"Well? I think you owe all of the Elders a clarification of what happened," the Elder said, folding her arms across her chest and fixing her gaze on Pattie, who drew back from Paige and pushed herself to her feet.

Pattie knew this Elder, her name was Sandra and she was by far the nicest of the beings 'up there.' If even Sandra wasn't around to be an ally this time Pattie knew she was in trouble. She matched Sandra's stance, crossing her arms and leveling her stare with the Elder's. "Why should I have anything to say to you?"

"Your mistakes were disastrous on so many levels, you may very well have messed up much more from your own time if you hadn't been more careful," she warned, fully expecting Pattie to come to her senses and realize what the impact was of her spell. Unfortunately, the opposite happened; the teenager stood firmer. Sandra had only known Pattie by one or two words as she grew up, none of the Elders had ever needed to deal with her actions personally seeing as they usually tied in with the rest of the family. But now, confronting her, Sandra realized how stubborn Pattie truly was. She'd only met Prue in the afterlife, but Sandra could still see the similarities and from her experiences with Prue, she knew there was a rough road ahead of her.

Pattie took a second to gather a response, and then replied. "You expected me not to be careful? No confidence in the naïve teenage witch, huh?"

Sandra hadn't considered how her words sounded and immediately tried to conceal them with ones easier to bear. "That's not what I meant, I –"

"Then say what you mean, or don't talk to me," Pattie interrupted, clearly testing her limits. She'd been by her family to always have manners with authority, but this was one exception, she figured. When Sandra sighed, and dropped her arms to her side, Pattie realized that she in fact had nothing to say. So Pattie did. "My mother said that I never should regret what happened when I went back to her." She smiled mischievously, "And I don't."

Sandra took that in, trying to contain her anger. This child was like Prue, exactly. They both had the same ability to make her want to scream with their pride, their strength. "Your choice to create that spell wasn't a smart one, Patricia. It could have led to changes you wouldn't have liked." She was just repeating herself now, and Pattie didn't enjoy it, she felt like she was being treated like a kid again.

"First of all, don't you dare call me Patricia, ever because you are not my mother, got that?" she clarified, anger growing as she spoke, a classic Halliwell trait. "Second of all, if my spell was so bad, why didn't you interfere and stop me? You must have known that it wasn't my intent to be sucked into a different time."

"We tried," Sandra admitted, sighing at her own shame.

"But…?" Pattie wondered aloud when the woman paused suspiciously.

"You…were a little too powerful for us to stop. A little more powerful than we actually realized," Sandra finished, watching Pattie's jaw drop and noticing that she wasn't alone in the discovery of the girl's sole power. Sure, for the Charmed Ones power came in three, but for this child it came in one.

As for Pattie, it'd always been Wyatt who was represented as high and mighty being the first born in the next generation. They'd assumed because Pattie wasn't born into magic seeing as their powers had been dormant at the time and that Prue was gone and technically no longer part of the Power of Three, the next generation thing skipped over her. Pattie hadn't enjoyed that at first because it'd played so much attention Wyatt's way for his protection. It made her feel like some sort of outcast, not being the strongest when she was the oldest, like her mother had been. But then, somewhere along the line Pattie had grown to like that she'd been skipped, it'd taken the fuss off of her.

Apparently, everyone had been wrong.

"So wait a minute here, for six years now we thought that my little cousin harnessed this great mysterious ability to be the strongest out there but now your going and taking all of that back and telling me that my strength is greater? Me?" Pattie cried exasperatedly. She could hardly believe it and she wasn't sure how it made her feel.

Sandra clasped her hands together and took a deep breath, trying to prevent Pattie from further exploding. "Yes. Your powers were just…latent, I guess you could put it, undeveloped."

"But she's had them for nearly ten years now and my son has only been around for six," Piper pointed out and Pattie glanced at her, forgetting until that moment that her family was still there watching, discovering a plethora of new information from this argument that would not suit her well in the future.

"Yes, but powers work through strength and emotion. Up until that moment, Pattie had never focused so hard on a spell in her life. She gathered all of her vigor and it worked, full force, better than we could have imagined."

Pattie couldn't help herself, "So you…couldn't stop me from going to 2001 either then, could you have?"

"That actually, was in our control," Sandra admitted, watching Pattie's anger grow.

"Why? Because I was further back in time and without my real powers?" Sandra nodded and Pattie dropped her hands with an angered groan. "So why did you then? To see me suffer?"

She didn't feel Phoebe's hands on her shoulders until they were restraining her slightly from lunging towards the Elder. The feeling calmed her frustration a bit, much like that night at the park. Still, once Pattie had settled she shook both of Phoebe's hands away, not wanting to risk breaking down and showing her vulnerability yet.

Sandra stared at her for a second, as if trying to see past the tough exterior and locate the little girl within her. "We let you go through with it," she finally explained, "because we knew we had to let you learn a lesson from all of this, otherwise the trip would have been pointless and you would have kept at your goal."

She didn't say what that goal was; Pattie knew the reason being was because she was the one who would have to further explain it to her family later.

"You said before that I could have messed everything up," Pattie reminded Sandra, her voice cracking.

"But what you didn't let me say was that we knew you wouldn't. Once you got there, it didn't take you long to realize that you couldn't stop her death without pretty obvious effects. We didn't actually think you'd watch it happen," Sandra told her, noticing that Pattie's hands were clenched into fists and shaking.

The child shook her head. She asked for the facts, but couldn't handle extra, "Stop, I'm not reliving it again."

"I'm sorry," the Elder replied, and she was.

"If you had control over everything in the past, why didn't you just bring me back here on your own? I couldn't do it without my powers because it takes even more strength to get back to your own time then to get out of it, but I bet you could have," Pattie guessed meekly. She wanted to fall into her family's comfort but she stood strong. After all, everyone told her she was like her mother, it was time to prove it.

Sandra's face softened. She said gently, "Power wasn't the only factor. We couldn't send you back because even if you didn't realize it, you weren't ready yet. Your inner magic, powers or not, probably would have repelled ours. Once you'd coped with your situation and you allowed yourself to let magic bring you home, we just let you rely on family. Time travel may be mysterious, but we knew the magic of the Halliwells combined could overpower it."

Pattie ran through all of this in her head. She was so powerful that the Elders couldn't interfere with her spell, and then wouldn't interfere when they did have the option of stopping her from going to 2001. She was so confused, and it showed.

"We may not have played a huge part in getting you back home, but we sent the ones who did," Sandra finally continued when Pattie did not.

Pattie picked her head up slightly, eyeing Sandra. "My dad?"

Piper and Phoebe both perked up to that, in the many years since Andy's death, Pattie had almost never mentioned him. It wasn't that she concealed that fact that she missed him; her grief over Prue was just more pertinent because of the years they'd spent together.

"Yes," Sandra told her. "And…your grandmother and great-grandmother."

"I've summoned them before," Pattie countered, a little stronger now. "That wasn't new to me."

"We specifically asked them not to go at first, feeling it might make it even harder on you, that you might not be able to take all of the lost family," Sandra recalled as Pattie remembered setting the candles in a circle and calling for Patty to come to her aid and then later doing the same when she had come up with a plan.

Both times their arrivals hadn't been immediate. Was that because of the Elders?

"So why did they come then?" Pattie wondered, staring at Sandra and waiting for an answer.

"Your grandmother was persistent. She reminded us of what had already happened because of the lack of guidance when you needed it, saying had we just sent her down in your own time or maybe have even sent down your mother that maybe this wouldn't have been happening now. Patty guilted us into letting her go, so we did."

Pattie smiled at the thought of her grandmother jumping to her defense. While Patty was definitely the gentler out of herself and Penny, the teen didn't doubt that when it came to her family you didn't mess with her.

That was the way it was with all Halliwells.

"We didn't try to go up against your great-grandmother when they went to visit you without your request or the second time you summoned them. It would have been suicide," Sandra said, smiling.

Pattie found herself laughing too, unexpectedly. That was her Grams. "Good choice."

"We pick our battles wisely," Sandra joked. Pattie wasn't sure she'd seen an Elder laugh before. "Which was why, when your father nearly demanded that he be the one to convince you that it was all right to return home, we didn't refuse."

"He told me that I could handle it. He was the only one I could bring myself to believe," Pattie's voice dissolved to a barely audible whisper, but her aunts still heard it. "He told me I wasn't alone."

"Because you're not," Phoebe spoke up. Pattie turned half-heartedly to look at her, then back to Sandra.

"Thank you," she said, though no one knew who it was directed towards.

Sandra, seeing how pained Pattie obviously was, held off for a second, considering the circumstances. She'd gone into this conversation convinced that the child needed to face some sort of consequences for her actions, but now it was clear that she'd already experienced them.

She'd had to come home.

Offering forward her hand, Sandra began, "Why don't we just leave it at that then?"

Pattie gaped at her, surprised, "You're not going to take away my powers or something?"

"I think you've already faced enough, don't you?" she asked and Pattie nodded slowly as if she couldn't believe she was off the hook. Then, a sealed agreement, they shook hands.

Almost as if, as an Elder and a witch, they were equals.

Then Sandra orbed out.

She left them there like that, the five of them alone. Pattie looked at each one of them separately, noticing the looks that glimmered in each of their eyes. Each stare was different, but she couldn't read what they were trying to say. Anger, shame, empathy maybe?

Billie was the first to speak up, hoping to lighten the mood a little bit. She wrapped her arms around Pattie, giggling. "Well, I think you already look older. Must be all that time travel," she joked, doing her best to put Pattie in a better disposition.

Instead, Pattie pulled away from her, gazing up towards Billie shamefully. The college girl had been like her big sister the past few years and while she appreciated the effort in her defense, Pattie wasn't ready to face her family like she'd thought originally. There was someone she needed to talk to first. "I'm outta here," she mumbled and then, realizing how much she missed her powers, cloaked herself with an invisibility shield.

Although she heard the sounds of her aunts calling after her as she ran out the door, Pattie just tuned them out. She slowed to a walk as she hit the sidewalk, not afraid of anyone catching her. After all, how could they?

In the back of her mind she heard the scolding of Prue's voice, telling her how she knew it was wrong to run away, asking if she'd learned anything from her trip and if she had, why she was doing this.

No one chased her out the door or down the steps. She walked nearly a mile with the invisibility guard still protecting her from sight. In many ways, Pattie was thankful for this power. When she walked by stores, there was no reflection staring back at her in the display window; Pattie didn't have to see the guilt and frustration that was glowing in her eyes. No one could recognize her, or give her concerned eyes, or try to help here. She had literally vanished.

That was what made it okay to cry.

She hadn't done it in front of the Elder because she wanted to appear stronger. But looks were purely deceiving, and her aunts already knew that she was concealing a huge burden. There was no pretending there.

The San Francisco beach was approximately two miles from her home, and after twenty minutes of walking she took off into a run, sprinting the second mile in eight minutes until she reached the barren beach. Dropping to her knees in the sand and panting, Pattie stared up into the sky. It was painted with swirls of coral, red, orange and even magenta as the sun began to rise on the eastern side of the horizon. That was when she noticed how early it really was, that time really had been moving differently in 2008 as opposed to 2000.

It worked to her benefit that the beach was closed and would be for an hour or two more. There was no one around to notice what she was about to do. Scampering off near the rocks which were piled high above her head and created an area isolated from everything else, she kicked off her sandals and let them sink into the wet sand as the water rushed higher up and finally swarmed around her ankles, soaking her skin.

It was freezing.

"Ugh," Pattie dropped her head back, moaning, but sat through it anyway. Once the water dwindled, absorbing in the sand and numbing her feet, she couldn't feel it anymore, not even when the next wave came.

Now if only she could make her whole body go numb.

There'd been one thing she wanted to do before she had the courage to explain to her family, in depth, what happened. There was someone she needed to talk to; someone she knew could give her peace of mind. But after all this guy had gone through with her family, she wasn't sure he'd even come.

Spirits of air, sand and sea
Converge to set the Angel free
In the wind I send this rhyme
Bring death before me before my time.

The wind picked up around her, sending a chill creeping down her spine. Pattie looked to her right and then her left, nervously. Had she thought this through properly before making any decisions?

"Well, isn't this a surprise."

"Oh," Pattie said, unconsciously getting to her feet, but still feeling small as she looked up at the figure draped in black. He stared at her. "You came."

"I think I'm looking back into the past," he noted, and said nothing else.

"Why? Did my mother…did she call you once like this?" Pattie asked hesitantly, although she already knew the answer in her heart. "She did, didn't she? She made you come to her, right? That's why she came here after Davidson died, to talk to you?" She remembered Prue telling her not long after they encountered the Seekers about how she'd met Death, even talked to him. But she'd never known the specifics. It figured she'd recreate them without even meaning to.

"Your mother and I crossed paths, yes," Death told her. "And I'll tell you the same thing I told her all those years ago. You cannot win against me. I cannot bring any person you may have lost back. Not an innocent, a friend, your father," he looked at her pointedly. "Not even your mother."

"I don't want you to bring her back!" Pattie shrieked, caught up in her own emotions.

"Yes you do, you feel guilty and you want me to bring her to you to prove that whatever part you played in her final minutes didn't contribute to her death. But I can't bring her back to you. You know that as well as I do." He had almost no emotion in his voice as he spoke, but it still caused Pattie to react.

"You think you know my thoughts so well, but you don't!" the teen yelled, dissolving to tears as she fell back on to a rock and wept.

Death didn't seem fazed. "No, I know you as well as I know any other grieving daughter or orphaned child. But it's not my job to ease your pain or hold your hand; I just deliver souls to where they need to be."

Pattie looked up, disgusted. "You're an evil being."

The Angel sighed. He wondered how he managed to deal with the Halliwells in the past; they were like a never ending wall of emotion, always ready to make his job more difficult. "Death isn't evil; it's just a part of life. You can't stop it any more than you can stop the sun from rising and setting each day. If you stay angry at me forever, then you're setting yourself up for vulnerability," he said, watching as she glanced up at him, as if for the first time she was really hearing him. "Your mother discovered that too. It'll do you well to learn from her mistakes."

She wanted to fume at the mention, yet again, of her mother, but deep down Pattie knew he was right. She'd wanted some sort of proof from the Angel of Death that she'd made the right decision in coming back, and she couldn't have it. He couldn't bring Prue to her. Pattie had probably known that all along.

It dawned on her then, that she wasn't even sure what else she could possibly say.

"You may as well say what you want to say to me now and stop wasting time. If I'm to keep the order of the Grand Design, I can't waste my whole day on this conversation," Death said, waiting for her to do whatever it was that was going to satisfy her, but Pattie was clueless.

"Just go," she waved him away without looking. "I don't even know why I called you."

"Yes you do. This family always has some sort of bone to pick with me. Patricia isn't it?" she nodded, cringing, "I can feel your need to blame me for this, Patricia. So go ahead then, blame me for the mess you got yourself tied up in, because you believe death is what caused you to act as you did."

Pattie felt the tears returning. "No, just leave me alone."

But Death was persistent. If she was going to work so hard at interrupting his day, he was going to be sure they were finished before he vanished again. "You asked for me and I came. Honestly, I don't care what problems you have, I'd just like to avoid another confrontation with you witches in the future."

At that, Pattie broke. She slammed her fists against the solid stone, screaming, "If you want me to shout, I will! Why do you do it? How do you get away from all of it knowing that you cause so much pain for families? How do you exist knowing you ended a life?" She wanted to tear her hair out she felt so weak, defenseless. It was the one thing you couldn't stop.

"That's the thing you aren't getting. I don't kill people, Patricia; I just take their souls after they're already gone. I'm not evil," he reminded her. "I didn't choose to take your father or your mother."

It was strange when Death actually sat down next to her on the rocks as Pattie pulled her feet to her body and stared out into the water. She contemplated all he'd just told her. "Then what did?"

"Something much bigger than either of us," he replied, gentler now, showing some sort of sympathy but not much. "It can't be stopped, so it's best not to fight it. Life has no meaning without death, because without an end people would not have a point." He watched as Pattie gripped her legs tighter, as her hair blew in the wind, as a single tear made a river down her cheek and created a small puddle on the boulder below. She was different than the other Halliwells, Death realized; she was more open to change without even comprehending it. "If you blame death forever, you're going to lose yourself, just like Prudence did. You cannot pit yourself against me, you have to accept me. Release your anger."

Tucking her hair back behind her ear, Pattie sighed. She thought of Prue.

"If I can't be angry at you, then what?" she queried, helplessly. "Can I be angry?"

"Life is unfair, Patricia," Death explained. "I take children who are too young to have any experience at life and husbands that never get to make up with their wives after a fight. I take a straight A student who was just accepted into college or an elderly man who just welcomed a granddaughter." Those instances were all familiar to death as he laid them out in front of her. They were common, because Death wasn't usually expected. "Be angry at the situation, at the creature that caused her demise. Grieve," he told her.

Pattie knew the ending to the sentence because Prue had said it to her after her own confrontation with Death. She hadn't been too convinced of it then, Pattie remembered, but maybe they did make sense. "Grieve," she repeated. "And then move on."

Even Death seemed surprised she could recall that.

"You should learn this now, you'll be better off," he told her.

"Are you going to take my family?" she whispered quietly, almost afraid of the answer.

"No," Death told her firmly. "They are not on my list, not yet anyway. But when one of them is, I suggest you remember this conversation and remember the bigger picture." Then, he actually touched her and Pattie felt herself quiver. Something about Death made her anxious. She shifted, brushing her hair away and looking at him. "I cannot spare one without affecting the cosmic balance of things."

It was hard for Pattie to grasp the thought of a future without her aunts. But then again, she'd once thought she couldn't live without her mother and now here she was. Maybe death wasn't the end of the world.

Had she finally found something to alleviate her heartache?

"Do you remember taking her?" Pattie finally spoke up. "Do you remember taking my mother?"

"That is against everything I'm supposed to represent," he warned her. But for some reason, when Death saw the gaze in her eyes, he changed his mind. The longing glimmer of hope Pattie had, that maybe this was the one piece of relief he could actually offer. "Yes, Prue was one hard to forget," he recalled, standing.

Was that a bad thing? Pattie wondered. She felt her heart skip a beat, pressing herself up. Death had his back to her, but he'd answered, which was more than Pattie believed she'd get to begin with, now she had to know more. She just had to if she was ever going to get any peace.

She thought of Prue, discovering she was dead. No matter how well she may have known her mother, Pattie couldn't come to an accurate conclusion of how she might react. Here was her chance to find out.

"I need to know. Was she okay?"

"What do yo—"

Pattie cut him off, her own voice shaking, "How did she react? Did she make it to…the other side?"

He stayed silent for a long time. "She fought me. For you. For her sisters. She told me she wasn't ready and that they weren't ready. And neither were you."

"I wasn't," Pattie replied softly. "I wasn't."

"Death's not about being ready, it's about when it's your time," the Angel clarified, and Pattie sniffled. "She stopped fighting me when she realized that. She allowed herself to be just a soul. Not a mother, a sister, or a witch. Just a spirit that needed to be guided to where she was supposed to be. And she made me promise to tell you that she made it safely, and that she'd be watching you."

"Really?" Pattie inquired, becoming more intrigued. Prue had always been the leader, for her to sacrifice her power and let someone help her was remarkable enough on its own. Death really was an inimitable moment. Not only did it change people on Earth, it changed the spirits too. "Did she make it safely, like she said?"

Death nodded, and then he added, "I saw to that personally."

"Can she really watch over me?" Pattie wondered aloud, staring towards the sky, recollecting the times where she, as a child, would look for the face of Prue in the clouds as a sign that she was really up there looking back at her. "Is that just something people say?" Pattie asked again, calming down a bit.

"Even I don't have all the answers," the Angel of Death admitted.

"I still don't understand this completely," Pattie conceded, clasping her hands together and taking a deep breath and she smoothed all of the information over in her mind. "It might take me some time to grasp."

"People are never given enough time, use yours wisely. One day, you'll be on my list too." When Pattie's eyes widened in fear, he quickly jumped to correct her. "But for today, you are not," Death assured her. Pattie thought of those who were having their final moments and for a moment she was scared for them, for the day it would be her. Death, seeing the expression on her face, jumped in. "What time you spend fearing me is also wasted time. From what I know, it's a peaceful end. That's why people have to live, to get there. Death has a meaning."

Smiling, Pattie nodded. She understood. "Thank you."

A wave crashed to shore, frightening the teen as she pulled herself back out of instinct. Letting out a breath and looking back to where Death stood she was surprised to notice he was no longer there.

She thought again of those people whose souls he was going to collect, and then replayed Death's last words. At the idea of Prue waiting for her, one day, Pattie wasn't scared anymore.

"I just hope that when the time comes, I can be as brave as you were, Mom," Pattie prayed, and another tall collapse of water onto the shore as a wave broke was her answer. Prue had to be with her. She felt her mother's presence with her, assuring her that she could be brave.

And then another voice complied. "Of course you will be."

Startled, Pattie turned to find Piper and Phoebe climbing over the rocks, without Paige. She wondered why. Her mind jumped to conclusions before she could stop it. Maybe Paige had figured it out, maybe she didn't want to see Pattie ever again, maybe she was too mad to confront her.

"What have we said about running away from your problems?" Phoebe scolded, even as she pulled her niece into a tight hug, happy to have Pattie in close proximity again. She'd always been so overly protective of Pattie, especially when she was a little girl, so afraid that if Pattie was out of her sight for too long, she'd disappear.

"Technically, I didn't run away," she muttered. "A spell backfired and catapulted me into the middle of them."

Piper rolled her eyes, trying to smother her own laughter. Sometimes her niece was too much. "I see."

Pattie sighed, not fighting Phoebe's embrace and instead inching closer to her because now she didn't have to hide anything, she could explain it all. "I screwed up," she murmured, gazing out as the rays of the rising sun began to sparkle on the water. "I screwed up big time."

Phoebe wrapped her arms around Pattie's, enveloping her niece tighter and grabbing her hands. "Well, sweetie, you're a teenager. It's kind of your job to mess things up," she said, trying her best to make sense of things.

"Not like this," Pattie spoke softly, choking on her words. "Did I scare you?"

"A little bit," Piper told her, but when she saw Phoebe's glare she admitted, "A lot. We couldn't figure out what exactly you'd gotten yourself into, but we knew it wasn't by a demon. Nevertheless, we figured it wasn't good."

"I'm really sorry," Pattie apologized, feeling hot tears spill down her face and not having the concern to wipe them away. Phoebe kissed her forehead with empathy, rocking her niece back and forth in her arms. "I'm such a bad person," Pattie cried, sobbing harder.

Even Phoebe gentle swaying of her body wasn't enough to calm Pattie. Despite all the crying she had done previously, she had been waiting for this moment all along to unload her greatest emotions.

"Ssh, sweetie, ssh, it's all right. Just try to breathe for me, okay?" Phoebe hushed her, smoothing her hand over Pattie's hair, breathing slowly and deeply hoping Pattie might do the same. Piper joined her and Pattie, seeing this, tried to focus and pull herself together. "Good," Phoebe said when she her crying decreased to minor whimpers. "Pattie, you have to talk to us. I know you're ashamed of what happened, but we can't help you if you don't tell us."

Pattie remembered what she'd told her younger self before parting. It all lies in family.

Taking a deep breath, Pattie began her story. "So this is what happened…"

Cliffhanger? I know, I know. Sorry to leave you hanging. I really was hoping this chapter might contain a little more, but I felt I left you guys waiting long enough. I didn't get too many reviews last time, I'm worried. Am I losing my touch here? Thank you for helping me reach 80 though! That's amazing. I tried really hard to keep true to the character of the Elder and the Angel of Death here so I'd love to know what you think. There are going to be some big things revealed next chapter. I can't believe this story is almost over, and I promise, I'll try to have a new chapter up sooner!

You guys are awesome!

Megan