Fic: Comes Out of Darkness, Morn (3/37)
Title: Comes Out of Darkness, Morn
Rating: PG
Warnings: none
Summary: Pax's disappearance shattered Paige. Losing Prue, three years later, reopens old wounds that she thought she'd managed to close off, forever. But, through tragedy comes a sliver of light, and discovering that she's a witch is only the beginning...
*****
Leo stood in the dark attic, in front of the open Book, tears streaming silently down his face. They'd buried Penny, today. He'd failed in his duty as her Whitelighter.
"I'm sorry," he whispered, and the pages of the Book started flipping under his hand, coming to rest on the page for a ritual for peace. "There's no peace for me," he muttered, as he turned away from the page, but the Book shook under his hand, the pages turning back to the same ritual. He could almost see Penny standing in front of him, giving him that sharp-eyed look and telling him not to be an idiot.
Relenting, Leo committed the ritual to memory before gently closing the Book. He picked the tome up, opening the steamer trunk under the window with a wave of his hand, and he carefully placed the Book inside. He'd just shut the trunk and stood up, intending to leave the attic and lock it behind him, when a flash of bright lights stopped him in his tracks.
When the trail of orbs cleared, he took a startled step back. Zola and Sandra, two of the higher-ranking Elders, were standing in front of him. And neither of them looked happy to see him.
"Leo," Sandra spoke, without preamble, "we cannot let you do this."
"I'm acting on Penny Halliwell's last wishes," Leo insisted, not even pretending to know what the Elder was referring to. Of course they knew; they knew everything.
"And that wish would take the Charmed Ones away from us, forever," Zola said, gravely. "We cannot allow this."
"She was trying to protect her granddaughters," Leo protested, but the Elders were unmoved.
"And we are trying to protect the world," Sandra told him. "Leo, this is their destiny."
"Who are we to say that?" Leo argued. "Just because they were born witches doesn't mean that it's the only path they have to follow."
"This is always who they were meant to be," Zola replied. "And, we cannot allow you to interfere."
"They're my charges," Leo protested, but the stern look on Zola's face told him that the argument wasn't going to work.
"If you continue to oppose us," he said, quietly, "you will be removed as the Charmed Ones' Whitelighter. They will be assigned to someone else."
"You're saying that the only way to keep my position is to keep my mouth shut," Leo said, flatly. The deafening silence was the only answer he needed. "What about Paige?" he asked, at last.
"She is not a witch, and therefore, not our concern," Zola replied, and Leo was shocked by the Elder's callousness.
"She's a Halliwell," he argued. "That, alone, would make her our concern. She's vulnerable. We have to keep her safe."
"She is not meant to exist," Sandra said, bluntly, and Leo stared at the Elder he'd so respected in stunned disbelief. "What I mean," Sandra hurried to clarify, before Leo could demand an answer, "is that her birth was still forbidden. If the rest of the Council were to find out about her-" She trailed off, shooting him a meaningful look. "If you truly want to keep her safe, she must remain unknown."
"Meaning that she can't know about her sisters, and they about her," Leo finished, his shoulders slumping.
"And, no," Sandra said, anticipating his next question, "she cannot be assigned to you as your charge. For her own protection, she must stay off the Council's radar. That means no Whitelighter."
"What about her child?" Leo had to ask, fearing that he already knew the answer.
"We do not have the time or resources to devote to the search for one child," Zola said, regret heavy in his voice. "Especially when that search has already claimed Penny Halliwell's life."
"She's been in the clutches of demons for nearly a month-" Leo protested, but Sandra shook her head, cutting him off.
"A month," she echoed, her voice gentle, "is a long time for anyone to survive in the Underworld, let alone a small child."
"Any search party we sent out would be searching for a body," Zola added. "And that's if she's even in the Underworld, at all. There are hundreds of very human monsters that could have gotten the child, as well."
"So, we're just going to give up," Leo said, bitterly. "Condemn a child to Hell."
"A child who is most likely dead," Zola reminded him. "And, Leo, if you attempt to go after the child, yourself, you will be stripped of your wings, and your soul recycled. Do you understand?"
"Yes," Leo said, quietly, watching as both Elders orbed out of the attic. "I understand."
He understood that if he made any move other than that which was approved by the Elders, he would be unable to protect Prue, Piper, Phoebe, and Paige. He understood that he was going to have to move very carefully from now on out, that they were going to be watching his every move.
'I never wanted to break your rules,' he thought, regretfully. 'But I can't just blindly follow, any more. Not if this is what we've come to.'
His mind made up, Leo took the Book of Shadows out of the steamer trunk and placed it back on the lectern. If he couldn't protect his charges by shielding them from magic, then he was going to protect them by making sure that they grew to their full potential as witches. He had a lot of work to do.
He crept silently out of the attic and down the stairs, and was headed for the kitchen when he heard the sound of footsteps behind him.
"Freeze," he heard someone growl from very close behind him, and he cursed himself for letting whoever it was get the drop on him.
Something pressed up against his back, suddenly, and he froze at the feel of a rounded end poking him in the spine. Then, he flexed his shoulders, experimentally, testing something.
"Is that curling iron?" he asked, curiously.
"No," came the furiously-hissed answer, as the object poked him sharply in the back.
"Yeah, I think that's a curling iron," Leo replied, and he turned around to find a pissed-off Prue Halliwell standing behind him in a short bathrobe and fuzzy pink slippers, brandishing the aforementioned curling iron at him.
"Who the hell are you?" Prue demanded, and she looked like she was ready to whack him with the curling iron.
"My name is Leo Wyatt," Leo introduced himself, and Prue's eyes narrowed.
"Wait a minute," she said, suspiciously, "you were at my grandmother's funeral. And I've seen you watching the house since the day she died. What the hell? Are you stalking us?"
"I can explain," Leo started, but it was clear that Prue wasn't going to listen to him.
"Piper, Phoebe!" she bellowed, her voice shockingly loud in the quiet room. "Get down here!"
Leo sighed as he heard the clattering of feet from over his head, and then Piper and Phoebe came charging down the stairs, Piper squeaking in surprise when she realized that they weren't alone, and that she was clad only in a nightshirt and a pair of shorts.
"Prue, who is that?" Piper demanded, as she grabbed the blanket off the back of the couch and wound it around her waist.
"I'm just about to find that out," Prue said, glaring venomously at Leo. "Start talking."
"My name is Leo Wyatt," Leo began, again, with a heavy sigh. "I knew your grandmother."
"How?" Prue demanded, suspiciously, as her sisters gathered close behind her.
"We worked together," Leo answered, evasively, but it was clear that none of the women standing in front of him were going to accept such a vague answer.
"Worked together how?" Piper asked, going to cross her arms over her chest, but changing her mind when she remembered that she was still holding onto the blanket.
Briefly, Leo wondered how angry the Elders were going to be with him if he told the sisters the truth, and then he decided that he didn't care. They were the reason that a little girl was trapped in the Underworld, and her mother would spend the rest of her life grieving her loss and never knowing what really happened. He didn't owe them any loyalties, any more.
'I might not be able to look out for Paige and her daughter,' he thought, 'but I can still watch over her sisters. You can't take my wings away if I'm doing my job.'
"Penny was a witch," Leo said, bluntly, watching as the women stared at him in shock. "I was her Whitelighter - kind of like a guardian angel."
A stunned silence fell over the room, and then Prue was the first to speak.
"You're crazy," she said, flatly, her eyes hard as she glared at him, "and I'm calling the cops."
Leo sighed; he hadn't thought that it would be that easy. Rather than say anything, though, he simply orbed to the other side of the room. He watched for a moment as the sisters stared at the space where he'd been standing, their jaws dropping open in shock, and then he cleared his throat.
"Over here," he said, quietly, and they spun around to stare at him from where he was standing on the stairs.
"How did you do that?" Phoebe demanded, but her tone was awestruck, rather than accusing,
"Magic," Leo said, simply, ignoring Prue's disbelieving eye roll.
Of course she would be the one to doubt what she'd seen with her own eyes. She'd certainly inherited the stubbornness of all the Warren women to come before her - in spades. But, he needed her to believe him, and soon. Her life, and her sisters, could depend on it.
"Piper, I'm sorry about this," he said, and then, before they could do anything, he gestured with both hands, telekinetically levitating Piper a few feet into the air.
Piper shrieked in surprise and clutched the blanket to her chest, glaring at him. Leo held her up in the air for several seconds, long enough for Prue and Phoebe to see that there were no wires attached to Piper, and then he set her gently back on the ground. His arms were shaking from the effort he'd exerted; he wasn't used to using his powers to lift another person, even for just a short time.
"Magic," Prue echoed, at last, a disbelieving tone in her voice.
"Magic," Leo repeated. Turning, he started to walk up the stairs to the attic, and when he reached the first landing, he looked back down at the women who were staring up at him in amazement. "Well? Are you coming, or not?"
They scrambled up the stairs after him, and Leo led them into the attic and over to where the Book was resting, illuminated by a beam of moonlight that was coming in through the picture window.
"Your mother was a witch," Leo told them, as they stopped by the Book. "As was your grandmother, and hers, and countless generations of Warren women before you. This is the Book of Shadows; it's the culmination of their magic, the legacy that's been passed down to you for over seven hundred years."
"This is amazing," Phoebe whispered, tracing her fingers lightly over the woodcut etching on the page.
Despite herself, Prue had also drawn closer to the Book, staring down at it with something like fascination on her face. Leo waited for Piper to do the same thing, only to find the young woman giving him a hard look.
"What?" he asked, when she just kept staring at him.
"Next time," she said, icily, "pick someone else to be your guinea pig."
"I didn't mean-" Leo protested, but Piper had left him to join her sisters at the Book. "Damn it," he muttered under his breath, seeing his plan going down in flames with two of the sisters mad at him.
"Look at this," Phoebe was saying, excitedly. "Doesn't this look like some kind of spell?"
"Bring your power to we sisters, three," Prue read out loud, glancing up to meet Leo's eyes. "All right, I'll bite. What does this thing do?"
"What do you think it does?" Leo asked, neutrally.
Prue looked back down at the Dominus Trinus spell, her eyes flicking across the page as she read the whole entry.
"It bestows powers," she finally said. "Us? We're the sisters, three?"
"Your ancestor, Melinda Warren, was burned at the stake for being a witch," Leo told them. "Before she died, she made a prophecy that her powers would pass down through the generations of her bloodline, until three sisters were born. You three."
"Why us?" Piper asked, suspiciously. "There have been other sisters in our family tree, haven't there?"
"But none with your powers, your connection," Leo replied. "You are the Charmed Ones, the witches that Melinda Warren foresaw in her final premonition."
"You're crazy," Prue stated, shaking her head.
"Only one way to find out," Leo shot back. He gestured to the Book, which was still open to the Dominus Trinus spell. "Well? What are you waiting for?"
Continued here
Rating: PG
Warnings: none
Summary: Pax's disappearance shattered Paige. Losing Prue, three years later, reopens old wounds that she thought she'd managed to close off, forever. But, through tragedy comes a sliver of light, and discovering that she's a witch is only the beginning...
*****
Leo stood in the dark attic, in front of the open Book, tears streaming silently down his face. They'd buried Penny, today. He'd failed in his duty as her Whitelighter.
"I'm sorry," he whispered, and the pages of the Book started flipping under his hand, coming to rest on the page for a ritual for peace. "There's no peace for me," he muttered, as he turned away from the page, but the Book shook under his hand, the pages turning back to the same ritual. He could almost see Penny standing in front of him, giving him that sharp-eyed look and telling him not to be an idiot.
Relenting, Leo committed the ritual to memory before gently closing the Book. He picked the tome up, opening the steamer trunk under the window with a wave of his hand, and he carefully placed the Book inside. He'd just shut the trunk and stood up, intending to leave the attic and lock it behind him, when a flash of bright lights stopped him in his tracks.
When the trail of orbs cleared, he took a startled step back. Zola and Sandra, two of the higher-ranking Elders, were standing in front of him. And neither of them looked happy to see him.
"Leo," Sandra spoke, without preamble, "we cannot let you do this."
"I'm acting on Penny Halliwell's last wishes," Leo insisted, not even pretending to know what the Elder was referring to. Of course they knew; they knew everything.
"And that wish would take the Charmed Ones away from us, forever," Zola said, gravely. "We cannot allow this."
"She was trying to protect her granddaughters," Leo protested, but the Elders were unmoved.
"And we are trying to protect the world," Sandra told him. "Leo, this is their destiny."
"Who are we to say that?" Leo argued. "Just because they were born witches doesn't mean that it's the only path they have to follow."
"This is always who they were meant to be," Zola replied. "And, we cannot allow you to interfere."
"They're my charges," Leo protested, but the stern look on Zola's face told him that the argument wasn't going to work.
"If you continue to oppose us," he said, quietly, "you will be removed as the Charmed Ones' Whitelighter. They will be assigned to someone else."
"You're saying that the only way to keep my position is to keep my mouth shut," Leo said, flatly. The deafening silence was the only answer he needed. "What about Paige?" he asked, at last.
"She is not a witch, and therefore, not our concern," Zola replied, and Leo was shocked by the Elder's callousness.
"She's a Halliwell," he argued. "That, alone, would make her our concern. She's vulnerable. We have to keep her safe."
"She is not meant to exist," Sandra said, bluntly, and Leo stared at the Elder he'd so respected in stunned disbelief. "What I mean," Sandra hurried to clarify, before Leo could demand an answer, "is that her birth was still forbidden. If the rest of the Council were to find out about her-" She trailed off, shooting him a meaningful look. "If you truly want to keep her safe, she must remain unknown."
"Meaning that she can't know about her sisters, and they about her," Leo finished, his shoulders slumping.
"And, no," Sandra said, anticipating his next question, "she cannot be assigned to you as your charge. For her own protection, she must stay off the Council's radar. That means no Whitelighter."
"What about her child?" Leo had to ask, fearing that he already knew the answer.
"We do not have the time or resources to devote to the search for one child," Zola said, regret heavy in his voice. "Especially when that search has already claimed Penny Halliwell's life."
"She's been in the clutches of demons for nearly a month-" Leo protested, but Sandra shook her head, cutting him off.
"A month," she echoed, her voice gentle, "is a long time for anyone to survive in the Underworld, let alone a small child."
"Any search party we sent out would be searching for a body," Zola added. "And that's if she's even in the Underworld, at all. There are hundreds of very human monsters that could have gotten the child, as well."
"So, we're just going to give up," Leo said, bitterly. "Condemn a child to Hell."
"A child who is most likely dead," Zola reminded him. "And, Leo, if you attempt to go after the child, yourself, you will be stripped of your wings, and your soul recycled. Do you understand?"
"Yes," Leo said, quietly, watching as both Elders orbed out of the attic. "I understand."
He understood that if he made any move other than that which was approved by the Elders, he would be unable to protect Prue, Piper, Phoebe, and Paige. He understood that he was going to have to move very carefully from now on out, that they were going to be watching his every move.
'I never wanted to break your rules,' he thought, regretfully. 'But I can't just blindly follow, any more. Not if this is what we've come to.'
His mind made up, Leo took the Book of Shadows out of the steamer trunk and placed it back on the lectern. If he couldn't protect his charges by shielding them from magic, then he was going to protect them by making sure that they grew to their full potential as witches. He had a lot of work to do.
He crept silently out of the attic and down the stairs, and was headed for the kitchen when he heard the sound of footsteps behind him.
"Freeze," he heard someone growl from very close behind him, and he cursed himself for letting whoever it was get the drop on him.
Something pressed up against his back, suddenly, and he froze at the feel of a rounded end poking him in the spine. Then, he flexed his shoulders, experimentally, testing something.
"Is that curling iron?" he asked, curiously.
"No," came the furiously-hissed answer, as the object poked him sharply in the back.
"Yeah, I think that's a curling iron," Leo replied, and he turned around to find a pissed-off Prue Halliwell standing behind him in a short bathrobe and fuzzy pink slippers, brandishing the aforementioned curling iron at him.
"Who the hell are you?" Prue demanded, and she looked like she was ready to whack him with the curling iron.
"My name is Leo Wyatt," Leo introduced himself, and Prue's eyes narrowed.
"Wait a minute," she said, suspiciously, "you were at my grandmother's funeral. And I've seen you watching the house since the day she died. What the hell? Are you stalking us?"
"I can explain," Leo started, but it was clear that Prue wasn't going to listen to him.
"Piper, Phoebe!" she bellowed, her voice shockingly loud in the quiet room. "Get down here!"
Leo sighed as he heard the clattering of feet from over his head, and then Piper and Phoebe came charging down the stairs, Piper squeaking in surprise when she realized that they weren't alone, and that she was clad only in a nightshirt and a pair of shorts.
"Prue, who is that?" Piper demanded, as she grabbed the blanket off the back of the couch and wound it around her waist.
"I'm just about to find that out," Prue said, glaring venomously at Leo. "Start talking."
"My name is Leo Wyatt," Leo began, again, with a heavy sigh. "I knew your grandmother."
"How?" Prue demanded, suspiciously, as her sisters gathered close behind her.
"We worked together," Leo answered, evasively, but it was clear that none of the women standing in front of him were going to accept such a vague answer.
"Worked together how?" Piper asked, going to cross her arms over her chest, but changing her mind when she remembered that she was still holding onto the blanket.
Briefly, Leo wondered how angry the Elders were going to be with him if he told the sisters the truth, and then he decided that he didn't care. They were the reason that a little girl was trapped in the Underworld, and her mother would spend the rest of her life grieving her loss and never knowing what really happened. He didn't owe them any loyalties, any more.
'I might not be able to look out for Paige and her daughter,' he thought, 'but I can still watch over her sisters. You can't take my wings away if I'm doing my job.'
"Penny was a witch," Leo said, bluntly, watching as the women stared at him in shock. "I was her Whitelighter - kind of like a guardian angel."
A stunned silence fell over the room, and then Prue was the first to speak.
"You're crazy," she said, flatly, her eyes hard as she glared at him, "and I'm calling the cops."
Leo sighed; he hadn't thought that it would be that easy. Rather than say anything, though, he simply orbed to the other side of the room. He watched for a moment as the sisters stared at the space where he'd been standing, their jaws dropping open in shock, and then he cleared his throat.
"Over here," he said, quietly, and they spun around to stare at him from where he was standing on the stairs.
"How did you do that?" Phoebe demanded, but her tone was awestruck, rather than accusing,
"Magic," Leo said, simply, ignoring Prue's disbelieving eye roll.
Of course she would be the one to doubt what she'd seen with her own eyes. She'd certainly inherited the stubbornness of all the Warren women to come before her - in spades. But, he needed her to believe him, and soon. Her life, and her sisters, could depend on it.
"Piper, I'm sorry about this," he said, and then, before they could do anything, he gestured with both hands, telekinetically levitating Piper a few feet into the air.
Piper shrieked in surprise and clutched the blanket to her chest, glaring at him. Leo held her up in the air for several seconds, long enough for Prue and Phoebe to see that there were no wires attached to Piper, and then he set her gently back on the ground. His arms were shaking from the effort he'd exerted; he wasn't used to using his powers to lift another person, even for just a short time.
"Magic," Prue echoed, at last, a disbelieving tone in her voice.
"Magic," Leo repeated. Turning, he started to walk up the stairs to the attic, and when he reached the first landing, he looked back down at the women who were staring up at him in amazement. "Well? Are you coming, or not?"
They scrambled up the stairs after him, and Leo led them into the attic and over to where the Book was resting, illuminated by a beam of moonlight that was coming in through the picture window.
"Your mother was a witch," Leo told them, as they stopped by the Book. "As was your grandmother, and hers, and countless generations of Warren women before you. This is the Book of Shadows; it's the culmination of their magic, the legacy that's been passed down to you for over seven hundred years."
"This is amazing," Phoebe whispered, tracing her fingers lightly over the woodcut etching on the page.
Despite herself, Prue had also drawn closer to the Book, staring down at it with something like fascination on her face. Leo waited for Piper to do the same thing, only to find the young woman giving him a hard look.
"What?" he asked, when she just kept staring at him.
"Next time," she said, icily, "pick someone else to be your guinea pig."
"I didn't mean-" Leo protested, but Piper had left him to join her sisters at the Book. "Damn it," he muttered under his breath, seeing his plan going down in flames with two of the sisters mad at him.
"Look at this," Phoebe was saying, excitedly. "Doesn't this look like some kind of spell?"
"Bring your power to we sisters, three," Prue read out loud, glancing up to meet Leo's eyes. "All right, I'll bite. What does this thing do?"
"What do you think it does?" Leo asked, neutrally.
Prue looked back down at the Dominus Trinus spell, her eyes flicking across the page as she read the whole entry.
"It bestows powers," she finally said. "Us? We're the sisters, three?"
"Your ancestor, Melinda Warren, was burned at the stake for being a witch," Leo told them. "Before she died, she made a prophecy that her powers would pass down through the generations of her bloodline, until three sisters were born. You three."
"Why us?" Piper asked, suspiciously. "There have been other sisters in our family tree, haven't there?"
"But none with your powers, your connection," Leo replied. "You are the Charmed Ones, the witches that Melinda Warren foresaw in her final premonition."
"You're crazy," Prue stated, shaking her head.
"Only one way to find out," Leo shot back. He gestured to the Book, which was still open to the Dominus Trinus spell. "Well? What are you waiting for?"
Continued here