Notes: So it turned out I had absolutely no internet over the holiday. Fun. But I did have my computer! Thus, here is chapter 4, and chapter 5 is a brief conversation away from being finished. Hopefully I will get to responding to comments tomorrow. Thank you all for reading!

"I wouldn't give up. There may be hope for you, yet." –Phoebe, "I Dream of Phoebe"

Chris and June met for coffee every other week for a few years. Chris tried holding down a job with his business degree and stayed long enough to pay off his loans and figure out that the so-called real world was not for him. June kept him updated on her daughter's progress through primary school and Chris imagined Melinda in her place. He imagined a sister he never knew but loved anyway and sometimes when he daydreamed he inserted himself, going to school with her and being a brother to her. He imagined Wyatt, the older sibling, sometimes bullying, but mostly good, and never anything like the Wyatt his had grown up to be.

"I had to tell him that I just wouldn't pay the rent. Until the heat is fixed, nothing doing," June was saying. "I don't care that it's not cold out yet. What if we had a freak snow storm or something? This is Chicago, and I can't raise a daughter in a cold apartment."

"Yeah," Chris said, idly sipping his coffee.

"You know," she said, "this whole conversation thing works better when both parties pay attention."

"I'm paying attention!" he said. "Your heat's out; you're pissed."

"Well then maybe you should help me out with it."

He put his coffee down. "What? 'Help you out with it?' Sounds like personal gain, June. You know I'm not into that."

"Come on, Chris," she whined. "You did that thing when the power went out last winter. This really isn't that much different."

"June, at that point, it really was cold. It's 75 degrees out today. You don't need the heat, and your landlord will take care of it."

"So I guess asking you for the pony my daughter wants would be out of the question, too, huh?"

Chris pretended to look thoughtful. "No, that I think I could handle," he said.

She laughed, but sobered quickly. "You're right, I shouldn't ask you for magical fixes. I'm sorry."

"Hey, don't worry about it. I understand the temptation, believe me."

"If I needed something that wasn't personal gain, you'd help me out again though, right?"

"You mean if we get that freak snow storm you mentioned? Yeah, I'd fix your heat then. Promise."

While Melinda and Wyatt grew bigger, and Leo was starting to see shades of the older Wyatt he had seen once or twice, Leo spent time looking for Chris. He didn't tell Piper or her sisters, but he couldn't let it go himself. He spent time on top of the bridge, in the place he'd felt both furthest away from, and closet to, his other son. But no matter how long or hard he tried to cast out his senses, he felt nothing.

After days on the bridge he was usually surly, and found it difficult to attend to his duties to both the magical realm and his family. Piper only had to tell him once that he was upsetting the children to make him realize he needed another way to find Chris, a way that would keep him from estranging the rest of his family in the meantime. So when he was frustrated, he would go lurking around Up There.

Elders were a gossipy sort. Of course, it was in the name of working towards the greater good, but really, he thought it was because they were a bit too bored after drifting around in white washed nothingness for decades on end. It was Up There that he had overheard the conversation about the whitelighter who couldn't heal, and it was Up There he went to try and learn more.

For years he heard almost as much nothing as he gained on the bridge. Sure, there were other things to learn about, new demons were constantly becoming a threat and subsequently being vanquished. Occasionally there was a dead whitelighter or dead charges, but most of those cases were resolved quickly enough to become old news. Only a few things lingered, like the sporadic witch turning up dead when he or she hadn't been involved in any sort of spell casting or magic making. Usually those were left to be dealt with by the local authorities instead, because the 'real world' often did encroach upon their magical one. Leo took the more interesting or dangerous sounding cases to the sisters as he always had, and they never had any reason to question how he had come about the knowledge in the first place; it was his job, after all.

Another five years of snooping around yielded next to nothing. He heard only a few more mentions of the whitelighter who couldn't heal, but it seemed that there wasn't much reason to talk about a whitelighter with no real charges, other than to speculate upon what would happen if that whitelighter ever found himself with an injured charge and design contingency plans. Leo was convinced this was Chris, but any elder he tried to question seemed to know even less than Leo did himself.

Piper and her sisters raised their girls with one eye towards a normal life and one eye towards a magical one and constantly focused on forming a balance between the two. So when Melinda wanted to go over to a friend's house for a sleepover, of course that was fine, so long as they had a discussion first about what to do in the event of a magical emergency, how to avoid using powers no matter what, and to always be polite and clean up after herself. Piper imagined that in a few years, the conversation would be about parties and dances and would go, "No drinking, no drugs, no magic. Be home by 10pm."

Wyatt was a slightly different case, and after elementary school they had sent him to the newly opened Magic School, run by Paige herself, where often he was in classes taught by his aunt or even his father. He was doing excellently with his active powers, keeping them under control as his strength grew, but he needed work with things like spell casting and potion making. Piper wanted him to be prepared for a life of magic, and for a life where as the eldest, he would be able to take care of his sister and cousins. She also wanted to foster ties to the magical community, because a little part of her remembered the Wyatt he could have been and wanted him to have as many positive influences as possible.

Once or twice, when Leo brought them a demon to take care of, they would look at each other and smirk because like son like father, but other than that, they never mentioned Chris. Piper tried to picture him at ten years old, like Melinda, going to school and making friends, and coming home and playing with Wyatt, but she often thought that the picture she formed in her head wasn't anything like the real thing. She thought of Chris as perpetually neurotic, and even the ten year old wanted to take care of demons before playing video games or doing his homework.

But she knew that couldn't have been true. The little she'd learned from Victor, and from Chris himself, indicated that before she'd died, Chris had been happy enough, and definitely not neurotic. He may have had father issues, but she knew from personal experience that that did not result in a man like Chris. Having a dead mother and an evil older brother was what changed him.

So in five more years, Piper tried not to dwell on what could have been, and tried to raise her children as best she could. She never told them, nor did she allow anyone else to tell them, about Chris. There was no point in entertaining thoughts of what could have been, and there was no point in scaring young children with dead relatives they had never even known and who would not respond to a summoning or any other magical attempts at communication.

Not that she had tried or anything.

Chris knew June for just about five years, and after that, she claimed a wanderlust that had haunted her all her life and took off for warmer climes. Chris was sad to see her go. He wasn't a naturally gregarious person, and had very few real acquaintances, even after ten years in Chicago.

"This is last time I can meet for coffee," she'd said. "I'm taking my daughter and heading out after this. I need to see more of the world that isn't covered in white for half the year. I want to see more greens and blues."

"There are a few lovely art museums here," he'd said. "Lots of opportunities for green and blue."

"Chris. I'm leaving. And I think you should, too. For five years I've watched you sit there and not age a single day. You look exactly the same. I don't know what's up, but I think you should go home and get it checked out. Your family can help you with whatever it is."

"I like Chicago. I like the weather…sort of."

"You don't mean that."

"I have obligations here. I can't just leave."

"You can always leave. Nothing should be able to keep you where you don't want to be."

"Really, June, I have a job here."

"Leave it. Seriously. I'm telling you from experience here. Get out of Chicago and go home."