The Snow Gardens

by That Girl Six

Three weeks after Chris's death, the family is in pieces trying to find their way back to one another in all the wrong ways. As each deal with their grief, the future, past, and present all come into question while they try to save their broken family.

3. Broken Hearts Can't Keep Time

Chapter Three
Broken Hearts Can't Keep Time

I.

" . . . And when her wedding with the Prince was appointed to be held the false sisters came, hoping to curry favor, and to take part in the festivities. So as the bridal procession went to the church, the eldest walked on the right side and the younger on the left, and the pigeons picked out an eye of each of them. And as they returned the elder was on the left side and the younger one on the right, and the pigeons picked out the other eye of each of them. And so they were condemned to go blind for the rest of their days because of their wickedness and falsehood."

Paige closed the book of fairy tales with a huff. She looked down at the two boys who were her captive audience and screwed up her face at them. "Okay. That was gross." When the boys both looked back at her without a sound, waiting for her to make a point, she suspiciously eyed her eldest nephew. "You didn't like that one too much, did you?"

"Paige!"

The youngest of the Halliwell sisters jumped at the sound of the voice behind her, turning to glare at the former youngest known sister. Not understanding what could possibly have given Phoebe (who was supposed to be upstairs taking a nap) a reason to shriek like that, Paige griped with annoyance, "What?"

Phoebe was gesturing wildly at the two boys lying on the floor in front of the sofa with near-hysterical fear. With a dark glare at her sister, Phoebe dashed over to drop to her knees on the blanket with the boys. She reached two protective auntie hands over Wyatt's ears. With another wicked scowl, she barked, "Don't say things like that to him! You don't know; you might be encouraging him with that stuff. Don't go giving him ideas. The objective is to keep him from turning evil, not trying to force him into it."

"I wasn't giving him ideas," Paige snorted with offense. She reached over and took her sister's hands away from her nephew's oh-so-tender ears and grinned down at him with all teacherly seriousness. "Okay, little dudes, listen up — both of you. What did we learn from this stupid story? I think (A) Your great-grandmother wasn't anywhere near to being the feminist she likes to pretend she was if she actually buys into this stuff. (B) Any girl you meet outside the family apparently is going to be helpless and will be spending her life cleaning the floors of her evil sisters if she doesn't find the perfect prince. (C) If this guy is a girl's perfect everything, you are both too handsome and too smart to be princes and therefore aren't going to get the girl. (D) Cutting off a part of your foot won't make your Pradas fit any better and will only leave a mess for that sister to clean up after. And (E) Birds are just plain cool."

"Cinderella wore Prada," asked Phoebe with a crooked smile, much more reassured by her sister's apparently instructional use of Grams's book of fairy tales.

"She had one wicked cool fairy godmother."

Before Phoebe could come up with a suitably sarcastic response, Wyatt interrupted them, pointing at the fireplace and asking, "'Hat's 'at?"

The sisters both turned their eyes in the direction in which their nephew was pointing them, but neither of them could see anything. They both glanced down at Wyatt, who was pointing like he was so sure he was seeing something. He looked up at both of his aunts for an answer that, after they glanced to one another for confirmation, they both knew that they could not give him.

After the sisters exchanged a few more concerned glances, Phoebe knelt down so that her face was level with Wyatt's, cheek to cheek. She moved her head with his as he looked around some more, continuing to ask his new favorite question. While his chubby fingers pointed to every lamp in the room, Phoebe asked him, "What do you see, Wyatt? What are you trying to show us?"

His attention span for this new game of his spent for the moment, Wyatt turned back toward his brother and aunts. He pointed at the book of fairy tales in Paige's lap and commanded her to read to them again. "'ook."

"Yes, your highness," Paige chuckled. She started flipping the pages of the book, looking for another tale with the hope of finding one that didn't in any way involve a damsel in distress or a subliminal message that sex was bad.

"Don't call him that," Phoebe said, her voice returning to that same overly-panicked, overly-protective tone.

"Pheebs," Paige started, sliding off the sofa and down onto the floor with the rest of the family. She pulled her knees up to her chest and wrapped one arm around them. With the other, she reached over and took her sister's hand, shaking it hard and squeezing until Phoebe's fingertips turned bone white. Softly but leaving no room for avoidance she asked, "What's wrong?"

Phoebe turned her watchful eyes onto her nephews and refused to pull them away. Everything about her expression and words screamed that she was lying as she told her baby sister, "Nothing's wrong. I just don't think you should talk like that in front of Wyatt — or Christopher, for that matter. I think we need to really be careful about talking about D-E-M-O-N-S and M-A-G-I-C in front of them right now. Considering that he is, in some ways, a highness, thanks to the S-W-O-R-D, I just think it would be a good idea if we didn't mention anything like that right now. At least, we shouldn't until we know for sure that he's safe."

"His altitude is safe," Paige said strongly enough to make Wyatt look up at her with curiously big eyes. Seeing him look at her, she softened her voice a bit and added, "And that's not what's wrong. You have a tone when you lie, and just now you had a tone."

"I do not have a tone," the sister argued, shaking her head and pinching her eyes shut in that way that she had that let everyone know that she knew fully well that she'd been caught in yet another lie.

Seeing the expression, Paige taunted her. "Yes, you do."

"No, I don't. I don't have a tone and there isn't anything wrong."

Paige squeezed her sister's still-captive hand tight enough to make Phoebe yelp in pain. The harder that her sister tried to pull her hand away, the harder Paige held on until her hand was just too slippery to hold on any longer. As her sister cradled her now darkly purple hand, Paige commanded, "Spill it."

"Really, Paige, it's nothing."

"Look, I don't need to be a rocket scientist or an empath or anything other than a sister to see that there is something bothering you. Ever since Christopher was born, you have been either hiding out in your room or in your office at the paper. You don't eat with the rest of us. You don't talk to the rest of us. When you do that, it pretty much tells me that you have a lot to say, so say it. Why are you avoiding us?"

The elder of the two sisters sighed and relaxed her shoulders just enough so that she didn't look so sharp. She looked to her baby sister, who was staring and waiting patiently for her to actually say something instead of avoiding the issue. Phoebe had to hand it to Paige. She had the 'sister thing' down pretty well considering she had been an only child her entire life. Either her sister skills had been an extra side effect when their incarnation of the Power of Three had been constituted or Paige was right and Phoebe really did have A Tone. Whichever one it was, it wasn't too hard for Phoebe to figure out that she had been caught but good. "I miss him," Phoebe finally sighed, caving to the pressure of her sister's watchful gaze. She smiled down on Baby Christopher, reaching a hand down to him. She rubbed her fingers slowly over his stomach in soothing circles, every touch seeming so much more important now. Even as she looked adoringly on their new baby, she was saddened by the thought of his adult counterpart. Nearing tears, she gave in fully to her admission. "I had no idea I was going to miss him this much."

"We all miss him," said Paige, trying to be reassuring without actually having to think about what she was saying. As much as she loved her sister, Paige had to admit that she had hoped that Phoebe wouldn't be in a mood to admit what she was thinking and feeling. She'd offered her conversational expertise because that's what sisters did, but still, she didn't want to think about any of it. Phoebe had obviously missed her oh-so-subtle eye blink that would have said, 'I know it sucks, but deal with it.' Instead, Phoebe had said the words, leaving Paige's mind screaming, 'Don't miss him, don't think about him, new baby, celebrate, be a good aunt, don't miss him'. Still, she had asked and now had to deal with it. So instead, she steadied herself to answer Phoebe, coming out with a much gentler version of "It's okay to miss him."

"Yeah, but I . . . " That's when Phoebe's guilt face took over, long before she was in any way able to disguise it. Hesitantly she admitted, "I know it's okay. I want to miss him. I do. I need to miss him. That's kind of why I — "

Immediately, Paige's stomach contents did a full lurch. She knew that look all too well and, quite frankly, after everything they had been through lately, she was not in the mood to wait for Phoebe to dally around the truth with her guilt. Careful not to be loud enough to alert the boys, she interrupted, "Oh, no. What did you do?"

"I might have sort of cast a teensy weensy spell," Phoebe said, the pitch of her voice rising guiltily with every word to match the pinching of her guilty face.

"Might have?"

"Maybe."

Paige did not look like she was in the least bit happy with her sister. Phoebe's active powers had been stripped because she had misused them. They couldn't afford to have anything else go magically wrong in the house these days. The guilt emanating from her sister was not encouraging her to believe that things were as simple as her words would like to suggest. Almost afraid to ask, Paige prodded, "How 'teensy weensy'?"

"Oh, it was teeny. I swear it was." That was true. The spell had been relatively short and simple. Four lines. Tops. And only end rhymes. However, Phoebe flinched awkwardly and admitted with her smallest voice, "The backfire wasn't."

"Phoebe!"

Defensively Phoebe jumped in before her sister was even done shrieking her name. "It shouldn't have backfired. It shouldn't. I made sure that I worded it so that there was absolutely no Personal Gain involved in it at all. I swear I did."

"What did you do?"

Relaxing and no longer caring about appearing guilty, Phoebe sank back, defeated. She let her honest fear take over as she explained, "Well, I . . . I was worried that there would be reprisals for everything that happened between Gideon and Leo. I was afraid that it would be bad enough and the other Elders were mad enough that maybe the Cleaners were going to have to get involved."

Confused, Paige struggled to see the connection between Phoebe's apparent predisposition to problems of the Personal Gain nature, The Thing That Didn't Happen, and the magical world's exposure clean up crew in badly tailored white suits. "Why would the Cleaners be involved in this?"

"Because the Elders really can't afford to have the Charmed Ones turning their backs on Them, now can They? If we were to suddenly quit doing our jobs, if we were to stop asking the proverbial 'How High' every time They said 'Jump', the balance of power between Good and Evil would shift. I don't know about you, but I'm angry enough with the Elders right now that I don't feel like doing Them any favors for the next — oh, say — fifty years or so." Phoebe caught herself in her anger as Wyatt tugged for attention on her arm, his little fingers barely able to hold on. She took her nephew into her lap, hoping that he could keep her calm enough not to lose her temper. She bounced him on her knee and softly, as if the Elders wouldn't hear her if she whispered, she went on. "I'm pretty sure They know that. The only ways to keep us on Their side then are to either be really, really good to Leo and just forgive the entire thing or to make us forget about all of it in the first place. That would mean making us forget about Chris and everything that has happened in the last year and a half. I just wanted to be prepared in case that should happen. I didn't want to forget him. I didn't want to even take the chance that I could forget him."

"So you cast a memory spell," sighed Paige, shifting the pieces of her sister's story around in her head. "Well, you obviously still have your memory or you wouldn't even know your own name right now. So where's the backfire?"

"I'm constantly reliving everything that happened when Chris was here. I'm seeing events, conversations, anything that happened at all," explained Phoebe. Then, darkly serious, she added, "But I'm seeing it all from his point of view, not mine."

"Huh?"

"That's the backfire, Paige. I'm not remembering him. I'm remembering for him." As an example, Phoebe pointed over toward the wooden bench near the front door. "The night that you and Richard broke up, he sat there the entire night, waiting for you to get back so that he could be sure you were okay. He waited until he heard you opening the door before he orbed out."

Finding that somehow endearing, a side of her nephew that she hadn't seen very often, Paige fondly smiled. "He did?"

"Yeah. He wanted to stay to talk to you, but he couldn't make himself do it. He was afraid you were still mad at him for not telling you who he was. He knew you hadn't really had time to think about it, and he didn't want to intrude. He just wanted to be sure you got home okay, in case Richard changed his mind about stripping his powers and freaked out again."

"Really?" Still focusing on the sweetness, Paige grinned even brighter. She looked at the baby lying on the blanket next to her and wiggled her fingers at him. "Thanks, my dude!"

Phoebe pointed over toward the corner of the room where he had been standing when he had been waiting to tell the girls that they were about to be turned into goddesses. "The day he came here? When you came downstairs and he saw you for the first time, it broke his heart. He was meeting you for the first time, hearing your voice for the first time, and he couldn't even tell you who he was. It meant a lot to him, though, just to be near you. We apparently always told him that he got his smart-ass streak from you."

Looking kind of thrilled about that revelation, Paige asked again, all smiles, "Really?"

"Yeah," the elder sister sighed fondly. Knowing exactly where else she had to go, Phoebe consciously relaxed all of the muscles in her face, trying to look as casual as possible. Her eyes, however, remained dark and sad, struggling with thought and memory. She didn't want to talk about this, but now that Paige had asked and she'd started, she really couldn't stop. Cautiously she asked, "Can I ask you something?"

Afraid of where this was going — Don't think, New baby, Celebrate — Paige could only nod her answer.

Carefully forming her words, Phoebe asked, "Once we found out everything about Chris being who he was and W-Y-A-T-T being E-V-I-L and the general state of our future, did you ever imagine it? Did you imagine what the future was like?"

Reluctantly, Paige admitted, "Sometimes, but nothing was really clear about it. I couldn't get that far." Even as she said it, her mind hummed her now familiar, comforting inner tune. Celebrate, celebrate, celebrate. New baby. Celebrate.

"But did you ever actually want to know?"

Still concentrating on not comprehending the place she knew Phoebe was trying to take her, Paige asked, "About Wyatt?"

"About the future, about the things that happen between now and when Chris comes back. I mean, Chris had secrets, a lot of secrets, and it was kind of easy to guess that they all led up to something horrible enough for him to decide that coming back and changing the timeline enough to even risk his own existence was the only way out. It was always an abstract concept that we knew but we didn't know. You know? It was an idea, not a reality, not for us. But did you ever really want to know more than that?"

"What are you getting at?"

Phoebe stopped bouncing Wyatt, feeling for some strange reason that she wanted to be looking him in the eye as she finally admitted what was going on. Maybe it wasn't so strange. After all, she knew now that Chris had never told them just how awful Wyatt had become. Maybe looking at any aged version of him was enough for her. It didn't have to make sense. Nothing else did these days. To him and Paige she said evenly, "I don't have a choice any more. I don't wonder; I know. I know all of the horrible things that happened to him, to Wyatt, to all of us. I know all the things he's going to grow up to do. I know what he did to Chris, to all of us. I know what he did to the world. Now that I know, I know for sure that if I had a choice, I would not want to know any of it. I don't ever want any of us to know any of it, ever again."

"I don't understand."

"When I'm remembering things, I'm seeing things as Chris saw them. I'm seeing them through the experiences that formed him, through his life. You know how smelling something or hearing a certain song can make you remember a certain something? When things happened here and now that made Chris remember things from his past, that's how I'm seeing them, too." When Paige looked at her for a little more clarification, Phoebe slumped back and pulled Wyatt close to her chest, hugging him hard enough to make him squirm. Hearing his protests, as if he knew that she was having thoughts of what he had once and might still become, she let him go enough so that he could breathe at least and started smoothing his hair to distract herself. It made her feel better, like somehow he was still just a little boy in her mind. She wanted to keep him that way forever if she was going to have to see those things in their future. Darkly, she made it as clear as she possibly could to her sister what she was going through. "I'm sharing the memories of his past, Paige."

Hesitantly, Paige asked, "Like what?"

Phoebe looked distantly into the sunroom, not seeing the room itself but seeing the things about it. She easily recalled the first memory of Chris's that she'd shared. She had cast her spell in that room, so it made sense she'd have one there first. It also made sense to her, like it or not, that Chris's strongest memories would be the ones he would most readily recall if he were alive to have them. She just hadn't been expecting to have his memories, let alone to have them hit her so strongly, so fast. Slowly, she felt the pain of Chris's memory, every time he had relived it in bright Technicolor detail over the last twenty months whenever he went into the sunroom, just as she was now doing. "Like . . . when Chris was ten, a demon attacked us, as usual. It was just me and him and Wyatt in the room. Wyatt had just enough time to warn us that he had seen something in the shadows. I must have heard the blast before I saw it because all Chris remembered was me tackling him to the ground as the windows all broke into the room. I had pushed him too far, though, and he hit his head on the end table there. When he woke up, I was still laying on top of him and the table was on top of us. It took him a few times of trying to push me off to realize that I was dead. I was dead, and he couldn't push me off of him because of the table. He didn't want to orb out from under me because he was afraid that the table would hurt me. He had to lay there, with me on top of him until Wyatt regained consciousness and was able to help us up."

"Oh, Phoebe," Paige said as stiffly as she could, fighting the tears that once again threatened to overtake her. Then again, it wasn't too hard for her to turn them off. She had stopped really listening to her sister as soon as she had heard the word 'blast'. She had known it couldn't lead to anything good and didn't have time to deal with anything less than good when it came to her nephew right now. He was here, he was a baby, and he needed to be celebrated.

"I can't turn it off," Phoebe whisper-sobbed. She was truly scared, something that she realized she hadn't felt in a long, long time. "I can't make it stop."

Knowing that talking about magic and the math of potions and spells was something detached enough that she could handle, Paige turned her hearing back on to full attention. Offering the most obvious solution, she asked, "Have you tried a reversal spell?"

"There isn't one."

Thoughtfully, Paige formed her words in her head as fast as she could before her mouth caught up with her brain. "Maybe it's like that time you brought your future and past selves here. Maybe there's something that you need to learn from the memories that once you've learned it, the spell will have played out and they'll just stop?"

"I thought about that, too, actually, but I don't think that'll happen. The spell shouldn't have done this. I worded it so carefully, I did. It didn't have anything to do with an end result. It was just about not forgetting Chris. I . . . I still can't figure out where the backfire was."

Wincing at the imagined consequences of her next suggestion, Paige offered, "Maybe we should tell Piper?"

"No," Phoebe disagreed vehemently, causing Wyatt to start curiously again. This time, she didn't even notice. Forcefully, she told her sister, "You can't tell Piper. I mean it. You can't tell her a word about this."

"Why not?"

"I am reliving her dead child's memories," Phoebe answered as if it should be the most logical conclusion in all the world. "Piper says she's okay, but she's not okay. I've known Piper my whole life, and I know that there is no way that she's okay. If she realizes that I know about all of the horrible, traumatic things that these boys are going to have to go through in the future — when she realizes that I know Chris's pain — it's going to hurt her even more. Chris had plenty of time to practice being able to hide his emotions from us and not show them on his face when he was around us. You saw him that first day; he smiled at you, even though it was killing him inside not to tell you who he was. He smiled. I don't have that kind of control. Everywhere I turn, I am seeing bits of his life, and I can't control myself. If Piper sees what it's doing to me, she's going to know how horrible her son's life was. I can't do that to her."

"That's why you've been hiding? So that Piper wouldn't see?"

"Hiding from Piper, hiding from everyone . . .and from the memories. There are enough of them in my room alone to keep my mind occupied. I don't need to go anywhere else in the house. There are a couple in my office, too, and in my car on the way to the office . . . "

"In your office?"

A wry chuckle escaped Phoebe's lungs before she had the chance to deny it. "They're at least happy ones, or as close to happy as any of them get." Phoebe sighed, trying to collect herself enough to be honest. "That's not true. Plenty of his memories are happy, I think. I just miss him too much right now to realize that they should be making me happy. I mean, I'm finally getting to know Chris, right? Isn't that what we all had wanted? Well, I'm getting it, full blast and gloves off."

Paige looked hopefully on her sister, completely missing the tone in Phoebe's voice. Fondly, thinking happily of Chris and one of the few times she had seen him really smile, she asked, "Yeah?"

Gloomily, Phoebe admitted, "I would have been that big of an obsessed train wreck, too."

Paige had no idea what to say to that, so she didn't bother to say anything at all. The girls both sat in silence for a few minutes, choosing instead to watch helplessly as their hearts were stolen away by the two tiny princes in their presence. Phoebe finally let go of Wyatt, who clumsily grabbed the book of fairy tales from the sofa and plopped down with it. He fumbled through the pages, pointing excitedly at random drawings of Princes Charming and their mighty swords. He would look up at them, his eyes big and round with wonder, before returning to the book and its many colorful pictures. Christopher, on the other hand, entertained them by merely breathing in and out as his eyes slowly shut on his wondrous new world after having been awake for almost two hours. It wasn't until they closed for good that either sister managed to break their silence.

Grudgingly, Phoebe opened up the conversation saying, "Elise thinks I'm not showing enough enthusiasm for the new baby."

With a sarcastic head jiggle, Paige snorted, "Seriously?" Glad for the in to get away from any more serious sister talk for a while, she teased, "Has she seen you make the goofy baby faces you make at these kids? Because you have the . . . "

Her sister rattled on, but Phoebe didn't hear her. All of a sudden, all she could see was herself, right up in her face, making ridiculous noises that she couldn't quite discern. She thought she heard the words, "You're going to be so cute. Yes, you are. Oh, yes you are," before she crumbled into more unrecognizable baby talk. Then she moved out of her line of sight to be replaced by Leo. She remembered — or rather, Chris remembered — saying to his father, "Okay. We've need to snap them out of this — fast." Phoebe shook her head, trying to pull herself out of Chris's memory, only to return to Paige still making fun of her inability to interact with children using real words or a grown-up voice.

". . . same problem with Wyatt. I know you want to be a good aunt, Pheebs, but you have to stop kissing his head every five minutes, especially with lipstick on. His skin is still too sensitive, and if you don't knock it off, he's going to break out in a rash like Wyatt did."

Trying her hardest to join her sister on a happier, less stressful level, Phoebe did her best to feign offense (which wasn't too hard considering that she was tired of everyone picking on her affectionate aunting skills). "How was I supposed to know that showing my nephew that I love him would make him break out?"

"Do you really want me to answer that, or should I just let the red splotches on the top of his head do my talking for me?"

Phoebe rolled her eyes backward sarcastically before settling them adoringly on the two boys on the blanket. Without even realizing that her tone regressed back to baby talk, she gah-gahed at them, "Fine. Auntie Phoebe will keep the kissy-wissies down to a minimum, my little smooshy faces. Yes, I will. Because Auntie Paige is just a widdle crabby pants tonight, and we need to tell her this to make her feel better. Oh, yes, we do."

Paige grinned brightly down at Wyatt and said (in the most chipper adult voice she had), "Look away, dude, while I use completely unacceptable violence to clown your aunt." With that, Paige whapped her arm back to smack her sister upside the back of her head. Her eyes and smile still focused on Wyatt, she sing-songed, "I'm not crabby."

"Yes, you are," Phoebe retorted, happy to be Accuser instead of Accused. Almost as an afterthought, she reached a protective hand up behind her ear to soothe the sting from Paige's playful but painful slap.

"No, I'm not," sang Paige, not betraying any signs of being in anything less than a Mary Poppins-esque mood.

"Really? Then why wouldn't you come with us to see Darryl?"

Ping! Paige felt herself sit up ram rod straight as she completely shut herself down to keep from hearing her former friend's voice in her head. "He needs to pay his fine and take his punishment . . . " Only the ringing of the front doorbell kept her from letting the wicked voice sing-song its way any further into her head. Doing her best to control even the flash of panic that would normally hit her eyes at being trapped like this, she kept looking adoringly at the boys and evenly asked Phoebe, "Shouldn't you get that?"

Phoebe didn't move to answer the door or anything else. She suspiciously eyed her sister, letting her know with her tone that she wasn't going anywhere until she got an answer to her earlier question. "Paige?"

"That should be your dad. I need to change clothes and get back to the club anyway," the younger sister hummed and hawed just a little too quickly to be honest. She stood up and reached a hand down to help her sister up as well. Paige stretched her arms high over her head, pulling at the now protesting muscles in her lower back. She really should have stayed on the cushioned safety of the couch (for more than one reason). At least she'd be in the ergonomic ecstasy of the chair in the P3 office shortly. When her body was sufficiently stretched and reawakened after a ninth straight night of minimal sleep, Paige dropped her hands down onto her sister's shoulders. She gave herself a grounding nod and leaned over to peck her sister lovingly, comfortingly on the cheek. "Say 'Hi' to your dad for me, and I'll see you guys all in the morning."

Not caring that her father was still waiting on the front doorstep (he could wait one more minute — it wasn't like he was going anywhere), Phoebe tried one last time to get her quickly retreating sister's attention. As Paige practically flew to the staircase and the apparent safety of escape, Phoebe called after her, "He's leaving San Francisco. He's packing them up and leaving the state."

Her feet already blissfully pounding up the stairs, Paige ignored her sister's new revelation and shouted toward the door., "Phoebe will be right there."

Phoebe growled after her sister as she stole one last look at the boys before heading into the hallway toward the door. As she stomped across the floor, she called ahead through the door, "Sorry, Daddy. I'm coming."

The childishly radiant smile on her face in no way matched the furrowed brow of fatherly concern on the other side of the door. "Is this a bad time," Victor asked cautiously over Phoebe's shoulder into the house, indicating that what he really meant was, "Is there something evil in the house — again?"

"Oh, no, Daddy! Everything's fine. We're just — Paige and I, we were just having a little talk that you conveniently got her out of. That's all."

Victor frowned as he continued to search for signs of demonic trauma over her shoulder. "Sounds serious."

Phoebe waved her father off with a huffy raspberry. She reached up and dropped his bag from his shoulder as she protested, "No. We were just talking about your incredibly handsome grandsons, who are both very anxious to see you, so come on in here already, unless you're planning on spending the next two weeks on the sidewalk."

The man didn't believe his daughter's twitchy grin for a second, but Victor knew when it was best not to push. He'd really only been a part of his baby girl's life for the last six years or so, but he was a quick study. He had learned very early on that when Phoebe gave him that look, she had been up to something. He just hadn't earned the right to call her on it just yet — not entirely anyway. He had, however, earned a right to a little fatherly sugar which he had every intention of collecting. He followed her into the house, and with arms opened wide, he didn't even have to ask before Phoebe poured herself into his embrace.

While her father smoothed her hair and kissed her forehead, Phoebe said into his shoulder, "I'm really glad you're here, Daddy."

"It's good to see you, too, Honey."

They held on to the hug, a habit neither of them consciously noticed but both of them felt. Since Prue's death, Father/Daughter hugs seemed so much more precious than they ever had before and were not to be wasted, tossed away, or taken for granted. It wasn't until they heard the first drops of rain striking the pavement that they realized that the door was still open.

As Phoebe reluctantly broke the hug, ushered her father the rest of the way into the house, and shut the door behind them, she cheerfully ran through the short list of greetings. "We're really glad you're here, Dad. Paige wanted me to tell you 'Hi' and that she'll see you in the morning. She's covering for Piper at the club tonight. Piper should be down in a little bit, and I'm sure that Leo will be happy to see you, too, Wherever Leo is — or . . . isn't."

"Leo's back," Victor asked. "I thought Piper said he'd gone, you know, Up There, permanently?"

"A lot's happened since the last time you visited, Dad. A lot. Why don't we go to the living room so that you can meet your new grandson — again — and I'll tell you all about it?"

"Shouldn't we wait for Piper?"

The witch gestured up the stairwell and through the ceiling as they snailed their way through the foyer. "She's probably going to be a while. She's up in the attic talking with Grams."

"Penny's here?"

"You've really missed a lot," Phoebe said again, chuckling lightly because it was the only thing keeping her from breaking down in tears again. She really didn't want to be the one to tell her father about all that he had missed, but she also knew that she couldn't put Piper through having to tell their dad after having to go through it all with Grams. Telling one of them was going to be hard enough. The least she could do was take care of their father. She replaced the smile that she had learned well to use since becoming a local celebrity and said cheerfully, "C'mon. I'll fill you in while Christopher is still asleep. Piper really needs some time alone with Grams and, damn it, I want some alone time with my dad. I didn't get to see nearly enough of you the last time you came to visit."

"No, you didn't," Victor grinned. He wrapped an arm around his baby's shoulders as she cozied herself around his waist and led him into the living room. "But I fully intend to make — "

"Wyatt!" Phoebe quickly let go of her father to cross the distance to her nephew where he remained on the floor. The only difference was that when she'd left him two minutes ago, he'd been quietly studying the pictures in the book of fairy tales; now he sat with the book closed at his feet, surrounding himself and his brother in his glowy blue protective shield. He lowered it as soon as she was within arm's length of him, but it had been up just the same. She looked all around the room for whatever could have scared him enough to raise his shield, nervously saying, "I'm so sorry, Baby. I'm sorry you couldn't see me. Did we scare you?"

The boy answered his aunt only by plopping back down and turning his attention back to his discarded book.

"Guess not," Phoebe shrugged, both confused and amazed.

Concerned, Victor asked, "Why would Wyatt be upset if he couldn't see you for just a second? He's been left in a room by himself plenty of times now, hasn't he?"

Gravely, Phoebe bent over and hoisted Wyatt onto her hip. She snuggled her nose up against his cheek for a moment before turning to her father. She indicated the sleeping baby on the floor with a nod. "Get Christopher, Daddy. I need to get the boys upstairs and changed, so I'll explain on the way."

Victor smiled down on the tiny little boy who he had met fully grown just a few months ago. He scooped the baby up gently, his few parenting skills coming back to him just like riding a bicycle. Softly he whispered to him, "Hello, there, young man. I'm your awesome grandpa and — because I'm your awesome grandpa — I'm going to spoil you rotten. There won't be anything in the world that you can't tell me. My promise to you."

None of the men with her saw the sadness in Phoebe's eyes as she silently prayed to herself while they trudged up the stairs that that would be true, for all of Christopher's days.

II.

"Is this a bad time?"

There were very few moments in Piper's life that she could recall with total clarity and know that she was in no way remembering anything wrongly. She remembered exactly the events surrounding her wedding(s) to Leo, even if the details of the final ceremony were a little on the fuzzy side. She would never forget every single detail of the day of her sister's death or the events that followed. She could remember even the color of the tie that Cole was wearing the night that they had vanquished him as The Source for the first time, setting Phoebe temporarily free. She even liked to think that she remembered every detail of Wyatt's birth, even though her sisters might argue with that one.

What Piper remembered with the most clarity about the day that she had been told that Chris was her son from the future was the look in his eyes when he had asked that question: Is this a bad time? He had been standing there in the doorway of her bedroom, a bedroom that she had kicked him out of many, many times. At first, he had looked like he always had. He could just as easily have been just popping by and had known when he had seen them that he had been interrupting some sort of sisterly chat. But then, when their eyes had met, mother and son, he had seen that the shock had yet to wear off of her face. He had seen that she knew. Immediately, everything about him had changed. The realization in Chris's eyes — which Leo later told her he should have realized were his eyes, which were so like his own mother's eyes, looking back at them — then had suddenly followed some unseen line to the most logical next step and steeled in preparation for being kicked out of the room, the house, and their lives one more time. In that look, though, there was also a lingering something more, something that she had never noticed before — a pleading, 'Please, just this once, listen to me' kind of look.

He had suddenly appeared so small to her, so lost. He wasn't the arrogant, mysterious, and more-trouble-than-he-was-sometimes-worth Whitelighter that she had come to both occasionally like and more often suspect. He wasn't even twenty-two years old anymore. He had suddenly just appeared to be a child, her child, and one who had seen and done far too much for someone of his age. In the ten months that she had known him, she had never seen him looking so vulnerable, and she, quite frankly, had had no idea what to do with that.

Chris had apparently felt just as lost as she had because that pleading look had been quickly replaced by that masked look that they had all come to know so well. He had waved a hand at the room, breezing them off. "You know, it's no big deal. You guys look like you've got some sister thing going on, and what I have can wait. I'll just come back later."

"Oh, good grief, would you just get your ass in here," Piper had moaned in exasperation. Him standing there and looking at her like that had been just a little more than she had been able to handle at the moment. When he still hadn't moved, she had waved him around in big sarcastic circles until she planted a pointed finger down in front of her. "Would you stop being such a baby and get over here?"

Chris had walked so tentatively through the doorway, like he thought that he was going to burst into flames or be struck by lightning once he was all the way through. The next few steps had appeared to go a little easier, but those last two steps before he stopped and was standing right in front of her had been excruciating for them both. They had stood there, looking at one another for a long beat, neither of them knowing exactly what to say or do. It wasn't until Chris had finally allowed the corners of his mouth to twitch in hopeful, smiling apology that Piper had known exactly what she had wanted to say and do.

That was when she had punched him square in the chest, hard enough to knock the wind out of him. Immediately his hand had risen up to meet the pain as he had looked on his mother in confusion, the grin wiped clean off his face. "What was that for?"

"That was for all of the lying and half-truths that you've been feeding me for the last ten months." She had watched him carefully, and as soon as she saw his hurt expression soften with understanding, she had pegged him just as hard, that time in his left shoulder. "And that was for telling Paige and Phoebe before you told me." That time, he had just smiled, apparently perfectly willing to take his punishment for that one. Not happy with his reaction, Piper had slugged him again, reaching for his right shoulder, which he didn't even bother to defend. "That was for all the times that you nearly died and still didn't tell us." After that, she let herself relax a little bit. She knew he was expecting her to go on and on and on about all the things that could be categorized as Coulda Shoulda Woulda, but she hadn't had the energy to keep going. The night before had been a rough one, and the news from her sisters had only taken what energy she had had left out of her. Still, she remembered feeling like she was finally regaining some of her breath after their announcement had knocked it out of her. She certainly had felt that she had had one more complaint left in her. So she had pinged him one last time, that time just behind his ear. "And that was for not warning me that I shouldn't have given all of Wyatt's baby clothes to Derek when you knew I was going to be needing them again."

"Sorry," he had said, not appearing to be in the least bit sorry.

"Don't you give me that look," she had told him, barely able to contain giggles as she had said it. The absolute absurdity of the situation had just started to encroach on her mind, her sisters' words just starting to make real sense. The adult man who had been standing in her doorway was her child, fully grown, fully sarcastic, and, if she could in any way have her way, fully grounded for the next month. The irrationality had just kept on coming as the ridiculousness of the entire thing pointed out the strangeness of trying to use logic at all. Realizing that there could be no winning on her part, she had moaned in exasperation, "Oh, who am I kidding? You're how old?"

"Twenty-two."

"Yeah, you stopped listening to me ten years ago," Piper had muttered to herself, eyeing her sisters. She knew Prue had had her phase, Phoebe had had a phase, and she'd heard that Paige had had a phase. Chris was a Halliwell. He'd had a phase. There was no way that she could have escaped that lovely part of adolescence with him, not when he had that smart ass little smile of his. She had turned her suspicious eye back on her son and asked, "You were a real handful, weren't you?"

Chris's only response had been to smile what Phoebe had dubbed his 'Creepy Pod-people' smile. Piper hated that smile. It always meant that he knew something that he was in no way going to tell them but he had been caught thinking about it. It had made too many appearances for their tastes. Now, though, with everything that had happened to them, Piper was beginning to think that smile hadn't been so bad. At least he'd been alive to smile it. She missed that smile.

The sound of the doorbell ringing downstairs pulled Piper away from the memory and from her grandmother's shoulder for the first time since finally breaking down. The sobs quickly died down, although even after half an hour of them, she still felt incredibly pent up. She was tired of fighting with herself about whether she was crying too much, or not enough, or if it was even appropriate considering how things had gone for the majority of the time he'd been with them. There was so much anger and devastation in her that there just wasn't room enough for all of it. She didn't know if there would ever be a manageable amount of her pain. That prospect seemed so far off that it was in no way attainable whatsoever.

Penny must have sensed the slowing of her granddaughter's breathing because she pulled her shoulder back slightly to look down into her girl's reddened eyes. "Better?"

"No," Piper laughed and cried at the same time. Apparently, her grandmother's impatience knew no bounds, even in death.

"What can I do?"

"I don't know, Grams," Piper sighed. She allowed herself to fall away from her grandmother's embrace and sink back into the corner of the sofa so that she could actually look at the ghostly lady again. She pulled a pillow over her still slightly-inflated stomach, again wishing for that tiny life that was no longer inside her to be able to bring her to some sense of peace. Outwardly, she had been nothing but the picture of peace for the last nine days. She was trying to help the rest of the family find their own peace first. Inwardly, all she wanted to do was keep her grams there so that she could just sit and cry until there weren't any tears in the world left to cry. She wanted so desperately for her grandmother to give her the right answer, to tell her what she was supposed to do with everything that had taken over her life. She wanted someone to take over for her the way she had taken over for everyone else. "I really don't know what anyone can do, but if you have any clue, I'll be glad to let you take over for a while."

Distracted from hearing voices floating up from the front hall, Penny looked sharply at her granddaughter. Both confused and concerned, she asked, "Are you expecting someone?"

"Just Dad," Piper answered, wiping her nose on her sleeve then groaning when she realized that she had. She gave it an ugly glance before waving her grandmother off. "It's okay. Paige was going to keep him entertained until we were done talking for now. Besides, I'm sure he'll want some time with the boys. He's on a Super Grandpa kick now that he knows he is the world's most awesome grandpa in the future."

Penny huffed in disgusted disbelief. It was no secret that she wasn't exactly fond of many men in the living world — or any other world for that matter. She had long proclaimed her disdain for her former son-in-law after he had abandoned her daughter Patty and her granddaughters. The sisters had managed a few years ago to move beyond that distance that separated daughters from father, even if Penny hadn't. That didn't mean she had to like it, though. She would profess her dislike for the man until the day he died and then some.

The attitude was not and could in no way go unnoticed by Piper. She chuckled lightly to herself, imagining the various four letter words that her grandmother was thinking of to describe her father at the moment. With a diplomatic half smile, Piper told her, "You really need to let that go. I know you aren't planning on ever forgiving him for leaving us, but you have to give him a chance to fix things for us. He's trying really hard to be there for the boys. I wish you could see that he deserves a second chance. Besides, Chris was incredibly tight-lipped about anything concerning his past, but he had no problem whatsoever with letting us know that Dad turns out to be the world's greatest grandfather in the future. They apparently end up being really close. Considering how little Chris was willing to tell us, I'm going to take that as a good sign for Dad that Chris was so ready to reveal that much."

"Your father," Penny asked, still not all that warm to the suggestion of forgiving The Deserter in any way. Parenting skills were an essential building block to being a good grandparent, and Victor Bennett, in her opinion, didn't even have a set of Lincoln Logs to build upon. "I find that hard to believe."

"Chris wouldn't tell us hardly anything about the future at all, but if you could have seen it when he first saw Dad sitting in the living room with me when he came to visit, you would understand. Chris couldn't say enough good things about Dad as a grandfather. If you could have seen the two of them together, it would be enough for you, too. I believe him, and I believe it when Dad says he wants to be a part of our lives and try to be a better grandfather than he was a father. You need to give him a chance, Grams. We all do. Better late than never, right?"

"He's a man, Piper. I don't want to see him break your hearts again, but he's going to. He can't control himself," Penny sputtered, collapsing at the heart-tugging, almost childishly wishful brightness on her grandchild's face. "I'm only trying to protect you girls."

Piper looked down at her hands thoughtfully, oddly noticing how much they were like her grandmother's for maybe the first time in many, many years. She didn't know why the thought was occurring to her at that particular moment, but then, she'd been having random thoughts like those now for almost two weeks. Still, there was a lot for her to know about her hands. Her hands were one of the most feared weapons in the demonic world. She counted on her hands to protect her family, and part of that family was her father. Realizing then that she wasn't just thinking randomly, that her thought did matter, she turned it on her grandmother, who above all other things would understand the need she had to protect her family, including her father. Thoughtfully, she told the lady, "We don't need protecting from him, you know. If anyone in this house needs protecting, it's him from all of the nonsense of our lives. Try to put it in his perspective. He's the only completely non-magical person in this entire family. He has to rely on his daughters to protect him instead of things being the other way around. He's already lost his wife and eldest child to demons. He probably waits by the phone every time he gets a twitchy feeling because that might just be the night when one of us is going to tell him that he's lost another daughter or a grandson. Trust me, Grams. He's the one who needs protecting, not us."

Penny, however, was not going to be so easily swayed, even by her granddaughter. A warning mist passed over her eyes, darkly letting Piper know that she was trying to manipulate the wrong woman with talk of family and protection. "You've been married to a Whitelighter for far too long if you're trying to play peacemaker between me and your father."

"Try, for me."

"Civility is the best I can do right now, my darling. Don't ask me for more."

Piper took in a long, deep breath and tried to think of anything that could possibly help her cause at all. Her dark eyes fell back to her hands, the hands so like her grandmother's, and there she found the answer. Her hands didn't give second chances. There were many demons that could no longer vouch for that. Why her grandmother's hands or any other part of herself would be any different wasn't the point, though. Penny believed she was protecting her family. Second chances were not something that Penelope Halliwell did, and that was the end of it. Right or wrong, that was all that really mattered. Settled on the realization that there was no changing her stubborn grandmother's mind, Piper nodded in conciliation.

Seeing the gesture, Penny made one of her own. A smile returned to her now unaging face, the closest that she was going to get to her promise of civility. "So your father knows about Chris — the Chris from the future?"

"That he was here? Sure. We haven't told him about . . . " Piper wanted to kick herself for trailing off and not being able to complete that sentence. Her son, the adult version of her son, was dead. She was going to have to get used to saying it at some point. It had been nine days. Shouldn't she be able to say it by now? That he'd been murdered wasn't anything that she had to admit yet, but that he was dead needed words by now. She huffed, annoyed at herself for doing it again, and marched on through what she had to say, forcing the words to keep coming. "We haven't told him about how Chris died or anything yet. We don't know how to. It's going to break his heart. They didn't have a lot of time together, but what time they did have was really special. It made a huge difference in them both."

All pretense of niceties quickly vanished as Penny muttered jealously, "I can't believe he knew and I didn't. That isn't the sort of thing that you girls should be keeping from me. You know that, don't you?"

"You're laying the guilt on a little thick for someone who hasn't had the time to look in on us for at least ten months," Piper argued. When she saw the ache on her grandmother's face, Piper realized that she had pinched a nerve in the lady just a little too hard. She quickly softened and apologized. "Sorry. I didn't mean it like that. I'm just really angry, really confused, and just plain worn out."

"What can I do?"

"I honestly don't know. I haven't really had much time to process any of it myself, you know? There isn't a whole lot of anything that makes any kind of sense, and I really don't know what to do with that. I don't know what to do with anything anymore."

Penny reached over and took her girl's hand and put it to her chest as she had done so many times when she was still alive. As a living, breathing person, her heartbeat had always been a calming reminder to her girls that she was there with them, no matter what they had to tell her. Good, Bad, or Otherwise. Her love for her girls knew disappointment and anger, but it never diminished. The beating of her heart was the best proof of that that she could offer her girls. Blood to blood, heart to heart, her girls were a part of her. She had always told them that as long as her heart was still beating, there would be no end to her love for them and her stalwart devotion to their every need. The gesture wouldn't have the same biological effects as it had, but the intent behind the gesture remained the same. She covered Piper's hand with both of hers as she pressed it hard to her chest. "Then you can start the way you always have. You give me your anger. You give me your frustration. Then when you have given me everything that you can give me, we'll find a way for us to get rid of it together."

Piper smiled reminiscently at the gesture. Now she remembered exactly why it was that she had called her grandmother to her side and not her mother or her big sister or anyone else. Grams was the one who knew how to do this. Grams had always known exactly how to do this, if it was about boys or school or whatever. Part of her knew that the little girl in her was always going to believe that her grams knew everything and had all the answers. She hoped that this time wouldn't be any different. Feeling that same relief of years gone by wash over her, that relief that Grams was going to fix it again, she allowed her eyes to well up once more. Grams would know what to do with the tears. Grams would know what to do with all of it. As the tears fell from her cheeks and she oh-so-attractively sniffed once again, she asked, "What do you want first?"

"Where is the beginning," Penny offered as a suggestion.

Piper rolled her eyes with a sarcastic smile. Another sniff accented the wildness of the question because, just like all of the questions Piper had, that one didn't exactly have a concrete answer. "I don't know. I mean, is it the first day Chris showed up here in the attic and turned our lives upside down, or the night that he was conceived? Should I start with the day he was born and killed in the same day? Hell, maybe it starts in the future. I don't know."

Penny removed her granddaughter's hand from her chest and set it gently in her lap. She held it with one hand and stroked it slowly and lovingly with the other. She gave herself a moment to think over all of the options that had just been randomly handed to her until she finally settled on the one question that had certainly been bothering her over the last half an hour. "Well, why don't you start with telling me why he came back here from the future in the first place?"

The request brought another sarcastic laugh from Piper. With a roll of her eyes she snorted, "You want the short version?"

"Piper."

"Sorry, but I told you, there aren't any simple questions here." Her grandmother tossed her another of her patented looks, prompting Piper to remember that she was the one who had called her grandmother to her in the first place. The simplest answer, the one Paige had told her he had offered her the night she found out about him, was probably the safest bet to start out with. Proudly, Piper told her grandmother, "He came here to save his family."

"From what?"

Taking a deep, calming breath, Piper tried to allow herself to remember that day when Chris had first appeared in the attic. For her, everything had started that day, and if she was going to be the one telling the story, that was where it was going to have to start, she supposed. Much more calmly she explained the story of the day that they had first met Chris, his part in Leo becoming an Elder, and all of the insanity that she was still trying to figure out if she should have grounded him for or not. She told her grandmother about everything that she knew, all of the things that she hadn't managed to have time to tell Grams during her last visit. For the most part, it was a lot easier to talk about those parts. After all, they hadn't known who Chris was, so details hadn't really seemed all that important at the time. To detach that part of his time with them wasn't all that difficult at all, actually. If she really took the time to think about it, she supposed that it made a lot of sense. He had been able to desensitize himself. If he could, so could she.

It wasn't until she remembered her birthday and had to actually put that into words that she found it hard. Her sentences seemed to slow down after that, even to her. As she spoke, it had the strangest dream-like quality to her that she didn't know how to explain. Even a year later, it was still hard to remember anything from that point on without massive guilt clouding everything around it. Her voice was flooded with it as she went on to explain, "Over the next few months, there were a lot of fights and suspicions and all kinds of insanity when it came to Chris and Leo and all of us. The only thing that we were clear about was that Chris had come back from the future not just to save Paige, but to save Wyatt. He didn't know what sort of demon we were looking for, but he knew that he was protecting Wyatt from something. He wouldn't tell us any of the circumstances that he was supposedly protecting Wyatt from or anything else that could have been helpful in any way at all. He was incredibly tight-lipped about his future and what he was trying to accomplish. Then on the night of my birthday, he decided to drop the lovely bombshell on us that he wasn't here because a demon had attacked Wyatt, but because Wyatt was the terror that he was trying to stop. In his future, Wyatt had grown up to be pretty much the ruler of all Evil and a terror on anyone and anything."

Penny sucked in a breath, pishawing at her granddaughter, even under the threat of being shooshed once again. "Now, Piper, why would Wyatt grow up to be the ruler of all evil? He's the child of a Charmed One and a Whitelighter. He's your son, Piper. He wouldn't. He couldn't."

"Yeah, we tried to tell Chris that, too," Piper snapped sarcastically. "Way ahead of you there."

"Then I don't understand," Penny said, forgiving her girl's attitude in her distress. "How — why would you believe him? If he was saying such horrible things, how could you possibly believe him?"

"That's just it, we didn't. We threw him out of the house. It wasn't until Phoebe went on some sort of vision quest thingy that she was able to figure him out. Even then, the two of them wouldn't tell us anything. Phoebe and Paige knew a lot more than I did. They didn't tell me who he really was until after he was conceived."

It was the word 'conceived' that finally clubbed Penny over the head. Her eyes darted down to Piper's stomach before she could stop them, only to find the necessary evidence concealed behind a decorative pillow once again. As much as she had been following their entire conversation, it was finally occurring to her that Piper had been pregnant, and she had missed the entire thing. The realization found softly spoken words with an astounded, "He really is your son?"

"Well, yeah, Grams. He's downstairs with Paige and Dad and Wyatt right now."

"You know what I mean. It's just so . . . "

Piper half-laughed, half-snorted wryly at her grandmother. For whatever reason, she was suddenly struck the absolute lunacy of the conversation. They were talking about a twenty-two year old man being the son of her thirty-two year old body. The math of it alone was enough to make her head spin. It was (and she hated that it was the only word she could come up with at the moment) ludicrous, at best. Piper's head shook, her eyes wide with the same wonder and strangeness that had been the staple of her life for the last ten months, as she asked, "You think it's weird for you? Physically, he was only ten years younger than me. He was old enough for me — well, Paige, at least — to date. Until the morning after he was conceived and the three of them told me who he was, I could look at him and see an adult. He was perfectly capable of being a man, of doing things that men are supposed to do. I don't think he'd had a curfew in years. He could drink at the club, and considering that his bedroom was in the back office of the club, it was easy enough access that I'm sure he was able to lure an unsuspecting girl or two back there . . . Now that I think about it, Ugh. Remind me to blow up that couch when I go back to work."

Bad mental images burned into the minds of both of the Halliwell women, bumping and grinding away until both women blurted scarred Ughs. As their expressions were mirrored in each other's faces, they looked away from each other, even more disgusted that their minds had gone to the same dirty, unbeckoned place. Grandmother and Granddaughter both subconsciously retched over the synchronized bad imagery. When they were finally able to look at one another again, they both had disgusted grins on their faces. As they had done so many times before, they giggled and echoed, "Never again."

Their laughs eventually died down to awkward sighs. Silence overtook them and the attic until it became too heavy for either of them to breathe. They both hitched in sighing breaths, prepared to say anything to fill the quiet. Seeing the other moving to speak, they both stopped and gestured permission to the other. After a quick round of You-Go/No-You-First, Piper settled back to give her grandmother room to do her thing and grandmother.

Penny's face took on a very rare form for her. She had spent her entire life dealing with darkness and loss. It was a Halliwell tradition, one that generation after generation had honored faithfully and all too well. It had, as had many other things, hardened a big piece of her heart. It had not and could not, however, touch that part of her that belonged to her girls. Piper was hurting. Nothing else mattered. It was her job then, as Piper's grandmother, to take that hurt away. Slowly and without any of her usual flair, Penny whispered, "It occurs to me, my darling, that I have yet to tell you just how sorry I am. Even though I know you called me to you because I am the only one to have been in your position, I know that I cannot even imagine your pain. Forgive me for not saying so sooner, but I truly am sorry for your loss."

Tears warmed Piper's eyes once again, but this time, she gratefully held them back. Her voice was husky, though, as the tears clutched at her throat, cutting off air as she said, "I miss him so much. I didn't think I was going to miss him this much." An angry, rueful bark escaped her, biting at the words and her heart. "Of course, he wasn't supposed to die, though. He's supposed to be home now, back in the future, happy and safe. He's supposed to be celebrating for himself that he saved his brother and the future and the family legacy. Instead, we don't even know for sure what's going on anywhere. We don't know where he is, if he's anywhere at all. We don't know if the future is safe, if Wyatt's safe. We don't know who is even on our side anymore. The worst part of all if it is that there is a little baby downstairs who I don't know how to talk to. I don't know how to look at him and not think of the man that he's going to grow up to be. I am terrified that I'm not going to be able to look at him without being sad or angry. I mean, technically, he's here. He's right here, downstairs, waiting for me to be his mother and do all of the things that I'm supposed to do as his mother. I just don't know how I'm supposed to grieve the man he's going to be twenty-three years from now when he's sitting here. I don't know how to do both at the same time."

Not really knowing if there was a right answer, Penny tried to offer one anyway. "But you've already given yourself the answer. Chris is still here. He needs his mother, no matter how old he is."

Feeling argumentative and not wanting to accept that as an answer, Piper fired back, "So I'm supposed to just move on? Chris is dead. There is no body for us to bury. There won't be a funeral or a headstone. One day, we are going to reach the day after he left the future and didn't come back. Then we're going to reach the day that should have been his twenty-third birthday and he didn't come back. When that day comes, he'll just be gone. There won't be any mark to say that he lived and was here and part of our lives. I won't be able to grieve for him then because he'll already have been dead for twenty-three years. So when is it going to be all right for me to mourn my son's death like every other normal human being does? It has to be okay at some point. After everything he did, after everything he went through, there has to be something for him. There has to be a piece of me for him."

Reassuringly, Penny once again grinned and took her granddaughter's furiously trembling hands in hers. "There is. You aren't going to forget him. You are always going to have the last twenty months with him, here in your heart. He isn't going anywhere."

"This isn't fair. He should have more than that."

"No, it isn't fair, but it is what it is. You need to be the best mother you can be for those babies downstairs because that's what Chris was here to do in the first place, to ensure that they would grow up happy and safe. Right? He made it safe for them. Now it's your job to make sure it stays that way."

Bitterly, Piper pouted. "So I'm just supposed to accept it all? Things are the way they are? I'm not supposed to think about any of it anymore and just move on. Damned if I do, damned if I don't?"

"That's not what I mean, Darling, and I think you know that."

"Do I? Because that's what it sounds like to me. It sounds like you're telling me that my son is dead, but I don't get to deal with that at all. Quite frankly, I need to do it. I do. I wasn't exactly the best mother that I could possibly be to him while he was here. I treated him so terribly sometimes. I have to be allowed to grieve and be angry and all of those things because, right now, I feel like it's the least I owe him for everything we put him through."

"It wasn't as bad as you think it was," said Penny, trying to be encouraging. She knew the effort was going to be thrown right back into her face, but she had to at least have said it. When Piper calmed down and remembered that she was usually right, it would make a lot more sense to her then. Until then, she knew she was going to be nipped at, and that was just fine with her if that was what Piper needed to do.

"How would you know," Piper snapped, filling her grandmother's expectations. "You weren't here. You didn't see. I really was a bad mother to him. I threw him out of the house so many times for stupid little things. I didn't just take his word for things when he told us about anything, especially when it concerned Wyatt. I was always suspicious of him. Yeah, I know that I had perfectly legitimate reasons to be suspicious, and just because I found out that he's my son doesn't make those suspicions any less valid. It just hurts because there were so many things that, when I look back on them now, I was so wrong to think or say."

"I'm sure Chris didn't think you were a bad mother."

Wanting more than anything at the moment to just be angry and fight with whoever would be willing to fight with her — and Grams, by default, had just volunteered — Piper shook her head and said defiantly, "I'm not? Honestly, I'm starting to wonder. Really, think about it: what do I — I don't know anything about him, Grams. I know he was alone and afraid enough in his own time that he risked his own existence to try to save his brother from becoming the ruler of all Evil, but that's about it. I don't know what he did for a living. Being a full time witch doesn't exactly pay the bills. Even if he could be made a full Whitelighter, the Elders don't exactly have a direct deposit program, either. I don't know what he did. I don't know what he wanted to do. I have no idea what my son wanted to be when he grew up. I refuse to believe that I didn't tell my children to have dreams of being something other than a witch. Magical though they may be, they deserve to be as normal as possible and have at least some semblance of a healthy, non-magical life."

Penny shrugged. She didn't want to dismiss her granddaughter's feelings, but the fact that she didn't know any of those things wasn't exactly a surprise to her. "Chris grew up in this family. He was a Halliwell. With all of the time travelling that has been done by the various members of this family, he no doubt had heard the lecture a thousand times over about revealing even the slightest thing about the future to anyone in the past. He knew the risks of being here. He had to. So naturally, one of those things that he knew was that he just couldn't reveal those things to you or it might influence his past too much."

"That's not the point," Piper barked. "You aren't listening to me!"

"I am listening to you. I just don't see how, when you know the rules of time travel, you could possibly think that not knowing something about the future makes you a bad mother."

"It's not the not knowing that makes me a bad mother," argued Piper, clearly frustrated that her grandmother (and no one else in the house, for that matter) was not following her line of thought the way that she should be. She couldn't understand why no one else got it. How could they not? Hadn't they all just lived through the last twenty months, too? Painfully frustrated, Piper said angrily in accusation to herself, "It's the fact that I didn't even ask. I never tried to ask him any of it. I didn't even try."

"Piper — "

"Screw the rules, Grams," Piper finished for her grandmother before the ghost could even get the words out. The frustration brimming over in her, she flung the pillow away from her stomach, tossing it hard and fast away into the leg of the new old table that Chris had dug up for them to be used as the new scrying table after the Scabbar demons that had been hunting him down had destroyed the last one. The amethyst crystal that Paige had left on it rolled off the table to fall onto the floor. All it did was annoy her even more. Her eyes locked on the crystal on the floor as she ranted angrily, "He was alone here, Grams. All he had was me, Paige, Phoebe, and Leo. I bet that if you were to ask any one of them, they wouldn't have a clue about any of that stuff either. They wouldn't know his favorite color or his favorite song. We don't know any of the stories behind any of his scars. We don't even know what all of his powers were. We know he had a fiancée, but that's only because she came back here to try to kill him and almost succeeded. He never said anything about having any friends at all. I hope he still lived here in the house, but he never said anything about that, either. We don't know how he did in school or even what kind of school he went to. The thing is, it doesn't really even matter to me if the others knew any of those things, because the fact is that I am his mother; I am the one who should have shown some goddamned interest and asked him. Me. I should have done it, and I didn't. In twenty months, the only things I managed to learn about my child are that he had a reason to hate his father and that his brother was the scourge of their time. Of course, neither of those things are as much about him as they are about Leo and Wyatt. I should have asked more about him, not about the events of the future. I'm his mother. I should have shown more interest in him and not his mission. Now he's gone and I won't have the opportunity to ever ask him those questions again. Damn it! Why didn't I ask?"

Penny just let her grandchild sit there and stew in her anger for a moment, knowing that that was exactly what Piper wanted to do anyway. It wasn't long, though, before the stew boiled over and Piper let her anger loose again.

"I want to go back and ask him, or find a way to figure out where the hell he is and ask him. It doesn't even have to be anything big. I just want to know something about him that has nothing to do with anyone but him. I don't want it to be about his relationships to any of us. I'll gladly settle for his favorite movie, his favorite food, anything. I need to know at least something. He was my child yet I know nothing about him."

"You know the important things. You know that he grew up loving his family enough to come back here to save you. You know that, even with his brother supposedly becoming the ruler of all Evil, he still loved Wyatt enough to try to save him, too. You're a new mother, Piper. Some day you'll come to realize, when the boys are all grown up, that that's all you can really ask for. If you're proud of him, if you're proud of the man he was, that's all you can ask for."

"What if I want more?"

"Then you're going to spend the rest of your life being very frustrated and asking your kids for things that they cannot give you."

"Not for the kids that are still here, Grams. For the Chris that isn't here. What if he changed the timeline so much that he doesn't exist anymore the way he was? Leo said that Chris disappeared from his arms when he died. We don't know where he went. He just disappeared. It's not like when every other person dies. We generally know that there are only so many places that they can go. Granted, with any luck, the members of this family all go to the same place, but we don't know what happened to Chris. I want to believe that he's downstairs, safe in that little baby, or that he's managed to get to his future safe and sound, but he could just as easily be gone. I wouldn't even have a clue where to look. He could be out there, somewhere, waiting for us to come find him, and we might never know. If it's just over, if there is nothing else for him . . . " Piper stopped for a moment, bringing her fingers to the inside corners of her eyes to dab away angry tears that she really didn't want. She didn't want to cry. She wanted to be angry. Tears did not go with angry, not right now. She took a deep breath and went on, explaining harshly, "I keep feeling like I'm just keeping time here. The world has gone on as normal. It didn't stop because he's gone, just like it didn't with Prue or with you or anyone else on this planet. It doesn't stop. Time won't even acknowledge that he was here. I don't understand how the world keeps turning when this stuff happens."

Soothingly, Penny sympathized, "No one does. If we knew, we wouldn't go through the pain."

"So in the meantime, the whole family is stuck in this little time bubble that — We aren't going forward. We're sort of stuck because we don't know where to go. Everything is . . . " Piper switched tracks of thought half of the way through her sentence, although she knew exactly why she had gone there, even if her grandmother was going to need a map to catch up with the random emotions her girl was going through. Piper plowed through, still angry, but snapping a little less. "Phoebe asked me once, when she first got her empathic power, why no one in the family wanted to own their own emotions. The funny thing is, right now, I'm wondering that myself. We're so good at telling each other what to think and feel, but we don't do it for ourselves. Paige is a wreck. You'd never know it to talk to her, but I can tell. Up until today, I was thinking that maybe she was just overcompensating, but now I'm starting to wonder. There is no way that she's this happy, I know it. She's a mess. Something happened that I don't know about, and she won't talk about it. Leo sort of knows, but I don't think he knows the whole thing. The thing is, I can't help her. I can't help her because I don't even have a clue how to help myself. Phoebe, she's falling apart, too. The only time we see her is when she's coming or going. Then there's Leo; I don't even know where to start with him. He's so lost that . . . They're all so lost. I'm lost. This whole family is in pieces, and the one person who could fix it right now isn't even alive to do it. A letter sure as hell isn't enough to fix it. I thought, maybe, just for a few minutes this afternoon that it was, but it isn't. It's not even close."

"A letter?"

Piper struggled to push herself out of the all-too-comfortable sofa (it was so squishy and used that they were sure it had eaten people whole) and walked over to the podium to flip through the pages of The Book of Shadows, looking for the Goblins entry. On the drive back from the cemetery, Phoebe had realized that she had still been clutching on to Chris's letter throughout the conversation they'd had with Darryl. As they had talked about it on the way home, the two of them had agreed that, until they were all able to part with it, they would keep it in The Book. Somehow, they both had felt that it belonged there, a parchment monument to Chris's smart-ass but loving gesture. She had put the letter back in there after a few more readings, right after she'd returned to the attic. When she pulled it out of The Book, she had to hold it for a moment, feeling its realness, its presence. It felt like it was the only piece of him that he had left behind. Her fingers even lingered on it as she handed it to her grandmother, fearing letting it out of her grasp, as if letting it go was letting go of him.

Minutes later, when Penny finished reading the letter, she grinned at her granddaughter and reached for her hand once again. Tearfully she croaked, "I take it back."

"Take what back?"

"He was more than prepared to take care of you girls. Maybe not himself so much, but he loved you girls. From the looks of this letter, he knew exactly how to take care of you."

"Yeah?"

"Yeah." Sadly, Penny added, "I wish now that I could have had a little more time with him post-slime. Do you really think Gideon was deliberately keeping me away from him all this time?"

Before Piper had a chance to answer, her youngest sister brightly swept into the room with a brilliance just short of psychotically chipper. "Hi, Grams! How's it coming up here?"

Piper immediately took note of the influx of exultation in her sister's demeanor and was concerned. She was beginning to wonder if Leo had anything to do with her sister's boundless energy. Something had to have kicked it up a notch. Suspiciously, Piper asked, "I have a better question, honey: how's it going down there?"

Paige shrugged, either missing the tone or choosing to pretend it didn't exist. "Fine. Terrific. Come on, I got to have some quality Nephew Time. There's nothing better in the world than that." With a patented Paige smirk that they all knew so well, she clued them in on a little secret. "It's better than sex, I swear."

"Paige," Piper shrieked. "Those are my kids you're talking about!"

"What?" Paige waved her sister off and scoffed. "We read a few fairy tales, discussed Cinderella's fashion designer, and decided that no girl on this plane is going to be good enough for my handsome nephews, which means I will never get to see great-nephews. Christopher and Wyatt have both assured me that they will both make up for it by staying young and cute and non-evil for their entire lives. For now, though, Wyatt's awake, Christopher is sleeping, and they are both down in the living room with their spectacular grandpa and fabulous aunt as we speak."

Penny huffed, again, at the suggestion of Victor Bennett being anything other than a self-absorbed, inconsiderate, child-abandoning jackass. When Piper burned a hole through her head with an intense glare that would have killed her if she weren't already dead, Penny reluctantly gave in. "Sorry."

Paige stretched her hands down to her grandmother and helped pull her up out of the sofa. Once Penny was standing up at her full height, granddaughter enveloped grandmother in a tight, loving embrace. Paige grinned over her grandmother's shoulder and said affectionately, "It's okay, Grams. It's good to know that you haven't entirely given up the man-hating ghost. One or two of them couldn't hurt."

"Hey," Piper argued.

Breaking their embrace, both Penny and Paige grumped, "What?"

"I realize that Grams promised to see the error of her ways after the last man she came up against and that one or two isn't bad considering a lifetime of male bashing," Piper conceded, thinking back to the day of Wyatt's Wiccaning and how her grandmother's misguided hatred of all things with male parts had almost cost them all everything. She knew, after a lifetime of living with Penny Halliwell, that it had taken a great deal for Grams to realize what her attitudes had done in the shaping of her girls' lives. That Grams was willing to cut it down to one or two victims of her wrath was certainly an improvement. However, as she pointed out to her sister and grandmother, "But does it have to be members of the family?"

Still exuberant, but with an unmistakable heat burning underneath, Paige seethed with a dazzling grin, "Fine. Grams, no hating of men in the family will be tolerated. If, however, you want a list of men who it is acceptable to direct your burning and understandable hatred toward, I can offer you a fairly wide range. I'll compile the list later, but to get you started off, there's Gideon, Barbas, any one or ten of the Elders, the doctor who almost let Piper die, Darryl Morris, the guy who owns the hot dog cart outside my old office . . . "

Piper's inwardly admitted amused irritation with her sister's encouragement toward activities of a misandrous nature turned to sisterly concern as Paige turned an unnaturally bright shade of red while she continued to rant without noticing that neither of the other women were paying her any attention. Piper exchanged a brief look with her grandmother, who seemed to have noticed the same problem as she had and confirmed her own worry. Softly, Piper took a chance, reached a soothing hand into her sister's, and interrupted, "Uh, Paige, honey?"

As if she had no idea that she had just completely burst out in nearly feral anger, Paige happily chirped, "Yeah?"

"Darling, are you feeling all right," Penny asked.

Smile as dazzling and toothy as it could be, Paige waved them both off. "I'm fine. I just have a lot to do and only twenty-four hours in a day to do things in. Speaking of which, I was just stopping in to say 'Hello' and give you an update on the boys before I take off for the night. I told Ray I'd be back at the club by now to deal with the band. They're probably already there and wondering where the owners are as it is." She excitedly wrapped her arms around her grandmother's shoulders again, squeezing painfully hard. "So it was good to see you, Grams. I'll talk to you later if you're still around by the time I get the club closed up for the night." Next, she reached over and hugged Piper. "And you: the boys are fine. Phoebe is down there with your dad about to tell him about Chris. Okay? Have fun, you two. I'll see you later."

With a dizzying flare, Paige orbed out of the attic. Piper called after her worriedly, "Make sure you orb into the office, please!" With a frustrated flap of her hands, she directed her attention back to her grandmother. "See what I mean?"

"She's a little on the happy side, certainly, but I don't think I would necessarily call her 'a wreck'."

"Well, I would. We're talking a ten car pileup in the middle of the freeway here, and she's the lead car. Phoebe is right behind her. Leo is, too."

"You are," Penny finished a little suggestively.

"Am not," Piper said defensively. "I'm far from being a wreck. I'm not even a fender-bender. I have a flat tire, tops."

Penny didn't even bother trying to argue with her granddaughter. She just stared at her, a single eyebrow raised until Piper talked herself into agreeing with her grandmother. It worked every time.

"I'll be fine, Grams. I will. I needed to vent, and now that I have, I'm ready to go back to taking care of everyone else again. Someone in this house has to have a level head, and since they're all cracking up, it's my turn to do it. I swear, I don't know how Prue always did it, the big sister thing. It sucks. I want my old job back, but I know I can't have it. So I have to be fine. I will be fine. I know that that completely goes against everything I've been telling you for the last hour, but I will. I guess I. . . I need to find a way to tell him that I'm not okay without him. I want him to know that I loved him, and that there is a hole in my heart now that he's gone. I don't think I ever gave him a reason to think that I . . . "

In that special Grams way that she had, Penny interrupted by cupping Piper's chin and bringing her girl's eyes up to meet her own. She smiled, knowing the answer before she even asked the question. "Darling, did you tell him you loved him?"

Piper didn't say anything in response, but her head moved in that way that anyone in the family would recognize as an unwilling admission that the person she was talking to was right in their assumption. She looked down at the floor, not wanting to see the all-knowing look that she knew was on her grandmother's face. She didn't want her grandmother to be right. She hated it that Grams had, for most of her life, always had the right thing to say and always seemed to know the answers. But then, that was why she had called her grandmother in the first place. She just needed to hear it.

Seeming to know what Piper was thinking, Penny said what Piper's heart was saying, even if her head wouldn't allow her to admit it just yet. "Then he knows. If, after everything that you all went through down here, you still told him that you loved him, he knows it and probably wouldn't have asked for any more than that. In fact, I'm willing to bet that when I go back and tell him what you've said to me today, he'll be mad at you for thinking you're a bad mother."

"Wait a minute! You've seen him? Grams! You have been sitting here acting like you had no idea about any of this and you've seen him?"

Immediately, Penny threw her hands up defensively in front of her, blocking off some invisible heat that was coming from Piper's newly rekindled fire. "No, Piper, I haven't. Calm down."

"Then what was that supposed to mean? Hmm?"

Penny waved a dismissive hand, as if her explanation wasn't nearly as important as Piper was going to want it to sound or be. "All I know is that your mother, your sister, your grandfather, and I were sitting down to a friendly game of poker with a few of the angels that we've come to know over the years. One of them, an angel of Death, was called away. We dealt him out of the game, but not long after we did, he came back for your sister. Neither of them have been back since. I'm just wondering, now that you've told me what you've told me, if maybe they're with Chris. Clarence said we shouldn't expect them back for a while because the person they were going to meet was a special case and was going to require some extra time to deal with. They took the other two angels with them as well. I don't know. It's entirely possible, anyway. With this family, anything is possible."

"Well, can't you find out? This is important!"

"You know that even if I did find him there, I wouldn't be able to tell you. The rules don't change just because we want them to. It's been four years yet They still aren't ready to allow you to see Prue. I highly doubt that They would allow you to see Chris."

"Oh, They can and They will. They owe us. We have always been good and done things the way They wanted them done. When They wanted to break Leo and I up, we agreed to Their terms instead of our own. We had to have Their permission to get married, for God's sakes. Normal people don't have to go through that kind of thing, but we did it because those were 'The Rules'. We continued to fight off every single demon that came crashing through that front door because it was 'Our Destiny'. When Prue died, we continued on, even though we didn't want to right away. We've obeyed the 'No Prue' rule. We've given up husbands and boyfriends. We've given up a sister. I've now given up a son. And for what? It was an Elder who murdered my son in an effort to kill my other son. We're just lucky that Wyatt was able to protect himself for as long as he was. We are so lucky. I could have lost them both. Oh, yeah, you can bet your sweet ectoplasmic ass that They owe me that much! They owe me the chance to know that my son is all right. Personally, I'm ready to drop this entire Destiny thing once and for all if They don't show me a little cooperation this time."

"Piper — "

"No. I want to see my son, and I want to see him right now!"

Piper's hand came slapping down emphatically on her thigh, but the sound was easily drowned out by the sounds of splintering wood. Ten feet away from them, an energy ball had rammed into the music stand podium that was the home of The Book. The support beam was splintered in two, toppling book and shelf to the floor.

Instinctively, Piper threw her hands out to freeze the room then leapt to her feet, forgetting that she was only nine days out of surgery. Her eyes flew open wide in bright, whitening pain as she fell back to the couch, her knees suddenly very weak and unable to hold her up. Her hand reached for the wound along her stomach, trying to soothe the pain away as she took her grandmother's hand to pull her back up. She breathed in and out in short, hard breaths in further attempt to steady herself. As soon as she was sure she could stand on her own, she waved her grandmother toward the fallen podium. She instructed the ghostly lady, "Get The Book. Don't let it out of your sight."

Penny didn't need to be told twice. That book was the source of the family's legacy, the heritage of the Halliwell family line. Passed down through the ages, it was in many ways another part of the family. More importantly, it had saved them all more times than any one of them could count. While The Book of Shadows was perfectly capable of protecting itself from Evil, that energy ball had seemingly come out of thin air. Any attacker with the power to throw energy balls and do it completely unnoticed by either herself or her granddaughter was an attacker that could not be taken lightly. Protecting The Book from being even threatened by that attacker was not a chance to be taken.

In the meantime, Piper's eyes narrowed, and through a minefield of swirling colors in front of her eyes from the brightness of the pain, she scanned the room for any sign whatsoever of what could have sent the energy ball at The Book. As she searched, she secretly thanked whatever it was that had sent the damned thing that it was such a lousy shot. Plenty of demons had tried to take The Book before, but they had never missed so drastically before. Sarcastically, she called out to the invisible and hopefully frozen perpetrator, "Sorry, pal, you may be good, but our book is better. I'd work on my aim a little if I were . . . y-you . . . "

The freeze broke on the room and a vivid flash of light followed by the strange darkness that happens whenever a bright light is quickly taken from a room took over the space of the attic. Piper's eyes darted toward the wall where the triquetra portal had collapsed on itself and become nothing more than a chalk outline. She had to blink a few times to get the remaining colors out of her way and to allow her eyes to adjust again to the changed light levels in the room.

"What the hell," she asked herself out loud. She took one last deep breath to force herself to regain her focus and send all of the physical distractions out of her head. When she could see normally and breathe normally and do all of those things that she had to remind herself to do these days, she turned to her grandmother and asked, "Grams, did you see anything come through the portal? Who the hell is throwing energy balls at us through a portal? No wonder he can't aim."

"I don't think he was aiming for you or The Book, Piper," Penny told her softly. In that special way that Penny had of gesturing, she waved her hand down in a circle and directed her girl's attention to the floor. "Apparently, your wish is granted."

As was the trend in her life of the last six or seven years, Piper was once again rendered completely speechless. Splayed with his back on the floor, looking very much alive and completely oblivious to the two women in the room with him was Chris. He was in a jacket and tie — which was just plain wrong — and there was blood, a lot of blood, on his hands and white dress shirt, but he was there. Chris was there and moving and alive.

Piper couldn't make her mouth work as she watched him. He opened his eyes and craned his neck up to look toward the wall, and seeing that the portal was closed, he let his head fall back to the wooden floor, closing his eyes again. He heaved a huge sigh, although it didn't sound all that relieved to his mother. In fact, it sounded a lot more worried, almost nearing panicked levels than it did relieved. Then, without seeming to see her, Chris sat up, propping himself up on his elbows.

"C'mon, c'mon, c'mon, come on," he whispered desperately at the wall. Darkly, he warned the wall, "Damn it! You had better be right."

That said, Chris was enshrouded with a haze of bluish orbs that whisked him away to some unknown destination and out of Piper's still-shocked sight.

"Chris," Piper squeaked out, barely even a whisper. That was him, right? That had been him? She wasn't just imagining it or anything. She had seen Chris. He hadn't seen her, but she'd seen him. That . . . that had to have been him, right? She had never seen him in a suit, so he couldn't have been a hallucination. He was solid, not transparent like every other ghost she had ever seen (except when Mom and Grams deliberately became corporeal). Was that possible? Was he really real? Her eyes wide with lost panic, Piper turned to the source of all answers and just plain asked, "Grams?"

"I saw him, too," Penny slowly confirmed. Everything about her body language said that she was as bewildered as her granddaughter. A more solid answer was going to have to come from someone, something, or someplace that was else.

Purely out of habit, Piper did the thing she always did when things made absolutely no sense. "LEO!" She then called for reinforcements, dashing as quickly as she could post-surgery to the attic door and hollered down the stairs for her sister to join them. "PHOEBE! Get up here and bring the boys. Don't let them out of your sight!"

Floating up from somewhere down the stairs, Phoebe's voice shouted up, "What's wrong?"

"JUST DO IT!" Piper spun back around on both heels, carefully hanging onto the doorjamb as she did (just in case the bright dancing spots decided to come back). She marched across the distance to where the chalk outline on the wall still waited to be used. She touched the wall, feeling along the lines to see if it was in any way still open enough for any other energetic or fiery-type things trying to come flying at them out of the blue. Satisfied that the wall was once again solid, she walked over to where she had last seen her son (her fully alive and bloody son) on the floor. She didn't say anything, but waved her grandmother over to her emphatically, reaching her hand out to have Penny help her with her balance as she bent down to inspect the floorboards for any sign as to why Chris had been bleeding. There were a few spots of blood that must have dripped off his hand, but nothing significant had pooled there. She tugged on her grandmother's hand, warning her ahead of time that she had better anchor herself because Piper was going to need all the help she could get climbing back up from her crouched position. (Randomly she thought, "Man, I can't wait to get my real body back!") She grunted as her grandmother back-peddled enough to counter the weight of them pulling on each other. Once they were both standing again, Piper swept her hair out of her way to reveal overly large, generally freaked out eyes. In her frustration, she yelled, "DAMN IT, LEO! PHOEBE, HURRY UP!"

A slightly cooler head prevailing, Penny soothingly said, "Darling, yelling isn't going to get them here any faster. Calm down. We'll figure this out."

"Did you miss the blood, Grams? Because he was bleeding and more than likely because he got hit by either the energy ball that tried to take out The Book or one just like it. That is not going to make me calm. And I'll goddamned YELL IF I WANT TO!"

Enveloping her stubborn granddaughter into her Book-free arm, Penny held Piper hard to try to calm her down. "We'll figure this out."

Into her grandmother's shoulder, Piper breathed, "He's hurt."

"Lucky for us we have an in-house healer."

"If I knew where he was," Piper grumbled in a snit. She pulled her head back enough to yell her husband's name at the top of her lungs once again, only to be disappointed when she didn't see the floaty balls of light signaling his arrival again. She glanced quickly at her grandmother, who had brought a finger up to her ear and was rattling it around in there to correct the ringing Piper's shout had produced. She quickly apologized sheepishly, "Sorry, Grams. I just . . . Where is he?"

"Until he answers your call, we have to assume that he isn't going to. What we need to do then is get Paige back here and get the three of you working on this. The sooner we figure out where Chris went, the sooner we find out what is going on with him and everything else. All right? So take a deep breath for me then do whatever you need to do to get yourself in the mood for work because it's time to earn your lousy paycheck for the day." With that, Penny glanced toward the door and let loose a holler of her own. "PHOEBE! I KNOW I'M DEAD, BUT I DON'T HAVE ALL DAY!"

Grandmother and granddaughter grinned goofily at one another as Piper nodded her head sharply in the witchly Halliwell bonds of solidarity. "Thanks, Grams."

"I see that Phoebe is still consistently the last one out the door, whatever we're doing. Some things will never change."

"I heard that," Phoebe's voice called from just around the door frame. She entered the candlelit attic a split second later, balancing a very unhappy looking Wyatt on her hip. She was followed by a wary looking Victor with the sleeping Christopher in his arms. Phoebe quickly scanned the room, saw the splinters of what remained of the podium, and immediately turned to her father. "You might want to rethink those retirement plans, Daddy. Here, take Wyatt, too."

Phoebe shuffled Wyatt around in her arms while her father maneuvered Christopher a little so that he could take both of the boys into his arms. Once his grandsons were safely tucked in his arms, Victor looked around the room for the safest place for them to stay out of the girls' way. He nodded gratefully when Phoebe directed him to the sofa closest to the attic door. To the boys he said, "C'mon, guys. It's time for the grandpa and the children to stay out the way so the women can do their work."

Victor and Penny shared a mutual huff.

"You, can it," Piper snapped at her grandmother. She then turned to her father. "You, too. I'm warning you both right now: I don't have time for your issues. So either you be quiet and help me out when I ask for it, or you both can spend the rest of the night in separate corners. Got it?" Without waiting for their indignant answers, Piper then waved at her sons with her best We're in trouble, but I'm not going to let you know that even though you know it anyway smile. "Hey there, my little misters! Mommy needs to work for a while, so you just take care of your super awesome grandpa for me, okay?"

With more than a little irritation that Piper was playing ring master instead of super witch, Phoebe rolled her eyes at her grandmother and father. "You guys got that? Great. Then my sister can tell me what the hell is going on up here."

The sarcasm drip in full flow, Piper gestured dramatically and snapped her head around with tight lips to punctuate her words as she explained. "Uh, well . . . Something managed to toss an energy ball at we aren't sure what because we were too busy noticing my dead child sitting here in the middle of the floor with blood all over himself."

"Blood? What? Huh?"

Phoebe started looking around the room a lot more closely, inspecting everything around her sister and grandmother. Chris was here? That hardly made any sense. She looked again toward what remained of The Book's home and was even more confused. Unfortunately, she didn't get to hear the explanation from her sister. There was something about the light of the room and the way the candles had flickered for just an instant that gave her a strange sense of Déjà Vu. Unbeckoned and unwanted, her mind was distracted away from the immediacy of the situation into one that didn't seem anywhere near as urgent but just as dangerous. Thrown into the memory that the light recalled, one that she knew without even thinking was not her own, Phoebe felt the hair raise on the back of her neck.

The room was still dark with candles being the only light. She was sitting on the floor in the middle of the room, watching the candles burning and studying a strange velvet rope that cordoned off half of the attic space when a deep voice startled her from behind. "Those candles are against the fire code. You should probably put them out."

Phoebe heard herself, or rather, Chris saying, "Since when do you care about rules?"

The male voice didn't answer the question, but somehow she knew that Chris had not expected an answer. He sat there without turning around to greet the speaker or anything. He simply waited for whoever the speaker was to make a deliberately slow walk around him until they were side by side, the speaker standing and Chris not bothering to get up. She couldn't explain it, but she knew that Chris had been incredibly conflicted at actually seeing the person. There had been intense anger there, but a certain nostalgia had creeped up on him, too. He had not liked either feeling, and neither did she.

The sound of the man's voice grated on Chris's bones as he said, "What are you doing here, Little Brother?"

"What do you think: is this grand opening shindig going to be a black tie thing? 'Cause, you know, I left my tux at the cleaners before your flunkies blew it up, and don't have time to get a new fitting."

The man at Chris's side dropped down, balancing on the balls of his feet and sounding not at all happy about having had to stoop to Chris's level to say his piece. Angrily, the man warned, "I don't have time for this, so say what you have to say so we can get this over with."

"It's still my house, too, Wyatt, no matter what you do to it."

"What? Why did you say that?"

Realizing that it wasn't Wyatt — oh man, that was Wyatt? — but Piper right in front of her face talking to her, Phoebe shook her head and tried to refocus herself on her sister instead of this strange encounter that Chris had had with his brother. Careful not to look anywhere but directly at Piper, with her eyebrows raised she asked, "Huh?"

From the sofa, Victor softly called, "Honey, are you okay?"

"I'm fine, Daddy," she answered. To everyone she said, "Why are you asking?"

Piper repeated rather impatiently, "Why did you say that?"

Seeing all of the eyes in the room on her, Phoebe was startled. Knowing that she wasn't exactly going to be getting answers from her father or the Under Two Crowd, she put her question toward her sister and grandmother, this time actually giving it more words than grunts. "Why did I say what?"

"You said, 'It's my house, too, Wyatt,' and something else that I didn't quite catch," Piper explained.

And that, ladies and gentlemen, is exactly why I've been hiding away from the family during this, Phoebe silently grumbled at herself for getting caught having one of Chris's memories. In order to change the subject, she stepped away from her sister's glare and walked around the room, looking for any other indications of what was going on. Willing herself to stay focused and keep Chris out of her head, she asked, "If he was here, where did Chris go?"

"Where did you go," Piper retorted.

"Nevermind," said the middle sister emphatically, shaking the last of this latest burst of memory out of her with a shiver of her shoulders. "It's nothing, and it doesn't matter. Now what's going on with Chris? You said he was bleeding?"

Before Piper got a chance to answer her sister, they were all blinded by a flash of light. Immediately, Penny encircled both of her arms around The Book again, just in case. Phoebe turned quickly toward her father and nephews to warn them, but Wyatt had already blanketed them with the safety of his protective shield. She exchanged a brief look of mild confusion with her father before turning her attention back to the further-expanding portal. As a second flash of light blared through it, she tripped over her own feet, trying to get out of the way of whoever or whatever was going to come through it next.

"Oh, what now," Piper groaned when she saw the bursting light, throwing her arms up in the air in complete and utter frustration. She was certainly starting to think that the shenanigans were nowhere near ending. She had better things to do than this. She needed to be out there finding out what the hell was going on with her son, and then figuring out what the hell was going on with her sister (in that order), not standing there waiting like one of those girls handing out the leis when people come off the plane in Hawaii. She glared angrily at the portal, as if it was the portal's fault that her evening was erupting in chaos. As soon as the body came through the glowing blueness, she knew it definitely was not the portal's fault — and she was not in the least bit happy about it.

Leo stepped out of the portal to find his ex-but-not-exactly-ex wife, her grandmother, her father, and her sister all staring at him, creating an invisible wall, and it wasn't to greet him happily. He blinked in surprise, obviously not expecting anyone to be there waiting for him. Considering the warning that Piper had given him before she had left to go meet Darryl, he knew it was probably safe to assume that she was not going to be all that happy when she finally said something to him.

"Hi," Piper snapped, even though her face looked like she was the perfect Samantha welcoming her Darrin home from a hard day of work in Phoebe's beloved "Bewitched". She kept the happiness on her face as she growled, "Caught the late portal home today, dear? I suppose that first one was a little full, what with the boy and energy ball and all."

His eyebrows raising in an all too familiar defensive gesture, Leo began, "I can explain."

"You bet your ass you're gonna find a way to explain this, Mister, and you'd better do it fast."

"Piper . . . "

The façade of happiness dropped sharply from Piper's face, unable to keep up the appearance of wifely perfection any longer. Her lips barely moved at all as she struggled to control herself from yelling, "And then you can tell me how in the hell you left us alone when I specifically asked you not to."

"Look, I had to — "

"Bring Chris home?"

There was no mistaking the change in Leo at the question. He suddenly didn't see Piper at all, or anyone else in the room, for that matter. His manner became deliberate and calculated, wanting and taking only what he needed to know. The rest was going to have to wait. He had to work. Urgently he asked, "You saw him?"

Not liking the change that came over her husband, Piper's voice remained snappish, wanting to keep the control she had and keep up the fight. Fighting was a lot easier to deal with than the panic, and if it meant fighting with Leo, well . . . She'd had enough practice over the last year that it wasn't exactly hard to do anymore. Sarcastically, she bit, "Uh, yeah. Grams and I did. He was bleeding, Leo. He had blood all over his hands and his shirt. So you better figure out . . . "

Without noticing anyone else in the room as his eyes darted over every inch of it during Piper's tiny rant, he swore in frustration. "Damn it."

"Don't you 'damn it' me, Mister," snapped the wife, not realizing that Leo's utterance had nothing to do with her. "What the hell is going on? My son, who is supposed to be dead, came crashing through the wall — followed by an energy ball, by the way — without any sort of . . . "

Jumping in, Leo asked, "Was anyone hurt?"

Phoebe looked at her brother-in-law like he was half off his rocker. "Are you missing the part where she just told you he had blood all over him? Leo! What the hell is — "

"I have to go," said Leo unapologetically.

"Oh, no, you don't!"

Both Penny and Phoebe shouted in the completely incredulous Piper's stead, "LEO!"

"Not now," Leo barked. With that, he orbed out, leaving his family behind to fume in their stunned anger.

"Did he just bail on us, again," Phoebe asked to no one in particular. When she realized that Leo wasn't there to answer her, she muttered the answer to her own question. "Of course he did. Unbelievable."

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If you had half as much fun reading this chapter as I had writing it, then I had twice as much fun writing it as you had reading it. Heh. Thanks for reading.