Post by Fourever Charmed on Dec 8, 2009 1:05:08 GMT -5
Summary: Patty Halliwell's first truly happy Christmas, with her first complete family.
Rating: PG-13
A/N: I just read Ryeloza’s story A Changing Wind and felt completely invigorated and inspired to write my own Yule Charmed tale this year! And in contrast to I’ll Be There For Yule, a bittersweet Victor/Patty/Sam love triangle holiday fic that I wrote last year, this one will be happily in season!
The brittle cold wormed its way from the rusting metal railing, up through the fabric of her hand knitted gloves, and eventually latched onto hand like a leech to a child’s innocent, unsuspecting flesh. San Francisco didn’t have snow, but the winter this year was just as brutal as if they had.
Groans echoed from the aching wooden planks as she shimmied across them, three floors up. She often found herself imagining the planks giving way with her delicate weight, rotting out beneath her feet, and sending her toppling to the pavement below. Especially on dark, rain soaked nights like this one. She always tried to push the thoughts to the back of her head, bury them in the deep crevices of her mind, and lock them away for eternity.
But living on the topmost level of her apartment building, right smack dab in the middle of the row were just about everyone has to walk to reach the stairs – and thus wear down that particular spot of balcony – it was only natural so have such fears. That, and of course the idea that she had cheated Death before and the possibility that Death might be a grudge holder, kept Patty Halliwell especially alert.
Her numb, knitted fingers wrestled with her key ring as she stopped halfway down the balcony, at apartment number six. The number was loose though and had fallen on nail, making it appear as though apartment number nine was incorrectly stationed between doors five and seven. Oftentimes in the mid-morning hours of the weekends, a chorus of knocks would sound on the door, courtesy of drunken guests hoping to find their way back to the party. After all, the real tenants of apartment nine were a couple of rowdy college going teenagers, newlyweds, according to the way they hung on each other whenever Patty saw them together.
The couple reminded her slightly of her youth, the way she and her ex-husband had once been, just after their spurious nuptials, which, as she looked back on, had been more of an outlet against their oppressive mothers. The fact that Patty had also unexpectedly discovered she was a mother-to-be had also played heavily into the initial engagement request.
As the splintering wooden blue door grunted open, a musty menagerie of smells and much desired heat blew into her face: burnt confections, saucy tomato, hamburger, chocolate, pine, and peppermint. The concoction alone was enough to keep demons away. Nevertheless, she trudged through – the call of the warmth too powerful to ignore – and pressed all her weight against the door to shut it against the sudden wind that had just picked up outside.
“Not a minute too late,” she breathed with relief, while listening to the cruel taunting whistles of Old Man Winter just beyond the frail wooden barrier. She twisted the lock and clicked the deadbolt into place. It wasn’t much use against the magical variety criminals, but it did have its purpose for the mortal ones and in a place like San Francisco – particularly the apartments in which she resided – she took all precautions.
As she made her way into the kitchen, she could see a pile of dirty dishes a mile high. Her mixing bowls were filled with sudsy lemon bubbles and water, most likely cold by now. She could still see the remnants of mixed batter, though. From the chocolate chips stuck to the spatula, she made an educated guess. “Cookies.”
Pressing her foot to the lever on the garbage can to pop the lid, she confirmed her guess when she saw cracked egg shells, an empty chocolate chip package, and a squashed milk carton in the trash. In addition, two cans of Manwich and a package for hamburger buns had also been set aside for the dump.
“Patty?”
Suddenly the dicey aroma permeating her nostrils faded away as she turned around. Standing by the refrigerator was the love of her life: the man who had been with her through thick and thin, hell and heaven, both literally and figuratively. “Sam.”
Eagerly, she moved across the squeaking linoleum and pressed her tired, frost bit lips to his. It seemed as though a fire ignited whenever they kissed, burning more brightly than any demon’s fireball ever could. The heat that his lips sparked seemed to warm her mouth instantly, causing it to tingle as though she’d just kissed a light socket. “You’ve been busy, I see.”
Sam smiled weakly. “Piper wanted to cook something for you. She says you’re always so busy cooking for everyone else that you deserve to be cooked for too.” He gave a meek shrug of his shoulders. “Unfortunately, I’m not culinary professor, just a regular old history teacher.”
“Are you sure?” Patty giggled. “From the looks of things, I would’ve guessed you to be a chemistry teacher.”
Sam stroked her face gently. “Well the girls did a pretty good job following your recipe,” he went on, motioning to the cookbook propped atop the microwave. “Problem is, no matter what I do, I overcook them. Unless I take them out too early and then they look alright on the outside until you bite in and get a mouthful of a raw, glue-like substance.”
The mere description caused her face to crinkle up like aluminum foil. The pale yellow light from the bulb above their heads caught the diamond ring on her finger and sparkled as she patted him gently on the chest. “That explains the charmingly charred aroma in here.” Her nose twitched in much the style of Samantha Stephens, though it was only in reaction to another powerful whiff of the aforementioned cooking catastrophe and not because she was activating a supernatural power. “Dare I ask how the Sloppy Joes fared?”
“Actually,” Sam chuckled, “those turned out just perfect.” He edged around her and pressed his thumb to the button on the microwave, setting the timer for a minute and a half. “Sloppy Joes are about the only thing this Average Joe can do well.”
“That’s not true,” Patty countered, her brown eyes twinkling in the dim kitchen light. She moved her delicate hand to the side of his face and stroked it as if comforting an infant. Pitching forward on her tippy toes, she leaned in for a kiss, only for a shrieking cry to sound from the paper thin walls on the other side of the kitchen. With a sigh, Patty leaned back, planting her aching heels back onto the ground. “So much for a night alone,” she exhaled.
“I’ll get her-”
“No. You’ve been home with them all day-”
“And I’m the one who got it easy.” Sam pressed his finger to a half dollar sized plum stain on her collar. “Let me do it, Miss Jack Horner. You just sit down and relax.” He pressed his lips to her forehead and like a cool breeze in the dead of summer he was gone again, disappearing past her into the miniature corridor that they affectionately called a hallway.
Patty slowly lifted her foot, yanking off one heel and then the other. She wriggled her toes and a fresh layer of goose bumps rose like yeast across her exposed flesh. It had always been like that, ever since she was a child, and her second daughter, Piper, seemed to have the same problem. It had always been peculiar to her how just simply taking off a pair of shoes could make a person so cold.
“Look at who’s here.” The scratch of his slippers against the worn carpet pursued Sam’s voice. He came out with a hefty bundle positioned on his hip.
“There’s my baby!”
The bundle in question had a full head of thick, black coffee curls. She was a fairly skinny child, except for her pudgy cheeks which were unnaturally rosy in comparison with her skin, which was the color of fresh fallen Solstice snow. Her arms waved aimlessly, though it seemed to Patty that they were really reaching out for her.
“Missy Paige,” Patty spoke in singsong. As she collected the child from her husband, Paige wrapped her vice grip fingers around Patty’s finger and proceeded to clutch it as if it were a hand she were holding onto for dear life.
“Piper was teaching Phoebe and Paige how to blow kisses today.”
“Oh she was, was she?” Her eyes doe eyes glittered in the kitchen light. “And just how did that go?”
“Paige just blew spit bubbles, but Phoebe…” He narrows his eyes. “You might want to keep an eye on her as she gets older, I have a feeling it won’t be long before she’s trying to give little boys at preschool kisses.”
“I wouldn’t be surprised. She always has had the most in common with my mother.” With a quick motion, she shifted Paige to her opposite arm. “I need to go sit down, I’m beat.”
The kitchen lead right into what they called their living room, which was about the same size as the master bedroom that she and Sam shared with each other. It was simple: an old loveseat from storage – in other words, the attic from Patty’s childhood home – which had once belonged to a relative named Pearl, an overstuffed recliner that didn’t recline, and a small pine tree that was so overly decorated the branches were barely visible.
Presents, however, billowed out from beneath the weighted branches. Most of them were poorly wrapped, with lots of tape and an over abundance of wrapping paper, an experiment in allowing the girls to wrap each other’s gifts that Sam nor Patty were keen on repeating next year or the year after that. Still others were eloquently wrapped – obvious gifts from Patty’s mother to her grandchildren – and then there were also a couple of finely stuffed holiday bags, courtesy of the Trudeau household.
With an exhausted sigh, the mother of four collapsed into the overstuffed recliner with her youngest tucked neatly into her lap. She didn’t even bother to stop Paige when the child began to twirl her hair between her little fingers. Being home after such a long day at Buddy’s was enough for her.
A blinking rainbow reflected off her face as Sam plugged in the Yuletide tree. She leaned her head back into the sagging brown leather of the recliner and watched the tree. Behind it, attached securely to the peeling floral wallpaper with mounds of duct tape so they would not slip, were five unique stockings.
“Mommy?”
When Patty looked for the voice, she found it standing just inside the hallway, belonging to a light haired brunette child with pigtails and a button nose. “Piper,” Patty softly admonished, “shouldn’t you be in bed?” She wagged her finger. “You know Santa won’t come if you don’t go to sleep.”
Piper pointed an accusatory finger at her baby sister. “Paige gets to be up.”
“Paige is a baby,” Patty reasoned. “Babies have a harder time sleeping than big girls do.”
At that, Prue appeared behind Piper, holding onto a toddling Phoebe’s fat fingered hand. “Mommy,” she addressed, “we forgot to leave the cookies for Santa.”
Piper blew a puff of air from between her lips, rustling the bangs hanging just above her doe eyes which mirrored her mother’s. “The cookies burneded.”
“Burned,” Prue corrected. She wrinkled her nose.
“We wanted to make some for you, Mommy.”
“And Santa,” Prue explained softly. “So he wouldn’t forget us.”
“Forget you?” Patty motioned her girls over. “Santa would never forget you just because you don’t have cookies for him. He gets cookies and milk from children all over the world!”
Piper stuck out a fat lip as she approached the recliner and held up her arms to grab the armrest. “How do you know?”
“Experience,” Sam explained. He leaned forward on the loveseat, resting his arms on his legs. “There were times when my brothers and sisters didn’t have cookies to leave Santa when I was a boy, but he never forgot us.”
“I don’t know…” Prue grumbled, ever the skeptic.
“Do we have ingredients left?”
“All the chocolate chips are gone,” Sam answered.
“Phoebe ate all the chocolate we saved.” Prue narrowed her Arctic blue eyes at her the two-year-old.
“Eggs? Milk? Flour?” Patty asked, her eyes dancing in the luminous spectrum of colors.
“Check all three.”
“Sugar?”
“This time of year? Always.”
“Then it’s settled,” a yawn escaped her lips, interrupting the flow of her sentence. “We’ll make sugar cookies.”
“Really?!” Piper jumped up and down.
Seeing her sister so excited, Phoebe threw up her arms. “Yayay!”
“Patty,” Sam frowned. “You need your sleep. So do the girls.”
“I’ve been cooking all day. What’s a little more?” Her eyelids hung tiredly. “They’re my daughters, Sam.”
He rose from the loveseat in defeat, managing a small laugh as he maneuvered his way into the kitchen. “I’ll wash the dishes.”
“I love you,” she squeaked.
The water turned on and the dishes rattled as he replied, “I love you too.”
“Mommy!” Piper screeched, startling Paige into a cry. She was pointing an accusing finger towards her second youngest sister, who was on the floor tugging at a bow on a box under the tree. The name on the tag marked it as a gift for the second oldest. “She’s stealing!”
“Piper!” Patty wagged her finger. “Prue, can you take that away from your sister?”
With a huff, Prue snatched up the gift, causing Phoebe to join Paige’s chorus of cries. A scowl began to carve itself onto Prue’s features, quickly followed by a mischievous expression. “Maybe Phoebe would stop crying if we could open a gift early?” Her thick black eyelashes fluttered like angel wings. “For Christmas Eve?”
“Yeah, early!” Piper yelled, over the sobs of her younger sisters. “Pleeeease, Mommy!” She pressed her hands together in a praying position and puckered her lips as she begged. “Please, please, please!”
Patty snorted as she leaned her head around the recliner and peered towards the kitchen, only able to make out the plaid arm of her husband’s flannel shirt. “Sam?”
Sam peeked around the corner, his hands dripping and coated in a layer of bubbles. “Why not?”
“Yeah, why not?” Prue echoed, her voice edged with a persistence that Patty knew was not going to go away until she got exactly what she wanted.
“Okay!” She pointed to Prue. “But you have to pass out a gift to each of your sisters first.”
“Sure,” Prue obliged, promptly handing the gift she was holding to Piper. Quickly, she scoured the presents for the names of her other sisters before supplying Phoebe with a lumpy red packaged gift dotted with reindeer and then finding an oddly long shaped gift wrapped in purple paper with snowflakes for Paige. After dispersing them, she headed straight for a bag billowing with green tissue paper that had a lovely glitter snowman on the front. “I want to open the one Andy got me!” she announced, loud and proud.
Piper was already busy tearing off the layers of metallic gold wrapping from her gift. When she was near the end, she dropped to the floor and squealed in delight at the picture of a little girl surrounded by child sized silver pots and pans on the cover of the box. “A kitchen set!” she shrieked, simultaneously attempting to tear open the box to get to the gifts inside.
Meanwhile, Phoebe was tugging at her own gift, slowly ripping strip after strip off, as if she were preparing to make paper mache. Her sausage-like fingers were electrified with delight as the holes in the wrapping paper soon revealed frilly blue fabric. Fervently, she latched onto the fabric and yanked, furthering to rip the paper as she pulled out a Cinderella dress up costume, complete with a pair of sparkly plastic heels to match. “Cinderelly! Cinderelly!” Immediately, she went to work shaking the dress up and down, while trying to yank it over her head.
“Look!” Prue cried, holding up a plastic tripod. “Andy got me just what I wanted!” She was up and running around the room in circles, shoving her beloved new tripod into each of her sisters’ faces, then her mother’s, and finally her step-father’s. “I’m gonna go get my camera!” she squealed as she disappeared into the hallway, headed for the bedroom she shared with Phoebe and Piper.
Patty slid Paige off her lap and placed her onto the floor next to her two-year-old big sister. “Piper,” she motioned, “can you please hand me that pillow from the loveseat?”
“’Kay,” Piper mumbled, without looking up from her new toy. With one hand behind her back and the other on the box, she scrounged around for the edge of the pillow and yanked it off the loveseat.
“Thank you.” The mother of four slipped to her knees and propped her four-month-old up against the cushion. Tenderly, she began to help Paige tear the wrapping from her gift, moving the baby’s hands to replicate the act of unwrapping the present. As the paper was plucked away from the gift, like Thanksgiving turkey meat from the bone, a toy microphone began to emerge. “Look, Paige! Look what your big sisters got you!” She held up the microphone and flipped on the On-Off switch with her thumb. The toy began to light up and a cheerful tune began to play as an electronic voice sung the ABC’s.
“It fits!” Prue’s stocking feet echoed throughout the tiny apartment as she bolted into the room, holding her camera fixed onto the top of her tripod high above her head. “I wanna take a picture! Can I take a picture? I think we should take a picture!”
Patty rose from her seat on the floor and moved across the room to Prue, where she kissed her ecstatic daughter on the forehead. “We’ll take a picture, Prue. Just give me one minute, okay?”
“A huh,” Her blue eyes dazzled as she extended the legs of her tripod and began to focus the camera onto her sisters, with the blinking tree as her backdrop.
Patty, on the other hand, slipped as quietly as falling snow down the hallway to the master bedroom and closed the door as gently as possible. She could still here the sounds of her laughing, cheering children, and the image of their smiling faces in her recent memory brought a smile to her own. Carefully, she tiptoed to the dresser she shared with Sam and opened her drawer. Pushing aside her socks, scarves, and gloves she revealed a small diary with a gold lock.
Moving to her jewelry box, she lifted the ring holder to expose a hidden compartment, where a small piece of cloth was folded. Once unfolded, the cloth yielded a miniature gold key, which Patty inserted into the lock on her diary, unsealing her innermost thoughts. She began to flip through the pages, starting from the beginning. As she went, the dates became later and later in time until she finally came to a date marked May 6, 1975.
A small piece of paper was folded and set into the crease of the diary. She pulled it out and began to unfold the paper. It was soft to her touch and the edges of paper had begun to fray from years of active use: folding and unfolding. On the paper black ink simply read: Mom, Be careful on February 28, 1978, or a warlock will drown you.
It was ironic, really, finding the note hidden away in the Book of Shadows, on the page of the Truth Spell. She knew it had to have been from one of her three daughters, the ones who had come from the future to stop her blessing Nicholas’s ring. The note had never been signed though, but she always had a sneaking suspicion that it might have been Phoebe, if only because according to the date, Phoebe would be the one she would have known least of all.
That May day, her life had changed completely. She found herself at a crossroads, almost three years in the making. She could choose to ignore the note or she could choose to save herself, as one of her girls had so desperately hoped she would. As much as she knew fighting destiny was wrong, the more she agonized, the more she realized, she could never abandon her girls, and November 2, 1975, she knew what she had to do.
Interestingly enough, just before the Winter Solstice of 1976, her life had taken another drastic turn. A second missed period confirmed what the daily nausea already had her suspecting: she was pregnant. But not with her husband’s child. No, she was pregnant with the child of her whitelighter, the true love of her life, a man she was forbidden to ever be with. If that wasn’t problem enough, she also had never seen a fourth child – nor had one ever been mentioned – when her girls had visited from the future. That worried her: she wondered if she’d miscarried, of it the child had been killed in some type of demonic assault, or if The Elders had found her and Sam out and taken the child as malicious payment for disobeying rules they had already been warned of breaking again.
Then there was her mother. Penny had insisted time and again that the only way to handle the pregnancy was to magically conceal it and upon the child’s birth, bind her powers and give her away. It would protect all of the children, all four.
At four months pregnant on February 28, 1977, with her divorce from Victor officially finalized and exactly a year from the day she knew she was supposed to die, she had been nearly ready to accept her mother’s better judgment. The words and fears had invaded her mind like cigarette smoke. As cruel as the idea seemed to her and Sam, they only wanted what was best for their daughter, and if she didn’t exist in the future – not to the knowledge of her other girls anyway – then perhaps this was what they were meant to do.
And that was when she remembered the note once more; it had been tucked in her diary ever since Phoebe’s birth. The note inspired an epiphany: if she was determined to change the future anyway – keep herself from dying and abandoning her girls – then why not just go all the way? Why not chance it this time? Keep the child growing inside her and see where fate would lead. If that meant going head-to-head with The Elders, then so be it. If that meant stripping her powers or those of her girls, then she was fine with that. She would rather have four daughters, than three witches.
“I’ll clip my wings,” Sam had whispered into her ear that day. “We’ll be a family.”
“You can’t. Sam, your charges depend on you.”
“And so do you. And so does our child. I’m doing this for her. I have to be in her life. Just think of it as my way of moving heaven and earth to keep her safe.”
“Her?”
“Your family has a pretty good track record for girls…besides, I wouldn’t want anything else. I want her to be just like you.”
Sam had his whitelighter retirement official that evening, proposed with a diamond ring that had once belonged to his great grandmother, and as soon as the courthouse had opened the next morning, she and Sam had obtained a legal document from the justice of the peace, proclaiming them husband and wife in the eyes of San Francisco. It was only after harsh insistence from Patty that Penny had finally agreed to perform a handfasting for them that same day.
The wedding had been small and it had taken place right in her childhood home: she wore a strapless white gown and silver shall and carried a bouquet of multi-colored wildflowers, her three daughters had acted as her flower girls dressed in their matching Imbolc dresses, and the Trudeaus had graciously allowed Prue’s best friend, Andy, to attend as the ring bearer. It had been more perfect than anything Patty could’ve imagine. Her first wedding had been too big for her taste, and in a church no less, which had caused religious issues to arise between her mother and Victor’s mother. But her wedding to Sam, it had been the wedding she’d dreamed of ever since she’d been a child.
By the time the powers of her unborn daughter had begun to manifest, a telekinetic ability transformed by orbs that Sam had coined telekinetic orbing, it was too late for The Elders. She and Sam were bound to each other, body and soul, and according to a being known as the Angel of Destiny, she had a very special destiny that prevented The Elders from doling out punishment unto the child for their actions.
Patty folded the note along its worn creases again and returned it to its special place within her diary. Her life wasn’t perfect: certainly the money earned by a waitress and a high school teacher – Sam’s job after clipping his wings – was not good, but it was enough to pay the rent once a month and purchase groceries once a week. They both knew that eventually, as Paige and her sisters grew, they would need a three bedroom apartment. But at present, they were getting by as a complete family unit, and for the first time in her life, Patty was truly happy.
As she padded back into the living room, she saw Sam on his hands and knees with Phoebe, helping her arms into the sleeves of her Cinderella dress. She saw Piper pretending to stir something in one of her metal pots, she saw Paige gumming her toy microphone as the song looped back to begin the ABC’s again, and she saw Prue snapping photographs of her sisters and step-father in front of the tree. As she looked down at the watch Sam had given her as a Yuletide present three days earlier, she watched the minute hand mark midnight.
“Paige’s first Christmas,” she breathed. Her eyes shimmered, reflecting the blinking lights of the tree. “Our first Christmas…as a real family.”
“Mommy!” Prue announced, suddenly beside her mother, tugging on her hand. “My camera’s set, it’s time for a picture!” Her black hair bobbed around her shoulder as she pulled her mother to towards the tree, where Sam and her sisters were already positioning themselves. “Hurry, hurry! You stand here, Mommy, next to Sam and Paigey. And Piper, you stand here with Phoebe.” She danced off towards her camera like a Prima Ballerina.
“Hurry up, Prue!” Piper begged. “I wanna play with my cooking set!”
Patty tugged playfully at her daughter’s pigtails. “Be patient, Piper.” She leaned into the crook of her husband’s arm and smiled as Prue anxiously waved her arm.
“Say ‘Merry Christmas!’” She held up her fingers and dashed over to her sisters, positioning herself in front Sam so that she could take Phoebe’s free hand, for the toddler was already holding onto Piper’s hand, who was stationed in front of their mother.
Sam grasped Patty’s hand in his as Prue counted down the flash on her camera. Tucked into his arm, held above Prue’s head, he held the only other thing he loved as much as Patty: their daughter.
“Merry Christmas!” shrieked the three children and Sam in unison.
“Merry First Christmas,” Patty whispered as the flash from Prue’s camera filled the room, capturing the first family photograph that would be cherished for generations to come.
Rating: PG-13
A/N: I just read Ryeloza’s story A Changing Wind and felt completely invigorated and inspired to write my own Yule Charmed tale this year! And in contrast to I’ll Be There For Yule, a bittersweet Victor/Patty/Sam love triangle holiday fic that I wrote last year, this one will be happily in season!
First Christmas
The brittle cold wormed its way from the rusting metal railing, up through the fabric of her hand knitted gloves, and eventually latched onto hand like a leech to a child’s innocent, unsuspecting flesh. San Francisco didn’t have snow, but the winter this year was just as brutal as if they had.
Groans echoed from the aching wooden planks as she shimmied across them, three floors up. She often found herself imagining the planks giving way with her delicate weight, rotting out beneath her feet, and sending her toppling to the pavement below. Especially on dark, rain soaked nights like this one. She always tried to push the thoughts to the back of her head, bury them in the deep crevices of her mind, and lock them away for eternity.
But living on the topmost level of her apartment building, right smack dab in the middle of the row were just about everyone has to walk to reach the stairs – and thus wear down that particular spot of balcony – it was only natural so have such fears. That, and of course the idea that she had cheated Death before and the possibility that Death might be a grudge holder, kept Patty Halliwell especially alert.
Her numb, knitted fingers wrestled with her key ring as she stopped halfway down the balcony, at apartment number six. The number was loose though and had fallen on nail, making it appear as though apartment number nine was incorrectly stationed between doors five and seven. Oftentimes in the mid-morning hours of the weekends, a chorus of knocks would sound on the door, courtesy of drunken guests hoping to find their way back to the party. After all, the real tenants of apartment nine were a couple of rowdy college going teenagers, newlyweds, according to the way they hung on each other whenever Patty saw them together.
The couple reminded her slightly of her youth, the way she and her ex-husband had once been, just after their spurious nuptials, which, as she looked back on, had been more of an outlet against their oppressive mothers. The fact that Patty had also unexpectedly discovered she was a mother-to-be had also played heavily into the initial engagement request.
As the splintering wooden blue door grunted open, a musty menagerie of smells and much desired heat blew into her face: burnt confections, saucy tomato, hamburger, chocolate, pine, and peppermint. The concoction alone was enough to keep demons away. Nevertheless, she trudged through – the call of the warmth too powerful to ignore – and pressed all her weight against the door to shut it against the sudden wind that had just picked up outside.
“Not a minute too late,” she breathed with relief, while listening to the cruel taunting whistles of Old Man Winter just beyond the frail wooden barrier. She twisted the lock and clicked the deadbolt into place. It wasn’t much use against the magical variety criminals, but it did have its purpose for the mortal ones and in a place like San Francisco – particularly the apartments in which she resided – she took all precautions.
As she made her way into the kitchen, she could see a pile of dirty dishes a mile high. Her mixing bowls were filled with sudsy lemon bubbles and water, most likely cold by now. She could still see the remnants of mixed batter, though. From the chocolate chips stuck to the spatula, she made an educated guess. “Cookies.”
Pressing her foot to the lever on the garbage can to pop the lid, she confirmed her guess when she saw cracked egg shells, an empty chocolate chip package, and a squashed milk carton in the trash. In addition, two cans of Manwich and a package for hamburger buns had also been set aside for the dump.
“Patty?”
Suddenly the dicey aroma permeating her nostrils faded away as she turned around. Standing by the refrigerator was the love of her life: the man who had been with her through thick and thin, hell and heaven, both literally and figuratively. “Sam.”
Eagerly, she moved across the squeaking linoleum and pressed her tired, frost bit lips to his. It seemed as though a fire ignited whenever they kissed, burning more brightly than any demon’s fireball ever could. The heat that his lips sparked seemed to warm her mouth instantly, causing it to tingle as though she’d just kissed a light socket. “You’ve been busy, I see.”
Sam smiled weakly. “Piper wanted to cook something for you. She says you’re always so busy cooking for everyone else that you deserve to be cooked for too.” He gave a meek shrug of his shoulders. “Unfortunately, I’m not culinary professor, just a regular old history teacher.”
“Are you sure?” Patty giggled. “From the looks of things, I would’ve guessed you to be a chemistry teacher.”
Sam stroked her face gently. “Well the girls did a pretty good job following your recipe,” he went on, motioning to the cookbook propped atop the microwave. “Problem is, no matter what I do, I overcook them. Unless I take them out too early and then they look alright on the outside until you bite in and get a mouthful of a raw, glue-like substance.”
The mere description caused her face to crinkle up like aluminum foil. The pale yellow light from the bulb above their heads caught the diamond ring on her finger and sparkled as she patted him gently on the chest. “That explains the charmingly charred aroma in here.” Her nose twitched in much the style of Samantha Stephens, though it was only in reaction to another powerful whiff of the aforementioned cooking catastrophe and not because she was activating a supernatural power. “Dare I ask how the Sloppy Joes fared?”
“Actually,” Sam chuckled, “those turned out just perfect.” He edged around her and pressed his thumb to the button on the microwave, setting the timer for a minute and a half. “Sloppy Joes are about the only thing this Average Joe can do well.”
“That’s not true,” Patty countered, her brown eyes twinkling in the dim kitchen light. She moved her delicate hand to the side of his face and stroked it as if comforting an infant. Pitching forward on her tippy toes, she leaned in for a kiss, only for a shrieking cry to sound from the paper thin walls on the other side of the kitchen. With a sigh, Patty leaned back, planting her aching heels back onto the ground. “So much for a night alone,” she exhaled.
“I’ll get her-”
“No. You’ve been home with them all day-”
“And I’m the one who got it easy.” Sam pressed his finger to a half dollar sized plum stain on her collar. “Let me do it, Miss Jack Horner. You just sit down and relax.” He pressed his lips to her forehead and like a cool breeze in the dead of summer he was gone again, disappearing past her into the miniature corridor that they affectionately called a hallway.
Patty slowly lifted her foot, yanking off one heel and then the other. She wriggled her toes and a fresh layer of goose bumps rose like yeast across her exposed flesh. It had always been like that, ever since she was a child, and her second daughter, Piper, seemed to have the same problem. It had always been peculiar to her how just simply taking off a pair of shoes could make a person so cold.
“Look at who’s here.” The scratch of his slippers against the worn carpet pursued Sam’s voice. He came out with a hefty bundle positioned on his hip.
“There’s my baby!”
The bundle in question had a full head of thick, black coffee curls. She was a fairly skinny child, except for her pudgy cheeks which were unnaturally rosy in comparison with her skin, which was the color of fresh fallen Solstice snow. Her arms waved aimlessly, though it seemed to Patty that they were really reaching out for her.
“Missy Paige,” Patty spoke in singsong. As she collected the child from her husband, Paige wrapped her vice grip fingers around Patty’s finger and proceeded to clutch it as if it were a hand she were holding onto for dear life.
“Piper was teaching Phoebe and Paige how to blow kisses today.”
“Oh she was, was she?” Her eyes doe eyes glittered in the kitchen light. “And just how did that go?”
“Paige just blew spit bubbles, but Phoebe…” He narrows his eyes. “You might want to keep an eye on her as she gets older, I have a feeling it won’t be long before she’s trying to give little boys at preschool kisses.”
“I wouldn’t be surprised. She always has had the most in common with my mother.” With a quick motion, she shifted Paige to her opposite arm. “I need to go sit down, I’m beat.”
The kitchen lead right into what they called their living room, which was about the same size as the master bedroom that she and Sam shared with each other. It was simple: an old loveseat from storage – in other words, the attic from Patty’s childhood home – which had once belonged to a relative named Pearl, an overstuffed recliner that didn’t recline, and a small pine tree that was so overly decorated the branches were barely visible.
Presents, however, billowed out from beneath the weighted branches. Most of them were poorly wrapped, with lots of tape and an over abundance of wrapping paper, an experiment in allowing the girls to wrap each other’s gifts that Sam nor Patty were keen on repeating next year or the year after that. Still others were eloquently wrapped – obvious gifts from Patty’s mother to her grandchildren – and then there were also a couple of finely stuffed holiday bags, courtesy of the Trudeau household.
With an exhausted sigh, the mother of four collapsed into the overstuffed recliner with her youngest tucked neatly into her lap. She didn’t even bother to stop Paige when the child began to twirl her hair between her little fingers. Being home after such a long day at Buddy’s was enough for her.
A blinking rainbow reflected off her face as Sam plugged in the Yuletide tree. She leaned her head back into the sagging brown leather of the recliner and watched the tree. Behind it, attached securely to the peeling floral wallpaper with mounds of duct tape so they would not slip, were five unique stockings.
“Mommy?”
When Patty looked for the voice, she found it standing just inside the hallway, belonging to a light haired brunette child with pigtails and a button nose. “Piper,” Patty softly admonished, “shouldn’t you be in bed?” She wagged her finger. “You know Santa won’t come if you don’t go to sleep.”
Piper pointed an accusatory finger at her baby sister. “Paige gets to be up.”
“Paige is a baby,” Patty reasoned. “Babies have a harder time sleeping than big girls do.”
At that, Prue appeared behind Piper, holding onto a toddling Phoebe’s fat fingered hand. “Mommy,” she addressed, “we forgot to leave the cookies for Santa.”
Piper blew a puff of air from between her lips, rustling the bangs hanging just above her doe eyes which mirrored her mother’s. “The cookies burneded.”
“Burned,” Prue corrected. She wrinkled her nose.
“We wanted to make some for you, Mommy.”
“And Santa,” Prue explained softly. “So he wouldn’t forget us.”
“Forget you?” Patty motioned her girls over. “Santa would never forget you just because you don’t have cookies for him. He gets cookies and milk from children all over the world!”
Piper stuck out a fat lip as she approached the recliner and held up her arms to grab the armrest. “How do you know?”
“Experience,” Sam explained. He leaned forward on the loveseat, resting his arms on his legs. “There were times when my brothers and sisters didn’t have cookies to leave Santa when I was a boy, but he never forgot us.”
“I don’t know…” Prue grumbled, ever the skeptic.
“Do we have ingredients left?”
“All the chocolate chips are gone,” Sam answered.
“Phoebe ate all the chocolate we saved.” Prue narrowed her Arctic blue eyes at her the two-year-old.
“Eggs? Milk? Flour?” Patty asked, her eyes dancing in the luminous spectrum of colors.
“Check all three.”
“Sugar?”
“This time of year? Always.”
“Then it’s settled,” a yawn escaped her lips, interrupting the flow of her sentence. “We’ll make sugar cookies.”
“Really?!” Piper jumped up and down.
Seeing her sister so excited, Phoebe threw up her arms. “Yayay!”
“Patty,” Sam frowned. “You need your sleep. So do the girls.”
“I’ve been cooking all day. What’s a little more?” Her eyelids hung tiredly. “They’re my daughters, Sam.”
He rose from the loveseat in defeat, managing a small laugh as he maneuvered his way into the kitchen. “I’ll wash the dishes.”
“I love you,” she squeaked.
The water turned on and the dishes rattled as he replied, “I love you too.”
“Mommy!” Piper screeched, startling Paige into a cry. She was pointing an accusing finger towards her second youngest sister, who was on the floor tugging at a bow on a box under the tree. The name on the tag marked it as a gift for the second oldest. “She’s stealing!”
“Piper!” Patty wagged her finger. “Prue, can you take that away from your sister?”
With a huff, Prue snatched up the gift, causing Phoebe to join Paige’s chorus of cries. A scowl began to carve itself onto Prue’s features, quickly followed by a mischievous expression. “Maybe Phoebe would stop crying if we could open a gift early?” Her thick black eyelashes fluttered like angel wings. “For Christmas Eve?”
“Yeah, early!” Piper yelled, over the sobs of her younger sisters. “Pleeeease, Mommy!” She pressed her hands together in a praying position and puckered her lips as she begged. “Please, please, please!”
Patty snorted as she leaned her head around the recliner and peered towards the kitchen, only able to make out the plaid arm of her husband’s flannel shirt. “Sam?”
Sam peeked around the corner, his hands dripping and coated in a layer of bubbles. “Why not?”
“Yeah, why not?” Prue echoed, her voice edged with a persistence that Patty knew was not going to go away until she got exactly what she wanted.
“Okay!” She pointed to Prue. “But you have to pass out a gift to each of your sisters first.”
“Sure,” Prue obliged, promptly handing the gift she was holding to Piper. Quickly, she scoured the presents for the names of her other sisters before supplying Phoebe with a lumpy red packaged gift dotted with reindeer and then finding an oddly long shaped gift wrapped in purple paper with snowflakes for Paige. After dispersing them, she headed straight for a bag billowing with green tissue paper that had a lovely glitter snowman on the front. “I want to open the one Andy got me!” she announced, loud and proud.
Piper was already busy tearing off the layers of metallic gold wrapping from her gift. When she was near the end, she dropped to the floor and squealed in delight at the picture of a little girl surrounded by child sized silver pots and pans on the cover of the box. “A kitchen set!” she shrieked, simultaneously attempting to tear open the box to get to the gifts inside.
Meanwhile, Phoebe was tugging at her own gift, slowly ripping strip after strip off, as if she were preparing to make paper mache. Her sausage-like fingers were electrified with delight as the holes in the wrapping paper soon revealed frilly blue fabric. Fervently, she latched onto the fabric and yanked, furthering to rip the paper as she pulled out a Cinderella dress up costume, complete with a pair of sparkly plastic heels to match. “Cinderelly! Cinderelly!” Immediately, she went to work shaking the dress up and down, while trying to yank it over her head.
“Look!” Prue cried, holding up a plastic tripod. “Andy got me just what I wanted!” She was up and running around the room in circles, shoving her beloved new tripod into each of her sisters’ faces, then her mother’s, and finally her step-father’s. “I’m gonna go get my camera!” she squealed as she disappeared into the hallway, headed for the bedroom she shared with Phoebe and Piper.
Patty slid Paige off her lap and placed her onto the floor next to her two-year-old big sister. “Piper,” she motioned, “can you please hand me that pillow from the loveseat?”
“’Kay,” Piper mumbled, without looking up from her new toy. With one hand behind her back and the other on the box, she scrounged around for the edge of the pillow and yanked it off the loveseat.
“Thank you.” The mother of four slipped to her knees and propped her four-month-old up against the cushion. Tenderly, she began to help Paige tear the wrapping from her gift, moving the baby’s hands to replicate the act of unwrapping the present. As the paper was plucked away from the gift, like Thanksgiving turkey meat from the bone, a toy microphone began to emerge. “Look, Paige! Look what your big sisters got you!” She held up the microphone and flipped on the On-Off switch with her thumb. The toy began to light up and a cheerful tune began to play as an electronic voice sung the ABC’s.
“It fits!” Prue’s stocking feet echoed throughout the tiny apartment as she bolted into the room, holding her camera fixed onto the top of her tripod high above her head. “I wanna take a picture! Can I take a picture? I think we should take a picture!”
Patty rose from her seat on the floor and moved across the room to Prue, where she kissed her ecstatic daughter on the forehead. “We’ll take a picture, Prue. Just give me one minute, okay?”
“A huh,” Her blue eyes dazzled as she extended the legs of her tripod and began to focus the camera onto her sisters, with the blinking tree as her backdrop.
Patty, on the other hand, slipped as quietly as falling snow down the hallway to the master bedroom and closed the door as gently as possible. She could still here the sounds of her laughing, cheering children, and the image of their smiling faces in her recent memory brought a smile to her own. Carefully, she tiptoed to the dresser she shared with Sam and opened her drawer. Pushing aside her socks, scarves, and gloves she revealed a small diary with a gold lock.
Moving to her jewelry box, she lifted the ring holder to expose a hidden compartment, where a small piece of cloth was folded. Once unfolded, the cloth yielded a miniature gold key, which Patty inserted into the lock on her diary, unsealing her innermost thoughts. She began to flip through the pages, starting from the beginning. As she went, the dates became later and later in time until she finally came to a date marked May 6, 1975.
A small piece of paper was folded and set into the crease of the diary. She pulled it out and began to unfold the paper. It was soft to her touch and the edges of paper had begun to fray from years of active use: folding and unfolding. On the paper black ink simply read: Mom, Be careful on February 28, 1978, or a warlock will drown you.
It was ironic, really, finding the note hidden away in the Book of Shadows, on the page of the Truth Spell. She knew it had to have been from one of her three daughters, the ones who had come from the future to stop her blessing Nicholas’s ring. The note had never been signed though, but she always had a sneaking suspicion that it might have been Phoebe, if only because according to the date, Phoebe would be the one she would have known least of all.
That May day, her life had changed completely. She found herself at a crossroads, almost three years in the making. She could choose to ignore the note or she could choose to save herself, as one of her girls had so desperately hoped she would. As much as she knew fighting destiny was wrong, the more she agonized, the more she realized, she could never abandon her girls, and November 2, 1975, she knew what she had to do.
Interestingly enough, just before the Winter Solstice of 1976, her life had taken another drastic turn. A second missed period confirmed what the daily nausea already had her suspecting: she was pregnant. But not with her husband’s child. No, she was pregnant with the child of her whitelighter, the true love of her life, a man she was forbidden to ever be with. If that wasn’t problem enough, she also had never seen a fourth child – nor had one ever been mentioned – when her girls had visited from the future. That worried her: she wondered if she’d miscarried, of it the child had been killed in some type of demonic assault, or if The Elders had found her and Sam out and taken the child as malicious payment for disobeying rules they had already been warned of breaking again.
Then there was her mother. Penny had insisted time and again that the only way to handle the pregnancy was to magically conceal it and upon the child’s birth, bind her powers and give her away. It would protect all of the children, all four.
At four months pregnant on February 28, 1977, with her divorce from Victor officially finalized and exactly a year from the day she knew she was supposed to die, she had been nearly ready to accept her mother’s better judgment. The words and fears had invaded her mind like cigarette smoke. As cruel as the idea seemed to her and Sam, they only wanted what was best for their daughter, and if she didn’t exist in the future – not to the knowledge of her other girls anyway – then perhaps this was what they were meant to do.
And that was when she remembered the note once more; it had been tucked in her diary ever since Phoebe’s birth. The note inspired an epiphany: if she was determined to change the future anyway – keep herself from dying and abandoning her girls – then why not just go all the way? Why not chance it this time? Keep the child growing inside her and see where fate would lead. If that meant going head-to-head with The Elders, then so be it. If that meant stripping her powers or those of her girls, then she was fine with that. She would rather have four daughters, than three witches.
“I’ll clip my wings,” Sam had whispered into her ear that day. “We’ll be a family.”
“You can’t. Sam, your charges depend on you.”
“And so do you. And so does our child. I’m doing this for her. I have to be in her life. Just think of it as my way of moving heaven and earth to keep her safe.”
“Her?”
“Your family has a pretty good track record for girls…besides, I wouldn’t want anything else. I want her to be just like you.”
Sam had his whitelighter retirement official that evening, proposed with a diamond ring that had once belonged to his great grandmother, and as soon as the courthouse had opened the next morning, she and Sam had obtained a legal document from the justice of the peace, proclaiming them husband and wife in the eyes of San Francisco. It was only after harsh insistence from Patty that Penny had finally agreed to perform a handfasting for them that same day.
The wedding had been small and it had taken place right in her childhood home: she wore a strapless white gown and silver shall and carried a bouquet of multi-colored wildflowers, her three daughters had acted as her flower girls dressed in their matching Imbolc dresses, and the Trudeaus had graciously allowed Prue’s best friend, Andy, to attend as the ring bearer. It had been more perfect than anything Patty could’ve imagine. Her first wedding had been too big for her taste, and in a church no less, which had caused religious issues to arise between her mother and Victor’s mother. But her wedding to Sam, it had been the wedding she’d dreamed of ever since she’d been a child.
By the time the powers of her unborn daughter had begun to manifest, a telekinetic ability transformed by orbs that Sam had coined telekinetic orbing, it was too late for The Elders. She and Sam were bound to each other, body and soul, and according to a being known as the Angel of Destiny, she had a very special destiny that prevented The Elders from doling out punishment unto the child for their actions.
Patty folded the note along its worn creases again and returned it to its special place within her diary. Her life wasn’t perfect: certainly the money earned by a waitress and a high school teacher – Sam’s job after clipping his wings – was not good, but it was enough to pay the rent once a month and purchase groceries once a week. They both knew that eventually, as Paige and her sisters grew, they would need a three bedroom apartment. But at present, they were getting by as a complete family unit, and for the first time in her life, Patty was truly happy.
As she padded back into the living room, she saw Sam on his hands and knees with Phoebe, helping her arms into the sleeves of her Cinderella dress. She saw Piper pretending to stir something in one of her metal pots, she saw Paige gumming her toy microphone as the song looped back to begin the ABC’s again, and she saw Prue snapping photographs of her sisters and step-father in front of the tree. As she looked down at the watch Sam had given her as a Yuletide present three days earlier, she watched the minute hand mark midnight.
“Paige’s first Christmas,” she breathed. Her eyes shimmered, reflecting the blinking lights of the tree. “Our first Christmas…as a real family.”
“Mommy!” Prue announced, suddenly beside her mother, tugging on her hand. “My camera’s set, it’s time for a picture!” Her black hair bobbed around her shoulder as she pulled her mother to towards the tree, where Sam and her sisters were already positioning themselves. “Hurry, hurry! You stand here, Mommy, next to Sam and Paigey. And Piper, you stand here with Phoebe.” She danced off towards her camera like a Prima Ballerina.
“Hurry up, Prue!” Piper begged. “I wanna play with my cooking set!”
Patty tugged playfully at her daughter’s pigtails. “Be patient, Piper.” She leaned into the crook of her husband’s arm and smiled as Prue anxiously waved her arm.
“Say ‘Merry Christmas!’” She held up her fingers and dashed over to her sisters, positioning herself in front Sam so that she could take Phoebe’s free hand, for the toddler was already holding onto Piper’s hand, who was stationed in front of their mother.
Sam grasped Patty’s hand in his as Prue counted down the flash on her camera. Tucked into his arm, held above Prue’s head, he held the only other thing he loved as much as Patty: their daughter.
“Merry Christmas!” shrieked the three children and Sam in unison.
“Merry First Christmas,” Patty whispered as the flash from Prue’s camera filled the room, capturing the first family photograph that would be cherished for generations to come.
