Title: The Chrismukkah Carol
Author: kevo
Disclaimer: I own nothing related to The O.C. and its characters, or A Christmas Carol and its themes. And I'd be very happy if they didn't sue me, because I don't have much to take. This fic is strictly for non-profit enjoyment.
Pairing: Seth/Ryan
Rating: PG-13. Ish. For language, some adult themes.
Spoilers: Most of this was developed a month and a half before Season Four even started, and I don't really feel like factoring it into my story, so only up to the end of Season Three.
Summary: Ryan has gone down a dark path; can a Chrismukkah miracle help him get his life back on track?
Warnings: AU after 3x25 "The Graduates"
Author's Note: This fic is the result of the bizarre urge to listen to Christmas music in the early fall, and a persistent drive write OC slash fic. My gift for the holidays. Special thanks to my mei-mei and anyone else that I forced to beta this story. Enjoy, all, and Merry Chrismukkah.

The Chrismukkah Carol

- First Verse -

–

"The Ghost"

---

Marissa was dead, to begin with.

There was no doubt about that. Ryan, more than anyone else, knew this. He was there when it happened. He held her as her body slowly went limp, then placed her gently on the pavement and called the paramedics. He knelt beside her until they arrived, and nodded dumbly when they told him there was nothing he could have done. Marissa Cooper was dead.

It is important to make this information distinctly understood, or else there is nothing remarkable about the story that follows. Therefore it must be repeated again, emphatically, that Marissa was dead.

On the particular evening this story begins, Ryan Atwood was working late. This was not that usual in itself. Ryan was known as something of a workaholic. He always took his lunches at his desk. When his co-workers would go out for drinks, Ryan would stay behind to get a jump start on the next day's workload. He came in early, and stayed late. It was his way.

The thing that made this night different from all the rest was that this night was Christmas Eve.

No one really knew why Ryan was so anti-social. He'd just always been that way. Ever since he first started at the Newport Group, and even before then when he'd make an appearance with his adoptive parents, the owners of the company. It's not that Ryan was difficult to work with or went out of his way to be rude. There was simply a line, a very solid, very real line between his professional and personal lives, and no one in his professional life was ever given a glimpse of his personal one. He was incredibly secretive when it came to things like that. Solitary. It was something people had come to accept over the past two and a half years he'd been working there.

In light of Ryan's absence of affability, most people at the Newport Group avoided coming near his office unless they had business to discuss. This didn't bother Ryan one bit. He'd always hated small talk anyway. Being the night before a holiday, most others had already left for the day, which meant he had little fear of being forced to converse with any passersby. Ryan could work alone, in silence, which was just how he liked it.

Ryan was deeply engrossed in a report regarding the company's latest housing development when, unexpectedly, a gentle knock sounded at his office door.

"Come in," Ryan called out without looking up from the report.

The door opened and Kirsten Cohen appeared. She was dressed in a stylish but simple black dress. In her hand she held a red envelope.

"Hey, Ryan," Kirsten said softly.

"Kirsten," Ryan replied. "Hi. What's up?"

He placed the sheet down on his desk. Kirsten was one of the few people in the company that Ryan was remotely warm with. In a grasping attempt to make polite conversation, Ryan asked, "Shouldn't you home, getting ready for, uh, for Chrismukkah?"

Chrismukkah. Ryan hadn't said that word, or even so much as thought about it, in a long while. The synergistic holiday's title felt awkward and clumsy coming out of his mouth now, like he was saying something in a foreign language. He hoped it wasn't obvious to Kirsten. If it was, her face didn't show it.

"I'm heading out now," she told him. "There were just a few things that needed taking care of here first." Kirsten moved closer to Ryan's desk. "Shouldn't you be getting home, too? It's late."

"I just have a few more reports to go over," Ryan said, gesturing at the pages on his desk.

"You need to give yourself a break, Ryan," Kirsten lightly scolded. "It's the holidays. The work will be there when you get back."

"Nah, I'd feel guilty just leaving it all here," Ryan responded.

Hoping they were done, Ryan reached for another report and pretended to read it. Knowing they weren't really done, he braced himself. Waited for Kirsten to say it. What she always said. After a brief pause, she finally did.

"Ryan, come to dinner tomorrow night," Kirsten pleaded. "You haven't been to the house in so long."

Ryan glanced up from his work.

"I'd like to Kirsten," he lied. "I really would, but, I, uh, I have plans already." Pause. "A date." Longer pause. "With a woman. We've been seeing each other for a little while now and I promised I'd take her out tomorrow. Otherwise…"

"Well, you could bring her," Kirsten suggested. "I know that might sound a little uncomfortable, given, well, everything that's happened, but it's Chrismukkah. You should be with your family."

"I don't think that'd be such a good idea," Ryan said sheepishly. "I don't want her to get the wrong idea, bringing her to meet my, uhm… you guys."

"I see," Kirsten said.

Even though she didn't see.

They did this dance every year. There were a few subtle changes here and there, claims of dinner reservations or a short ski trip instead of a date, but the gist was always the same: Kirsten invited, Ryan declined, they both went their separate ways.

"Well, I'll leave you to your work," Kirsten said following a long silence. She dropped the red envelope on Ryan's desk before uttering a quick, "Merry Chrismukkah, Ryan," and exiting his office in a hurry.

Ryan lifted the envelope, turned it over in his hands.

He wanted to call after Kirsten. He wanted to stop her, to tell her that there was no date, that he would love to come to dinner, that he missed her, and Sandy, and … and Seth.

But he didn't.

Instead, he shoved the red envelope into his briefcase, turned back to his report, and kept working.

CCCCCCC

Much later, what could have been hours for all he knew, Ryan gave up on getting anything more done in the office. At least, that's what he chose to believe, rather than acknowledge that he'd been all but kicked out by the night janitor.

He drove the familiar route to his apartment building, surprised by the lack of traffic for Christmas Eve.

Out of nowhere, angry static began blaring over the car's speakers. Under the static, a slow, mournful tune was playing. Ryan strained to hear what it was.

"Let's dance in style, let's dance for a while, heaven can wait, we're only watching the skies…."

Ryan looked quickly at the stereo. It wasn't even on. Yet somehow that wasn't preventing the song from playing. He hit the power button. Nothing happened. He hit it twice more, with more force, but that did nothing. Frustrated, Ryan pulled over to the shoulder so he could try and figure out what was going on. He pressed the On button again, and again nothing happened. He tried all of the radio preset buttons, the volume, hitting the button for the CD player. Still nothing.

"Forever young, I want to be forever young…. Do you really want to live forever…?"

Fed up, and not wanting to hear any more of that song, Ryan finally yanked the keys out of the ignition. The noise stopped. Ryan rubbed his mouth nervously. What was that? He made a mental note to take it to get looked at the next morning. Then he remembered that the next day was Christmas, and that everywhere would most likely be closed.

"Fucking holidays," he muttered.

Breathing heavily, Ryan turned the car back on and glanced in the rear view mirror to check for traffic.

Marissa Cooper stared back at him from the back seat.

Immediately Ryan whirled around in his seat to look in the back. It was empty. He searched frantically, even checked the floor, as though she might have been hiding there. Which was ridiculous. She couldn't be in the car at all, let alone hiding on the floor.

It was the song, he determined. It just brought up some old memories and he thought he saw Marissa sitting in the back seat but she wasn't. That was all.

Checking again for traffic, Ryan pulled out onto the road and drove.

CCCCCCC

After leaving his car in the parking garage, Ryan walked swiftly to the front door of his apartment building. It was astoundingly cold, even for December. Waiting at the entrance was Otis, the doorman.

Otis was a portly man with graying hair in his mid-fifties. There was always a smile plastered across his face, rain or shine, all year round. Normally Ryan didn't think too much about it, but after encounter with Kirsten and his spook on the ride home he wasn't in the mood to be around someone in such good spirits.

"Good evening, Mr. Atwood," Otis said, brimming with cheer. "Happy holidays!"

"Yeah, not really," Ryan mumbled.

He didn't mean to be heard, but he was. Otis clamped a large hand on Ryan's shoulder. This gesture was not entirely welcome and, had Ryan been in a different kind of bad mood, may have been met with a more violent reaction.

"Aw, c'mon," Otis prodded. "You can't seriously mean that."

"Why not?" Ryan snapped, brushing the man's hand off him. "What reason do I have to be happy?"

"What reason do you have to be miserable?" the doorman countered simply.

Glaring angrily, Ryan brushed past Otis and headed into the lobby. He dimly realized that he was taking his problems out on the wrong person, but at the moment he didn't really care. The overzealous doorman had triggered something in Ryan. He was already in a cantankerous mood to begin with, he didn't need someone to beat him over the head with Christmas merriment.

Upon entering the lobby, Ryan was greeted with something he'd never heard in the oppressively overheated foyer: singing. Ryan searched around for its source and saw a small boy sitting on the floor near the entrance. The first thing Ryan noticed about him was his skinny frame, skinner than Ryan saw on most boys his age, which Ryan approximated to be eight or nine. His clothes were disheveled and either too big or too small. The newest-looking thing the boy wore was a thick woolen hat, covering most of his dirty blond hair. Dirty in both senses of the word, as his hair, face, and clothes were all a little grimy. In his hand was a small object, what looked like a Christmas tree ornament of a rocking horse. Ryan didn't recall seeing him around the building, but then if the kid did live somewhere in the building he wouldn't be sitting in the lobby looking like that. He didn't seem to notice that Ryan had entered.

The boy sang softly, almost inaudibly:

"You better watch out, you better not cry, you better not pout, I'm tellin' you why: Santa Claus is coming to town…"

Ryan looked around curiously. They were the only two in the lobby, with Otis standing just outside the door. No one else was around.

Where the hell are this kids parents? he wondered.

But Ryan knew better than that. Dirty young kid sitting alone huddled in the foyer of an apartment building on Christmas Eve? Of course Ryan knew better than to think someone was responsible for him. He tried to pretend he didn't, though. As hard as he could he tried.

"Hey, kid," Ryan said gruffly. "What're you doing here?"

Startled out of his song, the boy looked up at Ryan.

"I'm waiting for my dad," he said. He eyes slid nervously to exit, like he was calculating how long it would take him to bolt if he needed to. "He-he said he was gonna go get us somefin' to eat." The boy pointed to Otis through the glass doors and said anxiously, "He said it was okay if I wait here."

"All right," Ryan said, nodding like he believed him. "I'm just going to go ask him if he knows when your dad will be back, okay?"

The child's eyes bulged slightly. He nodded mutely. Ryan stepped outside and stood casually beside Otis.

"You let that kid in?" he asked.

"I did," Otis replied daringly. As though he expected Ryan to object to this decision, to ask Otis to kick to kid out.

"He said he's waiting for his dad," Ryan continued, "to get something to eat."

Otis sighed, then shook his head. "I didn't see a dad," he told Ryan. "Kid told me he was waiting for his mom to pick him up. I knew he was lying, but…"

Ryan nodded and let Otis leave his sentence unfinished. He knew the kid was lying, but didn't have the heart to keep him out. Knew he was lying but couldn't let him stay outside on this cold December night.

Searching for the pack of cigarettes he made a habit of always carrying, Ryan pulled one out and lit it, taking a long, soothing drag. He'd quit smoking twice in his life: when he first moved in with the Cohens, and after he took them up again when Marissa died. Ryan knew he probably wouldn't be able to quit a third time. It helped that he had no reason to.

"What do you think we should do?" Otis asked. "Y'know, about the kid."

Ryan shrugged. "Leave him," he recommended. "He'll clear out eventually.

"Shouldn't we call someone?" Otis posed. "He's probably all alone."

"He's better off that way," Ryan muttered.

Taking one last puff, Ryan tossed the cigarette and stubbed it out with the toe of his shoe. He gave Otis a quick formal nod then headed back inside. The boy was still sitting there on the floor. He looked up at Ryan apprehensively.

"You're not gonna make me leave, are you?" he asked quietly. Ryan shook his head in response. Sitting up a little straighter, the kid ventured, "You got any, uh, any change or anything? I wanted to, uhm, make a phone call."

It would have been so easy, Ryan realized, to say yes. To extend a helping hand to this small child who may not have anyone else. To let him in.

Again Ryan shook his head. No, he didn't have any change. Fourteen seconds later he was on the elevator and headed up to his apartment. Alone.

CCCCCCC

Ryan entered his apartment, not bothering to put on the light. He liked being in the dark He didn't know why. It was the sort of thing his shrink probably would've made Ryan analyze if he hadn't stopped going.

The apartment was sparsely decorated, with only the essential furniture; a couch, a TV, a table with two chairs, though only one was ever put to use. Everything was a plain, sterile shade of white. There used to be more; more furniture, more color, more life. But that was when Ryan had a roommate, and someone to share that more with. This, the way it was now, was more than Ryan needed. It did the job, kept a roof over his head. Gave him some place to go at the end of the night.

Ryan dropped his briefcase and crossed quickly over to the kitchen. He was about to open the refrigerator when something attached to the front caught his eye. It was the first Chrismukkah card he had ever posed for with the Cohens. The four of them sitting in front of the fireplace, under their neatly hung personalized stockings. Sandy with his arms around Kirsten. Seth and Ryan seated next to one another, their legs just barely touching.

"The hell?" Ryan grunted. He snatched it off the door.

How had that gotten there? Ryan certainly didn't put it up. He didn't even realize he still had it. He figured he'd tossed it with everything else when he went through his bad relationship memory purging period. Yet here it was, staring him in the face like a grim reminder of a past he'd all but forgotten. Ryan considered crumpling the thing up, but instead he simply dropped it on the counter. Face down.

He yanked the refrigerator open and pulled out the bottle of vodka that was waiting there with two more of its kind.

CCCCCCC

Some time later, Ryan stumbled into his bedroom, carelessly discarding his jacket and tie. His bottle fell to the floor, landing with a soft thud on the carpet. He'd gotten through the better part of it. Or maybe he finished it, he couldn't quite remember. Ryan kicked off his shoes and crashed onto the bed. He was fully prepared to pass out and sleep straight through Christmas.

Suddenly, in the shadows, he heard something. It was the familiar sound of alcohol sloshing around in a bottle. He'd heard it so often before, it was as easy to recognize as his own voice. The part of him that never truly let his guard down, the part that remembered his roots in Chino, would never forget, froze.

"Who's there?" Ryan asked hoarsely.

He rapidly felt very sober, at least mentally. Physically he was still a little sluggish. He only hoped that wouldn't become a problem should he need to defend himself.

"No one," a voice answered sadly.

The voice. It was female. Familiar. Ryan felt it with ever fiber of his being. But the very idea, that it was…. No. Couldn't be. It was crazy. Ludicrous! It couldn't possibly be her. It was the booze and the damn holiday spirit playing tricks with his head.

"Yeah, right, no one," Ryan scoffed. He peered into the darkened side of the room, trying to discern who he was talking to. "Did one of my buddies at the office send you over? Try and give me a little Christmas cheer? Tell 'em thanks but no thanks."

A harsh chuckle.

"Oh, Ryan," the voice said with barely contained glee. "You don't have any friends."

She spoke with such absolute certainty that Ryan shivered. He swallowed, hard.

"And I'm not a prostitute," she added. "But I am here for you."

"How do you know my name?" Ryan barked. His eyes darted around the darkened room for something to use as a weapon in case he needed it. "What do you want?"

"Much," the woman answered plainly.

After a long pause to contemplate what that could possibly mean, Ryan asked, "Wh-who are you?" He barely even noticed the tremble in his own voice.

"Ask me who I was," came the reply.

For a full minute, he couldn't. His jaw was clenched, throat dry, and both unable to form words, much less the one he didn't dare to speak. Then, finally, in a voice barely louder than the muffled sounds of traffic streaming in through the closed door of his balcony, Ryan forced the name out.

"Marissa…?"

Again Ryan heard the sloshing, accompanied by the soft, soft sound of footsteps drawing slowly nearer.

"In life, I was," she concurred.

A delicate, bare foot stepped into a patch of light streaming in through the balcony's sliding glass door. The leg followed, then another. A tall, thin frame appeared in the moonlight, a woman. A woman Ryan recognized.

She was wearing a flowing white dress that billowed in a breeze Ryan couldn't feel. It was similar to the one in which she was buried, but slightly graying with age and worn ragged from use. She looked pale, cold, beautiful, bored, all at the same time. And there was something new about her, as well. An air of innocence, something she had lost long ago, that she was barely still clinging to when Ryan met her. It made her look like a little girl, swinging a half empty bottle of vodka instead of a teddy bear.

Then, in the same way, the same exact way, that Ryan had heard her say it more than a hundred times in the few short years he had known her, Marissa smiled and said, "Hey, Ryan."

Ryan, terrified by his dead ex-girlfriend's appearance in his room, scrambled backward on his bed. Even after he managed to reach the headboard, it took a few moments before he could form coherent words.

"Y-you're dead!" he screamed at her. "You're dead! I held you while you died! I was there when they buried you!"

"I know! I know you were," Marissa said soothingly. She moved toward him but Ryan recoiled in terror. Marissa frowned. "I'm not here to frighten you, Ryan."

"You're not here!" Ryan insisted. "You can't be here! It's not possible." He looked across the room, at his own discarded bottle of vodka. "I'm drunk," he said. "I got drunk and I passed out and this is all just some fucked up Christmas nightmare."

"And were you drunk this evening when you saw me in the rear view mirror of your car?" Marissa asked. "Was I some Christmas nightmare then as well?"

Ryan considered this.

"Besides," Marissa continued, "I used to drink too much all the time, I never saw dead people."

Despite himself, Ryan smiled a little. He knew Marissa was dead, he knew it, more than anything else in his life. But this … this specter, this apparition, was so like her, it made that fact easy to forget. Marissa smiled too, bright and beautiful, and it was like she had never died at all. She was the same sunny girl he remembered from the day they graduated high school.

Except she wasn't. If that Marissa had been the sun, golden and bright and happy, then this Marissa was the moon, pale and dark and sad. Beautiful, still, but in a more somber way.

"W…what are you doing here?" Ryan asked shakily.

"I'm here to help you, Ryan," Marissa said.

Her tone was soothing, like she was trying to calm a frightened or dangerous animal. That made Ryan the animal, and he didn't like being coddled like that.

"Help me with what?" he bristled. "I don't need any help. I'm fine."

"I think we both can agree that I've seen enough self-destructive behavior first-hand to know that you aren't," Marissa disputed. "Remember our first Christmas together?"

Ryan nodded. How could he forget his first Christmas in Newport? The shoplifting, the drunken misadventure, the Newpsie party, the introduction to Chrismukkah; it was nothing if not memorable.

"So, what, you're my guardian angel?" Ryan scoffed.

"Do I strike you as the angelic type?" Marissa grinned. "It's not like that, not exactly. Although, in a way, I have been watching over you."

"Really," Ryan frowned. He wasn't sure he liked the idea of Marissa Cooper hovering over him without his knowledge. There were many things he'd done since her death that he really did not want her to see.

The concern must have shown on his face, or perhaps she had some otherworldly power to read his thoughts, because Marissa then asked, rather archly, "Worried about what I might have seen you doing?" Then, more knowingly, she added, "Or maybe you're worried about me seeing who you've done it with."

Standing angrily from the bed, Ryan stepped a few passes away from her and said, "If you're just here to make fun of me, you can go now."

"I'm not," Marissa insisted.

"Then why are you here?"

"I'm here to warn you," Marissa said. "Listen closely. Bad things are waiting for you on the other side, Ryan. Very bad things."

"What!?" Ryan cried in disbelief. "Why? What did I ever do?"

"It's what you didn't do," she said firmly.

There was something in Marissa's ghostly face that made Ryan shiver, like she could see right through him. The statement was final, and Ryan knew there was no prying any further details out of her.

"I don't want to know this," Ryan said. "Why are you telling me this?"

"I'm telling you this to try and save you," she explained. "There's still hope for you, that you can change and avoid this terrible fate."

It was a strange post-mortem role-reversal, Marissa coming to save Ryan. He had tried to save her so many times in life and now here she was trying to help him in death. Ryan would have smiled at the thought if it wasn't so morbid.

"Well, what do I have to do?"

"You will be visited tonight," Marissa told him, "by three Spirits."

Ryan blinked at her.

"Do I have to?" he asked. "Can't I just try and be a better person?"

Marissa shook her head. "You're too far gone, Ryan. Saying you'll try harder isn't good enough. Without being shown the error of your ways, you may never change."

"You don't know that," Ryan said defensively.

"I know you," Marissa teased, despite the grim situation. "You're stubborn, and set in your ways. But your ways have to change, Ryan. If they don't…."

She let the implication speak for itself.

Ryan sank back onto the bed. His head was spinning, and not from the alcohol lingering in his system. He barely believed this was even real and now, if it wasn't in fact a drunken nightmare, he was being asked to subject himself to more? Or he would be facing a fate worse than death? This couldn't be real.

But it was.

Neither of them spoke for a long time. Ryan knew he should say something, have some sort of answer for her, but "I don't know what to say," was all he could muster.

"I have to go soon," Marissa said, rising suddenly.

"No, don't!" Ryan pleaded, raising a hand as if to make a futile attempt at grabbing her and holding here there with him. As much as she terrified him earlier, Ryan hated to see his old friend, his former love, leave again. "Please, wait."

"I can't," she said. "I don't even know how I'm here now." She smiled sadly. "I've walked beside you so many times before, Ryan. It's just tonight that you can see me."

"I'm glad I did," he told her, only realizing after he said it that it was true.

Marissa touched Ryan's cheek gently. Her hand was like ice, but Ryan forced himself not to brush it away.

"You've never had it easy, Ryan," she said without any trace of pity. Then, as though only just realizing to do so, she asked tentatively, "Do you think you could do me one favor?"

"Anything," Ryan vowed.

"The next time you see Summer, could you give her a hug?" Marissa asked. "You don't have to say it's from me. Just, I miss her sometimes."

"In a junior year, lesbian flirtation kind of way?" Ryan asked playfully.

"No, nothing like that," Marissa replied. "We aren't all in love with our best friends."

That shut Ryan up. Ryan looked into Marissa's eyes.

"Do I have to do this?" he asked meekly.

"No," Marissa admitted. "You have a choice." She paused to let that settle, then continued, "But I think you should. And I know that if you do, it will help things get better. You deserve to be happy, Ryan." With a meaningful look, she added, "No matter whom it's with."

The perceptiveness of Marissa's observations was becoming overwhelming for Ryan. He looked away from her, first down at his fidgeting fingers, then toward the balcony and the bright star-filled sky.

"I'll do it," Ryan said, quiet but with conviction.

He turned back to Marissa, to see her reaction to his decision, but she was gone.

Ryan was alone again in his bedroom. He lay back on the bed. With a sigh, he rubbed the bridge of his nose.

Nothing to do now, he thought, but wait.

END NOTES: So I was listening to my Christmas Carol soundtrack one afternoon, in September (I know, right? So random!), thinking about The OC and how I hadn't written a fic for it in a while, when suddenly the two began to merge in my head. The more I thought about it, the more it intrigued me. Eventually I heard the iconic words of the opening lines become, "Marissa was dead, to begin with." When I thought about how Marissa had just died in canon, it felt perfect. So I've been working on it ever since.
I've studied nearly every different version of A Christmas Carol I could get my hands on, including episodes of TV shows using the story as the basis for a Christmas episode. (By the way: the original? Is pretty boring. If you want to hear the story, watch the Muppet version; it's the most accurate depiction, if you overlook the Muppets and the singing, and is certainly more entertaining.) If you already know the story, I hope you'll notice the little parallels I've drawn here and can take delight in them. Some are pretty overt, but some are incredibly subtle.
Another little note that I'm sure no one will get, so I want to mention it here: Marissa saying "I never saw dead people" is in fact a reference to Mischa Barton being the little girl from The Sixth Sense.

Now, on to the first ghost!-kevo