Notes: Um... So I found this saved in a folder I never use, and as near as I can tell, I wrote it a while ago, perhaps before I started working on "The Mistakes They Make" (Chapter 5 is in the works, I'm still working on responses to comments, sorry!). Anyway, I don't usually pull the whole "if you like it, I'll work on it" thing, but I guess I'll just say that if you all are interested, I usually become more interested. :-) As usual, I don't own Charmed or really much of anything at all.
"If I'm not conceived within the next few weeks, I'll disappear forever." –Chris, "I Dream of Phoebe"
"Congratulations. You have a beautiful healthy baby girl."
The nurse held the whimpering infant out to the flustered looking father, and Leo accepted it with equal doses of confusion and awe.
"Baby girl? But, I mean, Chris is a boy," he said as he peered down into the little red face.
"What? No, sir, this is a baby girl. I checked her over myself. Did the ultrasound suggest something else?" She adjusted the blanket and made a cooing noise, before turning her attention back to Leo.
"Uhh…I guess, I mean, I don't know." He shifted the baby and even as it struck him odd that it wasn't Chris he was looking down at, he was already falling in love with his new child.
The nurse looked confused, and then brightened. "Look, why don't you go and check on her mother. I'm sure if you two discuss it, everything will be clear." She gestured back into the recovery room behind her, then closed the doors after he had entered and turned to the remaining sisters and little Wyatt in the hallway.
"Sorry, but only one visitor at a time. I'll show you back to the waiting room, if you want," she said, sweeping her arm back the direction they had come.
"No thanks," said Phoebe, "we know the way."
The nurse nodded pleasantly and moved off down the hallway, onto more urgent things, no doubt, and the sisters watched her go.
"Well this is interesting," Paige said. "It looks like our buddy Chris had a few more things he didn't tell us."
Phoebe could only nod in response.
Leo approached Piper's hospital bed with the now quiet baby and stood over her. She looked tired but glowing and happy.
She looked up at him with a small smile. "How does he look?" she asked.
"She's beautiful," he said. "Just like her mother."
"Sorry, what? She?" She sounded like she was asking for confirmation because she was so tired and drugged that she couldn't possibly have heard that correctly.
Leo answered by grabbing a chair from behind him and sitting down close to her bedside so they could inspect the baby together, and sure enough, they confirmed that the baby was, in fact, not a boy.
Piper reached out and Leo placed the baby in her arms. "Melinda," she murmured, awestruck.
Leo looked up from the baby to its mother surprised. "Melinda?" he repeated.
"Maybe, you know, he got a sex change?"
Phoebe looked over at Paige with a look that bordered between shocked and repulsed.
"What?" Paige asked, defensive. "Stranger things have happened in this family."
When awareness first came back to him, Chris was shocked to find himself "Up There." When he thought back to dying on his parents' bed, he expected he would find himself either in some version of the afterlife or even back to life in a changed future. Certainly, he wouldn't have expected to find himself surrounded by a council of Elders, all of them looking atypically not displeased with him.
He was standing, strangely enough, so after he was done being surprised at his whereabouts, he sank unceremoniously to the ground and clawed at his white shirt. It was still bloodstained, but when he pulled the shirt up to check his skin, there was no wound. He was completely healed. He pinched himself a little and decided that he didn't feel dead. Had they healed him? What was this? He looked back up and scanned the circle of faces, some that he recognized, some that he didn't. Some that he vaguely knew would be dead if not for his intervention in the past.
"What's going on?" he asked, or tried to ask. It came out like a croak and he cleared his throat to try again, but one of them was already speaking. She was an elderly looking woman, with crow's feet that made her look like most days she did a lot of laughing. Not this day.
"It is the decision of this council, that you, Christopher Peregrine Halliwell, be given a second chance."
"What?" he croaked, and cleared his throat again. "I don't understand." This time it came out clear, and the elder looked down on him with pity.
"Because you forfeited your existence for the good of the world, it is our decision that you be given a new existence." She frowned at him. "Do you accept?"
Chris felt his jaw drop, and suddenly, there was an ache back in his stomach. A new existence? "I don't understand," he repeated, "aren't I being born right now?"
"No," she said, and stepped forward, reaching out a hand to help him up, which he only looked at blankly. "Come and walk with me," she said.
He took her hand and they were gone from the circle of elders. They were now in a park, and the sun was shining overhead. He could hear birds and smell flowers. It reminded him of Bianca, but wasn't quite the same as the spot they had shared.
By the time he got his bearings, she was already walking ahead of him on a winding path. He hurried to catch up.
"A child who is essentially your twin has been born. I know you're an adult, so I won't go into too much detail of conception, but I point it out to say that the possibility of the baby being you was there, but even greater was the possibility that it wouldn't be you. To be perfectly clear, the egg was inseminated by a different sperm that the one that originally produced you."
Chris stopped walking and the elder stopped with him, talking his elbow and leading him to sit on a nearby bench. She sat with him, and folder her hands over her robes, looking every inch the picture of serenity.
"So I erased my existence after all?" He shook his head like he hoped it would clear it. "I don't know where to start," he said.
"Then I shall start at the beginning," she responded. "The day you would have been conceived, you were not, but a group of us elders, realizing the importance of your mission, decided that at least until the baby was born, you would exist. Further we decided that it was still possible that changes affecting the egg could still affect you, and thus we let it be. So when Piper took the antidote to the spider venom, you were thus inoculated. So I suppose," she continued, "you never would have noticed that the baby developing was not actually, well, you.
"But now your mission is complete. The world has been saved by saving your brother, but in the process you did not save yourself. So we decided to give you a new existence."
"Right," Chris said, and gave a short nod, his expression clearly showing his incredulity. "So this new existence…?"
"Is the same as yours was. You will remain everything that you were, and you will also remain in this time period. However, you will not age until your next proper birthday, which is, I believe, 23 years from this day. We argued considerably over that fact, but decided that you couldn't be allowed to travel back to your original time because you would not have existed for the 23 years in the interim. Neither, however, could you live outside your time and age because you would be living twice in the same 23 year time period. And finally, we could not return you to the state of an infant, because you've already aged to this point. You see, of course, the problem?" She looked at him with one raised eyebrow.
Chris' expression had not changed, and he only shrugged.
"Well, time travel is quite confusing," she said.
Chris gave a short bark of laughter and nodded in agreement, before turning away to stare up into the sky. "So where do I go from here?" he asked.
She reached over and grabbed one of his hands and held it in her own.
"You go home," she said. "You are, after all, still a Halliwell."