![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
myficsTitle: Boomerang [Part 6 of the "Heal" series]
Paring: Eventual Seth/Ryan, all other canon-things.
Rating: PG-13 for now.
Word Count: 2,314 (this chapter)
Summary: A hypothetical fourth season, continuing all current storylines, with eventual Seth/Ryan.
Warnings: Mentions of a 15 year old girl cutting herself in the past, only mentioned.
Disclaimer: Me = Poor. Josh Schwartz = Both very ballsy and extremely rich. Note the difference.
Spoilers: For everything. Literally.
Notes: Thanks to![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
dancinbutterfly for her help/beta on this chapter, and also for kick-starting my muse. Also, I'm writing this to prove that Seth/Ryan is still possible, now more than ever, so it'll continue ALL the storylines from the season 3 finale, meaning it does not focus TOTALLY on Ryan/Seth, though it mostly will. Please enjoy.
Part One can be found HERE
Part Two can be found HERE
Part Three can be found HERE
Part Four can be found HERE
Part Five can be found HERE
Right back where we started from.
- "California" by Phantom Planet
When Seth gets back from his shower, Ryan is still in the same position as when he left.
“All right, Ryan. So…maybe you’ll hear me through that sleep osmosis or whatever it’s called and this’ll actually sink in, okay? Listen, it’s not your fault. I know you think it was, but it’s not. Not at all. Not even a little bit. It’s that Volchok guy’s fault. You did everything you could, and no one blames you.” He starts to continue, but then he hears a soft noise.
“Yes, they do,” Ryan says. “Summer, Julie…they all blame me.”
Seth moves next to Ryan on the bed, but doesn’t touch him or pull the covers away. “Fuck ‘em,” he says softly.
“That doesn’t solve my problem,” Ryan replies.
“No,” Seth says, patting what he hopes is Ryan’s shoulder. “You’re right, Ryan. It doesn’t. But the thing is, there is no problem. I mean, other than the Marissa being dead thing, and…oh God, I just made it worse, didn’t I?”
“Nice try, Seth,” Ryan says.
Seth groans and throws himself down at the foot of the bed and starts to play Playstation.
He remembers the first time he saw Ryan. He’d been playing Playstation then, too. This very same game, in fact. Ryan had walked in, all muscles and scariness, and for some reason…Seth wasn’t scared. That alone was a miracle, because he was always scared, but something told him that this guy was different, that this guy wasn’t going to pee in his shoes or stuff him in a locker. So he held out a controller and asked, “Wanna play?” and he was pretty sure that doing so was the best thing he’d ever done in life.
He remembers the first time he looked at Ryan like he was a superhero. It was that night, on the beach, when Ryan saved him even after he’d been mean to him. No one had ever done that before and when Seth looked at him, he saw the hero of his story, not the villain like everyone else saw. But Seth had always had a knack for seeing things that weren’t obvious to most other people.
He wishes he could see what he needs to do to pull Ryan out of this.
*
Summer sits across the table from Luke, sharing a basket of chili fries.
“It’s just…I know that my dad needs to spend time with Julie, and I get that Chino’s taking this hard, but who the hell am I supposed to talk to? It’s not like I don’t miss her too, you know?”
“You can always talk to me,” Luke says.
“I don’t remember you being this helpful,” Summer says, dipping one of her fries into the chili.
“That’s ‘cuz I wasn’t,” Luke laughs. “Losing all your friends and finding out your dad is gay changes a guy.”
Summer nods thoughtfully. “I’m sorry about what happened to you, you know,” she says.
“’S not your fault. Besides, we’re here to talk about your problems, not mine, remember?”
She smiles and they continue talking until the fries are gone. It’s nice, Summer thinks, to have someone like this to talk to. She hasn’t had that in a long time.
“I…I better go,” she says, glancing outside to the total darkness of the night.
“Yeah, okay,” Luke says.
They both stand and face each other, and there’s a moment where Summer doesn’t know whether to laugh or to cry. Laugh that the only confidante she’s found in Newport is Luke-fucking-Ward, or cry that she’s only got one confidante.
It’s an awkward moment where she doesn’t know if she should shake his hand or hug him, so she settles for giving him a kiss on the cheek. She leans away and whispers, “Good night,” before heading out to her car.
The drive home is boring by herself, so she throws on a CD and lets her mind drift away with the music. Her mind is completely elsewhere, which is why she’s surprised when she pulls into the driveway and finds Seth sitting on her steps.
As soon as she gets out of the car, he runs up to her and grabs her, pulling her into a kiss. “Need to do this,” he says before he opens the door and the two of them tip-toe past the living room so as not to disturb her dad and Julie watching late night TV.
When they get to her room, she wants to yell at him for forgetting her, for choosing Ryan over her, for a lot of things, but she can’t because his tongue is in her mouth again and he’s pulling her down onto the bed and she can’t remember the last time she felt like this, so…so alive that she just lets him.
*
Kaitlin remembers coming back to her dorm room one night and finding her roommate cutting herself. Hadley looked up, surprised, and immediately tried to cover her thigh. Kaitlin just stood in the doorway like an idiot while Hadley tried to cover it up. Finally she moved across the room, sat down next to Hadley, and asked, “Why?”
It was a long time before she spoke, but Kaitlin waited.
“My dad ignores me,” Hadley answered. “He’s too busy working on The Valley all the time to really notice me. That’s why he shipped me off here, you know. And sometimes I just…I feel like I’m not good enough for him. Or anyone. Like maybe that’s why he doesn’t pay any attention to me. Even when he calls me, it’s just to complain about his ratings.”
“But…but why?” Kaitlin asked again.
“It makes me feel.”
“Feel what?”
“Just…just feel.”
But Kaitlin isn’t numb like Hadley was. She has the same problem, but she’s not numb, so she can’t deal with it that way. All she can do is try to figure out a way to scrape the mold off herself, to make herself presentable, to make herself wanted.
She considers going over to Summer’s room to talk to her, but she hears noises coming from over there and she really doesn’t want to think about Weird Neighbor Kid having any form of sex, especially not loud, and ew, raunchy sex, with her soon-to-be-step-sister, and that’s just…nasty.
So she sits back down on her bed and pulls on her headphones, cranking up her iPod, hoping to drown out the sex noises and…you know…life.
*
Sandy decides that it’s time to ask Ryan about Volchok. He can’t put it off any longer. He heads out to the pool house, pausing to avoid bumping into Seth, who is running away from the pool house like he’s got those demon water polo players he was always going on about chasing him.
“Oh, sure, run over your father, I’m of no importance,” he says to Seth’s back. He tries not to think about how fucking true that is.
He finds Ryan in the pool house, sitting in the middle of the bed, the covers bunched around his waist. He’s supporting himself on his elbows, staring at the door, eyes wide in…disbelief, perhaps? When he sees Sandy, his eyes jerk towards him and then nervously around the room.
There’s a split second where Sandy thinks that maybe Ryan is about to dive back under the covers, but he doesn’t, he just continues to stare.
“What was that about?” Sandy asks, pointing towards where Seth had just run away.
“Nothing,” Ryan says quickly.
“Okay,” Sandy says, sitting down on a chair. “Listen. Ryan, I know you don’t want to talk about it. Hell, you probably don’t even want to think about it. But…I need you to. Please. I need to know anything you can tell me about him, okay? Please. We have to find him, make him pay, right?”
“Yeah, um…Sandy, listen, there’s not much I know about him, I didn’t talk to him much. But…um…wait. Remember when that car got stolen?”
“Yeah?”
“Did they ever recover it?”
“No. Why?”
“Volchok’s the one that stole it. He ditched it somewhere, but…he may have gone back to get it. Instead of driving away in his van, he could be in it.”
Sandy pauses, working it out in his head, “So we wouldn’t find him because we’d be searching for the van in his name.”
“Exactly.”
“Kid, has anyone ever told you you’re brilliant?”
Ryan smiles at him, a real smile, the first one in a long time, and he pats Ryan’s arm before leaving the pool house. When he turns back, Ryan’s buried under the covers again, but at least it’s progress.
*
Ryan hears the pool house door open and shut, signaling Seth’s return. “All right, Ryan. So…maybe you’ll hear me through that sleep osmosis or whatever it’s called and this’ll actually sink in, okay? Listen, it’s not your fault. I know you think it was, but it’s not. Not at all. Not even a little bit. It’s that Volchok guy’s fault. You did everything you could, and no one blames you,” Seth says.
Ryan tries really hard not to cry because Seth’s lying, he knows Seth’s lying, hell, even Seth probably knows he’s lying and he just wants it all to be over, why isn’t it over yet?
“Yes, they do,” he says. “Summer, Julie…they all blame me.”
He feels the bed shift under Seth’s weight, almost senses Seth’s hand wavering above him, trying to decide what to do.
“Fuck ‘em,” Seth says softly.
“That doesn’t solve my problem,” Ryan replies.
“No,” Seth says, and Ryan feels a soft pressure on his shoulder. “You’re right, Ryan. It doesn’t. But the thing is, there is no problem. I mean, other than the Marissa being dead thing, and…oh God, I just made it worse, didn’t I?”
Ryan swallows thickly and tries to block out the mental image he’s carried with him for so long now, of Marissa, pale and ghostly, dying in his arms, but no matter what he does, it gets through, it fights through into his mind, and he can’t make it go away.
“Nice try, Seth,” Ryan says.
He hears Seth sigh and feels the bed shift as Seth gets up and soon come the sounds of the Playstation going.
Ryan remembers that first morning, back before he knew he was going to get to stay with the Cohens, when he was just a convict they were letting sleep in their pool house. He remembers coming into the main house, opening the living room door and finding Seth there, playing Playstation, and he remembers a moment of nothing but pure energy. He couldn’t explain it then, and he still can’t, but it was there and it was real. He remembers Seth asking him if he wanted to play, and he said sure, even though he’d never played before because his family couldn’t afford stuff like that in Chino.
He remembers eating cereal and letting the spoon hang out of his mouth before teaching Seth how to make it balance on the end of his nose. He remembers lots of things that day, remembers Seth yelling at him and then running to save Seth from the water polo players not because he had to, not because it was his fight, but because he wanted to, that even though Seth was mean to him, he still liked him and wanted to help him out. He remembers being scared, not of the fight and not of the guys, but scared that Seth would always hate him, and that was really weird because normally Ryan didn’t care who thought what about him.
He’s brought back to the present by Seth sitting down on the bed again and pulling the covers off his face. He leans up, propping himself up on his elbows and says, “What?”
“I’m not letting you do this, Ryan,” Seth says.
“Not letting me do what?”
“This. I’m not letting you. You’re not going back into angsty, broody, Chino-mode. I’m not letting you. So just…just stop, Ryan.”
“Seth,” Ryan starts to say, but then Seth leans down closer to him, and he can’t really talk at all.
“Stop,” Seth says again.
“Stop what?” Ryan asks.
“This,” Seth says.
His breath ghosts against Ryan’s lips as he speaks and a shiver runs down Ryan’s spine.
There’s a moment where they just stare at each other, and Ryan thinks he’s probably going to pass out because damn it, this is intense.
And then Seth leans down and their lips touch for the briefest of seconds and Ryan’s sure he’s passed out now because oh my God, that is definitely Seth kissing him.
Seth runs his tongue along Ryan’s lips and Ryan opens them in surprise, and yeah, okay, so that’s Seth’s tongue in his mouth and what on earth is going on? This can’t be real life. This has to be a dream. Maybe he’ll wake up any minute now and find that all of this, Marissa dying and Seth kissing him, maybe it’s all just one great big dream and he’ll wake up and be back to his real life.
Seth’s tongue does something particularly amazing in his mouth and he lets out a small moan, and that’s it. The moment is broken and both of them freeze. Seth leans away and stares at him, eyes wide.
There’s a long pause and neither one seems to know what to say, and finally Seth whispers, “I gotta…I gotta go,” and takes off like a bat out of hell.
He looks up and Sandy is standing in his doorway and Ryan tries his best to wipe the, “I just made out with your son,” look off his face.
“What was that about?” Sandy asks, pointing towards where Seth had just run away.
“Nothing,” Ryan says quickly.
The bad part is, he knows that it wasn’t nothing, but there’s nothing else he can think of to say.
Right back where we started from.
- "California" by Phantom Planet
So...I hope that you guys enjoyed this chapter. It was...a challenge to write because I had to try and make sure I threw in enough stuff to make it obvious that when you got to the end, you could put the pieces together. I hope that came through because...gah, it was a pain to orchestrate. Anyway, so...they kissed. I fought with myself over if that should happen yet or not, and...well, I finally decided it was time to start moving into that, so...here you go. Gah, I'm really flailing here, worried if you guys will like this or not. So...please comment because I will die if you don't. Don't let me die. If I do, you'll never know what happens. ;-)
Paring: Eventual Seth/Ryan, all other canon-things.
Rating: PG-13 for now.
Word Count: 2,314 (this chapter)
Summary: A hypothetical fourth season, continuing all current storylines, with eventual Seth/Ryan.
Warnings: Mentions of a 15 year old girl cutting herself in the past, only mentioned.
Disclaimer: Me = Poor. Josh Schwartz = Both very ballsy and extremely rich. Note the difference.
Spoilers: For everything. Literally.
Notes: Thanks to
dancinbutterfly for her help/beta on this chapter, and also for kick-starting my muse. Also, I'm writing this to prove that Seth/Ryan is still possible, now more than ever, so it'll continue ALL the storylines from the season 3 finale, meaning it does not focus TOTALLY on Ryan/Seth, though it mostly will. Please enjoy.Part One can be found HERE
Part Two can be found HERE
Part Three can be found HERE
Part Four can be found HERE
Part Five can be found HERE
Right back where we started from.
- "California" by Phantom Planet
When Seth gets back from his shower, Ryan is still in the same position as when he left.
“All right, Ryan. So…maybe you’ll hear me through that sleep osmosis or whatever it’s called and this’ll actually sink in, okay? Listen, it’s not your fault. I know you think it was, but it’s not. Not at all. Not even a little bit. It’s that Volchok guy’s fault. You did everything you could, and no one blames you.” He starts to continue, but then he hears a soft noise.
“Yes, they do,” Ryan says. “Summer, Julie…they all blame me.”
Seth moves next to Ryan on the bed, but doesn’t touch him or pull the covers away. “Fuck ‘em,” he says softly.
“That doesn’t solve my problem,” Ryan replies.
“No,” Seth says, patting what he hopes is Ryan’s shoulder. “You’re right, Ryan. It doesn’t. But the thing is, there is no problem. I mean, other than the Marissa being dead thing, and…oh God, I just made it worse, didn’t I?”
“Nice try, Seth,” Ryan says.
Seth groans and throws himself down at the foot of the bed and starts to play Playstation.
He remembers the first time he saw Ryan. He’d been playing Playstation then, too. This very same game, in fact. Ryan had walked in, all muscles and scariness, and for some reason…Seth wasn’t scared. That alone was a miracle, because he was always scared, but something told him that this guy was different, that this guy wasn’t going to pee in his shoes or stuff him in a locker. So he held out a controller and asked, “Wanna play?” and he was pretty sure that doing so was the best thing he’d ever done in life.
He remembers the first time he looked at Ryan like he was a superhero. It was that night, on the beach, when Ryan saved him even after he’d been mean to him. No one had ever done that before and when Seth looked at him, he saw the hero of his story, not the villain like everyone else saw. But Seth had always had a knack for seeing things that weren’t obvious to most other people.
He wishes he could see what he needs to do to pull Ryan out of this.
Summer sits across the table from Luke, sharing a basket of chili fries.
“It’s just…I know that my dad needs to spend time with Julie, and I get that Chino’s taking this hard, but who the hell am I supposed to talk to? It’s not like I don’t miss her too, you know?”
“You can always talk to me,” Luke says.
“I don’t remember you being this helpful,” Summer says, dipping one of her fries into the chili.
“That’s ‘cuz I wasn’t,” Luke laughs. “Losing all your friends and finding out your dad is gay changes a guy.”
Summer nods thoughtfully. “I’m sorry about what happened to you, you know,” she says.
“’S not your fault. Besides, we’re here to talk about your problems, not mine, remember?”
She smiles and they continue talking until the fries are gone. It’s nice, Summer thinks, to have someone like this to talk to. She hasn’t had that in a long time.
“I…I better go,” she says, glancing outside to the total darkness of the night.
“Yeah, okay,” Luke says.
They both stand and face each other, and there’s a moment where Summer doesn’t know whether to laugh or to cry. Laugh that the only confidante she’s found in Newport is Luke-fucking-Ward, or cry that she’s only got one confidante.
It’s an awkward moment where she doesn’t know if she should shake his hand or hug him, so she settles for giving him a kiss on the cheek. She leans away and whispers, “Good night,” before heading out to her car.
The drive home is boring by herself, so she throws on a CD and lets her mind drift away with the music. Her mind is completely elsewhere, which is why she’s surprised when she pulls into the driveway and finds Seth sitting on her steps.
As soon as she gets out of the car, he runs up to her and grabs her, pulling her into a kiss. “Need to do this,” he says before he opens the door and the two of them tip-toe past the living room so as not to disturb her dad and Julie watching late night TV.
When they get to her room, she wants to yell at him for forgetting her, for choosing Ryan over her, for a lot of things, but she can’t because his tongue is in her mouth again and he’s pulling her down onto the bed and she can’t remember the last time she felt like this, so…so alive that she just lets him.
Kaitlin remembers coming back to her dorm room one night and finding her roommate cutting herself. Hadley looked up, surprised, and immediately tried to cover her thigh. Kaitlin just stood in the doorway like an idiot while Hadley tried to cover it up. Finally she moved across the room, sat down next to Hadley, and asked, “Why?”
It was a long time before she spoke, but Kaitlin waited.
“My dad ignores me,” Hadley answered. “He’s too busy working on The Valley all the time to really notice me. That’s why he shipped me off here, you know. And sometimes I just…I feel like I’m not good enough for him. Or anyone. Like maybe that’s why he doesn’t pay any attention to me. Even when he calls me, it’s just to complain about his ratings.”
“But…but why?” Kaitlin asked again.
“It makes me feel.”
“Feel what?”
“Just…just feel.”
But Kaitlin isn’t numb like Hadley was. She has the same problem, but she’s not numb, so she can’t deal with it that way. All she can do is try to figure out a way to scrape the mold off herself, to make herself presentable, to make herself wanted.
She considers going over to Summer’s room to talk to her, but she hears noises coming from over there and she really doesn’t want to think about Weird Neighbor Kid having any form of sex, especially not loud, and ew, raunchy sex, with her soon-to-be-step-sister, and that’s just…nasty.
So she sits back down on her bed and pulls on her headphones, cranking up her iPod, hoping to drown out the sex noises and…you know…life.
Sandy decides that it’s time to ask Ryan about Volchok. He can’t put it off any longer. He heads out to the pool house, pausing to avoid bumping into Seth, who is running away from the pool house like he’s got those demon water polo players he was always going on about chasing him.
“Oh, sure, run over your father, I’m of no importance,” he says to Seth’s back. He tries not to think about how fucking true that is.
He finds Ryan in the pool house, sitting in the middle of the bed, the covers bunched around his waist. He’s supporting himself on his elbows, staring at the door, eyes wide in…disbelief, perhaps? When he sees Sandy, his eyes jerk towards him and then nervously around the room.
There’s a split second where Sandy thinks that maybe Ryan is about to dive back under the covers, but he doesn’t, he just continues to stare.
“What was that about?” Sandy asks, pointing towards where Seth had just run away.
“Nothing,” Ryan says quickly.
“Okay,” Sandy says, sitting down on a chair. “Listen. Ryan, I know you don’t want to talk about it. Hell, you probably don’t even want to think about it. But…I need you to. Please. I need to know anything you can tell me about him, okay? Please. We have to find him, make him pay, right?”
“Yeah, um…Sandy, listen, there’s not much I know about him, I didn’t talk to him much. But…um…wait. Remember when that car got stolen?”
“Yeah?”
“Did they ever recover it?”
“No. Why?”
“Volchok’s the one that stole it. He ditched it somewhere, but…he may have gone back to get it. Instead of driving away in his van, he could be in it.”
Sandy pauses, working it out in his head, “So we wouldn’t find him because we’d be searching for the van in his name.”
“Exactly.”
“Kid, has anyone ever told you you’re brilliant?”
Ryan smiles at him, a real smile, the first one in a long time, and he pats Ryan’s arm before leaving the pool house. When he turns back, Ryan’s buried under the covers again, but at least it’s progress.
Ryan hears the pool house door open and shut, signaling Seth’s return. “All right, Ryan. So…maybe you’ll hear me through that sleep osmosis or whatever it’s called and this’ll actually sink in, okay? Listen, it’s not your fault. I know you think it was, but it’s not. Not at all. Not even a little bit. It’s that Volchok guy’s fault. You did everything you could, and no one blames you,” Seth says.
Ryan tries really hard not to cry because Seth’s lying, he knows Seth’s lying, hell, even Seth probably knows he’s lying and he just wants it all to be over, why isn’t it over yet?
“Yes, they do,” he says. “Summer, Julie…they all blame me.”
He feels the bed shift under Seth’s weight, almost senses Seth’s hand wavering above him, trying to decide what to do.
“Fuck ‘em,” Seth says softly.
“That doesn’t solve my problem,” Ryan replies.
“No,” Seth says, and Ryan feels a soft pressure on his shoulder. “You’re right, Ryan. It doesn’t. But the thing is, there is no problem. I mean, other than the Marissa being dead thing, and…oh God, I just made it worse, didn’t I?”
Ryan swallows thickly and tries to block out the mental image he’s carried with him for so long now, of Marissa, pale and ghostly, dying in his arms, but no matter what he does, it gets through, it fights through into his mind, and he can’t make it go away.
“Nice try, Seth,” Ryan says.
He hears Seth sigh and feels the bed shift as Seth gets up and soon come the sounds of the Playstation going.
Ryan remembers that first morning, back before he knew he was going to get to stay with the Cohens, when he was just a convict they were letting sleep in their pool house. He remembers coming into the main house, opening the living room door and finding Seth there, playing Playstation, and he remembers a moment of nothing but pure energy. He couldn’t explain it then, and he still can’t, but it was there and it was real. He remembers Seth asking him if he wanted to play, and he said sure, even though he’d never played before because his family couldn’t afford stuff like that in Chino.
He remembers eating cereal and letting the spoon hang out of his mouth before teaching Seth how to make it balance on the end of his nose. He remembers lots of things that day, remembers Seth yelling at him and then running to save Seth from the water polo players not because he had to, not because it was his fight, but because he wanted to, that even though Seth was mean to him, he still liked him and wanted to help him out. He remembers being scared, not of the fight and not of the guys, but scared that Seth would always hate him, and that was really weird because normally Ryan didn’t care who thought what about him.
He’s brought back to the present by Seth sitting down on the bed again and pulling the covers off his face. He leans up, propping himself up on his elbows and says, “What?”
“I’m not letting you do this, Ryan,” Seth says.
“Not letting me do what?”
“This. I’m not letting you. You’re not going back into angsty, broody, Chino-mode. I’m not letting you. So just…just stop, Ryan.”
“Seth,” Ryan starts to say, but then Seth leans down closer to him, and he can’t really talk at all.
“Stop,” Seth says again.
“Stop what?” Ryan asks.
“This,” Seth says.
His breath ghosts against Ryan’s lips as he speaks and a shiver runs down Ryan’s spine.
There’s a moment where they just stare at each other, and Ryan thinks he’s probably going to pass out because damn it, this is intense.
And then Seth leans down and their lips touch for the briefest of seconds and Ryan’s sure he’s passed out now because oh my God, that is definitely Seth kissing him.
Seth runs his tongue along Ryan’s lips and Ryan opens them in surprise, and yeah, okay, so that’s Seth’s tongue in his mouth and what on earth is going on? This can’t be real life. This has to be a dream. Maybe he’ll wake up any minute now and find that all of this, Marissa dying and Seth kissing him, maybe it’s all just one great big dream and he’ll wake up and be back to his real life.
Seth’s tongue does something particularly amazing in his mouth and he lets out a small moan, and that’s it. The moment is broken and both of them freeze. Seth leans away and stares at him, eyes wide.
There’s a long pause and neither one seems to know what to say, and finally Seth whispers, “I gotta…I gotta go,” and takes off like a bat out of hell.
He looks up and Sandy is standing in his doorway and Ryan tries his best to wipe the, “I just made out with your son,” look off his face.
“What was that about?” Sandy asks, pointing towards where Seth had just run away.
“Nothing,” Ryan says quickly.
The bad part is, he knows that it wasn’t nothing, but there’s nothing else he can think of to say.
Right back where we started from.
- "California" by Phantom Planet
So...I hope that you guys enjoyed this chapter. It was...a challenge to write because I had to try and make sure I threw in enough stuff to make it obvious that when you got to the end, you could put the pieces together. I hope that came through because...gah, it was a pain to orchestrate. Anyway, so...they kissed. I fought with myself over if that should happen yet or not, and...well, I finally decided it was time to start moving into that, so...here you go. Gah, I'm really flailing here, worried if you guys will like this or not. So...please comment because I will die if you don't. Don't let me die. If I do, you'll never know what happens. ;-)
