A Charmed Future

Failure to Decapitate

Magic School was a massive network of endless marble hallways lined with dark wooden doors. Most doors led to classrooms, and a few were the entrances to the two dormitories. Like the one he had just walked through, the rest were portals to the outside world. He had never really been in the school for an extended period. Sure, he visited his father when he was younger, but those were distant memories of being holed up in the headmaster's office staring at boring old books as his dad fixed some problem or other. He had never enjoyed his visits to his father's work and disliked them even more after discovering the whole truth.

Anakin had been raised to believe he and the rest of his family were perfectly one-hundred percent normal. Or at least as normal as a family could be with a world-renowned advice columnist and novelist in the family. He had spent his first few school years in a small private school, but after much complaining and nagging, he had convinced his mother to allow him to attend their neighborhood public elementary school in the second grade. The same school he had been led to believe that his brothers attended. His parents had the lie completely built up: he had even been recruited by them to pick up his or Chris's or Wyatt's homework whenever one of them had been "absent." He had wondered why he never saw his brothers at school a couple of times. His family had an answer for that as well: Wyatt and Chris were protecting their "images." After all, having your little brother sitting with you at lunch was hardly a way to impress the guys.

As far as he knew, Prue was homeschooled, something all three brothers thought was incredibly unfair. Every time he brought it up, Piper would roll her eyes and pose, "would you want me as your teacher?" To which he would quickly answer, "no." And that ended the discussion. All his siblings had been perfectly disciplined into not revealing the slightest bit of magic in front of him. So he lived his life in complete ignorance of this entire other side of his family's turbulent history.

But all that changed when his parents finally informed him of the big secret. It had been his father who had told him everything. They had sat in the headmaster's office, which he believed to be of one of the numerous small private schools in the Bay area. Leo gently started to tell him stories of three powerful witches who battled against evil and who had a destiny. Slowly, he worked his way up to one of the witches having one kid, then another, and finally, another. Even though he was seven-and-a-half at the time, it did not take Anakin long to realize that his father was not telling him everything.

And that was when his whole world came crashing down around him. One of the students at the school, as requested, orbed into the office to collect a piece of paper from Leo. Anakin, never having seen magic being performed before, promptly fainted. His entire family was clustered around him when he came to, the kids all in their Magic School uniforms.

His mother had been the one to explain why they had tried so desperately to keep this a secret from him. The fact that this wonderful gift, which was his birthright, was slowly killing him. His mom explained how she and her sisters had bound his powers to slow down the disease, but now the Elders had a solution to the problem, and it was now his choice whether or not he wanted to be a witch. Of course, at the time, he was simply overwhelmed and did not give his mother an answer. Unfortunately, that was the only chance he had to give up his powers. Because after that...

Anakin shook his head. Now was not the time to be reminiscing. He was on a mission. He passed the fabled Hall of History; fabled because most students avoided the corridor at all costs except when they were in class. Anakin did not blame them for hating the class as history was intensely dull and, for the most part, had no practical applications. He walked past the ghost town and turned down the next corridor. He was in one of the numerous English corridors. It was a stark contrast to the history one. Here, students dallied around, talking over poems and rhymes. They would have hated the subject, but basic poetic structure was essential for any magical being to understand.