Sitting in the corner, choking with Deena over the soccer riot....

Thanks...I'd feel bad if you choked, though.

Opening, unbeta'd chunk of my Charmed/Angel crossover. The fic pretty much explains what you need to know about Chris, though this may help explain why I felt the need to write about him.

Title: A Little Warmth
Author: Elisabeth
Fandom: Angel/Charmed
Rating: A soft R for swearing and implied slashiness.
Summary: Chris and Connor needed to talk. (As one Anya Jenkins once put it, "*cough* Daddy Issues.") So I let them. I'd say this is mid-S4 for Angel, early S6 for Charmed, but the continuity is of limited importance.

"Fuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuck…." Chris Perry muttered. One second, he had been working with his aunts to vanquish a Skeltar demon; the next, there had been a whoosh and he ended up in this … place. A tiny cabin with a pile of furs on the floor and a blizzard whirling outside the smudged window. It was, quite possibly, the least promising situation he had ever seen.

He tried to orb out. Nothing. Tried again; even more nothing.

It was then that he noticed he was not alone. A young man watched him, another pretty boy with shaggy brown hair and blue eyes.

"Why are you squinting like that?" he asked, mildly.

Chris straightened himself. Be cool, he thought. "I was just trying to find a way out."

The boy gestured. "Door's there."

"Yeah, and so is six feet of snow. No way am I going out in that until I have to."

"So how were you going to get out?"

"I was going to … never mind. What are you doing here?"

"I was chasing a demon, and it jumped through a portal, and I ran after it – but all that's here is you." He looked puzzled. "You aren't a demon, but –" he sniffed the air --"You aren't human, are you?"

"Of course I'm human. Do I look like a demon to you?" The other boy kept staring. "Okay, I'm not exactly a normal human. But you couldn't have figured that out if you were human yourself."

He shrugged. "I'm not a demon, either. My name is Connor."

"Chris."

They shook hands, tentatively; Connor moved as though he was expecting an attack at any second.

He nodded towards the door. "I'm going to go and see if I can find another portal."

"You're crazy. It's awful out there. At least we're-" Chris watched his breath condense in the air "-not actually freezing in here."

"I've seen worse," Connor said. He grabbed a shaggy brown fur off the pile on the ground and was gone, vanishing into the snow before he'd gone six steps.

"Bye," Chris said, wondering what had just happened.

His individual spells had never worked, not the way Wyatt's had, and he had no supplies, but he had to try anyhow. He sat cross-legged on the furs, summoned the powers of the Halliwell family.

"Bound by snow, far from home, take me back, no more to roam."

He might as well have recited a nursery rhyme.

He tried again: "This cabin does not my mission hold, give me my family, more precious than gold." If crickets could live in snowstorms, they would have chirped.

He shrugged and began an inch-by-inch exploration of the cabin.

Forty-five minutes later, he was done, having found even less than he had expected. A bag of ancient jerky above a rafter, a sticky half-bottle of whiskey underneath the bottommost fur. No source of light at all, no heat beyond that radiating from the ancient gas stove in one corner. No clue as to who had built this, or why, or who had left the food.

*** The snow was blinding, and shifted so much that he fell down four times before he figured out how to keep his balance.

It didn't matter. Cold was better than heat, anyhow. Connor pulled the fur closer around him and walked more quickly, scanning the canvas of the snow for any sign of – of anything.

There was nothing.

As his energy flagged, he turned around.

Chunk the second:

And then Connor was back, as covered in snow as he was in fur. He hopped around a while, trying to get warmer. "I went as far as I could," he gasped. "At least fifteen miles. But there's nothing out there except the snow, not animals or other people or buildings." He spread his hands in front of the tiny flame. "I'll go back out tomorrow morning."

Chris nodded. "Should I go and see if I can find anything?"

"Nah. It's getting dark already anyhow." He paused to wring melted snow out of his hair. " Is there anything in the cabin to eat?"

"Jerky. Smells okay, but it's probably a million years old. Oh, and some Jack Daniels."

Connor accepted the bag of jerky, sniffed at it cautiously. "I think it's elk." He grabbed a piece of it, began gnawing.

"Did you find any sign of where we are?" Chris asked, as he took his own piece of jerky and settled beside Connor on the furs.

Connor shook his head. "Just a lot of snow. We could be in Antarctica or something, or it could be another dimension."

"That would explain why my powers don't work," Chris muttered, unthinking.

"What powers do you have?" Connor asked.

Shit. "How about I tell you what I am, and you tell me what you are, and we promise to believe each other."

Connor answered with his mouth full. "If that's important to you."

"Okay. I'm a whitelighter. Well, half-whitelighter, half-witch."

"What's a whitelighter?," Connor asked, curious.

"It's a guide for witches."

"Huh. I thought witches just figured it out on their own."

"Sometimes, but not usually," Chris said. "Your turn."

But Connor wasn’t done. "You aren’t going to use magic on me, are you?," he asked, suspicious.

"I wouldn't do that unless I had to," Chris said, and noticed Connor reaching for a knife in his belt.

"You better not have to," he growled.

"I won't. Really. I don't think I can do anything in this place even if I did have to. No powers," Chris said, trying to talk Connor down. "You didn't tell me what your deal is, anyhow."

Connor sheathed the knife, but continued to look suspicious. "I'm normal. I mean, enough. My parents were the freaks. Vampires," he said, spitting the last word.

"I thought vampires couldn't have kids. And aren't they extinct anyhow?"

Connor shrugged. "They aren't supposed to have kids. But as for extinct, the ones in L.A. don't seem to have heard that."

"No, because-" Chris was dizzy. "I know for a fact there are no vampires. The witches I help saw the last of them die years ago."

"And I know for a fact that I staked three of them and saw four others earlier tonight." Connor finished his jerky, licked his fingers clean. "Where are you from, anyhow?"

"San Francisco."

Connor shook his head. "Maybe there's a really amazing Slayer up there or something. Or it could be something with the portal."

"Oh yeah. This isn't my world, and it isn't your world, but that doesn't mean we're from the same place." Chris paused. "Freaky."

Connor nodded. "Yeah."

"Hope we can both get back."

"Yeah. I'm sure Fred and Wesley are trying."

"Who are Fred and Wesley? They your parents?"

"Nah. They're – friends, kind of. They love the magic. What about you?"

"The witches I help will do a locating spell and bring me back, somehow." He paced the room, ran his fingers over the wall. "It's just the waiting is going to kill me. And then, when I get back, Leo will."

Connor didn't answer.

"I mean it, him and my other bosses, they'll be pissed." Chris started pacing. "I'm stuck in this stupid room when I should be out helping my – helping people. I'm supposed to save the Charmed ones, not the other way around."

Still no answer.

"What about you, is anyone going to get angry at you?"

Connor paused. "I think they'll be happy not to have to worry about me. Anyhow, we probably won't be gone all that long."

"You think they'll get us out in the morning?"

"I think they might have not even noticed we're gone yet." He reached for the bottle of whisky Chris had stored on the edge of the mat of furs. "See, I grew up in a demon dimension. Time moves differently in them."

"So we could be here for five years…"

"And it would be overnight for them." Connor smiled, took a gulp of whisky. "Hope you like jerky."

The other boy shuddered. "Like my timeline isn't already messed up enough."

"Huh?"

"This is going to sound kind of insane, but I'm from the future. I mean, my dimension's future. If I'm in another dimension for a couple years … it will be weird. "

Connor shrugged. "Time was really fast in the dimension I grew up in. I'm either eight months old, or 18 years old."

"I'm 22. Or negative ten months." Chris accepted the bottle Connor offered and raised it in a toast. "To finding someone with as complicated a life as mine."

A small smile played across Connor's lips. "Who else do you find in alternate dimensions?"

The whisky warmed Chris's stomach. "So, what is it like, the vampires for parents thing?," he asked, tracing the sheen of a pelt with a forefinger.

Connor shrugged. "They didn't raise me or anything. When I was a baby, this man -- my father had killed his family -- he took me to another dimension, so he could keep me safe until the time came."

"What time?"

"When I was old enough to kill my father. But then my foster father was killed. And then … I didn't. Dumped him to the bottom of an ocean, but could never actually kill him. He can't be good. He's a monster. But he tries, goes around saving people to make up for all the killing he did. And his friends would kill me if I hurt him."

Chunk the final:

"And your mother?"

"She killed herself when I was born. Couldn't stand having a human child," Connor said, his voice flat. "Really, the only parent I had was my foster father. He taught me to hunt."

Chris whistled, low. "Remind me to remember that next time I complain about my family."

"What are they like?"

"My mom is nice, kind of high-strung. Really distracted by my brother, but okay. And my aunts are great. But my dad. He's been pissed at me ever since –" Chris paused, tried to remember. "Since I was a little kid, I guess, but it's worse now."

"How come?"

"It is such a very long story."

"I'm pretty sure we have the time."

Chris laid back on the furs. The room was spinning. Had it spun in any of the other dimensions he'd spent time in?

"I'm not sure there's even much to tell. He and my mom had this whole doomed forbidden love thing going on, right?"

Connor nodded.

"So they have my brother Wyatt, and everything is perfect. Then I'm born. A couple years later, it turns out Wyatt is evil, getting more evil as he gets older. No one can figure out why. My dad decides it's his fault for breaking the whitelighter rules to marry my mother, my mother decides it's her fault for marrying him, they split up, my dad starts working in Jamaica. Which is, you know, fairly normal, and I have my aunts. But when my dad actually bothered paying attention to me, it always seemed like he thought I shouldn't be there. Like if they'd only had one kid, Wyatt would have been good," Chris said. "But they had two. So it was my fault. And now with the time travel thing, I'm trying to keep Wyatt from turning evil, but of course I can't tell them who I am, so they're always about five minutes from deciding I'm the evil one and vanquishing me or something, and my father is the worst of them because I kind of got him fired. I mean, it's supposed to be temporary, and it's technically a promotion, but …" Chris drummed his fingers on the floor. "It's not like he cares about that."

"I think your old man and my old man should get together and go bowling," Connor said. Seeing Chris' puzzled look, he explained. "Sorry. It's from this movie Cordy made me watch when she was trying to teach me how to be a normal teenager. She wasn't crazy about my Destroyer routine."

"Who's Cordy?"

"A girl," Connor said, his mouth twisting into a scowl. "She works for my father. He has a crush on her even though he's ten times her age. I think she likes me better, though." He propped himself up on an elbow. "What's it like, the future in your world? Is it peaceful there?"

"I wish. It's a big time demonfest. And my brother started trying to destroy the world about ten years back. Hasn't worked yet, but he keeps trying." Chris shrugged. "My father tried that about five years ago. Didn't work for him, either." Connor ran his finger down the edge of his knife. "What else has happened?"

"I can't tell you. Shouldn't even have told you about Wyatt."

"But it might not happen the same way in my world."

"But if we end up both coming back to the same place, I'll get in even more trouble."

"If we both go back to the same place, I hope it's your world, not mine."

"How come?"

"Your family sounds a lot better than my dad."

"Yeah, but did you miss the part where my big brother's going to start trying to kill everyone and everything in a decade or so?"

Connor smiled. "Then I have a decade to get home."

"Dude, you're messed up. I want to come back with you," Chris said, raising himself up. "See, you get to be, like, this tragic hero. Your father is a tragic hero." He flopped back onto the furs. "If I do this job right, no one will even know what I did."

"You'll know."

"And hooray for me," Chris said, his voice muffled by the arm he had flung over his eyes. "I am so … very tired," he yawned. "Think it's safe to sleep here?"

"Don't see an alternative," Connor said, slipping between two furs. He lay down with his head beside Chris's, and found himself thinking what pretty lips the other boy had.

Chris must have had the same thoughts, because he was tracing Connor's chin with an index finger. Delicately, he leaned in and kissed Connor.

This is new, Connor thought, kissing back.

Their bodies frozen, their eyes met. "I'm not gay," Chris said defensively. "I have a fiancée. Bianca. She's-" and then his mouth was silenced with another kiss.

"I know," Connor said, hands roaming down Chris's body. "It's just for a little warmth."

The next morning, they woke up tangled in each other's arms.

Light, Connor thought. I must have forgotten to close my blinds again. And then he opened his eyes more fully and realized he wasn't in the Hyperion, he was in this tiny cabin in this frozen dimension, and he was snuggled up to … someone. Someone who understood him.

Also, there were two sizzling portals, one in the northwest corner of the cabin, one in the southeast. Blue light snapped around them.

"Chris," he said. "Wake up."

"Huh? Portals," he said. "Is this a dream?"

Voices emerged. From the northwest, a man, anxious. "Connor? Son, can you hear me? I don't want to risk this thing closing if I jump through, but I will if you don't answer-"

From the southeast, a woman, annoyed. "Chris, what the hell are you doing? We got the portal re-opened. Get back down here."

"My mother," he said.

"My father," Connor responded. "Want to trade places?"

Chris thought about it for a half-second longer then he would have admitted, then shook his head. "Nah."

They stood up, exchanged a final, bruising kiss, squeezed each other's hands tightly. "Good luck," they said, simultaneously.

And then they jumped back to their real lives

~finis~

Are people not reacting because they don't like *Charmed,* or because my writing sucks? Because if the latter, I would give cookies to anyone who gave me constructive criticism.

(Yes, I am needy. Extremely so. I'm also more proud of this story than of anything else I've written in quite a while, so if it sucks I'd like to know.)

I didn't say anything cause I just read it right now...unfortunately don't know Connor or Charmed well, but it still kept my attention.

erika, you are a doll, especially since my reaction to your entire ouevre has been "This seems really funny and well-written, but I don't know Homicide so I won't comment." Thank you.

Apologies for the insecurity attack.

Sorry, I read and then had to go deal with an Aidan evil.

I liked the story, except for the sex. I don't see slash as quickly as other people, I don't think, and two guys together who don't know one another, that light a connection... I dunno.. doesn't read as real. I'd either want at least one of them to have been shown to be curious about same-sex relationships previously, or turned on by the random weirdness of it, a little bit of a.. not quite abuser, but.. willing to take advantage. Maybe real is a little too much to ask.

The rest, I thought it was great. I liked the dialogue a lot -- really enjoyed Chris blurting out the fiancee. I don't watch Charmed, but I've seen one or two, enough to be able to place Chris, but that comment made him more three-dimensional.

This all may be my "who would want to shag HIM?" connor issues.