# The Darkest Spark
## Chapter 3: "The Party"
---
### Part One: The Mask
The Nigerian mask arrived at the Summers house on a Tuesday afternoon.
Stiles felt it the moment Joyce hung it on the wall. He was sitting in his study on Crawford Street, reading through Rumplestiltskin's memories of dimensional barrier magic, when a pulse of dark energy rippled through the Hellmouth's ambient field like a stone dropped into still water.
He closed his eyes and focused.
*Ovu Mobani. The Evil Eye. A demon that raises the dead and draws power from gatherings of the living. Parasitic. Clever. Dangerous to mortals. Absolutely pathetic by any meaningful standard of power.*
He opened his eyes and leaned back in his chair.
In the original timeline—the one burned into his borrowed memories from entities that existed outside normal causality—the mask would animate the dead during a party at the Summers house. Zombies would crash through the windows. There would be screaming, fighting, drama. Buffy and her friends would have their big, cathartic argument. The mask would be destroyed. Everyone would move on.
Stiles drummed his fingers on the desk.
He could prevent it. A snap of his fingers would unmake the mask's enchantment. A wave of his hand would banish Ovu Mobani to a dimension where it would spend eternity being digested by something larger. It would be effortless. It would be trivial. It would be *boring*.
No. The party needed to happen. Buffy needed the confrontation with her friends. She needed the catharsis. She needed to scream and cry and fight and break down the walls she'd built during her summer of exile. The Scoobies needed to say the things they'd been choking on since she came back.
But the zombies... the zombies he could improve upon.
He smiled.
"Let them have their party," he murmured. "I'll handle the uninvited guests."
---
### Part Two: Invitation
Buffy found the note in her locker the next morning.
It was written on heavy cream-colored paper in elegant, old-fashioned script—the kind of handwriting that belonged in a museum, not a high school locker. It smelled like ozone and leather.
*I hear there's a party at your house tonight. I'd like to attend. Don't worry—I'll bring a gift.*
*— S*
Buffy crumpled the note in her fist.
"What's that?" Willow asked, appearing at her elbow with the sudden, startling efficiency of a best friend who had spent two years developing a sixth sense for Buffy's emotional state.
"Nothing," Buffy said. She shoved the crumpled paper into her pocket. "Junk mail."
"In your locker?"
"Sunnydale," Buffy said, as if that explained everything. In Sunnydale, it usually did.
Willow accepted this with the practiced ease of someone who had once found a severed demon claw in the library's card catalog. "So, the party tonight. Your mom's really going all out. She invited, like, everyone. Even some of the neighbors."
"Great," Buffy said flatly. "Nothing I love more than making small talk with adults who think I'm a juvenile delinquent."
"It'll be fun," Willow said with the desperate optimism of someone trying to paper over a crumbling friendship. "We'll all be there. Xander, Oz, Cordelia... it'll be like old times."
*Old times,* Buffy thought. *Before I died. Before Angel. Before I killed him. Before I ran. Before a monster with golden eyes claimed me like a stray cat.*
"Can't wait," Buffy said.
---
### Part Three: Preparations
Faith spent the day doing something she hadn't done in months: shopping.
Stiles's money—she'd counted it, twelve thousand dollars in crisp hundreds, conjured from nothing—burned in her pocket like a promise. She told herself she'd return it. She told herself she wasn't going to be bought. She told herself a lot of things while she was trying on leather pants at a boutique on Main Street.
She bought the leather pants. She bought three pairs of boots. She bought a jacket that cost more than her mother had ever spent on her in a cumulative lifetime. She bought underwear that wasn't from a gas station. She bought *shampoo that smelled like something other than industrial cleaning fluid.*
She checked into a better motel—not great, but better. The sheets were white. The walls were thick enough that she couldn't hear the neighbors. The bathroom had a door that locked.
She took a shower that lasted forty-five minutes.
When she got out, wrapped in a towel that was actually soft, she looked at herself in the mirror. The bite mark on her neck was gone—healed by Stiles's magic—but she could still feel the ghost of it. A warm pulse, like a second heartbeat, right at the junction of her neck and shoulder.
She pressed her fingers against it and closed her eyes.
The bliss echoed back, faint but present. A memory of warmth. Of *belonging*.
"You're pathetic, Lehane," she told her reflection. "One bite and you're his. One good feeling and you roll over like a dog."
Her reflection stared back at her. It did not disagree.
Her phone—a prepaid burner she'd bought at a convenience store—buzzed. She didn't remember giving anyone the number. She picked it up.
One text message from an unknown number:
*Party at Buffy's tonight. You're coming. Wear the leather pants.*
*— S*
Faith stared at the phone.
"How did you—" She stopped. Dark One. Right. He probably knew her number before she'd bought the phone. He probably knew the number before the phone had been *manufactured*.
She typed back: *What if I don't want to come?*
The reply was instant: *Then I'll be very disappointed, and you'll miss the chance to see me in a suit. Your loss.*
Faith stared at the screen for a long time.
She wore the leather pants.
---
### Part Four: The Party
The Summers house was alive with noise and light.
Joyce had outdone herself. There were snacks on every surface, music playing from a stereo system that Xander had helped set up, and a crowd of people that included Sunnydale High students, Joyce's gallery colleagues, and a handful of neighbors who were blissfully unaware that their hostess's daughter was a supernatural warrior chosen by fate to fight the forces of darkness.
Buffy moved through the crowd like a ghost. She smiled when people talked to her. She laughed at appropriate moments. She held a cup of punch that she never drank. She was performing normalcy with the precision of a surgeon, and it was exhausting.
Willow was watching her from across the room with an expression that wavered between concern and resentment. Xander was telling a story to a group of people who weren't really listening. Oz was near the stereo, nodding along to the music with the serene detachment of a man who had achieved enlightenment through guitar riffs. Cordelia was holding court near the snack table, dispensing judgment on everyone's outfit with surgical precision.
And then the front door opened, and Stiles walked in.
He was wearing a suit. Not a rental, not a department store approximation—a *suit*. Charcoal gray, perfectly tailored, with a black shirt underneath and no tie. His hair was slightly less chaotic than usual, pushed back in a way that revealed the sharp lines of his face. He looked like he'd stepped out of a magazine—or a nightmare, depending on your perspective.
He was carrying a bottle of wine.
"Mrs. Summers," he said, approaching Joyce with a smile that could melt glaciers. "I'm Stiles. I go to school with Buffy. Thank you for having me—your home is beautiful." He presented the wine. "Château Margaux, 1995. I hope you enjoy it."
Joyce took the bottle with the dazed expression of a woman confronted with unexpected charm. "Oh—thank you. That's so thoughtful. Buffy didn't mention she had such polite friends."
"Buffy doesn't mention a lot of things," Stiles said with a conspiratorial wink. "It's part of her charm."
Joyce laughed—actually laughed—and Buffy, watching from across the room, felt her blood pressure spike to dangerous levels.
Stiles moved through the party like smoke through a forest. He talked to everyone. He was funny and warm and self-deprecating and impossibly charming. He complimented Willow's outfit and asked her about her computer science project. He engaged Xander in a debate about comic books that left Xander simultaneously delighted and confused. He told Oz that his band's name was "inspired" and asked about their upcoming gig. He even managed to make Cordelia laugh—twice—which Buffy had previously believed was a statistical impossibility for anyone not named "Cordelia."
Within thirty minutes, every person at the party adored him.
Buffy watched it all with growing fury.
*He's doing it on purpose,* she thought. *Integrating himself. Making himself indispensable. When I finally figure out how to tell them what he is, they won't believe me. They'll think I'm crazy.*
She was so focused on watching Stiles that she almost missed Faith's entrance.
The second Slayer arrived twenty minutes after Stiles, wearing the leather pants, a dark red top, and an expression that dared anyone to comment. She walked through the front door without knocking and scanned the room with the predatory awareness that all Slayers possessed.
Her eyes found Stiles immediately.
He was across the room, talking to Joyce about African art—because of course he knew about African art; he had centuries of accumulated knowledge rattling around in his skull—but he looked up the moment Faith entered and smiled.
It was a different smile than the one he gave everyone else. Warmer. More possessive. The smile of someone looking at something that belonged to them.
Faith's cheeks flushed. She covered it by grabbing a cup of punch and downing it in one gulp.
Buffy intercepted her near the kitchen.
"Faith. Hey."
"B. Nice party. Your mom's cool."
"Stay away from him," Buffy said without preamble.
Faith's eyes narrowed. "Excuse me?"
"Stiles. The guy in the suit. Stay away from him."
"Why?" Faith asked, and there was a challenge in her voice that hadn't been there yesterday. A possessiveness. "He a friend of yours?"
"He's not a friend," Buffy said carefully. She could feel the compulsion pressing against her tongue, a physical weight that prevented her from saying what she needed to say. She couldn't tell Faith what Stiles was. She couldn't warn her. All she could do was speak in generalities and hope Faith was smart enough to read between the lines.
"He's *dangerous*, Faith. More dangerous than anything we've dealt with. Please. Just... stay away."
Faith looked at her for a long moment. Then she looked across the room at Stiles, who was now making Joyce laugh so hard she was wiping tears from her eyes.
"He doesn't look dangerous," Faith said.
"That's the point."
Faith turned back to Buffy, and her expression softened. For a moment, the tough-girl mask slipped, and underneath was the same lost teenager who had cried when Stiles bit her.
"He's the first person who ever made me feel like I was worth something, B," Faith said quietly. "I know that's messed up. I know it probably makes me stupid. But I don't care."
"Faith—"
"I'm not staying away from him," Faith said. The mask was back. The walls were up. "Whatever you've got going on with him, that's between you two. But he's mine, too. He said so."
She walked away, and Buffy was left standing in the kitchen doorway, holding a cup of untouched punch, feeling more alone than she had in months.
---
### Part Five: The Confrontation
It happened at 10:47 PM.
Buffy was in the kitchen, staring at a plate of deviled eggs and contemplating the meaninglessness of existence, when Xander cornered her.
"So," Xander said, leaning against the counter with the forced casualness of someone about to detonate a conversational bomb. "That Stiles guy. What's his deal?"
"What do you mean?"
"I mean, he shows up out of nowhere, knows everything about everyone, charms every person in the room, and looks at you like you're the last donut in the box. That's either a really good guy or a really dangerous one, and in Sunnydale, I know which way I'm betting."
Buffy's heart clenched. *Tell him. Tell him everything. He's right here. He's asking the right questions. Just—*
Her throat locked.
"He's just a guy," she heard herself say. "New in town. Transferred from somewhere up north."
Xander studied her. "You sure?"
"I'm sure."
"Because the way he looks at you, Buff... it reminds me of someone."
He didn't say Angel's name. He didn't have to.
"It's not like that," Buffy said.
"It's always like that," Xander said softly. And for once, there was no jealousy in his voice. Just concern. Just the quiet, stubborn love of a boy who had been fighting beside her since the beginning and would keep fighting until the end.
Buffy felt tears prick her eyes. She blinked them away.
"I can handle it, Xander."
"I know you can," he said. "But you don't have to handle it alone. That's kind of the whole point of us."
He squeezed her shoulder and walked back to the party.
Buffy stood in the kitchen and breathed.
Then Willow came in.
And then the argument happened.
It started small—a comment about Buffy's absence, a deflection that landed wrong, a question that cut too deep. Within minutes, it had escalated into the full-scale emotional detonation that had been building since Buffy walked back into Sunnydale.
"You just *left*!" Willow said, her voice cracking. "You didn't call. You didn't write. We didn't know if you were alive or dead! Do you have any idea what that was like? We fought vampires without you! We protected this town *without you*!"
"I had to go," Buffy said, her voice raw. "I killed Angel. I sent the man I loved to hell. I couldn't—"
"You couldn't what? Trust us? Talk to us? Let us *help*?"
"You don't understand—"
"Then *make* me understand, Buffy! Because right now, all I understand is that you abandoned us!"
The word hit like a slap. *Abandoned.* Buffy flinched, and the tears she'd been holding back spilled over.
"I didn't abandon you," she whispered. "I was trying to survive."
"So were we," Willow said, and she was crying too. "So were we."
They stood there, two girls crying in a kitchen full of deviled eggs, while a party raged around them. The music was loud enough to cover the sound of their breaking hearts.
Neither of them noticed Stiles standing in the doorway.
He'd been there for the entire argument. He'd watched it unfold with an expression that was difficult to read—somewhere between fascination and sadness and something that might have been recognition. He knew what it felt like to be abandoned. He knew what it felt like to be the one who left. He knew both sides of this particular coin, and he knew that no amount of Dark One magic could fix it.
Some wounds had to heal the human way.
He stepped back from the doorway, unseen, and returned to the party.
---
### Part Six: The Dead Rise
At 11:23 PM, the first zombie clawed its way out of the Summers' backyard.
The Nigerian mask on the wall pulsed with dark energy. Its eyes glowed a sickly green. Across Sunnydale, the dead stirred in their graves—not vampires, not demons, just corpses animated by Ovu Mobani's parasitic magic, drawn to the gathering of living humans like moths to a bonfire.
The first one came through the back fence, trailing dirt and coffin silk. It moved with the slow, purposeful gait of something that didn't need to hurry because it didn't need to breathe.
The second came through the side gate.
The third crashed through the kitchen window.
Willow screamed. The partygoers screamed. Joyce screamed.
Buffy didn't scream. She grabbed a kitchen knife and drove it into the zombie's skull, dropping it to the linoleum with a wet thud. Years of Slayer training took over, her body moving on autopilot while her mind raced.
"Giles!" she shouted into the chaos. "It's the mask! The mask on the wall!"
But Giles wasn't close enough to hear. He was in the living room, where three more zombies had crashed through the front windows, and he was swinging a floor lamp like a broadsword while shouting instructions that no one could hear over the screaming.
More zombies poured in. Five. Ten. Twenty. They came through every window, every door, every gap in the walls. The partygoers stampeded toward the exits, trampling snack trays and each other. The house was being overrun.
Faith materialized beside Buffy, a broken table leg in each hand.
"What the hell are these things?" Faith shouted, driving a makeshift stake through a zombie's eye socket.
"Zombies! Real ones! The mask on the wall is controlling them!"
"So we smash the mask!"
"It's in the living room! We need to get through—"
A zombie grabbed Faith from behind. She spun, snapping its arm like a twig, and kicked it through the pantry door. Two more took its place. They were everywhere—a tide of rotting flesh and grasping hands, driven by a hunger that wasn't their own.
Buffy fought. Faith fought. They fought back to back, a hurricane of fists and improvised weapons, and they were magnificent. Two Slayers in their element, synchronized by instinct and adrenaline, cutting through the dead like scythes through wheat.
But there were too many.
For every zombie they dropped, three more crawled through the wreckage. The living room was impassable. The stairs were blocked. The partygoers who hadn't escaped were huddled in corners, screaming, while corpses reached for them with fingers that had been rotting underground for years.
Buffy was losing.
She knew it. Faith knew it. The cold, mathematical part of her brain that calculated survival odds was flashing red, and for the first time since she'd come back to Sunnydale, she felt genuinely afraid—not for herself, but for the people in this house. Her mother. Her friends. The innocent, oblivious civilians who had come to a party and walked into a horror movie.
Then the lights went out.
Every bulb in the house exploded simultaneously. The music died. The screaming intensified. For three seconds, the Summers house was plunged into absolute, perfect darkness.
And then the darkness *moved*.
It started as a low hum—a vibration that Buffy felt in her teeth and her bones and the deepest chambers of her heart. The air pressure changed. The temperature dropped. The zombies, which had been mindlessly pressing forward, suddenly stopped. Every single one of them. They stood motionless, their dead eyes staring at nothing, as if something had pressed pause on their animation.
A voice spoke from everywhere and nowhere.
"That's enough."
It was Stiles.
He was standing in the center of the living room, directly in front of the Nigerian mask. He hadn't been there a moment ago—he'd simply appeared, coalescing from the darkness like a figure stepping out of a painting. His suit was immaculate. His eyes were gold.
He raised one hand, and every zombie in the house lifted off the ground.
Not flew. Not jumped. *Lifted*. As if gravity had politely excused itself from the conversation. Thirty-seven animated corpses rose three feet into the air and hung there, suspended by invisible threads of power that Buffy could feel like static electricity on her skin.
The partygoers stared. Giles stared. Willow stared. Xander dropped his makeshift weapon and said, very quietly, "Holy shit."
Stiles looked at the mask on the wall. Ovu Mobani's eyes were blazing green, its power straining against the intruder who had dared to interrupt its feast. The demon was ancient. The demon was powerful. The demon had been raising the dead since before this continent had a name.
The demon was nothing.
Stiles closed his raised hand into a fist.
Every zombie disintegrated. Not collapsed. Not fell. *Disintegrated*. They came apart at the molecular level, dissolving into fine gray ash that drifted to the floor like snow. In two seconds, thirty-seven animated corpses became thirty-seven piles of dust.
The room was silent.
Stiles turned to the mask. He reached up and took it off the wall with the casual gesture of someone removing a picture frame. He held it in front of his face and looked into its glowing green eyes.
"Ovu Mobani," Stiles said conversationally. "Demon of the dead. You've been doing this for, what, three thousand years? Longer? Raising corpses, feeding on fear, hiding in trinkets. It's a nice racket. Very low-effort."
The mask pulsed. The green light intensified. Buffy could feel the demon's rage—ancient, inhuman, volcanic.
Stiles felt it too. He smiled.
"Here's the thing about me," he said. "I'm the Dark One. I have the accumulated magical knowledge of every Dark One who ever lived, plus the power of an Upgraded Original vampire, plus—and this is the important part—absolutely no limitations on any of it. No price. No weakness. No rules."
He held up the mask.
"You're a parasite living in a piece of wood. I'm the most powerful being this dimension has ever produced. This is what happens when those two things meet."
He squeezed.
The mask screamed. An actual, audible scream—a sound that came from somewhere beyond the physical, a sound that made everyone in the room clap their hands over their ears. The green light flared, blazed, and then went out like a candle in a hurricane.
The mask crumbled to dust in Stiles's hand.
Ovu Mobani was gone. Not banished. Not sealed. *Gone*. Erased from existence with the casual thoroughness of someone deleting a file.
Stiles brushed the dust from his fingers and turned to face the room.
Thirty pairs of human eyes stared at him. Some were terrified. Some were awed. Some were both.
"Sorry about the mess," Stiles said. "Great party, though. The deviled eggs were exceptional."
---
### Part Seven: Aftermath
The humans were easy.
Stiles looked at the partygoers—the civilians, Joyce's colleagues, the neighbors—and his eyes shifted to their compulsion red. He didn't need eye contact. He didn't need proximity. His compulsion was absolute, and it worked on everything.
"You will remember a wonderful party," he said, his voice carrying to every civilian in the room. "There was a minor earthquake. Some windows broke. Everyone is fine. You had a lovely time. Go home."
Like sleepwalkers, the civilians gathered their things and filed out the front door, chatting pleasantly about what a nice evening it had been. Within five minutes, the only people left in the destroyed living room were the Scoobies: Buffy, Willow, Xander, Oz, Cordelia, Giles, Faith, and Joyce—who Stiles had deliberately excluded from the mass compulsion.
He wanted the inner circle to know. Not everything. But enough.
"What," Giles said slowly, removing his glasses with hands that were not quite steady, "are you?"
Stiles considered the question. He looked around the room at each of them in turn. Willow, pale and wide-eyed, her hand gripping Oz's arm. Xander, jaw clenched, standing slightly in front of Cordelia in a protective gesture he probably wasn't conscious of. Oz, calm as ever, though his nostrils were flared—the wolf in him, Stiles knew, was howling at the wrongness it sensed. Cordelia, for once in her life, speechless. Joyce, sitting on the couch, staring at the piles of ash that had been zombies with the expression of a woman whose worldview was undergoing rapid, involuntary renovation. Faith, leaning against the wall, arms crossed, watching Stiles with an expression that was equal parts pride and hunger. And Buffy, standing in the middle of it all, stake still in her hand, blood on her knuckles, looking at him with eyes that held fury and gratitude and something she would die before admitting.
"My name is Stiles Stilinski," he said. "I'm not from this dimension. I died in my world, and I woke up in yours. I've been in Sunnydale for approximately two months."
"The disappearances," Giles said immediately. "The six missing women. That was you."
"Yes."
The room tensed. Giles's hand moved toward the crossbow on the weapons chest. Xander's fists clenched.
"They're alive," Stiles said. "All of them. Unharmed. Living comfortably in a house on Crawford Street. I feed on them, but I don't hurt them. I don't kill."
"You *feed* on them?" Willow's voice was small and horrified.
"I'm a vampire," Stiles said. "Among other things. I need blood. I prefer not to murder people for it. So I compromise."
"That's not a compromise," Xander said. "That's kidnapping."
"It's definitely kidnapping," Stiles agreed amicably. "I won't pretend otherwise. But consider the alternative. The vampires in this town—the *normal* vampires—kill their prey. Every night, someone in Sunnydale dies with teeth in their throat. I've been here two months, and my body count is zero. I'm the most humane predator this Hellmouth has ever hosted."
"That's a remarkably low bar," Giles said drily.
"Welcome to Sunnydale."
There was a long silence. The kind of silence that happens when everyone in a room is processing information that doesn't fit into their existing understanding of reality.
Joyce broke it.
"Buffy," she said, her voice remarkably steady for a woman who had just watched thirty-seven zombies disintegrate. "Is this... is this what your life is like? Zombies and vampires and... and *this*?"
Buffy looked at her mother. The weight of the question—the real question, the one underneath—pressed down on her like a physical force. *Is this what you've been hiding from me? Is this why you sneak out at night? Is this why you're always hurt, always tired, always carrying something I can't see?*
"Yeah, Mom," Buffy said quietly. "This is what my life is like."
Joyce was silent for a moment. Then she stood up, walked to Buffy, and pulled her into a hug so fierce that Buffy's ribs creaked.
"I'm so sorry," Joyce whispered. "I'm so sorry I didn't know."
Buffy broke.
She hadn't cried—really cried—since she'd come back to Sunnydale. She'd cried during the argument with Willow, but those were frustration tears, anger tears. These were different. These were the tears of a girl who had been carrying the weight of the world since she was fifteen and had finally, *finally* been given permission to set it down.
She sobbed into her mother's shoulder, and Joyce held her, and the Scoobies watched with the awkward tenderness of people witnessing something sacred.
Stiles watched too. And something in his chest—something that wasn't the Dark One, something that was still Stiles Stilinski of Beacon Hills, the boy who had lost his mother at ten and his life at seventeen—ached with a pain that no magic could cure.
He looked away.
Faith caught his eye from across the room. She was watching him with an expression he couldn't quite decipher—soft, searching, as if she was looking for the human beneath the monster.
He gave her the smallest nod. *I'm still here. Under all of this, I'm still here.*
She nodded back.
---
### Part Eight: The Terms
After Buffy and Joyce had separated, after the tears had been wiped and the dust had been swept and the broken windows had been covered with cardboard, Giles took off his glasses for the fourth time and addressed Stiles with the measured tone of a man negotiating with a nuclear weapon.
"You said you're not from this dimension."
"Correct."
"And you're a vampire."
"Among other things."
"What other things?"
Stiles considered how much to reveal. The Dark One's instincts—Rumplestiltskin's instincts, specifically—urged caution. Never reveal more than necessary. Knowledge is power, and power shared is power halved.
But Stiles wasn't Rumplestiltskin. He wasn't playing a centuries-long chess game. He was a seventeen-year-old dead boy trying to build a life in a world that wasn't his, and these people—annoying, fragile, *good* people—were the closest thing to allies he had.
"I'm something called the Dark One," he said. "It's a title, not a species. It means I have access to a form of magic that is, for all practical purposes, unlimited. No restrictions. No cost. No limitations."
"No *cost*?" Giles repeated, and Buffy could hear the alarm in his voice. Giles believed in rules. Magic had rules. Power had prices. The idea of unlimited, cost-free magic was, to Rupert Giles, roughly equivalent to the idea of a gun with infinite bullets and no recoil.
"None," Stiles confirmed. "In my world—the world where the Dark One originated—there was a price. Magic always came with a cost. But when the power transferred to me, the rules changed. I don't know why. I don't particularly care. The point is, I can do anything."
"Anything," Giles repeated.
"Anything. Teleportation. Transmutation. Temporal manipulation. Resurrection, theoretically, though I haven't tested that one. I can create matter from nothing. I can unmake matter into nothing. I can rewrite the laws of physics in a localized area. I can—" He paused, seeing their expressions. "You get the idea."
"That's..." Willow breathed. "That's not possible."
"And yet," Stiles said, gesturing at the piles of ash on the floor.
"Why are you telling us this?" Buffy asked. Her voice was steady, but her eyes were guarded. "You could have compelled all of us to forget. You could have handled the zombies without revealing yourself. Why show your hand?"
It was a good question. A Slayer's question—tactical, suspicious, cutting to the heart of the matter.
Stiles looked at her. For a moment, his expression was unguarded—no smirk, no charm, no Dark One mystique. Just a tired boy with too much power and not enough reasons to use it.
"Because I'm lonely," he said.
The honesty of it hit the room like a shockwave. Even Cordelia looked uncomfortable.
"I've been in this world for two months," Stiles continued. "I've spent that time learning, feeding, building resources. But I haven't talked to anyone—*really* talked—since I died. The girls on Crawford Street are compelled. They're content, but they're not friends. They're not *real*. I came to Sunnydale because this is where the action is, but I stayed because of you."
He looked at each of them again.
"You fight. Every night, against impossible odds, with no powers and no magic and no guarantee that you'll survive. You do it because it's right. Because someone has to. Because you're *good*." He paused. "I'm not good. I don't think I ever will be. But I'd like to stand next to people who are."
Silence.
Then Xander said, "Okay, but you're still kidnapping people, right? Like, that's still happening?"
Stiles blinked. Then he laughed—a real, genuine laugh that startled everyone, including himself.
"I'll release them," he said. "Tomorrow. I'll compel them to forget, return them to their homes, and find... alternative arrangements for feeding."
"What kind of alternative arrangements?" Giles asked warily.
"Blood bags. Hospital theft. Willing donors, if I can find them." He glanced at Buffy and Faith. "I have some options."
Buffy's cheeks flushed. Faith's didn't.
"So, what?" Xander said. "You want to join the Scooby Gang? Fight the good fight? Be one of the white hats?"
"I want to fight on the same side as you," Stiles said. "I won't pretend to be a white hat. I'll never be that. But I can be an ally. A very, very powerful ally."
Giles looked at Buffy. "This is your decision."
Buffy looked at Stiles for a long time. She looked at the ash on the floor. She looked at her mother, who was watching with an expression that said *I don't understand any of this but I trust you*. She looked at Faith, who was watching Stiles with naked adoration that she wasn't bothering to hide.
"Probation," Buffy said finally. "You help us. You don't hurt anyone. You release the girls. And if you step out of line—"
"You'll try to kill me," Stiles finished. "You won't succeed, but I appreciate the sentiment."
"Don't push it."
Stiles smiled. "Wouldn't dream of it."
He extended his hand. Buffy looked at it for a moment, then took it. His grip was cool and firm and sent that same electric jolt through her palm.
"Welcome to the team," she said. "Don't make me regret this."
"Oh, you'll definitely regret this," Stiles said cheerfully. "But in a fun way."
---
### Part Nine: Midnight
The party was over. The guests were gone. The house was quiet.
Buffy lay in her bed, staring at the ceiling, replaying the night in her head. The argument with Willow. The zombies. Stiles. Her mother's hug. The alliance.
She heard the soft displacement of air that meant he was there.
"You said you'd come to me," she murmured without looking.
"And here I am," Stiles said. He was sitting in the chair by her window, one leg crossed over the other, looking at her with those impossible eyes. In the moonlight, they were amber—warm, almost human.
"The compulsion," Buffy said. "The one that stops me from talking about you. Remove it."
"No."
"Why?"
"Because you're not ready," Stiles said. "If I remove it now, the first thing you'll do is tell Giles everything. Everything about the feeding, the compulsion, the bite. And Giles will call the Watchers' Council, and the Council will send a team, and I'll have to kill them, and then things get messy. I'd rather avoid messy."
"You could just... not kill them."
"I could. But the Council doesn't negotiate with vampires. They hunt and they kill and they congratulate themselves afterward. I've read about them in your Watcher's books. They're not good people, Buffy. They use Slayers as weapons and throw them away when they break."
Buffy was quiet. She knew he was right. She'd seen hints of the Council's ruthlessness in Giles's reluctant stories. She didn't trust them.
"I'll remove the compulsion eventually," Stiles said. "When the time is right. When you trust me enough to keep my secrets voluntarily. I don't want you silent because magic forces you to be. I want you silent because you choose to be."
"That might never happen."
"It might not," he agreed. "But I told you—I'm patient."
He stood up and moved to the bed. Buffy tensed, but he didn't touch her. He sat on the edge, a respectful distance away, and looked out the window.
"Thank you," Buffy said. The words surprised her. She wasn't sure where they came from.
"For what?"
"For saving the party. For not hurting anyone. For... being honest, even if only partially."
Stiles looked at her. His expression was soft in a way that didn't match the predator she knew him to be.
"You're welcome," he said.
"This doesn't mean I like you."
"Of course not."
"Or that I'm your... your *pet*."
"Absolutely not."
"Or that I want you to bite me again."
Stiles smiled. "Buffy."
"What?"
"Your heartbeat is incredibly fast right now."
She threw a pillow at him. He caught it, laughing, and the sound was so warm and human that it made her chest hurt.
"Go away," she said.
"Goodnight, Buffy."
He dissolved into smoke, and she was alone.
She pressed her hand against her neck—against the spot where he'd bitten her, where the skin was perfectly smooth and the memory of bliss was anything but.
"I don't like him," she told the empty room.
The empty room was not convinced.
---
### Part Ten: Faith
Across town, in her new motel room with its clean sheets and locking bathroom door, Faith Lehane stood at the window and watched the stars.
She felt the smoke before she saw it.
"You know," she said without turning around, "normal people knock."
"Normal people are boring," Stiles said. He was behind her, close enough that she could feel the cool radiation of his skin. "Did you have fun tonight?"
"Zombies crashed the party."
"Besides that."
Faith turned around. He was right there—inches away—and she didn't step back. She met his eyes, those amber eyes that could turn gold and red and held centuries of darkness behind them.
"You were showing off," she said. "With the zombies. You could have stopped them quietly. You wanted them all to see."
"Guilty," Stiles said.
"Why?"
"Because I'm tired of hiding. Because I wanted Buffy's friends to know that I'm real. Because I wanted *you* to see what I can do."
"I already know what you can do," Faith said. "You bit me, remember? You made me feel—" She stopped. Her jaw clenched. "You know what you made me feel."
"I do," Stiles said softly. "And I want you to know that it wasn't a trick. What you felt was real. The bliss, the warmth, the belonging—I enhanced it with the bite, but I didn't create it from nothing. Those feelings were already inside you. I just... unlocked them."
Faith's eyes glistened. She blinked hard.
"Don't," she said. "Don't be nice to me. I don't know how to handle nice."
"I know," Stiles said. "That's why I'm going to keep doing it until you learn."
He reached out and cupped her face in his hands. His palms were cool against her flushed cheeks. She could have pulled away. She could have punched him. She could have done a hundred things.
She leaned into his touch.
"You called me your pet," she whispered. "At school. You said I was yours."
"You are."
"What does that mean? What am I to you?"
Stiles was quiet for a moment. His thumbs traced the line of her cheekbones.
"You're Faith," he said. "You're a Slayer. You're strong and wild and broken in ways that most people can't understand. You're the girl who chose me when I gave her a reason to say no. And you're mine—not because I compelled you, not because I forced you, but because you *chose* to be."
He leaned forward and pressed his lips to her forehead. It was a tender gesture—almost parental, almost reverent—and it shattered something inside Faith that she'd been holding together with spit and stubbornness for seventeen years.
She grabbed the front of his shirt and kissed him.
It wasn't tender. It was desperate—a collision of mouths and need and loneliness so profound it had its own gravitational pull. She kissed him like she was drowning and he was air. She kissed him like she was trying to crawl inside him and hide from the world.
Stiles kissed her back. He wrapped his arms around her and held her against him, and his strength was absolute—she couldn't have broken his grip if she'd tried, and she didn't try—and for the first time in Faith Lehane's life, she felt completely, utterly safe.
When they broke apart, she was breathing hard. Her lips were swollen. Her eyes were wet.
"Bite me," she said.
"Faith—"
"Bite me. Please. I need it. I need to feel it again."
He looked at her. He read the desperation in her face, the hunger, the need that went so far beyond blood or bliss that it touched something fundamental in the human condition—the need to be wanted, to be held, to be consumed by something bigger than yourself.
He tilted her head gently, exposing the curve of her neck.
"It won't hurt," he murmured.
"I know."
He bit down.
Faith's eyes rolled back. Her knees buckled. Stiles caught her easily, one arm around her waist, the other cradling her head, and he drank slowly—savoring the whiskey-and-wildfire taste of her Slayer blood while the bliss washed through her in golden waves.
She clung to him, her fingers twisted in his shirt, her body trembling, soft sounds escaping her lips that were half pleasure, half prayer.
When he pulled away, healing the wound with a touch, she was limp in his arms. He carried her to the bed and laid her down gently. He pulled the covers over her and brushed the hair from her face.
"Stay," she whispered. Her eyes were heavy, drowsy with endorphins and spent emotion.
Stiles hesitated. The Dark One didn't sleep. Didn't need to. But—
He lay down beside her, on top of the covers, and let her curl into his side. Her head rested on his chest, her breathing evening out, her hand fisted in his shirt as if she was afraid he'd disappear.
"I'm not going anywhere," he said.
"Promise?"
"I promise."
She was asleep in minutes.
Stiles lay in the dark, a Slayer in his arms, and stared at the ceiling of a cheap motel room in a town built on a gateway to hell. He could feel Buffy across town, dreaming restlessly. He could feel the Hellmouth pulsing beneath the earth. He could feel the future rushing toward them—the Mayor, the Initiative, Glory, the First Evil—an avalanche of darkness that would test everything they had.
But tonight, the darkness was quiet.
Tonight, he held a girl who had never been held, and he made a promise he intended to keep.
*I'm not going anywhere.*
The Dark One closed his eyes and, for the first time since he'd died in another world, found something that felt almost like peace.
---
**END OF CHAPTER 3**
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*Next: Chapter 4 — "Faith, Hope and Trick." Kakistos comes to Sunnydale. Stiles has opinions about ancient vampires who hurt his property. They are not gentle opinions.*