"I've got a job for you," announced Chris, walking into the lounge.
"Chris, this is the first time demons have left us alone in months. Why should we have to do chores for you whilst we're actually getting some time off?" Phoebe complained.
"Because it's not a chore for me - it's for everybody," explained Chris. "You're supposed to protect people from evil. You can't do that if you're taking a break."
"We spend practically every day of our lives protecting people," Piper pointed out. "Are you telling us that you're gonna make us work when we get the first break from it all in months?"
"Well... yeah," admitted Chris. "This is what I came back from the future for after all."
"Fine," agreed Piper reluctantly, the first to concede that they probably weren't going to win this argument. At least they'd gotten away with two months off from hunting demons. "What do you want us to do?"
"Well, you know that everything's been really quiet recently. So me and Leo have decided that now's a good time to try and get rid of any demons that might cause us problems in the future," explained Chris. "We thought you should tackle the Darklighters first."
Paige nodded. "I see where you're coming from. That'll be good for Whitelighters at least. Darklighters are the only real problem for them."
"Hang on, I thought you guys couldn't track Darklighters?" Phoebe reminded them.
"We couldn't before, but Leo's found a way that we can," said Chris, holding up a small black bottle that had been partly concealed behind his back. "I managed to get this from what you'd call the demons' black market. It's Darklighter poison. You can use that to scry for them."
"But won't that only find us one Darklighter?" pointed out Paige. "What about the rest of them?"
"This bottle's full - it can't have all come from one arrow. Every time you use it to scry with, hopefully you'll find a different Darklighter," said Chris.
"Gotcha. Alright then, let me have the poison and I'll get started on the scrying," said Paige, getting up off the couch.
"Wait a minute, Paige. You're part Whitelighter, so I don't think you should handle the poison," said Piper.
"Aww, come on, I'll be fine," insisted Paige. "I'll wear gloves if it makes you feel better."
"No, I agree with Piper," said Phoebe. "One of us will do the scrying. And I don't think you should come with us to vanquish the Darklighters either."
"What? That's not fair; you can't make me sit at home and do nothing," complained Paige. "And you'll need me to orb you around anyway."
"Okay, good point," Piper agreed reluctantly. "You can help vanquish the Darklighters, but Phoebe and I will do the scrying."
Paige smiled. "I guess I'll take it."
"Great," Chris enthused. "Let me know if you guys have any luck."
Not long after that, following their first successful scrying from the Darklighter poison, the three young witches appeared in a swirl of white lights downtown, finding themselves outside a large old house. All of the windows were boarded up and a wild thicket of bushes had grown across the path, blocking access to the front door. It looked like it hadn't been used in a long time.
"How are we gonna get in?" asked Phoebe. "It's all boarded up."
"I could orb us in," suggested Paige.
Piper shook her head. "We don't know exactly where we'd be orbing into. For all we know, we could end up appearing in the middle of a Darklighter tea party. Not the best scenario for us."
"So what now then?" asked Phoebe.
"I could always blast the door off," Piper continued.
"That was going to be my Plan B," Paige grinned. "Let's go."
They made their way up the front path, stopping several paces away from the door. One of Piper's powers was molecular combustion, which caused objects and even certain demons to explode. Double checking around the quiet street to make sure that the coast was clear, she raised her hands and blew the door clean off its hinges. They stepped cautiously inside and stopped in the hallway.
The three sisters suddenly shared the same thought that maybe this was a dead end after all. The house didn't seem to have been lived in for years. A thick layer of dust coated everything in sight, giving the interior a very creepy decor job. It was clearly an old building too - the floorboards creaked loudly with every footstep.
"This place is a dive," Paige commented quietly, the eerie house making her feel the need to lower her voice.
"Somehow I'm not sure this is what we're looking for..." Phoebe agreed.
No sooner had the words left her mouth, there was suddenly a loud crash of a door banging open upstairs and a young woman came hurtling down the staircase, her eyes ablaze. She was pale skinned and painfully thin with shoulder-length, grubby looking black hair and faded blue tattoos decorating both of her bony arms. She seemed to move in an oddly stiff manner, as if her joints didn't work properly.
"I thought I made it clear that I'm not doing deals with anyone!" she bellowed. "Just leave me alone!"
She picked up a dusty china pot from the sideboard behind her and hurled it at the three witches. Piper threw out her hands to use her freezing power, intending to freeze both the pot and the girl. The china pot stopped in mid-air, but it didn't seem to have an effect on the girl. She turned and grabbed an equally dusty vase, launching that as well.
"Vase!" called Paige, holding out her hand.
The vase disappeared amongst a flurry of white lights and reappeared in Paige's outstretched hand. She threw it back at the girl, who orbed out of the room in a swirl of black lights, where it then smashed against the wall that had been behind her.
"Okay... why won't she freeze?" asked Piper, relenting her power so that the frozen china pot fell to the floor and shattered into pieces.
"I don't know," replied Phoebe. "You've frozen Darklighters before. Maybe she's a more powerful one?"
"She didn't really act the way I'd expect a Darklighter to," Paige pointed out. "She didn't seem interested in fighting - just getting us to leave."
"What do you think she meant when she said she didn't want to make deals with anyone?" Phoebe enquired.
"I have no idea... But whilst we're here, we may as well find out," Piper decided. "Come on, let's search the house."
They made their way through the creaky house and found the girl sat in a dark corner in one of the rooms upstairs. This room was just as dreary as the rest of the house - the barest amount of sunlight streaking inside in thin lines through the boarded up window. The girl herself blended in with the decor. Close to, they could see that her clothes, hair and even her skin were covered in a thin layer of dust like everything else was.
"Go away," she said shortly, hugging her knees protectively, barely even looking up. "I don't want to fight. Just leave me alone."
"Well, we're not here to fight either," said Piper. "But we do have a few questions." She closed the door behind them to show that they weren't leaving. The girl glared at her, but she didn't try to move.
"I already said I'm not making any deals," she repeated.
"That's okay; that's not what we're here for either."
The girl frowned at her suspiciously, her gaze then moving between Paige and Phoebe. "Then what do you want?"
"Call us nosy," said Piper lightly. "Like I said, we just want to ask you a few questions."
The girl's stony expression flickered only slightly. "Like what?"
"Who's been trying to make deals with you?" questioned Phoebe. "What kind of deals are we talking here?"
The girl still regarded them suspiciously, but she conceded to answer Phoebe's questions. "Demons mostly. They want to hire me as a mercenary."
"And what do they offer you in return?" asked Piper.
"A higher place in the hierarchy of evil," answered the girl monotonously.
"And... you don't want that?" enquired Paige, catching onto her blank tone. The girl shook her head. "Why not?"
"You're asking me some real personal questions right now," the girl accused. "What are you even doing here?"
"If you want the truth, then we came here to vanquish you," said Piper bluntly, feeling that the girl was in no position to be arguing.
However, her reaction was not what any of them were expecting. She didn't move - she didn't even try to fight back. She just sat there, eyes wide. "I don't understand... I won't work for any of you, so you're going to kill me instead?"
"Let's not get mixed up here," said Phoebe. "We're not demons; we're witches."
A confused frown crossed the girl's face. "Witches? But what did I ever do to you?"
"Actually Darklighters as a whole present a big problem to us and our Whitelighters," said Piper more calmly than she felt. She wasn't so sure anymore that she could vanquish this Darklighter girl. She didn't seem to have posed a threat to them - she didn't really seem to be much of a threat to anyone. And from the glances her sisters gave her, she was guessing that they felt the same.
"So because I'm a Darklighter, I have to be taken out, even though I've never done anything to anyone?" the girl protested angrily, finally showing a bit of fight. "I'm not like other Darklighters - why should I get thrown in with the rest of them? If I was just like all the others, then do you really think I'd spend my life sitting in the dark on my own, gathering dust? Isn't that bad enough? All I want is for everyone to just leave me alone!"
Paige had been mostly silent throughout the whole thing, but she finally stepped forward once the girl stopped shouting. "Well, if you guys aren't going to do this, then I am."
"Paige..." Piper cautioned her as she moved towards the girl. Though the young Darklighter had come across as harmless so far, she could still pose quite a serious threat to her sister as half Whitelighter.
But Paige ignored her and stopped in front of the girl, crouching down before her. The Darklighter may have been enraged by the idea of being lumped in with the rest of her kind, but her sense of self-preservation didn't seem to amount to anything more than angry protests. She watched Paige through narrowed eyes as she approached before closing them, seemingly in acceptance. What nobody expected was for Paige to then reach out and ruffle the girl's hair back, dispersing the dust into the air.
"How long have you even been sat here?" she chastised her, continuing to brush away the dust. "You're covered in dust."
If her sisters were surprised, then it was nothing compared to the look on the Darklighter's face. She opened her eyes again in astonishment. "Um, I don't know..." she said, not seeming to realise that the question was rhetorical. "A year? Maybe two. I don't really keep track."
"You mean you've been sat in that corner for two years?" Phoebe asked incredulously.
"Well, I get up and move around sometimes," said the girl, uncomfortable with the change of subject. "But kind of, yeah." It was true that the corner she was sitting in wasn't quite as dusty as the rest of the room. The sisters processed this information in amazement.
"Do you even eat?" Piper questioned, feeling safe enough to approach as well. Her motherly instincts kicked in as she registered just how painfully thin the girl really was.
She shrugged. "Sometimes."
"What's your name?" Paige asked her.
The girl seemed hesitant to reply. "...Blake. Blake Rodriguez."
"Where's your family? Are you here by yourself?" Paige asked, more kindly.
Blake looked a little taken aback but she nodded. "Just me. No one else."
"Paige, can I talk to you for a minute?" Phoebe cut in. "Piper, you too."
Paige straightened up and did as she was asked. Blake seemed neither happy nor sad to be left to herself. She watched as they huddled together in an opposite corner of the room, but made no attempt to move or even listen in on their conversation. Even so, the sisters still kept their voices down.
"We're not really going to vanquish her, are we?" Paige hissed.
"Of course not!" replied Piper. "I'm not about to vanquish a girl who does nothing more than spending all her time sitting in a dusty corner."
"So what are we going to do with her?" asked Phoebe, glancing back at Blake, who was now staring at the toes of her battered grey Converse that had probably once been black.
"What do you mean 'do with her'?" Piper repeated.
"Come on Piper, are you really going to just happily go back home and not think of her here by herself in this lonely house?" Paige pointed out. "I mean, you just said it by yourself; all she does is just sit in that corner."
"Well, what do you want to do; bring her home with us?" said Piper sceptically. "I have my own baby to worry about. One - I might add - that is apparently in danger of turning evil at some point in his life."
"But we can't just leave her here," Paige protested. "Look at her - I doubt she'd even be a threat to anyone. She could barely even walk properly when she came down the stairs."
"Maybe we could take her back to the manor for now and then decide what to do with her," Phoebe suggested. "We might be able to find someone who can watch over her for a while."
"Somehow, I don't think we'll find anyone who'll house a stray Darklighter for us," said Piper dryly.
"Do you reckon there's demon social workers?" Phoebe thought aloud. "She said she's the only one here, so maybe she doesn't have a family at all..."
"Because she's a Darklighter," said Piper. "Her parents probably got themselves vanquished by demons or killed each other."
"Come on, it's not like we haven't done this before," Paige reminded her. "Remember the manticore baby that we took in?"
"Yes, that was a baby," replied Piper. "This girl's gotta be nineteen, twenty? I'm guessing she'll be a lot less impressionable at this age. And even with the baby I'd had my misgivings about it."
"She doesn't seem very evil to me," said Paige, looking back over her shoulder at Blake. "She certainly didn't seem interested in being a part of the demon hierarchy."
"But Paige, we don't know her. We can't trust what she says," said Piper. "I'm sorry, but I don't want her in the manor. Seeing as we just recently learnt that my own son is the evil that threatens the rest of the world in the future, I just can't risk exposing him to anyone that could possibly turn him."
"Well, I doubt that she's the one who turns Wyatt evil in the future," Paige countered. "Think about it; we probably wouldn't haven't gone Darklighter hunting if it hadn't been for Chris... So if Chris hadn't come back from the future, then we never would have found her, right?"
"Why is it that I instantly get a headache every time someone starts talking about the future?" Piper complained.
"Because time travel's confusing?"
Piper sighed and turned to Phoebe. "You're really with Paige on this one?"
Phoebe looked solemn. "I just think we should get her out of here at least long enough to decide what to do with her. Just look at her... She looks practically half starved. I know that, as a mother, you can't ignore that."
"Urgh." It really sucked having an empath for a sister sometimes. "Hold on... You can sense something from her, can't you?" When Phoebe didn't say anything, she pressed on. "What is it? What can you sense?"
"She's scared," said Phoebe sadly. "Not to mention lonely. So lonely... And tired. She's fed up of everything."
Piper fought to keep anything from showing on her face. "You really don't think she's a threat."
She made it more of a statement than a question, but Phoebe still shook her head. "I don't know if she can hide some of her feelings from me or not, but from what I can sense, I don't think she's got an evil bone in her body."
Piper looked towards her other sister. "Paige, you're half Whitelighter. She's more of a threat to you than she is to us, but you seem pretty adamant about her. Are you sure about this?"
Paige nodded firmly. "I am. I don't know what it is, but she... she reminds me of me. When I was a teenager, I never knew my parents. I felt abandoned and lonely as hell. I never felt I fit in anywhere. And my guess is that for a Darklighter who doesn't want anything to do with evil, like she says she does? She must feel the same. And that makes her an innocent, no matter what's in her blood."
Piper trusted her sisters' judgement more than anything. And as a mother, she trusted her own gut too. Her family was her first priority and she wanted more than anything to protect her son, Wyatt. But those mother's instincts couldn't ignore how agonisingly thin Blake was or how stiffly she moved. If Phoebe and Paige's guesses were correct, then she was nothing more than a lonely teenager who had been born into the wrong life. And as the Charmed Ones, it was their job to protect innocents.
The Halliwell family had had more than their share of hardships, but if there was one thing Piper had never known, it was loneliness. After their dad had left, after the deaths of their mother and Grams, even after Prue... She'd still always had her sisters. Darklighter or not, this girl didn't appear to have anyone.
Piper sighed. "Chris is gonna freak when he finds out he sent us to hunt Darklighters and that we've brought one home instead."
Her sisters both smiled. "Oh, boohoo," said Paige. "We can deal with Chris later. One problem at a time here."
"Right. Let's deal with the first one," agreed Piper, raising her voice again and crossing the room back towards Blake, who watched her warily. She held out her hand. "Come on..."
Blake regarded her hand suspiciously. "What?"
"Let's get you out of here."
Blake's expression shifted as she backed away defensively. Fear filled her hazel eyes. "Where are you taking me?"
Piper took in her eyes and the protective stance. When she replied, it was much more gently. "For now, to our home."
Blake glanced from one sister to the next. "I don't understand..."
"We figured you should get you out of this place," Paige commented lightly. "Dust really isn't good for you, y'know. We'll help find you somewhere nicer - somewhere with a bit more sunlight."
Blake's eyes widened disbelievingly. "You mean... You're helping me? I won't have to stay here anymore?"
"That's what we're saying," Phoebe smiled.
Blake looked between them again, her gaze then settling back on Piper, whose hand was still outstretched. "But... why?" she asked softly. "Why would you help someone like me?"
Piper didn't go into detail of the discussion she and her sisters had just had. Instead, she simply said, "Because if magic has taught us anything, it's that not everything is so black and white."
Blake stared, then abruptly lowered her gaze. "Thank you..." Her voice threatened to crack on those two small words as she gingerly took Piper's hand. "I'm sorry, I don't even know your names..."
Piper helped to pull Blake to her feet with astonishing ease, only reinforcing the fact that the Darklighter girl was of a seriously unhealthy build. "My name's Piper Halliwell. These are my sisters, Phoebe and Paige. We help innocents. That's our job."
"But..." Blake still seemed to be struggling to control her words. "Where will I stay? What about... What about the demons? What if..."
"How about we discuss this all somewhere a little brighter?" Paige suggested with a smile. "I hope you're not actually allergic to light or anything?"
Blake almost smiled back. She shook her head. "No. I just haven't seen the light in a long time."
Paige held out her hand, linking her other with Phoebe's. "Then hold on tight and we'll change that."
This time, Blake didn't even hesitate. She took Paige's hand and squeezed it firmly, in a way that she'd only ever done as a child. Piper then joined hands with Phoebe, completing the circle. Blake felt the ground disappear from beneath her feet as, for the first time in her life, she orbed away from her prison with not black, but pure white lights dancing across her vision.
XXX
Author's Note!
This happens to be a reeeally old story. And when I mean old I mean dating back to 2004, 2005 time. So roughly about ten years, ouch. I recently rediscovered this on some old discs and found I still liked the ideas behind it, even if the pace of the writing was totally cringing then. So I figured I'd try my hand with a complete revamp!
I've tried to re-write as little as I can manage, since I still want to keep as much of the main backbone as possible. I mostly just changed the dialogue and added more description and more filler. If anything reads a little awkwardly then it's likely part of the old one that I missed. You'd think re-writing something would be easier than writing something from scratch, but noooo...
Anyway, just a little on the ideas. Charmed was a huge part of my teeny years and season six was definitely the one that just hooked me right in! Darklighters always got a bad deal on the show, unsurprisingly, but I liked the idea of the Whitelighters having a complete opposite so I wanted to explore more with that.
This is obviously set in season six, not long after the episode Prince Charmed. I tried to stick to the original plotline as much as possible, but I've had to go with a few time skews to make this work how I want it to, which you'll probably notice as chapters go on. The main one will be that Jason doesn't leave for Hong Kong until slightly later. So eh, not many changes really.