Chapter 6

A/N: In the course of researching this chapter, I looked at a couple of episodes of the show, and the Buffy wiki. I could have sworn a small character was named, but I couldn't actually find it anywhere. Recently I figured out that I'd lifted it from one of Kari Mouk's stories. So, thank you for that.

Liam was brooding; he wouldn't have put up with anyone else saying so, but he knew he was. He just didn't know how to stop. Brooding over his choices, what was going on around him, and how he could do more good, help more people…It had been what he did for almost a decade, and before that he'd had no purpose at all, so brooding must be better than that.

Things seemed to be going well at first, after he woke up alive. Sure, his arm injury was a nuisance, but it did seem to be healing fast. He had plenty of cash to start his new life with, after Jezebel bought the Hyperion from him. Tom had come and offered to help set him up with legal documentation, which was going to be incredibly helpful now that Wolfram & Hart didn't exist anymore. Connor was even speaking to him, and was being reasonably friendly. With all of that, he'd almost felt happy to be alive.

Of course, then Tom had said he was Spike's lawyer, and was helping him out of courtesy. Then the older Slayers had told him Spike was also going to be alive again. Then Buffy had shown up to do some weird mind-melding spell with Spike, and completely ignored him. That was less fun. It was definitely contributing to the brooding.

At some point Liam realized he'd lost control of the situation. Although technically Wesley had been the boss at Angel Investigations for a while, Angel had always been their driving force, his mission becoming their mission. Now he had no mission, and his entire former team had allied themselves with the Slayers. Which was fair he supposed, they were warriors for the Powers, it was certainly a more palatable alliance for them than Wolfram & Hart had been. But his former team members were keeping their distance, and not looping him in on things. It had taken a throw-away comment from the nurse Marta for him to realize Gunn was taking Slayers out on patrol with his old demon-fighting gang. He'd heard from Connor that Lorne was looking for financial backing to open a new club. Wesley stopped by almost every day to talk to him, but he still didn't know if Wes would end up working for the Council of Watchers again or going back to private detective work. He felt disconnected from all of them, with no way back in.

Which brought him back to Spike and Buffy. Buffy must have done something, said something to the other Slayers, because Liam felt like every time he went to Spike's room the last few days there was at least one Slayer in there. Girls Liam had never met before, who hadn't been in the battle with them and who definitely never approached him, just showed up to play video games with Spike. It stank of them getting instructions from somewhere.

And, since when did Spike have a lawyer, or an estate? When did Buffy go from 'he's in my heart' and brief text messages, to spending three days basically glued to Spike? Why was Spike on the inside, while he was cast out? He just couldn't figure it out, couldn't make the pieces fit. Which led to him rehashing it over and over again, almost completely unable to focus on anything else.

He would have said Buffy was under some kind of spell or thrall, but a thrall would have broken once Spike wasn't a vampire anymore, he was pretty sure. And Willow had gotten spooked about the portal Buffy took to Los Angeles, and tested her multiple times in multiple ways for magical interference. If anything magical or coercive had its hooks in Buffy, Liam was pretty sure that Willow would have found it.

What did that mean for Buffy's decision making, then? Had Spike actually gotten the girl? It rubbed the wrong way, that he'd sacrificed so much for his redemption only to have it blow up in his face. He knew life wasn't fair, but he'd been hoping for a real shot with Buffy one day. Especially now that Cordy…Well, anyway, he'd been waiting and hoping for so long, it didn't make sense that he would never get the chance to make things right between them.

He'd tried to talk to Spike, to make him back off from Buffy the way he had when the pest first came to LA, but Spike had just looked at him and said Buffy had made him promise not to give up, and he wasn't going to let her down. Liam tried to start conversations with Spike that would shed some light on things he'd missed, but when Spike talked about Buffy nothing he said made sense. The girl he described sounded nothing like the Buffy Liam remembered. His Buffy had been sweet and eager to please, and happy to get support for her slaying. He couldn't imagine her punching Spike in the nose for helping her, no matter how amusing the image was. Asking their plans for the future was completely befuddling. When Spike talked about them 'starting over in a better place', it sounded like something from daytime TV, not a concept he would have credited either of them with thinking was necessary or desirable.

Buffy was no help either. The few times he'd been able to catch her alone, she'd told him that she needed to worry about work, and didn't have time to focus on relationships or personal stuff. When he brought up the fact that she was focusing on Spike, she'd responded that she wasn't, and that she wished she had the time but she had other things to do in LA at the moment. Which was an obvious lie, she'd spent THREE DAYS glued to his side. She'd slept with him, eaten meals with him, been there while he spoke to Dr. Neves and Dr. Lieberman, and got Jezebel to hold their updates in his room so Spike was involved in everything that went on. If that was what her being not-focused on Spike was like, there was no way Liam was getting her attention any time soon.

Which left him trying to figure out where to go and what to do next on his own, and drawing a blank. Every time he tried to think about what kind of job he might want, or where he might want to live, his thoughts spun, and he ended up frustrated. On some level he was aware he'd honed in on Buffy and Spike because at least his brain could focus on them. Part of it was a sense of being in competition with Spike, and when you piled his feelings about Buffy and his general loneliness on top, it made it hard to stop rehashing what was going on between them, trying to figure out how to stop it.

A knock on the door made him start, and Liam realized he had no idea how long he'd been sitting there staring into space. That was probably not good. "Come in." He called.

Connor poked his head around the door. "Hey, Pops. Apple's cleared to leave campus, so I'm taking her and Laurie to get ice cream. Wanna come with?"

His gut reaction was to say no. He really didn't want to get ice cream or hang out with teenagers. Then again, Connor wasn't around all the time, he still had a few weeks of school before he'd be in LA full time for the summer. They did have to talk about how much time he'd be spending at the Hyperion. He could tag along on an ice cream run if it got them some time to talk. "Umm, yeah, okay." He stood.

Connor smiled, and Liam was glad he'd said yes. He didn't see that smile much. "Awesome, meet you in the lobby in 15? You probably want to get cleaned up and stuff."

Before Liam could answer Connor had ducked back out the door and was gone. He looked down at himself. Clean up? What was there to clean up? Hesitantly, he walked over to the bathroom and looked in the mirror. He flinched. He hated this, having a reflection again. Meeting his own eyes again was like a smack across the face. It connected him to the sense of disappointing his father, seeing his face hardly changed from back then.

Which was when he noticed the stubble. He couldn't remember the last time he'd had to shave. Facial hair didn't grow well on vampires for some reason. Probably to keep it from getting in the way of biting? Anyway, the fact was that if you'd died clean-shaven you were probably going to stay that way, and maybe have to shave once every fifty years or so. He'd seen men turned with full beards they'd been keen to preserve, and they'd tried, but eventually the hair close to the mouth started falling out, and it looked so odd you had to get rid of the whole thing.

Liam winced. He didn't even own a razor, and he was so unused to shaving that it hadn't occurred to him to put one on the list when Jezebel came around requesting a list of supplies to purchase for him. Add to that the fact that he never went anywhere, and that he avoided looking in the mirror, and here he was. With a face full of stubble that was honestly not very flattering, and no way to get rid of it. At a loss for what to do, he decided to brazen it out. He splashed some water on his face, fixed his hair, and changed his shirt. Then he headed down to the lobby.

He emerged from the elevator into a stand-off, the three teenagers he'd been coming to meet as well as Marta and David Gonzales holding off a Chaos demon, who had a knife in one hand and a giant bag slung across his back like an evil Santa. The Chaos demon was shouting something at Marta, and though Liam's Spanish wasn't good, he caught a few words here and there, enough to piece together what was going on. The demon was making a delivery on behalf of Drusilla. The kids hadn't understood what he was saying when he arrived and elected to hold him there by the entryway at knifepoint until a more qualified Spanish-speaker could be located. Which freaked the demon out, so he drew a knife. Which freaked David out, when he arrived and saw an armed demon ostensibly trying to break into the building where his small children lived. So the demon was appealing rather frantically to Marta to sort everything out.

By the time he'd realized what was happening, Marta and David had as well, and the situation was already calming. As he made his way across the lobby to join the group, Marta had started negotiating the delivery of whatever was in the huge bag to its final destination, which was evidently the main purpose of the demon's visit.

Liam had the sense that there was nothing in the bag for him, although he wasn't going to bring that up, and he didn't want to examine too closely how that made him feel. As soon as he realized he'd heard Drusilla's name, he started wanting out of the situation, and to remove Connor as well. No good would come from explaining to his son who Dru was and what their relationship had been like. He was pretty sure Connor didn't know anything and didn't speak Spanish, so…

Connor turned and nudged Laurie gently, projecting his voice unintentionally in Liam's direction. "Hey, Laur, maybe go tell your mom not to come into the lobby for a while? And see if Willow can come?"

"Why?" Laurie had relaxed after Marta gave the 'stand down' order, but she wasn't picking up what was going on. It looked like Connor spoke some Spanish after all. Great.

"If that's Drusilla's ex, or widower, or whatever you want to call it, him seeing Jezebel is probably not a great idea. He might freak, even more than he already did."

Liam winced internally, hoping it wasn't visible on his face. Yeah, the first time he'd seen Jezebel had been incredibly confusing. He'd thought for a second that he was going insane, or that someone was playing a horrible joke. With the battle going on and everything, he hadn't gotten a good explanation for days after. He just kept looking at her, getting hit over the head by guilt, and having to struggle forward.

Laurie nodded and ran off up the stairs, smiling at Liam as she passed. He stepped closer to Apple and Connor, and realized that Apple was quietly translating the conversation, or at least as much of it as she could follow. Evidently her Spanish skills were slightly better than his, though not enough for complex communication.

"So, seems like the issue is Drusilla left very specific instructions that William's gift had to go directly into his hands, and Marta's not keen on letting a strange demon, even one who's mostly harmless, any deeper into the Hyperion."

"Good call." Connor whispered back, catching Liam's eye and smiling faintly. "As far as excuses to let someone in go, it's not a bad one, but how do we trust him? Will's the only person here who met the Chaos demon, and it's not like he has ID to prove it's the same guy. I thought Will said they broke up after, anyway?"

"What's this now?" Liam asked, not sure how Connor knew any of this, or even that he was following what was going on.

"Drusilla's menagerie, or whatever. First the Chaos demon, then the Fungus demon. Isn't that the way it went?" Connor looked at him like he expected his father to know what he was talking about, and not be upset about it at all. Liam worked very hard to seem like he wasn't feeling ill. When the hell had Connor learned all this stuff? When had it happened? A Fungus demon, Dru, really?

Before he could put together a response, the elevator opened again and Spike rolled himself out in a wheelchair, followed closely by Willow, who had a cell phone shoved against her ear. Spike rolled forward quickly with a frown on his face, staring blatantly at the Chaos Demon. The demon had stopped speaking to Marta entirely and was silently observing Spike's progress. When Spike reached the base of the stairs, the demon stepped down toward him and sat at the bottom riser, making them roughly eye-level.

"Hola, Gary." Spike nodded and gave the demon a forced smile. "O, cualquiera que sea tu nombre en realidad. Or, whatever your name actually is."

"Mi nombre es Guillermo. Gary esta bien." The demon slipped the bag off of his back, and while he dug around in it, his voice lowered as he rapidly said…Something. Liam wasn't sure it was still Spanish, or else it was muddled because it was too quiet and his hearing wasn't what it used to be. He tried not to be bitter.

Spike replied, pitching his own voice low. Liam strained to hear what was being said, but the kids were muttering, David and Marta were shuffling around, and Willow was off to the side talking on the phone. He went to step closer, but Connor stopped him with a hand on his arm. "Hey, Pops, we'd better go. Crisis averted and all that stuff, and the ice cream place closes at 10. We should let them deal with the ex stuff in private, or something."

He wanted to object. Liam opened his mouth to point out that he was also Drusilla's ex, and he wanted to know what was going on. Then he closed it again when he remembered he really didn't want to tell Connor anything about his relationship with Dru. So he sighed and nodded, and followed the three teenagers out of the building, with one last glance at the Chaos demon and Spike deep in conversation, the demon now crying softly.