Disclaimer: I don't own the O.C or any of the characters, just playing I promise.
This is set just after episode 12: The Lonely Hearts Club. I started wondering where Ryan learnt to play pool and this was the direction it took. Hope you enjoy!
Requiem – Box of Broken Dreams.
Ryan dropped onto the low bed, resting his hands behind his head thinking about his game of pool with Caleb. Maybe now Kirsten's father -Lindsay's father- would accept him. Standing there with a cue in his hand had reminded him of Trey. Back in Chino, his brother had taught him how to play pool. Ryan could remember the hours they had spent hanging out in the pool hall avoiding their drunken mother and her latest lowlife boyfriend. They'd made a pretty good team, made some good money hustling too. But it was more than that. Trey, like Ryan, had never been one for conversation. And yet, shooting balls with cigarettes hanging from the corner of their mouths, they'd talked. Nothing big, nothing important and definitely nothing about what was going on at home. Just banter. Movies, girls, sports. Brother stuff. For a moment he wanted to be back in that pool hall in Chino hanging out with Trey sharing a pack of Marlboro Reds.
Stupid as it sounded, smoking had always managed to calm him down. Maybe if Kirsten hadn't been so insistent on him not smoking he wouldn't have gotten into so many fights over the past couple of years. Thinking about cigarettes took him back to his first night in Newport when he'd had to wait outside the house for Sandy to talk Kirsten into letting him stay. What had happened to that half smoked box? Actually, he knew exactly where they were.
Ryan opened his closet; pretty much full with all the clothes the Cohens had bought him over the last year and a half. He removed a stack of sweaters from the top shelf. Reaching around in the back his hands hit something hard. Carefully he pulled out the shoebox and took it over to the bed. The box itself had held the first pair of proper shoes Ryan had ever owned. Shoes Kirsten had bought him to go with the suit he wore to the fashion show. His first experience in the crazy Newport social world he now found himself in almost weekly. Ryan lifted up the cardboard lid, shook out the contents of the box and sure enough there was a pack of Marlboro Red and box of convenience store matches.
Originally he'd put them in the shoebox as an emergency stash he could smoke when the Cohens had gone to bed. Except that he really didn't want to disappoint either Sandy or Kirsten so the packet had sat there. Ryan opened the pack now, placed one of the white sticks in the corner of his mouth and left it there unlit, just enjoying the feel of it between his lips. The cigarettes hadn't been the only things in that box.
Black leather wrist cuff. He'd shown up at school angry with himself for even thinking his mom might have remembered his birthday. His mom had been too drunk to know what day of the week it was, let alone the date, let alone the fact it was his sixteenth birthday. Theresa had shown up by his locker and thrust a small box into his hands in her usual trying to be nonchalant way: "Thought it might help you with the tough guy image you're trying so hard to get." He'd worn it everyday, not because he especially liked it, but because it reminded him that there was someone out there that actually gave a damn about him enough to remember his birthday. It didn't seem right to wear it now after everything that had happened between them. But it didn't mean he didn't still think of that first girl next door from time to time
Photo. It showed a normal, happy family. Mom, dad, and two boys scrambling all over them. The nine year old in the picture sitting on his daddy's shoulders is a stranger to Ryan now. His blue eyes are sparkling and innocent. Happy. It was taken on some family trip the summer before his dad went to prison – for the first time, before his mom found comfort at the bottom of a bottle, before Trey followed in their dad's footsteps. Before his family fell apart. Ryan couldn't help wondering how it all could have turned out. It was easier for him to think that his family had never been good, never been happy. But the photo told him otherwise. It took him back to the feeling he'd had at ten years old. The feeling that it had been his fault his dad had gone away, his fault that his mom lay in a drunken stupor on the couch at eleven in the morning. It was a feeling even his seventeen year old self couldn't shake.
Another photo. Fuzzy and black, with just a faint outline in the centre. His baby. From the moment he'd decided to go back to Chino with Theresa it had been because it was the right thing to do. Yeah, he'd thought about the baby and how he couldn't let it grow up like he had. But when he'd seen that little blob on the ultrasound screen it had become something more. It was HIS baby. Blood or not it was his. He was going to be a father. A feeling had washed over him that he'd never experienced before. Unconditional love. In a way it was easier to pretend it had never happened but the ultrasound photo was evidence that it had. His baby.
Another photo. It had been taken some time last year at some Newport event or other. The boy in the photo looks uncomfortable. Uncomfortable at being in a suit and tie. Uncomfortable at being in such a posh, unfamiliar place. But his eyes are shining. Shining at the person beside him. This beautiful girl in a pink dress smiling at the camera as he holds her shyly in his arms. Public displays of affection had never been his forte. But with her in his arms his eyes show so much love, so much possibility. A time before Oliver, before Theresa and the baby, before Lindsay. A time when he'd fallen head over heels for the girl next door. Marissa. Marissa.
Suddenly conscious of the white stick hanging in his mouth he made his way outside by the pool. The smoke eased into his lungs bringing a moment of comfort. Ryan caught his reflection in the pool house window and couldn't help but smirk at the sight of himself kitted head to toe in Newport's finest clothes with a cigarette in his mouth. If only Trey could see him now. He'd almost expected his reflection to be wearing a wifebeater. But he wasn't that guy anymore. He wasn't Newport but he wasn't Chino either. He dropped the burning white stick, ground it out and then picked it up -conscious of his promise to the Cohens- and took it inside to flush down the toilet.
Sitting on his bed again he looked around at all the evidence of his life now. The Cohen's pool house that he now called home. Seth's comics stacked next to the playstation 2. Physics books from the classes he shared with Lindsay.
One by one he placed the photos and objects back in the box. Trey, his mom, his dad, Theresa, the baby, Marissa. A box full of people who weren't in his life anymore.
A box of broken dreams.