Post by StoryGirl83 on Sept 22, 2008 22:56:38 GMT -5
Chapter Sixteen – No Touching
One o’clock found things no better. Leo was over by the wall of potion shelves, looking for some potion that might help, one they hadn’t tried yet.
Prue was looking through the Book of Shadows. They had tried countless spells it seemed, but none of them had worked.
Chris had Pat’s notepad with ideas since Pat was still downstairs playing games with her sister and the Mitchell twins. Most of the ideas on it had been crossed through as failures.
Wyatt was sweeping up broken pieces of glass from potion bottles that had once contained potions that failed. Having no skill at potion making, he was no use there and he couldn’t seem to come up with any new ideas, just the one.
Paige was at the potion table working on a potion. She had spent much of the afternoon not moving from there, assisting Piper or even coming up with her own potions. Since Piper was downstairs fixing lunch, she was for the moment working without her.
In Piper’s place, Melinda stood, trying to help out with the potions. She wasn’t as good as her mom, but at least she knew a tablespoon from a teaspoon and could do a great job of cooking, so that helped. In the hours since breakfast she had progressively gotten more transparent, to the point where her arms were now completely transparent as where her legs to her knees. She moved to grab something off the table and her hand went right through it. She looked up at Paige and sighed. “Now, I can’t even tough things. We have less than six hours and I can’t even touch things.” Frustration prompted her to ask, “What use am I?”
Wyatt looked up. “You aren’t giving up, are you?”
Melinda shook her head. “No, I’m just frustrated. This whole thing is just frustrating. Because of me and my spell not only is everyone I know gone for good, but soon I will be the cause of the loss of the only ones remaining.”
“You have to stop thinking like that,” Chris informed her, his voice low and serious.
Melinda’s shoulders’ slumped. “How would you have me think? I did this.”
“As I did to a reality I was from,” Chris informed her in a voice so monotone, everyone almost missed what he actually said. Sometimes the lines between who was him and who was this other Chris seemed to blur, but though he liberally switched between first and third person, he always knew which actually was which.
“What?” Melinda looked at him, curious and confused.
Wyatt’s stood so still, he hardly breathed. Is Chris actually going to tell her something about the other reality? Will it be something that might give me a clue as to why he never talks about it to me?
Thinking back to earlier conversations, Melinda asked, “Does this have something to do with what you said earlier about almost preventing your conception and what Wyatt said about you having memories of another time line?”
Chris nodded. “Exactly that. I don’t agree with everything he did,” he told her switching to using third person to refer to the other Chris, the one whose memories where held within his mind, whose life he hadn’t actually lived. “I hated some things he did.” A certain dead Valkyrie came to mind, followed quickly but lie after lie told to his parents and his aunts and anyone else he cared to speak to. “But he went back in time knowing he was leaving behind his reality, knowing that everything from that time line would be gone. And you know what, knowing what I know of that time line, I would do that again in a heartbeat.”
“Things must have been bad,” Melinda commenting, wondering how they could have been worse than what she had lived through, but thinking by the way he said it that they must have been, knowing that if there was ever a time to ask him about what happened, it wasn’t then.
“That’s not a topic I want to discuss,” Chris told her, confirming what Melinda had thought.
“Someday you will,” Melinda assured him. If not me, then it will be someone else. Maybe if I’m around you will want to share it with me, but maybe that won’t even matter. “I hope when the time comes, I’m around to discuss horror stories.” She had no doubt that they were exactly that.
Chris smiled a little. “You know I hope when I am ready, you’re around to discuss it with. I think you might just understand.”
“What about me?” Wyatt protested, finally speaking, knowing he wasn’t learning much of anything today. “Did you forget me?”
“No,” Chris shook his head, “but it will be a lot longer before I am ready to discuss it with you.”
“Whatever I did,” Wyatt began before shaking his head and correcting himself with, “whatever he did in the other reality, I can take it.”
“That’s the thing,” Chris told him, sadness in his voice. “I don’t want you to have to. It wasn’t you, but I know you.” If Wyatt knew what had happened in that other reality, if he knew some of the people his evil version had killed, he would feel guilty and he had no reason to. It wasn’t him.
At that moment Piper enter the attic with a tray of sandwiches. “Sorry I took so long. Things are worse downstairs. Pat tried picking something up and she couldn’t.”
Melinda sighed as she acknowledge, “Same here.”
“No luck while I was gone I take it,” Piper commented, unnecessarily.
“None,” Melinda agreed.
“I’m going to go downstairs and check on my family,” Prue informed them. She headed toward the door, stopping at the sound of Piper’s voice.
Piper nodded, “I understand.” I felt the same way about getting back up here. She may not have known Melinda long, but she was still mother enough to be worried about her.
Prue sighed as she left the attic.
Piper turned to the remaining people in the attic and asked, “Do we know what we are trying next?”
Chris nodded, his face grim. The ideas were getting less and less likely and more and more ridiculous, but they were all they had.