the last act.

  Grief comes and goes in waves. It’s not a constant bleed, even though the wound is permanently open. Grief is a lot like the sea. It’s calm and gentle. Sometimes the tide is manageable. It caresses you into a false sense of security, until it mercilessly rips through the walls you’ve been building. The tide, violently carrying you further to sea by the lure of moonlight, but it does not save you. Under the weight of your fears, the inability to inhale, you’re still painfully aware. Painfully alive. You pray for death, but salvation is far from you. It was the sky, spreading over everything. It was the unrelenting ache for reality to be different, and for the impossible wishes to come true.

Today, I was drowning, and God was not listening to me.

“You’re not angry with me,” Phoebe states. While her voice is steady, her heartbeat is not. The same anger manifests through her and bleeds into me. She points a finger behind me, to the wall of names that surround us. But one sticks out and drives the nail into the coffin of my sanity.
  PRUDENCE HALLIWELL.
My whole life, I was someone’s little sister. I was the middle sister. I was backup. I was a shoulder to cry on. I had a shoulder to cry on. I followed in the footsteps of someone I could always look up to. She was there my entire life, to guide and nurture. To teach me right from wrong, to handle the harder parts of life with me. To be the strong one, the best of us. She was the glue that held the Power of Three together. And suddenly… she was gone.

I was a failure. I robbed the life of the woman who was strongest in our family, and couldn’t even afford to bury her properly. Everywhere I turned, magic had conspired against me. It refused to bring my sister back. It refused to erase this pain and guilt. Demons were thrown at us, left and right. And what was worse was the troubling news thrown at us shortly after burying our older sister. The world was spinning, when I desperately begged for it to stop. I couldn’t carry on this way. I didn’t know how.

Prue. She always knew.

I hear a woman scream, distant and bloody. She must be choking on razors. I feel pain, betrayal and rage dig roots in my veins, until it floods my senses. It leaves me with nothing, not even a name to my soul. An empty vessel. A cease fire to the call of my Elders. I hear her, again. The same woman cries out. My fingers curl into dangerous balls, digging nails into the palms of my hand.
  “You left me!” The voice cries out in despair, broken and fragile. “How could you leave me?!” Fragile fists bang against the cold concrete, willing her name to bleed in my frustration. “What am I supposed to do?” Tears stream freely down my cheeks, and I sink to my knees to allow the cold ground to cradle me in a deathly embrace.

Warm arms surround me, calling me home. Safely guided to shore, like a ship lost at sea, warm rays of love soak into my skin and embed my soul with desperate attempts at healing and mending my fractures. “Why did you leave me?” I call out again, but no one responds.

A weight lifts from my shoulders, and I no longer feel the dull ache of the curse that took hold of my emotions. Free to run rampant, they take control of me and spread out as dangerous as the depths of the ocean call. I’m a sobbing mess of despair and heartache. How could she expect me to be the older sister now? How was I to be expected to care for the family, and lead the Power of Three? What even were we now? Who was I now?

Gaze flickers around the mausoleum. I see Phoebe and Cole, standing in the corner. Her eyes are red and puffy. Her cheeks streaked with tears, and her nose was red. Cole is holding her tightly in his arms, pressing her cheek into his chest, stroking her locks of dyed hair with tender fingers. She’s as lost as I am…

Paige is just a few steps away from her, her eyes as sorrow filled as Phoebe’s… our sister. In the wake of Prue’s death, we were littered with more questions than we had answers for, but somehow. Somehow we were blessed with an addition to our family, and a new adhesive to the Power of Three… the Halliwell family.

They say grief is the last act we can offer to those we’ve loved and lost. What I lost—what we lost was more than meets the eye, which was so hard to explain to the living world. We lost hope, an endless sea of dreams. We lost the ability to say her name in normal, every day conversation without feeling the shreds of our heart. We lost what it would be like to know her in the coming years, instead of constantly wondering... We lost our innocence.

“Leo?” I weakly whisper, gaze finding his. “You saved the wrong sister.” I sob. Large hands quickly take mine. I’m surrounded by the familiar warmth, desperately reaching for my heart again. “How could she think that I could live without her?”

Grief comes and goes in waves. I lost my sister, and I couldn’t understand why. I couldn’t wrap my head around why magic couldn’t fix this, and why the Elders abandoned us, or why the Book suddenly lost interest in us. With every spell available in our arsenal, nothing was bringing Prue back, and I couldn’t figure out why The Charmed Ones weren’t as protected as we initially thought. Or why she left me such giant shoes to fill. Everyone keeps saying that life goes on. But, the more I hear it, the more I begin to realize that’s the saddest part in all of this.

How could she leave me all alone?