Title: Daguerreotype

Author: lilithangel

Website: www.livejournal.com/users/lilithbint

Fandom: Ats/BtVS

Genre: character study

Rating: General

Characters: Spike

A/N: Inspired by SueWorld2003 picture The Road to Nowhere. I loved Sue's manipulation and it made me think about photographs and here we are. Just a drabble about memories.

Daguerreotype

The one thing Spike regretted losing when Sunnydale collapsed was his box of photos.

From the first picture Darla, Angelus, Dru and he had posed for Spike had collected the images constantly fascinated by the way they never seemed to change.

He had learnt after Prague not to leave them hidden where they stayed instead once they settled into a place he would hire a safety deposit box only going to look at them at his most depressed moments, pulling each image out and staring at it putting aside his favourites to look at again.

It was how he tracked the subtle changes on his face, even though vampires weren't supposed to age there were changes. After the chip he had fewer photos as they began to show more of his pain and misery than he was comfortable with.

The earliest ones were stiff posed affairs, Darla with her permanent air of condescension, Angelus with that half sneer that hinted how much he despised the world and Dru, his dark princess with her fey madness struggling to keep still long enough for the photo to be taken.

With the advent of the snapshot the pictures came thick and fast. For a while Spike had his own camera and took shots of Dru by the camera full. The few times he encountered Angel he would steal as many shots as he could before the dark broody one realised. Many of them were fuzzy taken from a distance at speed but he treasured them all the same.

Most important were the ones he had taken of himself, it had not been difficult to find people willing to take his photo and looking at the developed film he could understand why, in an abstract sort of way. His nose was too big and his ears stuck out but somehow the package came together well enough he supposed.

The choice of the blond hair and black nail polish had been a deliberate one after seeing himself in the sixties in their hippy stage. Punk suited him so much more than the wet flower power look that reminded him too much of his human life.

He even had some photos in demon face taken just before he ripped the throats out of the terrified photographers; they were always out of focus because of the shaking hands that held them.

He liked himself in the forties, loved the clothes and the hats and fancied himself a bit of a Carey Grant type charming the ladies (and gents) out of their valuables and then their blood.

Right at the bottom he had the purloined pictures of Buffy and the other Scoobies along with a series of Angel taken by a private investigator he had hired after the first encounter in Sunnydale.

He knew he had an obsessive streak and did not question too deeply his choices of favourite pictures but it was the Daguerreotype of Angelus that was always the last to go back in the box. It was faded with time and even his careful handling had not protected it from damage. Angelus was on his own stiff in his eighteenth century clothes but watching the camera with a relaxed almost happy expression.

An expression that Spike only remembered seeing directed at him once, before the soul before the ugliness between them one moment of intimacy that he held deep inside whenever he and Angel raged at each other.

After the soul he didn't want to look on his own face again and the photos stayed in the bank where he left them to be pulled down into the crater that had once been Sunnydale.

He did miss them though, reminders of an easier time. Once he was dragged screaming back into the world again and the angry face of Angel filled his vision he missed them even more.

THE END