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.

6. He Is, They Are

Chapter Six
He Is, They Are

I.

"Caffeine," Piper begged as she stumbled through the kitchen door, her eyes shut against the bright orange glow on her counters that she wished wasn't there. As Paige handed her a cup that she must have started filling as soon as her sister hit the stairs, Piper slurred tiredly, "I am too old to have seen this many sunrises from this side in a week."

"Drink up," Paige ordered in a much softer tone than she'd had in quite a while. She almost sounded as unhappy with the rising of the sun as Piper was. "We're going to need it, I think."

Piper shook her head in that Big Sister way she had and argued protectively, "No, what you need, Missy, is a good night's sleep. Or day. Whatever. You need to get some rest. You've been running on empty for at least the last week. You really should take the day off and rest up."

"Honestly? I'd like to, but I don't think that's going to be an option," said Paige.

"What makes you say that?"

The youngest sister wrapped both hands around her mug and trudged over to the table, plopping down in the seat in near exhaustion. She looked up at her sister in confusion, not really sure how to explain what she was thinking. "I don't know. I just have this feeling, like maybe something big is about to happen. I can't explain it. I just feel it. I've been feeling it for the last few hours since I came out of the spell."

Piper sat down in the chair opposite her sister, somehow happy to have her mind working on something other than what she knew was going on elsewhere in the house. "Do you think it's something we need to be worried about?"

"I don't know," Paige shrugged. "I know that the couple of times I've had feelings like this, they've turned out to be right, like with Cole and the Titans. I know that when I do get them, Leo has always told me that I need to trust them. I have no idea, though, what this one means or why I'm having it at all. The only thing I can tell for sure is that something is off, horribly off."

"Well, then, I guess we're going to need another pot of coffee."

"Please tell me I just heard the word 'coffee' come from this room, and say that there is a lot of it," Phoebe demanded from the doorway, looking just as weary as her sisters. Her head drooping low from the lack of sleep, she followed the same path as Piper. She stumbled along to be greeted by the warmness awaiting her on the counter, then trudged directly to the table where she sank into a chair like she had just run the New York marathon, twice. She grumbled and groaned along the way, her muscles protesting even the strength it took to cross the room.

Piper was almost amused as she watched her sister's nose sink into her cup. Chuckling, she said, "You look like hell."

"Hi, Pot, nice to meet you. I'm Kettle," Phoebe retorted, still staring down at the swirling liquid in her hands. "We're getting too old for the showering method. It just doesn't work like it used to. I still can't keep my eyes open."

"Speak for yourself, Granny," Paige told her, bright as the morning sunshine. "It still works on me."

Phoebe tore her stare away from her coffee mug long enough to glare at her baby sister, who looked to be too awake for the week she had had. "Are you sure we broke that spell?"

"Yes, Phoebe, the spell is done," Paige snipped. "I'm having one of those mornings where it would be a lot easier to wake up to a bottle of Woodford Reserve, but otherwise, I can handle the sunrise a lot better than either of you. I'm fine. I'm just not as old as you."

Just as Phoebe was getting ready to find some clever reply, a sparkling of blue orbs appeared in between them, slowly forming a very tired Leo. Instead of attacking her sister, Phoebe muttered into her coffee, "Speaking of 'old' . . . "

When fully formed, Leo shot his sister-in-law a look to the back of her head that, if she could see it, would let her know he'd heard her perfectly loud and clear but was choosing to ignore her anyway. "They're still up there? I left almost an hour ago."

Piper pulled her chair around to make a little more room for her husband-not-husband at the table with them. "Still up there," she confirmed. "So take a load off. We could be here a while."

Paige looked up at the ceiling, even though she knew she couldn't see through it and would be seeing into the wrong bedroom even if she could. "What do you think they're doing up there?"

"They're probably sleeping, like normal people do," Piper grumbled. Leo responded by reaching his hand back behind her neck and holding it in that perfect spot that she loved, the one that was just as good as a massage. She rolled her head back and grinned happily. "Hmm . . . I knew we kept you around for a reason."

"Yeah — Full Service Whitelighter," Paige mused. "I could get used to that again."

"Couldn't we all," hinted Piper, knowing that Leo would know exactly what she was thinking with the way she'd said it.

The sentiment was lost on Paige, who had no idea what sort of conversation had gone on between her sister and her husband the night before. She was thinking of things in her own context. Wickedly, she grinned at him and teased, "You know, Sun God, I have this crick . . . "

"'Sun God'? Eeww. Stop right there," Phoebe growled. "I have no idea what that means, but I have the feeling I don't want to know. That sounds . . . Eeww. Awful. Put that mental imagery back where it belongs in the gutter, please."

Paige was about to find something in her little bag of sarcasm to toss back at her sister when the two younger sisters realized at the same time that Phoebe had just made a huge mistake. She had carefully concealed her face the entire time she'd been in the kitchen, but in the interest of a much needed sisterly banter, she had taken less care and raised her head to look directly at Paige. She had looked up and revealed to Piper and Leo exactly what she didn't want to. Phoebe and Paige both opened their eyes wide as they realized her mistake, just as Piper hitched in a breath to ask what was on both her and Leo's minds.

"Phoebe? What in the world happened to you?"

Not exactly wanting to go in that direction at the moment, Phoebe shrugged it off. "You should have seen the other guy."

Leo immediately shoved himself out of his chair and moved to his sister-in-law's side, kneeling in front of her. Before she could do anything about it, he reached up and took her chin into his hand, gently turning her bruised cheek to him. It had turned a viciously angry purple, making Leo wince in sympathetic pain. The cut in the middle of it was still very slowly bleeding, but only enough that he had to look hard to notice it. The cut in her lip was cracking open and bleeding further whenever she moved her lips, so that the blood mingled in her coffee with every sip. Worried, Leo let go of her for a moment and asked, "Why didn't you come to me? I could have healed this as soon as it happened. What happened?"

"I didn't want you to worry about it," Phoebe said, again passing it off as no big deal. "You guys have enough to worry about right now without me getting into fights. It was nothing. I'm fine. It looks a lot worse than it is."

"Well, it looks pretty bad to me," Piper argued with her Big Sister voice. "Who were you fighting with? If there were demons, you should have called. I know you are still Super Witch, we all do, but you don't have your active powers anymore. You can't go around chasing demons with nothing more than potions and spells without any kind of backup. What if something — something worse — had happened to you?"

Phoebe winced in sharp pain as Leo reached up to heal the bruised cut on her face while she continued to protest her sister's worry. "Really, Piper, I'm fine. It's nothing for you to worry about. Things sort of got out of hand, but they can be fixed. It's nothing."

"It's not nothing," Leo argued, confused. He looked between Piper and Paige with concern as he explained, "She isn't healing."

Piper pushed herself out of her chair and came around to the other side of the table to join her husband and sister. Too annoyed with her sister's inability to understand her current limitations to be concerned quite yet, Piper barked, "What do you mean? Just heal her."

"I can't. Whatever did this to her, it's blocking my ability to heal."

"Are you sure it's her," Piper asked. "Or have the Elders decided some sort of punishment for you and taken your powers?"

Paige's hand slid down to her thigh, feeling the stinging reminder she had from a few hours before. Her fingers felt along the ridges of the gauze pad under the bandage, the one protecting her while she healed both there and in her heart. In her head, she wanted to applaud her decision to be a normal woman dealing with the death of her nephew — finally — but she knew it was really only sentiment that was putting her through that pain in her leg at the moment. Her mind made up, she softly offered to Leo, "I have a way we can find out."

Leo looked up at Paige, seeing the hurt in her eyes that only he could really know, if anyone could at all. "Are you sure?"

Ruefully, she said, "It's not like you can really heal the rest of me, right? I still have to do the hard part on my own."

Sadly, yet somehow still comfortingly, he said, "Yeah. You do."

"Then get to, Healer Man, before I change my mind."

Moments later, the gashes on Paige's leg were healed, to Leo and Piper's worry and Paige's dismay. As soon as her leg was like new, Paige looked at Phoebe, who stared back through the bruised face with a slight disappointment. She knew what would be coming next. Then again, she'd known it all along.

"Phoebe," Paige said warningly. She didn't even have to finish the sentence. She knew from the guilty look on her sister's face that Phoebe knew exactly what she was thinking and why. Still, if it would guilt her sister into admitting what was going on, Paige didn't care if she outed her sister or not. "Is this what I think it is?"

Piper turned on Paige for a second, not sure if she should be grateful or angry. "You knew about this?"

"I'm not sure," Paige said defensively. "I might know what it is, but I'm probably wrong. Because what I think it is can't possibly happen." She turned her glare on Phoebe, who was trying very hard to be invisible at the moment. "It can't, can it?"

"What can't," Piper asked. "Would one of you please tell me what's going on?"

Phoebe stood up and backed away from all of them, even though she was forcing herself into a corner. Her hands pushed at the invisible barrier closing in on her as she asked, "Would you all just back off? I'm fine. It's nothing. It isn't anything I can't handle."

"Well, obviously you can't handle it or we wouldn't be talking about it right now," argued Piper. "How long has this been going on? Better yet, what is it?"

"She's — " Paige began, only to receive a deadly look from Phoebe.

"It's isn't anything. I've been trying too hard to make up for the lack of powers, that's all." Lying, Phoebe looked directly at Paige as she said, "I've been out trying to do too much. It just caught up to me in the middle of the night is all. I went out after you were in bed and —- There's nothing to worry about. I'm done chasing."

"That isn't good enough," Piper said angrily. "Our lives are dangerous enough right now, you know that. You can't go traipsing off in the middle of the night looking for something to fight when you don't have powers anymore. I hate to say that, but, god, Phoebe! What were you thinking?"

From the doorway, Victor's voice said above the quickly escalating scene in the kitchen, "I don't mean to interrupt . . . " He waited a beat until everyone was looking at him, then started again, softer. "I don't mean to interrupt, but Christopher is ready to come down, if you're ready for him."

Piper looked gratefully at her father, definitely appreciating whatever it was that Victor had done to talk Christopher down. "Is he okay?"

"Not really," Victor admitted with a shrug. "I don't think you can really expect him to be. The other Chris wasn't. These kids have had a lot to deal with. That isn't the point right now, though. He's calmed down and ready to come down to talk. He wants to talk to you alone first, Leo, but after that, he'll talk with all of you. He does, however, have a condition."

"Which is," asked Leo.

"He'll tell you whatever you want to know, within reason. He won't tell anyone if, when, or how they died in his past. He won't tell you about your future families, except to say that you have them. If you ask him legitimate questions that aren't about Personal Gain, he'll answer them to the best of his knowledge. If he says that he doesn't know the answer to any of your questions, it means he really doesn't know. If there is something he says he can't tell you, that's it. He won't even entertain giving you hints."

Leo looked at each of the sisters with an almost protectively warning gaze. Stiffly, he said, "I think that's more than acceptable, don't you?"

Only Phoebe looked reluctant to agree. "And if it's something we really think we need to know?"

"Considering that Christopher knows the outcome of it all, don't you think he's the best judge of that right now," asked Paige. Since coming out of the spell she'd wackied herself up with, she was feeling awfully guilty about not giving Christopher the time he should have had with her. She was going to find some way to make that up to him, and if being on his side right now was what he probably needed, then that was what she was going to do. "Let's just hear what he has to say, Pheebs, before you worry about what he isn't going to say."

Still not convinced, Phoebe argued, "We tried that approach with the other Chris, but it didn't get us anywhere. He still lied to us whenever he wanted to."

"No, we didn't," said Piper. "We never gave him the opportunity to just talk. We always had questions for him. If you look back on the kinds of things we asked him, I'm starting to think we were setting ourselves up for the secrecy and lies." She looked to Leo, who nodded back at her with an approving grin. She maybe hadn't really apologized to her son for their argument the night before, but she had at least learned her lesson from the experience. Mostly to Leo, she said, "If we let him just say what he needs to, we'll probably learn more than we ever learned from the other Chris. If it will make him feel better, we have to give him the ball."

Victor looked between his two girls, looking for an answer either way. "So what do I tell him? Yes or No?"

Without giving Phoebe's hesitation a chance to take the opportunity away from the rest of them, Piper nodded sharply. "Terms acceptable. Let me get the kids cleaned up for the day. We'll meet down in the sunroom in an hour. I think we could all use the wake up time." Her father nodded as well then turned without a word to head back upstairs to deliver the message, but she stopped him with an extra quick instruction. "Tell him the coffee's hot, and there's plenty of it. It's going to be a long morning."

Seeing Piper then whip around on Phoebe, Paige offered up her services as quickly as she could. "I'll go get the kids, Piper. I'm already ready for the day anyway. I have a feeling that the sooner we get Christopher started, the easier it's going to be on all of us."

Without taking her eyes off her middle sister, Piper smiled at the other. "Thanks, honey. If you need anything, holler."

"Will do," said Paige, skipping off down the hall just to show just how awake she was.

Piper's expression went wintry once Paige was gone. She knew she had the most uncomfortable stare in the family. She got it from Grams and knew perfectly well how her grandmother had used it. As expected, Phoebe even tried to get out from under it, but Piper just followed her sister around the room with that glare. She got her infinite patience from her mother and was using it to the best of her abilities at the moment. She waited for Phoebe to acknowledge the fact that she obviously knew she was in trouble for something, but it didn't come. Phoebe just kept dodging her sister's eyes, as if that would make it go away. Finally, Piper broke because she had things to do and say and couldn't wait forever. She warned, without any pretense of allowing wiggle room, "Don't make this hard for him, Phoebe."

Innocently, Phoebe said into her coffee cup, "I don't know what you mean."

"I'm not kidding. Don't you dare make this hard for him."

"I don't see what's wrong with us knowing as much as we think we need to know," said Phoebe defensively. She turned to look directly at her sister this time, willing to argue this one out. "All we know so far is what the other Chris has told us. Things that maybe this Chris didn't think were important may mean all the difference in saving Wyatt. We don't know for sure what happened between the two of them. We have no idea what Wyatt may or may not have done to this Chris before now. Things happen. Lies are told; memories blur. How can you be willing to risk only getting what he thinks is going to help?"

"Because I trust him," said Piper plainly. "Once we knew who he was, we trusted the other Chris. We understood his motives, whether we agreed with them or not. Based on what Leo saw when he went to the future and what I have seen since he got here, we can trust this Christopher, too. It isn't a perfect arrangement. There's no way that it could be. We just have to hope that it will all work out. I'm not going to doubt him when he's giving us something that the other Chris couldn't. He's trying, so I'm going to try, too. That's all. If you can't accept that, if you can't get on board, then I don't want you in the room, plain and simple."

Phoebe blinked at her sister in surprise but didn't say anything in return. She slowly set down her cup on the counter, trying to find words to say, but she couldn't form them. Instead, she walked out of the kitchen, once again carefully avoiding her sister's expectant gaze.

Breaking her calm, Piper looked at Leo, pointing dangerously in the direction her sister had vanished. "If she makes this too hard on him . . . "

"He'll be okay," said Leo reassuringly.

"Will he," she asked. "Or will he run out like he did last night if we push him too far?"

Seeing that she was still feeling guilty about the events of the night before, Leo got up out of his chair and crossed over to his wife. She didn't fight him when he put his arms around her, but he could tell that she was in no way ready to agree with him yet either. He pressed a kiss into her forehead then pulled away, keeping his hands braced strongly on her shoulders. "He's a lot stronger than you think he is."

"Really? Because it seems to me that, with a few exceptions, he's just about as jumpy as his other self. I mean, I remember twenty-five; I was nowhere near this single-minded at twenty-five. How much did he have to go through to be like this at twenty-five? Either of them? They both had had their whole lives ahead of them, but all either of them thought about is how to make right things that are in the past. I don't want to accidentally pick up on the wrong question and end up having to chase him all over the city again. I think he's a great kid. I do. I'm proud of who he has turned out to be. Even telling him that, though, seems to make him uncomfortable. I don't know how to make this work. He's had twenty-five years of being my son, but I have had all of, really, three weeks of being his mother. If we count the other Chris, I've still only had just under two years. I don't know how to be a mother to an adult. I still don't know exactly how to be a mother to a two-year-old. I don't know what he needs. How do I act? What do I say? How do I keep him together and still keep this family together at the same time?"

"Well, for starters, you don't have to keep him together," said Leo. "He's special, Piper. Wyatt isn't the only one. That isn't because of my half, either. In the entire Warren family line, not one of the men had witchly powers. Not one. Melinda Warren made sure that the powers would pass only to the women in the family. Yet, there they are, our boys, with powers beyond probably even her imaginings. They weren't supposed to happen, but they did. That alone proves that Christopher is a lot stronger than anyone wants to give him credit for. He said something to me this morning that I'm surprised hadn't exactly occurred to me before. We keep treating the situation like he's a little boy with a skinned knee, but he isn't a kid anymore. He's our child, yes, but he just isn't a kid anymore. When he came back here, he didn't stop being an adult. He is an adult, honey. We're both trying so hard to be parents to someone who hasn't had them for a long time. That didn't change when he came here either. That doesn't mean that we shouldn't be his parents; it just means that we need to remember that he is perfectly capable of doing the same things that we have done. He's now older than Phoebe was when you three first came into your powers. We didn't treat her like she wasn't capable of handling herself."

"It's different," said Piper grudgingly, even though she was thinkingg that he was right. That didn't mean she had to agree with it. Christopher was her baby, no matter how old he appeared to be. "She's my sister. I didn't give birth to her. She wasn't born with the expectation that I would protect her from anything and everything for her entire life."

"He doesn't need your protection. He needs your help and your understanding. There's a difference."

"I haven't needed protection in a long time, Mom," said Christopher's voice from the doorway between the kitchen and dining room. "Don't get me wrong; a little warning when a fireball is flying at my head is nice, but I've been pretty good about protecting myself for quite a while now."

Both of his parents turned around to look at him, surprised. Feeling a little guilty for talking about him behind his back, Piper asked, "How long have you been standing there?"

"Long enough to know that none of you are wrong, even Phoebe," he said, circumventing his parents on his way through the kitchen. He shrugged, adding, "I thought I could smell coffee." He didn't give them an opportunity to say anything in response to his other comment. Pouring himself a cup that might as well have been a soup bowl, he asked, "So did you guys see the shiner she's got going?"

"She got into something with some demons last night," explained Piper, not at all happy about the return to that subject either.

"No, she didn't," said Christopher.

"She didn't," asked Leo.

"No, she didn't. When I was coming down here to meet you, Mom, I stopped by her room. Old habit. I tend to check everyone's doors at night to make sure they're all home. Phoebe was home. She was typing at her laptop and listening to that Flaming Lips CD she's had to buy three times because she keeps losing it. She was in her room when I came downstairs."

Piper's face turned a little redder with frustration as she mentally cursed the ceiling. "That doesn't give her enough time between when you came down and when she came to tell us about Paige to have left the house, fought a demon, and come back."

"Something's going on with her. I've been able to tell since I got here," said Christopher, oddly detached, as if he was talking about a complete stranger. Clinically, he told them, "I catch her looking off into space a lot. I have no idea what it is, but I think she's in trouble. I get the feeling, though, that she doesn't know what's really going on either."

"And you didn't mention this before because . . . "

Simply, Christopher said, "I thought I was the problem. You really should talk to her. Dad, I'll meet you upstairs?" With that, Christopher made his back across the kitchen toward the hallway, pausing on his way out only to tell his mother, "You don't have to rein her in. Whatever she asks, I'll handle. If she doesn't like how I handle it, that's her problem."

As her son disappeared down the hall, Piper muttered, "I don't think that was going to be enough coffee for him. That is what I would call 'a mood'."

II.

A little over an hour later, the entire family was gathered in the sunroom, waiting patiently for Christopher to start talking. They had each taken up the various chairs and floor space in the room, leaving Christopher alone on the sofa. Somehow, he was radiating to everyone that he really didn't want to be touched at the moment. After talking to his father, he had accepted that, while he had his father's and grandfather's total support, he was on his own for this; the decisions were entirely his. His first decision was to know that he needed to be as alone as possible if he was going to get through it all. Hence, sole possession of the sofa. Of course, it helped that his grandfather was directing them all out of Christopher's way as they were coming in. In the end, the only one left standing was Victor, who stood guard in the archway between the dining room and living room, as if he could keep the secrets Christopher was about to impart from floating away into any room but the one they occupied. It seemed to make Christopher feel that much safer, so a guard he would be.

Christopher downed his third cup of coffee like it offered the same empowering effect of alcohol. He reached onto the table to where Piper had set up three pots and a little bit of everything else for their little conference, knowing fully well that he was stalling while he poured himself another cup. He couldn't believe he was going to do this. Maybe the other him had had it right when he'd kept everything a secret. He didn't know if he could take the looks that he was going to get every time he imparted something tragic or evil to them. It was hard enough knowing what their reactions had been the first time around whenever the other him divulged unwanted information. Maybe it would be better if he followed his predecessor's example instead?

Still, he knew without looking that there were expectant looks on all of their faces. He couldn't put it off any longer. Damn it all, anyhow.

He knew where he wanted to start, but he didn't know how to start it. He was, after all, breaking the rules in too many ways to count. He looked over at his father and grandfather, both of them smiling back at him with infinite patience and support. He nodded back at them then focused down on his hands, thinking that was the safest place to be looking at the moment.

See, jackass? This is why Grams told you not to do this in the first place.

God, it was hard to believe that it had only been a week since the last time he'd heard The Lecture. Time seemed to be moving so strangely here, much slower than it ever did in his own time. The last ten hours had been dreadfully slow, making even starting this conversation more than just a little uncomfortable. At least Leo had even been right there to hear The Lecture the last time. He had promised that he would field questions if he had to. Apparently, Grams had made quite the impression on him, too.

Time to soldier on, Buddyboy. You got yourself into this. No going back now.

Christopher started slowly then, still unable to believe he was really going to do this. "You guys never talked to us about this stuff, but Grams always taught us that we can't mess with time, especially the past, even though she wouldn't tell us why. I mean, we sort of knew 'Why' — that part is sort of obvious — but she always said it particularly to me. She'd give me the evil eye, like she had it in her head I was going to be the one to cause trouble with time travel or something. I guess now I know why."

Before Christopher could go on, two questions came at him at once.

"Us? Who's 'us'," Phoebe asked.

"You know Grams," asked Piper.

Already regretting that he'd promised complete honesty, Christopher had to bite back the impulse to use the 'Future Consequences' line. For this one, he turned to his father, who smiled reassuringly, somehow knowing immediately why his boy was hesitating. Feeling at least some measure of comfort in the smile, Christopher answered, "'Us' is all of your kids. I won't tell you who has how many or what their names are or anything, but I guess it's safe to tell you that there are eight of us and we were all really close. We might as well have all been siblings instead of only cousins. Then again, no matter how many rooms you add on, all of us under one roof kind of didn't leave us much of a choice in that department. It wasn't only that, though. I would do anything for any of them, and they would for me. We're a handful and fight just as much as we get along, but we turned out okay, I think. You would all be proud of all of them. As for Grams, well, the same rules applied to us as apply to you. We were never allowed to call Prue or any of you after you died to come over from the ghostly plane when we needed help or to just talk or anything. Since you were allowed to call on Grams and Grandma, though, so were we." He was about to go on when he looked into his aunts' faces and saw shock. Confused, he asked, "What?"

"Are we–we all . . . " Phoebe stuttered, not sure if she was feeling more sorry for the pathetic look on her nephew's face or for herself and the knowledge that she hadn't lived to see grandchildren.

A little more used to the idea that she died at an early age like the rest of the women in their long and illustrious family line, Piper finished for her sister, "I think she's trying to ask if they're both dead in your time like I am."

"Dad?" Christopher looked to his father again, not sure how to handle the answer to that question. Leo had been there in the future. He'd seen The Book of Shadows and knew that the Power of Three had been broken. He knew that the sisters were gone; it wasn't as if Christopher could lie to them unless Leo was a willing participant. Besides, if he told the truth, it was Leo who was going to have to deal with the girls every day for the next few years. His father was going to have to deal with their paranoia and fear as they wondered every morning if that was going to be the last time they woke up. He knew he couldn't live with that. It was hard enough knowing the things he did. There was no way he could make that decision for his father. He just couldn't.

Leo seemed to understand what it was that his son was thinking. He'd been thinking a lot lately about what it must be like for this Christopher (and how it had been for the other Chris) to know all of the things that he knew and to have to carry that with him. What little knowledge he had of the future was hard enough to keep to himself. It must have been excruciating for the boys. Still, Piper had handled the news well. Maybe the others could, too. If there was any way to lessen the pressure by revealing this information, he was willing to take that chance. He nodded his understanding and urged gently, "It's okay, Christopher."

"Truthfully," Christopher said as emotionlessly as he possibly could without sounding cold. "Yes. The day I left to come back here, I . . . Of all of us, including you, your husbands, and your kids, only myself, Wyatt, and one of the girls are left, although how it ended up being the three of us, I really don't know. I can't tell you where or when things happen, but I will tell you that in spite of all of it, of the violence and the uncertainty, we grew up loving all of you very much . . . I . . . I'd love to be able to warn each of you. I'd love to tell you all about your deaths and how to avoid them, but I'm afraid that it could — If you knew too much, it might make you take too many risks in between now and then. I don't want to take that chance. I really hope you understand why."

Piper looked over at Phoebe, a certain knowing in her eye. As soon as she and Leo had parted ways in the kitchen, she had gone directly to the attic. Her frustration with Phoebe was easily settled, if she could find the right weapon against her sister, which she did. She handed her sister the Polaroid she'd been flipping in her hand, the one of their mother, young Prue and Piper, and fetus Phoebe. Remembering the note that Phoebe had thought about leaving their mother to warn her about her own death, Piper said pointedly, "I think that we both understand, better than you could possibly know."

Phoebe smiled at the picture (still her favorite picture of herself, if she did say so herself), remembering how torn she'd been meeting her mother for the first time and not having nearly enough time with the young, pregnant Patty. Reluctantly, she agreed, "Yeah, we do." Properly admonished for their earlier argument, she and Piper exchanged a brief look before she added, "Go on, Christopher."

The young witch nodded and thought about where next to pick up his story. When he found his place, he took a long, steadying breath and started in again. "Grams and Grandpa were against the plan to come here and did just about everything they could to talk us out of it. The more dire things got, though, the harder it was for any of us to find reasons not to do it. Grams and especially Grandpa always had a reason that they wouldn't tell us about, and it wasn't until I came back here and Dad told me about the other me that I knew what that reason was. Looking back on it, though, I don't think that knowing about him would have kept me from doing this. Saving Wyatt — saving us all — that was and always has been more important. I made promises. There are people back in the future depending on me to make things right."

Again, after a sideways look at Piper, Phoebe interrupted, "Not to be pushy, but what people? If all of us are dead, what people?"

"Wyatt, for one, even though he doesn't know it," Christopher said nicely, letting his aunt know that that one question was okay, but he definitely knew where she was trying to go with it. It was a nice try, but he knew better. "Our friends, the people in the city . . . They don't exactly know what's going on around them, but Wyatt isn't as careful as he used to be. Civilians are getting caught in the crossfire too often. He tried to keep it contained in the magical world. There really wasn't a point in trying to take over the civilian population of the city; he would have to take over the entire country in order to keep the power he had over one city. He knows that. The magical world is what he wants anyway. Even the Whitelighters are in hiding these days. I've been told that, even if I wanted Their help, it's impossible to get an audience with the Elders. Wyatt tries to dress it up as him trying to bring peace between Good and Evil so that we will all be safe, but we all know better. The 'protection' he has set up on the house for the family isn't really protection. It's just to see what we're up to. Whether he believes it or not, he has to choose sides before someone chooses a side for him. It's making him paranoid."

Stealing a look at her toddler son in the playpen not ten feet away, Piper said hopefully, "So he isn't entirely evil yet in your time?"

"The other Chris's Wyatt was definitely evil by now," said Phoebe under Paige's icy stare. Quickly, the middle sister covered, "He told me when I figured out who he was from my vision. He wanted me to help him."

"Oh, no, he's evil," Christopher assured them. "He'll just tell you he isn't."

Leo nodded in agreement, looking at Christopher as he said, "He tried to tell me that he was never evil. He said that people were mistaking greater power for evil. I don't think he can even tell the difference anymore, not from what I saw."

"What did you see," asked Piper, hurt that Leo hadn't already told her.

"I already told you too much as it was."

Christopher knew without even looking that there was going to be a dark reluctance on his father's face. Leo had already stuck up for him earlier in the kitchen (and multiple other times in the last week), saying that he shouldn't have to say more than he was willing to. Able now to return the favor, Christopher warned, "Really, Mom, I don't think that's one of those things you want to know. I think that as long as you know that Dad had to see what Wyatt's really like is enough. At most, I'll tell you that except for Dad, Wyatt, and me, no one was left standing."

Piper's chin jutted out defiantly, her teeth clenching down on her tongue to keep from asking Christopher to clarify that last statement. She knew he wasn't going to. Unless he did, however, she didn't know that she wanted to believe it. Even though she had heard this all, for the most part, from the other Chris, she still didn't entirely want to believe it. That her child could grow up to terrorize anyone seemed such an impossibility, and yet . . . Chris returning from the future a second time was, in all reality, a pretty good indication that everything the two boys had told them was true. If that wasn't enough, someone besides Chris had now seen it as well. Her son really was going to grow up to be evil unless they found a way to stop it. Monitoring her tone to keep it from sounding angry with the son who was not responsible, she asked, "Do you know why?"

"Because he is, however and no matter how you want to spin it, stronger than the rest of us," Christopher admitted. "Fighting him isn't about winning. It's about just trying to get out of there alive and in one piece. Even coming out of a meeting with Wyatt with a broken anything is a victory these days."

"No, I mean, do you know why he is the way he is? The other Chris, he didn't know when he came back here. We didn't know until it was too late who was really after Wyatt."

Carefully, Christopher looked at his mother while he measured his words. "I'm not sure. I think . . . The dreams I've been having lately, I think they might be trying to tell me something. They're never the same, other than that Wyatt is always in them. He's never the same age. Sometimes he's a little kid; other times he's the way I last saw him last week. The only other thing that is always the same is this guy who hangs around him, whispering in his ears and gloating that you guys never saw him coming."

"You've never seen him before," asked Paige. "It isn't maybe Barbas?"

"No, I know Barbas. I've had my own run-ins with him the last few years since Wyatt changed. This guy is nothing like him."

Piper's face flushed with both anger and frustration as she asked, "Is he tall with kind of a pointy face and goatee? Does he maybe speak with an accent?"

Surprised, Christopher nodded. "Yeah. How did you know?"

Seething, Leo told him, "That would be Gideon."

"The Elder who kidnapped Wyatt, the one you killed?"

Softly, Paige added, "You forgot that he killed you, too."

"So maybe Wyatt saying that Gideon taking him had nothing to do with him being evil was a lie," asked Christopher. "He must . . . he must have known as soon as he remembered that Gideon had something to do with it."

Looking alarmed at her toddler, Piper asked, "Wait. He remembers? Even then, Wyatt remembers being taken by Gideon?" Still looking at Wyatt, she said helplessly, "But he's so small . . . "

"He didn't remember," explained Leo quickly. "At least, he said he didn't, not until he found out about it happening from Phoebe." He saw his sister-in-law's face fall and quickly jumped in to add, "He didn't say how. The way he said it makes me think that you didn't give the information up all that willingly. I don't think that he necessarily remembers. I think he just knows it happened."

"Until Dad and Wyatt mentioned the guy the other day, I had never heard of him," added Christopher. "I don't know any of the Elders by name. They've never been a part of my life."

"You have no idea why you've been dreaming about him," asked Phoebe, trying to get her mind off the thought that she was the one who had brought the memory back to Wyatt about his time with Gideon. It was hard enough being an adult and knowing about the sonofabitch. "You never knew his name or anything else about him?"

Christopher closed his eyes, seeing all of the dreams he'd had in the last few months with total but rapid clarity. He'd always had a near-perfect memory, even with his dreams, and could bring them up into his conscious mind whenever he wanted. Sometimes he didn't remember them right away, but they always came back to him with amazing clarity within a few days. Last night's was still a little sketchy, but the six straight before it were like crystal clear memories, along with all of them from the last few months. Seeing the nightmares fly past his mind, he said, "I know I'm dreaming about him for a reason, but I can't quite put my finger on it. I know I only see him behind Wyatt. Either I just hear his voice or he's right there behind him, but I've never seen him away from Wyatt. The older Wyatt gets, the closer this Gideon guy gets to him. They start saying everything together. It's only when Wyatt's little that he can say things on his own. I don't know what that means. Sam was the one who was good with dreams, not me."

Leo saw Christopher's eyes fly open as soon as he realized that he'd mentioned the name of one of his cousins. He also saw Phoebe's eyes widen with the information, along with her mouth, which was obviously opening to ask the boy who this Sam was. Jumping in for the save, Leo suggested, "Maybe it was just your mind trying to find a place to start? You yourself didn't know about Gideon, but it's possible you might have overheard us talk about him when you were little. I'm guessing that the subject probably comes up now and then in our futures, whether we know for certain that Wyatt is safe or not. We probably didn't know you were there."

"But how would he do that," asked Paige, who had always been curious in the back of her mind about her own ability to have a connection with the dream world. "He still wouldn't have known what Gideon would look like."

"No, he wouldn't," agreed Leo. Carefully, knowing that Christopher would want to object to what he was going to say next until he figured out that Leo was trying to protect him, Leo attempted to explain, "But he has a connection with the Elders that none of the rest of the family would have. The Elders are all genetically connected to him. The part of Christopher that is Elder probably already knew that he would someday know about Gideon. It probably gave him the image once he'd heard the name. He would just know."

"That still doesn't explain why he's popping up in Christopher's dreams now, though," said Piper.

Paige cocked her head to the side, her stare fixed at the floor as if she was trying to bring the answer to the question up out of the tiles. Her brow crinkled in curious concentration until she was finally able to put her own question to words. "I'm actually much more curious about what it is that Gideon is saying to Wyatt in the first place. Is it just a repeat of everything that he said to Wyatt that day? Is he just hearing all of that over and over, now that he remembers? Or is it something else completely different?"

Hearing his former friend's voice in his ears, Leo shuddered at the thought of ever having to hear that voice for real again. It was bad enough that he had to hear it in his own nightmares. He shook his head to get out of his mind what had once been a voice of comfort and was now a voice of terror for him. To Christopher, he asked, "Have you ever been able to hear what he's saying?"

"Nope. The only thing I hear is when he and Wyatt talk at the same time. Sometimes, I'm not even sure I'm hearing his voice. I think I just want to hear it so that I can blame somebody other than Wyatt. There are just . . . There are times when it's still hard to believe the kinds of things that come out of Wyatt's mouth, you know? But like I said, I'm not very good with dreams. I have no idea if it's me doing half of the stuff in them or not."

Thoughtfully, Piper said, "When we're done here, why don't you and Paige try to put your heads together on that one? She's the dream expert in the house. Maybe you two can come up with something you haven't thought of yet."

Nephew and aunt nodded at one another uncomfortably. They both knew in the backs of their minds that they had a lot more than his dreams to talk about, a lot more. Christopher could see that Paige was still pretty leery of thinking about the night before. He gave her a reassuring nod and smile that, once she seemed to understand them, washed relief all over her face. Without even having had the conversation yet, they both knew that they were going to be okay again.

"I have a question," Paige said, raising her hand shyly. When Christopher nodded his acknowledgement, she called for the snowglobe that she knew he had stashed in the bottom of Piper and Leo's closet. When it sparkled safely into her hands, she handed it gently over to Christopher, who looked at it rather wide eyed. They looked at each other again, both still seeming to be okay. To prove that she was, she smiled at him and said, "Still safe and sound, just as promised. It's obviously important to you, so I'm guessing it would be important to all of us if we knew what it was. No pressure or anything, but I'm thinking you'd feel better, too, if I just asked. So what is that thing? Why did you act like it was the Holy Grail last night?"

Christopher hefted the weight of the snowglobe into his hands, hugging it to his chest as if it were the most precious thing in the world. Softly he whispered, "To Piper and Leo : A little something to remind you of just one of the many places you can go to find your love again. Love, Chris." He laughed to himself, almost forgetting for a moment that anyone else was in the room. "It never even occurred to me that it was from, well, me."

Leo and Piper exchanged confused glances before walking over to join Christopher on the sofa. They sat on either side of him, Piper putting an arm around her son's shoulders. Leo slung one arm across the back of the sofa, embracing both his wife and son while the other hand gently reached over and turned the globe upside down to reveal an engraved sterling plate brandishing the words Christopher had just said to them.

"I don't believe it," said Piper sweetly, her words catching in her throat.

"How did he know," Leo marveled.

"I told him," Piper explained, her voice still on the brink of breaking. "It was one night after Phoebe and Paige moved out so Wyatt and I were alone in the house. Chris stopped by to check on us, or so he said. I think he was just really lonely. He asked about — "

". . . the most romantic place you and Leo ever went," Phoebe heard herself as Chris ask Piper. Suddenly she was no longer in the conservatory with the rest of them, but in the darkened living room with only the light of the television flickering over their faces.

Piper stiffened up at her — er, Chris's — side, but she didn't pull away, something that he hadn't felt her do before. Normally, if he asked anything at all personal, she would close herself off before he even finished asking his question. She hadn't that time, though. She even relaxed from her stiffened position after a moment. Her voice was actually a little nostalgic as she asked him first, "Why do you ask?"

"It's kind of hard to find any place romantic to go in the city in my time. Most of the city is crumbling and in ruins. I was just wondering what it's like to have a place that you can look back on and be happy about."

Piper turned to face him in the darkness then, her curiosity getting the better of her. "But you had a fiancée. There had to have been something romantic between the two of you. She didn't look like the kind of girl who married for convenience."

Chris chuckled at the thought. "Bianca? No. She doesn't . . . She didn't believe in convenience. She said life was hard enough, and saddling herself with a guy was anything but convenient. But yes, we had a place. It doesn't look anything like it does right now, though. I've seen it now. It's much more beautiful now." He stopped for a second, his hand in his pocket fingering the small ring that he'd kept there, even with everything that had happened. She was still his, no matter what had happened. She would always be there in his heart, where they were in love and happy. That wasn't going to change. He had hoped that the same was true of his parents, too. "But we weren't talking about me. What about you and Leo? I'm sure that wherever you guys love to go isn't completely destroyed like ours is."

"Actually . . . " Piper smirked. "The most romantic date that Leo and I ever had, that place is long gone."

"Piper," Chris started to protest, wanting to beg to remind her that she couldn't give up on Leo, not yet. God, he had made such a mess of things.

"It gets destroyed every year," Piper said, obviously enjoying the subsequent look of confusion on Chris's face. Apparently she couldn't keep it up for long, though, because she softened and explained, "It's made of ice, Chris. Leo took me to a winter carnival once. There were — "

Phoebe shook her head, hearing somewhere in the back of her mind that Piper was explaining the same memory to the rest of them in the room. Her big sister looked so happy as she was telling the storybook version of what Phoebe already knew pretty much was a fairy tale in Piper's eyes that she almost thought Chris's memory didn't do her sister's happiness enough justice.

" — all of these ice castles and cottages that had running electricity and a horse carriage that was made of ice. It was all so incredibly beautiful. It was really cold, but completely amazing." Piper looked down at the snowglobe in Christopher's slightly shaking hands and smiled. "It looked exactly like this. Every detail."

Lost in a thousand memories, Christopher stared at it as well and said, "When you shake it, the lights come on, too."

Leo took the globe from Christopher and held it up to the light, shaking it slightly to get the effect his son had indicated. As the lights inside the castle and in the street lamps lit up, Leo's other hand felt along the back of the sofa for where Piper's hand was reaching for his. It had been a long time since either of them had thought of that night. It had been a magical one for the both of them. They looked behind Christopher's head so that their eyes could meet. In each other's eyes, they saw that they were both thinking the same thing: it had been far too long since they had thought of that place instead of all of the things that had come between them in the last year. It had been too long indeed.

Christopher reached for the globe again, needing to hold it. Unlike everything else in the house, it was a piece of his future. They hadn't even known about it until last night. This was a part of him, not them. It inspired their memories, but it was his memories.

Seeing the three of them completely caught up in something that the rest of them weren't a part of, Phoebe tried to catch their attention and move the conversation forward at the same time. "It's really beautiful, but I still don't see what that means or why you reacted to it the way you did, Christopher. You acted like it was a lot more than just a souvenir."

"It looks so different," Christopher observed, ignoring everything his aunt said, excepting the 'beautiful' part. He looked fondly on it, tracing a finger over the glass dome. Still talking mechanically, though, he said, "The last time I saw it, some of the shiny was worn off and the lettering had started to fade a little with age. There's an air bubble in the top and a chip in the base. It stays behind glass most of the time now, but we can still see it. It reminds us where we came from, I guess . . . among many other things."

Paige leaned forward, putting her elbows to her knees. The lack of sleep from the last three weeks was really starting to catch up with her, and if she was going to be of any good during all of this, she was going to have to try to take part in the conversation a little more. To the room in general, she said, "It's a sweet little trinket, sure, but I think I'm going to have to echo Phoebe on this one. It's more than just something to look at and get all weepy over. Christopher wouldn't have reacted so violently to it otherwise. He didn't know it was from the other Chris, either, so it couldn't be that. What's going on? Christopher, why did you freak out about this thing?"

"It isn't just a trinket. It's a key." Christopher glanced between his father and grandfather again, as if looking for reassurance that, in this case, they were in no position to give him. Whether or not he gave up this information was entirely up to him, and he knew it. It didn't seem all that relevant to what was going on now; it probably fit more into the Personal Gain category than any other. They would work all of this out on their own with time, but maybe this was one of those times when it would be okay to break the rules anyway. Forcing the words out his teeth before he changed his mind, he quickly explained, "The snow gardens are a real place, or will be in your case and were in mine."

"'The snow gardens'? Is that what they called it," Piper asked Leo, unable to remember.

"No, not the place where you saw this for the first time," Christopher interrupted before his parents could confuse themselves and everyone else. "It's something different. It's something magic, magic created by you, with a little help from a few other magical beings. Wyatt and I named it 'the snow garden' when we were kids. It was Sanctuary. When you're three years old, 'sanctuary' is a little hard to say and even harder to understand, but 'snow gardens' was easier, even if came out more like 'sow gawden'."

Paige took the snowglobe from Christopher, getting her first up close look at it since the night before when she had still been feeling a little wacky. It was much prettier when spells weren't involved. She turned it around in her hands, trying to figure out how in the hell a relatively small ball of water on ceramic could possibly be as powerful as her nephew was describing. Knowing everyone else was wondering the same thing, she asked, "Sanctuary? What kind of sanctuary?"

Confused, Phoebe blurted, "There's more than one kind?"

Rather than acknowledge the silliness of the question, Christopher moved on and described the history of their place as best he could remember it. "Whenever we were in danger, there wasn't anywhere for you to take us to hide. I didn't know why until I came here, but you all had a horrible mistrust of the Elders, so you wouldn't take us Up There or to the magic school. Since they are the only two completely safe places that we know about where we couldn't be hurt permanently, you created a place for us, someplace that Evil couldn't penetrate. You went to the Valkyries for help in creating a place that couldn't be located by magic, just like Valhalla. You wrote a spell that could take us there and bring us home. When we were smaller, you used the Power of Three to give the snowglobe an extra power boost to make up for what we couldn't pronounce and power that we just didn't know how to access yet. It was also a safer way to make sure that the smaller kids stayed with us. We had a guardian there, a guy who would play in the snow with us and all that. It was the safest place in the world for us. It stayed that way until Wyatt destroyed it."

"Wyatt destroyed it," Piper asked. "Why?"

"That's one of those things that I don't know. He wasn't exactly ready to share at that point. A lot of stuff had hit us all at once at the time. It seemed to hit him the hardest. By the time he snapped on the gardens, we had pretty much stopped talking. I didn't think there was much point in asking. It wasn't like I could bring the place back, even if I did know why he'd done it. There was a lot more magic involved there than I could ever get my hands on."

"And yet Wyatt was capable of destroying it, he had that much power," Paige asked. "How? Where did he come up with — "

"I don't know that either," said Christopher. "I know that he did it on his own. I saw him afterward, and it hadn't even exhausted him, not physically anyway. He . . . None of us even come close to him. Combined, we can't match his power. Charlie says that the only singular being They've ever seen with that much power was The Source, and you guys vanquished him years ago."

This time, it was Phoebe's turn to ask the question. She needed to so that it would drown all the pop up thoughts of any and all variations of incarnations of The Source from her mind. Quickly, she interrupted, "Charlie? Who's Charlie?"

"Their Whitelighter," Leo answered, looking at Christopher with reassurance since he knew the boy was going to look to him to see if it was okay to answer that question anyway. To his son, he said, "It won't hurt anything for them to know that."

Piper suspiciously eyed Leo. "If we don't have any contact with the Elders in the future, why would They assign any of the family a Whitelighter, especially after what Gideon did to Wyatt?"

Leo and Christopher exchanged glances, but it was clear that neither of them knew why. Christopher shrugged. "He was just there. Sometimes I wonder if he was actually assigned at all. He has been a perfectly safe choice for us, though, whoever did it. Really. He is just as good at breaking Their rules as you guys are. He only contacts Them when we really need it, not that They would help us anyway. Until Wyatt went all Keyser Söze on us, we didn't need him to. Charlie is . . . was a good guy. He took good care of us kids." Thinking of Lucy and his nephew-to-be, he added sadly, "Sometimes a little too good, but he loved us, I think. He was family."

Hearing his son's voice trail off toward the end of his little defense of Charlie, Leo clapped a comforting hand on Christopher's knee. "He might be okay. They all might. We don't know yet what happened to them. They might be fine."

"Yeah, I guess."

Firmly, Leo said, "I'm not going to let you argue with me on this one. You did everything you could. Like I said, she was still alive when I left. He might not have hurt her any more than she already was. I couldn't get close enough to Charlie. He might still . . . "

"Your father is right," Victor said from his guardpost, unable to keep watching his grandson in pain without at least saying something. "They could all be okay."

"Thanks, both of you. I just — I don't want to get my hopes up at this point, okay?"

Piper crinkled her brow at her father then leaned forward over Christopher's lap so that she could clearly see both her son and husband. Calm but demanding, she said, "Yeah, hi. Remember the rest of us? What are you three talking about?"

Once again, Christopher exchanged looks with his father and grandfather, both of whom nodded to him, urging him to go on. Christopher shook his head, though, looking to his father. He had already told them once that he didn't think they should have to hear what Wyatt was really like. He knew that they were trying to help both him and themselves so that they could know where to start to help Wyatt, but it didn't really feel like help. It felt like being forced to relive things that only made it easier to give up on helping Wyatt at all. Somehow, he knew, though, that if he didn't go ahead and tell them, they were going to keep finding new and creative ways to ask him the same question over and over anyway until he told them what they wanted to hear.

Seeing the struggling hesitation on his son's face, Leo said, "It's up to you, but I guarantee you they're going to keep asking if you don't give them something."

Christopher slumped back a little bit in his seat, tired and starting to wear of thinking about any of this at all. There was no way that he was going to be able to tell this part of the story alone, especially with his grandfather standing very much alive only a few feet away. It was all still too raw for him. He looked at Leo with a sort of 'If I'm going down, then so are you' expression. Clearing the way, he told his father, "I can tell what I know, but you're going to have to start it. You're the one who got there first."

Piece by piece, Father and Son told the story of the day of Victor's funeral and Leo's little excursion to the future. The only name they kept safe was Lucy's, who they called "The Bum", much to Victor's amusement. At first, Piper had seemed to still be perturbed by Leo's ignoring of her direct order to wait to decide what to do until they had returned from meeting Darryl, but the further along in the telling they got, the more she relaxed. By the end of the story, she was able to reach across Christopher to take Leo's hand and offer up the closest thing to an apology he was going to get for her anger.

"I'm glad you were there."

Phoebe wasn't entirely satisfied, however. She leaned forward and asked, "Of all the days you could have done this, what made you choose that particular day?"

"We thought it would be the safest for us," Christopher shrugged. "We knew he'd have extra security on the house, but we also knew that any magic detected was probably going to be considered a surge from having other magical beings popping by the house to pay their respects. Wyatt knew how close we were to Grandpa. He wouldn't have expected us to try anything when we were mourning. We didn't think he'd expect anything when we had a house full of people, either. It seemed the safest. I had my reasons for needing it to be as safe as it could possibly be."

"No, I get that part," said Phoebe. "What happened with Wyatt to make you think that it was time or that you had no other options?" Thinking back on the memory she'd witnessed the night before, seeing Wyatt kill his own father and knowing that that had been the last straw for the other Chris to begin formulating his plan, she had to wonder what Wyatt could have done to this Chris to make him take the same measures. "Was there something in particular that he'd done or someone that he had gone after?"

Where should I start? Pick a relative, any relative. Christopher had to bite his tongue to keep from letting go with such a smart ass answer that he knew none of them would like. He thought carefully on it until he finally picked the one he thought they would understand the most. Looking at his hands, he explained, "The last of the final straws came about five months ago. One of us, the girl we told you about, had a vision. She had a vision of me and Wyatt, fighting, up in the attic. She wouldn't give me all of the details, but she said that there were things that she could tell from it. She said that she knew that we were all gone. Wyatt and I were the only ones left. She said she could feel that he had finally taken over completely. He wasn't even Wyatt anymore, even that little bit of him that we both know is still there right now was completely gone. She said the last thing she saw was him standing over me with Excalibur, pulling it out of me. I have no idea what it was exactly, but it really scared her. The thing is? She doesn't have visions. That has never been one of her powers. She's pregnant right now, though, and we think somehow that the baby gave her the vision. It scared the hell out of her. That was when we decided for sure that we needed to do this. Those of us who were left at the time, we knew we had to do this before the baby was born. We made a pact that the baby wasn't going to be born in that world. From that night on, we started trying to find ways to get around Wyatt and to figure out how to make the plan work without getting caught."

"But you got caught anyway," asked Paige through an unintentional yawn.

Christopher nodded, yawning himself. "We didn't quite get out of there fast enough. At the time, I thought Dad was just being crazy trying to stop us, but . . . "

"All of that blood, then, it wasn't yours," asked Piper.

"A little bit, but most of it was hers," Christopher admitted. He hung his head sadly, wishing that his answer could have been a little less painful for him. He was grateful when he felt his father put an arm around his shoulders and pull him into his closest spare shoulder. He wanted to say "Thanks", but instead shuddered against the warmth. God, there was so much he wanted to change.

Seeing that his grandson had probably had to answer a few too many questions, Victor really stepped in for the first time during the entire conversation. Stern enough so that no one would argue with him, he said, "I think that's about enough for now. I think what we need to do at this point is start to figure out what we have to do from here on out so that we can give these kids the perfect future that they've tried so hard to make."

That elicited a small chuckle from Christopher. He raised his head from his father's shoulder, sniffling a little from both emotion and exhaustion. He cleared his throat and said, "I don't want perfect. Perfect isn't any fun. I want the fights and the stupidity. I want us all to say things we don't mean, just like any other family. But I can't have even that when we can't be together. I'm not trying to make a perfect future. I'm trying to actually give us one. We can't have the good and the bad without one."

"One squabbling family, coming right up," said Paige enthusiastically, even through another yawn. She called for The Book of Shadows, which orbed immediately into her waiting hands. She flipped open the cover to the very last page then placed both hands firmly on either side of the spine. "So, where do we start?"

"With more coffee," Piper groaned, just as she took a sip of her rather cold sludge. She leaned over and pecked a small, motherly kiss on Christopher's forehead. Into his ear, she whispered, "We'll fix this, I promise." She carefully hoisted herself out of the cushions then picked up the coffee tray as she announced, "I'll be right back."

A glacial chill and a chicken soup warmness went through Phoebe at the same time hearing those words. Before she could stop herself, she heard herself say, "You know, you're going to turn us all into caffeine addicts if you aren't careful."

Over her shoulder, Piper asked, "What do you mean 'going to'? You were there years ago, Pheebs."

Phoebe didn't hear her sister's response, though. She was lost again in what Piper's response had been to Chris the day he'd said that same thing to her. To Chris, she had smiled and rolled her eyes. "I'm sure you can find a way to forgive me."

"Yeah, but I won't," sixteen-year-old Wyatt piped up. "But thanks for stunting Chris's growth." He said it almost distractedly, his concentration much more focused on the map in front of him. He scowled at it with an almost dirty expression before gathering it up into a ball and throwing it at Chris's head in frustration. He quickly excused the toss with a grumbled, "This is worthless. Your turn. Merry Christmas."

"Gee, thanks," Chris grumbled. He unballed the map and spread it out in front of him on the floor, his long legs framing either side of it and holding the corners down in the light breeze through the windows. He barely looked at it for ten seconds when he chimed in with his brother's unhappiness. "This is so stupid. I don't even know what we're looking for anymore."

"That's the whole point," Leo said, strolling in from the kitchen. A slight smirk tugged at the corner of his mouth as he asked without the least bit of innocence, "So you haven't found anything yet?"

Wyatt slumped in the corner of the sofa, his arms crossed angrily over his chest. "But you knew we wouldn't."

"I did," the angel admitted. "We figured that if you two couldn't find it, then we had done our jobs. Your mother and I were going to sit down and have a talk with the two of you about it after the holidays, but it won't hurt to give you a quick overview now, I suppose."

Phoebe could feel the curiosity getting the best of both her and Chris. He sat up straighter and his ears actually perked up a little, not wanting to miss a single word. Eagerly, he asked, "What's going on?"

"We're still working out the kinks in the system, but we think we may have found a way to destroy the Titans," Leo nearly whispered, paranoid that they might be overheard, even in their own home. The Manor was probably the safest place in the entire city with all of the magical protection they had been able to conjure up, but that wasn't an excuse for loose lips, either. They all had known that. "And just so that we know that the two of you will be safe if things should go wrong when we finally make our move, your mother and I have had some help from some friends creating a safe house for you. We wanted to make sure that it was in no way traceable so that —"

Wyatt quickly interrupted, standing back up and standing toe to toe with his father. Angrily, he protested. "No way! You can't leave me out of this."

Piper appeared at that moment, carrying another fully loaded tray of coffee and various snacks that were no more healthy than the coffee Chris had claimed to be so addictive. She tossed a knowing look at Wyatt before asking Leo, "I take it you just told them?"

"You guys are not leaving me out of this," Wyatt told her just as strongly as he'd insisted it to his father. "You can't."

"We aren't," Leo said, looking almost too proud of his son's eagerness for Phoebe's liking. It was no wonder Wyatt had turned out the way he had. Leo even went so far as to suggest that they had known all along that Wyatt was going to insist on being involved in their plans. "You will have a job to do. You just won't be right there at the front line. If things don't go well, we're going to need the two of you prepared to take over for us. This is going to take each and every one of us. You won't be left out; you're just going to be left for later."

"Left babysitting, you mean," Wyatt grumped.

Definitely offended, Chris snapped, "Hey! I'm sitting right here. And I sure don't need a babysitter. I can take care of myself. I'm fourteen now."

"Only by twenty-nine days, eighteen hours, and twelve minutes," Piper teased, looking at her watch. With stern looks all around, she told them, "I think this can wait until the plans are set in stone, anyway. We only wanted to give you two a heads up so that you wouldn't think we were keeping secrets from you, other than the usual Christmas ones. There are going to be a lot of late nights and really early mornings coming up over the next few weeks. We wanted you to be prepared. We can talk about this later. It's nearly Christmas. I can think of better things to do than worry about something that we can't fix today anyway."

In Chris's memory, the next few minutes were blurry and almost seemed to be in fast forward. Phoebe was actually a little disappointed; she would have like to have seen a little more of what the family was like, especially Wyatt and Chris. They seemed to be getting along like normal brothers without any trace of the future that she knew laid ahead for them. Sure, Wyatt seemed a little overeager to help, but that was a normal thing for all kids his age. Sixteen didn't make him a kid anymore, but it didn't make him an adult, either. At that age, kids had a tendency to attempt to speed through the last few years of their teens so that they could actually be considered adults instead of just being told to act like one. That was probably all that his attitude had been about. Still, it would have been helpful for her to see more.

All of a sudden, Chris's memory went black, pitch black, almost like his memory was going to commercial or something. Then it was back to normal, but the sun had obviously moved. It was shining at an angle that told her that hours had passed. She had barely had enough time to register the change when his memory then flashed a brilliant white, blinding Chris's entire field of vision. It took her a moment to realize that the flash had been all too real and not just a hole in his memory like the blackness. It wasn't until she heard Chris remember his brother swearing that she knew that she was probably moving into a much more important part of his memory of that day. After the last few she'd experienced, she wondered if maybe he was trying to tell her something. Unfortunately, things started moving too quickly for her to know for sure.

"What in the — oh, shit!"

Phoebe wanted to tell her nephew to watch his mouth, but then she saw through Chris's eyes what they had all seen. She decided then that Wyatt had described the situation rather accurately that day and was allowed to say whatever he wanted.

The three Titans that Phoebe remembered having been freed two years ago had come out of the flash of light, joined by another party dressed similarly enough to let her assume that he, too, was one of them. The bitch that she remembered having turned her sister to stone had come in dangerously close to Wyatt. The one with the annoying voice, joined by the one she didn't know, had come in just in front of Leo and Piper under the arch between the sunroom and living room. The fourth, the one she remembered as being the only remotely attractive one of them all, had come in at the back corner of the room, farthest away from everyone else. The family had easily been, for all intents and purposes, surrounded.

Without warning, the room flashed white again, blinding everyone in it. There was no sound to indicate what was going on. It wasn't until the light fell away again that it became clear to her that it was merely a weapon to disorient the family as the Titans regrouped under the archway, the woman joining her cohorts with a sassy laugh.

The family, too, then regrouped. Piper and Leo backed up, each parent grabbing the arm of a child as they moved themselves away from the intruders. For every step that they took, though, the Titans countered with a step into the room. Apparently seeing the futility of their move, Leo and Piper stopped with their retreat. They pulled their children behind them, shielding them as much as possible from the Titans' direct view.

"Going somewhere," Cronus asked them almost pleasantly, even with that deeply monstrous voice of his.

"Yeah, crazy," Piper smartly retorted, just like their father had done to them so many times since coming back into their lives. "Why? You wanna come with?"

"Certainly," Meta answered. "Wait right there. We just need to get our coats."

With that, the room flashed again. That time, Piper took advantage of the situation as much as she possibly could. Even though none of them could see, she grabbed for the boy nearest her and pulled. Before Chris knew what was going on, he felt himself being pushed down to the floor on his hands and knees. He could feel that Piper was crouched down next to him, her hand guiding him with a tug on the neck of his sweatshirt. He was just about been ready to ask where they were going when his head ran directly into a table leg.

Piper reached down and covered his head, shoving him under the table. Urgently she whispered into his ear, "They don't want us, honey. They want you and your dad. You have to stay hidden, no matter what happens. Understand?"

Chris's throat gave his mother an agreement, but Phoebe could hear him thinking anyway. Until you need me, sure. Phoebe herself was thinking, No matter what happens? Isn't that kind of like saying, 'I'll be right back'?

"Do not orb unless it is absolutely necessary. Now stay down."

With that, Piper turned back to the rest of the room, which had plunged back into darkness with the lack of light. She let her hands go at it, exploding everything in sight. The more that she destroyed, the angrier she visibly got, complaining that she was going to have to repair and replace it all when she got the intruders out of the house, and right before the holidays. Angry at the intrusion on what was supposed to have been a nice family day, she started in on the Titans with a growl. "Now look what you've made me do. At least demons give us a little more notice when they come over to visit. I wasn't done cleaning yet today, and I'm definitely not prepared for guests."

As if she were just playing with Piper, Meta tipped her index finger at a row of potted plants near the farthest window. One by one, she exploded the pots, flinging clay, dirt, and plant roots all over the room like confetti. "I don't mind a mess," said the Titaness with a satisfied smile. "You should see my house."

"That's why you three should have just left the other nine to rot in Hell where you all belong. If you hadn't brought them all back, you could have had the house all to yourselves."

Chris hadn't heard any further replies. In the corner of the room that had just been splattered with the remainders of his mother's miniature forest, a thundering cloud appeared. The wind surrounding it cycloned into a tall vertical tower, flashing lightning, until a body stepped out of it. During the only other encounter Chris had ever had with a Titan, he remembered seeing the guy move from place to place that way. Immediately Chris tried to shrink away, scampering further under the table.

It wasn't until Demetrius bent over at the waist and looked directly at Chris under the table that Phoebe even realized that he hadn't come back into the room out of the light like the others. A sadistic smile lit the Titan's face, sending chills through both Chris and Phoebe. Every instinct both of them had told them that he should scream for his mother, but the scream caught in his throat. Demetrius then straightened up and took very slow, deliberate steps toward the table. His voice was soft, almost sing-songy as he creeped closer, terrifying his prey.

"Mommy's busy, little bird," he taunted. "Whatever will you do?"

Chris's eyes immediately darted away from the feet approaching him, looking for his parents. He knew that neither one of them would be able see him where he had been hidden, neither would his brother. They were all too distracted by the battle waging in the middle of the room. He wanted to scream, but he also knew that to distract them could be even more dangerous for them. He was on his own. At least it was only one on one.

Just as Chris prepared to push himself up and out from under the table, the Titan's feet stopped directly in front of him. Before he could get far enough out of the way, Demetrius dragged him up by a handful of hair. The deceptively small Titan then held the boy up high enough that his feet couldn't touch the floor, even though Chris was sure he had grown nearly a foot in the last year. The boy tried to point his toes down at least to relieve the pressure on the back of his head, but couldn't quite make it. He struggled, only to the amusement of the Titan.

Announcing Chris's capture, Demetrius called out, "I'm sorry. Did you want me to put this toy back where I found it or can we clean up the mess later?"

"CHRIS!" Wyatt seemed to grow another six inches taller, his body stiff with nervousness. He looked right into Chris's eyes with a calmness designed to tell his brother not to worry. It was an assurance that Phoebe could feel Chris had readily believed. His big brother was going to get him out of this. Wyatt could get him out of anything. Wyatt almost lazily strolled up to the Titan holding Chris as if he was going to offer to buy the guy a cup of coffee. His voice was unnaturally soft as he ordered, "Put my brother down and I'll let you walk out of here alive for today."

Demetrius grinned back even as he snarled, "Come any closer and I'll snap its fucking neck."

While Wyatt didn't even flinch at the suggestion, Chris's heart had painfully skipped a beat or two. Phoebe could feel it. He was scared, really scared. He looked at his parents and saw that they were just as terrified as he was. The longer he hung there in the Titan's grip, the harder it became to concentrate on much of anything. It hurt enough that blazes of colors were shooting across his vision, whether he had his eyes opened or shut. He knew that as soon as he was dropped, if he alive when he was dropped, he was going to be leaving a nice handful of hair behind that would be replaced by the headache from Hell. All he could do was hang there. Trying to keep himself calm until his brother and parents could do something, he closed his eyes and fiercely kept reminding himself that he couldn't panic and run for the hills. 'Don't orb, don't orb, don't orb, they need you to orb so don't orb, don't orb, don't orb. . . '

When Chris's eyes opened so that Phoebe was able to see what was going on again, she saw the mistake immediately. She knew that Chris had, too. Taking Chris out of the battle left the Halliwells one man short. One of them was going to have to take two at once with himself in the crossfire. The seconds it took his family to realize that themselves had been enough time for the Titans to realize the same.

Cronus acted first, raising his hands and sending miniature bolts of energy in every direction. Leo had to slam himself to the ground before he could in any way retaliate. He popped up as quickly as he could, releasing a powerful stream of energy bolts right back. Wyatt quickly sidestepped the dart intended for him so that he could be closer to his mother. He extended his shield, protecting her the best way he knew how. Cronus's second round was just slow enough so that when it reached its intended target, Piper was safely ensconced in the bluish shelter. The dart deflected off to the right, finding a new target in Meta. The energy shared between Wyatt's shield and the magical weapon was enough to speed the dart along, sending it crashing into her chest so quickly that even Cronus couldn't have done anything about it. The Titaness writhed and screamed for a brief moment while the rest looked on in shock. Then, without much flair at all, she was gone.

Taking advantage of the Titans' disbelief, Piper snicked her wrists at the arm holding on to her youngest son. She obviously knew that she wasn't going to do much damage to him, but thought it would at least startle him enough to let Chris go. As hoped, Demetrius dropped Chris, his arm pulling away in an almost human way with the sting of it. They both knew it was a bee sting to him compared to what that would have felt like to a demon, but she was obviously willing to take whatever she could get. A satisfied grin grazed her face as Chris thunked to the ground and scampered away from the Titan as quickly as his feet would carry him. To the Titan, she said, "Four on three? I'll take those odds any day. Thanks." To Chris, she added quickly, "Take care of your brother. Other than that, do whatever you can."

Chris nodded and ran for Wyatt's side, reveling in his surge of relief. The Titans hadn't taken him; things weren't going to turn out as badly as he'd feared for that split second or twenty. His parents had always warned him that he would be special to the Titans and couldn't risk being captured. He'd been terrified of what it might mean, but for that day, he knew he would be able to escape with only nightmares of what could have been.

As soon as he reached Wyatt, he turned his back so that his brother could feel their backs meeting. They had actually practiced this before because their mother wouldn't let Chris help out unless he was close to Wyatt. They had learned to feel each other's movements so that they could move as one, taking out demons from both directions. They both knew that there was no way that this was going to be that easy, but they had had a system that hadn't failed them yet. They weren't going to let it now.

The boys started immediately flinging things left and right. Wyatt's energy balls had become so much bigger and powerful in the last two years that he could actually inflict a fair amount of damage, even on the two Titans in front of him. Chris, too, had been working on his telekinesis and had managed to improve quite a bit. He was nothing like his aunts yet, from what he'd heard in stories, but he could at least get things going fast enough to distract, if not actually hurt.

Even to Phoebe, things were starting to look positive. The remaining Titans seemed to be taking quite a few hits. She knew that her family knew that they weren't going to be able to defeat them in the confines of the sunroom, but at least they could put a good dent into their ranks, enough to get them out of the house. They'd all live to do this another, better prepared day.

Then, out of nowhere, the Titan Phoebe knew Chris had later learned was Hyperion seemed to grow bored with the battle. As another flash of white hot light of his making burst through the room, he roared darkly, "ENOUGH OF THIS!"

Unable to see, they all had to rely on what they could hear or feel. While Wyatt pulled him protectively close, Chris heard all of the windows shatter in one large explosion that seemed to rock them all off their feet. He heard several other things smash or blow up, but he had no idea what any of them were. He heard his father swear, his brother echo his father's curse, and his mother outdo them both with a string of blue words that weren't in the least bit fit for the tender ears of children.

For a moment, it seemed like the Titans had just given up, taken their toys, and gone home. Phoebe could feel Chris's relief. She knew he had a little too much of the pacifist in him to want to keep fighting any longer than he had to. She and Chris both thought that Piper must have heard something that the rest of them hadn't, though, because she stage whispered an order to her men. "Give 'em everything you've got then get out as fast as you can."

The light falling away had been just as blinding as its appearance. Wyatt adjusted a little faster than everyone else, though. With one hand, he flung an energy ball toward Hyperion. With the other, he pushed Chris down to the floor. As soon as the energy ball was out of range, Wyatt raised his shield again and pulled his brother back up by the shoulder of his sweatshirt.

While he was on the floor, Chris took his eyes off the Titans for only a moment, doing a mental check of the exits available to them without orbing. At least, that was what he'd planned to do. Wyatt was the weapons guy; he was the strategy guy. That's how they'd always done it since Wyatt did, after all, have much more power behind him. His job as the strategy guy was to keep them all safe and have ways to get them in and out of every situation. That was and always had been the plan. As his eyes adjusted to the normal light again, though, his heart sank down into his gut. He knew right away that this was one situation that he didn't know how to get them out of. When Phoebe thought about what he'd seen, she understood exactly why.

Slow motion took over for both of the boys as Chris got closer to standing straight up again. While the light had given them cover, the three remaining Titans had banded together in one tight clump that now blocked the exit into the living room. The explosion Chris had heard had turned out to be the collapsing of the wall and doorframe out into the kitchen, blocking that escape as well. With their prey effectively trapped, together the Titans had all raised their hands to shoulder height, their powers much more concentrated. Before Chris could warn him, the energy ball that Wyatt threw at them suddenly dissipated in the middle of the air.

Wyatt's eyes opened just wide enough to register surprise when he narrowed them angrily at the intruders. He formed two more energy balls, one in each hand, and lowered his shield long enough so that he could let the weapons do their thing. He was about to raise his shield around himself and his brother once again when he turned to the sound of Chris's scream.

In the back of her head, Phoebe knew that Chris hadn't seen it coming. He often thought that even his mother hadn't seen it coming. It wasn't until later that Chris would remember the sound of the exploding windows and furniture that he'd heard when the light had appeared. Phoebe somehow knew that it wasn't until later, when he was alone and couldn't think of anything else, that he would remember the sound of his own scream. He had been the first to see it, the first to let anyone else know that he'd seen it. The light hadn't been a mere distraction. It hadn't been an announcement. The Wyatt family had been toys to be played with, nothing more, and Hyperion was bored with them. His light had been a weapon, a very deadly weapon.

Phoebe saw the huge knife of glass that was sticking out of her sister's chest and knew that it wasn't good at all. The peppering of miniature cuts all over Piper's arms and face were nothing in comparison. She saw Piper standing there, swaying and looking oddly down at the protrusion from her chest with anger. She felt her stomach turn as Chris's eyes fixed on Piper's hands while they reached up and clapped them on either side of the glass so that she looked to be praying. As her hands trembled around the glass, pulling it out, her sister bravely looked up at the Titans. With a quaking growl, she informed them, "I wasn't done yet."

With that, Piper swayed just a little too far, dropping the glass to the floor.

"PIPER!" Leo shouted, seeing her fall into Wyatt's arms. Furious, he whipped around, ready to take on the Titans entirely on his own. In his anger, he forgot the cardinal rule not to look directly at them just long enough that he wasn't able to take his eyes away. Before anyone could tear him away, a visible chill came over him as his body became unmovable.

Chris couldn't move. All he could do was stare at the stone statue that was his father in total surprise. He knew what happened to the other Whitelighters and Elders when the Titans would first catch Them, but he'd never seen it first hand. It had always just been something that his parents had told him to keep him on his guard whenever he was out without them. He had never imagined that he would see the day when his father would be trapped like the rest of them.

"Chris, get her out of here," Wyatt shouted, flinging energy balls out of both hands, even with their mother limply leaning on his chest. "I'll be right behind you. Go!"

With the one hand, Chris upended what was left of the coffee table, telekinetically tossing the spilling contents over toward the intruders. Phoebe felt his other hand reach for her sister's elbow, yanking hard to pull Piper close to him. She felt his hands tremble as they ran through the blood on her chest when his arm encircled her. Once Piper was secure in their arms, she felt them orb away, ducking a volley of fireballs aimed to keep them from escaping along the way.

Phoebe couldn't hear the surprised exclamations from the people remaining downstairs in the real, waking world. For the last few minutes, they had all been watching her on and off curiously, not sure what was going on. She seemed to be staring into space, just as both Paige and Christopher had said, but there seemed to be a little more to it this time. When she'd thrown herself up and flung the table, no one had known what to do. It seemed so sudden and without explanation that all they could do was stare after her. Both Leo and Piper had asked her if she was seeing something, only to be ignored as if they weren't even in the room at all. It wasn't until she grabbed Piper and orbed away that any of them were certain that something was seriously wrong.

"Did she just orb," asked Victor, looking with wide eyes at the spot where his daughters had been standing. "I thought Phoebe didn't have powers anymore. How did she get the ability to orb if she doesn't have any of her other powers?"

Leo was bent over the edge of the boys' playpen, quickly picking out pieces of shattered glass before either of them could get their little hands on them. He crooked his head in the others' direction, making his voice sound strained from the weird angle of his throat as he pretty much thought out loud. "I don't think she did. It's too soon, especially under the circumstances. Something else made her orb, maybe, but it wasn't her."

Christopher, who suddenly wondered where this small scar in his hand had come from when he was a kid, joined his father at the playpen, only to be sent away.

"Stay back," Leo commanded, waving his glass-filled hand behind him. "I don't want Wyatt orbing you anywhere again." With a bright Daddy smile, Leo asked his other son, "Wyatt, where did you send Mommy and Phoebe? Can you bring them back?"

Sheepishly, Paige admitted, "I don't think Wyatt did it, either, actually." With a guilty scrunching of her eyes and shoulders, she said, "I think Chris did it."

"Me? I didn't do anything."

"No, not you." With all eyes suddenly upon her, she was overcome with the ugly feeling that she was betraying Phoebe a lot more than she thought she was going to. She had really hoped that her sister was going to be able to fix her problem on her own, but this was starting to become a little too dangerous for it to continue. Without necessarily admitting that she knew exactly what was going on, she gave them a nice, big — okay, glaring — billboard-sized hint instead. "She didn't get that black eye, either. Chris did."

Thoroughly confused, Christopher looked over to his aunt like she must have lost all her marbles and everyone else's. "Honestly, I had nothing to do with that. What makes you think I had anything to do with that? Dad, I didn't do it!"

"Not you," she said again, frustrated. She was about to try to find another way to explain without explaining when a scream sounded from upstairs. Her eyes flew open wide. She turned to Leo, but he was already a set of orbs floating dangerously fast toward the ceiling before she even got her mouth open.

Sensing that their numbers were dwindling, the toddler starting crying so as not to be forgotten. Naturally, when one of them needed to cry, so did the other. Both Wyatt and Christopher sprang into a torrent of tears. Every time Baby Christopher needed to hitch in a breath, Wyatt would stop, too, thinking that maybe it was all over, only to have to scream just a little louder than the baby again to be heard. It wasn't hard to see that it was all an act, though, because as soon as Grandpa dove in to scoop up both boys, the crying stopped.

For not the first time, Victor proudly smiled, "Yeah. Grandpa's still got it."

Christopher had to stifle a laugh, knowing all of the many things he knew about his grandfather's future. Hey, his sister had to get her klutziness from somewhere. With a smirk, he said, "Yeah. You go ahead and believe that one all you want."

"You're the one who told him he was awesome," Paige argued pointedly while making silly faces at the two boys in Victor's arms. "Live with the consequences."

"Are you saying I'm not awesome," asked Victor indignantly. "The other Chris told everyone repeatedly that I'm awesome. They heard it. I'm awesome."

"Oh, no, you're awesome, Grandpa," Christopher said almost a little too reassuringly. "Although, I'm thinking you guys really need to get a new word. I'm just saying that it has nothing to do with you, per se, why they stopped crying." He pointed a finger in the same direction that Wyatt was pointing, leading them all to a circle of orbs floating around like suncatchers in the window.

Paige chuckled, "He did that the other night, too. Apparently, your big brother knows how to keep you quiet when you annoy him."

Christopher rolled his eyes at her and discovered shortly thereafter that he really shouldn't have taken his eyes off his brother, even for the sake of sarcasm. Wyatt's finger quickly zoomed over to point at Christopher. The orbs that had been pacifying the smaller version of him flew past them all and slammed hard into the adult version. Before Christopher could catch a grip on anything, the orbs surrounded him like a bubble and carried him off backwards into the living room. He reached out on either side of him to try to grab onto the archway that led into the hallway, but he missed. Orbs encased the front door, making it temporarily disappear while Christopher was thrust across the threshold and out onto the sidewalk. As soon as the orb bubble safely set him down, the door reformed, effectively kicking Christopher out of the house.

"Damn it, Wyatt," Christopher seethed in frustration. He kicked at the air before stalking up to the door, muttering the whole way, "Kid, I may not have any powers right now, but I am a helluva lot bigger. Do that again, and I will have no reservations whatsoever about knocking you straight to the moon. Goddamn it!"

When Paige heard the door slam, she called out to her nephew. "Christopher? You okay?"

"Yeah," he grumped, trudging through the hallway. Still somehow more concerned about his brother than himself, he asked, "Is he okay?"

Paige ducked her head around the corner so that she could see him coming into the living room. "Yeah, he's fine. Victor's taking the boys up to the nursery until we can sort that out. Come on and help me get this mess cleaned up before they all come back down again. I don't want anyone stepping on this glass. We had enough of that last night. How are your feet, by the way?" Inwardly she winced, And how about the rest of you?

Coming into the sunroom, he shrugged. "They're fine. Nothing for you to worry about." He made sure not to look at her so that he wasn't putting too much pressure on. Lucy had always said he had a stare that made people feel guilty, whether they were or not. (Not that he believed it, but he did try to keep that in the back of his mind with some people.) He bent over and picked up the upended table to set it right. Keeping his eyes to the stuff in his hands as he started putting the bigger pieces of glass on the table, he asked, "What about you? You okay?"

She seemed to think about it for a while, as if she wanted to actually give him an honest answer instead of the family's company line of 'Fine and Dandy' when all things wacky occurred. She was about to open her mouth to answer him when another scream interrupted her thoughts. She dropped the waste basket in her hands with a concerned look up to the ceiling. "Phoebe."

Without another word, the pair orbed up to see what in the world was going on now.

III.

Phoebe and Chris had stuttered to a stop in the middle of Piper's bedroom floor, unable to hold Piper up any longer. She could feel how painfully Chris's arms had tingled as blood tried to flow to his fingers again. He had been holding on to her so tightly that releasing her from his arms had actually hurt more than to hold her.

He laid her gently down on the floor, automatically reaching behind him without looking for a cushion off the sofa. Gingerly, he helped her to sit up enough so that he could put the cushion under her head and neck. It wasn't until he started to swipe away strands of hair that were stuck in the gooey blood on her face that Phoebe could wrest a coherent thought out of the screaming panic in her nephew's head. Even then, it was just a speeding cycle of "Mom, mom, mom, mom, no, mom, mom, no, mom . . . "

She knew that she wasn't really with Chris, that it was only his memory that was with her, but that didn't stop Phoebe from wanting to hug her nephew with everything she had. She was feeling all of his fourteen years, his too few years. She knew that kids saw their parents die all the time; she just wished that she could have kept him from seeing what she now knew he had probably seen every day since, over and over in his head. This wasn't even real. She knew that, somehow. It was just his memory. Still, nothing in the world had ever been this vivid in her life. She knew he had even put on mismatched socks that morning and had been too tired to care to change them because he hadn't slept very well the night before. She knew he had been irrationally worried in that particular instance that his mother was going to leave him and that she would be mad at herself for leaving him just because he obviously couldn't take care of himself yet. He couldn't even put on a matched pair of socks.

"Mom, you have to wake up, okay? I can't carry us both. I'm not strong enough. Please. You need to wake up. Wake up now. Please."

Chris's heart surged when Piper opened her eyes and smiled at him. She barely nodded her understanding, but she did it all the same. She swallowed hard, gathering energy as much as swallowing the blood that Phoebe knew must have been clogging her throat by then. Softly, Piper rasped, "It looks worse than it is, honey, so don't you worry. Where are your father and brother?"

"Wyatt said he'd be right behind us. They . . . They turned Dad to stone."

Determinedly, Piper struggled to sit up, even though Chris's hand tried to push her shoulder down. Before her son had even had the chance to argue, she said, "I need to get back down there."

"You can't," Chris said.

"Don't you tell me what I can and cannot do. I'm going," she insisted. A little gentler, Piper told him, "Honey, I want you to go to the meeting point. You know which one I mean. We'll be there, I promise. Now help me up."

Orbs circled just to the side of them then, quickly forming two solid figures. Wyatt appeared, to Chris's worry, with his left arm saturated with blood, but he didn't give either his mother or brother time to say anything about it. Wyatt panted down at his mother without any preamble, "Where can I hide Dad?"

"I'll do it," Piper volunteered, her eyes worried at the sight of the statue that was Leo. "I want you boys out of here."

"I've got it, Mom," Wyatt argued. "I'm pretty sure Dad was right: they want Chris, and I can't hold them off for long. You guys need to get out of here before they figure out where he is. I can take care of myself."

Relieved to see her boy's calmness, Piper grinned as strongly as she could, apparently unaware of the blood in the corner of her mouth. Tiredly, she agreed, if only so that she didn't have to talk any more than necessary. "Okay. Put him in your room. Put a crystal cage around him to keep him protected. Even they can't get through one of those. Then come meet us at the point. Please be careful."

Phoebe vaguely wondered what 'point' it was that they were all talking about, and was grateful when Chris thought of it for her. Just like when they had been small children and gone to the fair or mall, they had always agreed on a place to meet up should they somehow be separated. Piper had taken it to a new, militaristic level with the family in the first Chris's past, turning it into a battle strategy whenever they were attacked in the house or anywhere else. They were to go there in an emergency and not leave until everyone had joined them safely. The kids had both apparently learned that rule early and well. Chris, however, was changing the rule this time, considering that both of their parents were effectively out of the picture. Strongly, leaving no room for argument, Chris told his brother, "If you aren't there in five minutes, I'm coming back for you."

"No, you aren't," both Piper and Wyatt said anyway.

"Try and stop me," Chris said bravely. Without another word, Chris slung his mother's arm around his shoulders and orbed out of the bedroom.

When the orbs fell out of their field of vision, Phoebe saw that they were in the alley behind P3. Chris carefully went about the business of helping his mother to sit up against the back door, smiling happily down at her. She could sit up on her own. She was weak, but she was sitting up. That had to be a good sign, right? Seeing that she was shivering, though, Chris offered to go into the back storeroom to get a blanket for her.

"Not until your brother is here," Piper ordered. "I don't want you going anywhere without Wyatt."

"It's just inside the door, Mom. You're cold."

Phoebe saw in her sister's eyes then what she knew Chris couldn't grasp for a few more years. Piper had known that her fourteen-year-old didn't really know what was happening to her. For that Phoebe imagined she had been glad and had obviously been determined to make it as easy on him as possible. Smiling a lie, she said, "I'll be fine, honey. Let's just wait for your brother."

"Yes, let's wait for your big brother," a wicked giggle called from behind the gate separating the P3 property from the rest of the alley.

In their concern for one another, neither witch had sensed the arrival of an entire murder of demons. Through the only exit out of the fence, they weren't been able to count how many there were. Only four sauntered through while more closed the gap. Chris instinctively moved in front of his mother, fists raised, as his brother had done so many times for him. The demon closest to him telekinetically moved him back to where he'd stood, shaking his head. "Don't worry, kid. We aren't here for her."

From behind the demonic quartet, a dark-haired young woman slinked toward her quarry, her deceptively innocent beauty taunting Piper without her even trying to. She casually crouched down on the balls of her feet so that she was nearly eye to eye with the wounded Charmed One then placed her hands elegantly in her lap. Her voice was sweet and blasé, as if they were the best of friends rather than enemies, when she said, "Do you remember the last time you saw me, Piper? I'll admit, it's been a few years and you are looking a little worn around the eyes; I should probably refresh your memory. I came to you the day your sister Paige died sixteen years ago. I warned you about the Titans, pesky little buggers that they are. I told you that they weren't just going to go away and that they would destroy this city if you didn't do something about it. You were too bereaved to listen to anyone but your husband and other sister. Of course, I don't have feelings, or maybe I would have cared and come to you another day. That's the tricky thing about these visions, though. I don't pick and choose when I get them. I told you that I could help you and yours defeat the Titans before they were able to resurrect the rest of their kind. I told you that I could help you so that you wouldn't have to suffer more than necessary. You didn't want to hear me. All you had to do was help me to become human once it was all over, but you apparently thought that helping one morally ambiguous being was too much to ask, even in the fight of your life. You sent me away. Everything I saw that day has since come to pass. This was the last of it. You were going to live to see everyone you ever cared about die, everyone but your husband. We're here now, at the end of things, and it all could have been prevented if only you had listened to me."

Piper worked up just as sincere a grin and said, "Oh, Seer, really; you don't actually expect me to take you seriously in that getup, did you?"

Phoebe was suddenly overcome with the urge to laugh at her sister, at the situation, at all of them. She wasn't sure if it was really coming from her, though, or from Chris. Then, out of the corner of his eye, Chris caught sight of what was letting his mother joke even then. Wyatt came charging down the end of the alley, running out of his orbs with a feral look on his face that Phoebe knew reminded Chris in later years of the look he had seen permanently scarring his brother's features.

Wyatt started lobbing energy balls in every direction, even as he was running toward them. He managed to take out three of the demons before he reached them. When he couldn't quite see around the gate, he hollered, "Mom!"

Piper responded by blowing up the demon closest to him, a defiant look in her eyes as she stared down the Seer. "Yeah, baby?"

"Just checking. Chris?"

Before Chris had been able to answer his brother, the Seer stood up and filled them all in with a sing-song, snappy pronouncement. "Oh, he's about to be captured for the second time in one day."

Wyatt stopped dead in his tracks, skidding to a stop, wrenching his ankle doing it. "Chris?"

Two demons shimmered in and replaced the Seer in position around Piper, guarding her from seeing or doing anything to aid her sons. As they moved on her, two Darklighters puffed in, flanking Chris exactly where he stood. They quickly took a forceful hold on him and marched him out of the gate so that Wyatt would have no doubt who was in charge. Even through the pain Phoebe could feel in the Darklighters' hands on his skin, Chris tried to crane his head around so that he could see his mother, but they held in their hands arrows positioned just an inch to either side of his head and chest.

The Seer looked between the two teenagers with a satisfied grin on her face. She clicked her tongue down at Piper, shaking her head sarcastically. "You really should have learned to take my word for it." She then turned and walked out to meet the Darklighters. All pretense of cordiality gone, she said, "All wrapped up, pretty as Christmas, just as promised. When this is over, I expect to be properly compensated for the information." Finally, she turned then to Wyatt, speaking to him as if he were still a child. "Didn't anyone ever tell you that you are your brother's keeper? That's twice in one day that he's been caught, and that's twice in one day that you've let it happen. What kind of brother are you?"

"The kind that's going to vanquish your cheap ass if you don't call your goons off my family."

The Seer's only response was to nod at the Darklighters holding Chris. They both produced crossbows in their free hands, which they aimed directly at Wyatt's heart. Apparently satisfied that everything and everyone was under control, she twinkled her fingers in all directions, waving particularly down at Piper, then flamed out with another malicious giggle.

Frustrated, Wyatt just started flinging energy balls left and right, looking only to make sure he wasn't hitting his mother or brother. Two more demons disappeared in flaming agony.

Without warning, they suddenly all disappeared, vanquished, except for the two holding Chris and the one standing over Piper. Wyatt took the opportunity to advance on the Darklighters, who glared angrily over his shoulders, telling him exactly where the new threat had come from. Wyatt whipped around, his hands forming energy balls before he had even been able to see what he was looking for.

Fifty feet away, Cronus waved a hand in Wyatt's direction, extinguishing the energy balls in the teenager's hands. In his deep, perpetually growling voice, the Titan went on to inform Wyatt, "We weren't done with you yet."

Defiantly, Wyatt retorted, "Yeah? Well, I was done with you." His blue protective shield came up, allowing him to actually turn his back on the Titan.

Chris's eyes then again trained on his brother's, obviously communicating something that Phoebe was in no way prepared to interpret. She knew Chris had understood some unseen response perfectly, though. She felt how his pulse quickened as he blinked two long blinks. Wyatt then blinked once, apparently another signal. Chris then called off a five count in his head until both he and Wyatt pounced.

Suddenly, Chris dropped into a crouch on the balls of his feet, leaning slightly backward to avoid the tips of the arrows. While the startled Darklighters had to take a second to react, he then bounced back up, leaping what he hoped would be a safe distance out of arm's reach. As his feet hit the ground, though, a heavily clad boot coiled around his leg, tripping him up. Before he could get up off his scraped hands, powerful hands took charge of his elbows and pulled him back between the pair of Darklighters.

In the meantime, Wyatt lowered his shield long enough to lob energy balls at the Darklighter standing over his mother. The weapon widely missed its intended target, though, as a hand grabbed his arm just before letting it go. Wyatt tried to raise his shield again so that he could freely turn to see who had stopped him, but the hand had such a steady grip that he couldn't get around it. The next thing the brothers knew, the teenager was pulled dangerously close to the Titan's chest, close enough that he was able to feel that the Titan had no breath. Wyatt struggled against Cronus's grip, but the Titan's hand was strong enough to crush his elbow. Chris could hear the ball in the joint practically turn to powder, the agony rendering Wyatt unable to be in any way effective against his captor or his brother's.

Delighted at this small personal victory, Cronus called over to the Darklighters holding Chris. "I believe your kind have spent and wasted over sixteen years looking for this one."

Not to be cowed that easily, one of the Darklighters pulled Chris even closer, the tip of his arrow actually penetrating Chris's skin. "And we know you've spent the last fourteen years, failing miserably, trying to get this one."

The Darklighter that was standing guard over Piper apparently took the challenges between parties as his cue to do something himself. His hand snaked down toward her. He extended one long finger and ground it into the seeping wound in her chest, forcing her to cry out until she was ashen with the pain.

"MOM!" both boys screamed, her pain echoing in their ears.

"Children, children," Cronus clicked at them. "Inside voices, please."

Darklighters and Titan alike laughed heartily at the screams. As soon as it died down, though, the silence became much more menacing. Sneering at Cronus, the Darklighter on Chris's left then gloated, "We have something you want. You have something we want. For now, I think we're done here."

Chris and Wyatt looked at each other in abject horror. They both leaned forward, as if trying for one last second to escape, only to be held back by laughing hands. Bright blue and green eyes both popped wide open, terrified; their mouths both opened, ready to scream.

And then there was nothing but blackness.

For all the brightness of orbing, travelling by black orbs was completely without light. At least, that's what Chris had and still thought. He hadn't exactly had a whole lot to judge it by, though. He found himself deposited in some room, cold and smooth, without even a sliver of light. Phoebe could tell that he was freezing, but that could just as easily have been from the poison she knew had penetrated his skin from the arrow tip. All he knew was that he was cold and blind. One of his captors told him to keep quiet and still, then vanished from what Chris could tell. He couldn't see or hear anything after that. He was able to feel along the floor he was on, which he was pretty sure was cement of some kind, until he found a wall to brace himself against. He raised a circle of orbs out of his palm, like he remembered Wyatt used to do for him when he was little and afraid of the dark. Even the walls and floor had been painted black so that it looked and felt like he was literally in the middle of nowhere. He flung barrage after barrage of orbs at the four walls, looking for any kind of door or escape hatch, but found nothing. It wasn't until the orbs began to stutter and fizz with his exhaustion that he gave up. It wasn't long after that that he started to cry. He cried until he sobbed, then sobbed until he fell asleep, praying that his parents and brother would be okay and find a way to come for him.

Surrounded by the blackness, Phoebe, too, cried. She trembled violently in her sister's arms, unable to control her fear. She wasn't even sure if it was hers or Chris's anymore, but at this point, it didn't much matter. Even though she'd been expecting it, nothing could have prepared her for seeing what she knew had turned out to be her sister's death through the fourteen-year-old eyes of her nephew. He hadn't been there when she'd finally died, alone and afraid for her children in a back alley, but she knew somehow that Chris had felt it. He'd felt her go, just as she had felt it when Prue left them. He'd done his best, but she knew he didn't think it was good enough. It was no wonder he had had such a hard time looking at Piper once she had known his secret. She was going to have a hard time now herself.

Even though the memory seemed to be over, his voice kept echoing in her head. She could feel him rocking himself for any kind of comfort and begging his mother to be okay, just wanting more than anything for her to open her eyes again so that she could find him. Still half-trapped in the space between his memory and the present, Phoebe sobbed uncontrollably, "Please, Mom, wake up. Oh, god, Mom, wake up. We need you. Please . . . They're okay. They're okay. They're all okay."

"Phoebe, honey, what are you seeing," Piper asked for the umpteenth time, thinking that somehow her sister had regained her powers and was having a particularly strong vision. It wouldn't be the first time she'd seen Phoebe reenact a vision since becoming an empath, nor would it be the first time one had hit her so hard. Of course, she hadn't actually orbed out with any of her visions before, but still . . . Piper was getting tired of trying to hold her sister down, though. This had to end and needed to end fast. "Pheebs?"

The witch's answer was a childlike, whispering sob, "Come back."

"Good idea. Come back to us, Phoebe." Truly frightened, Piper turned to a newly-arrived Leo with huge eyes. "What's happening to her? I thought They took her powers away."

Coming out of the memory at last, Phoebe blinked hard and answered in her own, somewhat steadier voice, "They did. It wasn't a vision."

Piper guided her still-shaking sister up off the floor and over to the edge of the bed to help her to sit down. She ran her thumb up and down Phoebe's shoulder, the way Grams used to do whenever they were upset, completely without realizing she was doing it. Leo sat down on the other side of them, attempting futilely to add his own brand of glowy comfort to his sister-in-law's head, just in case, to no avail. Piper gave him a grim but grateful grin before wrapping both arms around her sister and rocking her gently to try to restore a normal breathing pattern to them all.

She started to stroke her sister's hair, softly whispering, "It's okay. Whatever it is you saw, we'll fix it. That's what we do, remember?"

"It wasn't a vision," Phoebe reiterated with frustrated tears. "And you can't fix it."

"Okay, honey, look; you need to take a deep breath and tell us what's going on here. Maybe if you just lie down . . . "

A look passed between them, and without waiting for her permission, Piper and Leo started to move to resituate Phoebe on the bed. Not that she knew what they were doing. . . Still so lost in whatever it was she was caught in, she was easily pliable. It didn't take much at all for Leo to pick her up and set her gently against the pillows. She didn't even twitch in protest. He swept her hair out of her eyes and offered a reassuring smile before he and Piper both crossed the room to the stand near the nursery doorway so that they could talk.

Arms crossed over her chest, Piper glanced worriedly over at the middle sister. Scared, she looked back up at her husband and whispered, "What's wrong with her?"

"I have no idea," Leo answered helplessly. "But whatever it is, I think it has something to do with whatever did that to her face. Whatever it is, it's blocking my ability to heal her."

"She said it wasn't a vision, but what else would it be? I mean, something made her orb up here. Something has her scared out of her mind. You . . . you didn't hear her crying. She — something is doing this to her. Are-are They doing this to her?"

"I don't think so. That isn't Their style."

Angrily Piper retorted, "How do you know? We haven't heard from them since the day that Gideon . . . You turned your powers on another Elder. Maybe They don't care about why. What if They're turning her powers against her? They haven't exactly been on our side lately. You know They're trying to find a way to punish you. What if this is it?" Not so sure she should have her sights away from Phoebe for too long, she turned her frustration back on her sister, who was lying whimpering on the bed, asking for Paige. "God, Leo, what do we do?"

Leo loosely encircled his wife in his arms when she fell against his chest, unable to give her any real answer or comfort. Knowing that making her feel better was more important than his gun-shy reaction to pull away, he made himself kiss the top of her hair, closing his eyes. He hated the impotent feeling he'd had every day around her, not knowing what to say to her about even the weather. Damn it. What good was being an Elder anyway? How could he help solve the problems of the world if he couldn't even solve the problems of his family? Still, she needed him to get over it and fast. Attempting to put on the brave face he remembered once having, he told her, "We'll figure it out, Piper. We always do. She's going to be okay."

As if just to contradict him, Phoebe screamed from the bed, "Leave her alone! Paige!"

Startled, Leo and Piper darted to the bedside. At the same time, Christopher and Paige appeared in the bedroom doorway, orbing up together from the living room. They quickly took in the scene from where they stood and looked at one another, seeing that whatever it was, it wasn't good. While Paige stayed back in between the doorframes, Christopher stormed in, clearly worried. "What's going on? Phoebe?"

Leo answered him, "We don't know."

Piper took her sister's hand, scared. "Phoebe? Talk to me. What's happening? Can you hear me? Please, say something."

"P-paige," Phoebe asked, seeming to cower away from the people surrounding her bedside. Seconds later she let out a blood curdling scream.

"Damn it," Piper snapped. She wiped a frustrated tear from her cheek before surging with anger. "C'mon, now, you're really scaring us. What the hell — "

Before the question was finished, Phoebe weakly called, "So am I!"

"Oh, god, wake her up," Paige whispered quietly from the doorway.

Everyone turned to look at the ghost-white witch, who was holding on to the door to keep from losing all control of her knees and falling to the ground. Christopher dashed over to catch her, almost missing her as she gave in to her fear and pitched forward. He had to heave her up so that he could recatch her about the waist.

"Paige?"

"Wake her up, now!" she cried painfully, shaking so hard that Christopher could barely hold her up. "She'll die if you don't."

Confused, angry, and mostly terrified, Piper grabbed Phoebe by both shoulders and shook her violently. Phoebe's shorn head flopped around uselessly on her neck, as if she were nothing more than an overused bobblehead doll. "Phoebe? Wake up! Damn it! Why can't she hear me? PHOEBE!"

For a brief second, Phoebe's eyes opened and she gathered her breath to say, "Hey."

"We're running out of time," Paige said, choking on the words. "You have to wake her up now."

"You, either," Phoebe whispered.

Leo's eyes flew open, suddenly realizing what was going on. He looked at Paige, her thoughts that Chris was somehow behind Phoebe's orbing making so much more sense to him now. "Is she — " Without waiting for an answer other than his sister-in-law's stricken face, Leo leapt off the bed and gathered Phoebe into his arms. He screamed, "Somebody start a cold shower. NOW!"

Letting the fear finally move through her, Paige forced herself to turn around and ping-pong down the hall to the bathroom. Christopher tried to help her, but her arms flailed as she ran. When they reached the bathroom, Christopher shoved past her and turned the cold water in the shower stall on full blast.

Leo charged in behind them, the gasping Phoebe in his arms. He blew past them, thrusting himself and his sister-in-law into the frigid rains of the shower, not even noticing that he'd slammed the shower door so hard into the wall that it shattered into thousands of pieces all over their new rug. Oblivious to the glass crackling under their feet, Leo jostled Phoebe around so that she was in as much of a standing position as his arms could support. Paige squeezed in with them and quickly turned her sister's face toward the water. Both of them shouted in her ears, begging her to snap out of her state.

It wasn't long before there was more than just water from the showerhead gracing Phoebe's face. She started to weep openly, gripping tightly to her sister and brother-in-law. Her breathing changed from breathless gasps to water-logged chokes. When she finally opened her eyes, they were fearfully bright. Most importantly, though, they were hers.

Turning her eyes first on Paige, she sadly deduced, "That's why you didn't want to see Darryl." She then looked up at Leo. "Either of you. Leo, I am so incredibly sorry. I know I've told you already, but I didn't really understand until now. I am so sorry."

Still unbelieving, Leo asked, "You saw it? You saw — you saw Chris . . . die?"

Now just as shaken as his aunt and father, Christopher started to ask but couldn't finish, "You mean — "

"No," Paige said quickly, knowing what her nephew must have been thinking. "The other you. It wasn't a premonition. She saw our last few minutes with him. Leo laying her on the bed must have triggered it."

"Except it was from his point of view, right," asked Leo, trying to piece it all together.

Shaking the memory out of her head, Phoebe shivered. "It's okay. I can fix it."

"If you could fix it, you would have already," Paige argued, now more angry than ever. "Phoebe, this has to stop. Leo knows now; we have to tell Piper."

"Tell Piper what," Piper interrupted unhappily from the hallway. "Phoebe? Do you know what's happening to you?" When her sister just stood there shivering and staring at the floor, she turned on her other sister, demanding an answer. "Paige? Anyone?"

Sensing that Phoebe was at least temporarily staying with them, Leo reached behind them and turned the water off. Both girls greedily thanked him as much as his shivering muscles did. He took the towel Christopher was numbly holding out to him and wrapped it around Phoebe. He held her tightly about the shoulders as first Paige and then he ushered her out of the shower.

Piper didn't move out of their way. She instead crossed her arms over her chest, attempting to be unmovable. "I'm not moving until you tell me what's going on."

"Lucy, you got some 'splainin' ta do," Paige's teeth chattered. Needing an opportunity to talk to Phoebe alone, she held her sister's hand tightly as she orbed the two of them back down to the sunroom, hearing Piper shouting at them all the way down the stairs.

"HEY! NO ORBING! GET BACK HERE!"

Ignoring the yelling, Paige set her sister directly in front of her and hissed, "I'm telling you right now, either you march back upstairs when we're done here and explain this to Piper, or Leo and I will do it for you. This is it. I'm not covering for you anymore, and you know now that Leo knows, he won't either. You can't keep doing this. You've already got a split lip and a black eye. You orbed. How long before you end up like . . . You — I thought you were going to die, too. You've seen what happened when he — do you have any — I thought you were going to die!"

"I thought I was," Phoebe admitted, definitely scared. "I think the only reason I didn't is because I didn't actually see Gideon . . . with the knife, you know? I just — I don't know how it happened, but somehow I can't separate us anymore. Every time I turn around, it seems like something triggers a memory for him. Last night, all it took was seeing him sitting up on the bridge beam to remember so many things that I needed a map just to figure out where I was."

"That still doesn't explain where you're getting black eyes from," said Paige. "It doesn't explain what happened upstairs."

Exhausted and out of ideas, Phoebe sat down on the corner of the table and put her forehead in her hands. "I don't know. I just don't know."

"Four years ago, I would have accepted that answer, but I have been in this family for too long now to let that one lie. You guys were always telling me that 'I don't know' was never an acceptable answer, no matter what the problem if magic was involved. You can't change the rules on me whenever you feel like it. You have to know at least something, so start at the beginning. We'll figure out where to go from there."

"You already know the beginning," Phoebe argued weakly.

"Consider me addled," said Paige, crossing her arms over her chest. Pacing back and forth in front of her sister as if she was a drill instructor, she commanded, "Start talking, Missy."

Phoebe stared off through the windows, not wanting to look at her sister for the moment. She knew Paige was right; this had gone on long enough. As always, what had started out with good intentions had managed to turn into a disaster. She should have known better. It wasn't like she hadn't been a Halliwell her whole life. Their entire family history was peppered with good intentions that went sour. Mom and Grams had bound their powers with the best of intentions. They just had no idea that when the girls would finally get their powers back, the demonic world would be ready and waiting so that they wouldn't even have time to prepare themselves for the lifetime of battles ahead. Leo and Piper had started their marriage, thinking that they were more than capable of making it work, but look where it had landed them. Chris had ventured from the future with only a single-minded thought of saving his own brother. Hell, even Cole had had the best of intentions. Had he known that the Seer would trick him into becoming the new Source, had he known what would happen between them before it happened, he probably wouldn't have agreed to take on the Hollow. So far, the only one that was still out to the jury was Piper and Leo's marriage, and even that wasn't looking so great right now. Well, her predicament was out, too, but she wasn't going to count that one. Even thinking about it right now could bring on a memory, which was the last thing she needed to do.

Chris, the spell, or whoever was in control of this wacky little torture device apparently had other ideas. Just as vividly as it had been the last time she'd seen it, the glass of the windows exploded inward as she felt herself being tackled to the ground. She didn't have time to realize anything else as blackness overtook her thoughts.

IV.

Upstairs in the attic, Christopher was spooked. Really spooked.

After he'd had that talk with his father on the bridge, he had figured out that this other him had been incredibly important to the family. Even thinking on their conversation the day of Grandpa's funeral, it was right there staring him in the face. This other him had had such an impact on them that his father had traveled to the future to be sure that he was all right. Now though, he wasn't sure it had really sunk in for him until just a few minutes ago. Now? Now he was sufficiently disturbed. Whatever this other Chris had done, he had made the family love him so much that both of his aunts had apparently put themselves in mortal danger over his death. That was it, right? Why else would she suddenly be having visions or whatever about this other him dying? She had premonitions, not visions of the past, yet there they were anyway. How could he not be unnerved? It was enough to mess with anyone's head.

He stood in the middle of the attic, shivering in his uneasiness. Part of him, the part of him that was still capable of thinking about this rationally at the moment, was trying really hard not to think about the other thing that all of this told him about the other version of himself. The first Chris, if Phoebe's vision, encounter, whatever with the other him was to be an honest indicator (and he had no doubt that it was), had died in terrible fear and pain. If things had turned out differently the day he and Lucy were to come back, if their father hadn't changed his destination, he himself could have ended up in the exact same situation as the other Chris. So scared, so alone, so very dead. The way it had effected the entire family was the only evidence needed — it was no wonder that no one would tell him about the day he had been born. He wouldn't have wanted to know what was, quite possibly in their eyes, the way he was doomed to die either. He never would have wanted any of them to have to relive that either. For the first time in his life, after hearing Phoebe scream like that, he was actually glad that they wouldn't tell him about the ghost of impending death they must have seen every time they looked at him.

Christopher Halliwell did most definitely believe in spooks. Of all shapes and sizes.

I do believe in spooks. I do, I do, I do, I do, I do believe in spooks.

Shaking his head of the fear, he reminded himself that Phoebe wasn't done with her problem yet, and if he didn't get this show on the road, she might very well die next time with the memory of him. He had left his worried parents for the attic to find a spell to help her, not to wonder about what might have been. He had a family in the future to save, but it wouldn't matter worth a damn if they couldn't save the family in the Here and Now.

The young witch forced himself to snap out of it, strolling over to the podium with his hands reaching out to start flipping the pages of The Book of Shadows before he had even circled around behind it. It wasn't until his hands grasped thin air that he even realized that the mammoth volume was missing from its home. For a brief moment, he looked around wildly, searching it out and fearing the worst. It was as he opened his mouth to shout out to his mother that The Book was missing that he remembered that it was down in the conservatory where Paige had left it. Annoyed, he sighed and rolled his eyes back into his head. He was about to orb down to retrieve it when a bright swirl of orbs planted itself right at his feet.

Astonishingly white, the orbs circled round, nearly blinding him. Though bright, the orbs were obviously weak, circling in a laborious stutter to form a shape. Christopher stepped back, pulling the bookstand with him to make more room for the orber, just in case that was a problem. (He'd orbed into his own share of furniture as a kid. It happened.) The longer the orbs whirled, though, the more suspicious he grew.

Finally, the orbs settled into what appeared to be two struggling people. One, obviously the larger of the two, was working hard to hold the other much smaller person up and together. The orbs condensed further until the two figures tumbled violently out of them. A simultaneous crash into the floorboards jarred them both wickedly to Christopher's feet.

Christopher's heart stopped, literally. A pain in his chest was the only thing keeping him from thinking that he must be dead or something. It hurt so much that he knew he couldn't be either dead or dreaming. No living person could feel that and not be awake.

Lying at his feet, covered in blood, were both his brother and his sister, Excalibur clutched over her chest.

Stunned, enraged, and not looking for explanations, Christopher reared back and kicked at Wyatt, hard in the ear. His brother's head snapped back, forcing the elder of the brothers to lose what precarious balance he had. Wyatt held fast to their sister, though, arms encircling her about the chest. Christopher desperately reached his foot back again, this time determined to loose his brother's steeled grip on the unconscious body in his arms, but before he could swing it around, Wyatt looked up at him with an expression that startled Christopher's heart back to a breakneck pace.

"Help her, Chris," Wyatt pleaded, uncharacteristically sincere and seemingly terrified. "Oh, god, help her."

Christopher dropped to his knees with a grunt. He had to blink a few times, not sure he was hearing what he was hearing. This just couldn't be. It couldn't.

Angry that his brother was taking so long to get moving, Wyatt snipped, sounding very much like his usual self, "What are you waiting for?"

Still dazed, Christopher asked, "How? What are you — "

"She switched our powers," Wyatt interrupted in a panic. He reached up for his brother, who jumped back like he was dodging a hissing rattlesnake. Wyatt reached again, this time snagging Christopher's arm, and pulled him roughly down to his knees next to them. "I tried, but I can't heal her. Something is blocking me. You're going to have to do it."

"I can't! I've never been able to. You were too busy taking over the Underworld to teach me how, remember?"

As if he hadn't heard his brother at all, Wyatt ordered, "Damn it, Christopher, do something!"

"What did you do," seethed Christopher, not knowing in his fear that he was just short of screaming everything he said. He shoved the sword off Lucy's chest, her arms too limp to really hold on to it anyway. His hands ran up and down her body, feeling for any sign of the edges of the wound in the bloody mess in the center of her, but he couldn't find where it started or ended. His hands were shaking far too hard. He could feel the rattling all the way up through his arm and shoulder into his teeth. Even his words shook as he again demanded, "What the hell did you do?"

"I didn't do it," Wyatt weakly told his brother, clinging tighter to the girl in his arms like she was a shield. "She did."

"Liar," Christopher accused, hardly believing the same old 'It Wasn't Me' face that Wyatt had used his entire life whenever he was in trouble. Furious, Christopher glared through his brother without hearing anything Wyatt was saying. Instead of even humoring his brother, he desperately screamed for the only person he knew could help. "DAD!"

Undeterred by his brother's warranted but useless inability to believe him, Wyatt tried again to make Christopher hear him. He almost wouldn't have believed himself if he hadn't actually heard the tears in his own voice. They didn't make any sense to him. Nothing made sense to him; it was all so muddled. Wyatt hoped that the tears would work to his advantage as he said in a husky voice, "You have to believe me, Christopher. I don't want her to die any more than you do. I wouldn't lie about this. Not this. I don't know how she did it. She just started rhyming, and it all went black. There were so many of them, I had no idea what she was doing. It was — God, Chris, where's Dad?"

"He'll be here," the younger brother snapped. "Now what happened?"

"I'm telling you, I don't remember. It's all so fuzzy. I — We were at the manor. She — the baby's been making her really sick, really, really sick. I brought a doctor to see her, but he didn't have any answers about what was wrong with her either, so she talked me into taking her home. She said the fresh air would do her good. She thought that there was some kind of recipe in the kitchen for a potion that Mom supposedly had made when she and the other sisters were pregnant with all of us. I stayed outside on the patio while she went in to look. It was like everything was completely normal. After that, I'm not sure what happened. I — I know I didn't see them. When they attacked, I — there were so many . . . I lost track of her. She was standing in the doorway and rhyming. There was glass and — I don't remember!"

Christopher was quickly growing tired of Wyatt's spattered, barely coherent attempt to tell the story to suit him, to make himself look the innocent in all of it. He'd spent his entire life having to see through lies like these, and he wasn't about to let his sister die while Wyatt spun another one. He just didn't have time for this. In the meantime, the only thing he could do besides try to put the pieces together was scream his head off, and if that was what it was going to take, he'd be more than happy to do it. "DAD!" His eyes bore into his brother's, warning him without any mistake that Wyatt had better be telling the truth. "Before what? Wyatt, think! What happened to her? DAD!"

"All I remember is blackness. It was everywhere. Then it felt like every bone in my body was crushed. Everything went black and then it was just there in the middle of the air. I don't know how or what it was. The only thing I can think of to describe it is that it just sort of focused into this black cloud. I don't think she could see it, but it was like she was expecting to see something. She kept telling me to get up. I . . . I wanted to her to stay away, to close the doors and stay in the house, but she started coming toward me. She told me to call for Excalibur and the damned thing actually came to her. I don't know how. She just started swinging at the air, asking over and over where it was. I could hear her talking to someone, but I'm not sure. I really don't know. I think she knew that whatever she was doing had weakened me. I was about to try to orb her out of there anyway when it — I don't know — it saw her or felt her or something. The thing just rammed right into her and came out the other side. I don't know what it was. If I did, I — "

Willing his hands to do his father's magical healy thing, Christopher frantically waved them all up and down his sister's body, shaking them, as if all that was keeping it from working was a short in the wiring. At the same time, he continued to try to force a strangely docile Wyatt into piecing everything together for him. "How did you get here?"

"The spell. Our spell, the one for the snow gardens."

"Why would that bring you here? They haven't even been built in this time, and you've destroyed them in ours."

Smoothing her blood-matted blonde hair out of her ears, Wyatt looked down at Lucy and said, as if it were a great revelation, "That was never her safe place, Christopher. You were. We were. She didn't feel safe anywhere unless you were there. We are her sanctuary, not the gardens." He looked up, his eyes meeting his brother's. In them he saw a flicker of sweet nostalgia, but it quickly turned to business again. Going on to explain, Wyatt looked back down at her and said, "After it went through her, I got to her as fast as I could. She told me to find you. I knew she knew what was going on and asked her what I needed to do, but she kept telling me to tell you and then she just started saying the spell. She grabbed me about half way through and told me to finish it with her. It brought us to you. I think she knew it would. I'm not sure. I think that's how it happened, but it's all so —"

"Dad! I need you," Christopher yelled again. Then, having nowhere else to direct his anger, he venomously bit at his brother. "Of course you don't. The next thing I know, you're going to tell me that you don't remember exactly what happened because it wasn't your fault. Damn it! You're supposed to be the most powerful witch the world has ever seen. You are the next so-called King Arthur, Lord of Excalibur. So why is it that the rest of us are always trying to save your pitiful ass? Why are we always paying for your screw ups? Huh? And why in the hell are you blaming this on her? Take some fucking responsibility, for once in your life. Damn it! DAD! LEO!"

"Christopher?" Softly, Lucy whimpered, her eyes unopened but fingers reaching and curling around his. "Chris?"

"I'm here," he said, grateful to hear her voice. "I'm right here, honey."

"Is the baby okay," she asked, her hand too heavy to move again toward her stomach to feel for herself. "Is he?"

Even though he knew that there was no way in hell that the baby could have survived the mess that her entire torso had been turned into, he smiled reassuringly at her. He could pay the consequences of lying to her later. "He's fine, honey. You just worry about making yourself better right now."

"And Wyatt," she asked.

"Not going anywhere without you." He tried to smile for her, the first untwisted smile he could remember on his own lips in years.

Lucy tried to open her eyes but weakly closed them again once she had them half opened. She swallowed hard to try to make her mouth work. "I did it? Did I destroy it? Wyatt, you're safe?"

"I'm me, little girl. You did it. Remember?"

"Wyatt, what's she talking about? Destroy what — that cloud thing? I thought you said you didn't know what it was. What did you — "

Not to be interrupted by her big brothers as always, Lucy gathered up as much force as she could get into her voice and commanded, "Knock it off, both of you. Christopher, listen to me. You have to save him from here. It doesn't fix anything unless you do the same thing here. I think it's probably weaker here than it was back at home. You might have a chance if you get to it now. The evil, it — Daddy?"

Christopher looked up to see his father charging through the door. Relieved that things were finally looking up for his sister, he called hopefully, "Dad! Help!"

"Chr- — " The angel started, but then he saw the two familiar figures on the floor with his son and cringed. His sons, both of them, and his daughter — I'm going to be a grandfather! — all of his children were there, all of them covered in blood. Every panicky, fatherly instinct immediately took over. He raced over to the kids, hands already glowing. He dropped to his knees, his hands desperate to find the wound in his daughter's body. His eyes first found his eldest son, burning with an anger that he had rarely felt before. "What did you do? What the hell did you do?" Leo didn't wait for an answer and looked to his second son. "Did he hurt you?"

"What took you so long," Christopher asked, preferring not to answer that question.

"I was with your mother and aunts. Phoebe had another of these flashes or visions, whatever you want to call them. She was knocked out cold. I was trying to heal her when you called."

Under her father's hands, Lucy quietly coughed. For the first time since their arrival, she looked and sounded more afraid than concerned. "Christopher?"

The boy grinned comfortingly down on his sister. Their father was here now; he was going to fix it. They would all start over. Dad was going to make it all okay. Before he could put it into words, his attention was pulled away from her to the attic doorway where the three sisters were quickly falling into battle positions.

"Chris, we figured you forgot that The Book was downstairs. We heard a noise. Is everything — Step away from my son," Piper had started around the corner when she stopped just inside the door, her sisters flanking her with raised fists. Hands armed and dangerous, Piper warned the blonde-haired stranger, "I said step away now! You won't live long enough for me to have to tell you a third time."

Terrified enough as it was, Christopher cried in panic, "Mom! Get out of here! Please! You have to get out." He turned his attention back to his father and sister, both of whom were starting to cry. "Dad?"

"It isn't working," said Leo, numb with his own fear.

"Leo," Piper asked, unwilling to even lower her hands until she got an explanation of what she was seeing.

Furious at the inability of anyone in the family to do anything or to listen to him for one simple damned request, Christopher snapped at his mother. "GET OUT!" He didn't even care what she did next. She could be mad at him all she wanted right now. He had bigger things to think about. To his father he begged, "You're a doctor. Be a doctor and fix this. Please, Dad. You're the only one who can."

Leo shook his hands the same way Christopher had done moments before, just as irritated with his seeming inability to ever save any of his children from anything. He squeezed his daughter's hand in his, willing one last surge of healing into her. It was all he could do to swallow back his disappointment, but after a moment, he felt the change in him. Knowing that there was nothing more that he or his powers could do, Leo kissed his daughter for the first and what was going to be the last time, then stood up with finality. He bent over, kissed Christopher on the top of his head, and walked over to join the sisters. He stretched his arms wide to corral them out of the room, but they would only let him lead them as far as the door. Piper opened her mouth to ask what was going on, but Leo shook his head. When she stopped, he was almost sure it was the tears he knew were drowning his eyes that finally got through to her.

At the sound of a gasping whimper, Wyatt pulled his brother's attention back away from their father's retreat to their sister. "Chris? We're losing her." The now rapid, frantic gasping was scaring Wyatt in a way that he couldn't ever remember being frightened. He looked to his brother just as everyone else in the family had always seemed to him to do, and asked, "What do we do?"

Even though he knew it was futile, Christopher's eyes darted over to his father's one last time. "Dad?" When all his father could do was blink away tears, Christopher wiped away his own with the back of his hand. To his baby sister, he pleadingly croaked, "You need to tell me what did this to you so that I can find a way to fix it. You have — Come on, honey, you have to give me a chance to fix it. God, don't you leave me now. Don't make me the last one. Please."

Fading quickly and struggling to catch air, she stammered, "Y-you ar-aren't-t, no-ot anym-more. F-find the-the thing they m-m-miss-missed."

"What thing? Talk to me. Come on. Just keep talking."

Openly crying now, Lucy's voice took on the same pleading as her brother's, even as she struggled for breath to say anything at all. "It w-was the worst-worst d-day of his life-fe-life. I-I d-don't wan-wanna die-ie, Christopher. Do-don't let me d-die."

His heart now, finally, completely broken, Christopher choked, "Don't go. Stay with me."

"Stay with us," Wyatt begged. "You can't go now. Not now."

Lucy's chest rattled, air fighting for space in her lungs. Her eyes opened wide in confusion. She asked, "Chris-s?" Then, before he could stop it, her eyes glassed over. She whispered to the space around his shoulder with a weak smile, "O-okay-y, if-f you think-k so."

As the girl shut her eyes and her lungs didn't even try to reclaim the air it took to say those words, Christopher shook her shoulder gently to no response. His shakes grew stronger as he asked her repeatedly, "Okay what? Okay what?"

"Christopher," Wyatt sobbed, even though he knew he wouldn't get any sort of answer.

"No," Christopher wept. "You can't do this. Do you hear me? You can't leave me here alone. I can't do this alone. I — Don't do this!"

The only answer Lucy gave wasn't one of her own doing. As Christopher softly sobbed over her, the girl's body slowly disappeared, leaving her brothers empty handed and their father plagued with the searing image now of not one, but two of his children dying helplessly right in front of his very eyes.

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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.