Title: Smart

Author: Candle Beck

Pairing: Slash, Ryan/Seth, but not really, because even kids from Chino don't jump possibly-straight boys while they're hammered.

Rating: PG-13

Spoilers: oh, basically the entirety of the pilot, man.

Summary: Your life's over.

Smart

By Candle Beck

You get arrested stealing a car, your life's over. Fair enough. Really, nothing more than you expected.

The public defender plays nice guy, says he's on your side and that's such a fucking line you almost laugh right out loud. He definitely should never use the word 'dude,' again, but he tells you you're too smart to have fucked up like you did and maybe you know he's right.

Being smart's never done much for you, though. Not the way he means it. Smart enough to read mean drunk from huggy love-you-so-much-baby-boy drunk. Smart enough to not say much when AJ's in the room, and get your hands up in time to protect but not hit back, never hit back. Smart enough to hop the side fence and tear your jeans on the chainlink and go over Theresa's place when Trey comes home smashing a bottle on the walk behind him, swearing and screaming at your mom, calling her things you'd never in a million years say out loud but secretly agree with. Smart enough to reach sixteen years old and the only bullet wound you've got is in your side, just under your ribs, and that was an accident and you don't talk about that.

So, fuck being smart.

You get kicked out of your house, probably you should have seen that coming too. And your voice breaks when you say, "where am I gonna go?" and you wish it hadn't. And no one has a place for you to stay, not a couch or a patch of carpet or a fucking back porch, nothing. Theresa says, "My mom, Ryan, she heard you got arrested, she, she doesn't want-" and then her voice breaks too, just like yours, and you hang up before she starts crying and begging you to forgive her in Spanish. Some fucking friends. Some fucking life.

You tear up your hands on that pay phone, man, you pop a knuckle out and split the skin and lick the blood off, but it's not that bad, it won't scar or nothing. You find the business card in your pocket, smudge of grease like a fingerprint on one corner, and at this point the entirety of your mind is, 'what the fuck,' half of it desperate and half of it blind-scared, this fine line of recklessness and fear that you have been walking your whole life.

So you call him, the public defender with the eyebrows and the claims that he understands. You figure, best case scenario, he'll throw down twenty bucks for a bed in a hostel for the night, that's as lucky as you can imagine getting today.

You do not expect Newport Beach.

You do not expect a little house of your own. Or to be woken up by the sheer of the light through the glass walls, Windex-bright. Or to find that the fucking ocean should greet you, two feet away and as blue as a pilot light and bigger than anything you've ever dreamed.

So, okay. You roll with it, that's what you do. You keep your head down and you thank the P.D.'s wife, who's all sorts of cold with her compressed ice-bit smile and the sharp rings on her fingers. You play video games with their kid, the skinny gawky-looking kid who talks and talks and doesn't seem to notice that you don't really answer. You keep a spoon in your mouth, because, you know, it's easier that way, a good excuse.

You go out on the kid's boat, his own fucking boat, of all things, and let your hand drift in the water, the sunlight heavy on your closed eyelids. You learn how to tie a tie. You don't know what to make of this place. You go to the fashion show, a fashion show, honestly, and your sense of disconnect increases exponentially, the idea that you've been plucked up out of the real world and placed down in some absurd anti-reality.

You try to remember if the P.D. drove through some rip in the space-time continuum after wedging your bike in the trunk of his shiny black car and asking you off-hand, "pretty sure your cheekbone's not busted?" which is the only thing he said about your beat face and which made you think maybe he knows a little bit, after all.

You go to that fancy after-party, because the girl with the cheekbones like paper-cuts, who bummed a cigarette from you on the street and smoked it awkwardly without inhaling so that you knew it was her first, the girl who thought you were joking when you told her the truth, she invited you and you'll never come back to Newport, so what does it matter?

It's a beach house with colorful liquor and all these flash-silver rich kids and their dry-cleaned clothes, their good powdered blow on the coffee table, and you feel the eyes on you, the bruises on your face, the way you carry your shoulders so that you'll look bigger than you are, tougher. You wonder if you're fitting in, but of course you're not.

That kid, the P.D.'s kid, who's at your elbow all the time and doesn't have that mean watchful cast to his face that the rest of them have, he is, of course, the one who gives you up. Because you have terrible fucking judgment when it comes to people, you can't see them for what they are, and this kid is the only one you might have even halfway considered trusting, just on the basis of these few hours alone.

So naturally he's the one to reveal you, because that girl he likes with the cruel sweet mouth puts her arms around you and doesn't let you go quickly enough, and he just sees and doesn't listen, pushing you away and saying loudly in a broken drunk little-boy's voice, go back to Chino, steal another car, go back to Chino, go back.

Their eyes are on you again, on you bad this time, not curious but disgusted, and all you've ever tried to do is disappear. If nobody sees you, you can't get hurt.

You don't know what to do. This isn't your place.

You're gonna leave but you've still got nowhere to go, and you see the P.D.'s kid held upside down and outnumbered and still cracking jokes, sand in his hair and his face flushing red, half from the blood and half the heat of the bonfire, and you feel adrenaline and purpose flood through you, goddamn right, because this is easy, this is understandable.

Simple stuff. There's a kid who couldn't beat up a fourth grader and some small-dicked jocks have decided to kick his ass just for the fun of it. It's not a fair fight and this kid offered you video games and sugared cereal, he took you out on his boat and told you things that maybe should have stayed secret. This kid never looked at you like he was afraid you were gonna punch him or like you were some freak from the zoo of Chino, this kid you owe something, you're not sure what but something.

He sold you out, but it's not like you hold grudges because what's the point. So you hit the jock who looks in charge and you know you're gonna get the worse of this, but taking a beating is something you know how to do.

There's blood in your mouth and beach sand scraping hard under your eyelids, maybe you'll be blind in the morning, you never know. The P.D.'s kid is pulling at the back of your suit jacket and it's almost slipping right off your shoulders, because the inside of the jacket is some sort of slick silky slidey material and there's no sort of grip, not like your tough pocket-coat that holds onto you like arms.

You get to your knees, to your feet, and spit out blood and pieces of shell. The P.D.'s kid takes you back to his house and you watch the bruises darkening on his face in the moonlight, in the yellow of the streetlamp, smoking a cigarette to see the smoke twist up into his hair. His arm is around your shoulders and you keep tense for a long time, but he never jerks you into a headlock or throws you to the ground or starts choking you, and eventually you relax. He's got slender strong arms, and his hip bumps your side as he stumbles, pointy and taller than you just like everybody else, his shoes scuffling.

He's talking about how cool it was, and you get the feeling that he's been beat up a lot, but maybe tonight was the first time he's ever fought back. You wouldn't expect him to be so jubilant, seeing as how it didn't exactly turn out well, not like in the movies, but just fighting back, it seems to be enough for him. He keeps talking and it doesn't seem to matter what you say.

Back at the poolhouse, he follows you in and you give him a long look, wondering what he wants as he folds himself down on the couch and kicks at the air. Just to keep talking, maybe, though he's passing out even as you watch, sinking down and down and his eye swelling, scrunching shut. It's amazing, it's like slow-motion, seeing the marks show up on his face like that. It's like watching goosebumps rise on someone's stomach, trying to lick them off. Pressing your mouth down on someone's neck until you know there will be a dark heady smudge there when you pull away. You're very tired. Maybe you've never been this tired.

You don't know what he's doing there. Curled up in his nice suit with blood on the collar and the lapels wrinkled and crumpled out of form. You wonder, does he want you to come over and get on your knees on the carpet in front of him? If you go to sleep, will he slip in next to you sometime in the night and push his hands under your shirt, all clumsy as he unbuckles your belt and his playstation-quick fingers on your stomach, his breath on your throat?

Maybe that's how they do things in Newport Beach. You saw him looking at you. You were looking back, but not really. You don't really do that, except for sometimes.

You don't know what he wants from you, but he's got to want something. Everyone always does.

But he's unconscious now. Maybe it was just the novelty of someone new.

You know what's gonna happen. Take the favorite son, the only son, out to a party and bring him back drunk and beaten up, yeah, you're not gonna be staying in this house, not after tomorrow morning. You'll have to get your mom to take you back, which will probably mean letting AJ kick the shit out of you so that she'll feel sorry and guilty and hold icecubes wrapped in a dishtowel to your eye, to your mouth. You'll have to be shamefaced and do your best not to end up back in lock-up, do whatever it takes because you're smart and you got no other choice. The P.D.'s wife will have you out of here, you know, no matter what her husband says or what happens between you and her son. So nothing's gonna happen between you and her son.

You look at him sleeping, rubbing his face against the couch cushions. There's still sand in his hair, and the long pale curve of his neck, disappearing into the collar of his shirt.

Seth, you think suddenly, though of course you knew it the whole time. His name is Seth.

THE END