#it really irritated me that nobody on the show seemed to notice how sickly Cole looked in the episode

[charmed1998fan]

The Sick Faces of Cole

Receiving this request and being annoyed by The Three Faces of Phoebe inspired me to write a dumb little fanfic. I’m mostly just altering a few scenes from the episode so that Cole could be saved. Enjoy! :D

“What’s the matter?” Phoebe asked Cole, touching his face to comfort him.

“It’s nothing,” Cole insisted, pushing her away. “It’s just a migraine. I got to go.”

Cole started to walk away, but Phoebe stopped him because she was not blind and could see he was unwell. “If you want an aspirin, I can bring it to you,” she told him. “You don’t look good. You should go and lie down. Get some rest, okay?”

“I’m fine, I—”

“Don’t lie to me and act brave. I can see that you’re sick,” she replied. “Go to bed, Cole.”

Cole gave a nod and went to their bedroom.

“What’s going on?” Cole asked after a little girl ran past him, yelling for her grandmother.

“Hey, why aren’t you in bed anymore?” Phoebe asked, concerned.

Before Cole could answer, old Phoebe cut in, “Cole?” She stared at him for a moment, brows furrowed in confusion. “Why do you look so sick?”

“I’m—”

Once again, old Phoebe did not let him speak. “Is this the time I think it is? Is that why you look ill?”

Instead of answering, Cole asked his own question: “Who are you?”

“You know what, Cole?” present Phoebe cut in this time. “You should go back to bed, okay? You don’t look good. Come on.” She went over to him, stroked his back, then walked him downstairs.

“So who was that?” Cole asked her at the bottom of the stairs. Phoebe took in a breath but did not answer. “Is something wrong?”

“I don’t know,” Phoebe said.

“Who is the woman? And the kid? Tell me.”

“Okay.” Phoebe swallowed. “The truth is the old woman is my future self, and the little girl is my past self.”

“What?”

“Yeah. But you don’t worry about that. You just go to bed,” Phoebe said, opening the door to their bedroom.

“You want tell me how they got here?” Cole asked before going in.

“I cast a little spell,” she admitted.

“What spell?”

“To, um, hear my heart’s desire,” she said. It was not the full truth, but it was not a lie, either. “And I guess my past and future showed up to help me listen.”

“What desire did you want to hear?” Cole questioned.

“Well, that’s between me and… mes,” Phoebe said. “Like I said, don’t worry about it. Just go lie down and rest.”

“Well, then I don’t think they’re ever going to, because old Phoebe, she won’t tell me what’s wrong, but she has some grudge about Cole.”

“Talking about me?” Cole said as he walked into the living room.

“Oh, my gosh…” little Phoebe gasped when she saw him. “That man looks so ill! What’s wrong with him?”

Present Phoebe, Piper and Leo looked at Cole and nodded their heads. “She’s right, Cole,” Phoebe said. “You look even worse than this morning. Why did you get up again?”

“I was thirsty, I was coming to get more tea,” he explained.

Piper said, “I’ll make it for you.”

“Thanks.”

“You get back to bed before you make any of us sick, too,” she told him and made her way to the kitchen.

Phoebe looked at Cole and frowned. “Do you have a fever?” She touched his forehead with the back of her hand. “You do feel a little hot. And your eyes look so puffy… Maybe you should see a doctor.”

“No, no, it’s not that bad,” Cole lied because the Source inside him refused to let him tell the truth. “Don’t worry about me, really. What you should be worrying about is the, um, visitor who dropped in. Don’t you think you should help Paige find out who he was before he drops in again?”

“Right, we’ll do that,” Phoebe agreed. “Leo, ask old Phoebe to watch little Phoebe while we’re working on this. And you,” she said, turning back to Cole, “you’re going back to bed right now. You need to get plenty of rest when you’re sick.” After those words, she practically dragged him upstairs.

Cole was lying in bed, under a warm blanket, a steaming cup of tea on the nightstand on his left. He was already half-asleep when he heard a voice say, “Hello, Cole.” His eyes snapped open and he looked up to see old Phoebe walking in. She smiled in a rather smug way and closed the door behind her. “What’s the matter, Cole? Afraid I’ll tell the girls your secret?”

“Ah, no, you startled me,” Cole mumbled sleepily. “I didn’t hear you come in.”

Old Phoebe furrowed her brows when she saw just how sick he appeared. “Wow, you really don’t look good,” she said, more to herself than to Cole. She stood there, staring in silence, seemingly lost in thought.

“What do you want from me?” Cole asked her, breaking her thought.

Old Phoebe snorted. “My life back, for starters,” she told him.

“You look alive to me.”

“Well, sure, on the outside, I look more alive than you do right now,” she admitted.

In that moment, Cole felt another wave of pure evil from the Source wash over him. “I can fix that,” he said, but the tired look in his puffy eyes made his words sound less threatening than he intended.

“You can’t kill me, Cole,” she said, walking closer and sitting down on the edge of the bed. “And I’m not just saying that because you look like you’re suffering from a disease right now. You could never kill me. Even after the Source took you over, a piece of you always loved me.”

“That’s not always enough,” he said, then pulled the blanket up to his chin.

“Yes, it can be,” she told him. “I come from a different timeline, Cole. In my timeline, I didn’t realize how sick you appeared—looking at you now, I must have been blind, because, frankly, you look awful.”

He rolled his puffy, blood-shot eyes. “Thanks a lot.”

“You’re welcome. My point is, I didn’t realize you were the Source before our wedding. I married you, but it wasn’t long before my sisters and I had to vanquish you. …And then once more because you didn’t stay dead the first time.”

Cole frowned. “Why are you telling me this?”

Old Phoebe heaved a sigh. “Because I’ve spent most of my life wondering what would have happened if I had found out sooner,” she explained. “It could have been different for both of us.”

“Well, it’s too late for that now.”

“Maybe not,” she replied, shaking her head. “That’s why I’ve come to you first, before I risk everything. I have to know if there is a chance to save you.”

He turned his head away from her, clutching the blanket in his hand. “I’m not sure there is.”

“So you won’t even try?”

“I want to,” Cole said, his voice weak, “but he won’t let me, he’s too strong. I mean, look at me. I look like I must be contagious, but it’s not an illness, it’s the Source. The Source is making me look like this. And you said you didn’t notice anything in your timeline? How is that possible?”

“I think I needed stronger glasses,” she agreed. “But you know what? I’ll tell Phoebe the truth. She’s already noticed that you look unwell, I’ll tell her it’s because you’re possessed. I’ll convince her to save you, to save us. I’m going to go find her right now.”

“But if you change the future, Phoebe—”

“Don’t worry about anything, Cole,” she interrupted him. “Everything will be okay. You’re tired, go back to sleep.” Cole obediently closed his eyes. Old Phoebe smiled, stood up and left the room.

Old Phoebe came downstairs and found her present version as well as her sisters in the conservatory. “Phoebe, I need to talk to you,” she announced as she walked towards them.

“Have you finally decided to answer my questions?” present Phoebe asked.

Her future self nodded. “Yes, I have.”

“Finally!” Phoebe let out a breath of relief. “So do you think I should marry Cole or not?”

Old Phoebe sighed. “Yes, I think you should marry him, but—”

Poof!

Before old Phoebe could finish her sentence, she vanished into thin air.

Phoebe gasped. “What the f—”

“What just happened?” Paige asked.

Leo orbed in suddenly, eyes wide in panic. “Little Phoebe just vanished! I don’t know what happened. She was there one second, and the next she was gone.”

“Maybe the spell played out because old Phoebe answered the question?” Piper half-guessed, half-asked.

“But she was going to say something else,” Phoebe countered.

“Yeah, but you didn’t ask for anything else when you cast the spell,” Piper pointed out. “You only asked if you should marry Cole, and she told you you should. The spell fulfilled its purpose.”

“That makes sense,” Leo agreed.

“Ugh, but I wanna know what she was going to tell me,” Phoebe whined.

“Worry about that later,” Piper told her. “Right now, we still have a demon to find and vanquish.”

Phoebe came to her room to find her fiancé lying in bed awake. “Hey, you’re looking better now,” she said with a smile. His eyes were much less puffy and blood-shot than earlier. “How are you feeling?”

“Better,” Cole answered. “I think resting really helped.”

“Good, I’m glad to hear that.” She sat down on the bed next to him, then said, “Cole, we need to talk.”

“Is something wrong?” he asked.

“You tell me,” she replied. “I never told you why I cast that spell, did I?”

“I thought it was to hear your heart’s desire,” Cole said.

“It was to find out if I should marry you or not.”

“Oh.” He turned his eyes down for a moment, then looked back up at her. “And?”

Phoebe sighed. “My future self told me that I should,” she explained, “but she was about to tell me something else, too. I don’t know what it was because the spell played out and she vanished. All I know is that she said: ‘Yes, but.’ I didn’t get to hear the rest.” She leaned closer to him, then asked, “Do you have any idea what she could have been trying to say? Is there something that you’re not telling me? About you? Something that I don’t know?”

Cole took in a deep breath. The Source he had inside was screaming at him to say no, or even to keep his mouth shut and not say anything.

“Cole?”

“Yes,” Cole said. Thanks to the strength he had gathered by spending the whole day resting in bed, he finally managed to overpower the evil inside. “I’m possessed by the Source. I have been ever since I took his powers through the Hollow. That’s why I’ve been looking sick, because I’ve been trying to fight it and that’s hard.”

Phoebe stared at Cole for a few seconds, then said, “What the f—”

The Charmed Ones managed to write a spell that removed the Source of All Evil from Cole and made it disappear. Phoebe and Cole got married, had a couple of babies and lived happily ever after.

Fin