A/N – Happy Easter everyone. Thought I'd post something for the holiday, and here it is. Random thing that I had on my chest for awhile. Please, if you as much as like Ryan/Taylor, I'm sorry if you hate it or anything. That is your warning, so flamers will be laughed upon.

Disclaimer: I own nothing.

Seventeen Forever

Ryan Atwood was dying. Defiantly dying. He could slowly hear the surrounding buzz of nose start to fade away. He was starting to see black. He could just barely hear Taylor's frantic calls to save him… but it was too late. It was too late to stop him from dying. It was too late to make that drunk driver stay off the roads. It was too late to take everything back. He was dying.

It all happened when Taylor and he got in a fight. He got too upset to handle even being in her presences, and decided to go for a walk. It probably wasn't the best idea; now that he thought of it. He probably shouldn't have been walking on the side of a highway at twelve o'clock on a Friday night. But what was done was done. And here he was, on his deathbed.

He couldn't understand why he was so calm about the whole thing. He knew he should be trying to say something to Taylor, he knew e should at least say it wasn't her fault… but he didn't want to. He didn't want her to beat herself up over this, no of course not; he just wasn't going to take the chance of coming out of the peaceful painless death he was going through. He could hear Taylor speak to him, "Ryan, oh Ryan… please don't go. I'm so sorry. I love you."

He kept floating away though. He wouldn't dare move. He wanted to go. He no longer wanted to live here on earth. He could even hear his own monitor slowing down. It was calming to know this was it. He didn't know what it would be like once he was gone forever. He didn't really care. Anything could be better than living like he was living now. It seemed when she left, it was only his shell left. She had taken the best part of him away, and everybody knew that. Even Taylor. He figured that Taylor just learned to accept it though. He had to accept she was married once, so he thought it was only fair.

He couldn't even quite recall why he had gotten with Taylor so many years ago. They were now thirty, and still going nowhere close to marriage or children. Maybe, he figured, that Taylor was so different from her. He couldn't be with someone else like her after she died. So, when he found Taylor, he figured he could love her until it was time for him to meet her again. He knew it was wrong, to love a dead person, and live to be with her again someday… but she was his true love. As cheesy as it may sound, there is no one else out there that could ever replace her. Maybe he hadn't looked hard enough, maybe he was too caught up in wanting to love Taylor to look. But he had to face the hard cold fact, he didn't love Taylor. He loved her. He had enjoyed the time with Taylor, and he wasn't going to lie, being with her wasn't a death sentence, but like he said, she just couldn't ever replace her.

He was thinking about his prier life after she died, and all of a sudden it went black.

--

Ryan opened his eyes. His vision was blurry. It was just smudges of black and gray and white and blond. He shut his eyes again to clear them, and when that didn't work, he started to blink rapidly. He tried to move his arms, but found one was stuck underneath something. He took his thumb and forefinger and rubbed away at his eyes. They were still blurry, but he could make some things out. He was defiantly in the pool house, and he defiantly had someone wrapped in his arms.

He sighed, closing his eyes again. He thought the whole thing was a dream. He put his face into Taylor's hair, and then his eyes snapped open. Why was he in the pool house? Why was Taylor's hair blonder than he had ever noticed before? And why the heck did she smell like her? He sucked in the needed air in his shocked body, and took his free hand up move the blond hair from the sleeping woman. Before he did, he looked down at the woman; he looked around the pool house. This place had fallen down several years ago. The Cohen's had moved to Berkeley. The house in Newport had been taken down with the earthquake. It was all confusing him to beyond the point of normal confusion.

He moved the hair, and looked over at the face of the woman he was cradling in his arms. There, was a beautiful sleeping Marissa. His breath got lost in his throat, and his eyes got larger. He looked across the room, to see a mirror. He looked at it long and hard, and wondered to be jumping for joy, or be horrified. There he seen his reflection show his seventeen year old body, wrapped around a seventeen year old Marissa. He starred, and wondered if Marissa dying, and Taylor, and the drunk driver, and the fight, and the earthquake, and all the things that happened over the course since he turned thirty, was a dream.

"It's not a dream, Ryan. You died. You're in heaven now. Something happens when you die, that you go back to the age of when you were happiest. I only went back two years because it was the happiest time of my life. It's when I found my true love. Seventeen is when you were happiest, too. I'm hoping that that is because you met me when you were seventeen. The reason you're in the pool house is because it's where most of our memories were held." Marissa's eyes were open now, and starring at his own set of ocean blue eyes in the mirror.

Ryan turned her onto her back, and hovered over her. He met her eyes, and looked at awe at her. He never realized how breathtakingly beautiful she was until this very moment. "So… we can be together?" He asked with an uncertainty.

"Forever," she smiled up at him, and pulled his face down to meet hers in a sweet but passionate kiss. She tasted too good to want air ever again. She was too beautiful to care about anything else that was burning in the back of his mind to know. So he simply lost himself in the girl he waited for so long to met again.

He might have been with Taylor, but Marissa was always the one. The one that he would have died for. The one that almost sent him into death when she left. His head swam, as he took in everything about her that he had missed. He was now seventeen forever. And he didn't mind that fact at all, because like Marissa said to him, seventeen is when he met her. And seventeen was the happiest time of his life.

A/N – Hope you liked it! Happy Easter, again, and please review.