AN: Chapter 5! And moving along steadily...I have an outline that says 13 chapters right now, of course, always subject to change. Anyway, I own nothing, even though I'd like to. I hope you enjoy!

"Look, I haven't been a whitelighter very long, okay?" –Chris, "Valhalley of the Dolls, Part 1"

It turned out that Chris didn't have to decide whether or not to stay in Chicago after June was gone. The decision was taken out of his hands when one of his charges, the football player, decided to move to Florida to cheer on his favorite team, the Gators, and the other charge disappeared. He wasn't wholly surprised to wake up one morning and not be able to sense her, because she had often gone off on vision quests and the like before (involving means more fungal than magical) and fallen off his radar. He had every confidence she would turn up eventually.

So instead of going in to work, he had answered the summons Up There, and found himself back in a garden he hadn't visited in over ten years.

"Are you giving me new charges?" he asked his designated elder when she approached.

"Surely you're bored of that by now?"

"Why would I be? I watched my charges, I went to college, and I got a job. I finally had a shot at a real life."

"How was it?" she asked, and sat down on a bench. She seemed genuinely curious.

He sat with her and they looked out over the garden together. It was exactly the same.

"It was okay. Classes were interesting, the job was alright. You did give me boring charges, though. I did more magic helping out a friend than I did helping out my charges."

She paused for a moment before speaking like she was taking that in, then said, "Perhaps that was your mistake."

"What?" He tried to think of when he had made a mistake. Neither of his charges had needed him. He had checked in on them and made sure they weren't getting in over their heads, which was easy since neither of them had known any real magic, and everything had been always been fine.

She looked at him steadily, and was calm, almost disinterested when she said, "One of your charges is dead, Chris."

"That's not possible," he said. "I would know."

"It's alright. The witch died of natural causes. Well, as natural as a drug overdose can be, but not magical, nonetheless."

He didn't know if that was supposed to make him feel better, or worse. A magical death meant he had failed as a whitelighter. A non-magical death still meant he had failed to oversee his charge. "When did this happen?" he asked, even though he already knew.

"Last night. You were aware that she liked to dabble, correct?"

"She always was good with plants…" he murmured.

"Chris," she admonished.

"I was aware."

The first time he had been unable to sense her he had freaked out and was frazzled and anxious by the time he'd found her, passed out in a friend's apartment. The times after that hadn't even fazed him.

"And you didn't think it right to intervene?"

He knew how to deal with a lot of things, like darklighters, demons, and all sorts of things, including an older brother worse than anything in the Source's wildest dreams. But drugs and other human problems were not really his area, especially not when both he and the elders knew they had been assigned as a cover, a ruse to keep him happy.

"You gave me fake charges," he said. "Why would I have intervened?"

She sighed. "She was still a witch, Chris, powerful or not. You still could have helped her."

"It's not like she was addicted," he said. "I'm not in the lifestyle management business. If a demon was attacking her, I would have stepped in."

She studied him for a while and he wished he knew what was going on in her head. "Whatever the case," she said, "the council has decided not to assign you any new charges for the time being."

"Okay. So what does that mean? I should follow the other one to Florida?"

"No, we've decided to reassign that witch to a new whitelighter."

Chris stood up, starting to feel like the other shoe was about to drop and he wasn't going to like it.

"So I have no charges."

"Correct."

"And? What does that mean?" he repeated.

She looked up at him. "We think that you could use some experience dealing with people on a more human basis."

"Are you kidding me? You're telling me you don't think I play well with others?"

"Perhaps if you'd gotten to know your charge as a person, you could have helped her with her drug problem and made her a better witch."

"Is this a joke? I thought whitelighters were supposed to remain hidden from their charges anyway. Now you're telling me that I was supposed to make friends with them? What's next? Marry them and start a family?"

"You're overreacting."

"I'm not overreacting, and I'm not bad with people. I had friends in Chicago."

"You had one friend, if my sources are correct."

"So if I had thrown a party every night you would have been happy? But that's not it, is it? You don't care about how many friends I had. You care about how much I care." He glared down at her. "You want me to be more like my father."

She didn't respond, and after a moment he threw his hands up in disgust and turned away from her to head down a path that lead no where in a garden that didn't even really exist.

He paced in front of a fountain and couldn't even process everything that he was learning. He had gone from having another mediocre day in a mediocre life where he did a decent enough job of watching charges that didn't need watching, to having a backwards day where his charge was dead and the elders told him that he needed to improve his social skills.

"When we met the first time," he said, "you knew who I was. You knew what I had done to save Wyatt. You knew it wasn't all good magic and play-by-the-rules."

He turned around and she was there, just as he had known she would be, standing patiently.

"We want you to go home, Chris. Your parents would do their jobs better if they could stop worrying about you."

"That's what this is about?"

"You would do a better job, be a better witch, if you weren't still living in a world where Wyatt could turn evil at any moment. It's over. You can go home now."

"I already told you, no. There is no home for me there."

She turned and began to walk away from him this time. Over her shoulder she called back, "The council has decided to answer Leo's questions."

He stared after her and mouthed, "What questions?" even though he thought he already knew.

Leo had intended to spend a long Saturday with his kids at the park. Wyatt, at 12, was really into baseball, and Melinda, just 10, was really into whatever Wyatt was into, so they had taken a bat and a ball and a couple gloves and gone to the park. There were other kids there, so he sent them with the standard "be careful" out to play and sat on a bench to oversee the action. Piper was at the club, preparing for another busy Saturday night, and her sisters were off with their husbands, having a normal, non-magical day. Everyone's favorite.

So when the he heard the elders calling him, he didn't immediately go Up There. He wasn't thrilled with them after the past ten years of brush offs and if he heard, "Everything is as it will be," one more time he was going to…well, he didn't know what he would do.

They called for him on and off all day, but he remembered how Chris had told him he hadn't been there for him, and he didn't want to take any chances that Wyatt or Melinda would ever have cause to say that, so he stayed with his kids until he put them to bed, then brought Victor over to watch over them while he finally went Up There.

An elder was waiting for him, and he recognized her hooded form as the one who first told him, all those years ago, to let it lie. He still didn't know who she was, but he felt angry with her anyway.

"Have you called me up here to tell me to back off?" he asked. "Because I haven't found anything to back off from, but even so, I won't. I'm not going to give up on my son."

"Good," she said. "I have something to tell you."