Disclaimer: I don't own Charmed. Thanks everyone for all your wonderful support. This story would have been left as an unfinished oneshot without your lovely reviews and follows/favs/kudos/etc. I hope the ending lives up to your hopes and expectations.

Epilogue

Her time spent in the swirling vortex tunnel of blue and white seemed to last for an eternity, yet also seemed to be over in a blink. But when she stepped out, a weight fell off her shoulders and she knew that she had succeeded.

For one thing, her parents and aunts were standing in various places around the subtly different attic, Leo with an arm around Piper's waist and grey dotting all their hair, lines on their faces. For another, Niko was there. He wore a pair of faded denim jeans, his hands in the pockets of his black leather jacket, and gave her the cocky and smug, but gentle, smile that she had fallen in love with in her timeline. His whiskey eyes glinted with remembered horrors, unseen in this world.

Niko, Sophie realized lightning quick, would have also needed to travel back, to maintain the integrity of the timeline. He too remembered their first life together, and she felt a selfish relief that she wasn't alone. She wasn't the only veteran of a war that had never happened. That Niko was the one to remember was the icing on the cake.

Finally, standing behind their parents and staring directly at her, looking more uncertain than she had ever seen him, was Wyatt.

She only just had time to take him in, short hair, green t-shirt and blue jeans, before she fell to her knees, clutching her head as her memories from the new timeline suddenly began pouring into her head.

In the original timeline, Sophie's earliest memory was of being attacked by an upper-level demon while playing on the carpet of the living room. She screamed in terror, covering her face with her arms and unintentionally sending the lethal energy ball back at him as Piper came running in with her hands raised. When she was finished destroying the demon, she pulled Sophie to her, both of them pale from the close-call as Piper cooed lovingly to her daughter.

In the new timeline, everything was almost exactly the same, but Leo also came running in beside Piper. He picked her up and hugged her, soothing her gently while Piper blew up the demon.

In the original timeline, Sophie despised Magic School with a passion for all of the five months that she attended. The other students, jealous of her lineage and her natural ability at every subject, be it magic or mortal, bullied her fiercely. Usually, Wyatt led the way, laughing maliciously at his younger sister's eyes shimmering with unshed tears.

It finally came to a head when she lost control of her powers and put four bullies in the infirmary. Piper withdrew her from the School, and put her in Knox Academy under the name of Bennet, and Sophie swiftly blossomed there, making lifelong friendships that would become closer to her than her own blood in future years.

In the new timeline, she never attended Magic School. Piper and Leo, knowing that their magical child couldn't go to mortal school like her bound brother, but wary of her getting treated differently at her aunt's school, where she was well known, sent her straight to Knox. There, she still made friendships with the same group that would eventually become her coven. The Bennet siblings, Archer, Declan, Ethan and Sarah, Sienna Beckham and Kate Cunningham.

In the original timeline, Leo rarely remembered that he had a daughter, let alone spent time with her. She became Mommy's Baby Girl in the midst of crying over her father's broken promises and baking peanut butter cookies for tea parties.

In this timeline, Sophie was the doted on youngest child by both of her parents. She still baked peanut butter cookies for tea parties, but now she was also Daddy's Little Princess, as well as Mommy's Baby Girl.

And unlike in the original timeline, she wasn't bullied fiercely by her brother, despite him having many more reasons to be jealous of her in this timeline. Instead, Wyatt took the duty of 'big brother protector' with great seriousness. His worst bout of trouble in the new timeline was caused by him pushing down a mortal boy who made Sophie cry in the local playground.

In Sophie's first timeline, her birthday was forever overshadowed, first by Wyatt's kidnapping that continued to affect him years later, then later by 'The Event'. Her father rarely showed up, unless called by Wyatt on Piper's orders, and Sophie generally ended up spending the day in tears of disappointment. Eventually, Piper started hosting parties the next day, and Wyatt would be sent to stay with an aunt so he didn't ruin the day while she and Victor fawned over the girl.

Later on, after the Event happened, Sophie hated her birthdays, and refused to acknowledge them, save for working harder, so as to exhaust herself enough to forget her mother's eyes staring sightlessly at the ceiling while Sophie sobbed hysterically over Piper's body.

In her second timeline, Sophie's birthdays were always a big event. Everyone in the family, as well as anyone else that Sophie wanted to invite, came to the Manor for a party. A large, icing covered, cake was baked in her favourite flavour of the time, and she opened her presents after the guests had left, writing thank you cards and sending them to everyone the next day.

In both timelines, Sophie was ten years old when the Bennets' and Sienna's parents were attacked by a pair of warlocks. In both timelines, Phoebe had a premonition of the attack. In the first timeline, Paige's loss of her orbing ability to the Titans caused them to arrive in time to vanquish the warlocks, but too late to save their friends.

In the second timeline, however, things had a brighter ending. A mysterious message left for the families in 2004 had made the two families warier of attack, and so their regularly-strengthened wards held out longer against the warlocks' efforts to break in. Those wards, combined with Paige being able to orb herself and her sisters to the Bennet house as soon as Phoebe alerted the others to her vision, saved the parents from a firey death. It was Sophie's first experience with death.

In one timeline, Sophie gained a faint set of scars on her wrist from where Sienna's nails left bloody dents in them at her parents' joint funeral. At the same moment in the other timeline, she was watching Tangled with Sarah, Sophie and Kate, while their mothers chatted in the Manor kitchen, relieved by their narrow escape. The burnt down house could be restored after all, but their children's innocence could never be.

In both timelines, there was a three-pronged attack on the Charmed Ones on Sophie's fourteenth birthday.

In the first timeline, it was successful beyond the demons' best expectations. Paige, caught by surprise while scolding her son for not cleaning up his room, was stunned when Henry Junior was abruptly stabbed in the back. She was so shocked and horrified by her loss, that she didn't even fight when she was surrounded and had a dozen Darklighter arrows shot at her. Henry Senior came back from collecting their daughters from ballet practice, and was greeted by the sight of his wife and son's dead bodies.

At the same time, Phoebe was helping her youngest daughter Pamela get her coat on so that they could go to the park when a dozen demons abruptly shimmered in and attacked moments after her eldest daughter, Phaedra 'Fay' entered.

Hampered by her need to protect her children, and her lack of active powers, Phoebe and her girls were quickly overwhelmed. Cole arrived back with their middle daughter Primrose from buying a new loaf of bread to find all three dead, the house in ruins and clear evidence that the middle Charmed One had fought to her last breath to defend her babies.

Finally, Piper was decorating the Manor with Sophie for the party the next day when the largest group of demons, nearly thirty, shimmered in. She shoved her daughter under the table after they discovered a ward had been placed around the house to prevent anyone orbing out, ordering her to stay down and silent, before going to take on the onslaught of enemies.

She lasted a long time, longer than both of her sisters, but she was fatally distracted by Sophie's scream of panic when a demon sent her flying into the wall. Piper jumped between her daughter and a newly-arrived Darklighter, the arrow going straight through her rib area. The demons shimmered out, laughing maliciously, while Sophie clutched desperately at her mother begging for her to live, to have her dormant healing power finally activate, and for Leo or Wyatt or Paige to come and help.

When Leo finally did arrive, lost in his own grief, he flung accusations of blame at his catatonic daughter. Sophie was stricken, and Victor, who had arrived before anyone else, coldly told him to leave and never darken the Halliwells' doorstep again. That was the last time that they saw each other in that world.

In the new world, however, the family was pre-prepared for an attack, and had never let themselves become over-confident, as they had in the original world. Paige pulled her son to her, out of harm's way, and orbed them both to Phoebe's house. She grabbed her sister and nieces, before getting them all to the Manor. There they found Piper and Sophie fighting off their attackers while Wyatt and Leo hid in the next room.

With the combined fire-power of the Charmed Ones, and Sophie, Fay and Henry, the demonic horde was quickly beaten back, the survivors fleeing with their tails tucked between their legs.

In her original life, Wyatt's eighteenth birthday wasn't a particularly significant day for Sophie. She aided in an attack on one of her brother's prisons, taking advantage of the fact that most of the guards were distracted by Wyatt's large-scale celebrations, and battled her brother for ten minutes before fleeing with the rescued prisoners and her fellow Resistance soldiers. A semi-standard day for her at that point in her grim life.

In her second life, however, Wyatt's eighteenth birthday was the day he finally regained his powers. His first attempt to use them was so over-powered that the entirety of Paige's office, where they'd released his binding, was destroyed. The next few weeks, Sophie, her brother and her parents confined themselves to the School's guest quarters, where she and her parents taught Wyatt how to control the power in him.

"It's like I was trapped in chains my whole life," Wyatt admitted to her in a moment of weakness. "And now, I'm finally free, but I don't know what to do with that freedom because I've never had it before."

"Well, just do what I do and you'll be fine," Sophie answered lightly, only half-joking. Her smile softened and she reached over to pat his arm gently. "You'll be fine, Wyatt," she insisted softly. "You've got us to help you, and you have a damn Good moral compass to guide you. I mean, you couldn't even lie about having a cookie before dinner when we were kids, for crying out loud!"

Wyatt flushed, groaning at the same time. "You are never gonna let that go, are you?" he huffed.

She laughed, relieved that her joke had done its' purpose and the mood had been brightened. "Of course not," she chuckled. "You were hilarious, saying that you had turned evil and become a demonic thief because you had a cookie!"

He glared at her, but there was no heat in it. There never was.

In her first timeline, Sophie met Nikolaus Perry of the Phoenix Assassin Clan when she was sixteen. He had been sent to kill her, and joined the Peacekeepers (Wyatt's demonic 'law enforcement officers' a.k.a thugs) in a battle with the Resistance over a supply train the Resistance had been trying to steal.

The Resistance won, and in the midst of the fight, Niko had ended up impaled on a pipe, found by the Rebels when they were searching for any survivors or supplies they could take. Sophie called Mikelle, one of the few Whitelighters to survive the Invasion of the Heavens, over and, against heavy protests, had her heal the assassin as much as she could.

She imprisoned him, and later, in exchange for him becoming a spy for her, she let him go. While at first their relationship was cold, full of distrust on both sides, they gradually grew closer. First, they became lovers, and then later they fell in love. Their relationship was doomed from the beginning, but Sophie found, when she stared at love in his whiskey eyes, that she didn't care. She would happily die a thousand deaths if it meant she could have a second with him.

Nothing save her mother's death, not even Wyatt's turn, broke her heart as badly as Niko attacking her in the past. She had preferred the thought of her fiancé dead, then betraying the cause Sophie believed in so fiercely. When it hit her that he had literally traded the world for a mere chance of her safety, she ended up crying from a mixture of grief and the bitter laughter that shook her body.

How ironic that she, called the 'Ice Queen' behind her back by her own soldiers, would have someone who literally loved her more than the world. She certainly didn't deserve such loving devotion.

In her second timeline, Sophie met Niko when they crossed paths on a hunt when she was nineteen. They were initially wary of each other, her identifying him as Phoenix by his birthmark, which her parents had always warned not to trust, and him recognizing her sword as Excalibur, Sophie Halliwell's sword.

Despite their distrust of each other, they agreed to work together to wipe out the clan of Upper-Level demons. Sophie had been in the middle of an argument with her family at the time about moving away for college, (a situation which had become increasingly common over the years as her independent spirit pushed against their protectiveness of her.) so she was on her own, and Niko and his mother had separated themselves from their clan when he was young. Lynn didn't want her son to become an assassin, she wanted him to be happy, though she taught him everything he would have learned if he had followed the clan's path.

Both of them were sensible enough to realize the stupidity of taking on the large and powerful clan single-handedly, so they chose to help each other instead.

They grew close over the week of hunting, and continued to work as partners, bonding as friends between demon hunts and studying. Sophie found that she was able to talk to him in a way she couldn't talk to anyone else, and Niko never judged her or tried to shake her out of her occasional bouts of depression like her family did.

Niko, meanwhile, found himself fascinated by Sophie's strong character, and her unshaking determination to do what was right for the world at large, even if it meant doing something 'wrong' in the short term.

Neither of them could say when exactly they fell in love, but by the time the Halliwells discovered the relationship, Sophie was already fixed on having Niko as her husband and an engagement ring graced her left ring finger.

She fought back tears as she stared down her parents like they were enemies. In that moment, they were her enemies.

"If you make me choose between Niko and this family, you are not going to like the result," she warned, choking on her pain at the threat.

"You're not serious!" Wyatt cried. "He's a damn demon Sophie! He's bewitched you or something!"

"I recognized that tattoo the second I spotted it!" she snapped back. "Niko has distant demonic heritage, Uncle Cole has more demon in him than Niko does! And unlike Uncle, Niko never hurt and innocent! I didn't know that this family was so hypocritical but either way it doesn't matter! I'm marrying Niko and nothing any of you say or do is going to change that! So either you give in and accept that, or you lose me! Your choice."

She orbed away without giving her family a chance to answer. She feared that they would try and call her bluff. She feared that she wasn't bluffing.

She spent the night at Niko's apartment, sobbing into his shoulder while he stroked her hair and murmured comforting words in her ears, before orbing to Sienna and Sarah's shared flat the next morning when they called her. Her parents were there, along with Wyatt. Piper wore a brave, slightly desperate, smile, the same as Leo, when she handed Sophie a beautiful white veil made of lace.

"I wore this when I married your father," she said with a shaky voice. "I thought that you might like to have it as your something old for your wedding."

"I would love to," Sophie accepted the olive branch with relief.

"No man's ever gonna be good enough for you," Wyatt told her. "But if he means that much to you, I guess I can learn to put up with him."

"I love you Princess," Leo whispered, pulling her into a hug. "I'm sorry."

Sophie didn't apologize, because she wasn't in the wrong, but she did tighten her grip on him, muttering her own words of love as she did so while Piper and Wyatt joined the embrace.

In the original timeline, Sophie came up with the idea for time travelling at eighteen, and she and her coven and fiancé spent the next few years secretly preparing for the mission. They didn't dare even tell the rest of the Resistance, least a spy or captive leak the plan to Wyatt's forces.

Niko proposed to her the day she left, though they both knew she would never return to say 'I do.' Later, she was forced to sneak into her own home with him, and her last sight of her time was of Niko fighting off the guards that came to investigate the sudden surge of magic in the Manor Museum.

In the other timeline, things happened much quicker, but were complicated and angst-filled, just the same.

They were buried in preparations for the upcoming marriage ceremony, because even though both Niko and Sophie wanted a low-key wedding there was still a lot to do, when Elder Sandra appeared. She wore a solemn expression, and the family all immediately feared that the end of the world was nigh.

Their guess was close. It was time for Sophie to go back in time, as her other self had done. If she didn't return and cast the spell to become her original self by the end of the week, their timeline would collapse, and return to the original. They would fall into an unending time loop, and eventually the universe would collapse from the strain of constantly changing back and forth to the different worlds.

There was no guarantee, even with the spell to restore her previous self, that things wouldn't be changed by accident, and the mission put Sophie's life equally at risk in both worlds.

As the Charmed Ones and Leo had never even hinted at the events of 2004 to their children, not wanting to burden them with the knowledge, Sophie and Wyatt were both shocked and stricken by the announcement and subsequent explanation. If not for the urgency of the situation, they would both probably have been furious and cold to their parents for a long time after, as well as struggling to adjust to the new information about each other.

But the time limit prevented it, and so instead, on January 27th, 2025, in both timelines, Sophia Prudence Halliwell drew a chalk triquetra on the attic wall, kissed her loved ones goodbye and stepped into a portal, the fate of the world on her shoulders.

"Sophie?" Her family's voices broke through the fog she had mentally fallen into after the last memory, of casting the spell on herself and forgetting her second timeline after arriving in 2003, finished playing.

She blinked and realized that she had been staring at the ceiling for quite a while, from the stinging in her eyes. Her family, parents, aunts, brother and fiancé alike, were all bent over her with worried expressions. A smile broke her face, feeling strange after so long without doing so, and she sat up, engulfed by an unfamiliar feeling of serenity.

"I'm home," she said softly. She grinned cheekily at her relieved fiancé. "And you owe me a wedding twice-over now."

"Welcome home, Darling," Piper laughed, pulling her into her familiar, comforting embrace. "Welcome home."