Okay, so I did not in any way forget about "Begin" I'm just having a little writer's block, and this one just sort of popped into my head and wouldn't get out. I can't decide if it's a one-shot or if I should continue, so let me know what you think either way. Okay. So go read, enjoy, and review! Thanks!
Disclaimer: I don't own the characters. Unfortunately.
"Open the curtain,
Let some light in,
I feel so grey,
The world got smashed to pieces,
And put back together
The wrong way."- Aqualung
At some point Ryan stopped believing in God.
It could have been the night when he was seven, and playing Life with Trey in the living room. He had been pleasantly surprised that Trey was willing to play with him. Trey was eleven, and generally too cool to play any sort of game with his little brother. But that night, when Ryan had shyly asked Trey if he wanted to play, Trey had surprised him when he had put down the comic book that he was reading and nodded.
"Sure," Trey had said. "Why not?" His dad came in and sat down next to Ryan and asked to join the game, and with a little coaxing, they got his mom to play too. And so they sat on the floor of their living room, playing the game and Ryan was winning. He had the most money and the most Life cards, and he had the best house, even Trey said so.
And there was a knock on the door and his dad had climbed to his feet to answer it, and the next thing Ryan knew, his mother was sobbing hysterically, and Trey was clinging to their father. And his dad. His dad was placing his hands behind his back and being led away by the cops.
"You be good, boys," his dad said as they dragged him out of the house. "Take care of each other. Take care of your mother."
Ryan would be haunted by those words. Take care of each other. Take care of your mother. . .
Maybe it was that night that he stopped believing.
Or maybe it was the night that he broke a bone for the first time. Dawn's boyfriend at the time, a big coke addict named Daniel, was staying at their house. Ryan, only eight at the time, was in the kitchen making dinner. Trey had somehow procured for them a box of macaroni and cheese, and Ryan had run next door to their new neighbor's house and borrowed some milk and butter to make it, and was mixing it when Daniel came barreling through the kitchen.
Ryan wasn't sure what he had done wrong, he thought that he was doing something good, making Daniel and his mother something to eat. But Daniel grabbed him by the shirt and threw a punch that hit Ryan square in the face. Daniel tossed Ryan across the small kitchen, and he hit the wall with a sickening crunch, and felt a sharp pain in his arm. He didn't move from his huddled position on the floor until he heard Daniel leave the kitchen. He could hear Daniel in the living room, yelling at his mother, and Ryan slowly opened the side door and hurried across the tiny expanse of brown lawn to the house next door and knocked with his good hand. He stood on the front porch, cradling his bad arm, until the door opened and a little girl his age stood there.
"Can I help you?" She asked cocking her head to the side and staring at him. "You're our new neighbor, right? You came by earlier to borrow some milk?" It was then that her brown eyes widened as she noticed his limp arm, and his newly forming black eye, and she swore under her breath. "Mierda…" The little girl turned and called into the house for her mother who came to the door a second later.
"Teresa? What is the matter?" The woman noticed Ryan there and she too swore under her breath. "Oh, usted cosa pobre, come inside…"
Maybe it was that night, as he sat in the back of Teresa's mother's beat up car as she drove him to the hospital. Maybe it was that night that he stopped believing.
Maybe it was the night that he and Trey stole the car. As the police loaded them into the back of the cop car, he heard Trey yell at him that it was his fault that they had gotten caught.
He sat in his on his bed in juvie and wondered why this had happened to him. Why he hadn't just told Trey no. He wondered about a lot of things. He wondered if he was going to be in here for a long time, and how he would survive that. He wondered what in the hell he would tell Teresa, and figured that she would never want to talk to him again.
It may have been when his mother kicked him out of the house the next day. Choosing her boyfriend over her son. When he tried calling everyone he knew, only to find that he had no where to go.
Maybe it was then, standing at the bus stop, not knowing who to call and realizing that he had no where to go, maybe it was then that he stopped believing.
He may have stopped believing when he found out that Teresa was pregnant. When he found out that everything that he had worked for the past year was going to be wiped away from a single mistake. It had been a year full of ups and downs, but he was finally safe and happy, and then came Teresa's revelation.
She was pregnant. It could be his.
He had to do the right thing.
Maybe he stopped believing when the baby that he gave up everything for died. When he came back to the Cohens, and realized that when he had left, he had left a wake of destruction. They could pretend all they liked that things were back the way they were before the summer, but Ryan knew, and he knew that everyone else knew too. Kirsten was barely coping, Sandy was scrambling around trying to fix everything, and Seth was…well, Seth was Seth. The only one who hadn't changed. Ryan tried to be better, tried to fit in with Newport society than he had before. And it was working, or at least it seemed to be working, until Trey showed up in Newport.
Maybe he stopped believing when Trey showed up. Maybe that was the last straw. Trey came and slowly everything that Ryan had been working to rebuild came unraveling.
Maybe it was he found out that Kirsten was an alcoholic. Maybe when he realized that another mother was a drunk, maybe it was then that he stopped believing. Maybe it was when Kirsten lashed out at the intervention and repeated the words that would haunt his dreams.
"I let you into this house…"
Maybe it was later that day, when Seth told him that Trey had tried to rape Marissa while he had been in Miami. When he ran off to find Trey, to, if he was going to be perfectly honest with himself, seek some sort of revenge on his brother. When he was lying on the ground, Trey's hands around his neck, and when he heard the gun go off and saw Trey's stunned face as he fell off him. At any point Ryan could have stopped believing in God.
But it was none of those times. It wasn't when Trey came to Newport, or when he left again. It wasn't at any of the times when Marissa was falling apart and pulling him down with her. It wasn't when Lindsay left, or even before that with all the Caleb mess. It wasn't anything Dawn did, or anything that his father did, or any of Dawn's many boyfriends. It wasn't Teresa's fault, or even that crazy fucked up Oliver's fault, who in Ryan's mind got the whole ball rolling on the subsequent fiascos.
No, it wasn't those.
Ryan stopped believing in God the day that Sandy and Kirsten sat him and Seth down. It was five or six months after her return from rehab, and they were doing well. All four of them. They hadn't had any major problems, and they were going to family counseling, and for the first time Ryan felt like things might turn out okay.
Sandy led Kirsten into the room, and they sat across from the boys, and Sandy had said the words that shattered any illusions Ryan still had about God. Kirsten was playing with the new wedding rings Sandy had gotten her to replace the old ones that had to be cut off. And Sandy's eyes were rimmed with red, and Ryan realized that he had never seen his foster father cry. Not once. Not even when Kirsten was in rehab, and Sandy was left to deal with everything on his own. Seth had shared a worried look with Ryan, and they watched as Sandy picked up Kirsten's hand and gave it a squeeze and turned to the boys, but couldn't look either of them in the eye, choosing instead to look between the two at some invisible point on the wall.
"Kirsten's been diagnosed with cancer. Breast cancer..."
It was then that Ryan stopped believing in God.
Okay, like I said. I can't decide if it's a one shot or if I should continue, but let me know. It was just something to try to get me back into writing mode, because as I've said, I'm having a wee bit of writer's block. So hopefully this wasn't too terrible...