Post by StoryGirl83 on Nov 9, 2011 10:02:48 GMT -5
Chapter Twenty-Five – The Truth as You See It
Flashback
Flashback
Flashback
Flashback
Flashback
Flashback
“I can’t believe this!” Piper exclaimed excitedly as she looked down at the tiny remnants of the potion used to strip her son’s powers. She had only needed a little to figure out a potion to reverse it, but this was beyond believing.
Paige looked down at the liquid poured into a small glass. She blinked in surprise as she noticed that it appeared to have separated. An amber liquid settled on one side and a blue liquid on the other.
“Watch,” Piper directed as Prue came over and looked down at it skeptically. She covered the glass with a saucer and held it tight. Then, she picked up the glass and swirled it around. Holding the saucer on tightly, she held it up for her sisters to see. The liquid was well mixed, a brownish blue color.
Unimpressed Paige looked up at Piper. “So?”
Prue shook her head. “Piper, this is a waste of time.”
Piper smiled. “Just watch.” She lifted off the saucer and placed the glass down. Several seconds passed and then suddenly the colors began to separate, almost violently, spreading to different sides of the glass. Piper looked up at her sisters with a big grin on her face. “I might be mistaken, but I think we have a sample of the anti-orbing gel that inflicted my boys a couple of months ago. And if we’ve got a sample, that means I have the chance to find an actual cure.” She looked at her two sisters, her grin big. “We’d never have to worry about long term orbing loss for Paige or the boys or any whitelighters at all. We’d be doing the magical community at large a huge favor.”
“You know what this means right?” Prue asked.
Piper looked at her questioningly. “That I should start working on this potion?”
Prue shook her head. “Not this minute. If someone comes to you for a cure, you might be able to use the one you made for Chris,” she commented dismissively. “No, it means that someone believed the stripping potion wouldn’t take care of Chris’ orbing, so they mixed the two. If he has other whitelighter powers, it might mean he still has those. It also means that we need to try and call your other son and see if there’s anything we can do to help him. I don’t like not going after the demon behind this. We may not be able to cast a power of three spell, but we’re still the Charmed Ones . . . more or less.”
“Yeah, but it is more or is it less?” Paige retorted.
“What does that mean?” Emily asked from the doorway into the kitchen. “The power of three, the Charmed Ones. What does that mean?”
All three sisters turned to look at her, having completely forgotten her. Piper raised an eyebrow at her. “Exactly how much have my sons told you about magic?”
“Exactly how much?” she repeated. “Well.” She wrinkled her nose and shrugged. “Exactly very little, though I gather from it that Chris had a terrible life in another reality and Wyatt was a magical murderer in that other reality. And I have a pretty good grasp on what orbing is, though the way they describing I haven’t a clue why they can do it.”
“They can orb, because they are half whitelighter,” Paige informed her, slightly put out.
Emily shrugged. “See that doesn’t make any sense. It’s not like being Irish. I mean, aren’t whitelighters . . . dead?”
Prue chuckled. “You might have a point there. Both Piper’s husband and my own died prior to marrying us. Both are now living once more and no longer whitelighters.”
Paige gave her a look. “I’m a whitelighter.”
“Do you have charges?” Emily asked.
“Yes,” Paige replied instantly, before changing her answer. “No, not at the moment.”
“Hmm,” was the only response Emily gave.
“I think that’s enough of you,” Piper announced. “Did you have anything else that we could help you with?”
“Get my brother out of that building alive,” she replied without hesitation.
Piper’s face softened. She’d forgotten that Emily did have stake in the problems of the day. “From the sound of it, your brother should be just fine. I’ll make sure to let you know as soon as I hear that he is safely out of there.”
Emily smiled. “No need,” she assured them. “I’ll know the moment he gets off the phone with Matt, because Matt will call me to lecture me, again.”
Piper looked at her confused. “Wyatt has his cell, how is he supposed to call Matt?”
“Oh, don’t you worry there,” Emily returned unconcerned. “My brother’s are very resourceful. There’s no doubt he find a way to borrow one,” a mischievous look crossed her face as she added, “with or without the owners knowledge.”
“Your brother would steal a cell phone!” Prue exclaimed.
Emily shrugged. “He’d put it right back. They’d never even miss it.”
Prue looked at Emily, disturbed. “You have no issues with this?”
Emily chuckled. “Nate’s an accountant, not a pick pocket. He can do it if he had a mind to, but he wouldn’t. There are rules you know.” She looked at the three sisters. “So no, I have no issues with this.”
“Odd family,” Paige commented.
Emily gave her an innocent look. “Says the witch whose dad died at least six decades before she was born.” She nodded with laughter in her eyes. “Yep, I’m the one with the weird family.” She looked at Piper. “You’re right though, I no longer have a reason to be here. I’m completely lost when it comes to magic and you don’t need me underfoot right now. I’d like to learn, but today is clearly not the best time to do that.” She sighed. “I can show myself out. It was nice meeting you, Prue, and to be formally introduced to you, Paige.”
Piper watched her for a second and then turned back to her potions. “We’ve got something for Chris,” she repeated her earlier assessment, “so I guess we’d better call him.”
“You trust her?” Prue asked, looking at Piper curious.
Piper sighed. “Chris trusts her, and you have to admit, all problems aside, it’s hard to argue with a truth spell.”
Andy round the corner toward his apartment, juggling a bag of groceries while he hunted his pocket for his keys. When he reached his door, he was surprised to see Prue standing there. “Prue.”
“Andy,” she greeted him as he came to a stop in front of her. “I need to know how you feel about what I told you.”
“I’m gonna need a little more time,” he informed as he walked past her and reached toward the door with his key.
Prue turned with him. “I don’t have time, Andy.”
He stopped and looked at her.
“I need to know before eight.”
“Alright,” he conceded and nodded at the door. “Won’t you come inside and we’ll talk about it.” He went back to work on the lock with his key.
“I can’t,” she informed him.
“Prue . . .” he began.
“Andy, no,” she repeated firmly. In a dead serious tone, she continued with, “Look, if I come inside, we’ll have drinks, there’ll be small talk, and precious minutes will pass. I need to know now.” The look on her face earnest and a bit sad as if she suspected the answer would not be the one she wanted. “Can you or can you not accept that I am a witch?”
Andy’s lips moved slightly as he tried to form the words on his lips. “If I have to answer right now . . .”
Her eyes were big as she watched and listened.
“. . . I don’t think so, Prue.”
Prue looked down, sadness in her eyes, tears starting to fall.
“I mean there’s nothing wrong with it, I guess,” he continued, solemnly. “It’s just not a future I envision having.”
Then the bell had rung in eight o’clock and the end of the spell, leaving Andy with no memory of what had been said or done that day.
It was a few months later, a week after Andy had found out about magic, again, he was none too happy when he found out about the truth spell. “You did what last year?” he asked annoyed as he hurried down the stairs from the attic, glancing back at her in exasperation.
“Look,” Prue tried to explain as she followed his down. “I just wanted to see how you would react to finding out I was a witch.”
“So you cast a truth spell on me,” he shot back even as he slowed down at the bottom of the stairs. “Why didn’t you just ask?” Instead of looking at her, he looked away toward the door.
“Oh, because I was afraid you’d freak out on me,” she explained, more than a touch of annoyance in her own voice. “Which is exactly what you did, by the way, you just don’t remember. Part of the spell.”
“Wait a minute,” he stopped her, turning around. “My reaction to your being a witch isn’t the reason why we stopped seeing each other, is it?” he asked, hands on his hips.
“You’re the one who wanted to stop seeing me first,” she reminded him.
“Because you wouldn’t tell me what your secret was,” he shot back in disbelief.
“Yeah,” she agreed, “which turned out to be a good thing considering how you reacted.”
“Freaked out,” he repeated, annoyed.
“Exactly,” she agreed, again, “Kinda like what you’re doing right now.”
“You haven’t answered my question,” he informed her, lowering his tone. “Did that have anything to do with why we stopped seeing each other?”
“Sorta,” she spat out. When Andy gave her a searching look, requesting a straight answer, she sighed and in a normal voice admitted, “Okay, yeah, it did.”
“And just out of curiosity,” he continued. “How much time did you give me to react anyway?”
“Why?” Prue asked, confused. “What difference does it make?”
“How much time?” he repeated firmly.
“A minute,” at his widening eyes, she backpedaled with, “or two.”
“A minute?!” Andy exclaimed in disbelief.
“Or two,” she repeated in defense. “It, it, it was a twenty-four hour spell, all right. I was against the clock.”
“And that’s what you based your entire decision about us on?” Andy asked, stunned. “Prue, I’ve had a week to react to it this time. I still don’t know how I feel. You shouldn’t given me more time. I think I deserve that. I think we deserve that.”
Prue sighed and the moment, such as it was, was broken as Phoebe came down the stairs to join them.
Later that day, Andy came to Buckland’s to tell her he needed to talk. “Listen, Prue,” he began, breaking a happy mood with his serious tone. “I’ve done some thinking about the truth spell.”
Prue nodded and let him talk.
“And well, I’m still trying to sort my feelings out, but I’ve kind come to the conclusion that no matter whether I had a minute, a month, or a year to think about it, it wouldn’t change the truth. It may sound boring, but I know someday, I want to have a normal life to come home to. With a white picket fence, a two car garage, a screaming kid . . .”
Prue smiled at that, an amused sound escaping her lips.
“. . . But no demons.”
She nodded and sighed. She’d known this was coming.
He sighed, too. “Maybe it’s because of all the evil I deal with everyday on the job. I don’t know.”
“You don’t have to explain,” she stopped him, shaking her head. “I understand. Believe me I wouldn’t want to come home to it either if I could avoid it, but I can’t. You can.”
He nodded ever so slightly.
She smiled, and wrapped her arms around him, a good-bye, of sorts, to what could have been.
And then Andy had died. He’d understood why they did what they did so much that he turned in his badge to avoid answering questions in an internal affairs investigation. And he’d cared for them so much that he had gone into their home, knowing about a premonition that Phoebe had where he died, knowing that Rodriguez was a demon, almost certainly the one who would kill him. And then when he knew they could have let time be reversed, again, he told her to make sure it wasn’t, that she had taught him everything happened for a reason.
Prue shook her head with a sad smile. I lost so much time there. “Sometimes things aren’t always what they seem. You can say a complete lie, if it is what you believe. According to the spell, the truth . . . is the truth according to what they know at that moment in time.”
And for that moment in time, that was the truth for Andy, but there was another moment in time. It was over ten years later when the other side of the matter had presented itself.
“This was more Phoebe’s thing,” Prue admitted as she looked at Paige. She had pulled her long blonde hair into a pony tail, something her hair hadn’t seen in more years than she cared to consider. I can’t believe I’m actually doing this. I’ll probably pull a muscle.
Running Buckland’s had not been a particularly stressful activity . . . physically. There had been no need for training. In fact, she’d been so busy with Buckland’s and Piper had been so busy with Chez Magique, Melinda, and the divorce, that Phoebe had been the only one doing anything with magic or demons or any of it in months.
And Phoebe was dead, killed because, ironically she had misused magic. It wasn’t as if she didn’t, in retrospect Prue realized that. It was more that she did it the least of the three sisters.
Four sisters, Prue amended as she ducked a kick directed at her midsection. They’d been at this for half an hour already. Paige had asked her to show her some moves she used when fighting demons and it had quickly become apparent that Prue was rusty and Paige had some skills.
Another kick from Paige and Prue forced her attention back on her friend and newly discovered sister. How could we have known her all these years and had no clue that she was also our sister? She heaved in a breath and landed a well-aimed punch at Paige’s midsection, right before she doubled over in pain.
Paige stopped instantly and looked at Prue with concerned. “Prue, are you all right?”
Prue moaned and clutched her midsection. “I don’t know,” she admitted through clenched teeth.
“Leo!” Paige screamed. “Leo!”
Leo appeared in front of them in white orb bubbles. Seeing Prue his eyes widened. “Prue, what happened?” He held his hands against her stomach.
“I don’t know,” she repeated. “Leo, something is wrong.”
“But not with you,” Leo informed her puzzled. “How did this happen?”
“We were sparring,” Paige told him concerned. “She landed one on me and she was the one who went down.” She placed a concerned hand on Prue’s shoulder and was instantly surrounded in orb bubbles.
The vision Paige had been pulled into, a most bizarre combination of Phoebe’s premonitions and the orbing ability Paige possessed due to her whitelighter father, Sam, had taken her far away to the other side of the planet where a young woman lay crying over her dying whitelighter.
Paige had ordered Leo to follow her and to bring Prue.
Prue wobbled as Leo let go of her. In all their years of having him as a whitelighter, she had only been orbed once or twice. Leo had put his foot down after a time and he’d stopped orbing anyone, even Piper places. That had been a week and a half after that had met Sam. Sam’s situation with Patty Halliwell twenty odd years before had mirrored the story unfolding before everyone’s eyes with Piper and Leo.
After they had saved Sam from sacrificing himself for Prue, and much to Prue’s relief, saved her, too, he had been none too happy about it, but the three sisters had badgered him for stories about their mom, especially Phoebe. It had taken four days, sixteen hours, and ten bowls of chocolate ice cream to get him not only relaxed enough, but also hyped up on sugar enough to talk. Most of that had been Phoebe’s doing.
Six days later he had told them a story about orbing their mom somewhere and how she’s nearly gotten killed as a result. Leo had over heard the story and after that he refused to orb them anywhere.
And yet, ten years later, here they were.
Paige looked around and quickly spotted the young woman from her premonition. “Leo, there.”
Leo followed her running form as she sprinted over to the young woman crying over the still form of a man.
She looked up at the sound of running footsteps. “Can you help him?” she asked, pleading. “He won’t let me even try.”
The first thing Prue saw was the arrow sticking out of the man’s back. “Turn him on his side,” she directed. “We have to get that thing out of him.”
Leo knelt down and felt for a pulse. It did no good to try healing until the arrow was removed, but he wanted to know if the man was even alive.
“You can’t touch it,” the woman protested.
“I know,” Prue admitted, thinking of the first time she had seen a darklighter’s arrow, deeply embedded in Leo’s body.
“Then what . . ?” The woman stopped as she watched Paige and Leo turn the man on his side.
“Your whitelighter?” Prue queried as she readied her hand.
The young woman just nodded.
Prue waved her arm and sent the arrow the rest of the way through the dying whitelighter’s body and into a nearby concrete wall, snapping it in two.
Paige helped Leo turn the whitelighter over the rest of the way. It wasn’t until Paige moved out of the way to allow Leo space that Prue glimpsed the whitelighter’s face.
“Andy!”
Prue had never truly gotten over Andy’s death, but she had moved on with her life. She had spent ten years without him and suddenly, there he was. Just knowing that he was literally just a call away had been hard, but for once things seemed to go her way and in time Andy had been granted permission to not only see her, but ultimately to marry her.
“Thanks, Aunt Prue!” Melinda called out as she grabbed her homework off the table and ran toward where Leo stood in the doorway.
Prue smiled and waved.
“Thanks for watching her, Prue,” Leo said over his daughter’s head as Melinda hugged his torso.
“Anne thinks I’m nuts,” Prue informed him with a laugh.
“There are worse things,” he reminded her as orb lights swirled around next to her.
“Get out of here, Leo,” Prue ordered good naturedly as the orbs turned into her boyfriend, Andy Trudeau.
Leo smiled and grabbed Melinda’s hand. “Say good-bye to Prue, Melinda.”
“Bye, Aunt Prue,” Melinda called out before pulling Leo toward the hall. “Come on, Daddy. I want to show you what I did in school today.”
As the door closed behind them Prue turned to Andy. “I thought they said you couldn’t come here, too much magical exposure risk or something like that.”
“Actually, I think the ruling from then was that I stay out of places in this building with cameras unless I am glamoured, since I am still officially dead,” Andy informed her. He smiled at her. “No cameras here.”
Prue smiled back at him. She learned over and planted a kiss on his lips. “So how’s my favorite whitelighter doing?”
“I believe he’s doing good, hanging out with his daughter and all,” Andy teased.
“Not Leo,” Prue gave him a little shove in the shoulder. “You. How are you, Andy?”
“Nervous, if you must know,” he replied matter of fact.
Prue looked at him puzzled. “Nervous? Whatever for?”
“Remember when you asked if I could accept that you were a witch and what you really meant was could I accept that I was dating a witch?”
Prue nodded, a little sad at the memory. “And you said no, twice.”
“Yeah, well I don’t precisely remember that first time,” he reminded her. “So it’s probably best we don’t go into that one.”
She nodded. “You were nervous then,” she mumbled to herself.
“What’s that?”
“Oh, you were nervous that day, too,” she commented, wondering what had him nervous today. “We both were, but this time I’m not the one with a secret. You know I’m a witch. Why you chose to risk coming her and being seen by Anne, is a mystery to me.”
“Maybe because you still spend far too much time here and I wanted to see you today, rather than next week,” he teased. “So do you have time for me?”
“Of course,” she informed him. “You had just to ask.”
“And what if I wanted more of your time than this?” he asked looking at her questioningly. “What if I want to come home to you every night?”
“You sleep?” Prue asked, regretting voicing the thought as soon as it exited her mouth. “I mean . . . I . . .Oh, dear.”
Andy chuckled. “You’ve known Leo how long and yet you ask that question?”
Prue gave him a wry smile. “Before I embarrass myself anymore, why don’t you explain what you are talking about, Andy. You want to move into my little bitty apartment with me? You might have noticed I’m never there.”
“No,” he told her with a smile on his face. “I want you to marry me.”
To say she was stunned would not have scratched the surface of her emotions. With everything that had happened since the elders let Piper and Leo marry, she never expected they would let Andy and her marry. She’d been surprised that he’d been allowed to date her.
It wasn’t as if normal was ever going to happen to him at that point, but that had never been in the plans for Andrew David Trudeau, believer in the supernatural. What he had wanted was normal to come home to. When his desire to live his life out with Prue at his side had outweighed his desire to come home to a white picket fence, a two car garage, a screaming kid, and no demons, he’d ended up with all but the no demons. Truth had changed as Andy had changed. Had he again been asked those same questions from all those years ago, he would answered differently, and it would have still been truth, because it was the truth as Andy saw it, not some universal truth that was unchangeable. And that was worried Prue about Emily. When it came to feelings or opinions or plans, truth changed.