Disclaimer: The O.C. is property of Fox.
Author's Note: A collection of drabbles for my little LJ buddies. See end for the original prompts().

"Hope is a good thing; perhaps the best of things, and no good thing ever dies."
For Ctoan.

When he was six years old, Ryan hoped he'd get skates for Christmas. He remembers the fight between his parents a few nights just after Thanksgiving, when he first asked for them and another, on Christmas Eve when he heard his mother asking his dad where he got the money. He remembers his dad snapping at her, telling her not to worry about it and lying awake in the dark, listening to Trey snoring from the other side of the bedroom, and hoping that they weren't going to be mad at each other tomorrow.

Unwrapping the skates the next morning, Ryan realised what they had been fighting about. Two weeks later, when the police came looking for his dad, Ryan began to understand where he got money. By the time his mom bundled him and his brother in a half packed car and headed for Chino, Ryan knew for sure.

He left the skates behind. Sitting across the darkened hospital, listening to the mechanically regulated sound of Trey's breathing, Ryan wishes not for the first time that he'd left his hope behind with them.

"It's always darkest before the Dawn."
For Mel39, an early birthday present to tide her over.

Ryan doesn't really remember exactly when he started to call his mother by her first name instead of calling her Mom, but he knows exactly why. It's too hard, after calling 911 for the third time in a year, after coming back home after a summer in foster care to hear her say sorry and that she'll try for all of them, only to have to watch her do it to herself, to Trey, to him, again. It's too hard to call her Mom to hear paper grocery bags illogically clink together when she only went to the store for tonight's supper, it's hard to smell the cigarettes and mints on her breath in the mornings afterwards when she's trying to hide it from them.

In Ryan's mind, it's not his mom but Dawn who drinks. It's Dawn who let the only decent guy in Chino move to Austin before letting A.J. move himself in and move her kids out.

Sometimes, when he's being kind, Ryan wonders if she makes the same distinction. The rest of the time, he wonders if she even cares.

"Do you remember the first time?"
For Famous99.

The first night, it had been strange. Ryan knew they were just cotton sheets on the bed like back home, just feathers in the pillows, like back home. But lying on this bed, beneath these sheets and with his head resting on these pillows, it was something else. It was the first time he realised that safety had a scent.

The second time, the night after he'd watched Dawn drive away from him in a taxi with not even a note, but a frail wave by way of explanation, Ryan realised he could smell his mother's distinct tracing of cigarettes and Seagrams' on the pillow. He'd stripped the bed and put the sheets in the bathroom, where the scent of shower gel would swallow them and remade it fresh with clean linen from the baskets.

The third night, Theresa lay beside him, their physical closeness the direct antithesis of the emotional distance between them. Burrowing under the covers, Ryan pulled the t-shirt he would never normally wear to bed up under his nose and breathed in deeply, finding comfort in the aroma of home.

"Man hands on misery to man,
It deepens like a coastal shelf."
for Smc36

Ryan blurted it out at dinner. He'd meant to wait. To ask to talk to them both afterwards, but somewhere between the second and third time somebody had asked him to pass the asparagus, it had tumbled out of him, freezing the air around them like he was a mysterious stranger walking into a bar of ill-repute in an old Western.

"Theresa lost the baby."

Lost. Such a small and simple word, yet somehow it possessed the power to change the animate into the inanimate. Their baby had been lost; like keys on a sideboard, or the middle piece of a jigsaw. It wasn't right; in order to be lost, children needed first to be born, to be seen taking their first steps, to be heard saying their first words, to be taken on their first trip to the park, the zoo, the beach and one day turned away from for one second too long. Lost could be found again.

"The baby died. She doesn't want me without him."

"Him?" Kirsten had asked softly.

Ryan nodded. He had no idea where to start looking.

"It's a good thing childhood is at the beginning of our lives; we'd never survive it if it were in the middle."
For overnighter

Sometimes, when he was lying awake at night, or sitting on his surfboard waiting for the sun to warm him in the early morning, Sandy would wonder if Ryan had remembered yet the first time they really met.

Gratefully leaving the building with the bars and battered tables where they would meet officially six years later, Sandy's gaze fell on Ryan at ten years old, half asleep in the arms of his barely older brother, who muttered under his breath at the woman ahead of them avidly greeting a scruffy kid of seventeen with unsubtle affection. Breaking apart, the teenager with delusions of manhood had pulled the car keys roughly from her hand and unlocked the rusty door.

"Are you kids coming?" he called with thinly disguised impatience before climbing into the car.

"Do we have to?"

It was only then that Sandy noticed the boy's black eye, the clumsy cast on his arm.

Sandy filed it under "Better Best Forgotten" until he saw Ryan hug Trey when he came out of jail. Fierceness and surrender all in one gesture.

He wouldn't forget again.

"What they undertook to do
They bought to pass;
All things hang like a drop of dew
Upon a blade of grass."
For MissBegonia

Seth sat on the beach, ignoring the Halloween party around him, wondering if someone could die from an over consumption of brownies. With a clever through his head, he was dressed for it. Honestly? He could care less. When he was joined by a six foot rabbit from Hell, Seth wondered if he'd passed over already.

Bunny regarded bludgeoned.

"Hey."

"Hey Frank. World ended yet?"

"You tell me; I'm not the one moping on a beach."

"Ryan?"

Ryan removed the big fluffy head of his costume and shook his head.

"You have no idea how hot I am right now."

None whatsoever, thought Seth, his mind fertile. "You're wearing a bunny costume."

"I'm not a bunny, I'm Frank. From Donnie Darko."

"I know that. And you're still a bunny."

"Yeah, I am." Ryan smiled, nodding at Seth. "Like the eyeliner."

"I am the very model of a modern metrosexual."

At Ryan's smile, Seth finally gave up. "Actually, I think I'm kinda gay."

"Yeah?"

Frowning, Seth nodded numbly. "Yeah."

"Well then," said Ryan looking out at the ocean, "I guess that makes two of us."

() Original prompts:

Ctoan: I'd love some Ryan angst. I'm always up for Ryan angst.
Famous99: Anything Cohens +1 will do.
Smc36: I'd love to see Ryan explain to Kandy Theresa' losing the baby. I'm still waiting for someone to do that. Can ya? huh? Please?
Overnighter: I'm always up for Ryan angst, but I've had a particular yen to see a young Ryan and Sandy interact -- how it up to you.
Miss Begonia: Anything Ryan/Seth would be great. Friendship fic is fine, doesn't need to be slashy. Maybe something future or AU so it can be fluffy? It's up to you. Oh, and you have to use the following words: brownies, fertile, metrosexual and bunny. Just because. )