i found a martyr in my bed tonight
..
but i still wake up, i still see your ghost
oh, lord, i'm still not sure what i stand for
"some nights," fun.
..
He doesn't really know who he is anymore and it's kind of becoming a catastrophe.
Because the star of the football team only shines bright until football season's over, and let's face it, he was always too much of a good boy to be a very convincing Danny Zuko once the costume is off. He tries being Finn's protégé, Marley's unrequited lover, Jake's best friend, but you can really only define yourself in terms of other people for so long before you start to lose little pieces of yourself to them. And sure enough, after everything that happens with the doomed Bermuda triangle of him and Marley and Jake, and then the whole thing with Katie (Unique, she was Unique, and how sad is it that he still has to remind himself of that sometimes?), so many pieces of him have been chipped away that he's little more than a skeleton boy, with a hollow space between his ribs and bones that can't remember how they used to fit together.
When you've got nothing to prove and no one to hold onto, life suddenly becomes a whole lot bleaker. He tries exercising a lot, going for a run every morning before the sun rises, and even though he likes the darkness and the quiet of the sleeping suburban streets it's not enough to distract him. He tries drinking, but he's not a very pleasant drunk, and then he tries smoking, at least for a week until his dad finds and throws away all his cigarettes.
And then he's drifting, wandering aimlessly through life with nothing but weary brown eyes and a restless soul, and there's probably a Bob Dylan song about this somewhere but this is nothing so poetic as a song. Everything is kind of a blur, these days, and he knows he's got it bad when even people start to fade around the edges and blur and blend into each other so that he can barely recognize or tell them apart anymore.
(The irony is that the most unrecognizable one is himself.)
It goes like this, an incomprehensible blur of faces and hours and voices and days, and he barely pays attention to any of it, so it shouldn't be a surprise when one night he inexplicably finds himself tangled, sweaty limbs around sweaty limbs, in bed with McKinley's femme fatale herself, Kitty Wilde.
"Just because I'm letting you fuck me doesn't mean I'll start listening to you when you talk or respecting any of your ideas," she tells him archly, in between biting at his shoulder and scratching a hand down his back.
He stares up at her with wide eyes, too bewildered by how he even ended up underneath the bitchiest girl at school to contradict her now. "Uh, no, no, of course not," he hurries to acquiesce.
"Good," she hums in his ear. "I like my men submissive," and he could swear she has The Velvet Underground playing in the background.
Kitty takes control and bosses him around a little (okay, a lot) but somewhere along the way she also builds him up, and the moment of his release comes quite unexpectedly and as a pleasant surprise for him. And then he realizes he's been a bit selfish and it's his turn to surprise her, when he leans his head down between her smooth legs and makes her come apart at the seams.
When it's over, they look over at each other, and he would wonder at the flicker of vulnerability he sees in her hazel eyes if he weren't so preoccupied by the realization that just now, with her, he'd completely forgotten about his restlessness and his identity crisis and his feelings of hurt and loss and betrayal. He'd just…been. For once, he'd been fully there, completely present in the moment, and it's been so long since that has happened that it feels brand-new.
Days pass, again, but slower now. Things are still kind of blurry but he notices things, small things, like the way his own voice sounds when he's talking to his mom, or the way his eyes have to adjust to the brightness when he turns on his bedroom light in the morning. And there's a memory, a vivid one, of her silken skin burning underneath his fingertips.
Somehow he ends up in bed with Kitty once more and she's even colder and more domineering this time, if that's even possible, but he doesn't care because it happens again, the thing where his problems all fade away and there's nothing but her and him and the burning of her skin.
"That was…" she avoids meeting his eyes afterward, her fingers clenching at the sheets, "…nice," she finishes lamely.
He scoffs and raises his eyebrows at her, and she finally looks up at him and sighs. "All right, fine, it was more than nice. Happy now?" Kitty snaps, and the weirdest thing is that for a split second, he almost feels like he might be.
And after that time, he starts to notice a little more, like how chalk dust stays on his teachers' hands after they're done writing on the blackboard, and how people's tones change when they're talking about important things, and how Marley smiles encouragingly at him every morning and Jake splits his cookies with him at lunch. And there's still that memory of her skin under his fingertips, but now it's also her lips on his and the sound of her gasps.
It happens a third time and by now they're starting to learn each other, so he knows where her waist curves into her hip and she knows how his muscles meet his bones. He knows what makes her come apart and she knows how to put him back together. At one point he catches sight of Kitty when she doesn't know he's looking and he forgets how to breathe, for a second, at how scared and defenseless the look in her eyes is.
Then a fourth, a fifth, a sixth, and soon he's lost count of everything except the number of her breaths in the dark.
People start to come into focus around the edges and stand out and become distinguishable from each other so that he begins to recognize them again. And always, his fingertips burn with the ghost of her skin under his.
And then one night he finds himself in bed with Kitty yet again, but they're just lying there, talking (about triangles and suburban streets in the morning and smoking and Bob Dylan and nineteenth-century Austrian erotic novels and chalk dust), and before he knows it they've lain there all night talking without hooking up even once.
Days turn into hours turn into minutes. His eyes are less weary now and his soul settles down.
Maybe on the twenty or thirty-somethingth time, they're talking to each other afterward, and Kitty's head falls back in laughter and he feels his muscles seize up with how glorious she looks, there, just like that, joyful and honest and uninhibited.
Then one day she slips her hand into his, and he blinks, then reopens his eyes and lets them adjust to the light, because they're at school, it's daytime, not at night in one of their darkened bedrooms. But he somehow finds himself smiling down at her, which is startling but not nearly so much as her grin in return. That's when he realizes that the undercurrent of fear and vulnerability has disappeared from her eyes somewhere along the way, and that maybe he had been unknowingly building her up and putting her back together, too.
The space between his ribs grows less hollow and she teaches him how his bones fit together. And everyone calls them a catastrophe, but if this is how the world ends then Ryder wants to go up in flames with her skin burning underneath his fingertips.
..
A/N: I haven't been able to write Kyder for a long time because the way the show was going was just annoying me to the point where I basically stopped watching. But I know generally how things ended up, and this fic is Ryder, post-Season Four, lost, vulnerable, and rebellious because he feels lied to and used. I think both Kitty and Ryder changed markedly over the course of the season, and I wanted to explore how they would each recover from the problems and setbacks they're currently facing. So I will probably do a Kitty-centric version of this later, keep an eye out!
If you want to hear what song Kitty has playing the first time they have sex (and why they later discuss Austrian erotic novels), check out "Venus in Furs" by The Velvet Underground.
Thank you for reading, and please take a moment to leave a review!