Hi! So here is another story from me for this wonderful fandom. I wanted to get this out before the start of the New Year but I was burning the candles at both ends so to speak finishing up all my other stories so I decided the best thing to do was to take a little break and recharge and get into a good place to start this one.

So on a few notes: I have always wanted to write a story with all four sisters. Shannon did such a wonderful job as Prue and Rose did such a wonderful job as Paige it is a shame that for whatever reason we did not get to see a scene shared with them (that one with the back of Prue does not count). So this is my little remedy for that.

This is a happy ending for all of the sisters, it runs this story approximately from prequal days to the end of Season 3. I do intend to redeem Cole and probably Zankou who was arguably the best villain of the series-only just beating Gideon who was outstandingly bad. I wrote Paige and Zankou on a whim in my last story and I enjoyed it and I got a lot of good feedback from it so we are going down this road again. And also Prue/Andy were the love story that for me kicked off a love of Charmed so...he too gets to live.

Some episodes will be skipped over and if you are looking for a cannon compliment, word perfect, dialogue perfect, punctuation perfect story then let me tell you that is not me. I also do a lot of swearing in my stories so if you don't like that then turn away now at this first chapter.

Also again let me be plain I DESPISE the Elders. I hate them, I hate the hypocrisy, I hate the way they treated Leo after Gideon, I hate the way they were with the Avatars, I hate the fact that they expected the sisters to be on supernatural speed dial and I hated that they constantly butted in. Believe me in Season 5 I was actively cheering for the Titans. To me the Elders made themselves Titans. So if your looking for a story where they get a good rap then walk away now please.

Disclaimer-Nothing here is mine.

Please Read and Review.

I do not do private messages anymore. If you have a question then please stick it in a review and I will try to answer it in the next chapter notes.

I will try to update as soon as work allows me. Spelling and Grammar have never been my friends please keep that in mind too.

This story will be 28 Chapters long.

And now we are into the main story...kind of.

Let There Be Light

Chapter 4-Conspiracy Of Silence

The Charmed Girls grow up but without powers and in hiding...but there is a charming man interested in Paige, a cop to be interested in Prue and Penny...who is beginning to feel her age reads the cards to get a better look at what the future holds for her granddaughters…its' confusing to say the least...Penultimate Prequal?

All little girls have to grow up.

That was reality and so the four girls that had lost their mother to magic grew up to be the four dark haired Halliwell sisters. All stunning, all powerful, all mortal.

Or that was what they believed.

And all of them had boys after them.

Their grandmother said it was the high cheekbones, the temper and the way they walked. She would say this over a sip of her gin at the dinner table as they grew from babies, to girls, to teenagers. They were all Grandmother's girls, even Phoebe who was arguably the rebel of them all. Prue was career minded. Piper liked to stay around the house, Pheobe was the troublemaker and Paige was the baby that was always underestimated at everyone else's peril.

Underneath it all was the travels of sisterhood. There was rows and slammed doors and fights over boots, there was clothes and eyeliner and smoke bombs, cigarettes, parties, drinking, finales. They were bold and adventurous and never once did any of them go up to the attic because as their Grams had always told them the attic door was jammed shut and there was nothing worth going in there anyway so what was the point of spending good money to get it open again?

They never heard from their father. In reality they never needed too.

And if Sam Wilder never darkened their doorstep again then as far as Penny was concerned that was a good thing. The sisters never needed to know that they had a half sister. Victor to his credit (she had to give him this) was good on his promise that Paige's parentage would never be spoken off publicly. The Elders never once bothered her. They didn't send her a whitelighter either.

It was as if they had given up controlling her, given up on trying to get her to give the girls their powers. She had bound them all after Patty and had never regretted her decision. For Penny keeping them alive was the only thing that mattered.

She just wished sometimes they didn't go looking for trouble…although with their tempers and their wit and their looks mortal or witches there was the reality that trouble would find them no matter what.

And naturally it had to come when they were old enough to know better and young enough to not. And at a time when the reality was age was creeping up to her, death stalking her like a friend. The older she got the more she wanted to reflect on her girls, the more she would sit at the cards and ask what was in their future other than the destiny that had already been handpicked for them, the destiny that she still believed in despite all that it had cost her so far.

The cards were an old trick, but gypsy magic and witches magic often went hand in hand and she had learnt her craft well from Theresa and Lydia who had been kind enough to help her out from time to time with some healing herbs, some palm readings and when it all got too much some of that dark liquor that made her cry, laugh and forget all at once.

(Whatever that stuff was it was lethal and not in the good way. Penny was quite sure she had said yes to two of her husbands under the influence on that stuff and look at how well that had ended up)

But the cards were safe and the cards were easy and comforting, they were half truth and half a game and yet she drew cards for each of her girls when the moon was full and her heart was thumping against her chest beating hard and hard against her ribs, beating wrongly like it had done when she had first heard that she had lost her only child to death and that she was never coming back through the front door again.

She drew the cards to find out what would happen to her girls.

First was Prue.

Andy Trudeau was problem number one with Prue. Oh not like that! She liked Andy. As men went Andy was a uncomplicated issue. He had been a sweet boy that had grown to an even sweeter teenager to an even stronger man. He wanted to be a cop which given his families line of work was hardly unsurprisingly and he clearly thought the world of Prue. So why she had to go and dump him for that stuck up snob Rodger Penny would never know. She knew that it had been born a little out of the way Prue was when she had come home from being attacked that night. The demon in disguise was easily vanquished and none of the girls had to know the truth but Rodger was a pest that she wanted gone.

Personal gain got in the way.

Prue she wanted to see happiness. She was marked still by what she had seen, never free of the demons that was her mother's death. She had always been driven, so much so that it was often at the sacrifice of her personal life and the last thing that Penny wanted (despite her views on men) was for Prudence to look around her and see that she was married to the work (job or demon hunting) and realise that she had let life and love pass her by.

The cards didn't tell her that she was wrong on that front either but she had hope for Prue and Andy. If any man was not Victor (and God knows Prue needed a man that was not her father) then it was Andy. Andy she thought after the initial shock might be the one man that would take the news that his wife was a witch with good grace.

Like Alan.

You know…after the half a bottle of scotch.

Piper, her sweet Piper was burning away her potential at bank job that she had no interest in and no desire to succeed in. The problem with Piper was not lack of confidence, Piper had confidence even if it was always dominated by her three other sisters. She thought for Piper and she was pleased to see that she was right, that there was a great love in the cards for her, the more she stared at that card the more she thought that this great love would shake up the rules, the more that she hoped it would. She did not want Piper to be like her mother in the sense that she had suffered but at the same time if one of her girls could shake the Elders out of their all or nothing position she would actually put her money on Piper.

Piper who was going to do wonderful things, who would one day live her dreams and who would gain a confidence that would inspire a generation.

Looking back this was probably the moment where Penny should have stopped pouring herself another good slug of gin and gone to sleep but she had two more girls to draw cards for, two more futures to look at in the smoke of her incense.

Phoebe.

Good God Phoebe.

What could one say about Phoebe?

Phoebe was trouble.

Underneath the trouble though Phoebe was more her mother's daughter than any of the girls. While Prue had inherited the looks, Piper the temperament Phoebe had inherited the danger side, the side that had drawn her baby girl to her whitelighter. Pheobe had the same lust for life, the same love for the world, the wanderlust that Penny knew would pry her from this house even if it did see her tumbling back. With Pheobe the man…whoever he was…would have to have guts and endurance. Penny loved Pheobe but she was headstrong.

She turned over the cards and paused her hands on one.

She did not know why looking at the lovers card for Phoebe she felt such a flicker of…something. Out of all of the girls she knew deep down both as a witch and as a grandmother that Pheobe was going to love like a butterball, have it ooze out of her. But she could not shake the feeling that there was something dark about her love story.

And then there was Paige.

Paige the baby that had upended destiny.

Paige who was dating someone—oh Penny didn't know who but she knew what young love looked like and Paige at nineteen was dripping with it, oozing out of her pores. Paige who was giggling and grinning and acting almost like she was under a love spell (she wasn't Penny had checked—it was just that teenage stupidity often mimicked love spells and so she had to check to be on the safe side).

Paige who was more like her father than any of her girls.

She turned over her blank card for Paige and stilled. She had seen great loves in all of her girls but for Paige it was blank. She turned over the other card and then paused.

The wheel of fortune.

Well…that was either good or bad. That could be either good or bad.

Damn.

She wasn't a gypsy fortune teller she could not interpret the signs. She did this for fun most of the time but she's found herself wondering about this boy of Paige's. The pack of cards had three blanks ones there for added space it was not supposed to be a reading and yet Paige's love had drawn a blank…almost as if he wished to be hidden.

She tapped her nails on the card and then put them all back in the box.

There was no good worrying not just yet. She had ordered a new camera. She wanted to take photographs. She wanted to live.

She was not ready to die yet. She was not ready to leave them yet and she was certainly not ready for them to know the truth. What she did want was to sleep and sleep without this catch in her chest that had been plaguing her for months.

And so she blew the candles out.

She did sleep.

But not without the catch in her chest.

Paige watched as Prue staggered in after another night out with that prick Rodger. She leaned out the window and then gently as soon as the front door closed she leaned out her own window and climbed down the trellis gently until her feet hit the ground.

It was getting easier to do this, then again Phoebe had made sneaking out the house via the window and then back in again an art form.

Her boots hit the floor and then she eased around the house to where he was waiting.

He didn't have a car and he was dressed in black leather which in Paige's mind made him very, very cool. She ran towards him and hugged him and he hugged her back and the second his arms were around her she felt safe. She felt safe with him.

Zankou.

It was a funny name for a funny man and she knew that it was something in the air around him. Almost like magic.

But then again Zankou was magic.

A demon.

He'd told her when she'd turned eighteen, told her that he was a demon, showed her magic, told her what he could do. Paige had been half torn between horror and fascination but then he had looked her in the eye and said clearly.

"I am not like the rest of my kind you know. I am not…I don't hunt people unless they hunt me. I have been around for centuries. I have loved and I have lost. But I like you…and I am young enough to remember what that feels like"

There was something in there that told Paige that Zankou was much older than the twenty year old he looked like but she had not really thought about it.

When he had showed her magic she had thought it the best thing that she had ever seen, one of the most glorious things that she had ever seen but it was more than that, there was something in her that felt almost…almost like a kindred spirt.

"Hey" she said as he let her go and she dropped to the ground.

"Hi tell me something darling, your Grams never tell you that meeting strange men on dark corners is a bad idea?"

"You're not here to turn me evil are you?"

Zankou rolled his eyes at her piss poor joke.

"I could" he said and there was a hint of seriousness to it that she woudlnt understand until much later. "I could but I won't. I don't plan to get involved in any fight that I can't win, and I know enough to know that I cannot win this one"

Paige opened her mouth and then closed it again.

"I don't understand" she said and he grinned kissing her long and low and slow in that delicious way that her whole body shaking and aching with desire.

"Not now you don't" he said and he looked up at the house with a wry expression. "But one day you will. And I might regret playing with fire then."

"I don't regret anything" she said as they turned to walk down the street. Zankou liked walks she had realised. She just liked Zankou.

"Not now you don't" he said wryly. "But you might"

"Not you" she vowed.

His smile was dark and bitter. It only served him to make him more attractive.

"We'll see" was all he said.

Paige couldn't understand the warning then. She would understand what it was much later.

But it was too late for her then.

To be honest…it was too late for her now.

She was in love.

And there you go. I think maybe one more before we hit the main series.

Next Chapter-In which Penny dies. And the Charmed Ones, the Halliwell sisters are all blown apart to their four respective corners of the world.