A Charmed Future

You Just Don't Know It

AN: I borrow heavily from the Charmed episode "Chris-Crossed" in this chapter.

Also, in some scenes, Chris is very out of character with Anakin ... can't have your dead brother show up unannounced and not show some emotion. Now, on with the fic...

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The darkness enveloped him until he felt like he was suffocating. Nothing had prepared him for this torture, an eternity of endless shadows with nothing but his own thoughts to keep him company. He would have screamed had he not been too exhausted to try. Not that it would have done him any good, Anakin mused. He had finally answered the eternal question about the tree falling down in the empty forest. There was little he could do about it, so he focused his small amount of remaining energy on keeping the debilitating memories below the surface of his semi-consciousness.

He remembered Lucien, bruised, battered, and dying, standing up against the Source. He saw the Seer's death, and the time portal opened up. Then it became blurry, but he knew he felt great anger. He felt Lucien's agony as he burned; that alone made him question his decision to go to the past. After all, if he had not, Lucien would still be alive and free to live some semblance of a normal life. But instead, once again, he had made a decision that cost someone he loved dearly.

Anakin twisted around in the formless void, trying desperately to shake off the sickening thought. He was going back, and he would be able to change all of it. He would be able to stop the death of his sister, his cousins, his aunts, and hopefully, his parents' deaths. Then hopefully, he would never have to choose between Lucien and his brothers. But even if they did corner him, he would be prepared. He would be able to stop them without killing them.

He closed his eyes and tried to focus. He knew enough about time travel to recognize that it was beyond complicated and extremely dangerous. It certainly was not a good start, with the portal only opening up when the Seer died. The spell was exact in how it should have worked and had some other magic interfered with it – Anakin shuddered at the thought.

I want to get out of this, Anakin thought, silently holding back tears. I want to see my brothers again.

There was a bright flash of light and the sound of a thundering propeller. A wind picked up, and it rushed through Anakin, taking his breath away. Then gravity seemed to kick back into play, and the exhausted witch found himself plummeting through the thicker swirling shadows. The inky shadows dissolved into the shining blue of whitelighter orbs, and he felt a hook tug at his navel, pulling him out of his endless fall. Out in the distance, he saw daylight, and the opening in the blue grew more prominent as he accelerated toward it.

The glowing blue triquetra grew larger and larger on the wood-paneled wall of the Victorian attic until it was extensive enough to reach both the roof and the creaky wooden floor. It grew brighter, and a wounded and spent Anakin Halliwell plunged out of the time portal. He tumbled painfully across the floor until the solid, heavy potion table rudely arrested his momentum. Unbottled potions and capped glass vials flew everywhere, covering Anakin in various colors of goop and animal parts.

"What the hell!" exclaimed an angry twenty-two-year-old, a dull purple potion in hand.

Anakin groggily pushed himself far enough off the floor to see through the mixed potions' smokescreen. Through the thick, multi-colored haze, he spotted a man with long dark brown hair parted down the middle. The stranger was not skinny, but by no stretch of the imagination was he a well-defined man, either. He had a small round nose and cracked red lips. He had not shaved in a few days, but Anakin took little notice of those features. The young teen focused on the emotionless pale sleep-deprived green eyes studying him intensely. They were the same eyes Chris had, ignoring the apparent pain and sorrow.