Pictures
By Felicity

Disclaimer: Nope, they're not mine. I wish they were!!!!

Author's Notes: This is just my little interpretation of Angel's thoughts when Buffy's pictures falls out of the book in "The Bachelor's Party".

One night, I hid all the picures of her.

It was about a month and a half after I moved to L.A., maybe more, more less. Times was nothing to me then, just night after night, day after day, missing her. Before I left, I collected pictures. She never knew, but I begged them away from Willow, her mother–I even stole into her room one night when she was out and took some from a drawer. I needed something, something physical, real, to remind me. To anchor me to her in the world, in some tiny way.

I would sit and stare at them for hours at a time. Sometimes just one. Sometimes all of them, spread before me, a fest for my soul of despair, longing, memories.

And then one night, I couldn’t look at them anymore.

I knew, in an instant, that if I spent one more moment looking at the her that wasn’t her, that still frame that captured her beauty but could never capture her soul, her vitality, her laugh or her brightness, I would be lost. I would be on my way back to Sunnydale and unable to leave again.

So I hid them.

I hid them everywhere, all separate so if I happened to find one, it would only be one. I hid them in my closet, beneath the matress in my bed, behind the bathroom cabinet, in books, in empty drawers and obscure files. I hid them all, and found the illusion of freedom, the shadow of moving on, the pale reflection of a world separate from her.

I think I remember where each and every single one is, if I think about it. After all, I’ve spent months avoiding them. It was mostly subconscious. I’d find myself deciding that drawer had nothing I wanted in it, or that book would be boring. But this time I didn’t think. I just picked up the book, and I didn’t even realize until the picture fell to Doyle’s feet.

She is so beautiful. But more than that, what really strikes me about pictures of her, is all the things just beyond the image. All the fire in her that you can almost see and yet…not.

I had almost made myself believe that I had forgotten.

In that moment, when I saw the picture again, I was lost.

And now looking at Doyle, knowing somehow what he is going to say, I know I am lost, forever.

Lost and going home. To Sunnydale. To her. To everything a picture cannot show you.