Precious Illusions
part 6
"Your palms aren't sweaty, are they?"
Cole Turner raised an eyebrow, abruptly halting step upon the stairwell, slowly and deliberately turning around to face his sister-in-law with amusement shrouded in his blues. "Unlike certain people who will remain nameless, I didn't run through the manor completely naked when an earthquake was about to hit. So trust me, I'll be fine."
"For your information, that was Phoebe, and she was wearing slippers. Prue told me all about it."
"Really?" His face lit up, a small smile faintly crossing his gorgeous profile rather teasingly. "In that case, maybe I should remind her about that someday. Could actually prove to be mildly entertaining."
"Oh, yuck. Okay, I did not want to know that."
"I was only joking," he objected innocently, the grin still touching his lips.
"No, see, that's how Cole Junior...Junior will come into the picture. And far be it for me to say this place gets smaller and smaller every time you guys have another kid. I mean, I always thought it was going to be Piper who'd be popping them all out."
"So is it the name Cole that bothers you, or the fact that we might just have enough kids to finally kick you out?"
"Probably a little bit of both," she acknowledged. "But hey, who am I to complain?" She then thought better of it, fumbling her way through the words. "Re...really though. It's...it’s not like you'd actually do that anymore, right? I mean, c'mon. I've been here for quite awhile now. I've pulled my weight, and you can't deny that."
"Oh, I think you'd be surprised."
"But I'm a great babysitter," she protested.
"I hate to be the one to tell you this, but I don't think making out with Merrick in front of my daughter on the couch really counts. In fact, it could have scarred her for life. You know, come to think of it, it could have probably just plain scared her, too."
"Yeah, and Nick said he was sorry about that."
"Nick's sorry about a lot of things," he commented, shrugging. "Either way, it's of no consequence to me. The guy lives to cause trouble."
"You know that's not true."
"Paige, just do me a favor and shut up."
"I-"
"Don't come near me," a shaky voice cut in, as the frail figure seated in the armchair suddenly threw her arms protectively around her body, shrinking deeper into as much comfort as the piece of furniture would allow her, quickly pulling up her feet. Her long blonde hair shielded most of her face, her green eyes peeking out from beneath it, clothed in both fear and apprehension.
He carefully put out a hand, as if to indicate he meant to exhibit no possible trace of malice, gently urging her to stay where she was. "Hey, look, I'm not the bad guy here, okay? I'm just here to try and have a reasonably civilized cha-"
"You're a murderer," she whispered, reiterating her previous claim, holding tightly to the accusation, as her fingernails dug into the skin on her back, her legs gliding up to fully meet her chest.
"I'm a lot of things," he told her, his tone becoming somewhat hoarse, "but I'm not a murderer. I haven't been one for some time."
"Don't take another step," she warned.
"See? What'd I tell you? Unresponsive and unforgiving," Paige drawled, immediately shaking her head. "Maybe she actually wants us to hurt her."
"You're harboring a killer," Laurel snapped, roughly glancing up at Paige, "and that makes you just as much of a monster as he is."
"Am I a monster too?" Alexandra Turner quickly spoke up, entering the living room, quietly clutching a glass of juice in one tiny hand.
"You want to leave?" Cole offered, calmly shrugging his shoulders. "You want to get up and get out of here? Go. See if I care...see if I give a damn about it. With all due respect, Miss Egan, no one's holding you against your will now. In fact, they've pretty much given up on you altogether, because you still refuse to say much of anything that might actually be of some help to us. But while you stay there and remain completely indifferent to your fate, you’re also still a liability."
"And why the hell would I want to help you?" she snapped back.
"See, this is a good start. We're getting somewhere, aren't we?"
"You're not the slightest bit curious as to how you ended up in the twenty-first century? Not even a little bit?" Paige questioned, delicately raising a brow.
"Like it or not, I'm the only chance you've got," Cole continued, ignoring Paige completely, as he proceeded to study his former acquaintance with interest. "And despite what you've already come to witness, good sometimes wins over evil. It's rare, but not entirely impossible."
"The only chance I have?" she repeated. "You're clearly out of your mind. Then again, you always were, weren't you? You didn't even have to try."
"I'm serious."
"You took my life, you son of a bitch, and now you're suddenly demanding repentance for your crimes?"
"It's not like that. I don't just demand it...it finds me and demands itself."
"Oh really? Is that how it works?"
"Laurel."
"Don't say my name," she hissed. Her eyes struggled to maintain the danger clouding them, even as her expression grew softer, very nearly on the verge of faltering. "After what you did to me, you don't deserve the luxury."
"Look, I'm not ou-"
"You've brainwashed them. Done something so they can't see through to what you are. Each and every one of them. You're hurting them like you hurt me."
"The man you knew no longer exists. He doesn't hurt people anymore, and he's already suffered plenty for what he did in his past."
"You're lying."
"Okay," he uttered, letting out a deep breath, fighting to keep himself calm and below the radar, reaching as far as he could before he felt ready to snap. "Now that you're finally coherent, maybe it's time I show you something then. Maybe it's time you understand what you've gotten yourself into by finding me again." He sighed, almost admitting defeat. "I can't give you whatever it is you're looking for, because I don't have it in me. I don't have a bone in my body that says I want to subject you to any harm. None whatsoever. I can't do anything to you, because I don't want to. You're just a memory. A memory I didn't want to- one I tried so hard to repress, because of what was involved."
"I didn't come back for you!" she roughly accused, her tone cutting through his gentleness like ice.
"Then why did you? If it wasn't to cause me heartache and grief, and have me rethink the way my entire life's gone up until this point, then what for?"
"I don't know," she said quietly, her demeanor a bit more refined, as she finally relaxed her grip, her body coming forth as she positioned her feet upon the floor, allowing her back to lean forward in his direction. She nervously grasped a strand of blonde hair, carefully winding it around her index finger. "I don't know."
"They buried you," he told her, "I saw it with my own eyes. They took your broken body, and they put it in a fresh grave, and I watched them cover it with shovels and dirt. I watched them, Laurel, and not once did you even try to move." His eyes grazed hers, as he pleaded with them. "Because I knew what I did, and I already knew you wouldn't."
"And yet here she is, in all her cranky, pissed off glory."
"Paige."
"What?" The Charmed One objected. "She's been nothing but psycho since she got here. I get that she's got issues, but don't you think this is pushing it a little?"
"She's upset."
"Clearly," she added, rolling her eyes.
"Yes, and when someone is upset, they act out on those feelings, pretty much the way she's doing right now."
"Hey, fine, whatever, Dr. Cole. Either way, I've just about had enough of this. I'll see you bright and early in the morning," she added, as she began to climb the stairwell once again, tossing out a random wave in his direction. "That is, if she doesn't grab a sharp, pointy object and run around the house, trying to kill us all."
"Your sarcasm is a blessing in disguise."
She only scoffed at the thought, as she continued on up, her slippers slowly sinking deep into the carpeting.
"So you enjoyed the sight of my dead body," Laurel carefully considered, nodding to herself, very nearly smiling. "I mean, I guess it doesn't surprise me...knowing you'd actually take pleasure in the fact that you saw them put me in the ground."
"It's not-"
"You had every right to rejoice," she confirmed, shrugging, entirely apathetic. "And they probably took me out of my misery, only to have it happen to me all over again, because once just wasn't enough, and I wasn't experiencing nearly enough of that torment in the hell I’d begun living." She met his blue eyes dead on, corning them roughly with her green ones. "It just wasn't, was it?"
"I don't understand," he admitted.
"And yet I still don't see how you can still be alive, how you can still be here, just- just waiting to do your worst all over again. You're the one man I wish I'd never met."
"No, I think that title belongs to your father."
"My father?"
"I know what it's like to lose family."
"You've mastered this," she said softly, laughing. "All these years, and you're a real pro. Congratulations, well done. Remind me to get down on my hands and knees and thank you."
"For what?"
"You really know how to show a girl a good time- even if your idea of a good time doesn't necessarily fit the standard definition of it. You're still right there, just waiting to rip some poor girl's heart out, letting her bleed to death, in the most literal sense of the word."
"You think this isn't hard for me?"
"You think you're a better man than my father?" she challenged. "You're obviously out of your league."
"Your father wasn't who you thought he was."
"Well, he sure as hell wasn't a demon like you, was he? That much I know."
"Oh, you'd like to believe that," he told her, his voice dangerously low, "but the truth is, you don't have to be a demon in the flesh to be considered one. An ordinary man who deals with darkness behind his daughter's back, is just as much to blame for her hardships as someone whose face isn't his own. Evil doesn't seek you out unless you let it."
"And you let it."
"So did he, and I'm sure he's being judged for that."
"You didn't know a damn thing about him or me," she roughly accused. "You're only pretending you did, just like y-"
"That's where you're sadly mistaken, I'm afraid. Your father was into things you couldn't even begin to comprehend. Things that weren't exactly fit for his daughter to lay eyes on." He tossed her a painful smile. "You might still think I'm a monster for the half breed I was, the things I did to you...but he was entirely human."
"You still are."
He shook his head. "Belthazor was vanquished a long time ago. I'm just Cole now. I have a wife, I have three children- and before he was gone completely, I'd already learned to repress that side of me for the woman I loved- the woman I still love...very much."
"It still doesn't make it okay."
"Laurel."
"It doesn't," she repeated more sternly. "How she can touch you, and...and care for you in return? It doesn't make sense. It's wrong. It's- it shouldn't have been your fate. You don't deserve it."
"I realize it doesn't condone years and years of torment, but the fact of the matter is-"
"There are no facts, there's only death."
"Would you jus-"
"And so help me, if I ever find out you were behind bringing me back here, I won't sit and wait around for your charms to find me this time. I'll just kill you, you son of a bitch, and I'll be done with it. If it's anything you owe me, maybe it's your life."
"Is that really what you want?"
"More than anything," she said softly, as she slowly picked herself up, carefully rising from the chair, her bare feet taking a few trembling steps toward him, her hands clenched wildly at her sides.
"Then I'm not going to stop you."
"Daddy?" Alex's worried voice drifted through the silence, cutting into it like a block of ice, as the little girl's empty glass shifted in her grip and shattered to the floor. "Daddy, what's going on?"
But he didn't seem to register the gesture, instead keeping his concentration trained on Laurel, who began to plant herself directly in front of his line of vision, her expression unreadable. "But you should kno-"
"It wouldn't bring me back though," she told him, shrugging. "It wouldn't make me whole again- a whole person. None of it. As much as I want you to take responsibility for what you did, this isn't the way to go about it."
"No," he whispered.
"But if all else fails, then what choice do I have? I can't go back, I can't go forward...I don't have the answers, Belthazor. So maybe there's only death. Maybe it's the only thing I can take comfort in now."
"Cole. It's just Cole."
"I guess I don't have the answers for that, either."
"We can reform ourselves," he initiated, his tone becoming slightly remorseful, as his blue eyes slowly winced. "But it doesn't happen overnight or when we want it to, and it certainly doesn't happen when we still want...desire horrible things, and wish them on someone else. The truth of it is there's still so much more we have to learn." He calmly nodded, more to himself than to her. "You have to know that I was given an order to execute, and it was at your father's expense. I didn't- I would never have had contact with you if the Source hadn't come to me. I would have never tried to get your attention so desperately if he hadn't- your father was under obligation to sacrifice you if was unable to comply with the terms of his debt."
"One lie after another."
"No. I'll swear by everything I have, that it was the abso-"
"You could have betrayed your cause, made a change for the better...gone on the run. People did it all the time."
He shook his head. "They were all I had, they made me who I was. And because of it, I was forced to play by their rules- even if those rules meant taking an innocent and destroying them until there wasn't anything left to destroy. I wasn't as smart back then- I never could've dodged the bounty hunters. They would have taken my life for my treason."
"You didn't want to tr-"
"I thought about it once or twice," he confessed, throwing her a single glance, his unshaven visage watching her intently. "Unfortunately, the odds were never in my favor."
"But killing me was much more appealing. Your freedom for what they asked of you."
"Give me your hand."
"Why?"
"Give me your hand," he repeated, as he casually held out one of his own, quietly beckoning to her, his expression failing to reveal much of anything, as he lightly cleared his throat. "Sweetie, go on up to bed."
"Daddy?"
"I promise I'll be by to tuck you in."
"Where are you going?"
"There's something she still needs to see," he informed his daughter, professing a single nod her way. "It won't take long."
"But it's dark there now," the little girl whispered.
"It may be dark, but it's still going to be deserted."
"Because they sleep all the time," she murmured.
"That's right."
"Do you think it might save her?"
"Not so much saving...as knowing," he assured her, winking.
"It wasn't a person though, was it? It was your conscience."
"Ally..."
"And sometimes your conscience is what can save people. Because you really do want to take back what happened. Maybe your magic is what she needs."
"I don't think so."
"Where are you taking me?" Laurel spoke up, turning to glance at both of them, her slender frame growing slightly tense, her fingers absentmindedly weaving their way through her clothing, a few strands of blonde hair falling in front of her face.
"From what I'm starting to gather," he continued, "the place where it ended, and probably the place it all began."
"You're going to put me in the ground again?" her voice nearly broke, its tone so meek that he nearly felt on the verge of crumbling himself. "Put me down there again, and just keep hoping that I suddenly go away?"
"You want answers, don't you? You were obviously disoriented when you got here, and-"
"And I sure as hell don't need to be buried alive," she viciously snapped at him.
"It's not exactly on my list of things to do, but if you're that keen on trying it, maybe we could arrange something."
"Then what are you goi-"
"Actually, though, you still might want to grab a shovel...just in case."
She still looked rather askance. "What for?"
"Because we're going graverobbing."