Disclaimer: I love the OC, but I don't own it.
A/N: Hope this is getting further away from the show for you. Review if you love angsty Ryan, because imprisioned Ryan is coming up next.
Josh was squatting by a pile of old carburetors when Ryan found him.
"Hey J!" Ryan called out to him.
Josh looked up, his hands, t-shirt and jeans stained with grease. Josh rarely smiled, he had little to smile about, Ryan knew. Yet, he and Josh had been friends for a few years. They shared a penance for fighting and both could throw a punch. They were known throughout the small streets of Chino, if they were together, they were a pair not to cross.
"Ryan! Thought you'd be knee deep serving a nickel by now." He spoke not looking at him, rather his eyes still on the carburetors.
Ryan shook his head. Shrugged his shoulders. "Juan chalks it up to white boy luck."
"I never see none of that white boy luck, on this side." Josh replied, gesturing to himself, his surroundings.
"Man, trust me; I don't know what the hell went on. Trey's up at the Penn, and I get this bleeding heart lawyer, who wants to talk about how similar we are." Ryan touched his face gingerly, the bleeding had stopped.
"But then my luck ran out, I wanted to know if you could hook me up with a place to crash?" Ryan hated asking for favours. It was that stupid 'real men don't ask for help' ideal that his father had implanted in him.
Josh was nodding.
"Hope you don't expect too much. I'm squatting, with my boys in an old warehouse up on 23rd."
Ryan had always pitied Josh, he'd never told him such, never told anyone, and never expressed it in anyway. But he'd always felt a stab of guilt, even if his Mom was a drunk, and AJ beat the shit out of him, he had something. He had a home, no matter how crappy, he went to school, even if he blew it off most of the time. Before whenever he saw Josh, his clothes caked in grease, stoned, his face carved in stone, he would feel that stab. No one knew his story. Ryan wasn't feeling that way anymore. The playing field had levelled out, he had exchanged a prison cell, for an abandoned factory, and he wasn't sure if he wasn't better off in jail.
"Ry, I'll be done here in a few, figure we can pick up some beer, and head over. Celebrate your get out of jail free card?"
Ryan smiled, Josh smirked ever so slightly.
"Sounds good, I'll be back at the garage."
Picking up beers to Josh, meant of course, stealing beers. Ryan certainly didn't care about that; he'd been trained how to steal, and how to do it properly, in his stints, by his brother, and his friends.
Lifting a few beers from a corner store certainly wasn't a problem.
The street Josh led him to, was abandoned. Several factories, in various states of decay, left to rot, when the state of California had practically laid off its working class population and instead imported from China. They both drank a beer, in the darkening street, chatting amicably of things they always chatted about; girls, sex, cars, and Chicano gossip. Sometimes combining all four in one juicy story, Josh eleaborated.
"You know Maria? Maria Valmuerez? Well she's Diego's old lady, yesterday he goes to do a little work on that Camero- the bright blue with the white racing stripe and the V8 under the hood? There is his old lady, going at it with Santiago! You know that new kid. Diego whooped that fool's ass. Who knows what he did with Maria, but damn!"
"Damn!" Ryan echoed. " But J, Camero's are a bit of a sore spot with me right now."
The top floor of the factory, a place where the foreman had once presided over his kingdom, was where Josh squatted. It wasn't bad, stacks of cardboard boxes, a few blankets. Josh's 'boys', were a variety of kids from the neighbourhood, most whom Ryan knew from the garage, a party, juvie, or foster care.
Ryan chugged the remainder of his beers, and took hits off passing joints, while listening to elaborated and cooked stories of sexual exploits. He laughed along with the rest of them, even piping in once or twice.
On his empty stomach, the beer and weed was churning in his stomach, his head was growing heavy. He was glad when the group dispersed, and began to sleep around the room. Ryan too, found a corner, wrapped himself in a hoody from his backpack, and quickly fell asleep in a near stupor.
Ryan felt himself being jerked awake, as someone ran past him.
"Motherfucking po-lice." He heard someone else cry out. Everyone seemed to be running, everyone seemed to be going somewhere. Ryan was new to squatting, where was he supposed to run to? What did the police care about a few stoned kids in an abandoned factory, on an abandoned street? Yet still they were there, he was trying to navigate himself to the stairs, when a light shinned in his eyes and he was down on his stomach, his hands behind his back.
Out only 16 hours, he thought bitterly and he was being sent back. So much for fucking white boy luck. It was all Atwood bad luck.
He felt slow, stupid and tired in the back of the police wagon. Josh wasn't there, good for him, he thought. Yet the boys that were there looked guiltier than they should, for simply being picked up squatting.
The boy beside him, Hector, he'd known at school. Ryan may have beaten the shit out of him at one point over a girl, he really wasn't sure, the details were fuzzy. But he did know him.
"What's up? You got something else going on here?"
Hector shook his head. "Someone must have ratted out our operation."
Oh, shit. Motherfucking shit. Operation? Ryan was seeing years added on to his sentence, his arraignment for grand theft auto was going to seem like a breeze.
"Operation?" Ryan asked.
"We've got a little meth in the basement. That shit was supposed to be golden, didn't even get a fucking taste, motherfucker." Hector swore empathetically.
"A little meth?" Ryan sighed. "Like a meth lab?" He grinded his teeth, his head pounding.
"Yeah man."
Possession, intent, and trafficking. He was going to kill Josh, going to kill AJ, gonna Kick his own ass, for landing himself in this piss-poor situation.
TBC