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Posted 9-6-2023

Chapter Three

The Vision

Kate had been their Whitelighter for four months when Phoebe got the vision.

In those four months, Phoebe had become an empath, Leo had been kidnapped and sent to Valhalla, and accused Kate of it when they got him back (she, naturally, firmly denied the accusation, but Leo was convinced and the sisters themselves were getting annoyed with his new habit of trying to stalk and harassing the young witchlighter). Just when they got Leo back, Piper was turned into a Valkyrie. Two weeks later Wyatt was erased and then restored by the Cleaners, soon after that their identities were stolen by three rather weak and stupid blondes (Kate had saved them by manipulating the trio into turning against one another and breaking their Power of Three, allowing the real Charmed Ones to call back their powers) and Paige had started dating a male witch with an addiction to magic after helping end his family's feud against another coven, the Callaways.

And in the midst of all of that, Kate had been sending them on more vanquishes than they'd ever done before, with a vague warning of a demon attacking Wyatt and causing her dystopian future. Kate never gave any details as to what this mysterious demon did to Piper's baby, or how it caused her supposedly terrible future, but they did believe that she was telling the truth. Manipulative and secretive as the younger woman was, there was a haunted look in her eyes that made them believe her warnings, even with Leo's suspicions.

Needless to say, it had been a long few months.

It was as they in the attic, were preparing for yet another demon vanquish that Phoebe got the vision. Piper was stirring the vanquishing potion, while Paige studied the Book of Shadows' warning about the demon they were after. It was a high-level demon called Ozzamoth. For once, the sisters were eager to go after this demon. It fed on infant good witches to maintain its' strength and powers, and had killed thirteen children in the past month alone. To the Charmed Ones, this was an offence they couldn't bear, especially as Wyatt was a prime target for Ozzamoth, a powerful good witch under the age of five. Ozzamoth had to be vanquished. For everyone's sake.

Phoebe was crossing the room to grab an ingredient for Piper when she stumbled on the loose floorboard. Kate was nearest to her, and lunged to grab her and prevent her falling. As their skin touched, Phoebe was flung into a vision.

Piper was lying on a pile of blankets and bloody sheets in the attic, frighteningly pale with tears on her cheeks. She looked torn between happiness and grief as she cradled a small bundle to her chest. A tiny arm flailed around in an uncoordinated manner, the little hand slapping against Piper's chest.

There was no sign of Paige or Leo, or even Cole. Wyatt wasn't there either. Only an older Phoebe, missing an eye and giving a tiny smile even as she too wept.

The watching Phoebe knew herself and her elder sister well enough to know when she was looking at tears of happiness or of sorrow, and these were definitely tears of pain. The baby in Piper's arms was loved, there could be no question about that, but something was terribly wrong.

The vision changed, and Piper was lying on the ground, staring blankly at the ceiling. If she'd had a voice, Phoebe would've wailed, because it was so obvious her elder sister was dead. Even more heartbreaking was the sight of a too-thin toddler kneeling in a pool of blood, patting Piper's shoulder clumsily as she tried to wake what could only be her mother. The door burst open and an older, thinner and wearier (and still one-eyed), Phoebe burst into the room with a panicked and distraught expression.

The vision changed, and changed again, showing Phoebe with bleached blonde hair cropped unflatteringly short, growing older and more battered, a young girl with big, solemn green eyes and a frighteningly thin form turning from toddler to teenager. They were always in different locations, never the Manor after the vision of Piper's death, but once an old apartment with Victor there, the adults having a whispered argument while the girl pretended to sleep, the watching Phoebe seeing her occasionally crack open her eyes to glance at her aunt and grandfather before 'going back to sleep'. Often the pair were fighting, demons or people in Kevlar armour with collared witches chained to their wrists, their eyes dull and broken. Phoebe and the girl only ever hurt the demons, often earning themselves injuries they wouldn't otherwise have gotten by refusing to hurt the slaves or mortals. Witch Hunters? Other times, they seemed to be running some sort of organization. A rebellion? Or just an Underground to help witches escape, like the one Future Leo had shown Piper and Prue in the future where she was burned at the stake?

When the girl was in her early teens, Phoebe disappeared and the girl continued to grow, her shoulders slumping under a too-heavy weight, her eyes turning harder and more haunted with each vision. She was on her own a lot, but also visited with Victor, Darryl and Elise. Phoebe cried seeing her father waste away shortly after her own (she assumed) death. Then, when her niece was about sixteen or seventeen, a Hispanic man with hard eyes (though it seemed like everyone had hard eyes in this terrible future) joined her. He was in all of the visions after that.

Phoebe was glad for his presence, because her niece, daughter? Piper had given birth to her, but Phoebe had raised her, and the girl called her 'Mom' in the visions, so which was it? Finally began to smile, her expression softening in his presence, at least sometimes. They kissed in a destroyed garden that Phoebe recognized as being downtown, and danced at some sort of party in the tunnels of the rebellion.

They began working on something, speaking with older members of the rebellion, pouring over books and maps, drawing charts. Eventually, Phoebe Saw them in the Manor attic, though something was off about it. (Well, something was off about everything in this vision). And it wasn't that there were demons were everywhere. There was a portal at Kate's back (and there was no denying that it was Kate anymore). But rather than running through she stared in horror and anguish at her fiancé (to judge by the battered ring now on her finger) who was being held hostage by a blonde man with, to Phoebe's horror, the black eyes of the Source. Kate managed to fight the Source and demons off long enough for her and her fiancé to escape through the portal, the Source letting out a loud roar of rage and sending an energy ball flying after them as they fled.

Then, finally, blissfully, the vision ended.

"Phoebe? Phoebe! Can you hear us?" Her sisters' and Whitelighter's, daughter's? Niece's? Desperate pleas came filtering slowly into her mind. She was shaking, she realized dimly. She thought that she might be in shock. Information overload.

"Phoebe, come on, I need you to drink this," Kate coaxed her, holding a vial to her lips. Still dazed from everything she had Seen, Phoebe obediently opened her mouth and swallowed the liquid. It tasted okay, if not nice, and after drinking it Phoebe felt more herself.

"Thanks," she croaked out. "What-what was that?"

"It's a Calming Potion," Kate replied, still crouched in front of Phoebe with a worried look. "My- my mother used to make it for me when I was kid and we had the ingredients. I don't go anywhere without a vial or two nowadays."

"Now that you have access to the ingredients, you mean?" Phoebe asked.

Kate didn't respond, studying her in concern. Phoebe stared back, wondering how she'd never noticed that Kate shared Prue's eyes. God, that wasn't the only similarities between her late eldest sister and Kate. Not to mention all the other features and personality traits Kate had inherited from the Halliwells. Phoebe's face and eye shape. Paige and their mother's lips. Piper's hair with a slight kink in it from Grams. Piper's stubbornness, Prue's tunnel vision when it came to demons, God, she even crossed her arms and sighed in frustration the way Piper did when frustrated! Everything about her just screamed Halliwell! Phoebe couldn't see anything of Leo in her except her orbing abilities. Even with only Phoebe around during her childhood, Kate had ended up as a mosaic of the Charmed Ones, all four of them, but so much harder and bitter.

It made Phoebe want to cry at how badly they'd failed their little girl.

"Are you alright, Pheebs?" Piper pressed worriedly, breaking Phoebe out of her thoughts on Kate's Halliwell traits. "I've never seen you have a vision that long before. And you were shaking and crying, and Kate wouldn't let us try to break you out of it."

"It's too dangerous," Kate said in a frustrated voice. "You could have trapped her in the vision forever, like I told you in the first place, Piper!"

"Mama, you mean," Phoebe corrected her.

The others froze. Kate's face went paler than when she was living in the tunnels in the visions. She swallowed harshly and opened and closed her mouth several times before answering. "What are you talking about?"

"That's what you called her in the vision, wasn't it?" Phoebe pointed out. "Piper was 'Mama', and I was 'Mom'."

"What- that's insa- Phoebe, what did you See?" Piper demanded, looking shocked and incredulous. Paige was, for once, completely silent, her brown eyes wide and stunned as she looked between Kate, Piper and Phoebe repeatedly.

"I Saw Kate. Being born. You-you dy-dying," Phoebe stammered over that. Paige let out a sob, but Piper just seemed too shocked to absorb the news about her death. "Kate must've been about two, but she was so thin. So small. And then, I Saw you growing up," she turned to Kate, who was silent and strained looking. "I think you were about twelve or thirteen when I disappeared from the visions. I assume I died too. Then you met some Hispanic guy a bit afterwards. You're still with him. He came back to the past with you.

And," Phoebe hesitated, because she wasn't dumb and could put two and two together, but it was so painful, so hard to believe. "And Wyatt is the Source of All Evil. You're here to stop him from turning evil."

"No!" Piper shot to her feet, shaking her head desperately. This, apparently, was her breaking point. "No, I don't believe it! You misinterpreted the vision. No way would I raise my son to be evil! Never! Kate!" She turned to their Whitelighter, desperate for her to deny it.

But Kate didn't deny it. She simply met Piper's eyes with a stony expression and a chin lifted in defiance.

"You died when I was three," Kate told her stoically. "Wyatt was almost five. But he was kidnapped when I was born, and you never got him back. Cole tried but died trying. The Power of Three was broken already by then. I wasn't lying when I said that Paige died in the Titan attack. Without the Power of Three, you're just regular witches. Not strong enough to defeat a bunch of upper-level demons. That's what I'm here to stop." She turned to Phoebe, ignoring Piper who had sunk back to her knees and buried her face in her hands. "His name is Nico, by the way. Nicolas Parker."

She looked around, at Phoebe in her haze of guilt and grief, a stunned-speechless (for once) Paige hugging a sobbing Piper, and shook her head. "We'll deal with Ozzamoth later," she mumbled. "Nobody's in any shape to fight a demon right now. I'm-I'm going to leave you be for a bit. Don't do anything reckless."

She began to orb away, but Piper called after her before she left. "Were you ever going to tell us the truth? About who you are, I mean?"

Kate stared at her for a moment before shaking her head. "No," she admitted. "I'm here for a mission, Piper. Not a family reunion. I never planned for you guys to find out anything."

"Didn't you trust us?" Paige finally spoke, sounding hurt.

Kate's lips twisted into a bitter smile. "I don't trust myself," she replied bitterly. "Never mind a bunch of ghosts of people I barely know."

Then she left, leaving their lives in tatters and the woman destined to give birth to her sobbing in grief and anger and despair. Phoebe buried her head in her hands and tried to persuade herself that everything would be fine.

It wasn't working. Her efforts kept being intruded by the image of a young Kate, so used to pain she just seemed bored when older-Phoebe set and bound her broken ankle with some dirty planks and tattered rope.

How had everything gone so wrong?

Kate met Nico when she was sixteen, two years after Phoebe died and she became Leader of the Resistance.

They were cleaning up after winning a battle against Wyatt's forces. Their reward for their efforts was a train full of food and medical supplies. The first thing they'd done was unload the supplies and send them to safety in the tunnels using a transportation spell. Orbing and other types of magical transportation were trackable, but spells weren't, thank the Goddess for small mercies. Once the supplies were secure, they turned their attention to the bodies.

Kate was helping stack bodies of Resistance fighters for burning, identifying them by their dog tags, when one of her lieutenants came running up to her. Aviva was one of the first innocents saved by the original Charmed Ones. She'd allowed herself to be manipulated by the demon Kali years ago, nearly killing her aunt, and since then had become obsessed with fighting evil and making up for her mistakes. She was one of Kate's fiercest defenders due to Kate's status as Phoebe Halliwell's daughter (only a handful of people knew the truth about Kate's parentage, and Kate had no intention of changing that and letting people know she was Wyatt Halliwell's sister, not cousin. Just that more distant connection had earned her more than a little suspicion from new recruits on many occasions, though Phoebe had long ago disowned Wyatt from the Warren line and everyone knew he'd been raised by demons, not the Halliwells. Kate didn't want to imagine how bad the distrust would be if anyone learned the truth. Even Wyatt kept it quiet. Perhaps he didn't even know. He'd been two and her unborn when he was kidnapped, after all.).

"Kate!" Aviva cried, coming up to her side.

"Aviva, I told you to get back to base and get your ribs checked out," Kate frowned in disapproval.

"I will, once you go," Aviva retorted. She didn't give Kate a chance to press or order her into leaving, instead hastily changing the subject. "Look, we've found one of Wyatt's Phoenixes. He's still alive and offering to give up all his information in exchange for a quick death."

Kate raised an eyebrow in surprise. "Take me to him," she demanded.

Aviva led the way to the other side of the blood and ash-covered park, where they found a small group of soldiers surrounding someone on the ground, weapons or hands aimed towards him. They made a small opening for Kate to squeeze through and peer down at the man lying on the ground, pinned down by a stake through his gut.

He was gorgeous. Kate had never had a thought like that before, but she had it now. He had dark hair shaved around the sides and slightly longer on top, Mexican features, a lithe but muscular form and stoic dark eyes. She could feel his pain through her empathic powers. Wyatt didn't allow his servants to take empath or telepath blocking potions, though he obviously drank them regularly himself. The Phoenix was dressed in the male Source's Assassin uniform, consisting of a black leather brocade vest with silver buttons and tight bondage pants. His lip was split and his Phoenix tattoo was on show for all to see on his left arm, a warning to all of the dangers of the man.

"Huh, so you're the Resistance Leader, then?" He coughed out, his lips and chin speckled with crimson blood. "Somehow I thought you'd be taller."

"Are you trying to aggravate me?" Kate drawled, crouching next to him and scanning his form with pursed lips. "Because that wouldn't be the most strategic way to get me to help you."

"Who says I want to be helped?" He retorted, and she sensed it in his emotions, the bleakness that said he had nothing left to fight for, no reason to survive beyond the sake of survival itself. But there was a desire to survive. A wish to avenge his suffering.

"So, you want us to kill you then?" Kate hummed thoughtfully, studying him intently.

"You've got a telepath around here somewhere, I imagine," the Phoenix half-asked, half-stated. "Take everything I've got and use it to bring Him down. Then have mercy and put an athame in my throat."

"Oh, I'll take it all, that's for sure," Kate confirmed. "But you're not getting away that easily, Phoenix. You work for me now."

"Halliwells," the Phoenix scoffed bitterly. "You're all such control freaks, you know?"

"Comes with the territory," Kate said flatly. Halliwells played chess with real people and the stakes were the remains of the world. "Come on, you knew I wasn't gonna waste a fighter like you. You wanted me to make this decision. I'm a telepathic empath, I know these things."

"Did I?" He sighed. "I don't even know anymore. Can I at least be unconscious when you take this damn stick out of my gut?"

"Night night," Kate replied dryly, reaching out to press a pressure point and knock him out.

Not exactly the typical start to a love story, but then theirs wasn't so much a love story as a choice.

A choice to build a future together beyond the War, a choice to trust each other and live for each other. A choice to love one another.

Phoebe was right about him though. She did feel like their love hit her like a lightning bolt. Even when she thought of him as handsome, the first time she'd made an emotional instead of analytical observation like that, she never expected that he would become her right hand. Her most trusted supporter, her ever-present, steady advisor.

But then one day she turned around and there he was at her side, and she realized with a jolt that she hadn't even imagined he'd take advantage of his easy access to her back to stab her in it, despite a lifetime of having it ingrained in her never, ever to let anyone stand behind her, because it could be the last thing she ever did, and she was too busy to die yet. She had a world to save.

She'd had sex with a lot of people. Demons, mortals, Resistance fighters. Sex was just a tool to her, a way to manipulate people to her will, an itch to scratch. But Nico was the first person she called a lover. The first person she trusted enough to let into her bedroom and the only person she allowed herself to fall asleep with instead of just leaving when they were done.

He was the first, the only, person she chose to love.

Nico was brewing a vanquishing potion for a clan of Drogans, flesh-eating demons who would become some of Wyatt's favourite 'executioners' in their time when Kate orbed in. He took one look at her and knew something was wrong.

Her face was way too pale, her hands were trembling despite being clasped together and she was swallowing compulsively like she was about to throw up. She collapsed on their unmade couch-bed the moment she finished forming. Nico swiftly switched off the gas and set the cauldron to the side before hurrying to his fiancée's side.

"They know," she whispered.

Nico went tense, because that could mean a lot of things and none of them were good for his lover. "What does who know?" He pressed, turning her face to meet his gaze. Her eyes were brighter than usual and sparkling with tears she would never allow herself to shed, even if it was only him around.

"The sisters, they know everything," she explained, a hint of panic beneath her blank façade. "Phoebe, she had a vision. A long one. They know that Piper gave birth to me but died when I was a toddler and Phoebe raised me. They know about Wyatt, that you came back in time with me. Everything. They're probably telling Leo already."

"Fuck," Nico swore. "Memory potion?"

"Too risky," Kate refused immediately. "We don't need another Valkyrie incident."

Nico grimaced and nodded. Despite Leo's accusations, they hadn't actually killed those Valkyries to get the pendants. Their alliance was too important to jeopardize it over him. Instead, they had simply asked to borrow the necklaces. Faced with all the evidence of the terrors of their future, the magical creatures had been very helpful. Freyja had simply handed them over. But the disaster with Piper and the runaway warriors hadn't done much to prove the time travellers' competence in the Valkyries' eyes, even though it wasn't their fault.

No, Kate was right. Wiping the Charmed Ones' memories was too risky, which meant that there was no way to close Pandora's Box again.

"Maybe, maybe this is a good thing," Nico suggested tentatively, doubtfully. "I mean, you've been struggling to convince them that you're telling the truth. Now, they have to believe you."

"Piper was pretty in denial about Wyatt," Kate answered dubiously.

"Wouldn't anyone in this time be?" Nico reasoned. "It's her son after all. But once she's calmed down..."

Kate shook her head abruptly and rose to her feet, pacing the small apartment, neatly avoiding the stacks of books and weaponry that littered their little safehouse.

"I don't like this," she breathed. "I really don't like this."

"We'll figure it out," Nico assured her. He suspected there was more to Kate's distress than worry over their plans being ruined. She'd been growing more troubled with each clash between her and the sisters. She'd never, ever admit it, but Nico knew that Kate wanted the sisters' approval. It stung that they didn't seem to like who she'd turned out to be.

Never mind that they had no idea what she'd been through, what their actions had put her through. They just saw the end result, and it didn't fit in this clean, happy and naïve world.

Kate's eyes fell on the vanquishing potion on the counter. "Is that potion ready?" She demanded abruptly.

Nico pursed his lips. Now, with her upset, was not the best time for demon hunting. But she'd go whether he went with her or not, so the best thing to do was just go and be there to patch her up afterwards.

"Almost," he replied evenly. "Just a few more stirs to thicken it enough."

"Then hurry up so we can get something useful done today!" Kate urged angrily. "Ozzamoth is already after getting away because of that damn vision, the Drogans aren't escaping too."

Nico sighed. He knew there was no point in trying to discuss things any further.

Besides, a good demon hunt could cure all emotional woes.