Title: Pictures

Author: Erin Kaye Hashet

Rating: G

Summary: Sandy POV, set sometime between The Graduates and The Avengers

Disclaimer: Not mine, don't sue

I'm writing for fredsmith518. My sentences: "Ryan laughed loudly. Sandy sighed deeply. Kirsten smiled broadly." If you were expecting something light…sorry, it's rather angsty. Here we go!

Pictures

After Ryan left, Sandy suddenly started wishing he'd taken more pictures.

Not just of Ryan. Of anything.

After Seth was born, all he and Kirsten did was take pictures. They'd filled an entire album by the time Seth was three months old. When they moved to Newport, of course they'd had to take pictures of the new house, and of Seth in his new bedroom, and swimming in the pool, and at the beach. They'd taken pictures of Seth's first day of school and of every major school event, and continued doing so up until Seth was old enough to realize that parents taking pictures of you all the time was embarrassing. After that, they cut down on the picture-taking. It was just as well, really. They were both busy with work and often forgot to bring their cameras anyway.

By the time Ryan came to live with them, their picture-taking days had long since passed. They had the picture of them that they used for their Chrismukkah cards. Other than that, there wasn't much from the last few years. There were a few from what Seth had called Ryan's Chrismukkah Bar Mitz-vukkah, but not many—that had been such an awkward night that taking pictures would only have made it more so. And a couple from Ryan's birthday party, although Ryan had spent so much time with Sadie that night that they'd tried not to interfere too much.

They did, however, have several pictures from graduation.

Sandy had dropped them off at the one-hour photo place the night of graduation, and the morning before Marissa died, he went to pick them up. Then he went to work putting them in the photo album.

Looking at them now was painful. There stood his sons and their friends, happy and nostalgic, nervous about the future but excited at the same time, never imagining what came next. In the pictures, Marissa looked happier than she'd been in years, Sandy realized. She had no idea that the next day would be her last.

In the pictures, he and Kirsten smiled broadly as they stood with their sons, never imagining that in a day, one of them would be taken away forever in spirit if not in body.

In one picture Sandy found particularly hard to look at, Ryan laughed loudly at some joke Seth had made. Whoever had taken the picture had snapped it when Ryan wasn't looking, and the result was a snapshot of Ryan with his mouth wide open in a sincere, good-natured laugh.

Sandy sighed deeply as he closed the photo album. That was one image he was fairly certain he'd never see again outside of that picture. The idealist in him didn't like to admit it, but he had a hard time imagining that Ryan would ever be okay again.

He wished he had other images like that picture of Ryan laughing caught on camera. But some of the greatest moments from the last few years, the ones that warmed his heart the most when he remembered them, were the ones too personal to be subjected to photography. Ryan's shy smile when he told them he'd unpack later. Kirsten throwing her arms around the boys after they'd returned from that horrible summer they'd spent away from them.

And to balance them out, there have been some moments in his life whose horrible images haunt his dreams, sometimes waking him up in the middle of the night. Kirsten's car accident. Ryan's car accident. Oliver holding a gun. Ryan collapsing in the hospital after Trey had been shot. Finding the note from Seth after he'd run away.

And now, the one he hasn't been able to stop thinking about for months.

It was two days after Marissa's funeral, which Ryan had spent in the pool house, lying on his bed, staring at the ceiling. Since the accident, they'd all been taking turns checking on him. They'd had to train themselves not to say, "Are you okay?" since they knew he wasn't, and to say, "Can I get you anything?" and expect his inevitable answer of, "No," since they knew there was nothing they could bring that could possibly help. Sandy wasn't sure what he was afraid of, exactly, if they left Ryan alone for too long, but with Ryan, the worst thing you could do was make him feel alone.

Assuming, of course, that he didn't thrust himself into aloneness voluntarily.

Sandy had a bad feeling as soon as his hand progressed from a few unanswered knocks on the poolhouse door to turning the knob. He knew before he looked that he wouldn't find Ryan in that room.

Months later, after they'd read and re-read the note ("Thank you for all you've done for me, but I can't stay here anymore. Don't worry about me. I'll be fine. –Ryan") he still couldn't find any trace of Ryan in the poolhouse or anywhere else. Ryan had lived in that poolhouse for three years, and yet he'd never decorated it or made it his own in any way. Once he was gone, the poolhouse looked clean, neat, with a perfectly made bed—not just the way it had for the three years Ryan had lived there, but for all the years before that as well.

It was different that summer that Seth and Ryan had both left. Ryan still called then, and Sandy occasionally went to visit him in Chino. And Seth had left most of his stuff at home. There were still traces of Seth throughout the house.

He'd never really believed that Seth wouldn't come back. He knew Seth too well to know that he always would. But Ryan was depressed, angry, and eighteen—and Sandy knew him well enough to know that he really might not come back.

Sandy looked around the room, and around the house, and found no trace of the son he'd loved for the last three years. There was almost no evidence that Ryan had ever been there at all. That he'd ever been a member of their family.

He should have taken more pictures.

The End