DISCLAIMER: Not mine, never will be, blah blah
TIMELINE: set 10 years after 'Chosen'
SPOILERS: Most of the shows, particular the B/A saga.
SYNOPSIS: What lurks behind the curtains?
DISTRIBUTION: My site, The Angel and Buffy Show (www.geocities.com/angel_and_buffy_show). If you want it, just ask.
FEEDBACK: yes, please. My second fic, I really need responses!
RATING: PG-13
AN: Written for 'Buffy Survivor', week one. The assignment was "write a fic between 300-1000 words, include the words 'wine', 'a bubble-bath' and 'photo album'.

She always comes home around 4:30pm. She drops her keys on the table by the front door, hangs her jacket on the hall tree, stretches her arms above her head and sighs deeply. Next she starts dinner, different courses every day of the week. She isn't a gourmet cook, there are lots of days she just put some fast-food on the table. Some days, after dinner, she stretches out on the couch with a glass of wine or a snack, all depending on her mood, or the weather. When she falls asleep with the TV on, as she does on most week days, she is so relaxed and content, and is the most beautiful thing in this dimension, and every single dimension he had ever been in. That's when he usually draws her, or snaps a picture, even though it is impossible to capture her beauty.

He remembered their last kiss. Standing the mouth of hell, on the day of doom. He came to town with a gift that would save them all, and left with a bad cookie-metaphor and a promise of 'maybe, someday'. It had hurt to smell Spike on her. And even though he was not ready for a relationship at the time, he had wanted more. He wanted a promise of her heart.

On Fridays, she usually goes out with her friends. Sometimes they sleep over, other times she comes home alone. She never brings men from night-clubs or bars into her home; it is as if she knows he is watching her. On Weekends she spends the day out in the sun, the afternoon at home, sometimes lying exhausted on her bed, other times soaking in the bath-tub. Even though he can not see her bathroom from where he stands, he often finds himself imagining her in the tub, surrounded by bubbles, her skin wet and glistening. He has at least fifty drawings of his Golden Blonde taking a bubble-bath.

In the ten years following their last kiss, they lost contact. She wrote him a few post-cards, never personal letters, from all over the world the first year, but after she settled for Rome, he heard no more. She didn't write, she didn't call. It didn't matter though; he had kept close tabs on her. Every time she had a new boyfriend, he knew. When she usually broke up with them some weeks later, he was the first to know.

Sometimes, when she is baking cookies, or when she is eating Cookie-dough-fudge-mint-chip ice cream, she cries. She walks across the room to sit in the chair by the window, looking out with her beautiful, teary eyes. She sits there for hours, gazing at the sky, as if searching for something. He likes to sit by his window, across the back yard formed by their building, gazing right back at her. She never sees him; he had after all been lurking for 286 years. On his wall there is a selection of pictures of her crying, of her pain.

For ten years, on every on of her birthday's, he sends her a claddagh. For ten years, on every one of her mother's day of death, he sent her a yellow rose. For ten years, on the day she kicked his butt in a long destroyed ally behind a long gone club, he sent her a cross. And for eight years, on every one of her sister's day of death, he sent a painting of dawn.

Every night she walks the streets. The demons are gone, but she can't get rid of her own. At night, he follows her, at a distance, but he still watches her every move. They never meet. He is not out much in the day; old habits are hard to lose. If she knows he's there, she never show any sign of it, and he never reveals himself.

When he Shanshued nine years after the last of their kisses, thirteen years after his last human day, sixteen years after their first meeting, he moved into her building. She didn't know, her friends didn't know. He still waited for the right time to talk to her, kiss her, to start their long denied lives together.

He wasn't stalking her, he thought as he put the latest photograph of her in his photo-album. He loved her. And for now, that was enough.

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