Chapter Nine

Seth felt wild panic race through his veins as he shoved his way through the crowd. His eyes scanned the faces, desperate to find the familiar face he was looking for. The panic and the crowd was almost too much for him. He hated enclosed spaces, but especially now, when he was so desperate to be on time, so worried that he wouldn't get there in time to say goodbye. Seth's breath hitched in his throat at the thought. Why was this happening? Why was any of this happening? It shouldn't be like this, it never should. Things were so wrong.

Finally, Seth's eyes caught who he was looking for. Relief flooded over him before he suddenly realized he was still so far away. That's when he decided that desperate times called for desperate measures. He looked around for a way and eventually found what he was looking for. He climbed up onto a table, ignoring the angered yell from one of the security staff as they pushed their way through the crowd towards him. He only had one chance. He cupped his hands around his mouth and yelled out the name, "Anna!"

The blonde girl at the security gates of the airport turned, her eyes wide with surprise as she spotted him on top of the table, being escorted down by one of the security guards. Seth ignored whatever the man was saying to him, even though he sounded furious, and watched as Anna left her bags behind and maneuvered her way through the crowd towards Seth.

"Seth?" she finally called when she was close enough. "What are you doing here?" She demanded.

"You didn't tell me when your flight was," Seth said rapidly, getting frustrated with the security guards who were still trying to get him to listen to them. He glared at them, hoping that some of Ryan's death glare had actually rubbed off. Apparently it hadn't.

Anna stepped in for him. "Please, forgive him," she said, smiling. "One of his friends is in the hospital and he's emotionally unstable. I've got him from here."

The guards gave her a questioning look, but eventually let up and let go of Seth with a warning to not climb on any more tables. They watched the guards leave before Seth turned to Anna. "Okay, I know I'm a little off right now, but emotionally unstable?" he tried to joke.

Anna just smiled softly. "What are you doing here?" she repeated her earlier question.

"We never got a chance to talk," Seth said, feeling still slightly winded. "But I need you to know that I don't want you to leave because of me. You said it wasn't, but I don't know whether I can believe you. I mean, we had something and if you're leaving because of me, please, don't…"

"Seth," Anna interrupted him, putting a finger to his lips. "I'm not leaving because of you. This just isn't my place. I do love you, as a friend. We just were never any more than that." She rubbed his arm, tears filling her eyes. "I have to go."

"But…" Seth felt his voice hitch in his throat. He shook his head. "What am I going to do without you?" He asked, his voice soft and broken. "With everything that's happened…"

"You have Summer," Anna said, trying not to cry. "You have your family. Confidence, Cohen."

Seth let out a small chuckle as Anna took him into a hug. He held her, so many thoughts racing through his head. He didn't want to let go. He knew that he had Summer, but he also knew that Anna had really understood him, she'd let him see who he really was. She'd changed his life and they had become such good friends. He breathed in her scent, feeling his eyes sting with tears. He didn't know how he was going to handle this, any of this.

Anna finally pulled away. "Bye, Seth," she whispered and kissed his cheek. He tried to say goodbye, but he couldn't find his voice, so instead he watched her retreating back as she walked through the gates. She turned and gave him a slight wave, which he answered with one of his own, before she disappeared around the corner. Seth stood quietly by himself, fighting the urge to break through the security gates and run after her, forcing her to stay here in Newport.

The ringing of his cell phone broke his urge and he closed his eyes, covering his eyes for a moment before picking up the phone. "Yeah," he said, though it came out as a strangled choke.

"Cohen?" It was Summer. "Cohen, where are you? We've been trying to get a hold of you."

Seth's heart stopped. "Why? What's wrong? Is it Ryan? Is he okay?" The questions came before he could stop himself.

"Cohen! Cohen! Seth!" Summer finally managed to stop the barrage of questions. "Ryan's fine, everything is okay. We were just worried when you weren't at home. Where are you anyways?"

Seth took a second to calm his racing heart. He repeated her sentence through his head to remind him, Ryan is fine. He took a deep breath and looked around, noticing once again how alone he was in the airport with no one he knew. But he had Summer on the phone, wondering, worried about him. So perhaps he wasn't so alone? "I'm at the airport," he said. "Anna's gone."

Summer was quiet for a moment and Seth prayed that she wouldn't be upset. He expected her to explode at him, yell at him that Anna wasn't his girlfriend, that she was and he was such a jackass for going to see her off, leaving her to worry. What Seth didn't expect was for Summer to ask quietly, "Are you okay?"

The question caught him off guard, with his defenses down. Usually, he was all about talking about his problems. He would usually make some joke and then get down to business, detaching himself from the problems. But for some reason, the question had rubbed him wrong, the way Summer's voice was genuine in her worry about his well being. Was he okay? The tears that were stinging at his eyes gave him the answer. "No," he whispered brokenly. He put a hand to his eyes, trying to stop himself from crying in public. Seth Cohen didn't cry in public.

"Do you want me to come get you?" Summer asked.

"No," Seth answered, feeling himself starting to break again. "But can I come over?"

"Of course!" Summer nearly squealed. "The step monster is drugged out again on her latest pain medicine, so if you don't mind a little drool." She paused for a minute. "It's going to be okay." She gave softly.

Seth nodded before he realized Summer couldn't see her. "I hope," he gave.

It took Seth less than half an hour to get to Summer's. She was waiting for him on the porch, cell phone in hand. He parked and when he got out, she immediately wrapped him in a hug. He hugged her back and finally, Seth Cohen allowed himself to cry. He distantly thought that he was a wuss for crying in front of his girlfriend, but Summer's reassuring hand on his back as she stroked it up and down his spine told him that he didn't have to worry about that right now. He buried his face into Summer's shoulder.

"Come on," she whispered, leading him inside. They headed to Summer's room and sat down on her bed. By then, Seth had got his crying under control. Summer sat next to him, holding his hand. She waited for him to say something, knowing that he needed to get it all out.

"God, I can't believe I'm such a wuss," Seth joked, his laugh coming out as a half sob.

Summer merely smiled at him. "I can," she said and he gave her a wide eyed, joking look as she rubbed his arm. "Look, you've been through a lot lately. I'd be worried if you weren't upset."

"It's…it's just all happening so fast, you know?" Seth said, using his hands as he talked. "I mean, I was still getting over the fact that she was leaving and then Ryan gets shot and I think she's staying and she ends up leaving anyway. That's like a combo punch to the gut."

"Well, you'll still see her," Summer said. "Besides, you've got everyone else. You have me, and Marissa, and for some strange reason you even have Luke. And Ryan will be okay and once he is, you'll have him too."

"I know," Seth nodded. "I guess I'm just sick of all this bad stuff happening to Ryan. He just never gets a break."

Summer chuckled and laid her head on his shoulder. "That's why he's Chino."

Seth thought about those words. Indeed, when you first looked at it, Ryan did seem to be defined by all the bad stuff that happened to him. But the more Seth thought about it, the more he realized that Ryan wasn't defined by just the bad stuff, but by how he got pass all the crap he was dealt in life. That's what made him "Chino." The ability to bounce back. Seth just hoped that Ryan would be able to bounce back from this.

Kirsten put the third scoop of sugar into her coffee and stirred it with such dedication and caution, careful that every grain of sugar was completely dissolved. It was tedious and time consuming, but she was putting off something that she wasn't sure she wanted to do anymore. She sat at Sandy's desk. Ryan's file lay in front of her, seemingly isolated from any other thing on Sandy's almost barren desk. It looked lonely, dangerous, alluring, and heavy.

As she took a sip of her coffee, Kirsten read Ryan's name which was printed in bold, capitalized letters on the top of the folder. Atwood, Ryan M. She suddenly wondered what the M stood for. She'd never bothered to ask Ryan what his middle name was. She supposed that she would find this out, along with everything else she'd ever want to know about the boy, and many things she didn't want to know, as soon as she opened the folder. But opening the folder was turning out to be harder than she ever imagined.

After another sip, Kirsten decided that she would open the folder and read the first page. After that, she would decide if she wanted to continue or not. Reaching out a slightly shaking hand, she flipped open the top and let it fall. It was a run down crease and she realized that Ryan's folder had probably been read many times, mainly by Sandy. Closing her eyes for a moment, she prepared herself the best she could before starting to read.

The first page didn't turn out to be anything Kirsten didn't already know. It was the full police report of the auto theft that Ryan and his brother, Trey, had been involved with. The one that landed him in juvie. She read through it, taking note that Ryan had spent one night in juvie before his mother had come to "claim" him. He'd been treated for a cut on his right shoulder, but the wound was superficial. She wondered why she had never noticed it. Probably because she was too busy wondering if he was going to turn around and steal something from them when they weren't looking. The thought made her feel guilty.

"One down," Kirsten whispered to herself. She took another sip of her coffee and then quickly turned the page, wondering if perhaps she had overanalyzed the file. This first page didn't seem so bad.

Page two was an entirely different story.

Kirsten gasped at the photographs that were paper clipped to a hospital record. There was a little boy being photographed in the pictures. He looked to be around five or six years old, only. The photographs were of wounds, documented by social services. The first picture was one of Ryan's face, one of his eyes purple and swollen shut. There was a cut on his chin. What shocked Kirsten the most was the fear and sadness that was in Ryan's eye as he gazed at the camera. He looked so young, so lost.

The next photo was of Ryan's chest, the right side bruised an assortment of colors with a small cut in the middle. An officer was holding Ryan's arm up and only the lower portion of his face was showing, but it was obvious that he had been crying in the photo. Kirsten felt her hands start to shake. She could do this, she had to do this.

As she read through the hospital report, she found that social services had been investigating the injuries at first, when the stories between mother and sons didn't match up. But after a while, they deemed it an accident, a mishap with a vehicle, not the mother's fault. The words blurred together as Kirsten read them. Dawn had hit Ryan with a car? She suddenly felt angry, so angry at the woman she'd made a promise to, to look after her son. How could a mother do something like that? Kirsten knew that she wasn't getting the whole story, she would never get the whole story, not unless Ryan told her. This file was just the bare minimum. How many things had happened that hadn't been recorded? Kirsten didn't want to think about it.

She spent the next few hours reading through the file carefully. Watching as Ryan grew up in the pictures, reading about "accidents" that seemed so fake she wondered how social services never saw through them. Most of the file were hospital records. Two broken arms, a couple of concussions, and a severe case of pneumonia were the most severe of the cases. Kirsten couldn't believe all of the hospital records there were. Seth had gone to the hospital only a few times, so few she could count them all on one hand. But with Ryan, she'd lost track. And none of the hospital visits were from little things, either. Kirsten had to fight back the urge to cry, multiple times as she looked through the file.

Once she was done with the hospital records, Kirsten came across something she hadn't expected to find. It was a record of foster care. She hadn't known that Ryan had ever been in foster care before. He had been nine at the time. He had been taken away when Dawn Atwood had gone missing for several days, a little over a week. The neighbors had alerted the authorities and when social services came, Ryan and his brother had been taken into the program. It didn't say what happened to Trey, but it said Ryan spent a month with a family before they sent him back. Then, for two months he was in and out of houses, always being sent out for fighting, or violent tendencies. Kirsten couldn't believe what she was reading.

Ryan and Trey both had ended up back in Dawn's care, when she had informed the state that she had some mental disorder Kirsten had never heard of. But with the proof of medical treatment and an inspection of the home, Dawn had reclaimed her children. Kirsten knew that it had been a mistake to ever give Dawn her children back. Her faith in social services was diminished.

After the foster care papers came Ryan's school records. She looked them over carefully, noticing with trepidation that Ryan's grades were below average, but passing. His test scores, however, were phenomenal. No wonder Ryan was doing so good at Harbor now. She saw that he'd been suspended multiple times from his school in Chino for fighting, truancy, and an assortment of lesser "felonies" in the school system.

Kirsten breathed a sigh of relief when she found she only had one more slip left in the file. She didn't know how much more she could take of reading through Ryan's past. She had expected it to be bad, troubled even, but this was beyond anything she had thought. Just one more paper and she would know the bare facts of Ryan Atwood's childhood.

The last paper turned out to be the hardest thing Kirsten had to read, though it was hardly about Ryan at all. It was the police report of John Atwood's arrest for armed robbery. Kirsten paused, wondering if she really wanted to read this. Ryan barely ever talked about his father. She only knew that he was in jail and had been for some time. Ryan hadn't mentioned whether or not his relationship with his father had been good or bad. They had never asked Ryan about his father, knowing how touchy of a subject Ryan's past was.

Kirsten decided to read it, knowing that if she didn't, it would taunt her until she did. She may as well get it over with now. She read through the report, seeing that John Atwood had robbed a convenience store when Ryan was only five. He had been found guilty of armed robbery and resisting arrest, which made Kirsten wonder if Ryan had been there, watching as his father had been taken away. If he had resisted arrest, had Ryan been there to watch his father be dragged away kicking and screaming. How would that have looked through the eyes of a five year old? She couldn't imagine it, she couldn't picture it. What had Ryan been told? Had Dawn sat him down and told him his father wasn't coming back, that they were on their own?

Tears pricked at the corners of Kirsten's eyes. She forced out the thoughts of instant sympathy for Ryan. But he had been through so much, had led such a horrible life. What had happened that wasn't written up in an official report? How many times had Ryan come home to a drunken Dawn, taken care of her in a reversed role of parent and child. How many times had Ryan been left to fend for himself? How many times had Ryan felt alone? Like he had no one?

She suddenly slammed shut the file, her palm stinging from the motion and she let the anger flow out of her. She'd made a promise to Sandy that reading this file wouldn't change anything. It wouldn't change the way she looked at Ryan. None of it mattered now. None of Ryan's past mattered to how she thought about him now. Now, he was not Dawn Atwood's son, he was not another street punk fending for himself, he wasn't a battered, broken down little boy. He was the new Ryan Atwood. He was her son now and nothing would change that. She wouldn't treat him any differently than she would treat Seth. This changed nothing.

And by the end of the night, Kirsten almost believed that.

Review Responses:

katwoman76: Yeah, Sandy's used to all that kind ofangst, but Kirsten is not. I rewrote the last part of this chapter three or four times. I wasn't sure what I wanted to do with it, but hopefully I wrote it all right. :)

Gartan: Well, here's how Anna really leaves, hehe. :)

Dumbeblondi02: This should shake things up a little bit between Kirsten and Ryan.

forgottenletters: I really wish they would go more in depth with Ryan's past. I rewrote this chapter like three or four times because I couldn't decided what to do with it. But I finally narrowed it down to this. I figure this is all stuff that was expected, but still hard to read. Those files don't tell everything, so maybe I can still play around with his past a little.

SVOC Luva: Yeah, I always wanted them to do something with Kirsten finding stuff out about Ryan's past. I always that would be really explosive to watch.

beachtree: I always thought it was weird that Kirsten was never motivated to find out more about Ryan's past. So I incorporated that into this a little. Yeah, the gruesome twosome will make an appearance in the next few chapters. :) Thanks for the long review!