This is a series of drabbles I've written on Ryan and the idea of silence.
Disclaimer: I don't own the O.C or Ryan Atwood, but if I did my Ryan would always come with a wristcuff.
Silence.
Silence is the uneasy wait for something bad to happen.
Before he'd come to Newport there had been very little silence in Ryan's life. It was always harsh words or tyres screeching, flesh hitting flesh or glass breaking. The silence was not the precious moment in between; it was the uneasy wait for something bad to happen. Silence was the waiting and wondering if Trey was ever coming back. Silence was watching cartoons with the sound off next to his mom passed out on the sofa.
Silence was not crying out when his mom's latest boyfriend beat the crap out of him. Silence was his mom not telling them to stop. Silence was crawling into Theresa's bed for the third time that week. Silence was not explaining where the purple-blue marks on his body had come from. Silence was people no longer asking.
In Chino, the silence was always broken.
Silence is the ripple of an infinity pool and the distant lap of the ocean.
He lies on the bed in the centre of the room, staring up at the ceiling, looking out at the ocean. In the pool house the lack of sound means new things. It means safety and seclusion. Space and solitude.
The Cohen house itself always seems to be full of noise. But it's good noise. It's the banter between Sandy and Seth – the kind of gentle mocking that only occurs between a father and son who are truly comfortable with one another. It's Kirsten rustling papers on the kitchen table, catching him as he peers over her shoulder to look at the latest blue prints. It's cutlery clinking together as the four of them sit down for a meal, in a home where takeaway is placed in bowls and eaten off plates.
He still tosses and turns at night, straining to hear barely audible sounds from the main house, to hear cars on the street.
Ryan is not used to silence being safe.
Noise is Seth.
Not just his music or the sound of the computer games he's always playing. It's not just the endless words that seem to fall out of his mouth as if someone forgot to install his off switch. He just physically makes noise. All the time. Maybe it's his lankiness or his slight awkwardness but regardless of how much he mentions Camp Takaho or how stealth he is, Ryan can always hear Seth coming.
There is no in between with Seth. He doesn't sit quietly in a corner reading a comic book, he doesn't relax on a pool float watching the patterns of light on the back of his eyelids. Seth taps along to music in the car. He makes this weird clicking sound with his tongue when he's concentrating in class. He has entire conversations with a plastic horse and keeps a running commentary while watching TV by himself. It's as if his internal monologue is projected word for word as he thinks it.
Seth is either there or he isn't.
Silence is the absence of Seth.
Silence is uncomfortable.
Silence is a double bed with three heartbeats and doing the right thing.
Silence is phone calls at 2am that you know are from Marissa but kind of hope are from Seth. Except that Seth isn't speaking to you, and even though he is completely the kind of person who would call you up to inform you that he isn't talking to you he is not the type of person who would just heavy breathe down the phone.
For a moment Ryan wonders if Seth ran away just so as to put enough distance between them that he can't drive down to Chino to see Ryan. Because if Seth was still in Newport his self-restraint would have broken by now and he'd be standing on Theresa's doorstep suggesting baby names, asking which house Ryan used to live in and trying to introduce music to Chino. Or he'd be at the construction site pointing at the bright yellow hard hat in Ryan's hands questioning where the other members of the Village People are.
It wouldn't change the fact that Theresa is pregnant, or that he misses Marissa or that he's left the Cohens as if everything they have given him doesn't really mean anything at all.
But it would make everything just a little more bearable.
Silence is the absence of Seth.
Silence is white noise.
Silence is the drive to Trey's apartment when there are just too many things running through your head that they mix and tumble together to form incoherent white noise. Silence is the gap between the bullet leaving the barrel and blood soaking out across white cotton, in empty apartments on the numbered streets and in distant memories of houses by the beach.
Silence is a broken, forgotten mantra.
United, we're unstoppable, but divided people get shot.
Silence is police cars and yellow taxi cabs and greyhound buses bound for Las Vegas.
Silence is dry cereal from the box before Sandy gets back from surfing while Seth is searching for his history homework and Kirsten is putting on her make-up.
College is
Parties and study sessions and pages turning in the library and questions shouted out in lectures and the girl who comes so loudly the whole dorm hears and pipes in the bathroom clanging and the thud of the hip-hop music blasting from the room above and your room-mate's snoring and talking out in the hall.
Silence still catches up with him.
Silence is the pause after some other freshman asks where you're from and you get caught between Newport and Chino and wish Seth was there to explain between the lines.
Silence is hearing a Death Cab song without Seth singing along.
Silence is lying in bed at five am tuning out your roommate's snoring and feeling an uncontrollable urge to talk to Seth.
If this had been Newport, if he was lying on his bed in the poolhouse, then he could just cross the space to the kitchen, head up to the first floor and wake Seth up. Of course, if this had been Newport he wouldn't have to bother with any of that. Because with pretty much the same certainty as the sun rising in the morning Seth would be found perched on his very own Seth/Ryan time chair waking Ryan with a cup of coffee and some epic monologue about Summer or the latest issue of some comic book or some band that's playing at the bait shop.
But the space separating them can no longer be walked bare foot.
Ryan has missed people before.
Ryan misses people still.
This is different.
It isn't leaving or running away, abandoning or giving up.
Still,
Ryan can hear the continent separating them.
Silence is the absence of Seth.
Silence is the vibration of a cell phone.
He doesn't bother to check the caller ID, doesn't bother to answer with "Hello," just hits the call accept button and pulls the phone up against his ear.
"Ryan. Are you asleep dude?"
Ryan rolls his eyes unintentionally, involuntarily, automatically. Because of course it's Seth calling him at five in the morning with no concept of time zones or appropriate calling hours.
A simultaneous twitch pulls his mouth into a half-smile - "Yeah Seth, I'm asleep" - because Seth is calling.
"Ninjas or a little GTA?"
Controllers and flat screen have been replaced by handheld PSPs courtesy of a Seth Cohen College Starter Pack via Kirsten's credit card.
Bringing Seth/Ryan time into the 21st century.
Ryan had tried not to accept it, had tried to explain to Seth that Seth/Ryan time had only ever occurred in the 21st century. But Seth had managed to persuade the soon to be empty-nester Kirsten that the latest games consoles constituted as essential college supplies and Ryan resigned himself to the fact that sometimes it was just easier to accept what the Cohens gave.
Seth talks about places Ryan has never been to, people Ryan has not yet met. It doesn't really matter. It's not so much the content of the conversation that Ryan misses, especially when Seth is the type of the person who really does sometimes talk just to make sounds. Maybe it's not even the noise he misses.
Maybe it's just because it has always been easy between them.
Seth uses a hundred words for every three of Ryan's. But somehow it balances. It fits. Words tangle and melt, mix up and stick. Sentences pick up half-way through and topics once discarded are resurrected and discarded once again until it feels like it's just one conversation. One incredibly long - and admittedly pretty one-sided – conversation. Beginning with a playstation and cereal and bruises on Ryan's face. Holding them together through everything that's happened since.
And the pauses, the spaces, the gaps; they just turn out to be the punctuation.