diversified | a guide to courting your whitelighter (in eight easy steps) [ psl ]

WHO Cole Turner and Chris Halliwell
WHAT The sisters and Leo disappear under new identities at the end of season and stay gone, leaving Wyatt and Chris (and eventually their baby sister Melinda) to be raised by their grandfather Victor and their powers bound. Cole is pulled from the void with his powers intact and charged to watch over the kids as some sort of ghostlighter. Fast forward to the kids being in their late teens/early twenties, where they learn that they're the new Charmed Ones, Wyatt and Chris are whitelighters, and that they're stuck under Cole's now visible watchful eye.
WHEN uh, the future?
WHERE around
WHY because Leo has topped himself by being an even worse parent.

This was a mess. Cole knew the kids hated him after he had been trying to push them into training harder than he really should have been and alienated all three of them from him. Chris was the one he pushed farthest away just by him being so much like his incredibly stubborn mother. Things had gotten somewhat better after Cole's ingenious plan to summon Patty from beyond the grave so that she could not only teach her youngest grandson to channel his active power properly, but also teach all three of her grandchildren about being witches and what that meant. It didn't make Cole get back into everyone's good graces, but it settled things enough that everything went back to some level of normalcy around the house.

Wyatt and Melinda had some level of acceptance of magic forcing its way into their lives, but Chris still fought it and every time Chris left, Cole followed at a distance, letting him try to have some sort of life while keeping him safe from the magical forces that wanted him dead just for being one of the Charmed Ones. Eventually though, Cole had enough of this sulking around and trying to stupidly prove that he could have a normal life, so he dusted in where he sensed Chris to be and looked around. Oh good, he wasn't in public and was alone. That was always good.

"Alright, I think the two of us need to talk about some things and set down some ground rules from here on out," Cole started and immediately held up a hand. "Don't even think about orbing off because I can and will follow you through every realm and plane your orbs can reach, so let's just skip the part where you run off like a kid at least half your age, okay?"

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"There are no ground rules to set," Chris said almost as soon as Cole had stopped talking. Practically before he'd finished, really, which said a lot to how much Chris actually cared what Cole had to say right now. Much as he did appreciate being introduced to their grandmother, it wasn't anywhere near good enough to make up for the magical drill sergeant routine to go with being drafted into the lives of the Charmed Ones.

Much as Chris intended to follow along and do things for the good of the people, his life had been going in other directions and like hell he was going to let something like this stop it. He was better than that, his siblings were better than that, and Cole Turner had no idea what he was up against if he thought pushing the Halliwell siblings to drop everything for his vision of the Charmed Ones' destiny was going to work. Magic was still shiny and new, something they were figuring out, but it was apparently in their blood all the way back to the colonization and certainly they'd be able to figure it out on their own? Guardians were fine. Life coaches were not.

Raising his hand in return to Cole's, he kept himself from forming the almost-habitual motion to freeze him instead. If only that actually worked on this guy for any length of time. "Demeaning me isn't going to make your rules sound any better, either, so just cut to the chase. What leash do you want to put us on now?"

"No leash this time," Cole said with a roll of his eyes. He really did think that Victor had done a better job in raising him, but it seemed that some things couldn't be trained out of a Halliwell. Oh well, he could handle it like everything else he was forced to deal with. "First of all, I'm no longer going to be training you or your siblings. Instead, you'll be trained by your grandmother and enrolled in Magic School for weekly lessons until you've reached the same strength as your mother and aunts."

He didn't even give Chris time to respond before he moved on to the next point. "This part, I'm sure you'll like. The three of you will also be on light duty when it comes to dealing with demons and whatever evil is out there wanting you dead," he said easily. "I'll be dealing with the minor threats while you get to have your normal life, but anything involving all three of you is the first priority above everything else. Do you think that'll work for you?"

"That's nice," Chris said, very blatantly unimpressed by the offer being given. Chris wanted to have his own space and time more dearly than anything; however, he was not a total jerk enough to say anyone that needed saving from the Charmed Ones could sit back and wait for him to get his Starbucks first. There was a balance going on that he needed to achieve and meddling guardians were not anywhere on the list toward that goal. "Not what we were asking for. Did you ever stop and ask what it was we wanted, or just noticed we were complaining at you and couldn't figure out why?"

It was at least somewhat unfair of Chris, he knew that. It was nothing in comparison to everything else Cole had gotten up to in the meanwhile ever since their powers had come in. He wasn't going to speak on total behalf of his brother and sister, but there was a certain unanimity to their opinion of Cole going about things the completely wrong way when it came to his magically-budding charges. "First of all, we're not our mother nor our aunts. 'Until we're as strong as they were'? Give me a break. They had their magic for years with all these threats around every corner. Second," he continued, not close to done by far, "if there was such a thing as 'light duty,' you wouldn't need us facing them in the first place. So you've either been wasting our time or you'll be biting off more than you can chew. Which one is it?"

"No, the three of you are not your mother and aunts. You're better than them, you have a support system where all they had was a book, a cat, and a whitelighter posing as a handyman," he pointed out in a tone usually kept for lecturing the kids when they had made a mistake. "They also had to deal with an Underworld united under the Source while you and your siblings are only dealing with a handful of evil beings that caught wind that you're the new Charmed Ones."

He sighed and dropped the lecture tone, looking straight as Chris as he changed gears. "If there's a good time for you three to take some time off to be normal, now's the time while everything's so disorganized in the Underworld. Right now, the three of you have a chance to do something that your family hasn't been able to do and I'm giving you the opportunity. I can handle anything that's thrown at me and if I can't, then I'll call on you three, but you three deserve this after everything I've forced you to do."

Those were some things Chris hadn't heard before. Bits and pieces of the Charmed Ones' legacy was all they'd had so far, in lieu of focused training and practical lessons. Where they came from was important but the smaller details apparently slipped through the cracks all too often. Stories about their parents and aunts had come from Victor, naturally, and were later revealed to have been heavily edited for magical content. What else was there in their heritage that was just assumed-to-be-useless knowledge for a trio of powerful witches apparently awakening evil in the Underworld?

"You're still missing the point. Nice try, but—" Chris shook his head, moving to sit back down where he had jumped to his feet at Cole's appearance. He still had reports to write, being in his last year of college and all. This was not the best time to be having an argument about destinies and duties, but neither of them really had that whole timing thing down, anyway. "We're not looking for a vacation. Being super-powerful witches isn't a career and I'm sure there's even better people out there to lecture us on how to do it than you. Like Patty," he added, something of an acknowledging tone to the fact that Cole had already taken steps in that direction.

It still wasn't enough, not yet. This was not a balance so much as a hostile takeover of their mortal lives. The three siblings had been talking it over in private and there were a lot of different directions they could go, but they did all agree on one thing: they wanted to decide it themselves. Being guided was fine, being herded wasn't. That was how Halliwells rolled.

"Actually, you're missing the whole point, but it doesn't really matter now," Cole said shortly, done with dealing with Chris acting like such a child about this whole situation. He was suddenly realizing just why exactly he'd been pulled from his exile in the void and all previous thoughts of him getting a break were gone, knowing now that being the guardian of the new Charmed Ones was the Elders's idea of an even better punishment for him.

He was starting to miss the cosmic void.

"Everything's been taken care of already, so now you're Magic School and your grandmother's problem for the near future. Go worry about school instead of of your destiny for a while." He barely gave Chris a moment to respond and with a long sigh, Cole disappeared into dust, not caring about how upset the three of them will be at him after this. If they didn't get their acts together, they were going to get themselves killed.

a guide to courting your whitelighter (in eight easy steps) [ psl ]

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