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myficsTitle: Could've [Part 9 of the "Heal" series]
Paring: Eventual Seth/Ryan, all other canon-things.
Rating: R for now.
Word Count: 2,003 (this chapter)
Summary: A hypothetical fourth season, continuing all current storylines, with eventual Seth/Ryan.
Disclaimer: Me = Poor. Josh Schwartz = Both very ballsy and extremely rich. Note the difference.
Spoilers: For everything. Literally.
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
Part Six can be found HERE
Part Seven can be found HERE
Part Eight can be found HERE
Part Nine can be found HERE
And I don't have the time to waste on you anymore.
I don't think that you even know what you're looking for.
For my own sanity, I've got to close the door
And walk away...
- "There's a Fine, Fine Line" by The Original Broadway Cast of Avenue Q
Seth goes to the airport to say goodbye to Summer the day she leaves for Brown. He looks away when she kisses Luke goodbye and then gives her a hug and says he’ll see her in a few months. She makes him promise to call her every day of the trial, now only two months away, and let her know what’s going on. When she leaves, Luke asks Seth if he can have a ride back to his mom’s, and Seth grudgingly agrees.
“Hey, Cohen?” Luke asks as he shuts the passenger side door.
“Yeah?” Seth starts the car and pulls out of the parking space.
“You’re okay with this, right? I mean, I figured that since you’re with Ryan and all—“
Seth winces, which is a bad thing to do given that he’s about to pull out into traffic. “I’m not ‘with Ryan’,” he tells Luke, tightening his grip on the steering wheel.
“Oh, I just thought…Summer said she saw you two in bed together, and…hey, it’s okay, man, I’m not gonna pee in your shoes or anything. All in the past, right?”
“Yeah,” Seth sighs. “But we’re not. I’m not. He’s not…it’s a big pile of Not, Luke.” He can see Luke watching him out of the corner of his eye. Finally he sighs and asks, “What?”
“You do though, right?”
Seth stares out at the traffic and shakes his head. “No. I don’t.”
“Sorry,” Luke says quietly. “I mean…I just…I assumed. I’m sorry.”
“When are you going back to Portland?” Seth asks.
He knows it’s rude, but at this point, he just wants Luke out of his life. Luke started this. Luke started Queer. Luke started it all, and if he’d just hurry up and get the fuck out of Seth’s life, Seth could go back to playing video games and keeping his mouth shut while Ryan works every day at the Crab Shack and they hardly speak to each other.
It’s easier this way, Seth tells himself, even though he knows that it’s not. It’s never easy, it’ll never be easy, it’ll never be like he wants it to be. He’s Seth Cohen and Ryan is Ryan Atwood and never the two shall meet. Except to play Playstation sometimes, because Seth kind of misses that. And also, like, sometimes in the kitchen, because hey, a boy’s got to eat. Schmear is a terrible thing to waste. And also, that one time they kissed, but hey, who’s counting?
All right, so they do meet. A lot. But Seth can’t think about meeting because if he does, he’s going to lose it, so he just stares out the window and watches the coastline until they’re at Luke’s house and they say goodbye.
When he gets home, Ryan is sitting in the kitchen. He immediately gets up and heads out to the pool house, and Seth sighs and stomps up to his bedroom.
It’s been a boring summer of doing absolutely nothing. If he left the house, he ran the risk of running into Summer and Luke, and that was a sight he really didn’t want to see. If he stayed in, he ran the risk of running into Ryan, which was a sight he did want to see, but that was a whole other can of worms entirely. Mostly he just stayed in his room except for dinner time, when his parents made him come down and eat at the table like a normal family that didn’t have two teenage boys who had made out and who were tiptoeing around something that probably bordered on incestuous but was mostly just kind of hot. Except not, because it couldn’t happen. Because as awkward as these family dinners were, it could always get worse. Sex had a way of complicating things like that.
Great, now Seth’s mind was on Ryan and sex, and that was another of those “never the two shall meet things” that did end up meeting, mostly in his subconscious late at night when he locked the door and shut the blinds and smoked a joint before jacking off.
The only time Seth really left the house was to go buy pot, which, after the whole Newport Group fiasco, was clearly a bad idea, but so what? A lot of his summer had been based around bad ideas. Bad ideas like Ryan not just pulling off the road that night, like Volchok going all stalker on them, like him ignoring Summer, like him kissing Ryan—his entire summer had been based around bad ideas, so what was one more bad idea in the long run? It really just added some nice spice to the gigantic Bad Idea Pot that had taken over Newport the morning of their graduation and still hadn’t left. Which makes Seth think about pot, and he’s all out, but he doesn’t feel like leaving the house again, so he just flops back down on his bed and groans at his misfortune.
*
Kaitlin spends two hours getting ready for her first day at Harbor, then scowls at her mother when she says, “Honestly, honey, you look fine. Marissa never obsessed over her appearance like this.”
She makes it about half way through her first class when someone mentions Marissa, and that’s about all it takes. The girl doesn’t even say anything mean, she just says Marissa’s name and Kaitlin is so sick of hearing her name that she’s ready to break something. All she’s heard all summer is “Marissa this” and “Marissa that” and she’s so fucking sick of Marissa that as soon as class is over, she pushes the girl against the wall and starts punching her. Her fist connects with the girl’s jaw and blood flies out of her mouth. Some of it lands on Kaitlin, and she thinks of how Marissa must’ve looked that night, all bloody and disgusting, and that thought only fuels Kaitlin on because she just wants Marissa out of her head. She keeps punching until someone pulls her off and drags her to the dean’s office. The next thing she knows, a cop comes in and tells her that she’s under arrest.
Kaitlin screws her eyes shut and thinks, “Well, at least this is something Marissa never did.”
*
Sandy’s had a lot on his mind lately. He’s been in constant contact with the DA’s office, offering to do everything but give his first born, as long as Volchok ends up in jail. He’s also been talking to Ryan a lot, helping Ryan to prepare what he’s going to say and do in court. Ryan told him about the stolen car, and Sandy’s been trying to figure out a way to spin it to remove the blame from Ryan. He’s also been watching his two sons. It’s like watching a snake and a mongoose dance around each other. They’re constantly circling each other, and half of him wants to just push them together so that they’ll get this over with already, but the other part of him doesn’t want it to ever happen because these are his two sons and it’s more than a little weird for him and Kirsten to think about them being together.
It’s not the gay thing. He’d go out and join P-FLAG right now if he didn’t know it’d ruin their whole standing-on-the-sidelines thing. It’s the fact that they’re his sons, and he knows that they’re going to be together. It’s one of those things that he knows is going to happen. It’s as inevitable as taxes. It’s just got to happen. And Sandy is still having trouble with that.
He sighs, flicking open the folder he has on his newest client and steps inside the room.
“Let’s see, you are…” He freezes and looks up, staring at the girl in the room. “Kaitlin Cooper?”
“Hey,” she says, looking at her nails.
“You…” he looks down at the chart. “You…you put a girl in the hospital?”
“Guess so. So, Mr. Cohen. Get me out of here. Work that magic.”
Sandy sits down across from her. “Kaitlin, I hate to tell you this, but that girl’s family is pressing charges.”
“Plead it,” Kaitlin snaps.
“I’ll see what I can do, Kaitlin, but that girl is going to have to have surgery on her face. I’m not sure how partial they’ll be to pleading.”
“Have Mr. Roberts do it. He’s gonna be my step-dad soon, I’m sure he’d be happy to.”
“Kaitlin…I’ll…I’ll do what I can,” Sandy sighs.
“When’s my mom getting here to pick me up?”
“I don’t know,” Sandy says.
“Well, call her cell and tell her to get her ass down here,” Kaitlin tells him.
Sandy just stands and closes the folder with Kaitlin’s case in it and leaves.
*
Neil is at work when a girl comes in for facial reconstructive surgery. He looks at her chart and sees that she was beaten up at school and he heads in to check her out.
She’s a girl about Kaitlin’s age, thin with blonde hair. Her face is swollen all over.
“What happened?” he asks her mother. “Has she told you any details of the fight?”
“Only who did it,” the mother says through clenched teeth. “Kaitlin Cooper.”
Neil has a feeling this is going to be a long day.
*
Ryan is at work one day when one of his customers hits on him. It’s been happening all summer, but this one is different.
This girl he’s attracted to.
She’s pretty, but not conventionally so. She reminds him of Lindsay, only not. She’s got dark black hair and big green eyes and she speaks quickly. When she leaves, she leaves a ten-dollar bill on the table by way of a tip, and her name and phone number is written on it.
When he gets home, he debates calling her. On the one hand, he liked her. But on the other, he knows that she’d be nothing more than a placeholder. A replacement.
But it’s been so long since he’s had someone to talk to. To really actually talk to, not the one-word conversations he and Seth have these days.
He wants to connect with someone. He’s been walking around hollow since Marissa died, probably since before that and he just didn’t know it. He’s been a shell of himself, a walking corpse. All this time, he’s been deader than Marissa.
It’s weird, the prospect of dating. All summer, since the kiss, he’s been thinking that eventually Seth would come back to him, and he didn’t really picture the two of them dating. It was mostly just…them being the same as they’ve always been, but more. The prospect of actual dating is a weird concept.
But that girl—Kate—she makes him want to. It seems like she will be worth it.
He picks up the phone and holds it, staring. He knows that if he dials this number, if he goes on a date with this girl, whatever he has with Seth, it’s over. It’ll mean they’ve beaten this angst-horse to death and they have to move on to something else.
He sets the phone back down and sighs.
Seth. Seth. Seth. That’s what it all comes back to. It comes back to Playstation and cereal and sailing on the Summer Breeze and it hurts so much because his fingers are dialing the number even as he fights back tears.
He almost hangs up twice as it rings, almost throws it down and runs inside and grabs Seth and kisses him like there’s no tomorrow. He almost makes the decision to do what his heart knows is right.
But the thing is, almost doesn’t count, and Kate picks up the phone and he gasps out a hello, even as his voice threatens to break.
It kills him that he’s doing this, that he’s ending something that could’ve been real, that could’ve been great, that could’ve been everything.
Could’ve gets pushed out of his mind as he makes a date with Kate.
Sorry the update took awhile, I've been trying to figure out if I should skip this far ahead or not. Finally I realized that if Josh Schwartz always skips the entire freaking summer, I can skip this much. ;-)
Paring: Eventual Seth/Ryan, all other canon-things.
Rating: R for now.
Word Count: 2,003 (this chapter)
Summary: A hypothetical fourth season, continuing all current storylines, with eventual Seth/Ryan.
Disclaimer: Me = Poor. Josh Schwartz = Both very ballsy and extremely rich. Note the difference.
Spoilers: For everything. Literally.
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
Part Six can be found HERE
Part Seven can be found HERE
Part Eight can be found HERE
Part Nine can be found HERE
And I don't have the time to waste on you anymore.
I don't think that you even know what you're looking for.
For my own sanity, I've got to close the door
And walk away...
- "There's a Fine, Fine Line" by The Original Broadway Cast of Avenue Q
Seth goes to the airport to say goodbye to Summer the day she leaves for Brown. He looks away when she kisses Luke goodbye and then gives her a hug and says he’ll see her in a few months. She makes him promise to call her every day of the trial, now only two months away, and let her know what’s going on. When she leaves, Luke asks Seth if he can have a ride back to his mom’s, and Seth grudgingly agrees.
“Hey, Cohen?” Luke asks as he shuts the passenger side door.
“Yeah?” Seth starts the car and pulls out of the parking space.
“You’re okay with this, right? I mean, I figured that since you’re with Ryan and all—“
Seth winces, which is a bad thing to do given that he’s about to pull out into traffic. “I’m not ‘with Ryan’,” he tells Luke, tightening his grip on the steering wheel.
“Oh, I just thought…Summer said she saw you two in bed together, and…hey, it’s okay, man, I’m not gonna pee in your shoes or anything. All in the past, right?”
“Yeah,” Seth sighs. “But we’re not. I’m not. He’s not…it’s a big pile of Not, Luke.” He can see Luke watching him out of the corner of his eye. Finally he sighs and asks, “What?”
“You do though, right?”
Seth stares out at the traffic and shakes his head. “No. I don’t.”
“Sorry,” Luke says quietly. “I mean…I just…I assumed. I’m sorry.”
“When are you going back to Portland?” Seth asks.
He knows it’s rude, but at this point, he just wants Luke out of his life. Luke started this. Luke started Queer. Luke started it all, and if he’d just hurry up and get the fuck out of Seth’s life, Seth could go back to playing video games and keeping his mouth shut while Ryan works every day at the Crab Shack and they hardly speak to each other.
It’s easier this way, Seth tells himself, even though he knows that it’s not. It’s never easy, it’ll never be easy, it’ll never be like he wants it to be. He’s Seth Cohen and Ryan is Ryan Atwood and never the two shall meet. Except to play Playstation sometimes, because Seth kind of misses that. And also, like, sometimes in the kitchen, because hey, a boy’s got to eat. Schmear is a terrible thing to waste. And also, that one time they kissed, but hey, who’s counting?
All right, so they do meet. A lot. But Seth can’t think about meeting because if he does, he’s going to lose it, so he just stares out the window and watches the coastline until they’re at Luke’s house and they say goodbye.
When he gets home, Ryan is sitting in the kitchen. He immediately gets up and heads out to the pool house, and Seth sighs and stomps up to his bedroom.
It’s been a boring summer of doing absolutely nothing. If he left the house, he ran the risk of running into Summer and Luke, and that was a sight he really didn’t want to see. If he stayed in, he ran the risk of running into Ryan, which was a sight he did want to see, but that was a whole other can of worms entirely. Mostly he just stayed in his room except for dinner time, when his parents made him come down and eat at the table like a normal family that didn’t have two teenage boys who had made out and who were tiptoeing around something that probably bordered on incestuous but was mostly just kind of hot. Except not, because it couldn’t happen. Because as awkward as these family dinners were, it could always get worse. Sex had a way of complicating things like that.
Great, now Seth’s mind was on Ryan and sex, and that was another of those “never the two shall meet things” that did end up meeting, mostly in his subconscious late at night when he locked the door and shut the blinds and smoked a joint before jacking off.
The only time Seth really left the house was to go buy pot, which, after the whole Newport Group fiasco, was clearly a bad idea, but so what? A lot of his summer had been based around bad ideas. Bad ideas like Ryan not just pulling off the road that night, like Volchok going all stalker on them, like him ignoring Summer, like him kissing Ryan—his entire summer had been based around bad ideas, so what was one more bad idea in the long run? It really just added some nice spice to the gigantic Bad Idea Pot that had taken over Newport the morning of their graduation and still hadn’t left. Which makes Seth think about pot, and he’s all out, but he doesn’t feel like leaving the house again, so he just flops back down on his bed and groans at his misfortune.
Kaitlin spends two hours getting ready for her first day at Harbor, then scowls at her mother when she says, “Honestly, honey, you look fine. Marissa never obsessed over her appearance like this.”
She makes it about half way through her first class when someone mentions Marissa, and that’s about all it takes. The girl doesn’t even say anything mean, she just says Marissa’s name and Kaitlin is so sick of hearing her name that she’s ready to break something. All she’s heard all summer is “Marissa this” and “Marissa that” and she’s so fucking sick of Marissa that as soon as class is over, she pushes the girl against the wall and starts punching her. Her fist connects with the girl’s jaw and blood flies out of her mouth. Some of it lands on Kaitlin, and she thinks of how Marissa must’ve looked that night, all bloody and disgusting, and that thought only fuels Kaitlin on because she just wants Marissa out of her head. She keeps punching until someone pulls her off and drags her to the dean’s office. The next thing she knows, a cop comes in and tells her that she’s under arrest.
Kaitlin screws her eyes shut and thinks, “Well, at least this is something Marissa never did.”
Sandy’s had a lot on his mind lately. He’s been in constant contact with the DA’s office, offering to do everything but give his first born, as long as Volchok ends up in jail. He’s also been talking to Ryan a lot, helping Ryan to prepare what he’s going to say and do in court. Ryan told him about the stolen car, and Sandy’s been trying to figure out a way to spin it to remove the blame from Ryan. He’s also been watching his two sons. It’s like watching a snake and a mongoose dance around each other. They’re constantly circling each other, and half of him wants to just push them together so that they’ll get this over with already, but the other part of him doesn’t want it to ever happen because these are his two sons and it’s more than a little weird for him and Kirsten to think about them being together.
It’s not the gay thing. He’d go out and join P-FLAG right now if he didn’t know it’d ruin their whole standing-on-the-sidelines thing. It’s the fact that they’re his sons, and he knows that they’re going to be together. It’s one of those things that he knows is going to happen. It’s as inevitable as taxes. It’s just got to happen. And Sandy is still having trouble with that.
He sighs, flicking open the folder he has on his newest client and steps inside the room.
“Let’s see, you are…” He freezes and looks up, staring at the girl in the room. “Kaitlin Cooper?”
“Hey,” she says, looking at her nails.
“You…” he looks down at the chart. “You…you put a girl in the hospital?”
“Guess so. So, Mr. Cohen. Get me out of here. Work that magic.”
Sandy sits down across from her. “Kaitlin, I hate to tell you this, but that girl’s family is pressing charges.”
“Plead it,” Kaitlin snaps.
“I’ll see what I can do, Kaitlin, but that girl is going to have to have surgery on her face. I’m not sure how partial they’ll be to pleading.”
“Have Mr. Roberts do it. He’s gonna be my step-dad soon, I’m sure he’d be happy to.”
“Kaitlin…I’ll…I’ll do what I can,” Sandy sighs.
“When’s my mom getting here to pick me up?”
“I don’t know,” Sandy says.
“Well, call her cell and tell her to get her ass down here,” Kaitlin tells him.
Sandy just stands and closes the folder with Kaitlin’s case in it and leaves.
Neil is at work when a girl comes in for facial reconstructive surgery. He looks at her chart and sees that she was beaten up at school and he heads in to check her out.
She’s a girl about Kaitlin’s age, thin with blonde hair. Her face is swollen all over.
“What happened?” he asks her mother. “Has she told you any details of the fight?”
“Only who did it,” the mother says through clenched teeth. “Kaitlin Cooper.”
Neil has a feeling this is going to be a long day.
Ryan is at work one day when one of his customers hits on him. It’s been happening all summer, but this one is different.
This girl he’s attracted to.
She’s pretty, but not conventionally so. She reminds him of Lindsay, only not. She’s got dark black hair and big green eyes and she speaks quickly. When she leaves, she leaves a ten-dollar bill on the table by way of a tip, and her name and phone number is written on it.
When he gets home, he debates calling her. On the one hand, he liked her. But on the other, he knows that she’d be nothing more than a placeholder. A replacement.
But it’s been so long since he’s had someone to talk to. To really actually talk to, not the one-word conversations he and Seth have these days.
He wants to connect with someone. He’s been walking around hollow since Marissa died, probably since before that and he just didn’t know it. He’s been a shell of himself, a walking corpse. All this time, he’s been deader than Marissa.
It’s weird, the prospect of dating. All summer, since the kiss, he’s been thinking that eventually Seth would come back to him, and he didn’t really picture the two of them dating. It was mostly just…them being the same as they’ve always been, but more. The prospect of actual dating is a weird concept.
But that girl—Kate—she makes him want to. It seems like she will be worth it.
He picks up the phone and holds it, staring. He knows that if he dials this number, if he goes on a date with this girl, whatever he has with Seth, it’s over. It’ll mean they’ve beaten this angst-horse to death and they have to move on to something else.
He sets the phone back down and sighs.
Seth. Seth. Seth. That’s what it all comes back to. It comes back to Playstation and cereal and sailing on the Summer Breeze and it hurts so much because his fingers are dialing the number even as he fights back tears.
He almost hangs up twice as it rings, almost throws it down and runs inside and grabs Seth and kisses him like there’s no tomorrow. He almost makes the decision to do what his heart knows is right.
But the thing is, almost doesn’t count, and Kate picks up the phone and he gasps out a hello, even as his voice threatens to break.
It kills him that he’s doing this, that he’s ending something that could’ve been real, that could’ve been great, that could’ve been everything.
Could’ve gets pushed out of his mind as he makes a date with Kate.
Sorry the update took awhile, I've been trying to figure out if I should skip this far ahead or not. Finally I realized that if Josh Schwartz always skips the entire freaking summer, I can skip this much. ;-)
