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Wyatt is the powerful one. Twice-blessed, prophesied, all of that.
Chris is the smart one. He doesn’t know if he’s naturally smart, or if it’s a skill he developed, like one develops a survival instinct. Wyatt gets into a lot of trouble that he powers his way though, his magic sloppy and basic and blazing like a supernova. Chris is in those same situations, but he doesn’t have that power to get him out, so he has to be smart, he has to be prepared, he has to be ready.
Sometimes, Wyatt remembers to save him, grabbing his hand and standing between Chris and whatever mess they’re battling, a booming, arrogant laugh and a spell burning so hotly in his hand that the laugh no longer seemed arrogant.
Sometimes, he forgets.
~
Sometimes, Chris thinks that his brother loves him. Thinks that he’s the only person Wyatt has ever managed to love. He hadn’t killed him, after all. He’d killed their parents, their aunts and uncles, their cousins, their fucking dog. But he hadn’t killed him.
Sometimes, he thinks that Wyatt can’t love at all, and Chris is just the only one who’s dumb enough to buy the act. He thinks Wyatt wants to think he’s capable of love and Chris just loves him so much that he lets those feelings be reflected back at him, lets himself think they’re real.
~
Wyatt takes after Mom. Powerful, older, take charge, and little like Aunt Phoebe in the way he looked through everyone, and definitely like Aunt Paige in the way he was so charming, effortlessly charming up to and including the moment he shoves Excalibur through your chest.
Chris doesn’t think he takes after anyone. Certainly not his father, not that he sees him enough to know for sure. He doesn’t think even Wyatt takes after their father, no matter what he likes to say. At least Wyatt is around.
He’s closest to Aunt Paige, because he feels like he doesn’t belong, and Aunt Paige didn’t know she belonged until they were adults, and he thinks maybe she understands him, a little bit, when he feels like no one else ever does. They just think he’s jealous. It’s not jealousy.
It’s fear.
Aunt Paige tells him he’s like Prue.
“I never met her,” she says, “but from everything I heard, you’re a lot like her, I think.”
He flushes. Prue died young. Died before the Charmed Ones understood the full breadth of their powers. Died when they needed her.
He doesn’t think he wants to be like Prue. He doesn’t want to leave his brother when Wyatt needs him.
~
He can’t summon any of his family, after they die. He knows right after is too soon, but he waits, years and years, and still they don’t come.
What does that say about him? Did they ever love him, or was it all pretend?
Fuck, what if Wyatt really is the only who’s ever cared about him? What if this is as good as it gets, his homicidal, tyrannical brother who would let Chris rule the world with him if he promised to stop trying to save people.
Bianca doesn’t count. He loves her and she’s beautiful and perfect and everything he wishes he could be, but sometimes he worries that her love is circumstantial. That she loves him, but like the way a man on a deserted island loves a raft. Truly, and with all her heart, but only because she’d die without him.
Literally die without him, even. It’s a toss up if being with him gives her more protection against Wyatt rather than less, but there have already been a few scrapes that she shouldn’t have gotten out of, not if she wasn’t branded as the fiancé of Lord Halliwell’s traitorous and beloved brother, and he doesn’t think her love is a lie, exactly, but he thinks in another world, she never would have loved him at all
He’s angry. He’s so angry when he calls for a Halliwell in the pentagram, willing to take any of them, even Gram and her disappointed stares if it means getting to talk to a sane member of his family.
He only recognizes Prue from the pictures.
“You don’t answer calls,” he says.
It’s something Mom and Aunt Phoebe had let themselves be bitter about, sometimes.
She looks him over, and she’s so young, barely older than him. He wonders if he’ll live to be as old as she was when she died. It’s not looking promising, so far. He knows his life had been worse than hers, but she’s made of steel and he’s made of glass.
“You,” she says, and he’s already flinching, “have been sabotaged. Fuck. Why would they waste you like this?”
What.
“What?” he says.
She shakes her head, and there’s familiar disapproval on her face, but it doesn’t seem like it’s of him. “One of the things that really made me wish I hadn’t died was watching you grow up,” she says. “You’re so clever. They knew to appreciate cleverness, once.”
“You were clever,” he says, because that’s what all the stories say. That Prue had been clever and ruthless and so fucking desperate to shine that she’d snuffed out.
Aunt Paige had meant it as a compliment, when she’s compared him to Prue. It hadn’t been one, though.
She almost smiles, a flicker of it at the edge of her mouth. “Yes. There’s a spell in the book, you know. It lets you travel back in time.”
Travel back in –
“That wouldn’t work,” he says, but he’s already thinking of all the ways it could.
“I’d kill him,” she says bluntly, and he freezes, “but you’re not going to do that. So you have to save him.”
Save him. Go back in time to save Wyatt, this brother he loves, and end up saving the world and everyone else he’s ever cared about.
It could work, maybe. But it’s not something he could brute force his way through. He’d have to smart, and prepared, and ready.
He’d have to be clever.
“Good luck,” she says and then she’s gone.
“Thanks, Aunt Prue,” he says to air, a dozen plans already half formed in his mind.
It seems impossible. But she believes he can do this.
She believes in him.
He’s not going to let her down.
~
The power of three hadn’t meant as much, in the future, even before everything went to shit.
It’s a little bit because the Halliwell sisters had taken out the more powerful evil leaders years ago, and a little bit because even the power of three seemed small against the power of the twice-blessed once and future king, and a little bit because, well, it’s not like they’d had it before, right? Yet people still managed just fine.
It’s not like Chris is weak, after all, it just looks like that sometimes, compared to the rest of his family. But he’s what a lot of people are – a strong witch from a long line of strong witches, and if he can’t hold the power of a dying star in his hands, it’s not like that’s a thing most people can do anyway, not like it’s something required to kill most demons.
Throughout history there are lines and lines of brave, clever witches with a power like a flickering candle, power that Wyatt would move and crush in his fists.
Those same witches had been enough, for a long time, to keep the balance, to kill enough demons and save enough innocents that the world was a mostly okay place to be.
All fire starts as a single flame.
Sometimes, an inferno is just overkill.
Sometimes, an inferno can be started with a single, flickering candle flame.
~
He didn’t think he’d have a problem going to the past, with seeing his long-dead family. They’re so different from the ones he remembers, how much could it really hurt to see their faces again? He sees their faces in his nightmares often enough.
He’d been prepared for them being different.
He hadn’t been prepared for them to be the same.
Maybe other people hadn’t noticed, too in awe of the fabled Halliwell sisters, or because they were too close to it and just the same, but Chris had been ignored a couple too many times to be totally ignorant of it, in his darkest moments when love didn’t outweigh the hurt. He’d felt terrible, after, but that hadn’t stopped those moments from happening.
He’s known for a long time that his parents weren’t perfect, that the sisters weren’t perfect.
They are so infuriatingly imperfect now, selfish and flighty, and so staunch and sure that they were beyond reproach that it’s so easy to see where Wyatt got his nauseating holier-than-thou attitude from, and it wasn’t from their whitelighter father. Except their faults aren’t tempered like it is in the future, with control and concern and with priorities solidly planted in doing the most amount of good and least amount of harm regardless of the consequences to themselves. Consequences to themselves seems to be the only thing they care about now, and it’s exactly like them and nothing like them at all, and it makes him want to scream until his voice goes hoarse.
Sometimes he does, orbing to the top of the Golden Gate Bridge and screaming out all his frustration and fear.
Wyatt is the worst part.
“I’d kill him,” Prue had said, and he thinks of that now, looking at his elder baby brother.
His shield isn’t enough to stop him. Chris had figured out how to get past it when he was eight, although it had been an accident, a too close assassination attempt. His mother blew up the darklighter who’d had his arm around Chris’s throat, and he’d been covered in the blood and sobbing, reaching for his elder brother who’d been right there, who’d thrown up his shield and watched as Chris was pulled away from him. Wyatt always lowers his shield for him, but this time he doesn’t have to.
Blood covered, Chris had passed through the shield like it hadn’t even been there, and later, he’d figured out why. He doesn’t think Wyatt ever did, if he even noticed that Chris moved slightly faster than he’d lowered his shield. He probably hadn’t.
Chris is the clever one, after all.
Killing a baby isn’t clever.
~
He’s so fucking exhausted all the time, and they hate him, they all hate him so much, and all he’s trying to do is save them.
Chris knows it’s stupid, and pointless, but it’s either lighting five white candles or drinking until he forgets how miserable he feels, and he’s never liked drinking anyway, not really, not more than a glass or two, he hates how out of control it makes him feel.
The candles flares to life and Prue is there, standing in the middle of a pentagram in the backroom of P3.
“Shit,” he breathes. “I didn’t think that would work. Why’d you answer me?”
“Don’t know,” she shrugs, raking her eyes over him, “I don’t, as a rule, but usually the only ones trying to summon me are my sisters.” She reaches out, then stops, not trying to step out of the circle, instead staying safely inside it, but her hand is still outstretched. “You’re one of ours, aren’t you?”
He laughs, but it comes out as a sob. How fucking pathetic is that? Months and months around the sisters, and they’d never even suspected, but Prue takes one fucking looking at him and does.
“Unless we have a brother that Mom never felt the need to tell us about, which I don’t think is the case since she told me about Paige after I died, then it looks like you’re in a place you’re not supposed to be,” she continues. “Get a little in over your head, huh?”
“So fucking clever, aren’t you?” he throws out bitterly, pressing the palms of his hands into his eyes, trying to be less of an embarrassment.
“Usually,” she says, and he can hear the smirk in her voice. She sounds like him. “Are you going to tell me what’s wrong so I can fix it or did you just want someone to witness your mental breakdown?”
The laugh catches him by surprise, and she’s grinning a little when he looks back at her. “This isn’t something you can fix.”
“I can fix everything,” she says, tossing her head, hands on her hips, every inch the eldest sister everyone talked about. Piper does that sometimes, and he thinks she got it from Prue, a form of imitation not meant as flattery so much as desperation. “Talk to me.”
He’s shaking his head even as he opens his mouth, the words pouring out of him before he can stop, and they’re both sitting cross legged on the floor by the time he finishes, the candles burned halfway. “I don’t know what to do,” Chris says, head hanging low.
“What’s your power? You didn’t say.” He blinks, looking back up at her. “Your main witch power.”
“Telekinesis,” he says.
Prue smiles, quick and sharp, and says, “I think you were supposed to mine. If I hadn’t died before popping out a kid. You’re too much like me, it’s going to get you killed.”
Warmth rushes through him, and he can’t distinguish the affection from the anger. Story of his life. “Hey!”
“Sounds like you’re doing just fine to me,” she says. “What are you supposed to do, tell them the truth? You got shit to do, you don’t need them hovering and acting like they get a say in how you live your life. If they’re too dumb to figure out you’re one of ours, they’re too dumb to trust you to handle this. And that would be a mistake. It seems like you’re handling it just fine.”
There it is again, that belief, completely sincere and unexpected. “I don’t know what the hell I’m doing. They won’t listen to me.”
“So?” she asks. “Screw them. Use them as you need them, but don’t let them get in your way.”
He stares, unprepared to hear all his darkest thoughts coming out of her mouth. “They’re your sisters!”
“And if they’d done their job right the first time around, my nephew wouldn’t be stuck cleaning up their mess,” she says, and again there’s that disapproval, but not of him. “Do you know how much time I wasted, trying to get Piper and Phoebe to focus? I needed the power of three, I couldn’t do it on my own. You don’t and you can.”
He looks away as he admits, “There are some demons that need the power of three.”
“When people started talking about the power of three, they didn’t have in mind twice-blessed witches,” she says dryly. “Just rewrites some of the spells, they should still work.”
“It won’t work,” he insists, “Wyatt is the twice-blessed one, not me!”
Prue just raises an eyebrow, and pictures really never did her face justice. She looks like him. Or he looks like her, he guesses, not in how their faces look but in how they move. “You have the same parents, don’t you? You’re just as much the son of a charmed one and whitelighter as he is.”
He stares, then says numbly, “It’s – not the same. We’re not the same.”
She just rolls her eyes. “You know why I answered your call?” she asks, but it’s clear she doesn’t expect an answer. “It’s because I’ve always been drawn to fire and you burn.”
The denial is on the tip of his tongue, but he swallows it down at her glare.
Maybe he’s not a candle flicker.
But compared to a supernova, what’s the difference, really, between a candle flame and an inferno?
Not much.
Not enough.
~
Bianca is dying in his arms, and he can’t do anything to save her. “Being with me was supposed to keep you safe!”
She laughs, uncaring as it makes blood coat her lips. “Where the hell did you get that idea? Wyatt’s possessive. He never would have been wiling to share you. Loving Chris Halliwell is a death sentence all on its own.” She pulls him down enough to kiss him, and he wishes that her blood in his mouth wasn’t a familiar taste, but it is. “Loving you was worth it. You were worth it.”
Fuck, he’s so stupid. Bianca didn’t love him like the shipwrecked man loved the raft. She loves him like the moth loved the flame.
He’d wanted to be her salvation, not her destruction.
“Go,” she tells him. “Go! We’ll be together again, one day. In a better future, with nothing to keep us apart.”
“There’ll be nothing to bring us together either,” he whispers.
She reaches up with her weak, shaking hand and cups his face. “I loved you the first moment I saw you. I’ll do it again. Just one look, Chris, that’s all it will take, and I’ll be yours again. Now go, otherwise we’ll never get the chance.”
He kisses her, one last time, and goes.
~
The next time he summons Prue is the first time she steps out of the summoning circle, her arms solid around him as he sobs into her chest, curling his body into her until she can hook her chin over his shoulder and rub a hand over his back.
“You could still kill him,” she says, and it almost sounds like she’s joking, except that he knows that she’s really not.
“No,” he says. He doesn’t even have to get past the shield anymore. Wyatt trusts him, of all things. “He’s your nephew too, you know.”
“Yes,” she agrees, “but you’re my favorite.”
He’s never been anyone’s favorite before.
It just makes him cry all the harder.
~
Prue had been right, of course. She has a really annoying habit about doing that.
They’re all insufferable once they find out who he is. Apologetic when they’re not being accusatory, as if he’d owed them the truth, as if they’d earned it.
At least they listen to him a little more than they did before. He doesn’t hide anymore, doesn’t have to hold back like he had been, too worried that they’d find something familiar in his powers. He may be no match for Wyatt, but he’s no average witch either, he never could be. He’s a Halliwell.
He’d done what Prue had told him to, a few times now. Copying the spell, modifying the language, and doing it on his own when the sisters absolutely refused to be wrangled into doing what needed to be done.
It had worked.
He couldn’t do it too often, though, because the last thing he needed is rumors floating around of a single male witch capable of taking out demons that everyone thought could only be defeated by the power of three. A few times could be brushed off as a coincidence, but if enough people started talking to each other, they’d definitely notice the pattern.
He doesn’t do it now either, not wanting to answer any questions from the sisters, but when he sends over a dozen demons flying with a distracted wave of his hand, Paige turns to stare at him.
“What?” he asks, irritable, looking over the spell that will supposedly vanquish the lot of them. He doesn’t think this even rhymes, and it needs to rhyme, unless the spell is in Sanskrit. Has anyone ever told them that? Probably not. No point in it, really, since none of the sisters spoke Sanskrit and he doubts they’d sit still long enough to learn it. He swaps out a couple of words so it actually rhymes and then hands it back to her. “Here. Are you going to finish them off or not?”
“Oh, do you actually need my for something?” she asks sarcastically, but takes the paper.
He has no idea what she’s talking about and doesn’t ask. Asking questions is dangerous because then they ask him questions, and then get pissed when he doesn’t answer, as if he’s been doing anything besides not answering since he got here.
~
Piper reaches out for him and he avoids her and the less said of Leo the better and his aunts keep trying to interrogate him and corner him and it’s gotten to the point that Prue just laughs at him when complains, because they’re not getting in his way, exactly, but they keep being there and he’d appreciate it if they were around a lot less, actually.
“There’s no reason not to enjoy it while you still can,” she says, smiling even though what she says is sad.
Even in the best case scenario, he still loses them, after all.
If it works, and he manages to go back to the future, it’s not like he’ll be able to go home. There will be some other Chris there, one that’s nothing like him with a brother nothing like his Wyatt, and that’s good, but Chris can’t just barge in there and mess everything up.
Best case scenario, he finds Bianca, and she loves him when she has no reason to, and they get as far away from as San Francisco as they can.
“Am I going to lose you too?” he asks, only able to gather the courage to ask the question he’s been avoiding when it’s to avoid a different, equally unpleasant conversation.
She smiles. “I’ll always answer your calls, Chris. I always have, haven’t I?”
Best case scenario, he gets Bianca, and he gets Prue, and a boy with his face and his name gets a second chance at a life that’s not steeped in tragedy.
The best case scenario is pretty good, actually.
~
Of course, he doesn’t get it.
Chris doesn’t know why he ever thought he would.
Happy endings aren’t for people like him, after all.
He dies young. He dies before he understands the full breadth of his powers. He dies when his family needs him.
His last thought as his father holds him and cries is that at least he gets Prue. At least she’ll be there, waiting for him, and even if she’s mad at him for dying, she’ll hold him and he won’t be alone.
~
Chris is twenty-four years old when he wakes up with another set of memories behind his eyes.
The first thing he does is turn over and throw up. The carpet is such an ugly color he thinks it could only be an improvement. Why did they take this shitty two bedroom apartment again? It’s not like they can’t afford better.
“Drink too much last night?” a voice that’s familiar and completely different at the same time asks, mocking, and when Chris lifts his head he’s already got tears in his eyes.
It’s Wyatt. Hair short and clean shaven, and slimmed down so he looks less like a bodybuilder, and absolutely nothing like the man who tore the world apart and laughed. It’s not just his looks, but twenty four years of memories that confirm it, memories of growing up with his impulsive, annoying big brother who didn’t stand in front of him or forget he was there, who stood beside him, shoulder pressed to shoulder, and who loved him in a way that had never once made his stomach turn.
“Woah, hey,” Wyatt says, eyes widening as he steps around the vomit to sit on the edge of his brother’s bed, pressing the back of his hand to Chris’s forehead just like Mom does. “What’s wrong? Are you hurt? Here, let me.”
Chris can feel the warm glow of whitelighter healing, but he doesn’t need it. He reaches up, gripping Wyatt’s wrist and pulling his hand away, holding on too tightly but Wyatt doesn’t complain, just looks at Chris with a concern that’s turning a little frantic, and he says, totally sincere and with a easy, uncomplicated love for his brother sitting in his chest, right alongside the much messier one, “You were worth it, Wyatt. All of it.”
“Worth what?” He demands. “Chris, what did you do? You have to tell me so I can fix it, that’s my job.”
He doesn’t answer, just laughs as he presses his forehead against his brother’s shoulder. He doesn’t resist when Wyatt pulls him into a proper hug, still demanding to know what’s going on, his voice getting higher and higher the longer Chris doesn’t answer him, but he doesn’t care.
His brother has never felt solid before. He does, now, like he’s the port in a storm rather than the storm itself.
~
He texts his parents and aunts, saying, I remember, it’s okay, someone should talk to Wyatt I think I freaked him out, and then turns his phone off. The memories are fading in intensity, feeling more like dreams now, his old life taking a backseat to his current one, as it should be. The knowledge is still there, but blunted, not so overwhelming to who he is now. Twice-blessed, half-Elder rather than half-whitelighter which is something he holds over Wyatt’s head every chance he gets, a younger brother and a big brother, with a job as an assistant to a museum curator who doesn’t care what hours Chris keeps as long as his work gets done. Which is good, because it turns out that Chris is clever no matter the circumstances, that he’s still the smarts behind every terrible idea that his siblings and his cousins come up with, and he’s the most feared witch in the underworld, here, because Wyatt has mellowed with age and Chris clearly hasn’t.
He’s still just like Prue, after all.
But there’s something from his old life that he’s not willing to give up, the one good thing from that terrible timeline.
Scrying is kind of a crapshoot, but luckily his uncle is a cupid, so. He gets to Coop before Phoebe does, and he ignores his uncle’s confusion over Chris falling in love with someone without him even noticing, promising he’ll explain later.
She’s in the middle of a fight, which doesn’t surprise him, but she’s fighting demons, which does. He jumps in even though she doesn’t need it, until they’re standing there looking at each other, a scorch mark that used to be a demon all that’s between them.
“Who are you?” she asks. “What do you want?”
He could lie to her.
But he’s kind of sick of lying to the people he loves, actually. He’d done that enough in his old life. He doesn’t need to do it in this one. “I’m kind of from a different universe, kind of not, but in that other one we were engaged. You said you’d fallen for me the moment you saw me, that all it would take is one look and you’d be mine again. Were you right?”
She laughs, but he’s not joking, and she can tell even though he can’t stop smiling.
Bianca steps closer, considering, and says, “You’re Chris Halliwell. If you and yours want to kill me, you don’t have to resort to tricks to do it.”
“You’re Bianca Bishop,” he says, and her eyes widen. It’s not the name she goes by, but its her name, the name passed down from mother to daughter, from the mother who’d died in the trials and the daughter who’d carried her legacy on to present day. “And I’m not trying to trick you.”
She laughs, head tilted to the side as she considers him, then she steps onto the scorch mark and gets close, so close, and breathes, “You’re cute,” against his lips before she kisses him, and this time she tastes nothing like blood.
She flickers away, and he hadn’t realized he’d been leaning against her until he stumbles at her absence.
He finds her number in his back pocket, and it’s enough. Bianca fell in love with him once and she’ll do it again.
~
It seems a shame to waste an empty room.
He finds five white candles and draws a pentagram, casting a familiar spell.
“Chris,” Prue greets cautiously, trying to keep her face neutral.
He’s never summoned her in this timeline. He hadn’t need to.
“Hi, Aunt Prue,” he says quietly.
She figures it out in less than a second, raising a hand to her mouth and then shouting, “Do you have any idea how worried I was? It’s one thing you go off and get yourself killed, but then you didn’t even show up, and I looked, and I couldn’t find you.”
“Sorry,” he gets out before she’s stepping out of the circle, something she hasn’t done since he came back from watching Bianca die, and wraps him in her arms. He smiles against her shoulder and asks, “It’s a good thing I didn’t kill him, right? This Wyatt’s pretty great.”
She pinches his side, and he tries to squirm away, but she doesn’t let him. “You think you’re so clever, don’t you?” she accuses.
“Yeah,” he says, grinning. “I do.”
“Well, you got it from me,” she says grumpily, and he laughs, because there’s no reason not to.
This is the real best case scenario, and he’d gotten it. He meant what he said to Wyatt.
It was worth it. All of it.