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.

5. When the Thought of You Catches Up

Chapter Five
When the Thought of You Catches Up With Me

I.

Christopher tiredly threw his hand up and behind his head, reaching for the pretty much useless cell phone on the coffee table that had become a makeshift nightstand. The technology of the phone hadn't been invented yet, but somehow it was managing to annoy him as much in the past as it had in his own time. It had been ringing off the hook at night, all night, every night, making him want to smash the thing with a very large and very lethal hammer. When he'd answered it, only static had greeted him, every time. Still, he answered it on the first ring anyway, maybe even before. He wasn't sure. He just knew that he was expecting the call. Before he even heard the voice on the other end, he happily marveled, "You aren't dead!"

"Well, I'm not going to leave it up to interpretation, that's for sure," Lucy's voice said dryly into his ear, surrounded by a cone of static. "You knew he wouldn't kill me. I don't know what you were so worried about. For whatever reason, he could do whatever he wanted to the rest of the family, but he always had a soft spot for you and me. I'm not saying a bolt through the shoulder isn't a little bullyish, but Wyatt could never kill me. That doesn't really matter right now, though. Are you okay? What's wrong?"

Only hearing every other word, Christopher struggled to put her thoughts together into a sentence before giving up and asking, "Where are you? I can barely hear you."

The girl's laugh was eerie, echoing in the phone before she'd even let the air out to do it, as if she wasn't really on the other end at all. "Of course you can't, you bum! We're talking over twenty-five years' worth of life and chances. There's bound to be some static. Besides, where you are, there is no certainty that I'm even going to exist. You're lucky to be getting through to me at all."

"Getting through to you? You're the one who called me, remember?"

"No, I didn't. You called me. You have had this phone ringing off the hook all week. I had to turn it off just to keep him from hearing it ring constantly. So what's wrong? I don't have a whole lot of battery left, so as much as I love you, we're going to have to get this one done kind of fast. So spill it."

Christopher pulled the phone away from his ear and shook it, annoyed that again he'd caught only a few words. He had no idea whatsoever what she had said to him. "Damn it," he swore. "I can't hear you. Can you get to a window or something? There's no signal."

As he finished his question, she happily asked him all too clearly, "Can you hear me now?"

Foolishly, Christopher's head whipped up from his pillow so fast that his eyes swam with bright colors from the effort. He blinked a few times to straighten them out, but once they were clear, he had to knuckle them with both fists. It was impossible, but somehow, his sister had just appeared out of nowhere and was sitting calmly and lady-like at the foot of his improvised bed. Too confused to immediately be as relieved as he knew he should be, he stammered at her, "H-how?"

His baby sister shrugged simply at him. "You call, I answer."

"Huh," Christopher mused to himself, both amused and surprised at the plain honesty of her answer. Somehow, at this point, it seemed like as logical an explanation as any. He chuckled again, "Huh. Well . . . okay, I guess."

Lucy giggled and reached toward him, taking hold of his hand that was now oddly reattached to his ear. From it she took his cell phone and tossed it onto the floor without a care. "You won't need that anymore."

Alarmed, Christopher made to sit up and grab for the discarded phone, but she quickly crushed it with the heel of her heavily clad foot. Angrily he snapped, "Are you crazy? What the hell are you thinking? What if you need to call me again, or I need to call you?"

"You can't." She winced apologetically and explained, "This is a one time thing. Wyatt is going to freak out enough as it is when he figures out that I tricked him and called in the first place. He's a little on the grouchy side these days."

"That's an understatement, don't you think?"

"It's a phase, Christopher. He'll get over it one of these days, soon. That's why you're here, isn't it? You wouldn't have tried to come back here if you thought that it couldn't be done or that the family's past, future, whatever couldn't be fixed. You're smarter than that." She gave him a sad smile, one that, for the first time in his life, Christopher couldn't quite decipher what it meant. When she saw the confusion in his eyes, her smile grew even sadder, reaching into her entire body. She quickly overcame it, though, and sat right back up again, a reassuring grin lighting her face. "On the other hand, you can't be your usual stubborn self about it either. You're going to need some help this time."

"Is that an offer," Christopher asked, laughing. After all, hadn't they planned on this being a joint venture all along? Maybe they had gone through a slight set-back, but she was here now. They could do this, together. They could return home together, both safe and sound, to a time that in no way resembled the one that they had come from. The hope of it almost felt like it had to be some kind of a trick, but there she was, and he wasn't about to let her out of his sight again, not even for the slightest second.

Lucy, however, didn't sound as though she was thinking the same thing. "That's not what I meant, Christopher. I'm not the help you're looking for."

"Why not? You don't have to go back," Christopher argued desperately. "Stay here with me until we figure this out. We can fix this. We can."

"No, Christopher, you can't," said a dark, hollow voice from somewhere and everywhere in the room.

Christopher leapt up off his mother's sofa and grabbed his sister by the wrist, pulling her safely behind him. He peeled his eyes, searching the shadows for the voice and its owner, but could see only shadow. Into the darkness, he barked, "Who's there? WHO'S THERE?"

"It's all right," the voice said with a strange soothing air, as if there was nothing dangerous at all about a voice popping up in someone's room in the middle of the night. Christopher was unnerved by the way the voice seemed to know him and what he was thinking as it addressed him. "There is no need to be alarmed, Christopher. Whatever you have been told, you need not fear me."

Suspiciously, Christopher challenged the voice. "Really? Then why are you hiding in the shadows? In my experience, people who lurk around where they can't be seen give me and mine plenty of reason to worry and aren't exactly free of things to be hiding from, if you know what I mean."

"Experience tells me that I cannot exactly trust the members of your family, either. So it would seem that we are both in a bit of a bind."

Before Christopher could stop her, Lucy moved away from behind him and walked to the center of the room between Christopher and where it sounded like the voice was coming from. She smiled at her big brother hopefully. "It's okay, Christopher. He doesn't know any better. He believes his heart, just like you believe yours. We've all been told a lot of lies. It's just a difference of who we heard them from."

"Lucy, come back," Christopher both pleaded and ordered. He didn't like her being out there exposed. He didn't like it at all. Any other time, he would have thought her trusting nature a personality quirk, nothing more, but things were too dangerous for them for her to be so willing to walk into a dark room without turning the lights on first. "Lulu, honey, come back, please. We don't know who this guy is. You can't trust him."

Seeming to know exactly what her brother was thinking, Lucy nodded ruefully. "You're probably right." She then looked off into the mirror across the room where, in it, a somehow eerily still Wyatt was standing, waiting and staring, his arms crossed over his chest. She glanced between her mirrored brothers, caught in the middle, and told Christopher, "But trust is what's kept me alive. Not everything is black and white, good and bad. If that's all we see, well . . . "

Christopher barely heard what she was saying. He was suddenly so wrapped up in watching his brother in the mirror, trying to gauge Wyatt's mood (and more importantly his next move), that he didn't see anything else. In what he told himself had to be some wicked trick of his eyes and sleep-deprived, over-stressed mind, he watched in horrified realization as his brother stepped out of the mirror and made a rapid cross of the space between them. He had never seen his brother move so fast. Wyatt's face was perfectly still, something Christopher hadn't seen in a very, very long time. He'd seen his brother wear nothing but scowls and sneers for so long that he barely remembered what Wyatt looked like without them. It somehow made him look younger.

". . . Then you're going to miss everything that's important," Wyatt finished with Lucy, their voices blending and sounding not like the adults they were, but like the teenagers they had been the last time Christopher remembered Wyatt being a real part of the family so many years ago.

From just over Wyatt's shoulders, the sinister voice Christopher had heard in the shadows said with what sounded like relieved delight, "Like me."

Christopher knew he could only handle one problem at once whenever Wyatt was involved, no matter how old his brother appeared to be. He had no idea who the owner of the voice could be, though, and didn't know who he should distrust more. Still, the dripping insinuation in the voice was enough to make him look away from his brother long enough that he lost sight of Wyatt. Unable to see anyone at all, Christopher whipped around to search them out again. Before he could see the face of the man that was damned near right on top of him, a pair of hands reached out and shoved into his chest, toppling him over into the floor. He yelped in annoyed pain as his elbow crashed into the suddenly earthy ground. He tried to look around and catch his bearings, but he had somehow missed the fog rolling in all around them, so thick that he could hardly see his own feet.

Taunting him from just above his head in a deceptively innocent drawl, the voice continued, "None of you saw me, not in your whole life. Your parents certainly didn't. Your brother didn't, not until it was too late."

Suddenly, Wyatt's face was right next to Christopher's, bright blue eyes opened emphatically wide. Again, he had lost age. Christopher wasn't sure, but Wyatt looked to be eight or nine now, but was still as strong as he would grow to be as an adult. He reached behind Christopher and pulled his little brother up by the collar of his shirt until he was standing up again. Wyatt dusted off the back of Christopher's shirt, which came off a mixture of dirt and blood. Wyatt didn't even seem to notice as he nonchalantly explained, "That's true, but even if I had, I couldn't have done anything to stop it. I know you think you can. I don't know if you can, but you're more than welcome to try. But you aren't going to get anything accomplished if you don't open your eyes. You're blind, Christopher, to a lot of things."

"Like me."

Wyatt tilted his head out of Christopher's way to reveal a man, as dark and sinister as his voice had suggested, grinning serenely at him as if he belonged there. After a quick wink in Christopher's direction, the man leaned in to young Wyatt's ear and whispered something only Wyatt could hear. Wyatt shook his head violently, careful not to take his eyes from where they were matched with Christopher's. The man whispered in his ear again, but this time Wyatt's face seemed to blank out. Triumphantly, he said in the same voice as the man in his ear, "Like us."

"Like that," said Lucy weakly, drawing Christopher's attention back to her. He couldn't see her, but he felt her hand trying to settle itself into his, turning him into her direction. When he found her, she was looking down to the middle of her stomach where the hilt of a sword was somehow embedded solidly as if her gut was built of stone. She looked at it curiously, without even the slightest whimper of pain or fear. "Huh. Guess I missed that one, too. See, Wyatt? This is what happens when you can't share your toys with the rest of us. You should have told us." To Christopher, she added, "This thing kind of hurts. If it's okay with you, I think I'm going to have to sit this one out. You two boys play nice after I'm gone, okay?"

"They can't," a new bodiless voice echoed over their heads, joining their conversation. Their heads all looked up to the starless sky as the voice continued, "Good and Evil were never meant to get along. We're sorry for you, kids, but the balance has to be maintained."

"Wyatt isn't evil," Christopher yelled defensively at the sky. Angrily he accused all of these voices that seemed to want to interfere with what was supposed to be a family discussion, "At least, he wasn't until all of you came along. Leave us alone! Leave my family alone!"

From just over five-year-old Wyatt's shoulder, the man started speaking, but the words came out of Wyatt's mouth. Both sneering and soothing, the still echoed voice said, "That's a convenient excuse for your family, Christopher, but that doesn't make it true. Your ears are as closed as your eyes. We warned you all, but you couldn't hear it. Wouldn't."

The still faceless voice boomed, "We won't warn you again."

Wyatt pulled away from the man at his shoulder, pacing slowly around his younger brother. An actual smile of happiness graced his childlike features as he nodded his chin in the direction their sister had taken off in. Wyatt closed his eyes and hummed along with her a tune that Christopher couldn't quite place. As she started putting words to the notes, Wyatt mused, "She has a great singing voice, don't you think? Sad. You really should have listened to it more often."

Suddenly the room flared in brightness. There was no sound, no jingle, but there were orbs circling all around them. Christopher searched frantically for his brother, reaching his hand into the brightness to find Wyatt, determined not to lose sight of him. The more his hand swatted at the orbs, the denser they became until they were all he could see. He listened for any sound to give him a clue where to look, but the voices of his siblings were growing fainter by the second. He barely caught on to his sister's singing as the last note faded into an agonized scream.

". . . what makes you think you're the one who can live without tryin'? What makes you think you're the one who can live without dyin'? Every little thing is there to see . . . NO!"

Christopher opened his mouth to cry out to her, to beg her to tell him where she was, that he would find her if only she would tell him where she was. The scream caught in his lungs, though, as a fiery pain tore through his spine. He looked down to see the blade of Excalibur protruding sickly through him just below his ribcage. He struggled to find some air to warn her. Gently, a hand rested on either of his shoulders, pressing just hard enough to make it harder to find that air he so desperately needed. Evil chuckles sounded in each of his ears, the nauseating voices of his once again adult brother and the stranger at Wyatt's side. Together they whispered hotly into his ears.

"Made you look."

For the seventh night in a row, Christopher screamed himself awake, even though he had absolutely no idea as to why. He was quickly overcome with chills as he realized that he'd kicked his blankets off again. He would have leaned over the edge of the couch to retrieve them, but he was somehow too paralyzed to move. He knew he'd been dreaming, and he knew that it had ended badly, but he couldn't for the life of him remember what it was that could have scared him so horribly. His mind struggled to find any sliver left of the dream to tell him what was going on, but the harder he tried, the faster the details dissipated into the wasteland of Forgotten Dreams. Frustrated, Christopher whapped the side of his fist into the back of the sofa before he realized that he was not as alone as he would like to be.

The rustle of sheets from his parents' bed told Christopher that at least one of his parents was awake, and that it was his fault. He wasn't all that surprised when he heard his mother's voice in the darkness whispering to him, "Christopher? What's wrong?"

Trying to sound like he actually believed what he was saying, Christopher told her, "I'm fine, Mom. Go back to sleep."

The lamp on her bedside table switched on at the same time she called him a liar. She took one look at her son and flung her sheets aside, dropped her feet to the floor, and crossed the room fast as lightning. It was exactly what Christopher did not want her to do. Still, he obeyed and drew his knees up to his chest when she patted the end of his makeshift bed to make some room for her. He even went so far as to offer her his top blanket, but she quickly put it aside when she realized just how drenched it was with his terror.

"Okay, Mister," she urged. "Start talking."

"About what," he asked innocently, delaying the inevitable and starting a frantic search for any way out of the conversation, no matter how futile he knew the effort to be.

Tired of playing the same old avoidance games she had spent the last two years playing with the other Chris, she scowled angrily. "Christopher, I love you, I do. I know I've only really known You you for a week, but you still will never know how much I love you. That said, however comma pause, between your father, your brother, the other you, and now you, the men in my life have given me more than enough to be awake all night over. Your brother is too small to tell me what's wrong, and so is the you who is still sleeping. The other you isn't here, and your father seems to have sneaked out of the house again tonight. So, by default, you get to be the one to get my expert Mom advice since it was apparently your turn to wake me up. So either you start talking, or you will be the only one without coffee in the morning."

"How about I just sleep on the couch downstairs tonight instead?"

"Nice try," she shook her head. "But your grandfather is staying on the couch until he finds a house here. You're stuck up here, with me, and I'm not going to let you out of my sight until you tell me what's going on."

"And that doesn't bother you? 'Cause if you ask me, there's something kind of disturbing about sharing a bedroom with my parents. I mean, don't get me wrong, if my being here puts my parents in the same bed instead of him on this couch, great. I'm all for it. That still doesn't make it any less disturbing. I liked my memories of the two of you just fine the way they were."

Piper was in no way going to be held hostage by her boy's diversionary tactics. She knew better. She'd used bigger and better ones in her day. Holding on to her reserve, she tried to steer Christopher back on track. "Honey, what's wrong? Is it something from the future? Should we be looking for something tonight?"

With one last surge of effort, Christopher evaded her with an almost innocent, "Where's Dad?"

"I haven't a clue, but I'll call him if you think it would help you tell me what's going on and why you woke half the block screaming your lungs out."

"That really isn't a good idea," Christopher protested, even though he wasn't entirely sure why he'd said that. Of all the people in the house, Leo had been the only one he'd really been able to talk to. Dad and Grandpa. It was too hard with the others. They were the only ones who seemed to really be open to hearing him, anyway. Everyone else had been trying too hard. He understood why. He did. It must have been really hard for them to lose this other version of him when they'd spent so much time with him. He could hardly imagine what it was like. But if their individual behaviors were any indication, well . . . It certainly explained a lot to him about his childhood with them, at least.

Still, he didn't remember Paige and Phoebe being this avoidy. Paige had hardly said ten words to him since his arrival, but they had all been happy, at least. She was maybe even a little too happy in comparison with what his father had said about her behavior lately. But who was he to say, right? She had been doing her best to hold everyone together, it seemed. She was keeping herself psychotically busy, taking care of everything around the house — Piper, don't touch that! You need your rest! — and running the club so efficiently it was unreal. He didn't think she'd managed to sit still for more than two seconds since he'd seen her the morning after his return. She was like a happiness machine, something his aunt had never been in his lifetime that he could remember. Phoebe, well, she had pretty much avoided him altogether once she'd disappeared up the stairs with Grams that night. She hadn't done a very good job at all of hiding the fact that she was staying out of his way as much as possible. When contact was unavoidable, she focused her attentions on his infant self and Wyatt. He could count the number of times she'd made eye contact with him on one hand. They weren't doing it intentionally; he knew that and in no way blamed them for it, but at the same time, constantly feeling like a dead man walking was starting to wear on his nerves a little bit.

At least Piper was trying in the other direction. She seemed to genuinely care about being his mother, even though he hadn't had one in quite a long time. Her efforts would be amusing if they weren't making him so sad. He didn't really know why it surprised him, though. She had been the world's greatest mother in his eyes all his life. Other kids, he knew, went through that thing when they wanted someone else's parents, anyone else's parents but their own, but Christopher never went through that one. He loved his parents exactly the way they were. Still, there was just something about sitting there in the middle of the night with nothing on but a pair of his father's flannel pants talking with his dead mother that was really kind of disturbing. As much as he wished that he could vocalize that, it probably wouldn't be the smartest thing he could say to her at this point. He could see she genuinely wanted to help. Telling her that it was seeming a little gross at the moment was only going to hurt her feelings.

He was lucky enough not to have to say anything at all, as it turned out. Piper's eyes suddenly widened in the awkward silence, sensing a drastic change in the way he was looking at her. She knew that look. She hated that look. She also understood it, which was an advantage that she had not foreseen and knew that her son wouldn't have either.

Sadly, she asked him, "I'm still dead, aren't I? At some point in your life, I've already died. Is that why you can't talk to me?"

Christopher's eyes snapped up suspiciously to meet his mother's. "How-how do you know that?"

"When you — the other you — were here before, he used to do the same thing, especially as we got closer to when he knew he was going to have to leave. Once we found out that he was my son, everything changed, for all of us. Everything had a whole new meaning, for us and for him. He stopped talking to me about anything other than demons and Wyatt, not that he was a chatterbox before. Your father was still Up There at the time, so your grandfather came to help out for a few days and talk to you for me. That's why he wasn't as surprised as he probably should have been when he saw you the night you came back; he's seen you before. The two of them spent a lot of time together talking. It was the first time I'd seen the other Chris feel comfortable about being around anyone in the family, so I let it be. I knew that Dad was going to get through to him, one way or another. Somehow, in the middle of their conversations, it slipped out that I hadn't been around in his life all that much because I had died. He wouldn't tell me how or when, although I think maybe your grandfather knows, but that's not the point. The point is, you're acting the same way he did, so it wasn't too hard to figure out what you could have been thinking. That is, you're acting the way he did until we agreed that the future wasn't completely set in stone. So I'll tell you the same thing I told him: save it. I'm here now. I'm still your mother. If there is something you need, or if you just need your mom to talk to, I'm her. I'm her, and I'm here. Got it?"

Letting his knees fall away from his chest, releasing the invisible guard he had around himself every time his mother had been there when he woke up screaming in the middle of the night, Christopher put his feet on the floor. He leaned over and rested his elbows on his knees, hands holding his head. He didn't get it. How could she be sitting there, talking so calmly about what was pretty much one of the top three most awful, horrible days of his life like it was the simplest thing in the world? There hadn't been a single minute in the last seven years that he hadn't wished for a way to go back and change that moment. If she had been just that much quicker, if he and Wyatt hadn't been distracted, if Wyatt had helped her instead of him, if, if, if . . .

Her pep talk obviously not doing the trick she wanted it to, Piper reached over and rubbed her fingers in circles around on Christopher's back, hoping to soothe the answer out of him. "Christopher, I mean it. Listen to me. I'm okay, and if what we do now to ensure Wyatt's safety does what it's supposed to, I'll still be okay thirty years down the road. So can you try to focus for me? We can only solve so many problems at once, and I think that whatever is still after your brother is the more pressing of the two. Besides, it's my death, and I'm not worried, so you aren't allowed to be either. So let's try that again, and even if you don't agree with me, put some effort into making it sound like you do. Knock it off. Got it?"

Actually a little amused with her, Christopher looked up at her and put on the best half smile he could manage. "Got it."

"Good," she said, slapping her thighs and standing up, declaring that part of their midnight adventure over. "Then put some clothes on and meet me downstairs. If we're going to be awake at this godawful hour, we're going to have ice cream to go with it. Anything less would be uncivilized."

"Yeah," Christopher chuckled fondly, hearing those two sentences for the first time in seven years. Incredibly, they sounded exactly the same as they always had. Some things really don't change, he supposed. Feeling a little better, he agreed, "That sounds great."

With a quick look toward the nursery door, Piper turned to walk away, wanting to check on the little kids before taking care of the big kid. "I'll be right down then."

Christopher watched her walk away, but caught her just before she reached the door. He knew that if he was going to say this, he had better do it now before the moment passed. "Hey, Mom?"

"Yeah?"

"I do know you're trying. I'm . . . I'm glad you're trying."

Not wanting to spoil the moment, Piper simply grinned back at him until she disappeared around the doorway.

He wasn't sure why, but Christopher was actually grateful that she didn't make a big deal about him saying that to her. He'd never really been much for words, not like his cousins and Wyatt. Half the time he couldn't get them to shut up, but he was much happier staying in the background. There was just something about everyone trying to talk over everyone else that had always turned him off. Not that he wasn't a part of the family. He was always right there in the middle of it. He just didn't like to talk about it. Words usually got him in trouble anyway.

Still, there was a part of him that would appreciate some words right now. He didn't really know who from, but words might be nice. In particular, it would be nice to have some words directed at him instead of around him. The last week had passed pretty much without incident, which was a relief to him and the others. He knew that. It wasn't like he was looking for trouble. Things were actually quiet enough that, in the backs of their minds, each and every one of them was wondering what was taking the usual demons, ghosts, and random evilness that goes bump in the night so long to pounce on them, but none of them had dared to say it out loud. There was no reason to invite the bad guys to stop over, right? They already did it enough. So instead, everyone remained silent about all things supernatural and hoped for the best. They had plenty going on under their roof as it was.

Christopher knew he was part of those goings-on, more than he wanted to be. He knew they had to be talking about him. There was no way that they weren't. He could walk into a room and people would suddenly look up at him all smiles, doing a horrible job of hiding the fact that they had been talking about him. Phoebe didn't even have to be talking to anyone to look at him that way. She would be staring off into the distance as if she was seeing something that none of the rest of them could see when she would suddenly snap back into the moment, doing a horrid job of pretending that she had heard anything that had been happening around her. He understood why they would be talking about him. From everything Leo had told him in the last few days, he knew he must be a little bit confusing to them just by being there. Still, he wished they could try to act normally around him. The silences were starting to get really old really fast.

Then again, a lot of things were getting old. The sisters weren't the only ones having strange reactions to his presence. Even after a week, Wyatt still hadn't been able to be in a room with Christopher, with or without his little protective bubble. He had always known that his brother had been powerful, even as a child, but he'd had no idea that Wyatt could do some of the things that he could already. Christopher was actually a little grateful that his brother was so small, though, and didn't have the power to orb him any further than the city limits. Finding himself out in the middle of Angel Island was quite enough. It hadn't taken a genius to figure out that Wyatt was constantly saying that his little brother wasn't his little brother every time he said, ' 'Ot 'ris '. No matter how many times they tried to convince him otherwise, Wyatt was so sure that Christopher wasn't who he was that it had become a habit for him to actually ask if his brother was in the room before he'd enter one.

As the second oldest of all of the Halliwell children, Christopher had spent many a night helping the mothers getting their brood into bed at night or just taking care of them in general. He wasn't only Lucy's big brother; he was big brother to all, save Wyatt. So when he caught himself thinking about Wyatt and actually looking in on the nursery on the way downstairs to meet his mother, he didn't really think anything of it. It wasn't until he looked into the crib and saw his infant self there that he realized who it was that he was really looking in on. As quickly as he could, he backed out the nursery, hoping that Wyatt hadn't stirred and noticed the Not-Chris in the room with him. He really didn't want to end up in the middle of the bay for no reason other than that he was doing his job. He was having a hard enough night.

Christopher grabbed one of his father's corduroy shirts out of the closet that semi-matched the flannel pants on the way out of his parents' bedroom, actually tiptoeing his way out, just in case. On his way down the hall, he stopped for a second to listen at Phoebe's door to make sure she was home safely. Again, it was habit. Especially once Wyatt was out of the house and Grandpa was sick, he had made it a habit to check everyone's doors to make sure that everyone had made it safely through the day and were in their rooms for the night. It was his responsibility. He had promised his mother and aunts that they would all make it home at night, and he did his best to make sure he kept that promise. Whatever Phoebe was feeling these days about him and everything else, he could at least relax a little bit knowing that she, too, was at home, safe for the night.

At the bottom of the stairs, Christopher stopped again for a second, listening to his grandfather's snore from the sofa in the living room. Until his arrival here in this time, he had only been without it for two nights, but he had never known how much he was going to miss that sound until it was gone. There had been safety in it ,and that safety had been yanked out from under him. As responsible as he was for everyone under the Halliwell roof, his grandfather had been the one place that he could go to whenever the responsibility felt like too much. They used to sit up and talk for hours, under good circumstances and bad. They would sit up and watch The Wizard of OZ like it was the first time they'd ever seen it, laughing at the witch and how she had been so much more frightening to both of them than any demon they'd run into. They'd talk about school and the club and all of the things that happened in their days. Grandpa was the one person who let Christopher be a kid all the time with him. There was no responsibility there, only love.

Guiltily, he wished he was on his way to talk to his grandfather rather than his mother. Somehow, he was willing to bet that that conversation would go a lot better than the one he was about to have was going to. But if wishes were fishes . . . That conversation would have to wait for another time.

Resigning himself to the conversation ahead, Christopher trekked the rest of the way down the hall, reminding himself the entire way that it really wasn't going to be as bad as he thought it was. She was his mother, after all. She was trying. She really was. He had to give her that chance. As much as he had missed her for those seven years, she was here now. It wasn't her fault that she hadn't been around for him before. She was trying her best so he needed to as well.

Taking one last stabilizing breath, he leaned against the doorjamb and yawned a grin at her. "Hey. Sorry it took so long. I couldn't find a shirt that I wasn't drowning in."

Piper looked up from the plate of carrot and celery sticks, a mixture of surprise, relief, and apology lighting her eyes. "I was beginning to think you'd ditched me."

Sheepishly, Christopher shrugged and dug his fists into the pockets of his father's pants, not that it took much seeing as how they were about two sizes too big. It took him a second to collect his thoughts before he admitted, "I thought about it."

"But you didn't," Piper asked, appreciating the honesty.

"No."

Mother and Son watched one another for a moment, letting his answers hang over the room. Neither one of them really knew what to make of them. Piper didn't say anything at all. She waited for him to steer the conversation, knowing that the look on his face meant that his mind was working a little overtime trying to figure out what to say. She was right. Until coming to the past, Christopher had never lied to his mother. She had always beaten it into his head that their relationship was too important to her to be tainted with lies and half-truths. He could tell her anything as long as he told her the truth. Until learning about the other him, he hadn't really understood the reason behind her fervor for their bond. When his mother finally filled the silence because it looked like he wasn't going to, he never knew he could be so grateful for having told the truth. The look on her face was more than enough.

"Thank you for at least being honest."

Christopher slowly left his perch in the doorway and crossed the distance between them, casually leaning his elbows on the island counter. He didn't look at her, but he lazily played with the vegetables, lifting and dropping them onto the plate.

"Sorry all I have is veggies," Piper said, sensing his distaste (or distraction, one of the two). "One of the others must have killed off the ice cream and not said anything."

Softly, Christopher ignored her apology and asked, "He lied to you guys a lot, huh?"

"Oh, I don't think he wanted to," she said thoughtfully. "The thing you have to understand about Chris is that he had it differently than you do. Not necessarily easier or harder, whichever way you look at it, but definitely different. When he first came here to us, he had . . . He had us hunting demons day and night. We just thought he was some sort of workaholic and was trying to impress the Elders so that he could stay here. Threats that . . . Threats that you have never had to know are gone because they had plagued his life, and he knew to destroy them in the past before they could get to you. You haven't had to see so many demons because he did. He thought that, in order to do that, he would have to lie because he didn't think that we would be willing to help him if he told us the truth about who he was. The more I think about it, I know somehow that he was right; we never would have believed him if he had just shown up like he did and told me he was my son from the future. But it doesn't really matter. He made his choice, and for ten months he stuck with it. I don't know if it was easier for him then, when he didn't have to admit to caring about anything in the family at all, or if it was harder after we knew who he was and truly cared about him. But I do know that he did all of the things he did because he thought they were for the right reasons, and that includes the secrecy and lying. He was doing what he thought was right."

Christopher let her admission drift off as she seemed to come to a realization even as she spoke. He waited a beat before sitting and asking her, as if he were asking for her permission, "And if I decide to lie to you?"

"I would hope you wouldn't, but I'd at least try to understand if you do. I'm sure this isn't easy for you. It isn't easy for any of us." Piper seemed to stop to think about that for a moment, as if realizing for the first time that she really wasn't okay with all of this. And if she wasn't okay, she couldn't expect anyone else to be okay with it either. "So speaking of truths and half-truths, how are you? We haven't really talked much about you since you got here. We've talked a lot about Wyatt and the other Chris, but you've been awfully good at dodging the question whenever it's directed at you. I tried not to ask about what was going on and all, but . . . A lot's happened to you lately. Can you tell me why you were all soaked in blood when you came through the portal last week? Your dad, I know he knows, but he won't tell me. He says that's up to you."

Christopher gulped hard. He definitely did not want to go there. He couldn't. It was bad enough he had to go there in his dreams at night. To do it in the waking hours would make it even more real. He'd had plenty of practice over the years learning to put things into a mental box and take them out only when he needed to. This was one of those times when the lid needed to stay taped on tight with heavy duty packing tape. So he steeled himself, waiting for her to find another question to ask. If it was about Wyatt or what their next move should be, great. But everything else was positively out of limits right now.

Seeing her son's features harden, Piper knew he was either going to evade the question or lie to her altogether, so she offered him an alternative. "Okay, for now. Moving on."

"Thanks."

"Can I ask you one thing?"

Hoping that she was going to change the direction of the conversation to something a little more positive and two a.m. friendly, Christopher said cheerfully through a yawn, "Shoot."

"I don't want to pry, and you can certainly tell me if I am, but I was wondering and wanted to at least offer to you the opportunity to tell me the answer. I know you've been having a hard time sleeping since you got here and . . . Have your dreams been about Wyatt? Is he why you woke up screaming?"

"Mom — "

"Before you start denying that you were screaming about anything at all, let me get this out," she interrupted. "Look, when the other you was here, he tried too hard to protect us from the truth, and it only ended up causing us problems in the end. I think things would have been a lot different between us if he had started out with at least that part of the truth. He told us that he was here to save Wyatt from a demon, which I suppose, from his perspective, was true. But he had been here for eight months before he even told us that Wyatt himself was the threat from his future, and I still don't know what that means. The most he ever told me was that Wyatt had killed and that I didn't want to know anything else. I know that Wyatt was so desperate that he sent his brother's own fiancée back here to kill him. That's all I know, though. You were going to come back here to try to fix things the same way that he did, but I don't know what that means."

Dark and evasive, Christopher told her, "You don't want to know what that means."

"I need to know."

Trying to remember that he was, after all, talking to his mother (his grandfather would be rolling in his grave if he said anything too harsh to her), with as much understanding as he could muster, Christopher said, "No, what you need to know is that it wasn't your fault that he turned out the way he did. Knowing what he turned out to be in my time, if we are successful, isn't going to matter anymore. Why do you need to know something that isn't going to be?"

With a motherly, stern pinch of her eyes, Piper corrected him. "I need to know because it has woken my child up screaming in the middle of the night every night since he got here. It used to wake him at night, too. Between the two of you, the neighbors are going to think we've got some poor shmuck tied up in the basement to torture him for fun. Please, tell me what you were dreaming. You have to let us help you, and I can't do that if you don't talk to me."

"It wasn't about Wyatt," he lied, feeling guilty even as he was doing it, even if it was for his mother's own good. He felt even more guilty for what he was about to say, knowing that it was barely even remotely true. It needed to be done, though, if he was going to get through this conversation, and he knew it. Attempting to keep the sadness out of his voice, he said quickly, "It was about someone else, someone who doesn't matter. She isn't a part of this anymore, and I can't worry about it. She's a friend who I haven't thought about in a really long time who used to be important to me, but she's gone, and there isn't anything I can do about it. There wasn't then, and there isn't now."

"That's all it was?"

"That's all it was."

Offering a sympathetic grin, Piper reached her hand out to her son and squeezed his hand before pulling it back again, knowing that it probably wasn't a good idea to get too familiar with him yet. "Well, I'm sorry for whatever happened to her to make you scream like that. It sounded awful."

"She was a good friend, one of the best, and I miss her. But that's for me to deal with, and I will," he said with sad determination. After all, that part of this all was true, wasn't it? He was going to have to figure out how to deal without Lucy one of these days, just as he had learned to deal without Sam or Jack or anyone else in the family. Somehow reassured that he'd found a way to shut himself off before and would therefore ultimately be able to do it again, he said confidently, "I don't want you to worry about it, okay?"

"Only if I get to ask one more question." She waited for Christopher's nod to continue. When she got it, she asked nervously, "Her name wasn't 'Bianca', was it?"

Suspiciously, Christopher eyed his mother. "How do you know about her? Did Dad tell you?"

"No, he didn't say anything about her at all. It was just a hunch. Let's just say that you seem to run in the same circles as you did before," she said a little unhappily. It had been a wild guess, one that she had hoped he wouldn't confirm. She didn't like that that woman was still a part of his life at all, especially if he was having dreams about her. "You knew her, or rather, he knew her. She is the fiancee that I mentioned, the one who tried to kill him. If you could have seen what she did, it — Well, Bianca isn't all that high on my list of people that I would have liked to see be in your life. That's all. If I had my way, you wouldn't be doing anything with her ever."

"I don't do anything with Bianca," he defended himself a little too quickly. "I mean, she comes over to bring messages or orders from Wyatt, we flirt, we threaten to kill each other, and she leaves. It's all games, nothing more."

Piper blew out a small breath of relief. "Good."

"Listen, I know it's tempting to want to know what Wyatt's like and what has happened between us. I get that, Mom, I do. I just don't think it would do you any good to know those things. It won't help Wyatt either. I don't want you to look at him differently for things that he hasn't even done yet. That isn't fair to him. Dad showed me that letter that the other me left before he died. He was right to ask you not to tell us about him or what happened in his lifetime. It only would have made things harder for us. We had to figure this stuff out on our own." Christopher looked hard at his mother, willing his next words to sink in without him needing to go too far into it. "So do you. You don't have to like it, but you have to deal with it."

A chuckle escaped Piper's throat before she could catch it, causing Christopher to raise his eyebrows at her as she quickly clapped her hand to her mouth.

"Something funny," asked Christopher.

Not quite sure how to word it, Piper spoke slowly, forming her sentence as she moved along. "The two of you . . . were . . . are . . . very talented."

"What does that mean?"

"It means that you both have managed to spend your time here telling me a lot of things without telling me a damned thing at all. You remind me of Phoebe when she was your age. She could dance with the best of 'em, too. Of course, with her, it was mostly because she had either slept with one of Prue's boyfriends or borrowed our clothes and ruined them."

Christopher looked down at his hands, trying to hide the grin on his face. He'd heard that line before and wasn't in the least bit offended like she had seemed to think he would be. He knew he was doing his job well then. He hadn't revealed as much about his life as he'd thought he had to everyone but his father. Considering the circumstances, he had to be happy with what he could get. Still, he asked softly, "Is that a problem? Or is that considered part of the lying thing?"

"Let's just say that you've been kind enough not to use the words 'Future Consequences' yet, so you get points for that."

Laughing a little, Christopher admitted, "Yeah, Dad kind of warned me off of that when I first got here. I figured it wouldn't go over well if I just said that."

"It'll do, for now, but don't let it become a habit, okay?"

"Then don't ask any questions I can't answer and we'll be good."

"I'll see what I can do." Now that she had her son in a better mood, she thought she'd try to at least breach one more topic while she had him alone, something she'd been meaning to say to both of the Chrises for a long time. "Christopher? By the way? In case I forget to tell you later . . . thank you."

"What for?"

"Coming here," Piper smiled, thinking on the last time she'd said nearly the same thing. She hadn't had the time to say all of the things to the other Chris that she had wanted to, so in some ways, this was her chance to say it to both of them. She looked at him hard, hoping to drill the sentiment into his already-blushing head with her eyes. "Thank you for taking the chance to come here. I know I can't imagine what a chance it was. You risked your life to save your brother. It's pretty incredible, especially since you've technically done it not once but twice. Most people wouldn't have even done it the first time around. I guess . . . I guess I just needed you to know that I'm proud of you and what you've done."

"Don't be."

"Why not?"

Christopher sighed, trying to give himself time to find the right words without offending his mother. He knew she meant well, but it was really becoming a little too much from her and everyone else. Evenly, he informed her, "I'm not some hero, Mom. I'm not. God, I hate that word. It's so overused that it doesn't mean anything anymore. A kid pulls a cat down from a tree, he's a hero. A ten-year-old doesn't get into a car driven by a stranger with candy, she's a hero. I'm not a hero. I'm just looking out for my brother, the way we were all taught to look out for each other. I'm looking out for him the way you would for Phoebe or Paige or Prue when she was alive. You guys do stuff for each other every day, every time another demon shows up on our front doorstep. You don't go around slapping each other on the back, calling each other heroes. Not once in my lifetime have you used that word to describe your sisters whenever they save you from an energy ball or anything. It isn't 'thank you' stuff; it isn't hero stuff. It's family stuff. I don't understand why this has to be anything special. Wyatt needs help. That's all."

"That's not really what I meant. It's just . . . I know that the two of you led very different lives. I mean, we wouldn't be reminding ourselves whenever we talk to you that you're Christopher and not just Chris if you two weren't different. You have to understand, though, really, in so many ways you're still the same. Either way, your brother has a lot to do with it. The way he treated you and everyone around you, most people wouldn't have taken the time to care about someone who acts that way, but you did."

"I'm not a victim, either, if that's what you mean," Christopher interrupted. He didn't like where any of this was going. It was one extreme or the other. Quite frankly, he wasn't in the mood for it either. He did what he was supposed to. End of story. Why couldn't any of them see that? "Mom, I really need you to hear me. This isn't anything special, okay? I'm doing my job. He's my brother, my responsibility. That's it. It doesn't need a label. It just is. Please? Just stop."

Piper tried not to appear too hurt, but she knew he could probably see her biting the inside of her cheek to steady herself anyway. She was a little surprised at his reaction, but it was strong enough that he'd obviously been thinking about it for a while. She didn't really know what to say, but she started anyway, hoping to calm him down a little. "I'm sorry. Really. I didn't know you felt so strongly about it. I didn't mean to make you uncomfortable, and I know that no one else has meant to make you feel awkward either, if they have. We're all a little overwhelmed is all. This isn't like you jumped in front of a fireball for your brother. You jumped through time. That isn't exactly an easy thing to do."

"Mom, I'm serious. Stop it right now."

"Christopher, please, let me explain."

Beyond uncomfortable, Christopher pushed his stool away from the counter and hopped off. Darkly, he dropped the subject and said, "It's late. You need to get some sleep. The boys will be up before you know it."

With that, Christopher orbed out of the kitchen for destinations unknown.

"Christopher? Chris, come back," Piper groaned, literally kicking herself in the shin. She knew she should have known better than to try to talk to the kid. Hadn't she had plenty of experience in the field to know that she was only going to complicate things that way? Of course she had. But there was something that . . . Why did she have to push? Why couldn't she have simply kept the conversation light, talking about all those things she had told her grandmother she wanted to know now that she didn't have the opportunity to ask. As with her other Chris, she didn't even know his favorite color. She couldn't let him leave them again without knowing those kinds of things. If she did, she'd never forgive herself. She couldn't ask those questions if she didn't get her son back. Irritated with both herself and her incredibly stubborn son, she hollered, "Chris! Damn it, Christopher! Come home! I'm sorry. Just come home."

The only response she received was the ice maker in the refrigerator shuddering a few newly-formed ice cubes into the waiting tray. Piper thought that wasn't exactly without its sense of irony.

At the end of her rope, Piper buried her head in her hands, hoping that the pressure on her head would make it feel a little better. When she yelled for her husband, it came out muffled and almost indiscernible so that she had to lift her head and call him again. "Leo! Wherever you are, I need you to get home. NOW."

Seconds later, orbs circled around in front of her, nearly blinding her. Urgently, Leo asked, "What's wrong?"

"Christopher stormed out," Piper said, not caring that she was exaggerating a smidge. "He had a nightmare, and I was trying to at least relax him so that he could sleep the rest of the night, but I must have said the wrong thing because he orbed out before I could stop him."

Leo narrowed his eyes, thinking more of his child than of his wife's apparently hurt feelings at the moment. "A nightmare? About what?"

"The same nightmare he's had every night since he got here," she snapped. Her anger suddenly redirected, Piper instead focused on Leo, crossing her arms angrily. "But you wouldn't know that since it's apparently impossible for you to stay in our bed for the night."

"His nightmare, Piper," Leo urged, ignoring her accusatory tone. That was an argument that could be saved for another time. "Did he say anything about it at all?"

Unable to control the urge to be angry, she went straight for Leo's heart. "He asked for you. Where were you?"

"Excuse me?"

"Where in the hell have you been, Leo? He has been screaming himself awake all week. Every time he does, I wake up to find out you've left us alone again. Where are you going at night? What is so much more important than to be here and just share a bed with your wife?"

Defensively, Leo mimicked her stance, thrusting his arms over his chest as well, and glared back at her. "What's so important? Protecting my wife is what's so important so that one day I will be able to sleep a full night in her bed and not lie awake all night wondering if there is something else I should be doing to protect my family. Protecting my children is what's so important so that I can sleep at night and not wonder if the few minutes a day that I'm not sensing them is that window of opportunity that Evil needs to take them and try to murder them. I made the mistake of trusting someone outside the family to help me do my job and it cost me my son and nearly my wife, her sister, and both of my sons. Do you have any idea . . . "

When he trailed off and turned away from her in frustration, Piper relaxed a little. She shook her head to get the hair out of her eyes and let her arms drop back to her sides. Her voice dropped back down to a normal tone as she asked, "Do I have any idea what?"

"It doesn't matter."

Piper reached her hand out to touch his shoulder but only ended up pulling it back at the last second, unable to give herself that moment of intimacy when she'd snapped at him for no real reason other than that she had to be mad at someone. She put her hand into her other, looking at them as if she was afraid of what they might try to do next. Softly, she suggested, "Leo, talk to me. You used to tell me everything. Please, talk to me."

Leo walked around to the other side of the island, putting a little extra distance between them. He needed to. As much as he had wished for the opportunity to talk to his wife again, they were so far from being able to do that right now that it just seemed like it would be better if they didn't talk at all. She wasn't going to understand. How could she? She wasn't there. She didn't know. Unable to actually tell her that, knowing that it would only hurt her to hear that — and Mother always said that if you can't say something nice, then don't say anything at all — Leo sighed and leaned back against the refrigerator, arms remaining closely pinned to his chest in frustration.

When Leo didn't say anything to her, Piper's heart sank. She honestly didn't know what to do. She couldn't remember a time when they had been unable to trust each other, even when they were as separated as they had been a year ago. They had still always been able to talk to one another. How could they have let themselves slip so far from each other? It didn't seem right. "When did we give up and let the Elders win? All those years, we fought so hard to prove to Them that They didn't know anything about love and that we could make it through anything. When did that change? When did we let Them win?"

Surprised at the question, Leo started and leaned forward, balancing his elbow on the island. He reached forward with one hand to take hers into his, but pulled back, not knowing she had just done the same thing. He met her eyes for the first time since she'd turned on him at his arrival, hoping that his eyes would make her hear him. "I didn't give up, Piper. I'm still trying to find my way home. You just have to wait a little longer."

"I'm not going anywhere," she said hopefully. "So what's stopping you?"

"It needs to be safe," said Leo. "I need to be safe."

"We're never going to be completely safe," she said, hating the brutal honesty of it. "As much as I want that in our lives, part of me knows that it just isn't possible, not while we are who we are."

"But I can make us as safe as possible," he countered.

"You can't do that from home?"

The dark anger returning to his normally peaceful features, Leo nearly growled. "Not when I can't even trust the people who are supposed to be on our side to not turn on us. Piper, the man I trusted with my family murdered my son in our own home. I brought him into this. If it weren't for me, if I hadn't let him trick me into joining Them full time . . . "

"That's a lot of 'If's to deal with, Leo," she soothed. "And that's just part of who we are right now. It isn't all going to go away overnight. We can't just put our lives on hold because of it. We can't put our children's lives on hold. I'd love to be able to lock the boys away in a protective little box until we could be sure that they were going to be perfectly safe and live demon-free lives, but you and I both know that if we did that, as soon as we let them out, they'd be hit by a bus crossing the street. Of course, that's if we lived long enough to let them out. We have to protect them the best we can and still be here when they need us."

"But I can at least make it a little safer by vanquishing demons like Barbas who just keep coming back and coming back and destroying our lives every time they do."

Pointedly, she asked, "How many of them will be enough? Huh? Is it going to be enough to get rid of Barbas for what he did? Is five going to be enough, or ten? Twenty? How many demons will be enough before you decide that it's okay to come home and be a father to your children and be my husband again?"

"That's not fair," said Leo. "You have given me the exact same argument plenty of times, just last week, in fact, before your little talk with Grams. Before Wyatt was born, you used to say the same thing about why we couldn't have children and raise them in this house when demons were always around. Considering you didn't believe it then, you can't turn it around to use on me now."

"It might not be fair, but you know it's right."

"Can we drop this for now and just talk about what it was that you called me for in the first place?"

"Only if you promise to talk to me about it again when this is over."

Reluctantly (because he knew damned well that Piper would in fact bring this up again at a later date and time), Leo silently agreed. Without actually acknowledging the request, he asked, "So Christopher had a nightmare?"

Knowing that was the best she was going to get out of her husband for now, Piper let the subject drop. She did, after all, have something a little more pressing to deal with at the moment, right? She wasn't going to fix her marital problems in one night, but Christopher's problems might be solved a little more easily. Nodding, she told him, "It was bad. He might as well have woken the entire neighborhood. It's been that way all week. I let them slide until now, thinking that he would get through them on his own, but I just couldn't do it anymore tonight. He looked really scared, Leo."

"Did he tell you what it was about? Was it Wyatt?"

"That's what I thought, too, but he said it wasn't. All he said was that it was about a girl, and that it didn't matter anymore, that there wasn't anything he could do about it."

It didn't take him long to figure out who it was that Christopher had dreamed about. Leo himself had been dreaming of her every night as well. The little bit that he'd been able to sleep lately had been tortured at best with dreams of her and what they had left her to. He understood Christopher's fear more than he ever wished that he did. Still, there wasn't anything he could do, not now, regardless of Wyatt's threats. To answer Piper's question, sadly, he shrugged. "There isn't, not really."

"You know who he's talking about?"

"I do," he said. "And he's right. As much as I keep trying to tell him that it will be okay, we both know it won't be. The only thing that's going to help her now is to fix the problems back here and hope that we do it right this time."

"So Wyatt is involved," said Piper, more as a statement than a question. "He lied to me."

"Let's just say that, knowing what I know now, I understand the impulse the boys have had to lie to us. I wish to God that I didn't know the things about our future that I know. If I were Christopher, I would lie, too." Seeing that Piper was about to ask him just exactly what made him think that, Leo jumped in and asked, "What else? What else happened that made him leave you? You said he stormed out."

"I'm not sure. We talked about the other Chris for a while, what I told you about the dream, and then . . . I don't know. I told him 'Thank You' for coming back here to help us with Wyatt. I didn't tell the other Chris that enough when he was here, and I'm angry with myself for not saying it. I wanted to make sure that I said it this time. He didn't like it. He started going on about how he isn't a hero or a victim and that he didn't want us thanking him because it was his responsibility to do this in the first place. He couldn't get out of here fast enough."

Leo looked at her, so worried, and wanted immediately to go chasing after his boy, just to make her feel better, but he knew better. The Chris he had known — actually, both of the Chrises — liked to handle his emotions on his own. He knew that. It was a guy thing. Leo knew he'd become too used to having to always talk things out after seven years of being in a household surrounded by only women. He sometimes forgot how they could pressure a guy into talking when he didn't want to. So instead of giving in and hunting Christopher down like he knew she wanted, he closed his eyes and sensed for his child. It didn't take very long to figure out where Christopher was. He could feel his son's frustration, but he was okay. No imminent danger. It probably wouldn't make much of a difference to Piper, but he had to give in to it anyway. This was about Christopher's feelings, not hers. "He's fine, honey. I think, this time, you need to let him sort through this himself. Give him time to cool off. He'll come home. He will."

"I made him really mad."

"And he'll get over it."

"So I just wait," she asked grudgingly.

"I think that's the best idea, yeah."

Piper narrowed her eyes on her sort-of husband and grumped, "I really hate those pacifist tendencies of yours sometimes, you know?"

"I know."

The couple grinned at one another shyly, the way they would have done when they had first been dating after Leo had revealed his true identity to the sisters. They had even started to cross the room toward one another around the island when they were interrupted by a pair of heavy shoes clomping on the hardwood floor toward them. Before they reached one another, Phoebe's impatient voice interrupted them, not even checking to see if they were in the middle of anything or not.

"I hope I'm not interrupting," the younger sister said without any hint of remorse. "But I'm interrupting. I need you, or rather, Paige needs us."

"What's wrong?"

"I just talked to Rex at the club," Phoebe explained. "He said she's kind of freaking out, in a weirdly happy way."

Piper looked at her sister, confused. "Define 'freaking out'."

Phoebe turned right to Leo this time, knowing that he would understand what she meant more than Piper would. "Like, really happy, like alternate universe happy. She could get shot right now and not care kind of happy."

"But how," asked Leo, his mind stinging with the thought that they were in danger of returning to that awful reality. "There hasn't been any kind of shift that we know about. Even if there was, she would be the only one affected by it. Everyone else is acting completely normal. She hasn't been all that — she hasn't been that same psychotically happy that we saw that day. She's been a little excitable lately, sure, but not like that."

"Not like that that we've been around to notice," corrected Phoebe. "Have any of us spent more than two minutes with her in the last few days?" When both Leo and Piper looked at one another and then shrugged their guilt, she looked down at her hands in her own guilt as well. "Neither have I. I don't think any of us has. I've noticed that she'd been a little chipper, but it seemed normal. She kept talking about celebrating the baby and putting together the shower for him, just like she did with Wyatt before he was born. I just thought maybe she was going a little overboard like she did before. But after Rex called . . . "

Concerned and not at all fond of the memory of what the girls had all been like that day, Leo asked, "Is it really that bad?"

"I didn't think it could be, but after I got off the phone with him, I checked her room." As Phoebe handed a folded piece of paper to her sister and brother-in-law, she inwardly cringed. "I found this."

Scribbled in Paige's girl-like loopy script, a spell told them all they needed to know.

We have a new baby to celebrate,
So hurry mind, don't hesitate.
Don't let my calls be in vain,
Help me, Spirits, move past my pain.

"This is not good," Piper half groaned, half barked. Baby Sister was in so much trouble once they saved her ass on this one, it wasn't even funny. "How could she do this? She knows that messing with spells for our emotions never turns out well."

"I don't think she meant it to be that way," Phoebe apologized for her little sister. "We . . . I was talking to her last week, the day that Christopher came back. There was just something about the way she was talking. It was like she wanted to be strong for the rest of us so that we could grieve for him without having to worry about things getting missed in the meantime. I think she did it for us, not for her. At least, that's how it sounded to me."

"So what do we do," asked Piper. "I mean, we'll write one in case, but I'm guessing there isn't a counter to that spell."

Back in Whitelighter mode, Leo sighed and said simply, "We have to make her deal with the specific cause of her pain that she intended to move beyond."

"Yeah, that's great," Phoebe griped. "That would work if we knew what that specific thing was. It's not like we haven't all had a lot to deal with lately. We have a fairly wide selection to choose from."

Sadly, Leo admitted, "I'm pretty sure I know."

Piper slapped her hands together, ready to get on with business. She was tired of this family falling apart, and it was about damned time that they started putting it back together. "Well, then, let's get to it. Phoebe, go wake Dad and tell him we're going to be gone for a while so that he can listen for the kids if they wake up. As soon as Leo finds Paige, we are out of here. We have a sister to save."

Silently, she added, And a son and another son and a husband and a marriage and, and, and . . .

II.

The office at P3 had become a half-way decent sanctuary for Paige in the last week since Chris's return. It wasn't exactly quiet at night, but the noise was a pleasant distraction. She could sing along with the bands, and when she didn't know the songs, she could make up the words as she went along. It wasn't like it mattered if the words were right. No one was there to hear them. That was the whole point.

Things at home were so complicated. Another future Chris — sorry, Christopher — was there and it had everyone in a total panic. She could see that. From the time Christopher was born until his adult counterpart had shown up, things had been a lot more simple. They had had time to watch Christopher and mourn Chris and all of the things that were supposed to be happening. She, of course, had been the only one all-out celebrating, but that was so that the rest of them could mourn until they were ready to join the celebratey party. She had seen to that. But now, it was too far away. Celebrating was too far away. Wyatt was evil again, not saved like they had thought. Of course, she understood that saving Wyatt had to be Priority One. Everything depended on it. It did, however and in all honesty, make things complicated.

So now she was celebrating alone again. She had hoped that Victor's arrival was going to induce everyone else to celebration with her. Instead, the fog of grief that had been slowly lifting sank back down again, affecting everyone but her. She didn't need to do that right now. Chris, Baby Christopher, still needed celebrating. If she had to do it alone, that was okay. At least he was getting what he deserved in her. Hence, sanctuary.

Or at least, it would be a sanctuary if people would quit barging into the office like they owned the joint.

"Sorry to interrupt," Rex smiled as he poked his head around the door.

"It's okay," Paige chirped, not really sure why she was in a good mood considering how she felt in her head. Not that it mattered. All that mattered at the moment was celebrating the new baby. Silly interruptions weren't all that important on a larger scale of things. Happy that she could convince herself of that, she went on and waved the bartender into the room. "C'mon in."

Permission granted, Rex slipped around the door, leading with a cardboard box in front of him. Two quick steps had him standing in front of her, placing the box on the desk with gentle care. He shrugged at her, not sure if the box needed explaining or not. When she looked quizzically back at him, he gestured at it then hooked his thumb back toward the noise of the bar. "Ray said it arrived last week for your friend Chris? It's been under the bar all week, but the new guy keeps bumping into it. It fell to the floor, but it sounds intact. Since it was labeled 'Glass', we didn't want to take any chances on him dropping it a second time."

Paige rolled her eyes but asked in a June Cleaver voice, "How is he handling the rest of the glass? You know, the stuff he has to serve to the customers? Or do we have to worry about being sued because people are getting extra toy surprises in their drinks tonight?"

Rex tried to hide the strange, concerned look he knew was going to crawl onto his face by talking before he even knew what he was going to say. "We're k-keeping him busy and away from the glass as much as possible. We're going to bring him in for a little extra training tomorrow afternoon, I think."

"Sounds peachy."

Unable to hide his concern (and the concern they had all had for her in the last week), Rex cocked his head to the side and asked, "Paige? Are you okay?"

"Right as rain," she buzzed. "Although I've never understood that silly expression. I guess the rain is right or things wouldn't grow. So I guess that means that everything is as it should be for me if I'm going to use that expression. So right as rain it is. Rain-like, even." Without seeming to even see Rex anymore, she started singing happily to herself. "Daddy, what if the grass stopped growin'? What would happen then? Well, if the grass stopped growin', you would probably cry, and the ground would be watered by the tears from your eyes."

"Uh, Paige?"

The woman giggled at him and once again waved him off. "Sorry, random thought., but not that random if you think about it, what with the rain and the grass and just the absolute cuteness of the song. Am I right? I think I'm right. It's very cute. I think — yeah. I need to remember to sing that one to Christopher. We have a new baby in the house, you know. He's just cute as a button. He needs to be celebrated. I really should write all of this down." She started shuffling through the stuff on the desk, but when she didn't see what she wanted, she pulled the center drawer out of the desk and dumped the contents of it onto the desktop. She tossed several pens over her shoulder because they weren't the ones she wanted. A few Post-It pads flew over her other shoulder because they weren't bright enough. Finally, she found the yellow ones that she wanted and started scribbling on them, only to look up at Rex with a cheerful distraction. "What was I writing down again?"

Now incredibly concerned, Rex reached over and took the pen out of Paige's limp hand. He grinned at her, no harm intended, and said soothingly, "You were going to let me write while you told me how I could find Chris for you so that he could come pick this box up. Then you were going to let me call Piper to have someone come pick you up."

"I can't go home, silly goose," she chided him. "There's a ghost in the house."

"Okay," he said lightly, more convinced than ever that something was terribly wrong. He'd have to call Piper himself and get her down here. Someone had to come for Paige. He nodded his head back toward the door and smiled to keep her distracted. "Then I'm going to go out there and announce Last Call. I'll leave you alone to figure out what you want to do, and then I'll take you home or wherever. Just hang out and promise me you'll leave the work stuff until tomorrow."

"Only if you help me celebrate," she negotiated. "The others, they aren't ready to celebrate. The new baby, he needs to be welcomed and enjoyed now, before he ends up completely obsessive and paranoid and all of that stuff that I know he's going to grow up to be if we don't do this properly now."

"I have no idea what that's supposed to mean, but yes, I will gladly help out in whatever way you guys need, but not tonight. Tonight, you just sit there and relax. Once we get everyone out of here, we'll start that celebrating."

"Perfect," Paige cheered.

"Perfect," Rex agreed, although he wasn't sure why. He winked at her and took off back through the door, ready to get people out of the club as fast as possible tonight. Paige was in trouble, and it probably wasn't something that could be solved in front of a house full of people. As soon as things were half-way quiet, he'd call Piper and see what she wanted to do.

Paige was quickly left to her own devices again, suddenly cold and out of place. It had been that way the whole last week. Sanctuary, my ass, she thought. She was always fine if she came in alone and stayed alone, but people didn't want to let her be alone. Someone was always trying to come in or out, so that whenever they left, she was left alone, and the room was left that much more empty. Rooms had a way of doing that, though, didn't they?

She pushed back her chair and stood up, charging first to the front of the desk and then back and forth in front of it. Her hands twitched as she swung her leg out as she turned, almost looking like a first year dancer, struggling to find the correct balance to keep a turn graceful. Then, as soon as she realized that her hands were twitching, she raised one of them up to her hair, the same one that had been tugging on her hair for her for the last few weeks. She had yet to notice that the hair was actually getting thinner in that one spot from all of the pulling. She didn't have time to notice, not really. She had to celebrate.

And what was better to celebrate with than presents?

She paced back and forth some more around the desk, her bright eyes glued to the cardboard box on the desk. Only two feet away, she could read the label just fine. It was addressed to Chris, the other Chris. It was maybe twelve inches on each side, indicating something fairly small. It had made a thunk when Rex had put it down on the desk, though, so that also indicated that it was somewhat heavy. There weren't any warning labels on the package, other than, as Rex had said, that it was glass. The return address was New York, but it didn't say what the place was. It was definitely from a store, though. Unless someone had put a glamour on the label to make them think that it was a legit package, which, she supposed, was always possible with this family. It could be something meant to hurt Chris. It wouldn't be the first time that something or someone from the future had tried to dispose of him or the rest of them. It could be just about anything in that box, anything at all.

Paige stopped pacing to stare directly at the box that suddenly looked a lot more dangerous to her than it had before. She eyed it and the distance between herself and the box. Her hands reached for it then pulled back sharply, trying to figure out if she could get away from it in time if something with tentacles tried to pop out at her. It was probably nothing, though, right? It was probably a perfectly benign somethingorother that she was blowing out of proportion. The only way to know for sure was for her to open it, right?

It was probably some weird present from Chris to himself or something anyway. Presents were good. Presents made people happy. Every day should start and end with presents. That reminded her; she really should remember to get to Toys 'R Us tomorrow if she was going to get all of next week's toys for Baby Chris.

As Paige's head jumped from logic to happy and back and forth, her hands had been doing the same. In and out, close and away, her hands reached for the box and then let it go. It was just as she was making a mental note to make a mental note to go to the toy store that her hands started tearing at the tape holding the relatively weighty box closed. Bits of Styrofoam caught under her less than perfect nails as she tugged away at everything around the inside of the box. Her hands caught on to something hard, definitely glass-like, and felt around to find the edges. With both hands, she gingerly hauled the object out the box.

There were two thoughts that ran through her head, equally accurate and simplistic at the same time. The first was one of distaste as she hefted the weight and twisted it in the purplish fluorescent light of the office. There is no way that the baby gets to play with this, ever, she thought. The second thought flashed through her mind just as quickly and reverted to the chipper mode she'd been in since when she couldn't remember. Ooh, pretties!

She set the object down on the desk then crouched down in front of the desk so that she could still be at eye level with it. She studied every speck of the silvery blue ceramic base, noticing right way that it wasn't perfectly shaped. It sort of wobbled on one side of it, but that was okay. Wobbles add character. The base supported a plain glass dome, filled with the standard sparkly liquid that any other snowglobe would have in it. Inside, that was where the fun part was. It was the most beautiful castle she had ever seen, made of some kind of crystal that almost looked like ice. In front of the castle, lamp posts dotted the sides of a road that supported a horse-drawn carriage that looked like it was actually moving. It was incredible.

It was incredible and so not like Chris to have one of these things. She should know. She was the one who ended up helping him pack up all of his stuff here in the office in the days before he left, but she really shouldn't think about that. She couldn't think about that. If she did, she was going to go places that she didn't want to go. She didn't have time to go there. She had to celebrate.

New baby. Celebrate. Baby Chris. Celebrate, celebrate, dance to the music. Heh. Celebrate . . .

Naturally, no one can let anyone around here just celebrate, Paige thought half an hour later as a thumping on the door announced yet another interruption that she really didn't want at the moment. She had things to do, a baby to celebrate, and didn't have time for all of these useless interruptions.

"Paige?"

As soon as she heard the voice on the other side with the impatient rapping, she felt her stomach sink. She knew that voice. She hated that voice. If she ignored it, maybe it would go away. She plugged her fingers in her ears, willing the voice to go away. "La la la lalalala," she hummed. "I can't hear you. If I can't hear you, you aren't really there. Go away. Go, go away."

The voice on the other side of the door didn't even have to yell to get through the door. The bar had cleared out so that only Ray and Rex were still around. She wished they would say something to the voice to make it go away, but they had no idea what was going on. They weren't going to do anything. So when the voice on the other side yelled again, all Paige could do was cringe.

"I know you're here, Paige."

Bad thoughts. Bad thoughts aren't welcome. Have to get ahead of them. He's not real. He's not here. He's not. I don't have time for him. I have to celebrate. He doesn't fit in to 'Celebrate'. He can't. I have to. Celebrate, celebrate, new baby, celebrate.

III.

Christopher kicked his bare foot furiously at the air, helpless to do anything else. It wasn't like he had any other way to release all of the pent up frustration and fear. Were he in his own time, that would be one thing, but he wasn't. He didn't have Sam or Jack or Lucy or Charlie — anyone that he could normally go to. Phoebe was almost entirely incommunicado, and Paige wasn't really the Paige he remembered and could normally have talked to. He was still a little too weirded out to talk to his grandfather yet, and he couldn't exactly go to Piper, not when she was such a big part of the problem.

She wasn't doing anything wrong. None of them were. They were just being so damned wonderful (when they were around, anyway). He could see it; they were all worrying and being so, so, so . . . everything he had missed for so damned long. How was he supposed to do what he had come for, to help his brother, and have to spend so much time with these people whom he loved, only to have to leave them behind for a life where they no longer existed? He had known that spending time with his dead family was going to be hard. They had spent plenty of time trying to prepare themselves for that inevitability. He just hadn't known it was going to be this hard. If only they hadn't known about him . . . To do this as a stranger to them, he could have been treated like any other Whitelighter. But as a son, it was growing more and more impossible every hour.

It had been a rough week for him, though, too. He knew they had a lot to deal with, but so did he. He knew they weren't doing it deliberately, but he could see that they were constantly comparing him to the other version of himself. He supposed he probably was a lot like the other one. They had, after all, grown up with the same parents and aunts. They both had an EvilWyatt to contend with. But he wasn't the other guy. Whether it was because of this other him or not, he had had very different experiences growing up. He had always had Paige; she had been a huge part of his life. He'd had lots of cousins and friends and a sister. He couldn't even imagine what it would have been like to grow up without a single one of those people in his life. Then again, he supposed it had been the same for the other him. After all, he'd had a father his entire life, even if they weren't the best of friends as Leo had suggested. But Leo had been taken from him when he was just a kid, irretrievable. He supposed it probably wasn't exactly a fair trade-off to have had Paige instead, but still . . . If he hadn't had Paige, he wouldn't have had Sam or Jack, either. The idea of growing up without either of them didn't even register. That was what made him different, though. He wasn't this other Chris. He was him, himself, Christopher. He really wished that they could see that, even if only for a little while.

The weirdest part, though, had to have been reading that letter that this other him had left behind. All of the stuff about him and Leo, about how they had so much to work out, it was incredibly eerie. Christopher had never had any problems with his father at all. He hadn't had enough time with the man to have them. At the same time, though, he kind of understood what the other him had been thinking. Grandpa had always told them that even if they didn't understand choices that Mom and the others were making for them as kids, they were going to grow up and understand them a lot better as adults. He would say that you never really appreciate your parents and the things they do for you until you are an adult yourself, but you really weren't going to see it until the right moment. From reading that letter, Christopher knew that the other him had reached that point, too. He truly hoped that he was going to have a chance to tell his parents that the same way that the other him had.

Still, he had a lot to do before that was even remotely part of the plan. Right now, he was too tired and crabby to actually have to try to figure out what those things were that he had to do before he could get to whatever else he thought he might have to do. Thoughts really weren't making much sense now anyway.

To be quite honest, Christopher wanted a drink. He hadn't ever been much of a boozer. He had always been too busy to be. A guy couldn't exactly be at the top of his game against the constant threat of demonic attack if he was tanked, especially when he had a family to take care of. There had been a few occasions, though. Wyatt hadn't bothered to notice the club since their mother's death, so it had fallen to Christopher to keep that up and running, too. He'd even tend bar every now and then, so if a patron offered to buy him a drink at the end of the night, he really didn't mind.

It suddenly struck him that . . . well, he wondered anyway, if maybe he didn't have at least something of a connection with this other Chris that he maybe hadn't realized before. Apparently, this other him, when he'd been in the past, had lived in the bar for almost two years. He'd made the place his home away from the manor. He'd made it enough of a home that since his journey back a week ago, his family had actually kept him away from the club to avoid having to answer questions about where he's been for the last two weeks. Still, he'd always loved the place ,and if he couldn't find comfort anywhere else, P3 was the place he wanted to be. It felt like home to him, too.

Yeah, he really wanted a drink.

Besides, Last Call had gone out about twenty minutes ago and Paige, being the workaholic that she was these days, would be alone in the bar shortly. If nothing else, t had to be warmer inside P3 than it was atop the bridge, so really, where was the harm?

Then, just as he was about to orb out, a voice said behind him, "You cannot save him, you know."

Christopher whirled on his heel, his hands reflexively up in a defensive position and ready for anything, even though he knew his witchly powers weren't working in the Here and Now anyway. There was no reason to let his family's enemies know that, though. His eyes narrowed on the man standing in front of him, his gut telling him that whoever this was, he shouldn't be expecting hugs and puppies. Tensing for possible battle, Christopher gritted his teeth and demanded, "Who are you?"

"None of us wanted things to come to this," the man said, ignoring Christopher's question. "We hoped for the best. You have to know that. We never wanted to be proven right. Most of us wanted your parents to be happy. But Wyatt is still such a threat to the . . . Your coming here a second time is all the proof we need. Gideon perhaps helped the process along, but it was inevitable. There's nothing you can do, Chris. You cannot save him."

Sick to his stomach, Christopher glared at the man. "You're one of Them, aren't you? You're one of the Elders."

Almost friendly, the man offered a hand out to Christopher with a smile. "I am — "

"Don't touch me," Christopher growled, pulling himself back an extra pace to put some distance between them. "I have nothing to say to You, any of You. Stay away from us."

"If you could just give Us a chance to — "

"I know now what you people did to my brother and to me, so I'm warning You, all of You, stay away from my family, or my father won't be the only one of us to kill an Elder," Christopher bit and orbed away before the supposed angel Elder could get another word in edgewise.

As soon as Christopher reached the P3 office, eyes closed in frustration, his pulse quickened. He was angry as all hell with that Elder for thinking They knew anything about anything. It was no wonder Mom had always kept him away from Them. But that anger was apparently nothing. When Christopher opened his eyes, his heart stopped. It restarted again with an even quicker beat.

Something was wrong. Something was definitely wrong.

The office was torn apart. All of the drawers had been pulled out of the desk and filing cabinets. The boxes on the steel frame storage had all been ransacked, save one labeled 'Spare Uniforms', which struck him as odd since no one at the club wore a uniform. The fluorescent light above was flickering. Half of the bank had been blown, startling him with a shock of sparks. He yelped in surprise, jumping back out of the way, and landed his still bare feet in a pile of Post It pads sprinkled with shards of plexi-glass from the light. He leapt back out of the pile, swearing a colorful streak while he leaned against the desk and pulled the pieces out, dulling the pain only a little. He sighed heavily as he took a quick breather and had a chance to really take in the damage. This really was not right at all.

Unsure of what to do next, Christopher was about to call for his father when he heard raised voices coming from the dance floor. He eased himself across the office, wincing in slight pain as the balls of his feet made contact with the cold floor and cursing himself for leaving the house so quickly that he didn't even bring shoes. He didn't have his watch, either, but he'd been sure that the club should have been empty except for Paige and maybe a bartender or two, who would have no reason to be fighting quite as loudly as it sounded like they were.

To Christopher's surprise when he opened the door, Paige wasn't as alone as she should have been. Two bartenders were standing quietly behind the bar, carefully watching Paige and keeping an eye on the exits at the same time. That, Christopher had sort of expected. The other guy, though, that was something he hadn't expected at all. It was quickly becoming apparent that Paige hadn't been expecting the stranger either. Unless, of course, she always greeted people with that particular epithet. She kissed the babies with that mouth?

The crazy thing to him was that, despite the heightened screech in her voice, she looked ecstatically happy telling the guy off. Christopher had never seen her quite so happy, even when she was happy. This was different. He didn't know how, but it felt different. He could see it in her eyes. Whatever happy-go-lucky, Mary Poppins attitude she'd been sporting since his arrival, it couldn't disguise the black fury in her eyes now, a fury that he'd only seen once from her in his entire life. Whatever it was, it was wrong, terribly wrong.

Keeping a wary eye on the stranger, Christopher called out to his aunt, if for no other reason than to make sure she could handle the guy on her own. "Paige? You okay?"

Paige barely even blinked as she sang, "Go home!"

Christopher couldn't help but notice that the other guy did more than blink, causing him to take his attention off of her for the time being. The man visibly paled when he saw Christopher, looking like he was going to be sick. He started to back away from them both, pointing a shaky finger at Christopher. His mouth opened and closed like a fish, unable to form words. Christopher would have felt sorry for the guy if he wasn't so obviously making Paige upset.

"I mean it. Go home."

His attention pulled back to his aunt, Christopher really didn't like what he was seeing. He looked Paige up and down, somehow knowing that he should in no way be leaving her alone. It didn't take more than a second to see the blood oozing from between her fingers. She was clenching her fists so hard that her brightly painted but chipped nails had dug deep enough into her palms to produce freely flowing rivulets of blood. Feeling sick at the thought that things had progressed so far for his aunt that she couldn't even feel that, Christopher firmly told her, "No way. Can't do it."

"Not you, silly," she smiled sweetly without really looking at him. "You don't exist, so it's not like you can go to your home or anyone else's. But he can."

The man didn't seem to hear what Paige was saying. He was too busy staring at Christopher, still unable to find words. At best, he started to stutter, "H-h-how?"

Without acknowledging his existence (or lack thereof, as the case may be), Paige pulled Christopher by the elbow to stand slightly behind her. She then took a step closer to the guy, menacing and Donna Reed at the same time. Sugary sweet, she asked, "How what? What's the matter? Seeing a ghost? Maybe it's the Ghost of Christmas Past, here to show you what a completely screwed up individual you are."

"Paige," the guy scoffed.

"No, really," she trilled. "After all, you were there. You saw it. You felt it. And yet, you haven't done a thing to track down the murderer. I bet there isn't even a file started yet. He needed to take his punishment, right? He needed to pay his fine. Well, who's going to pay the fine for what happened to him, huh? Where's the justice now? It was a magical death, but it was still murder."

"Paige, please," the man's low voice pleaded. "We need to talk about this. I understand that you're furious, and I would be, too, but I don't want to leave without us having even said 'Goodbye'. It wouldn't be right. We've been through too much."

"Like you helping that bastard murder my nephew," Paige retorted, nearly singing with psychotic chipperness. "Chris, allow me to introduce you to Darryl Morris, Inspector Extraodinaire and the sonofabitch who helped murder you two weeks ago."

"It wasn't like that and you know it," Darryl countered. "I didn't know what was going on at the time any more than you apparently do right now."

The witch batted her eyes at the man, innocent and sweet. "Oh, I know exactly what's going on: you are interfering with the celebration process. You were too busy facilitating the murder of my nephew to realize it, but we have a new baby in the house. Since I don't want him growing up thinking we didn't love him enough or didn't have time enough for him, I have a lot to do for him. I don't have time for you when the baby needs me. I have to celebrate."

"Are you hearing yourself," asked Darryl. "I know you're mad at me, but you sound so ridiculous. Be mad at me. I understand. Have your say, do it so that we can say 'Goodbye' and not regret it for the rest of our lives that we didn't."

Paige smiled at the guy without actually saying anything. Her body changed, though, in a way that only someone in the family would have recognized. She was angry before, but now she had been pushed too far. She would finish this conversation on her own terms, not his. Even Christopher hadn't expected what those terms were.

Under the hands of Rex and Ray, who had been trying their damnedest to be invisible, the entire bar began to glow in a strangely dark blue. They both backed away from the counter, hands raised as if it were white hot. Their eyes simultaneously flashed wide as the glow separated into smaller sections. The three people on the dancefloor didn't even notice what was going on there until Rex said "What the hell" as one of the sections broke away and darted away from them toward the trio.

It wasn't much, but Rex's yell was just enough warning for Darryl, who Christopher was still seeing as just the guy who was giving his aunt a hard time. As if he knew it was going to happen, the guy jumped back a step so that a flash of orbs blew right past the tip of his nose. A second blur of light flew toward him, this time too close behind the other to give him time to jump out of the way. Seconds later, his hand clapped to the meaty part of his arm to stave off the pain left by the heavy base of the tumbler Paige had attacked him with.

"Paige," the guy asked, obviously wounded in more ways than one.

"Darryl," she acknowledged, both challenging and chipper.

Christopher's eyes darted around the room, nervous. He caught sight first of the two bartenders still trying not to be seen. He gave them both a quick reassuring grin before turning his full attention on the more urgent situation at hand. He knew they'd have to deal with the bartenders and what they were seeing eventually, but for now, he didn't think they were in any danger. The Darryl guy was. So was Paige. That, in his mind, trumped all of the rest of them.

A pilsner orbed off the bar and started toward Darryl, forcing Christopher to actually get involved instead of letting Paige handle things in her own way. He stepped up to her and put a hand on her shoulder. He tried to turn her around to face him, but she shrugged him off. "Paige, what are you doing," he asked sharply. "Stop this before you hurt him or someone else. We aren't alone."

"He killed Chris," she sang. "He has to pay his fine."

Christopher bit the inside of his lip to keep from blowing his top on her. He'd already done that one time too many tonight. He shook his head, horribly frustrated. Backing away from her, he raised his hands in surrender to her. "Fine."

"What," Darryl yelped at Christopher. "Are you kidding me?"

"You have a better idea, let's hear it," Christopher retorted. "But we have Innocents here in the room, and I kind of think that it would be better to let her just get this over with so that we can deal with them instead of dealing with whatever this is between you two."

"Paige, please," Darryl started, still thinking he could reason with her. He only saw her finger tick at the glowing bar, signaling that another glass should come barreling to meet him. He stepped forward this time, closing a little bit of the distance between them. "You have to know that I never meant for that to happen." To Christopher, he earnestly said again, "Chris, really, I never would have let you die, not like that. I didn't know — "

"Look, man," Christopher said as quickly and equitably as he could. He really wanted to get Darryl out of there, and he wanted to do it without having to hear any apologies for something that he didn't want to know anything about. "I don't know you. I've never even heard of you. That said, you obviously make Paige upset, and that's reason enough for me to not like you. Do us all a favor and leave, huh?"

Darryl didn't want to leave without saying his piece, whatever injury he had to sustain to get it all out. Maybe Paige had no idea what she was really doing or saying at the moment, but he knew from experience that she would when the spell or whatever was over. His words would have to mean something when she was herself again. If they didn't, at least he would have said them. He had to, for his own sanity, for this own heart. For his own guilt. "I never meant for him to die. If I'd known what was happening — "

Another pilsner flew toward his head, this one orbing back into Paige's hand when it was clear that the glass would miss him by an inch. She re-aimed while he tried again to get through to her.

"We've been through too much to let it end like this. We — "

This time, the glass clipped his ear before flipping end over end into the corner.

The witch grinned wildly, a small satisfaction in her eyes. She shrugged at the shattered glass and said cheerfully, "You can't say we both didn't warn you. Now get out of here!" To emphasize her point, she called for one of the knives they kept under the bar for slicing fruits for the drinks. "Knife!"

Seeing the devastated look on the man's face, Christopher actually felt a little sorry for him. He wondered just how close the guy had actually been to the Halliwell family here in the past. Was he close enough that Paige was going to feel badly about this when she was back to her usual self? Better safe than sorry, Christopher loped over to the man. He gave the guy half a nod that finished up toward the stairway. "Cut your losses, man, and try some other day. If you care about her as much as you seem to think you do, let her be tonight. Let us find a way to fix this first."

Darryl nodded as well, knowing that Chris was right. Defeated, he didn't even try to say anything else. He just dabbed at the blood on his ear as he trudged up the stairs toward the exit.

One crisis averted, Christopher turned his attention to the two bartenders, who were both looking a little more relaxed. The one guy had a broom in his hand and was about to lift the counter so that he could head out to the dance floor after all of the glass that was shattered around the joint. Quickly, Christopher held him up with a raised hand. "Don't worry about it. I'll get it later. Are you guys all right?"

They both nodded slowly. Both men looked at each other a moment, as if arguing something until the guy without the broom asked, "The sisters are witches or something, right?"

Christopher narrowed his eyes on them, not really suspicious but curious (and a little impressed that they were just cutting to the magical chase). "Maybe."

"Well, that explains a lot," the broom guy said.

"It does," asked Christopher.

The other guy spoke up, half laughing with nerves. "A lot of strange stuff happens around here. It's kind of an unwritten rule among those of us who have been here long enough that you just don't ask questions. The sisters are good to us and pay us all better than we'd be able to get at some of the other busier clubs in town. As long as we don't let curiosity get the better of us, it's a great arrangement."

"It's really okay with you guys?"

Broom guy said, "You can tell the guys who don't like the goings-on around here by the turnaround. Those who can hack it stay. The ones who get too freaked out when people who we are pretty sure are leprechauns and fairies are getting served drinks at the bar are the ones who take off after a week or two. You don't need to worry about the rest of us. We can handle it."

Thrilled but still wary, Christopher said, "Just make sure it stays quiet, even among you guys, okay? We never know who's listening. If the sisters get exposed for what they are, the consequences . . . People generally aren't as understanding as you."

"Their secret is safe with us," Broom Guy said. To seal the conversation, he switched topics and asked, "So where have you been? We've missed you around here."

"Long story," Christopher said entirely too quickly, but he didn't have time to explain that one just now. He nodded his head toward the office door, where he'd seen Paige disappear out of the corner of his eye, and said, "I'll tell you sometime. I really should go check on her before she destroys what's left of that room back there."

"Yeah, go," both of the guys said. Broom Guy added, "And really, don't worry about the mess. We'll get it."

"Thanks, guys."

That problem solved, or agreed on anyway, Christopher turned his attention back on his aunt, a sliver of light under the office door showing him the way. Not even imagining that he would get a reception similar to that Darryl guy's, Christopher fearlessly opened the office door with a cheerful announcement of "He's gone."

As she aimed and threw the stapler at Christopher's unprotected head, Paige warned him, "You should be, too."

Hearing the damned near demonic Mary Poppins singing at him, Christopher griped, "You don't have to sound so happy about it."

"Of course I do," she said offhandedly.

Confused, Christopher asked, "Why?"

"We have a new baby. We have to celebrate." Without even realizing she was doing it, Paige's voice dropped the cheerfulness and took on the tone of a whispered mantra as she continued. "Celebrate, baby Chris, celebrate, celebrate because the others can't, celebrate, new baby, things to do, celebrate, celebrate, celebrate."

Scared that his aunt was truly falling apart, Christopher dashed worriedly to her side, ducking the pencil holder's trajectory along the way. He gripped her upper arms, fighting the urge to shake the Paige he knew into her head. He knew she'd been acting strangely. Everyone had said so at one time or another in the last week. She had been avoiding him so skillfully, however, that he had no idea that things were really this bad with her. He had no idea. Softly, as if he were talking to a spooked animal, he asked, "Paige? What's wrong with you?"

Sickly sweet, she responded, "Silly boy, there's nothing wrong with me. I'm peachy! You aren't supposed to be here."

"You keep saying that. Why?" Christopher didn't exactly get an answer. Paige's hand swiped the desk for something to clunk him over the head with, so he held her a little tighter, pulling her almost close enough to hug. "Why shouldn't I be here?"

Paige put her hand to her nephew's chest and pushed him away hard. Elatedly happy, she told him, "I don't have time to do this. There's a new baby in the family, you know. We should be celebrating. There's so much to do, and everyone is so busy that I have to do it all. I have to do it all because they can't. They need time, and I have to give it to them." Again her voice dropped as if there was no one in the room but her. "Celebrate. He's not alone this time. He's loved. He's happy. He's celebrated. New baby. Celebrate."

Growing even more fearful, Christopher tried softly to try to get her attention. "Look at me. Please? You had every right to shut that guy Darryl out, but you can't shut me out forever. You can't. I wish you would just look at me. You don't have to talk to me or anything, but I wish you could see me."

"I see you," she clucked in cheerfully condescending disagreement.

"Do you," he asked. "Or do you see the other me?"

"Pardon me for not seeing a distinction, dummy," she giggled.

"I'm not him, Paige."

The bright-eyed witch flipped her hands up in the air, palms up as if to say "Whatever". Her head bobbed side to side cheerfully as she proclaimed, "If it looks like a duck . . . "

"Quack, quack," Christopher groaned, annoyed with her attitude for the first time. He would almost be tempted to just orb out of there and leave her to her dementia if he weren't so worried. It wasn't only the chanting. Of course, attacking people with orbing knives wasn't a good sign. A lot of seemingly little things were adding up to a much bigger thing that was really ugly and dangerous for her. Unwilling to give up on her yet, Christopher dusted off the cushions of the plexi-glass and flopped down onto the couch. He took his time crossing an ankle onto his knee, slumping back into the cushions, and resting his elbow on the arm of the sofa. He casually cradled his now aching temple in his hand as he tiredly asked, "What do you want me to say?"

For the first time, Paige offered a brutally honest answer, even if it was still in her ridiculously happy voice. "You can't tell me what I need to hear, not if you aren't him. And you aren't him. You shouldn't even be here. You're in the way. I should be celebrating now, not playing with ghosts."

Christopher smiled gently at her, appreciating her honesty, disguised though it was. Reciprocating, he asked, "Try? Please? I know I'm not him, but maybe if you try to talk to me, you might feel — "

He had to throw his hands up to catch the next thing to come flying at him in response. It wasn't anywhere near the answer he was looking for. His hands stung as a glass orb smacked hard into them, prompting him to oddly wish his sister were around so that she could have frozen the damned thing. Angrily he dropped it into his lap and glared up at her, forcing himself to remember to check his temper as he shook the pins and needles out of his hands. He had to fight the urge to throw anything back, tempting as it was. Whatever this was, she didn't know what she was doing or saying. Right? Still, that hurt like hell.

"Do you mind," he barked instead.

Sugary sweet, Paige replied in song, "I told you that you shouldn't be here. That wouldn't have hurt if you had gone away like I told you to."

His hand still stinging, Christopher temporarily did lose his temper. Hurt and confused, he snapped, "Then why don't you just zip on up to my past, figure out exactly when it was that Wyatt turned evil, and tell him not kill anyone so that my life can be normal? I won't have to be here, and you can go back to not having to even look me in the eye. Sound like a plan to you?"

Cheerfully, she disagreed. "I would, but I have too many other things to do right now. Haven't you heard? We have a new baby in the house. He needs to be celebrated. There's so much to do. The announcements need to go out, and the alarms need to be set, and I have to build a new bedroom, and I have to celebrate. I have to celebrate. The others can't. You don't get it. They can't celebrate. Not now. So I have to. Celebrate the new baby. Celebrate. New baby. Lots to do. Celebrate."

"I'm the baby. I give you permission not to. For five minutes, forget about that and talk to me."

All of the color that remained in Paige's face drained away, turning her already pale features a ghostly white. There was no trace of the sickening happiness in her as she started to violently shake and back away from him, reaching behind her for the corner of the desk to help her stand on her own two legs. Her face contorted, struggling between pure hatred and that smile that still wanted to take over every inch of her. What came out was a wicked sneer coupled with eyes burning a hole right into Christopher's chest.

"Get out, whatever you are, you evil bastard."

Confused, Christopher stood up again and made to cross over to her. "What? What's wrong?"

"Get the hell out of here right now!" With that, Paige brandished the knife she had called for when Darryl was still in the club, pointing it directly at Christopher's chest. He stopped dead in his tracks, their eyes both dropping to the length of the blade. Christopher stared at it, stunned, while Paige marveled at it with wide eyes that were suddenly much more afraid than they were furious. "That's a lot of blood."

"That is a lot of blood," Christopher said, too, staring at the blade. "But where did it come from?"

"You shouldn't be here," said Paige again, her voice trembling in song.

Christopher's eyes worked furiously, trying to figure out where the blood was coming from. On second glance at the knife, he followed the blood up along the blade to the hilt to his aunt's hand, which was also streaked in blood. Fearful, he looked her up and down, afraid that something might have happened before he'd come to the club, whatever it was that had torn up the office as it was.

Paige, however, wasn't anywhere near as concerned about the blood as he was. She turned away from him, lowering the knife. She bent over and tossed through the pile of Post It notes that were scattered on the floor, looking for the perfect shade of blue to write herself a memo to figure out how to get the ghost away from her once she was done celebrating the baby. "You shouldn't be here," she mumbled. "You're in the way. I have to celebrate the baby, the new baby, not play Ghostbuster. There's a new baby. He needs to be celebrated. Celebrate, celebrate, new baby, things to do, celebrate . . . "

It was as Paige was bent over the pile of notes that Christopher noticed that even when she appeared to have settled down, she hadn't stopped moving. Her hands were constantly searching for something to do. If she wasn't playing with her hair, she was tapping her hands against her thighs, anything to keep her hands busy. The problem was, she was doing it with the knife still in her hand. Christopher wanted to be sick, seeing the deep gashes in the side of his aunt's thigh, gashes that had stained her skirt a dangerous black-red.

Soothingly, Christopher stepped a little bit closer to her, reaching his hand out to her. "Can you give me the knife, please? Darryl's gone. You don't need it anymore."

"No, that's okay," she chirped. "I might still need it."

"Paige, really," Christopher said worriedly. He started walking even closer to her, hand out and waiting. "I need you to give me the knife."

Furiously cheerful, Paige stood up and turned to him, shrieking off key, "I said, 'NO'!"

At the same time, Christopher lunged for the knife to try to take it out of her hand, but caught it instead with the right side of his gut. They both grunted in surprise as the hilt stuck in him like a stopper, the rest of the blade disappearing as if by magic in Christopher's stomach. Paige's hand stayed on the hilt for a moment, shaking too violently to make an effort to remove the blade. She gaped at her hand, terrified. It wasn't until Christopher grunted again in pain that her eyes rose up to meet his.

"I killed you," she whispered.

"P-paige?"

"I killed you." Paige's hand finally let go of the blade as she stepped back in horror. "Oops," she said stonily, as if she weren't really saying it at all. "Forgot to use a glove — can't very well go poking around in a mortal wound — breaking the law . . . Still here," she started whispering as she backed all the way into the wall and slid down it. "Still here, still here, still here . . . "

Christopher tumbled backward, unable to pull his hands away from the knife in his stomach to break his fall. He crashed hard into the frame of the sofa, jarring his back and rubbing his spine raw as he slid down. He took a second to catch his breath, what little of it he could catch, and braced his index and middle fingers of his left hand around the wound, giving it a little pressure. He again tried to catch his breath as he grasped the hilt of the blade, preparing to pull it out. Even the grip he had on the knife was too much, sending blinding white sparks into his eyes. There was no way he was getting this thing out of himself without help. Weakly, he called for his aunt, "P-paige? I can't do this. You — "

" . . . start with the basement, whistle while you work," she continued to mutter. "Has to pay his fine, don't even try to orb out, only Gideon can stop this, still here, still here . . . "

His aunt completely useless, Christopher forced himself to remember that he had to call for his father, not Charlie like he normally would. Everything was so cold and blurry that he wasn't sure who he was actually calling for. "Charlie, " he called then shook his head, reminding himself that that wasn't right. He needed Leo. He needed his dad. "Da-dad."

Before he'd even finished calling for his father, a large group of orbs circled into the room in between himself and his aunt. When the orbs settled into human form, it revealed Leo, Piper, and Phoebe, all with their backs to Christopher. All three started forward when they saw her sitting on the ground, muttering to herself words that were quickly descending into nonsense.

" . . . killer killer killer . . . still here stillherestillherekillerstilllkiller . . . "

"I thought you said she was okay," Phoebe asked Leo, seeing the blood on Paige's hands as she was wringing them together. She knelt down by her sister whispering, "Paige? Honey? Can you sit up for me?"

Paige didn't even seem to see them. She kept muttering, although a little more discernibly, "I killed you. I killed you. Forgive me. I killed you."

Next Piper crouched down next to her sister, even though it took her a little longer to do so with the lingering surgical pain. Softly, she asked, "Killed who? Paige? Who did you kill? You didn't kill anyone, honey, I promise."

Paige's voice instead settled out, back into her normal voice with a little bit of panicked confidence mixed into it. "You stay here! You hear me? Just hold on. I'll get your dad, but you have to hang on for me. Leo!" Still not really seeing her sisters, Paige catapulted herself up from the floor and pushed her sisters out of the way, darting over to the sofa. Along the way, she screamed for her brother-in-law in quick succession just as she had only three weeks ago. "Leo! Leo LEO LEO LEO!"

She scampered over to her nephew, who weakly pulled away from her as she tried to put her hands on his shoulders. Christopher looked at her with wide eyes, not sure if he was seeing what was really going on. "P-paige?"

The other three in the room turned around, stunned. All of the air escaped Leo's lungs in a strangled gasp as he took three very long, quick steps across the room and dropped to his knees at his son's side before even realizing he was doing it. "What happened," he roared.

"It was an accident," Christopher heaved. His father's hands immediately reached for the wound, but Christopher put a hand out to stop them. "Just a second." Christopher turned his bloody hands to Paige, turning each one over once in front of her. "It's blood," he told her. "It's real. I'm real. I'm here. I'm not dead, and I'm not him."

Without explanation, Paige glowed a strange blue color, running from her head to her toes. Her eyes suddenly cleared and she started, as if seeing what was going on in front of her for the first time. "I know. I'm so sorry, Chris. I am so, so sorry," she said softly, crying. It didn't take long before tears mingled in the corners of her worried smile. "Will you let him get that damned thing out of you now please?"

"Uh. Nevermind," said Phoebe, dropping the scrap of paper which she and Piper had scribbled a counter spell on, just in case. The remaining two sisters looked at one another, relieved to have their other sister back. Still not quite sure what had happened, though, Phoebe shrugged, "Well, that was easy."

"Steady his shoulders," Leo told Paige on the other side of the room, putting his right hand on Christopher's forehead for comfort. To Christopher he said, "It's going to be okay. Just try to relax." When Christopher nodded in agreement, Leo told them both, "On three. One. THREE!"

Piper and Phoebe both turned their heads away as Christopher screamed, holding onto one another's hands for support. As many times as Piper had pulled Darklighter arrows out of Leo's body or Paige's, she hadn't ever grown accustomed to the sound. She certainly wasn't ever going to get used to it with her children. She couldn't even look as Leo's hands started to glow over Christopher's stomach, doing their magical healy thing that she was suddenly more grateful for than she'd ever been before.

Before she knew it, Christopher was calling out to her, "It's safe to look now, Mom."

She laughed lightly, her voice trembling with relief. "How did you know?"

Wryly, Christopher told her, "You were never able to look when it was one of us kids. Anyone else, sure, but not any of the kids. I'm kind of used to it."

"Let's try not to get you too used to that, huh?"

Christopher nodded then turned his attention back on his aunt. He knew he'd missed something, but he was grateful to have had her sitting there with him. He raised an eyebrow at her. "You okay now?"

"Yeah, are you," Phoebe interjected.

"I'm fine," Paige told them all, nodding solemnly. "Sorry for the trouble."

"Yeah, that Personal Gain thing is kind of tricky sometimes," Piper teased, much more relieved. Still a little serious, though, she asked, "What were you thinking? Paige, haven't you learned from any of the other times ones of us tried to get over our pain with magic? Dan ended up ancient, I ended up a Valkyrie, Phoebe has — well, you get the picture. I don't want to yell. Can you just promise me that you won't go trying any more spells to deal with things like that? You can talk to any one of us. There are no designated mourning periods, you know."

Paige looked up at her sisters with tears in her eyes. "I know. I do. I just didn't know how to . . . You weren't there and I didn't want you to ever have to be, even in your imaginations. It was bad enough that Leo and I had to see it. It was — No one that close in my life has died since my parents. I didn't know how to — I didn't remember that it could hurt so badly."

"Speaking of you hurting badly," Christopher groaned and tried to sit up a little. Even though he was completely healed, it still hurt enough and probably would for the rest of the night. His hurt wasn't the one he was concerned about, though. He pointed his father toward the shreds of Paige's skirt and said, "I think those could probably use a little help."

Leo's fingers gently reached for the folds of fabric around Paige's thigh without even thinking about it, glowing before they even got there. She looked down at his hand for a second then pulled her leg away, refusing to let him touch her. "That's okay," she grinned. "I think it would be good to let these heal on their own, along with the rest of me."

"Let him look at them at least," Christopher requested. He looked at his father, a strange look of understanding that none of the others could translate passing between them. Proudly, Christopher added, "He's a doctor, remember?"

On her nod of approval, Leo stood up and Christopher scooted over onto the other end of the sofa to give his father room to work. Leo asked Piper for the First Aid kit behind the bar which she quickly took off to go get. Phoebe, in the meantime, marveled at the tornado that had seemingly attacked only the office of the club and nowhere else in San Francisco.

"Wow. So can I ask what happened in here?"

Paige quickly apologized without really apologizing, "I'll clean it up in the morning. The bar, too. I know I made a little mess, but I can get it." With a slight grin, she added, "I'll do it without magic, I promise."

Just as Paige was apologizing, Piper came back in with the First Aid kit, thumb hooked over her shoulder. "What happened in there? Rex just dumped an entire trash bin of glass out the back."

"I'm sorry, I'm sorry," Paige groaned. "I'll deal with it in the morning, I swear." She seemed to stop for a second, realizing what had created all of the glass in the first place. Her nose wrinkled, thinking of Darryl and the long road they both had ahead to dealing with what had happened that day in Piper's bedroom, and said sadly, "I have a lot to deal with in the morning."

Yawning, Piper said, "We all have a lot to deal with that can wait until morning." To her son, she added, "Right, Christopher?"

Christopher wasn't really paying any attention to the others in the room anymore and didn't hear his mother talking to him. When he'd slid over on the sofa, at first he'd landed on something round and hard. He'd arched his back a little bit and pulled out the object from behind him, seeing for the first time what it was that Paige had thrown at him. When he'd seen it, his stomach had turned to ice. It couldn't be. There was no way that it . . . It couldn't be.

"Christopher, honey," Piper asked again, taking a few steps over to him. "Are you okay?"

"Huh," he asked distractedly.

"I said that we could all go home and deal with everything in the morning," she told him, brow crinkled in concern. "I know you're mad at me, and I guess I don't blame you, but will you at least come home? I'll make a full apology in the morning, complete with . . . " Piper caught sight of the globe in his hands and peered at it a little closer, wondering what it was that was holding his attention when she was trying so hard to apologize. "Christopher? What is that?"

Now suddenly more aware, Christopher's head shot up, eyes wide. He clung to the globe harder, not wanting them to see it or get near it. It was too important. After Paige had thrown it at him (not that she had any idea what it was), he needed to be sure that it was okay before he let them near it. It was far too important to his past for him to let anything else happen to it. Before he even knew what he was saying, he told them (even though he knew they hated that excuse), "I can't. Future Consequences. I gotta go."

Without any further warning, Christopher orbed out of the office, leaving his bewildered family staring at the empty space he'd left with open mouths.

To make sure none of them followed him, Christopher immediately started orbing here and there, all over the city to keep them off balance. He quickly hit an alley, a department store downtown, a random pier, and a few other choice spots of no significance. He even orbed back to the club, to the back door, and waited there long enough to hear his father call his name before orbing out again. He went to his mother's old restaurant, but security alarms started blaring so that he couldn't stay there for more than a second or two. All the while, he held close to the orb, not daring to let even one finger slip from its base.

Finally, he arrived back on top of the bridge like he always did. He knew it was the safest place in the world for him to be, other than a cemetery. His father might be able to find him there, but it would at least take him a while. He needed time alone to think, time to figure out what to do next. Of course, because that was what he needed, he didn't get it. The cosmos was great at screwing that up for him, no matter what time he was in.

A jingling of orbs floated down in front of him, taking the shape of another stranger to Christopher. Darkly, as if he wasn't going to give Christopher a choice, the man said, "You need to hear us out, Christopher. For your own safety and for your future."

IV.

"Christopher, you get back here right now!"

Leo briefly opened his eyes to look at his wife with understanding that only he could have compared to the others in the room. Christopher was, after all, his son, not his nephew. As much as he knew the other girls loved his boy, there was still that elevated level of affection for him that only Leo and Piper could have. Still, as much as he understood his wife's apprehension, she was being incredibly disruptive to the searching process. "Piper, relax. He's fine. Yelling at him isn't going to bring him back."

"Really? Then what's your brilliant plan to get him back this time, Daddy?"

His eyes closed once again, Leo spoke softly in that annoyingly serene Elder voice that he had used at first when he came back from Up There four months ago. "Calm down. If you try too hard, he's just going to block me and then we won't be able to find him until he wants to be found, period. So if you could please just give me a moment, I'll let you know where he is and we can figure out what — Damn!"

"He put you on 'Mute', didn't he," Phoebe half-chuckled. "I hate it when he does that."

"No, he didn't. I'm still an Elder. He can cut all of you out completely all he wants, but he can't entirely lose me. He can block me until I find his soul again, but it isn't possible for him to clip his wings since he's genetically tied to all of the Elders since I was an Elder at the time. No matter what he does, They-We will always be able to find him. That doesn't mean he can't make it extremely difficult in the process."

Concerned (and afraid of what the answer was going to be), Piper asked, "Then why 'damn'?"

"He isn't alone," Leo nearly growled. Before she even had the chance to open her mouth, Leo knew Piper was going to ask the question he didn't have an answer to yet and held his hand up to staunch the impulse any of them had to ask him what was going on. "I can't tell who it is, but they're talking."

"Well, then get me over there so that I can blow whoever the hell it is up before something happens!"

"It's not that simple," Leo said, irritated. He cocked his head to side, as if he were trying to listen in to the conversation, which, considering the way They had always listened in on them before, he probably had that power now, too. Quickly he explained during a supposed silence, "I didn't say I didn't know what was with him. I just said I didn't know who. It's one of the Elders. I can't tell who."

"Again, I say, get me there so that I can blow the sonofabitch up. Thank you."

Phoebe reached over and grabbed her elder sister's upper arm, pulling Piper closer to her. She locked the bicep in the crook of her arm and with her other hand rubbed up and down along Piper's angrily trembling forearm. Soothingly, she said, "Honey, give him a second. If Leo thought Christopher was in any danger, he would have orbed there without even thinking about it. Give it a minute and see what happens. Leo won't let anything happen to Christopher, you know that."

"Don't you use logic on me right now," Piper retorted, still shaking. "Just wait until you have kids. You don't understand. You couldn't possibly — "

"Hey!" Paige jumped in, offended. "You know damned well we care about Christopher as much as you do. That's really unfair of you to — "

"He's alone," Leo announced, having missed the entire commotion going on not five feet away from him. He opened his eyes and looked directly at Piper. "And he's perfectly fine."

"Are you sure?"

"I'm sure," he said. "He's twenty-five years old. He can handle himself in a conversation just fine."

"That's all they did, talk?"

"All they did was talk," confirmed Leo. He sighed heavily, tired, knowing that his evening wasn't even remotely over. "He's annoyed, but he's fine. That's the second time one of Them has cornered him tonight. He handled himself just fine. I'm going to go get him. Is there anything else I need to know about what the two of you talked about in the kitchen before I go? Anything would help."

Piper's eyes popped out in disbelief. "You aren't going without me." She felt Phoebe squeeze her arm even tighter, enough to cut off the circulation, and added, "Without us."

As a show of solidarity, the third sister linked arms with her other two. The three of them stared directly at Leo, standing straight as boards, waiting for him to make the next move. Leo stared back, trying his hardest not to give in and let them win, once again. This time it was different. When Chris had been here before, he hadn't trusted his father to save his own life, let alone the lives of those around him. The sisters had respected that once they had known who Chris was. For six months, Chris's identity (and existence) had remained a secret from the boy's father. Once Leo had known, he had respected Chris's feelings, as hard as it was for him to do it. Now that the tables were turned, now that he was the one on the inside and they weren't, the sisters weren't anywhere near as respectful of Chris's needs. Maybe that wasn't fair to say so, but there was a certain amount of hypocrisy in the whole thing. Still, it might not hurt to have them there as much as he was thinking it would.

Reluctantly, Leo said, "Fine, but unless he has changed his mind in the last few minutes, you need to let me carry the conversation."

"Please," Paige smirked. "Leo, you couldn't carry a tune in a bucket."

"This isn't a negotiation," Leo retorted. "He trusts me. You, on the other hand, just stuck him in the gut with a very large, very painful knife. If he's going to talk to any of us right now, it's going to be me. Can you at least give me the chance to get through to him before the rest of you jump in? Everyone else has scared him away tonight. I'm sorry to put it that way, but you all know it's true. The important part is getting him to come home tonight, not who gets him to do it, right?"

Feeling that they were wasting too much time already, Piper released her arms from her sisters' sides and reached forward to take Leo's hand. She smiled at him and said, "It's cold outside. Let's get him home before he freezes himself to death." She looked over her shoulder at Paige and ordered, "Follow us."

With that, the family disappeared from the confines of P3's tiny office in a rain of orbs bright enough to light the entire club.

Seconds later, as her sister's orbs settled around them, Phoebe found herself tottering in the strength of the wind. She was about to ask if maybe Paige had taken a left when Leo had taken a right when she heard her sister swear next to her. She looking in the same direction and gasped. "I'll raise your 'Damn' and throw in a 'Jesus, Mary, and that other guy, Joe'. This is really high. Really, really high. What are we doing up here?"

Just over the tips of their toes, they were looking down into the traffic of the Golden Gate bridge.

Closing her eyes and gulping hard, Phoebe asked, "Are you sure your little Whitelighter radar isn't just a little on the fritz?"

"This can't be right," Paige mumbled over her sister's question. "What would Christopher be doing up here?"

"Hiding from us," Piper said sadly from behind them. She reached out and pulled them both back from the edge of the beam by the elbows. "Which is apparently something they both do from time to time."

Piper nodded toward where Leo was slowly approaching Christopher, talking to him in low whispers. Christopher was sitting cross-legged on a perch a little bit higher than the rest of them, looking down at them with obvious nervousness. He shook his head wildly at Leo, who gestured for his son to come down and join them so that they could talk. As the three sisters watched the men in their lives attempt to coax the other into his position, they stood helplessly by, unable to hear what was being said over the winds.

Ten feet away, Christopher was asking his father, "Why did you bring them here?"

Leo shrugged and rolled his eyes. "They didn't give me a choice. Paige would have followed me. They are, however, going to stay over there and not say anything as long as you don't give them a reason to think that I'm not getting anywhere with convincing you to come home tonight."

"I'm not going home tonight," Christopher argued plainly. "They are all too confused about me, and I'm only making things worse for everybody by being there. I yelled at Mom. Wyatt can't get anywhere near me without trying to either throw things at me or orb me out of the county. Paige never would have slipped as badly as she did if I hadn't been around. I think it's best if I give them time to figure themselves out before they worry about figuring me out."

"It isn't like that and you know it," Leo grumbled angrily. He didn't mean for it to sound that way, but it did anyway. Still, maybe that was going to be the best way to get through to his son. It had worked the first day Christopher was back. Why couldn't it now? Settled on a sort-of plan of action, Leo crossed his arms lazily over his chest, settling in for what could possibly become a long argument. "So are you going to tell me why you're sitting here feeling sorry for yourself or am I going to have to guess?"

"I'm not feeling sorry for myself," Christopher shot back. "I'm not."

"Then come down here and tell me that to my face."

Christopher looked over to where his mother and aunts were standing there watching him, waiting for him to make some kind of move. He hated seeing the way they looked at him, like he needed to be coddled and smothered and would make him his very favorite chocolate chip cookies as soon as they were done kissing and pinching his cheeks. He wished they would quit looking at him like that and that they would quit treating him like that. Any other parent of an adult child would have let him blow off the steam and come home on his own terms because he was, in fact, an adult. He was an adult with adult problems and would handle them like an adult. He'd blow off the steam and go home with a clear head to formulate a plan. That was how it was supposed to work. Apparently, he was the only one in on the secret that he hadn't been twelve years old in a very, very long time. That's what had put him in this jam in the first place.

The only way out of this was to convince them that everything was okay. He understood that now. They weren't going to stop babying him, of course, but it would maybe quell the impulse a little bit if he could get them to think there wasn't anything drastically wrong. He just had to convince them that he was fine. He'd find another way to calm down on his own time and then he could figure out what to do next. He just had to make them believe.

'And miles to go before I sleep,' Christopher reminded himself, convincing himself that he was right. It didn't matter that Leo was probably right, too. He had a show to put on and get them all to believe it. Suddenly he was very glad he had made himself stop crying before the family had appeared. It would be a lot easier to deal with them if they didn't think he was upset. He was fine and dandy. That was all they needed to hear.

Unfortunately, Piper needed to hear it immediately. Unable to wait any longer for Leo to negotiate his way out of her mess, she stomped over across the beam of the bridge, irritated and cold. "Christopher, get down here this instant. We need to talk to you and I am not going to stand around doing it here in the middle of the night. I want to know what the hell is going on with you, and I want to know now. Damn it, Chris, we're all tired. Come down before we make you come down."

Every bit of convincing that Christopher had given himself that he was truly okay vanished into thin air as his mother yelled at him. Now he was just as freaked out as he had been when he'd left them at the club. Everything would have been fine if she had let him go at his own pace instead of, once again, demanding answers he didn't know how to give. Thankfully, his father came to his rescue the best he could.

"Piper, stop it. I know you're upset, but this is not the way to do this," said Leo. "You have been worked up ever since you called me tonight. It isn't good for you, and it isn't good for the rest of us. Relax."

"Don't you dare," Piper snapped, hating that he was right. Of course he was right. She knew he was right. She had been overreacting to just about any little thing for the last three weeks, and she knew it, but that didn't mean it wasn't warranted. Her family had been through too much lately for her to think straight. This was not the time to try to make her think like her usual self. It was too hard. Angrily, she warned both of her men, "Don't you patronize me, either of you. I have had about all of this that I can take right now. So no more secrets, no more lies, starting with that thing in your hands. We do this together, as a family — "

" — Or not at all," Christopher finished for her. "How about you all go home instead and let me figure this out on my own?"

Across the beam where she was waiting with surprising patience, Phoebe looked up at Christopher, sitting there cross-legged on the beam, and felt that tug around her mind again that told her she was about to lose control. She tried to force herself to stay in the moment, not to think about anything other than what Leo was saying in response to Christopher. She clung to his words, but they weren't enough to keep her there. Before she knew it, all she could hear was Leo's voice, telling Chris that it was only fair that he . . .

". . . deserve to know what I did that's so bad."

She heard herself, Chris, snuffle away more tears that somehow she didn't know she had left. She — Chris — had cried over Leo long enough when she was a kid, all that time he missed, but for whatever reason, they were back. The tears were back with a vengeance and she couldn't stop them. She heard Chris saying, "You were never there for me. You were there for everyone else. Mom. Wyatt. Half the world. But you were never there for me. You didn't have the time."

Then, without warning, even that world of Chris's memory was gone. Instead, she was sitting with him in the house, downstairs in the kitchen. They were staring down at a blank sheet of notebook paper in front of him, tapping the eraser end of the pencil on it. She knew that he was nervous, really nervous. He was waiting, waiting for something important. She knew he was thinking that he shouldn't be putting this much pressure on the answer, but he had been thinking that the answer he was waiting for was one of the Last Straw variety. He knew it shouldn't be, but he couldn't help it.

Hoping to steer the answer a little closer to the one he wanted, he tried to boost the up side of his request. "We're supposed to have some sort of personal aspect on it. Most of the other kids have grandparents who can tell them about it. And if their grandparents are gone, their parents can at least tell them everything that their parents told them about it. But you're here. You were there. Grandpa's dad couldn't go because of his eye, but . . . You don't even have to tell me anything. I'll do all of my own research if you'll just read my paper when I'm done and tell me if I got it right. Please, Dad?"

Then, before Phoebe or Chris heard the answer, she could feel herself being dragged back to the bridge where he had been sitting with just Leo. It had seemed like she had been there for a long, excruciating time, but she knew it had flashed in Chris's mind for just a fraction of a second. She could hear him thinking, "That's not fair. You can't exactly hold him hostage for that time he said, 'No'. You were twelve. You couldn't have known that asking him to relive the place where he died was actually going to bother him. You know better now. It was war. It was hell. No man should have to relive that, even him. He wasn't ignoring you like always. He just didn't want to talk about it. But, still . . . "

They were pulled away again, this time to the bridge top, only it was daylight. With what little capacity she had for her own thoughts, she started to scold Chris, even though she knew this was her mess and not his. Not even realizing that she was saying it out loud, she grumbled, "Chris, I don't have time for this. You, the new you, you're in trouble. We're trying to get you to come home right now, but I can't help your mom and dad unless I can actually think for myself. You have to let me talk to — "

As if Chris were really inside her head and could really hear her, Phoebe's mind relaxed and let her hear what was going on around her instead of in him. At the moment, though, she wasn't entirely sure she wanted to be there, either. Paige was standing slightly off to the side, trying to be as small as possible. Piper and Leo flanked the other Chris on either side, but the poor kid was backing away from them as well. He clutched the orb that he had taken from the club tightly, his hands turning white with the effort.

"I can't," said Christopher, shaking his head.

Then, without warning, the globe started to sparkle in Christopher's hands. Surrounded by Whitelighter orbs, it floated away from him before he could catch it. His eyes widened in near terror as it pulled away from him until it settled gently into Paige's waiting hands. She smiled over at him with the most reassuring, honest smile she had. "Christopher, it's perfectly safe. It's obviously important to you so I would never let anything happen to it. I'm just going to hold on to it so that you can talk to your parents without worrying about it. See? It's completely safe. So talk to them. I'll be right here with it where you can see me the whole time. I promise. Talk to them."

Christopher just withered under the looks he was getting from everyone but Phoebe. "I . . . I . . . "

"We — You need to do this," urged Leo. "We can't help you unless you talk to us. Tell us what you're thinking. I know there is plenty you can't tell us; we've pretty much beat that horse to death. But you can tell us at least something to help you."

Turning to face only Leo, Christopher looked hard at his father. His voice high and pleading, he said, "There's a line. There's a very definitive line you can't cross, Dad. What you saw in the future, it more than just crossed that line. I can't tell you any more than you already know. It's too dangerous. It's just — there's a line. Okay? There is a line."

Phoebe didn't hear the answer of anyone present around her. Instead, her throat tightened with dread as that same dark voice from future's past inspired that horribly conflicted feeling in Chris's gut. She didn't have the energy to fight her mind or his this time and let Chris take her where he needed her to go. As she gave in, she knew that she didn't want to be there. Chris certainly didn't. She knew. She could feel it, too. Sickly sweet, the response made both her and Chris cringe.

"A line? And who draws that line, Chris, hmm? You? Suddenly you, the Golden Boy, have the ability to actually judge what's right and what's wrong? Need I remind you that this was your idea at the start? I finished it. Big deal. You were going to get there eventually. I just beat you to it. So what? When you want to do it, it's okay, but when I actually do it, it's suddenly over this invisible line of yours?"

Astonished at Wyatt's seeming inability to distinguish Right from Wrong, Chris gaped at his brother. "It was a joke, Wyatt. I was just angry. I never meant for it to actually happen! If you had just . . . "

Wyatt grinned at his little brother with a twistedly sunshiny face, as if he had just discovered that there really was a Santa Claus. Excitedly, he asked, "What the hell is your problem? Chris, we are finally free! Don't you get that? You are safe to live that life without magic that you and Mom and everyone else has been going on and on about for all these years. Don't you get it? We don't have to look over our shoulders anymore."

Phoebe felt Chris's gut sink. His throat had almost been too dry to talk as he incredulously asked, "Is that what you think you did? Wyatt, you — "

Before Chris could finish his question, orbs circled in between them, settling into the form of their father. As soon as he was completely solid, the man turned his attention to his eldest son, his back turned on his youngest. "Wyatt, are you okay? I just went to see how everything went with the mission, but none of the other Elders were there. I went to the safe house, but it's completely torn up and Chris is gone. You weren't with him, and I was afraid someone had taken you both. Are you all right? Are you hurt?"

Chris couldn't believe that that was the question his father had for his brother. He opened his mouth to call attention to himself but Wyatt simply shrugged at his father and answered him instead. "I'm fine, Dad." With an unreadable expression, he nodded over Leo's shoulder and added, "Chris is okay, too."

Leo had turned around, his eyes burning with what Chris was sure was anger but Phoebe recognized as fatherly fear. "Chris? What are you doing here? I told you to stay hidden. God, Chris, I can't protect you if you can't even follow the simplest instructions."

Their shared heart irritated, Phoebe and Chris snapped at his father, "It wasn't safe! It never was. As soon as Wyatt started working with Them, I wasn't anywhere close to safe, and you know it!"

"Chris, I know you've never been a fan of the Elders. You were too close to your mother to ever appreciate Them for what They have done for us. They kept all of us alive a lot longer than we could have done by ourselves. Ever since the Titans slaughtered all of the existing Elders, those of us who were brought up from Whitelighter status have tried to make this world as safe as we could with the Titans around. Your mom didn't trust that. I understand that she wouldn't want to trust anything that would take me away from her and you boys, but I was gone for you, for your mother and your brother. It was the only way to keep you safe. You're an adult now, Chris, or, at least, you're supposed to be. I need you to act like one and stay put when I tell you to. You're just lucky that I was on separate business when the others went on the attack. Do you think I could actually have done my job if I had known that I should have been having to worry about you? Damn it, Chris. Do you have any idea how worried I was when you weren't at the safe house? You have to listen to me when I tell you do something! I can't be worrying about — I just can't."

Bitterly, Chris burst out, "I'm not the one you should be worried about!"

Phoebe could see that Leo was about to ask what that was supposed to mean when a new set of orbs settled around them, buzzing with urgency. "LEO!" The orbs shouted on the way down from the skies and went on rambling, hardly making sense through wracked sobs as they hit the steel. "They're . . . They. . . Gone. They're a-all dead!"

"Thomas, calm down. Who is dead?"

"I did as you asked and went to check out the site where we sent the raiders. All of the other Elders, the ones who went on the attack. They're dead," the deceptively old-looking Elder had sobbed. They all watched as the stricken look paled Leo's face and Thomas turned away, unable to look at the same expression that stained his own face. That look was quickly replaced on his features when he caught sight of not one, but both of Leo's sons with him. Ecstatically relieved, he reached for Wyatt and practically danced around the young man. "Wyatt! You — you're safe!" He hugged Wyatt to him in his excitement while Wyatt had looked over the Elder's shoulder at his brother with a look that was all but a warning to keep his mouth shut. "Thank God! I thought you were lost to us, too."

Leo searched the faces of the two of them with confusion, his berating of Chris seemingly long-forgotten. "Why would he be lost to us? Wyatt, what is he talking about?"

Bravely and loudly, Chris answered the question for him, not caring what the consequences were going to be. "Because he led Them on the raid, Dad. He's the only one who made it out of there alive. Go ahead, big brother; tell him why."

Wyatt masked his face with complete innocence as his father had stared at him. Only Chris would have known what that look meant, but that was the important part. Phoebe knew that the look was meant just for Chris. The others wouldn't have known, couldn't have known. "It was really terrible," Wyatt said throatily, as if he were next to tears. "I know I was supposed to be watching Chris, but a few of the others came to the safehouse and asked me to go with. They thought They needed all of the extra power They could get. Chris promised me he'd stay hidden, so I went with. When we got there . . . Dad, it was so awful. We all believed the demons when they said they wanted to be rid of the Titans as much as we did. I trusted them. We all did. But when we got there, it was a trap. They had double-crossed us and made a deal with the Titans to wipe us all out. I tried to fight, but They ordered me to go. They said I was too important to risk any further. Dad, I'm so sorry."

"LIAR!" Chris shouted at his brother, forcing all of them to flinch, including himself. He couldn't believe he had actually called his brother out in the first place, but he was only making it worse because he just couldn't keep his mouth shut this time. He knew he'd regret it, but he confessed, "I was there, Wyatt. I followed you. I saw you! The only double-cross there was — "

"You were there? What were you thinking?" Leo turned back to his younger son, his face even more furious than it had been before. "You are half Elder. Wyatt is safer, even being the Twice-Blessed from the prophesies, because he is part Whitelighter. You know there is a difference. You have powers that he isn't going to have because of who I was at the time that he was born compared to you. He may be more powerful, but you are in much more danger than him. You can't just come out of hiding whenever you feel like it!"

Sheepishly, Thomas put a hand on Leo's shoulder to catch the other Elder's attention. "This is a family matter, Leo. I'll be Up There when you're ready to proceed."

Leo nodded in agreement and sent the Elder orbing away without taking his hurtfully concerned eyes from his child. Phoebe could feel it. The look on Leo's face had Chris feeling terrible for worrying his father like that. It was hard to be under that look as angry as the angel was. "Chris, do you understand why I'm upset? Do you have any idea what could have happened to you if the Titans had been able to get their hands on you? You wouldn't have lived long enough to know what they could do with your powers. Do you have any idea how afraid I am of that every single day?"

Offended that the man had the gall to suggest that it was out of concern for him that he was yelling, Chris fired back. "Please! That isn't because you care about me. It's because of your precious brotherhood Up There. You know I'm a weapon against you. It has nothing to do with caring about me because I'm your son. Don't try to dress it up as concern when I know better. If you cared that I'm your son, you would be hearing me right now. I am not the danger to you. Keyser Söze over there is."

Leo's anger dropped from his face, only to be replaced with complete confusion. "What are you talking about?"

"The Elders' precious prophecy? The one about the Twice-Blessed child? I've seen the thing, Dad. It said he could go either way. It never said what side of the battle he would end up on. Now we know. It was a set up, Dad, a very elaborate, perfectly planned set up. The Titans were never going to make it out of that chamber alive, but neither were the Elders. They never had a chance, not against Wyatt and the pack of demons that were taking orders from him to take everyone out. They never had a chance."

Seemingly terrified suddenly that something had happened to his child's mind when he'd been lurking about during the slaughter of a raid the others had been on or during whatever it was that had destroyed the safehouse, Leo cautiously took a step toward Chris. At least, that's what it had looked like to Chris. The father's hand reached out to his boy, but Chris backed away before his father could get close enough. "Chris? Honey, did something happen at the safehouse? Are you okay? Are you hurt?"

Devastated, Chris looked over his father's shoulder to where his brother had been watching the scene and smirking with satisfaction. He hadn't looked away from his brother's suddenly unfamiliar eyes when he sadly said, "You don't believe me."

Leo turned to his eldest son, pain in his every move. "Wyatt," he asked. "Can you take your brother some place safe for me? I'll catch up to you in an hour or so, then we can try to sort this out there. We can't do anything here, whatever's happened to him."

"Sorry, Dad," said Wyatt, his innocent face back on cue. "I really don't have time to babysit right now. The chaos —people are waiting for me. I have a job to do."

"Yes, you do," Leo argued incredulously. "Your job is to take care of your brother for me. You know he's your responsibility, Wyatt. What's going on Up There and down here doesn't change that. I don't have your power. It's up to you to take care of him because I can't. I cannot protect him the way he needs to be protected. Please, Wyatt. He's your brother. It isn't so much to ask. If your mother were here, you wouldn't have thought to argue the point at all. I may not be her, but I expect you to still remember that I'm your father, and I am asking you to do something for me. Nothing is more important than protecting your brother."

Oddly distant, Wyatt's only response had been, "I really don't have the time."

Phoebe could feel how the sick had struggled through the tightness in Chris's throat. He wanted to deny it, but it was right there. He'd seen the change. He knew that look on his brother's face. He had seen it only a few hours before when the Elders had first walked into the trap that had awaited them. He didn't have to jump very far to find a very unpleasant conclusion. His eyes flashed between his brother and his father arguing over which one of them loved him enough to actually spend any time with him. Laziness shaped Wyatt's shoulders as if he was arguing only because it was amusing him. That was when Chris knew for sure that Wyatt was gone. That amusement was the only reason Wyatt was bothering with his father at all. Swallowing the bile back behind his tonsils, Chris urgently interrupted, "Wyatt. Stop. He's not a threat. Let him go."

In what, in Phoebe's eyes, looked like a father honestly fearing for his baby's sanity, Leo pulled Chris tight to him before his son could pull even half an inch away. He clenched a chunk of Chris's hair, as if he could hold whatever was slipping out and away from the boy in with just his hand. "God, what happened to you? Whatever it was, you have to tell me what they did to you. You aren't making any sense at all."

Under any other circumstance, Chris would have welcomed this display of affection and concern from his father. It was worlds beyond the 'Hide him, I don't want to see him out in the open' mantra that he had heard from Leo ever since he could remember. If only it had come at some other time when Chris had needed to hear it instead of at that moment when it was the last thing he wanted to hear. Hearing it now meant that Leo couldn't hear him at all or didn't want to. Chris was furious with him for that. Phoebe could feel that, even as he was sitting there on the bridge with Leo during the original part of this memory of his, he had still been carrying that anger with him. It was nauseating. Phoebe felt her beloved nephew's heart breaking into millions of irreparable pieces as he pushed himself angrily out of his father's embrace. Tears blurred his vision as he pleaded, "Dad, please, get out of here. Go."

"Stay," Wyatt countered.

"You can let him go, Wyatt," Chris tried to negotiate. "No one will ever have to know. He'll disappear. I'll make sure he does. Just let him go."

"You know I can't. He's one of Them. He's part of it. You don't understand right now, but I can't let any of Them live, Chris, not even him, not after what They've done."

Leo had been watching the exchange between his sons as if watching a vigorous tennis match. He suddenly stopped dead cold when he heard the snarl in his son's voice, something Chris knew he had never heard before. "What?"

A triumphant grin took over Wyatt's face, the checkmate that he'd been working toward for the last few years finally a reality. He owed it all to his father, and the man's blindness for his family. "You know, Chris would have done anything for your approval, Dad. He didn't want your protection or your rules that were for his own good. He wanted you to just know that was alive. He wanted his daddy, not an Elder who watched him from as far away as he could be and still see."

"I didn't just watch," said Leo defensively. To Chris, he said again, "I don't just watch."

"You don't know anything about him," Wyatt retorted. "You made all of what's happening now possible. You left me alone with him. All those days, just the two of us hiding out from the big scaries of the world that you brought us into, he had no idea what I was planning for him. But it was okay because I'm his big brother and could take care of him while you were too busy. You did this to him. He knows what's happening, even if you haven't figured it out yet. And you did it. You did it to Them. You did this to yourself. You should have loved him like I do."

The feral yell Leo let out as he charged his older son was drowned out by Chris's terrified scream. "DAD! NO!"

Chris had wanted to close his eyes. Phoebe tried to will him to. Instead, his still-tearing eyes remained riveted on his only remaining family. Wyatt almost playfully took his father's punches, laughing at the angel as he swung away. Chris knew that Leo never saw the fourth person shimmer in. He never saw the dark-haired woman come up behind him. Chris hadn't seen her right away either and started to move in too late as she produced a black arrow from thin air. Chris tackled her anyway, even though he was two footsteps too late. The arrow, unmistakably of Darklighter construction, had plunged directly into Leo's heart. Even as Chris and his father's attacker tumbled to the steel under their feet, she shimmered back to whatever hell she had come from, out from under Chris's strangling grasp. He landed hard, jarring his teeth, but quickly rolled and sprang to his feet.

"DAD!" Chris dashed over the physical distance between them, hoping beyond hope to catch his father in time. The look of utter terror for his children was still frozen on Leo's face as he fell back into his boy's arms. Under the leaden weight, Chris's knees buckled, toppling them both to the ground. Ignoring the shooting pain in his tailbone, Chris cradled his father's head and wiped his hand over the angel's brow. His eyes stared into his own, seeing just how much his mother had been right whenever she'd said that their eyes were exactly the same. He hadn't had his father's time, but he'd had his eyes.

A sharp kick in the head tore Chris away from his father, leaving lights blaring in front of his eyes mercilessly. He shook his head to clear them but it only made it worse. Forcing himself to his hands and knees, he mistakenly lifted his head. He caught sight of his father, the arrow Chris knew he couldn't dare to touch to save his father entering his back and completely protruding through on the other side, the strongly poisoned shaft stalling the angel's heart forever. He hadn't even had time to speak. Chris wanted desperately to tear his eyes away but was unable to. All he could do was stare and Phoebe with him. It wasn't until she felt Wyatt pull them up by a painful handful of hair that Chris was able to blink his eyes away.

As Wyatt reared back with his fist, he said, "He never loved you, Chris, not like I do."

Chris took the blow that bloodied his face without care. It wouldn't matter. They had lost. The Titans were gone, but the Good Guys had still lost. Everyone he had ever trusted . . . He suddenly didn't know where the sides were. Darkness started to cloud even his will to live when, suddenly, he found it in two very simple words.

"Join me." Surprisingly sincere after just smacking his brother around, Wyatt stood his brother up and held him by the shoulders. He earnestly searched his brother's face for any semblance of understanding what he was asking. Cheerfully, he started, "Think about it. You'll never have to hide from anyone ever again, Chris. No more basements with fairies fluttering about keeping you awake all night. No more jumping every time someone knocks on the door. No more running. The magical world is ours for the taking now. I can teach you all of the things he never taught you. Come with me, little brother."

Slowly, Chris backed away from his brother. Phoebe felt him shiver and was actually angry with him for taking so long to do it. She wanted to yell at him to wake up, to snap out of it, to do something, anything that she was used to seeing him do instead of actually sitting there listening to this insanity that she was hearing from her other nephew. When all he did was back away from Wyatt enough to get back to Leo and kneel beside him, she thought she was going to explode. What the hell was he thinking? He should be trying to escape, not hanging around listening to the guy Chris had told them more than once as a maniac. What was wrong with him?

Chris knelt down behind his father once again, pulling the man close to his chest. He was furious with his father for not hearing him, for not giving him the time he needed, but Leo was still his father. He didn't deserve to be betrayed like this. None of them did. He looked defiantly up at Wyatt, hugging his father as he asked, "How long has Lissa been working for you?"

"Chris, be careful. You can't touch that. You know that. You'll be dead before you hit the ground. Please, put that down."

"That, as you so eloquently put it, is our father. I — Don't play games with me, Wyatt. How long have you known you were going to do this?"

Wyatt crouched down on the other side of their father, training his no longer bright blue eyes on his brother's tearful green ones. "We don't need the Elders. All They ever did was hold this family back. Forget what They've done to Mom and Dad. All of Their rules kept us from being who we were meant to be. There are things that I can't tell you right now, but in time you will understand why this had to happen. The important thing is, we don't have to be afraid of ourselves anymore, Chris. It's over. Now please, let's go. It's late and it's cold." Wyatt stood back up and extended his hand down to help his brother up. "Let's go home."

The younger of the brothers rose on his own, watching his brother's extended hand the entire time. Then, slowly, he started backing away, not even sure what he was doing yet. He watched the confusion on Wyatt's face growing and was almost sad. He knew then he was looking at his brother for the last time. He was making a decision that would force Wyatt to kill him if they ever saw each other again. He knew. Then, before he could change his mind, he took that last step before he'd fall over the edge of the bridge beam. He stopped, only to see his brother for one last 'Goodbye'.

Phoebe could feel that it was a struggle to do it through the haze in his brain, but Chris telekinetically pulled his father to him and slung the angel's arm over his shoulders, never taking his eyes from his brother. Gently sad, Chris told him, "You are not my brother." With that, he backed himself and his father off the bridge. As they were free-falling into orbs, Phoebe heard Chris thinking what Leo had said that night on the bridge when this memory had flashed for him, pulling them both back into the moment that was slowly killing Chris with every word. "So maybe you came back from the future not just to save Wyatt. Maybe you came back to save us, too."

"I doubt it," Chris achingly retorted before brightly orbing away, unceremoniously dropping Phoebe back into the moment she was meant to be in, blinded by even brighter orbs in her eyes.

"You had better be right about this," Piper grumbled as the orbing lights faded and plunged her concerned face back into darkness.

"It's going to work, " Paige insisted. "Just relax."

Phoebe turned her head and looked up at Piper and Paige standing over her, both clearly unhappy. As if she had no idea what they could possibly be looking so angrily at her for, she shrugged and asked innocently, "What?"

Snippily, Paige asked, "What? You thought you would just sit this one out?"

As if I had any choice in the matter, Phoebe thought to herself. Knowing she couldn't exactly say that out loud, she muttered, "You guys looked like you had it under control, and I figured that if too many of us were in Christopher's face, it was just going to make it worse. The guy needed breathing room if he came up here, and if I had joined the circle, his air supply would have been cut off."

Paige glared at her sister. She huffed and crossed her arms over her chest but didn't say anything. She knew that with the look she was giving Phoebe, she didn't have to.

Piper, on the other hand, seemed to hear Phoebe's excuse as honest. She thought about it for a moment then let her stern face drop. "Thank you," she said. "That was thoughtful."

A relieved grin plastered itself all over Phoebe's face. "Anything for my boys." Quickly, before Paige could interrupt, Phoebe asked, "So what's the plan now?"

"Leo and Christopher are going to go back to the house and hole themselves up in one of the bedrooms with Dad. Christopher needs to get some stuff off his chest and feels better talking to them right now than he does to all of us. If that's really what he needs, then I don't mind at all . . . much."

"And the rest of us," asked Phoebe.

"Paige will take us back, and . . . and then we wait, I guess."

Phoebe tried to hide her nervousness as she glanced at Paige, who was standing slightly behind Piper's shoulder. Just as expected, there was a very dark, angry look on the youngest sister's face. It actually made Phoebe flinch inside. She had to concentrate to keep from sounding as nerve-wracked as she felt when she agreed, "S-sure. Then let the waiting begin."

Piper looked over her shoulder at Paige, who stepped in between her sisters without question. She held her hands out to meet the inside hands of them both, ready to take off for home. Before she did, though, she pulled tight on Phoebe's hand, nearly crushing it. She yanked Phoebe closer to her and whispered angrily in her ear, "You fix this, Phoebe, or I'm telling Piper in the morning."

"Working on it," Phoebe whispered back.

"And that split lip you have says you need to work harder."

Utterly surprised, Phoebe licked at her lip, tasting pennies in the back of her throat. She swiped her sleeve over her bloody nose and lip and stared at it as if she had never seen blood before. Confused and somehow exhausted, she shook her head, the answers not as forthcoming as she had hoped they would be. She carefully averted her eyes from Paige's as Piper tiredly waved over the city. "Home, Jeeves," she commanded jokingly as the three of them vanished from sight in a hail of blue orbs.

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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.