What's Left

Disclaimer: Characters and Premise are borrowed from the show "Buffy, the Vampire Slayer."

It's an odd thing to thing of, but tonight I find myself realizing that there's not a person left on this planet who even knows the name of the person I once was.

It was Cordy's party that started this line of though, watching her young, mortal friends laugh and pretend. I used to be so much like them. Now I can't even remember how to talk to another person if demons or evil aren't some part of the conversation.

Cordy asked me if this party were my idea of Hell. It was just an expression when she said it, but I replied that I knew more people in Hell. I had to remind her that for me Hell isn't an expression; it's a stamp on my passport.

I tried to talk to her friend Laura, tried to mingle. I watched Wesley mingling, a picture to strike terror into the heart of any self –respecting demon. I ended up spending the evening sharing a beer with Cordy's dead roommate; I had more in common with him than the other partygoers.

Cordy wasn't happy. I tried, I really tried, but I just don't remember how to be a part of life. I don't like large groups of people anymore. Their scent, their warmth, the thunderous roar of their heartbeats, they all remind me that I'm not one of them. My demon loved those sensations, the feel of being apart, a predator moving unsuspected among the sheep. To him it was a thrill, a joke, to chat with them, to pretend he was one of them, to win their trust. He loved to play with them till that delicious moment when he would reveal his true visage then wait for the horror to dawn on them before sinking fangs into their fragile bodies, and then casting aside their drained husks.

Since my soul as returned I've lost all interest in crowds, in parties. Such gatherings bring too many memories, and not just of the demon's hunting patterns. It's even harder to have the memories of the wild foolish boy who would never leave Galway drug to the surface.

That boy was even more at home at a celebration than the demon he became. He loved the spotlight; in every gathering he was the center of attention. Until he passed out from the drink, that was. Weather it was the nightly gathering at the town pub or the fancy dress affairs at the residence of one of the gentry I'd be the first to arrive and left only when kicked out.

I despised my real life; it was too bland, too ordinary. I was the son of a small landowner. I hated my father, I wasn't what he wanted and he wasn't what I wanted. He was Galway born and had never traveled more than a score of miles from his holding. He was a hard worker and he saw to it that the families little holding stayed profitable.

My mother was another story; she was a lovely woman, and a titled Lady despite having married beneath herself. She'd been educated in London itself when she was a girl and knew all the court graces. But she went and fell in love with my father anyway. I never understood it while I was alive.

My mother saw to it that my sister and I could read and write both English and Latin as well as do figures and she taught us the manners expected in polite society.

With her teachings and my appearance I gained access to the local upper class. My father hardily disapproved, he saw everything I enjoyed as worthless, for my carousing to my sketches. I hated him for disapproving of me, and I was ashamed of him because my friends looked down on him. What was worse was that despite everything I always knew that either of my parents were worth a dozen of my friends.

Once I could have empathized with Cordelia when she realized that she needed more than money and looks in a potential boyfriend. I spent enough of my time looking for a woman among the gentry willing to marry me, who didn't bore me to death with her empty headed prattling.

Once I could have been just another of Cordelia's acquaintances, all of them desperately hoping to be noticed, to become somebody important, but that was so long ago. The boy I had been would never have recognized what I have become. He wouldn't have spent the evening in the kitchen talking with a ghost; he would have fit in perfectly. He always did, even at the parties he had to crash to get into.

I can freely admit that the boy I had been was hardly worth the space he took up. And with the number of scrapes he got in it was a wonder he lived long enough for Darla to meet him. In twenty-six years I am forced to acknowledge he hadn't done anything worth note.

Still a part of me misses him, he was young, free of guilt and horror. He dreamt of seeing the world and leaving his mark upon it. And a century and a half after he died, I woke up and found the dream a nightmare. For a few precious seconds in that gypsy comp Liam was returned to life. Then the memories came and the horror of what Angelus, the one with the Angelic face, the scourge of Europe, had done changed that boy so much that he might as well have died all over again.

I'd seen the world, and made it scream and bleed. In my wake I'd left chaos and death on a scale that the boy I'd been couldn't have imagined. Liam couldn't fact those memories, and so I came into being. Neither the demon nor the mortal, but something between them and different from them.

The demon's deeds will live on in infamy and I like to think that since joining Buffy a few of my action have altered the world for the better, but the mortal boy Liam lived and died without ever touching this world in any way at all. In the end the only mark of permanence that he left was his name on a rock in Galway's cemetery. By now it's likely even that has worn away. I wish it had been otherwise.

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