Author:  LJ
Rating: never more than a strong PG-13/15
Spoilers: up to about half-way through Graduation Day, Part 2; some spoilers for Somnambulist, The Prodigal, and Five by Five (you know what I'm talking about). Possible spoilers for other episodes in the future.
Relationship: Angel/Willow, but probably only friends.
Summary: Only two people survive the Mayor's ascension. A rewrite of the ending to Graduation Day, Part 2.
This sort of answers Bri Harper's Amnesia Challenge #2 (to a certain degree), which can be found here.
Feedback: As necessary as blood for a vampire.

Graduation Day 1999, Sunnydale, California

It was dark now. She had run out of tears for the dead and could only stand and stare.

She did not fear that vampires would find her. She knew that there couldn't be too many left in Sunnydale to begin with, and they tended to keep quiet for a few days after an event like this.

A disaster like this.

She wanted to cry again but simply couldn't find the tears.

She walked amidst the ruins, searching for any other survivors. She didn't know what had gone wrong, and she really didn't want to know either; if she knew, then she could find some way of putting herself at fault.

And she didn't want to be the one at fault for destroying not only the high school and killing everyone in attendance save herself, but also triggering the chain reaction that had pretty much wiped Sunnydale, California, off the map.

She was the sole survivor.

She suddenly had the sinking suspicion that she was being watched. She looked around slowly and saw nothing, felt nothing new. When the feeling continued, she moved on in her search.

Suddenly, another, a different feeling washed over her. Not quite dread, yet it wasn't entirely comforting either. She paused a moment and then spotted the source of her uneasy feeling. She saw, just barely, a man, almost hidden by some debris. It covered him completely on all but one side, and she knew that was what must have saved him when the eclipse had ended and the sun had shone for a mere hour before leaving and submerging the world into darkness again.

It was Angel.

In her heart there was a moment of happiness. Even though he was unconscious and looked terribly injured, he wasn't dust yet, and so there was some hope. She quickly knelt beside him and tried to wake him, foregoing the useless search for breathing or a pulse.

"Angel? Angel, can you hear me? Are you all right?"

There was no answer.

Wanting to swear and curse, but for some reason deciding not to, she stood again and began moving the boards and beams which covered him, objects which would have been impossible for her to lift only hours earlier. She did not dwell on the reason for her sudden strength.

She knelt down again and examined the unconscious vampire carefully. She was honestly not certain he would survive, vampiric healing or no. She guessed that at least one leg was broken, and possibly an arm, and there was a deep, long gash on the backside of his head that she was rather worried about. The rest of him was heavily bruised and battered.

She lifted him and held him in a fireman's grip, seeing a little irony in the role reversal. By all reason, he should have been the one carrying her, not vice versa.

Again, her strength did not surprise her. She knew now who she was:

Willow Rosenberg, the Vampire Slayer.

The bruising had begun to fade a little, but it wasn't until she'd seen his eyelids flicker in REM sleep that Willow began to truly believe that Angel would eventually awaken.

She wondered what he was dreaming about, and when she came closer to him and his face involuntarily changed, she suspected that vampires were like dogs and cats: they dreamed of the hunt.

When Oz had still been alive, he had been like that on full-moon nights while sleeping. The wolf had dreamed of the hunt, too. When he had still been alive.

When this realization had occurred to her, it had scared her a little. Willow had intended on cutting herself and trying to get him to drink from her, but the idea that he might have reverted to a baser form, as he had upon his return from Hell, and was dreaming of hunting had frightened her. What if she couldn't get him to stop drinking once he started, even with her new Slayer's strength?

In the end, her heart had won and she'd cut her arm and held it, bleeding, in front of his mouth. After a moment his fangs lowered the rest of the way and he had bitten her. She hadn't liked it, but knew that her blood, now that she was a Slayer, was the the best medicine for him.

And it was what Buffy would have done - for a second time - if she were still alive.

On the third day of feeding him like this, he opened his eyes, his face turning human as he stared at her. A frown had appeared on his face and he'd whispered something to her in a language she didn't really recognize. She suspected it had been Irish Gaelic, but she wasn't sure and had no way of really knowing at that point.

Giles would have been able to tell her. And if he hadn't have know, Wesley might have.

If they were still alive.

After that brief moment Angel had fallen asleep again. It was a more normal sleep, rather than a coma, she wanted to believe. He was needlessly breathing, which Buffy had once told her he sometimes did when he was sleeping. It was as if, during his sleep, his brain forgot he was a vampire and started telling his lungs to work again.

The bruising continued to fade. Angel's eyes opened a few times again in the following days, speaking only once more, but she was now certain it had been Gaelic. She had known a few words, lyrics from an Enya song she had liked, and had recognized them.

Then, on the seventh day, she came into the room to find him trying to sit up on his own. They stared at each other for a few moments, and finally he spoke:

"You're the Slayer, aren't you?"

"You're the Slayer, aren't you?" The question was asked in a heavy Irish brogue.

"I am now," Willow replied after a moment.

He looked at her, the expression on his face one of being lost in thought. "There was a blonde Slayer before you, wasn't there?" he asked suddenly.

She nodded. She had anticipated some level of amnesia, both due to the length of unconsciousness and the nasty injury to his head, but had hoped it wouldn't happen.

"Just now, the image of a blonde lass appeared to me, like a ghost," he told her, "and I knew she was a Slayer. But I knew when I saw you that you're one as well."

She nodded again and sat down beside him. After a moment she asked, "Do you remember who I am?"

He was silent for a moment. "A tree that can do magic," he told her. "But I don't know what that means."

She smiled sadly. "My name is Willow," she told him. "Do you know who you are?"

He frowned, as if searching inside himself for the answer. "I know my name is Liam, but I also know that I changed it." He paused. "I can't remember what the new one is, though, or why I changed it."

"It's Angel," she told him. "Your name is Angel." Seeing him frown again, she added, "But I can call you Liam if you want," realizing that it must have been his human name.

He nodded. She decided to continue with her last question.

"Do you know what you are?"

He inhaled sharply with realization. After several attempts to speak, he finally managed to whisper, "Vampire."

And he began to cry.

Willow had never seen a man of Angel's superficial age cry. She curled up next to him and held him until he fell asleep.

And this time she could not see him dream.

Willow awoke to the sound of screaming. She sat straight up, uncertain as to where she was at first, and then realized that she had fallen asleep next to the amnesic vampire. She turned and tried to wake him. "Angel - er, Liam! Wake up! Wake up!"

Finally he awoke, his face changing suddenly out of instinct, his eyes glowing yellow. he was breathing heavily, too, out of habit. "What..."

"Sh...it's all right," Willow whispered, comforting him. "It was only a nightmare." They sat together in the bed for a few minutes, until he calmed down. Slowly, his face turned human again. "Better?" she asked quietly.

He nodded, but there was sitll a terrified look on his face, and a wild light in his eyes. He looked...human.

"Hungry?" she asked after a long silence, watching him carefully for his reaction. When he nodded calmly, she realized that he probably didn't remember what was entailed in sating his hunger. She stood. "I'll be back in a minute, okay?"

He nodded a third time, not yet able to speak after his nightmare.

She left the room and walked a little ways down the hall to the kitchen. It was a large apartment, not far from where Buffy had told her Angel's apartment had been. She didn't feel guilty living there, eating the food she had found there and in other apartments and houses in the neighborhood. It appeared that at least one family had already been preparing for Y2K, so there was plenty of bottle water, as well as canned food. She wouldn't starve.

Nor would Angel - Liam, she corrected herself. While scavenging the day before, she had made it to Sunnydale General Hospital and had raided the blood bank. She had filled a cooler with blood bags kept fresh in refrigeration, which was still working thanks to the emergency generator, and had also taken some equipment to use to draw her own blood. She decided that from now on she'd mix a little of her own blood with the normal variety to give it that extra bit of potency to help him heal. Looking at him after they'd woken up, she'd noticed that all of the bruising was gone, and by the way in which he'd been able to flail about during his nightmare, she guessed that his arm was as good as healed and his leg was definitely improving. Even the worrisome gash on the back of his head, not quite hidden by his hair, was looking better.

She returned to the bedroom with a tall glass for Liam and a sandwich for herself. He watched her carefully, uncertain if he should say something. He began to speak, but Willow, after setting her sandwich down on the nightstand, raised her free hand to her mouth, covering it with a finger. "Shh. Eat first," she said, hading him his 'mixed drink'.

He sniffed it in disgust and a little morbid curiosity before his face changed and his demon forced him to drink. When he was finished, he looked at Willow. "I could taste you in it," he said with fear and little fascination.

She nodded. "Only a little. As a Slayer, my blood is special for vampires. It can cure diseases, it's the antidote to various poisons, and it helps with the healing process," Willow told him detachedly. "It's more potent."

"It is," he agreed. "I remember...vaguely...being sick. A Slayer cured me." He paused. "I didn't want to drink - her blood. But she made me do it." He spoke softly, but the brogue was clear. Willow wondered how long it had taken him to lose his accent the first time. He had always sounded purely American as long as she had know him.

She nodded in agreement. It had been Buffy, only a week earlier.

Liam looked at her. "It was the blonde Slayer. The one before you, Willow-tree." He paused, and then asked, "What was her name?"

Choking back the tears, she whispered, "Buffy," and fled the room, taking her food with her.

Three weeks later, Willow was still worried about Angel - no, she told herself for the thousandth time, Liam. Physically, the vampire was completely healed and in fine shape, but most of his memories had no returned. Fragments of memories sometimes crept into nightmares as he slept, and he would scream until Willow shook him awake. Listening to him talk about his nightmares in that deep brogue, Willow learned about the darker moments which had created her friend Angel and were now haunting her new friend and roommate Liam: Darla luring the drunken Irishman into that Galway alley, the mass slaughter there, Angelus tormenting Drusilla, his siring and mentoring of Penn. Everything stopped with Drusilla's rebirth as a vampire, it seemed, and despite a number of hours of thinking on it, Willow could not fathom why - unless it somehow had something to do with Spike, but she couldn't imagine what that something could be.

Liam, though he wore the same body and was similar to him in many ways, was not the man - or vampire - Willow had know as Angel. He was still melancholy and brooded fairly often, but that was to be expected, given his amnesia and constant confusion and befuddlement at the modern world. But Liam could also be talkative, and even funny, leaving Willow to wonder if maybe that had been why Angel and Xander had never gotten along: Angel saw in Xander a variantion on his human self, a person who had died some two hundred and fifty years earlier. He regretted the events which had led him to Darla's embrace, and had not wanted to see more of the same with Xander.

They had created a sort of routine and were now living on vampire time for the most part. Sometime in the late afternoon, they would wake up and get started with their day. At dusk, Willow would go on patrol, and Liam would sometimes join her if he felt up to it. He still wasn't very good at fighting, but the instincts were still there and he was improving slowly. By midnight, they would have covered most of what was left of Sunnydale, and they would go home. They would eat and talk and find ways of amusing themselves; Willow would write in her journal, and Liam would draw. In the wee hours of the morning, they would go to bed simply because there was very little else to do. A few times during the daylight hours, Liam would start screaming and Willow would come to him and wake him from the nightmare.  Sometimes Willow would then stay with him, and they would sleep, curled up together like mother and child. Then, the sky would start to darken, and the cycle would repeat itself. Each day was identical to the last and the next; only Liam's nightmares changed.

But at a quarter til noon on the fourth day of the third week, the entire world changed for them with a knock at the door.

Willow awoke suddenly at the almost foreign noise. Sunnydale had become a ghost town, silent like a grave. There were a few vampires left, but not many. Most had migrated to Los Angeles, and the ones still in Sunnydale were slowly starving to death, making them easy targets for the recently Chosen Slayer. Willow saw them as props in a sort of Slaying crash course: Slaying 101 - Vampire Staking for Beginners. And no demons remained either, that she knew of. The mass exodus to Los Angeles was over.

So it hadn't even entered the realm of possibility that someone would ever knock on their door.

Willow stood and sleepily makde it to the door, checking on Liam on her way. He continued his impersonation of a corpse despite the knocking. At least he's not having another nightmare, Willow thought to herself gratefully.

As she approached the door, she felt a strangle tingle along her spine, which she believed to be what Buffy had always called her "spider-sense". Whoever this person was, he wasn't human-

Or was he? The dark-haired man who stood before her certainly looked human. And he seemed to share some genes with Xander in addition to the hair, those for color-blindness and fashion sense - or the lack thereof - in particular. Sheesh, Willow thougght to herself, talk about channeling my inner Cordelia.

"Willow Rosenberg?" the man asked.

Is that a trace of an Irish accent I hear? she asked herself. Goddess, am I to be surrounded by nothing but Irishmen? "Yeah?"

"I have a little proposition for you, Red - for you and the vampire with a soul back there," he told her, gesturing towards Liam's bedroom. He drew himself up, as though trying to impress her with his height - which wasn't impressive at all. But when he looked her straight in the eyes, she saw that, at least in that particular moment, he was all business. He gave her a sad little smile, and then said:

"My name is Doyle."