I forgot to mention that these next four weeks or so are incredibly busy, and I likely won't be able to upload consistently. I'll upload if I can, but expect things to start up regularly afterwards.
All right, lots of different things happening in this chapter. I hope it's not too many directions to go at once.
After his unnerving encounter with the disappearing boy, Chris orbed straight home, mind awhirl. He barely noticed his parents sitting rigidly in the living room, their hands clasped between their knees as they stared at each other without words. The moment he appeared in the foyer, the silent duo jumped to their feet.
"Chris!" Piper exclaimed, "How did it go?"
"Huh?" Chris said without even looking at her. It took a moment to register the meaning behind the question. Dwight, right. "Oh, uh, no idea."
If he had paid attention, he would have recognized the pained look in Piper's eyes that exposed how desperately she wanted to ask for further details, which warred internally with her opposing desire to grant her teenage son privacy. From behind her Leo rested a hand on her shoulder, and she grasped his fingers with her own. Chris noticed none of this as he brushed past them up the stairs.
What was that? The boy couldn't have been another vision; he had appeared in full color. Chris couldn't mistake the vibrant jade of those eyes. Plus, he had never been able to interact with his visions before, yet they had had an entire conversation (albeit a confusing one).
Unless this was merely a progression of his powers. If so, he wished they would give him some time to acclimate before jumping into next stages of expansion. He had to ask his other self about this. The man had lived with these powers for years already; if anyone would have insight into what had transpired, he would.
Usually, Chris stayed up as late as possible on New Year's Eve, a tradition he started years before when he and Wyatt would compete for who could remain awake longer. But tonight, Chris scrambled into pajamas and leapt into bed, though it took his mind a while to regulate enough to let him fall asleep.
However, when he finally opened his eyes to the abyss, determined to demand answers from his other self, he was met with an unfamiliar sight. To his right, as always, lay the cramped office that the older Chris called home with its desk, sofa, and bookcase. The light there was dim, as if it trickled in through the slats of a half-shuttered window that didn't exist here. But across from it, to Chris's left, stood a tall jungle gym with a spider-shaped climbing frame, two metal slides on either end, a trail of monkey bars, and a thick but short tunnel in the middle. Unlike the other Chris's space, this playground was cast in bright light, as if it truly existed outdoors on a sunny day. The light reached all the way to the perimeter of the familiar area, ending abruptly a couple of yards away from the sofa.
Speechless, Chris took a step toward the unfamiliar addition. Was his interior world expanding somehow? Was this a place from his older self's childhood, perhaps? When he did not spot the man in his usual space, he cast his gaze around, desperately seeking him out. Finally, Chris's eyes landed on him behind a slide at the far end of the playground, walking a slow, wide circle around the new contraption, sizing it up. When he met Chris's bewildered gaze, he gave a wry smile and rounded the jungle gym to join him at the edge of both spaces.
"You're probably wondering what's going on," he said
Chris narrowed his eyes at the man's much too casual tone. "You knew this would happen, didn't you?" he accused.
His counterpart said nothing. Suddenly, a small face popped out of the metal tunnel.
"That's the boy I saw!" Chris exclaimed, pointing dumbly as the head retreated back inside the tunnel.
Gently, Chris's older self draped an arm across his shoulders and guided him to the familiar rundown sofa. He pressed Chris into a seat cushion and then sat across from him in his desk chair, hands on his knees as he leaned forward to force Chris to make eye contact. "I think I should explain."
Chris blinked, then turned his head back to the jungle gym. "Who is that?" he demanded.
The man sighed, leaning back. "Okay. As good a place as any to start. That's you. After a fashion."
"Me," Chris repeated.
"As much as I'm you, yes," the man replied. "I told you we also see across timelines. That boy is you, is us, from another timeline."
"Right," Chris replied faintly. He watched the boy poke his head back out of his hole, peer around, then scramble out of the tunnel and onto the top of the monkey bars. He swung himself upside down to dangle from his knees. His messy hair flopped toward the ground. "He said…" Chris glanced back at his older self. "He said he didn't have parents."
Looking unsurprised, the man nodded. "That explains the playground."
"It does?" To Chris this explained nothing at all.
"Yeah. This place"—he waved his hand to encompass the whole of the abyss—"it recreates the location that most feels like home to each version of you. Where you slept, where you spent most of your time, that sort of thing."
Chris stared past the man's shoulder without really seeing. Though he had entered the abyss with a laundry list of questions, his astonishment had suddenly reached its limit. Now, none of it, none of the details, sounded strange anymore. Or perhaps he simply felt too numb to process them. Voice oddly calm, he remarked, "So I'm… homeless. At six."
"I'm eight!" shouted an affronted voice in the distance.
The man settled a palm on Chris's knee. That single point of contact reached out to Chris like an anchor, reeling him in. "So in some world, Mom and Dad—what, died? Abandoned me?"
"I don't know," his older self replied, though he didn't seem quite as disturbed by his ignorance, nor by the possibilities Chris had suggested. "Frankly, there are probably a lot of versions of us that are orphans, given the hazards of being a witch. I am one, in most senses of the word." Chris jolted in surprise, but his counterpart spoke matter-of-factly and without unease about this surprising admission. He did not appear remotely bothered by the existence of potentially several other selves in this position, either.
"Listen," he said, not unkindly, "There are countless possible timelines. In some, Mom and Aunt Phoebe never met their extra sister. In some, Mom had a girl instead of Wyatt. In many, we probably never exist. The slightest choices can trigger a new timeline. And we have access to all of them."
Chris felt as though he were caught in a riptide, struggling to keep his head above water as the current dragged him deeper into the ocean. He could sense his own mind flailing with a level of desperation, panic even. "So every time I see… me… my head will just get more crowded?" he asked, scrambling to grasp the bigger picture.
"Pretty much," his other self replied. "The frequency of their appearances ebbs and flows over the course of our life. My first few months I got a whole bunch, but then nothing for years. When I went back to the past, I started seeing them more often again."
Chris nudged the man's hand off his knee so he could lean forward. He scrubbed his face with his hands, trying to rub the disorientation away. "So," he said slowly, "do you… do you have other Chrises in your head right now? Is it just an endless ladder of Chrises with other Chrises inside their heads?" The Escher-drawing of his own subconscious made his mind reel.
His older self smiled. "No," he said. "I don't dream. I don't have contact with my subconscious, which is where they—we—exist. I'm just a sliver of myself, my memories. I'm a product of your subconscious."
"Of course," Chris uttered weakly. He tilted his head sideways toward the playground. He said nothing further and his older self seemed to have nothing to add, so they sat in silence for a time, staring at the little boy jumping across the jungle gym like a wild marsupial.
Chris wasn't sure how much time passed before the calm began to wash over him again. He counted each heartbeat as it echoed in his ears. "So what do I call him?" he said at last.
"What do you mean?"
Chris glanced at his older self. "You know. A name. I can't just call them all 'Chris,' can I? It'll get confusing real fast."
To the older Chris, this question seemed a good sign, an indication that the teen was drifting toward acceptance. The sooner he came to terms with this part of his abilities, the less stressful and disorienting these unexpected appearances would become. "I guess so," the man agreed. "You could ask him. Not all of us are actually named Chris, you know."
Chris's eyebrows rose to his hairline. "How does that work?"
The man shrugged without looking away from the jungle gym. "Our essence is tethered to our soul. Your parents could have named you something else; you'd still be the same person. There are also past lives. And future lives. Same soul, different bodies."
"Okay." Chris watched the boy swing down from the giant spider-shaped beams between the two slides and land on his hands and knees with a triumphant grin. Chris stood and made his way over with his older self following closely behind. "Hey, kid," he called once he reached the bottom of the nearer slide. When he placed his hand against the metal surface, it felt warm, not hot as he expected from the sunny glare it reflected.
"What?" the boy called back, pushing himself into a racer's position, knees bent, knuckles against the ground, and backside in the air. He took off like a shot and leapt onto the farther slide, landing halfway up.
"What's your name?" Chris asked him.
The boy swiveled his head up to appraise the two. He scrambled the rest of the way up his slide, then clamored on top of his tunnel, drawing nearer to them. "Most people what see me call me Mutt a'cos I stink so much," he said proudly.
"That's your name? Mutt?" Chris said skeptically as the man beside him swallowed a snicker.
The boy hopped to the ground and trotted over to them cheerfully. "No," he snorted, as if Chris were the stupid one, "But no ways I tell you my real name. I ain't goin' back."
"Back where?" Chris wondered, already feeling lost again.
Smirking, Mutt said, "Nuh-uh, nice try," and raced back to his tunnel with a gleeful whoop.
Chris didn't remember when he drifted from the abyss into his dream world, but he did remember what he dreamed, quite vividly, in fact. He was in the middle of a large room lined with at least fifteen beds, facing a floor-to-ceiling window at the far end. His knees were bent with his knuckles pressing into the floor and his backside in the air. He smirked. Then, like a shot, he was off, racing across the scuffed-up wooden floor with his muddy sneakers squeaking. When he made it to the window, he didn't slow down, merely swung up his arm to protect his face as he crashed straight through it. The glass shattered into millions of tiny shards, raining down on him, leaving behind nicks and cuts as he soared through the empty frame and onto the concrete outside.
He was behind the multi-storied building where the group home kept several large dumpsters. Behind him he heard shouting from inside the now-exposed room but ignored it, landing on his hands and knees and pausing for just a moment to catch his breath. As soon as he could, he took off again, ducking between alleyways and around buildings to remain out of sight. He was getting out of here once and for all.
When he heard footsteps crash from some distance behind him, he leapt behind a dumpster, hugging his knees to his chest to wait them out. The frantic voices breezed right past his hiding spot without pause, and Chris curled his lip back in a feral grin. "You ain't takin' me back," he whispered triumphantly.
Once the voices had faded, he hopped back up and headed off in the opposite direction at a steadier pace. He kept a cautious ear perked in case others came searching, but he ran into no one else.
The world around him faded as he walked on, time seeming to zip by around him, and then there he stood outside a café. He wasn't sure how many days had elapsed. He still wore the same t-shirt, the same lucky socks, though they had acquired several layers of grime since the day he had made a break for it. He didn't know where he was, only that he had made it far from anyone who might recognize him. And his stomach was growling.
Gripping the fabric over his torso, Chris pushed the café door open and wandered inside. People turned to stare as he passed, wrinkling their noses at the stench that trailed after him. He ignored them, ignored, too, the line of waiting people as he marched straight up to the cash register.
"S'cuse me!" he said loudly from below, his head barely visible over the counter. The teenage girl at the register peered down at him, one eyebrow raised as she snapped her bubble gum. When he had her attention, he pointed to the glass display below the counter. "I want one of them sandwiches," he announced.
The girl's lips pinched. "Do you have mo-ney?" she asked in a tone that told him she already assumed the answer to her own question.
Chris knelt down, digging into his right sock to pull out a wad of cash. He peeled off a five, stuffed the roll back into his dirty sock, and slapped the bill onto the counter with a smug smirk. The girl lifted the bill in two dainty fingers, looking faintly nauseated.
"Well?" she demanded. "Which one do you want?"
Chris shrugged. "Which one don't cost a load?"
Nose wrinkled practically up to her eyelashes, the girl opened the case from her end and reached in to retrieve a plain egg salad sandwich on rye. She wrapped it in brown paper and held it out to him, along with a few coins of change. Chris seized both. He set the sandwich on the linoleum floor while he shoved the coins into his left sock, then snatched it back up and took a monster bite. The people around him backed up farther. He grinned wolfishly as he walked by them.
Squatting on the curb outside the door, Chris scarfed down his meal. Someone who wasn't paying attention stepped off the curb and nearly trampled him. The man, business suit, tie, briefcase, barely looked up as he caught his footing and continued on.
"Watch it, numbnuts!" Chris hollered after him, but the man didn't even glance back. Chris felt the dead air around him begin to rustle, tugging at the fabric of his shirt. An empty chips wrapper danced across the sidewalk behind him. This happened sometimes when he got upset. He couldn't explain it, this strange ability that none of the other kids at the group home seemed to possess, and he certainly couldn't control it, but things around him often moved without ever being touched, especially when he got mad. It got him into plenty of trouble back at the home. Yet another reason not to return.
But there was no reason to let that idiot businessman upset him, not now, at any rate. His stomach was full for the first time in days, his hands sticky with egg salad, and the air was warm, the sky bright. He was free to do whatever he wished, go where he pleased. The air around Chris stilled. Licking his fingers clean, he bounced up and trotted on his way.
The next day, Chris didn't let himself think about Dwight at all. He woke up late and spent what remained of the morning learning about the ghostly plane from Phoebe. Afterward, he orbed to Jake's hallway and knocked on his bedroom door. In his determination to avoid worrying over Dwight, he had planned a rather elaborate schedule for a day with his charge.
"C'min," the boy called from the other side. He jumped up when he saw who stood there. "Chris!" he exclaimed. "You're never here so early!" His bright expression dimmed a bit with sudden anxiety as he asked, "Is it… Did I do something wrong?"
"Course not," Chris replied, stepping forward to ruffle the boy's hair. "I thought maybe you'd like to go out somewhere for lunch. Your mom's not home, right?" Chris had actually sensed for her presence before orbing, as he usually did, but he let the boy answer the question with a quick shake of his head. "So," he asked, clapping his hands and rubbing them together, "you hungry?"
Jake nodded eagerly. He ran to his closet to grab a denim jacket and shrugged it on. "Where are we going?" he asked, carefully zipping himself up.
"It's a surprise." Chris wanted to give Jake everything he never got from his mother. He couldn't give him a stable, loving parent, and a fancy restaurant was a pale comparison to that, but it struck Chris at least as an enjoyable experience to have and memory to treasure. He had gotten the idea from the way his Aunt Phoebe and Uncle Coop so often jetted Katie off all across the globe to make up for all the everyday normalcies she missed. This, at least, he could do for Jake.
"You ready to take a ride?" Chris opened his arms and, after a moment's hesitation, Jake stepped into them, leaning against Chris's chest when Chris dropped a careful hand onto his shoulder. "This may feel a bit strange," Chris warned as he began to orb.
They rematerialized in a large, elegant bathroom with pink tile that crept across the floor and halfway up the wall. The rest of the wall was painted a pastel avocado hue. The sink had two faucets, one hot and one cold. Playing softly from outside the door was a slow, gentle song in French.
"Come on," Chris urged, opening the door and leading Jake out to the main room. The tables were covered with tablecloths in that same pink with white stripes crisscrossing in both directions. The wallpaper was decorated with tiny fuchsia florets. Jake's head swiveled back and forth as they made their way to a table.
"Where are we?" he asked in wonder.
A waiter with a narrow mustache and prim white suit spotted them and headed toward their table with a couple of menus.
"South of France," Chris answered, grinning. "Betcha didn't think you'd ever visit here, did you?" Mutely, the boy shook his head.
The waiter arrived and set the menus in front of them, saying something neither understood. Full whitelighters could speak all languages, a necessity to ensure they could communicate with any charge across the world, but Chris had not inherited that skill. Wyatt had developed it better than his brother and had an ear for languages, though he, too, needed good old-fashioned studying to get the job done. Chris had chosen American Sign Language as his foreign language in school because it had seemed easier to learn than Spanish, but even that he struggled with.
"Do you, uh, speak English?" he asked.
The waiter seemed annoyed but gave a long-suffering sigh and continued in heavily accented English. "Yes. What I can get you?" American tourists, it seemed, were nothing new to him.
"Jake?" Chris prompted. "Anything you want."
Jake flipped open the menu, casting frequent glances at the waiter. "I, uh…" His smile waned a bit as he stared at the long column of foreign words. "N-nothing. I'm not hungry."
The waiter made a sound between a scoff and a grunt. Ignoring him, Chris stared at the boy. "What's wrong?" he asked.
Jake shook his head. "Nothing. I'm just"—he eyed the man nervously—"not hungry."
Chris followed his gaze. "Can we have a minute?" The man inclined his head and backed away from them. "Jake," he said softly. The boy refused to meet his eyes. "You were hungry when we left. What changed?" Jake shrugged. "C'mon," he cajoled. "You know I won't be mad. You can't hurt my feelings." He paused to assess the boy's hunched frame. "Would you rather go somewhere else?"
After an interminable pause, Jake nodded.
"Jake." Chris waited this time for the boy's gaze to rise up to meet his. "That's fine. That's no problem." He closed his menu and clasped his hands on top of the table, the picture of patience. "Where would you like to go?"
Jake sat with his hands tucked beneath his thighs. Head tilted toward the table, he glanced up at Chris through his bangs. Nibbling on his bottom lip, he finally whispered, "Donny's Pizza."
Chris thought for a moment. He recognized the name. "Isn't that a local parlor back home?"
Shyly, Jake nodded. "It's three blocks away from my house," he said.
"That's it?" Chris asked in disbelief. "That's all you want? Pizza? Not even—I mean, we could get fancy pizza straight from Italy. We could go literally anywhere in the world."
Jake hitched up a shoulder. "I like Donny's Pizza."
Chris barked out a laugh. For all he tried to give Jake the world, the boy didn't seem to want more than his own backyard. "Well, okay then. Like I said, anywhere you want."
With a wash of relief, Jake began to smile. It wasn't often he expressed his own desires aloud. He certainly hadn't wanted to hurt his angel's feelings after he'd gone to all this effort. But Chris was smiling himself, reaching out a hand to tug Jake back to the bathroom while the waiter looked on in bemusement.
They rematerialized next in a tiny bathroom stall with sticky linoleum floors. Jake could smell that familiar grease, sauce, and cheese combo. Grinning, he squeezed out of the stall and led the way to an unadorned, square, wooden table.
"This is my favorite seat," he told Chris. "Look, you can watch the pizzas come out of the oven."
"So what do you want?" Chris asked.
Jake knew instantly. "Fries and pizza with those green olives on it." He watched a man in a stained apron shove a new pie into the oven.
"You got it," Chris said as he headed to the counter. He ordered for Jake, got two plain slices for himself, then paid at the register. It took the work of a few short minutes before he could carry paper plates of pizza balanced on his forearms and a cup of fries back to the table. Jake bounced in his chair, giddy with excitement, and Chris couldn't help but smile. To him a local pizza parlor may not have sounded like an especially memorable outing, but how could he deny his charge's explicit preference, especially when it brought him such joy?
By the time the weekend came around, Chris had exhausted the ways to avoid thinking about Dwight. School would start up again that Monday, and his friend still had not attempted to reach out in any way. Friday evening, he found himself pacing the floor of his bedroom in frustrated silence. That was how his father found him when he came home from Magic School.
He had intended only to poke his head in to pass along a message, but when he saw Chris storm to his desk, then spin back around and start a circuit all over again, he stepped all the way inside and sat down at the edge of Chris's unmade bed, patting the mattress beside him. Chris rolled his eyes, though he was quietly grateful Leo had interrupted his spiral of thoughts. He didn't sit but stopped pacing to stand before his father, hands splayed open, palms up, to express his desperation.
"Dad, what am I supposed to do? What if he still doesn't forgive me?" he asked, the skin around his eyes taut with worry.
"All you can do is give him space," Leo said. "You can't force him to accept this. It has to be on his terms."
"I know, I know, but…" Expelling a slow breath, Chris ran his fingers through his hair and turned toward the dresser. "I just wish I knew what he'll decide. I wish my visions would be useful and show me something like that."
Leo chuckled from behind him. "Sorry, buddy, I don't think it works that way."
Grinning despite himself, Chris admitted, "Yeah, I'm pretty sure I already knew that. This power doesn't seem like something you learn to control." He frowned for a moment, cocking his head in thought as he pressed two fingers to his lips. "Except maybe the future me. I mean, he was able to achieve actual time travel. He must have learned some control."
"I suppose so," Leo agreed, climbing to his feet on knees that creaked with age. "But I'm sure he didn't manage it in one weekend."
As his mind returned to what had started his frustrated back-and-forth, Chris's grin slipped from his face. "Maybe I should just switch schools so I don't have to think about it anymore." Had this been his mother, he would not have voiced the thought, but his father had always been more open to the idea from the get-go. As its headmaster, he obviously believed in Magic School's mission.
What Chris wanted was for someone to give him a definitive solution, but Leo didn't offer that. Instead, he stood with his hands clasped loosely behind his back and asked his son, "Is that really what you want?"
"I want not to be in this position," Chris grumbled.
After considering this for a moment, Leo rephrased the question. "If Dwight accepted you, would you want to switch then?"
Chris didn't answer right away. At first, sliding past his father, he flopped face-first onto his bed before flipping to his back to stare at the ceiling. "No," he admitted at length. "I'd want to stay."
Leo nodded, as if he had expected this. "Then I think that tells you that you should give him more time. There's no rule that says you have to decide before winter break is over. It may be a bit trickier to switch mid-semester, but it's certainly doable, especially for someone as committed as you. Don't rush a decision like this."
Chris expelled a sharp sigh, followed by an uncertain, "Yeah…"
"Well, think about it," Leo offered, turning toward the door.
Before he could leave, Chris lifted his head. "Wait, Dad, what did you come here to say? Before?"
"Oh, yes." The man waved a hand almost dismissively. "Your Aunt Phoebe called to ask if you could babysit for the girls tomorrow. She and Coop got tickets to A Doll's House on the West End. They want to make a whole day of it."
Chris shrugged. "I guess." It certainly beat worrying away the hours about whether or not Dwight would call.
"Thanks, kiddo. I'll let your mom know." Leo returned to the bed to ruffle Chris's hair, but the teen ducked his father's upraised hand. Shaking his head, Leo turned to the door. He glanced back over his shoulder to say, "Remember, Chris, be patient."
Saturday afternoon found Chris cajoled into taking Katie to the park near her home. Lea, who believed herself old enough to stay home alone, took great offense when Chris insisted she join them. "I'm only two years younger than you, Chris," she pointed out, arms crossed. "You're here to babysit Katie, not me."
"Oh, come on, Melon," he nagged, poking her shoulder repeatedly. "It'll be fun." Scowling, she swatted his hand away. "Please," he said more seriously. "You know Katie's boundaries better than anyone. You'll know if she's getting worn out and needs to leave." He dropped his finger but continued to hold out his hands, pleading.
Her expression softened as she huffed, "Fine. Let me get a book," and stomped up the stairs to her room.
Chris turned to Katie, who had bundled herself in a thick down winter coat. Her hair had been braided into twin pigtails that disappeared beneath the collar of her zipped coat. Chris had always wondered how Phoebe managed to do the girl's hair since she had come into her powers. As a chubby infant, she'd been dolled up in pink laces and bows, and somehow that hadn't changed after she lost the ability to touch others.
That train of thought, however, reminded Chris of the memory he had witnessed in the abyss, Katie as a teenager, her hair whipping around her face as fire leapt all around her. Shaking his head to dislodge the image, he forced himself to smile at his young cousin. "Ready?" he asked, and she nodded.
Once Lea returned with a book under her arm, they left the house and walked the couple of blocks down to the park. Katie raced to the monkey bars and began to clamor across them as Chris and Lea searched for a clear patch of grass where they could sit. When they found it, Lea plopped down on her stomach and immediately cracked open her book, legs kicking behind her in the air.
Chris picked a spot beside her that gave him a decent view of the monkey bars in case Katie called out to him. He lay his head back against his hands and watched her between his bent knees. The sun, peeking out from behind a cluster of clouds, cast a warm strip directly over them. Against his will, Chris found himself closing his eyes, drowsing to the white noise of chatter and laughter. On occasion he picked up Katie's voice in the mix; she had run into one of her classmates from Magic School, the daughter of a shaman who happened to live in the area. Together they ran off to the slides, out of Chris's direct line of sight. He listened for her high, tinkling laugh with a lazy smile. This was nice.
Some time later, Chris felt a sharp nudge in his ribs. When he glanced at Lea, who had elbowed him, she had her finger on the page to hold her place as she nodded toward the playground. Skipping toward them was Katie, her face flushed and her hair escaping the braids in thin strands.
Chris sat up on his elbows as she came to them. She looked about ready to flop into the grass but instead took the time to situate herself carefully between Chris and Lea. She could never really "flop." If she weren't conscious about her movements, she could fall a couple inches too deep, directly into the ground. Though this wouldn't harm her, it did risk exposure. Even when she played, if in public, she made the deliberate choice to make her hair fly out behind her as if tugged by the wind. It was likely at least one reason that Phoebe twined her hair back: less motion to control. Chris had no idea how Katie could consider all the variables at once, but for her to do so came as second nature.
"You ready to go home?" he asked, shading his eyes from the glare of the sun.
"Not yet," Katie sighed with a giggle. She lay back, closing her eyes. "I just wanna sit here a while." Chris smiled and let his head fall back again. He watched a low-hanging cloud sail past, casting a brief shadow on the trio as it floated across the sun.
Despite what her life looked like, Katie seemed to bear most of it with a pleasant smile. Chris did not wish for struggles like hers, nor did he consider positively the possibility of having a powerful empath for a mother—the lack of privacy that inevitably came with that—but he sure did envy her ability to smile and truly mean it through almost anything. She had her bad days, like anyone, but they came infrequently.
Chris turned his head into the grass to watch her. She had dozed off, breathing deeply from inside her overlarge coat, as Lea read quietly beside her. Lea's lips moved silently as she read, Chris noticed with affectionate amusement. One of Katie's hands rested on her stomach, rising and falling, rising and falling. A loose strand of hair fluttered gently across her nose in the breeze—
Chris shot up so abruptly that it drew Lea's attention away from her book. Frowning at him over Katie's head, she asked, "You okay?"
Katie's hair was fluttering. In her sleep. While awake she may have had precise control over every movement, but even she couldn't use deliberate telekinesis while unconscious. It had been just a millisecond, her hair lay completely still now, despite the breeze, but Chris had seen it. He was certain.
"Chris." He looked over at Lea, who had closed her book and sat up on her knees, brow furrowed in concern. "What's wrong?"
"Oh, uh… nothing," he replied, eyes drifting back to his younger cousin's face. "I, uh, thought I saw a wasp."
"In winter?" she scoffed. He laughed half-heartedly along with her. As she lay back onto her stomach and reopened the book, he stared intently at Katie, riveted to that single strand of hair. He held his breath, waiting.
There. There it was again.
When his older self had claimed Katie could learn to control her intangibility, had done so, in fact, back in his timeline, Chris hadn't wanted to believe it. It had sounded impossible. What they knew most about Katie was that she could not turn it off, not since the moment she grew into her powers as a toddler. It was why Phoebe had to bespell her bed so she didn't actually fall through it in the middle of the night. Every inch of her life had been carefully constructed around her disability—because that's how everyone thought of the power, a disability. And all this time, all these years, they had treated the symptoms, thinking a cure could not exist.
But there it was, plain as the hair on her head. The moving hair on her head. An external force pushing a part of her as if she were solid, as if, for mere seconds at a time, she were normal.
"Lea," Chris whispered urgently. "Lea."
"See a wasp again?" Lea smirked without glancing up.
"Lea, look at Katie."
Eyebrows raised, she put her finger on her place and cast a sideways glance at her sleeping sister. "Okay," she said, sounding bored, "I'm looking."
"Wait for it," he urged.
They were quiet for a moment before Lea rolled her eyes. "What am I looking at, Chris?"
Almost too afraid to breathe, he murmured out of the corner of his mouth, "Her hair, it moved." Lea opened her hands and deliberately widened her eyes in a clear so what gesture. "By itself," Chris stressed.
Her brows drove downward as she sat up on her knees, her book forgotten in the grass. "That's not funny, Chris," she said flatly.
"I'm not kidding," he insisted, pointing his finger centimeters away from Katie's face. "Look. It was that hair right there. I saw it."
"It was a trick of the light," Lea dismissed without taking her hard stare off Chris. Leaning forward, she slapped his hand away from Katie's face. The sleeping girl shifted slightly, mumbling something incoherent under her breath.
Chris ignored Lea's glare. "Katie," he called instead, "Wake up." He had never had to refrain so strongly from trying to grasp her shoulders to shake her awake.
"Chris…" Lea said warningly.
"Katie," he said again, and the little girl at his side turned her face toward him, blinking lazily. She smiled at him. "Katie, you were just solid."
"Chris," Lea hissed.
Katie's smile waned. She didn't try to sit up at first, only stared at him from her supine position. "Huh?" she said. Subconsciously, the hand on her stomach closed into a loose fist.
"I'm telling the truth. It was just for a second, but I saw it. You were definitely solid, or at least a part of you was."
As if it were some joke whose punchline she hadn't understood, Katie cast a helpless glance at her sister, whose eyes had narrowed to slits in her fury. "Shut up, Chris!" Lea snapped.
He rocked forward on his knees, desperate to make them both comprehend. Finally, he understood his other self's frustration at his own vehement denials. They could fix her. "Don't you see?" he demanded, "It means we can change it. You can get better."
Furious, Lea jumped to her feet, her hands tightly balled at her sides. "Katie, get up. We're leaving." Without a word, Katie climbed up, shoulders hunched. She wouldn't meet Chris's eyes, but Chris saw hers glimmer with unshed tears. Her teeth bit hard into her bottom lip to keep from crying.
"Katie, I'm not…" He extended a hand in her direction, not to touch her, just to stop her, to express some unnamable emotion, but she shied away from his outstretched fingers and closer to her sister.
"What is wrong with you?" Lea shouted, stepping in front of Katie to form a shield. Katie hugged herself, each hand fiercely gripping the opposite elbow. "I thought that thing on Thanksgiving was just you being an idiot, but this isn't stupid; it's cruel. Seriously, are you brain damaged?"
Chris dropped his hand. "It's true," he said helplessly.
Lea just squeezed her eyes shut and shook her head. "You're horrible," she said with disgust. Putting her hand behind Katie's back, she herded the girl forward. "Come on," she said to her sister. Katie stared at her shoes as they shuffled to the sidewalk and disappeared around the block.
Grabbing the book Lea had abandoned, Chris followed at a distance. He couldn't shake the image, a single strand fluttering across a pale nose. What could he possibly say to make them listen?
When they got back to the house, Lea ushered Katie into Lea's bedroom. Casting a venomous glare at Chris from over her shoulder, she shut the door firmly behind her. Chris heard the lock click. With a heavy sigh, Chris trekked into the living room and sank onto the couch, staring numbly at the book in his lap.
When Phoebe and Coop returned home, Lea and Katie still had not emerged. Chris debated whether or not to tell them about the fight but ultimately decided against it. Let Lea or Katie tell them, if they wanted to. When Phoebe asked how the day had gone, Chris said simply, "Fine," and left it at that.
"How was your date?" he asked before they could press for more details.
Phoebe curled against Coop's chest as she tossed her purse onto the kitchen table. Coop's arm came up around her to caress her shoulder as she stared up into his eyes. "It was wonderful," she sighed. Coop tilted his head forward, butting her forehead with his and giving her a soft chuckle.
"We went out to dinner at this little hole in the wall in London," Phoebe continued dreamily. "And this adorable young couple—they must have been in their teens still—"
"Nineteen," Coop supplied with a fond grin, "The boy was still eighteen, though."
"Well, he proposed!" Phoebe squealed. Well, that explained his aunt and uncle's behavior. Her empathy and his nature as a Cupid always made them a bit dopey when they were in close proximity to strong romantic vibes. "It was just the cutest. Do you remember teenage love?" she said, closing her eyes and snuggling into Coop's arms. One finger drew small circles on his chest. "I was such a mess with it. Back in high school, Todd and I…" She laughed, blushing.
"I was never a teenager," Coop replied with an indulgent smile.
Phoebe wrinkled her nose. "Gross," she remarked. With a chuckle, Coop pecked the bunched-up skin on the tip of her nose.
Chris got to his feet. "Well, that's my cue."
Tearing her gaze from her husband, Phoebe smiled sheepishly at Chris. "Sorry," she said, "And thank you." He wondered if she would still feel grateful once Lea told her what he'd said today. Still unconsciously gripping her book, he orbed back home.
He lay awake most of the night, staring at the ceiling. Eventually, he drifted off and appeared inside the strange new half-light abyss. The new kid, Mutt, was nowhere to be found, likely tucked away in that tunnel of his. But Chris spotted his older self immediately, his back turned as he scribbled furiously at his desk. Chris marched into the darkness of his older self's domain and dumped himself onto the couch. "You were right," he announced, determination steeling his voice.
The scratching of the pen paused. Slowly, the man turned in his chair to meet Chris's gaze. Seeing the boy's fierce look, he bypassed the joke on his lips—I'm always right—and asked instead, "What about?"
"Katie. I saw her hair move in the wind."
Expelling a slow breath, the man gently set his pen aside. "Okay," he said with a nod. "Well, this is good. How old is she, eight? Much sooner than she learned in my world."
"Yeah, but they don't believe me," Chris muttered, running his fingers through his hair. "How did she learn to control it? In your timeline, I mean."
The man shook his head, wincing in apology. "We never knew. It was Wyatt who figured it out, but he never explained how."
Chris let out a frustrated growl under his breath. "How am I supposed to prove it to them if I can't get her to do it on purpose?"
The man leaned back in his chair as he pondered the predicament, fingers drumming against his chin. "Maybe you can," he remarked. "Our powers are tied to our emotions."
"Yeah, but it clearly doesn't work that way for her intangibility. It's always on."
"It's still got to be connected to them somehow," his older self argued. "That's how witches' innate magics work."
"Innate magics?" Chris echoed as a question.
The man waved a distracted hand, still staring at the ceiling as he thought. "As opposed to external abilities, like spell-casting and potion-brewing, which are primarily skill-based." Suddenly, he snapped his fingers, eyes bright. "So maybe it's backwards."
"Backwards," Chris repeated skeptically.
His other self grinned at him. "Yes. For most powers, you tap into your emotions to provoke them. If hers are always on, maybe losing control of her emotions will turn them off."
Chris sat back in surprise. Could it be that simple? The girl who, by necessity, had precise control over every other power, who had adopted that same control over every negative emotion as it hit her—did she merely need to lose control? His fingers tapped out a rhythm against his thigh as he tried to formulate a plan. He was so focused that he barely noticed when the space around him fell away and bled into regular sleep.
He dreamt of the day he had first encountered Katie's powers for himself. It had happened a few months after her second birthday, when Chris, nine years old, had snuck into his napping cousin's room. She had been so cute, the way her nose twitched as she slept, and Chris had reached through the bars of the crib with one finger to poke her wrinkled little nose. His hand had poked straight through her face, and he had run hollering to his mother, waking the toddler in the process.
"Mommy, Mommy! She's a ghost!" he had wailed as Phoebe went in to soothe Katie back to sleep with a lullaby.
Piper had explained to Chris about Katie's new power and, even without truly understanding what it would mean for the girl, he had cried.
In this dream, he was nine years old again, staring through the crib bars. He kept trying to move a strand of hair lying across her nose, tongue bitten between his teeth as he concentrated, but it wouldn't budge.
Chris woke early the next morning. Piper seemed surprised to see him in the kitchen. "I would've thought you'd sleep extra late on your last day of vacation," she remarked.
He shrugged, feeling jittery with anticipation for the rest of the day. He knew he had only one shot at his plan, if they even let him try at all. "I'm going to Aunt Phoebe's," he said, distracted. "There's something Lea and I were gonna do."
Unable to pinpoint what was wrong but sensing something off just the same, Piper frowned. "Okay... have fun."
After downing a quick bowl of dry cereal, he returned to his bedroom to grab Lea's book and orbed back to Phoebe's house. This had a chance of working only if his cousins had not told their parents what Chris had done yesterday. If they had, it was unlikely Phoebe and Coop would let Chris talk to Katie.
He felt reasonably confident that Katie would not have mentioned it. She so rarely acknowledged negative occurrences, afraid to cause her parents undue distress. Lea was the question mark. She often withheld information from her mother out of a simmering resentment that Phoebe could and often did breach her privacy to empathically assess her emotional state. But she was also very protective of her sister. Chris wasn't sure which would trump the other in this instance. Still, he had to try.
He rematerialized in their kitchen, where Phoebe and Coop were chatting over bowls of fruit and yogurt. Phoebe brightened when she saw him, though her brow furrowed a bit in confusion. "Hey, Chris, what are you doing here?"
They didn't know, then. Phoebe was an atrocious liar. If she had heard, she wouldn't be able to keep the anger and hurt out of her face. Step one, done. He waved Lea's book in the air. "Lea forgot this at the park yesterday." And it wasn't even a lie. "I just came to return it to her."
Phoebe smiled fondly. "Oh, that's sweet, hon. She's in her room." She waved vaguely toward the stairs, and Chris thanked her as he stepped into the hall. Time for the real challenge. With a deep breath to steel himself, he climbed the stairs and knocked.
As soon as Lea opened the door, her expression collapsed into a scowl. "What are you—"
"I came to apologize," he interrupted quickly.
Eyes narrowed, Lea stepped back to let him into the room. She noticed the book in his hand and snatched it. "Thanks," she said begrudgingly, and turned to set it on her bed. In the meantime, Chris cast a furtive glance around, searching for something useful. When she turned back, her arms were folded. "Well?" she said expectantly.
"Actually," Chris said. "Can you get Katie? I'd like to say it to both of you."
Lea stared at him hard, as if trying to read him, but eventually dropped her arms. "Fine," she said with a put-upon sigh, marching past him out of the room. Chris darted to her dresser, where clothes lay draped over an open drawer. He sifted past hair care supplies on top of the surface, behind which sat an intricately-detailed wooden jewelry box inlayed with concentric gold circles. Chris had been there the day she'd received it, a birthday present from her father. He knew when the lid opened, a series of gears cranked, allowing the case to unfold into several layers, triggering secret compartments to appear and tiny drawers to slide open. It was a stunning piece of machinery, hand-crafted in Japan, and one that Lea absolutely cherished.
"Perfect," Chris murmured. He hefted the large box carefully in his arms.
Lea returned with Katie in tow. "This better be a good apology," the older sister muttered as they crossed the threshold. Her eyes narrowed at Chris. "What are you doing?"
Surreptitiously, he twitched a finger to ease the door closed behind them. "I was thinking about it," he said slowly, catching Katie's gaze, "A lot. And I realized you never really get mad or scared, do you, Katie?" Katie's brow furrowed in confusion. "You're just too sweet," Chris pressed on. "Even if I threatened to break your favorite toy, you'd probably just"—he shrugged—"let me." He took a step backwards, staring intently at the mute bewilderment on Katie's face. "But you really love Lea, don't you?"
"Chris, what are you up to?" Lea demanded, voice tinged with fear.
"Don't worry," Chris replied. "This will work." He squinted his eyes, and the ornate box rose from his hands and floated slowly across the room. Lea lunged wildly, throwing out a hand to use her power to freeze it, but Chris's telekinesis forced it forward. It wavered its way over to a white-faced Katie. Without thinking, she lifted her hands, though she knew she couldn't stop it.
"Chris, Dad got that for my birthday!" Lea cried in a panic. "You're gonna break it!"
The box came to hover just above Katie's hands, so close that they couldn't see a space between the wood and her skin. "It'll be fine; Katie's holding it," Chris said with confidence.
"That is so not funny!" Lea snapped.
Lea glared at Chris, Chris watched Katie, and Katie stared at the box in her hands, her eyes impossibly wide. "I'm letting go in three, two, one…"
"No, don't!" both girls cried out in horror as Chris dropped his hands to his side. Katie's arms sank a few inches as the weight of the box landed in her hands.
The room fell deathly silent. Katie's atrophied muscles began to tremble. Her knuckles blanched from her tight grip. She could feel the grainy wood, the smoothness of the gold design, its every raised bump and crevice. Her pinky dug into one of the small gold hinges on the edge. She was touching something, actually touching, for the first time since she could remember—
—But I can't touch, she thought—
All of a sudden, it was gone and the wood slipped through her palms. Quick on his feet, Chris threw up his hands. The jewelry box halted inches before smashing to bits against the carpet. Carefully, he sent it floating back to land on the dresser.
Nobody spoke. Chris and Lea stared at Katie, who turned over her hands as if to analyze them, as if they were two new and unfamiliar appendages. Her eyes were bright, almost feverishly so. At long last, in a voice no louder than a whisper, with a tone brimming with wonder, she said, "It was… heavy."
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