Disclaimer: I own nothing. The song is 'Gone Gone Gone' by Philip Phillips. I have a love/hate relationship with Glee. I'm kind of a Ryder stan, so I'm sorry if this comes across as slightly more pro-Ryder than pro-Marley.
Notes: Sorry to anyone that was reading my other fanfic 'Everybody Hurts.' I promise I'm still planning on finishing that. I wrote this drabble as part of Ryley week on Tumblr, though, so hopefully it'll help me get my Ryley muse back so that I can write some more for you!
Gone, Gone, Gone
Ryder was the first one there when Marley found out about Jake and Bree. He didn't say a word, just opened his arms and wrapped her in a gigantic bear hug. He asked no questions; around her he didn't need to. There was no point in asking her if she was okay or not because he always knew when the answer was no.
The shock had barely worn off, and once Ryder's arms were around her, her face crumpled, and the tears finally came. If it were anyone else she would have felt horribly self-conscious about the way her ugly sobs wracked against his chest, or the way that his shirt was getting soaked with her tears, but this was Ryder. He had seen her at her very worst, and still thought the very best of her.
She didn't know how he could do that; how he could still look at her like his whole world revolved around her, after the way that she had treated him. After she had chosen Jake over him. After she had chosen Jake over him again. After she had taken Unique's side in the Catfishing ordeal. She didn't deserve it, not at all, but right now she needed it more than words could describe. She felt like her entire relationship with Jake was one big lie; like she had never meant anything to him. And maybe it was selfish, but she needed to feel like she mattered to someone, and no one knew how to make her feel that way more than Ryder.
He did it so effortlessly, too. It was in the way that his face lit up every time she waved to him in the halls. It was in the way that, the second there was a frown on her face, he was cracking a joke, or prodding Sam to do a lame impersonation, or making some ridiculous facial expression that brightened her mood. It was in the way he always answered the phone on the second ring, or the way that she got a text message back within 5 minutes (she figured it would be even faster if he weren't plagued by dyslexia, but that thought only pained her again because good Lord, had she ever been there for him when he needed her?). It was the way that he always suggested a group do her favorite things, because she was usually too timid to try to ask all her friends to do things like play glow-in-the-dark mini golf or to go see old black and white movies at the Lima Theater. The way that he was always right by her side, doing the lamest dance moves in glee club as if they were the most fun things in the world.
She didn't even realize that she had stopped crying until Ryder was pulling back from her, looking down at her with his brows furrowed. "You can keep crying, you know," he said lightly, arms still around her, offering her a lopsided, half-hearted smile. Because he understood. He understood just how much of herself she had put into being Jake Puckerman's girlfriend, and it hadn't been good enough. Was that how she had made him feel? When she had picked Jake over him?
"Although if you think you're done for a bit, I can take you to go get ice cream. Dairy Queen has a new birthday cake batter dipped ice cream cone that sounds right up your alley." He disentangled himself from her, pulling a packet of tissues out of his pocket and offering her one to dry her eyes with, squeezing her hand reassuringly as the Kleenex traded hands. "I got you the kind with aloe just in case, because I didn't want your nose to get all scratchy and raw from having to blow it too many times."
Coming from anyone else, Marley might have been a little bit creeped out that they had put that much thought into what was going to happen to her nose, but the way Ryder said it was just so damn sweet that it made her already aching heart hurt for an entirely different reason.
"Ice cream sounds good," she admitted with a strained laugh, rolling her eyes fondly at him as she blew her nose. She had to admit, the tissues were much softer than the generic ones that could usually be found by her mom's bedside table.
They avoided the topic of Jake the whole time that they sat side by side at the ice cream parlor, and Marley was amazed at how happy she felt. When was the last time she had been able to talk about the Hunger Games so openly like this? Or been around a guy who understood references to both Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Mean Girls? Ryder even made an allusion to I Love Lucy, which Jake had turned off after 5 minutes because he didn't like watching shows in black and white.
It still stung that Jake had cheated on her, still stung that she had lost her first boyfriend… But Marley had spent two hours with Ryder and had forgotten to feel sad the entire time.
She hadn't even realized she'd been spending the evening comparing the two of them until Ryder opened the passenger seat of his car for her, letting her get in before he jogged lazily around to the other side and started the trek back to her house. A Jake never did this kind of thing for me had just flitted through her mind, though, when it hit her like a ton of bricks, and she wished she could take the thought back.
It wasn't like it was the first time she had wondered what it would be like to be Ryder's girlfriend instead of Jake's. A girl was allowed a certain amount of leniency when, by some miracle, two of the hottest guys in school both wanted to be with her, didn't she? She was allowed to wonder.
The more she had wondered over time, though, the more guilty she had felt about it. A part of her knew that Ryder never would have gotten the chance to kiss her after Valentine's Day if she hadn't still been kind of wondering what life would have been like if she had chosen him. When he admitted that everything had been real? That had been a glimpse at what being with Ryder could have been like, and quite frankly? She had liked it.
But the thought of leaving Jake terrified her. The thought of losing the first boy she had been so convinced she had loved scared her, and so she had done everything she could to fix things with him, ignoring whatever lingering fantasies she had about the taste of another boy's lips and moving forward with the relationship she thought she was meant to be in.
Look what good that had done her. Now she was sitting here, frown plastered on her face as Ryder pulled into her driveway, eyebrows scrunched up in that manner that only people who are thinking about something really, really hard seem to experience.
She was so lost in her train of thought that she didn't even notice the way Ryder tilted his head to the side, studying her curiously before letting himself out of the car and coming around to open her door again. He looked down at her, still buckled into her seat, and cleared his throat, bringing her back down to earth.
She nearly jumped out of her seat, scurrying to unbuckle her seatbelt and taking the hand that he was offering to help pull her out of the car.
"Normally I can read you really well," Ryder pointed out, biting his bottom lip as they walked side by side to her front doorstep.
"Mmm?" she murmured questioningly in response, not quite sure what his point was. He didn't seem like he was in any hurry to leave, taking a seat on her illuminated front stairs and patting the spot next to him for her to join him.
"I can't tell what you're thinking," he said, worry lacing his voice. "I expected you to be sad. And you were earlier, when I got here. But now… I don't think I've ever seen you feel… whatever that was, back in the car," he admitted, running his fingers through his shaggy brown hair and letting out a small, frustrated huff. It was touching, the amount of concern he was showing.
"I was thinking… that you never would have done that to me," she admitted, voice small and timid as her gaze was drawn to her hands, folded in her lap. She wrung them together nervously, wondering what had possessed her to tell him that when it was selfish of her to have been even thinking it. That chapter in Ryder's life should have been over – and sure, maybe he hadn't actually been as crazy about his Catfish once he had realized who it was. Maybe he had only gone on that one failed date with Kitty before turning her down. But that didn't mean Marley could reopen that door, could expect him to still think about her that way, did it?
"Never done what?" he asked, his words slow and cautious, as if he was afraid to ask. She supposed it was a fair question, considering that they had had a light, fun-filled evening and hadn't delved into the serious emotions that it was natural for her to have lurking there. Maybe he really hadn't made the jump.
"Cheated on me. If I had dated you instead, you never would have cheated on me," she said, pulling her knees up to her chest and hugging them a little bit, curling in on herself.
"Oh." His words were flat, and maybe she had been right the first time. Maybe he had known where she was going with this, and just hadn't wanted to open the past back up when everything was still so new, so different, so… Not what Marley had expected it to be. She was worried that a tense and awkward silence was falling when he spoke up again, a shrug of his shoulders accompanying the words, "Of course I wouldn't have."
The way he said it, in such earnest, it was almost as if they were back in elementary school and he had said "Duh" to her. As if it was the most obvious thing in the world, as if it was outrageous that she even would have doubted it for a second.
"I was always sort of worried about that with Jake. There were so many Cheerios around, and they're all so pretty, and popular, and – "
"Stop." Ryder had shifted so that he was facing her directly, his body squared towards hers with an air of seriousness.
"Stop?" she questioned. It crossed her mind that Jake and Ryder were best friends, or best bros, or whatever it was that guys classified themselves as, and worry flickered through her eyes. Had she stepped on his toes by saying that she had never trusted his best friend? Had she…
"Jake's a fucking moron," Ryder said, and she detected the anger in his voice, saw it flash across his face. "He promised me. He promised me he would never hurt you, he promised me that he would be a good guy for you. And I believed him, even after he thought all the Valentine's presents I helped him with were just a way to get laid, even when he almost ditched you for Sadie Hawkins because Kitty offered to sleep with him, even… God, I'm just so mad. I almost went straight over to his house to beat the crap out of him for doing this to you, you know, but being with you was more important. His face can stay bruise free for another day." She wasn't sure she had ever seen Ryder seethe like that, as if nothing in the world mattered as much as protecting her from the pain she was feeling, but oddly enough, seeing this protective side of him made her forget that the pain was even there.
"If you had been my boyfriend instead…" Marley said, heart thumping against her chest. How many times had she thought those words to herself when she had been dating Jake? When Ryder had flashed that smile at her that had made her melt the first time she met him? And here she was speaking them aloud, after a night of barely caring that Jake had been lying to her, clinging to a desperate hope that Ryder would provide some kind of reaction to show that he had thought about that to.
Maybe that was why she wasn't so broken up about things as she should have been. Maybe a part of her knew that she had always been lying to Jake just a little bit, too. The fact that these thoughts were all rushing forward the second she was single seemed to be a fairly good indicator of that.
"Marley…" he said in a warning tone, stopping her right then and there. "Marley, you just broke up with Jake. I can't – it's not… It isn't right," he said desperately, but she couldn't ignore the underlying hope that she heard in his tone. He knew her almost better than she knew herself at this point, but maybe, just maybe, she knew him pretty well too.
When she lay in bed staring at her ceiling later that night wondering what she had done, she blamed the shock, the prospect of loneliness, and a lot of other things for her actions. Because if she hadn't been traumatized by the days events, would she have closed the space between them and kissed him the way she had? Would she have still felt the taste of his lips lingering there even after he had jolted to his feet with a panicked "I should go" if she hadn't been missing Jake?
Her mind flashed back to a scene in the ceramics room, a feeling of looking in on her own life and seeing Ryder there kissing her, holding her, singing to her instead, and she buried her face in her pillow with a frustrated grunt.
Yes. Yes, she still would have done those things.
If only she had done them months ago before things had gotten so complicated.
Was it wrong that in the days after that, the guy she was staring at longingly in glee club was Ryder, and not Jake? She tried to tell herself at first that it was just because Bree was in glee now too, and she couldn't bear to look at the other woman, but if that was really it, then why did her eyes fall on her best friend every time?
She knew saw her, too, because he would still flash her that grin of his, but it never quite reached his eyes the way it usually did. It was like there was turmoil behind his brown eyes, thoughts that she couldn't possibly tap into, and she wished she knew what he was thinking.
He had told her when he left her house that first night that if he needed her for anything, if she was still feeling sad about Jake, he would be happy to help her out. But how could she tell him that she was more worried about having screwed things up with him than whatever Jake and Bree were doing between bedsheets?
She wasn't sure if she was actually avoiding him or not, because he still responded to her texts just the same, still picked up the phone just like he always did, still swung by her locker every time he found an article or a comic he thought she'd like to see. But he was much more hesitant than normal, as if he was dancing on the edge of something he just wasn't sure of. She wanted so badly to ask, but the way he had gotten up and left after she kissed him had made it clear that he didn't want to discuss whatever it was was going through his head. She could only hope that he would talk to her about it in his own time, and that it wouldn't drive a wedge in their friendship right when she realized that she had never stopped caring in the first place.
And he did come to her, when he was ready, but she never saw it coming. She watched him raise his hand in glee on a day when Jake had skived off early – and how convenient that Bree was absent, too – and tapped his fingers nervously on the empty chair next to him as he asked if he could stand up and sing.
Mr. Schue had eagerly nodded, always happy to see students preparing things on their own time, and Ryder had slid easily behind the drum set, twirling the drumsticks anxiously as he locked eyes on her.
"I, um… I wanted to sing this song for Marley," he said. He didn't give any further explanation, just turned to Brad the piano guy and nodded quickly, as if he would chicken out if there was too much idle time.
"When life leaves you high and dry
I'll be at your door tonight
If you need help, if you need help.
I'll shut down the city lights,
I'll lie, cheat, I'll beg and bribe
To make you well, to make you well," Ryder began tentatively, but Marley had felt her heart swell the second she recognized Philip Phillips's Gone Gone Gone. She scooted towards the edge of her seat, hanging on to his every word and blushing at the realization that it already resonated with the role Ryder had been playing in her life this year.
"When enemies are at your door
I'll carry you away from war
If you need help, if you need help.
Your hope dangling by a string
I'll share in your suffering
To make you well, to make you well."
Marley was pretty she felt Unique giving her the side eye, but she was so wholly focused on Ryder that it didn't seem to matter to her. His eyes were still cast downwards, but memories were flooding through her anyway. The sight of Ryder barging into the bathroom the night of Grease to stop her from hurting herself. Her eyes opening after her collapse at Sectionals to see his face looming above her. His hurried crawl as he had made his way across the choir room during the shooting, wanting to spend his potential final moments right next to her. The way he had been by her side during Finn's memorial service, understanding her feelings better than Jake ever had been able to."Give me reasons to believe
That you would do the same for me."
He finally looked up, and there; there was that hopeful look on his face again. The one that made her feel like she was his whole world, and whatever conflict she had seen in his face all week was gone. He still wanted her. She had just been too stubborn to see it, too caught up in the fantasy of turning the womanizer into a respectable boyfriend to see that Ryder had been there all along."And I would do it for you, for you.
Baby, I'm not moving on
I love you long after you're gone.
For you, for you.
You will never sleep alone.
I love you long after you're gone
And long after you're gone, gone, gone."
She clambered out of her seat sometime during the first chorus, hearing Kitty mutter a sarcastic "She really doesn't know what the word 'serenade' means, does she?" as Marley floated towards Ryder's side in an almost dreamlike state, not sure she believed her own luck right now. She rolled her eyes, nonplussed by Kitty's sarcasm – this time she needed to be up there, singing with him. He had been searching her face as he had sung about doing the same for him, and he needed to know that yes, yes she would be there for him from now on. She wasn't going to keep making the same mistakes, wasn't going to keep letting him suffer, wasn't going to take him for granted anymore. The dream of Jake had been shattered, but she was pretty sure she was left with a reality of Ryder that was far better than the alternative ever could have been.
"When you fall like a statue
I'm gon' be there to catch you
Put you on your feet, you on your feet.
And if your well is empty
Not a thing will prevent me.
Tell me what you need, what do you need?"
Ryder seemed honestly a bit shocked when Marley turned the tables on him, placing a hand on his shoulder and twirling around the drumset to look into his eyes."I surrender honestly.
You've always done the same for me.So I would do it for you, for you.
Baby, I'm not moving on,
I love you long after you're gone.
For you, for you.
You will never sleep alone.
I love you long after you're gone
And long after you're gone, gone, gone."
She was pretty sure the rest of the glee club was staring at her, appalled that she was here, singing a love song with another guy so soon after her breakup with Jake, but she didn't care. She wasn't doing this for them, she was doing this for her. But more importantly, she thought as Ryder joined her for the closing of the song, she was doing this for him. She should have been doing this for him all along.
"You're my back bone.
You're my cornerstone.
You're my crutch when my legs stop moving.
You're my head start.
You're my rugged heart.
You're the pulse that I've always needed.
Like a drum, baby, don't stop beating.
Like a drum, baby, don't stop beating.
Like a drum, baby, don't stop beating.
Like a drum my heart never stops beating...For you, for you.
Baby, I'm not moving on.
I love you long after you're gone.
For you, for you.
You will never sleep alone.
I love you long after you're gone.
For you, for you.
Baby, I'm not moving on,
I love you long after you're gone.
For you, for you.
You will never sleep alone.
I love you long, long after you're gone.Like a drum, baby, don't stop beating.
Like a drum, baby, don't stop beating.
Like a drum, baby, don't stop beating.
Like a drum my heart never stops beating for you.And long after you're gone, gone, gone.
I love you long after you're gone, gone, gone."
Mr. Schuester was the first one to stand up and start clapping at the end of their song, with Sam following close after, whooping and saying "Yeah! That's my boy!" Marley honestly didn't care about their reactions, though. Only one reaction mattered to her, and when Ryder squeezed her hand gently as if it was a promise of things to come, she knew that she had gotten the reaction she had hoped for.