title: Shoebox
series: The Faculty
characters: Zeke, Casey
scenario: AU. Marybeth doesn't go down, alone.
notes: (written 11.05.05; revised 12.15.05; G) Plotbunny. This originally came to me as this single snapshot, but the idea of expanding on it is becoming awfully appealing. Probably because I am an awful person.

Somehow, there were more pictures than he could comfortably account for. More weight and age than felt reasonable, even given the wear on that old Canon--and it was well worn. He knew it intimately. Its shape and peculiar gravity were etched viciously into his hands, curling them in its absence. Making his fingertips itch to slide against the familiar smudges in chrome and grain. Overlaying old, time-smooth prints with his own, real ones.

Familiar and not, as his knowledge was borne of obsession, rather than time.

His fingers traced against the edges of the photos instead: focusing, sifting, framing. Colors and blacks and whites all shook apart and merged under his touch, haphazard and meaningless. Captures of people and places, surreal. Of times long before it ever occured to him that the photographer even existed. Of times before he simply existed, himself. So very long ago...

There was one of Stan, small and awkward, walking a dog bigger than himself, through piles of leaves. Another, of Delilah leaning into the open window of a car, eyes carelessly bright, a smattering of tiny freckles stark but lost to her smile. Frank Connor, studying the newspaper, his face softened with unknown, pleasant thought. The faces continued to spill out in front of him, and he recognized them all... Didn't. Did. Caught stripped down and imortalized in that lens, they became aliens that his brain just barely managed to supply names for.

Frowning, he swiped the blade of his hand across the top of the pile, leveling and making the images incoherent again. Intending to be done with it. Except he looked again, without meaning to, and it took him a moment to realize he'd gone still. That he was looking down into his own face--

Cloudy day. A pass of shadow, obscuring his eyes behind glasses he wouldn't wear again, publically, after he turned sixteen. Hunched on a stoop, somewhere, textbook in hand and pencil in mouth. A furtive glance over his shoulder, as though he'd heard something...

Carefully, he shut the lid of the shoebox, somehow knowing exactly why Casey would preserve that memory. Nevermind that he couldn't place it, himself. Not many people recalled that he used to be an honor student, when he first moved to Herrington. But then, two weeks was hardly enough time to settle in, anyway.

Closing his eyes, he willed those thoughts--those images--away. He didn't want to remember. None of them wanted to, except Casey Connor. Not that they did him any fucking good, now. But maybe that's why his parents were so willing to give these up--to let the camera sit, unclaimed, in Zeke's garage--not that they had any interest in it, anyway. Rich as the history was, nestled in this battered box, their son wasn't in any of these photos. And never would be. Would never be behind the lens to capture another person without their face on, again. Another person without his face.

And even without a photo, Zeke would never be allowed to forget that.