He takes it out and turns it over in his mind sometimes, but he keeps getting lost, the thread getting blurry before it slips from his fingers entirely, somewhere on the way to Tijuana.
He thinks it might be comforting to think that he'd somehow given Marissa more time, but his brain struggles to follow this notion to its conclusion. He tries to trace each element along its new course, but it isn't the kind of thing that comes naturally to him, connecting actions and reactions, understanding who would've done what differently and when, and how those different choices and different events could've still converged to lead Marissa into that same alley in Tijuana, only this time without anyone to find her and take her home.
If Ryan had never come to Newport, Jimmy would've still been a criminal and her parents probably still would've been splitting up, but Marissa wouldn't have had the same issues with Luke. If things were solid with Luke, did she ride down to Tijuana with him, or did she still decide not to go and then change her mind, catching a ride with Summer and someone else?
And who was the someone else?
Was it still Seth somehow? Had he found a way to insert himself into the story, even without Ryan's assistance? Were Summer and Marissa so hard-up for a ride that they'd accepted one from the quiet nerdy kid who neither of them really knew?
And would that version of Seth have had the chutzpah to not only ditch Comic Con for a solo journey to TJ, but to also invite the two most beautiful girls in school to accompany him?
How exactly would he have explained any of that to Sandy and Kirsten, after, in his own telling, sixteen years of essentially living as a shut-in?
And then if, in this different version of events, Marissa did go with Luke, would she have somehow gotten separated from him and then caught him cheating on her? Or would something different have driven her to that bar with that handful of pills?
He can't puzzle it out, not in any way that really feels true, whether his dream had any kind of grounding in reality or if it was all some kind of fulfilment of a subconscious wish, a thing he'd never have thought to ask for: exoneration for Marissa's death, credit for the life she lived between sophomore year and graduation.
He turns it over and over in his mind, but he doesn't really get anywhere with it.
ooo
Ryan and Seth talk on the phone a few times a week from their respective dorm rooms.
Ryan's never really been a phone guy, but there's something comforting about the routine and the piece of home: late night chats and Sunday morning coffee talks, debriefing exams and art critiques and New England culture and Ryan's relatively boring dating life and the cute artsy girls that Seth had-very platonically, he was quick to clarify-bonded with over comics and promised to set Ryan up with whenever he finally made it out to the East Coast.
"You know, I've always seen you with a mixed media sculptress," was how Seth put it. "Newport just did not provide in that department."
Seth and Summer are long-distance, but solid, another piece of home that Ryan secretly finds comforting, and he smiles to himself whenever he hears her in the background of their phone calls:
"Tell Atwood I said he better get his ass to Providence next time I'm in town."
"Tell Summer I love her too."
"Ryan says he loves you too."
"Damn right he does."
It's in this series of phone calls that Seth tells him-off-handedly at first, then picking up steam and enthusiasm as the weeks go on-that he's working on a new graphic novel, what he describes as a grittier, realer re-envisioning of Atomic County, with the same basic characters, but without the bright colors and the deliberately corny one-liners that dull and obscure the intensity of the Core Four, their complex emotional lives and their angsty backstories.
Though Seth is a bit vague about the specifics of the plot or of his own alter ego's angsty backstory, he does talk to Ryan about the creative process, how difficult it can be to tell a story that doesn't lapse into formulaic tripe. He tells Ryan that we've all heard so many stories in our lives that we instinctively know how they'll go, can often easily anticipate what will happen next. When he's writing, he says, he has to resist the urge to make the next thing that happens the thing that seems like it should follow the last thing, the tidy bow to tie everything together, to explain all the loose ends and demolish any lingering questions.
Part of making this go around of Atomic Countyrealer, he explains, is sometimes leaving things ambiguous or unresolved, endings not always emotionally satisfying, but hopefully more compelling and relatable for that very reason.
Sometimes, Seth tells him, he'll end up scrapping and rewriting large chunks of his work because he'll realize he fell into a trap, trying to create this neat little narrative arc that will make everyone happy.
"And real life just isn't like that, you know Ryan? It's messy."
At the same time that Ryan is happy to get the sense that Seth's finally hit on something important to him creatively, something he's actually excited about pouring himself into, thatsentiment burns into Ryan's brain somehow, plays in the background of his mind as he goes about his own life between phone calls: classes and his internship and a few dates that continue to not really pan out into anything.
And he keeps circling those same thoughts and that same idea: the messiness of life, the fundamental differences between reality and a good story.
Then one day, before he can think too hard or talk himself out of it, he calls Seth.
ooo
"Do you remember when I fell off the ladder with Taylor?" Ryan asks, though he presses forward without waiting for an answer,because Seth obviously remembered him falling off the ladder with Taylor. "I kind of had this dream..."
"I knewyou had a coma dream," Seth gasps. "How could you hold out on me like that?"
Ryan closes his eyes, wincing.
He'd held out a little hope that Seth had forgotten that this had been a subject of hot debate at one point: whether or not Ryan had technically been in a coma, and whether or not he'd had a coma dream, something Seth described as extremely significant in television history, citing several examples to support this claim.
It was a hot debate, of course, where Seth had been the one arguing both sides, musing about what exactly constituted a coma, picking apart exactly how the doctor had described the weird confluence of events where he and Taylor would just "'wake up whenever you were ready' whatever thatmeant,"-"and honestly Ryan, that felt like some weird tv medicine too"-expressing fascination with what happened to the brain during a coma, speculating about what kind of a coma dream Ryan might have had, and what kind of a coma dream he might have were he to be stricken with a coma, what it might do for his at-that-time stunted creative process, because-at least on tv-the coma dream typically helped the be-coma-ed characters resolve some kind of conflict or question in their lives.
And throughout, Ryan had shrugged his shoulders, claimed he didn't remember anything from when he was out, and let Seth exhaust himself with speculation.
He hadn't been ready then to give it to anyone else, to hand it over to the runaway train that was Seth's thought process, to have to relive Kaitlin in the airport and that gut punch when he realized that Marissa was still dead.
He'd wanted to keep that close to himself.
He's not sure how he knows he's ready now, but he's doing it.
And of course Seth hadn't forgotten any ofit.
If his mind was a runaway train, it was also a steel trap, grabbing hold of tiny details and never letting them go, noticing and cataloguing things Ryan would have never picked up on.
It was why Ryan needed him for this; he just also needed to be able to rein in the runaway train.
"Do you want to hear about my coma dream, or do you want to criticize me for not telling you about my coma dream sooner?"
"I definitely want to hear about your coma dream,"Seth answers quickly. "It's not often that I get the opportunity to delve into the subconscious mind of one, Ryan Atwood. You don't give a lot of yourself away there, buddy."
Ryan's mouth traces into a smile at that, familiar with Seth's attempts to understand and analyze him.
It used to feel uncomfortable, but he can kind of appreciate it now, that he has someone in his life who's dying to hear about something as mundane as his dreams.
That was a piece of home too, the way the Cohens-especially Sandy and Seth, as Kirsten had a little more subtletyin her game-showed their love by being all up in his and each other's shit all the time.
"The dream was about Newport, what everyone's life was like, but if I'd never come to live with you guys," Ryan explains. "How things would've been different for everyone, I guess."
There's a long silence on the other end of the line.
"Oh my god Ryan, you It's a Wonderful Life-d it? And at Chrismukkah?" Seth sounds horrified. "This is like one of those Hallmark movies Mom pretends she watches ironically. Man, of all the coma dreams I've heard about, this is by far the most embarrassing."
Ryan's eyes narrow. "How many coma dreams have you heard about before?"
"Okay, touché, yours is the first," Seth admits, "and I'm sure my coma dream would've been much more embarrassing."
"It definitely would've been," Ryan agrees.
"From here on out, I will treat your coma dream with due reverence and respect. Please proceed."
Ryan's brow furrows, struggling to figure out how to say what he wants to say.
"It kind of makes me think about what you've talked about with writing, you know, like how often stories just tell you what you want to hear."
There's another pause on the line, and he pictures Seth in his dorm room, taking this in.
Seth had a habit of doing something bizarre while talking on the phone.
Ryan had once walked into the Cohen kitchen to find him lying on his back on the tile floor, phone wedged between his shoulder and his ear, balancing a broom in the palm of his free hand while he talked to Summer.
He wonders idly what else Seth is doing right now.
"Okay, so we're trying to figure out if your dream is accurate right, like a correct rendering of Newport life, sans Ryan Atwood?"
"Basically, yeah."
"Cool. Lay it on me."
It's something heappreciates about Seth, something he knew he could expect when he was finally ready to talk to him about this.
Once Seth understood what was being asked of him, he was on board, and Ryan didn't have to explain it or justify it any further, what already felt like a pretty goofy request, the kind of thing he would've been embarrassed to bring up to almost anyone else.
But Seth was pretty game for whatever, and you never had to be embarrassed with him.
Ryan bites his lip, wondering where to start.
"Wait, was I there?" Seth asks, before Ryan can start anywhere. "What was I doing?"
"You?" Ryan winces again. "Yeah, you uh…" He runs a hand through his hair, thinking about the Seth in his dream: sullen and angry, a kind of ticking time bomb still getting picked on by teenagers."Well, you went to Brown."
"Figures," Seth says. "It would be too bad though. It's kind of unhinged that I went to art school on a whim, but I think it's starting to work out for me here."
Ryan thinks about the Seth he'd met that first day in the Cohen living room: nervous and awkward and a little bit earnest. He can still see him on The Summer Breeze, navigating the ropes and sails with a surprising grace and certainty that were in contrast to the way he carried himself otherwise, like he was painfully aware that he was taking up too much room, and was painfully apologetic to everyone for doing so.
He hadn't seemed put off by where Ryan came from, and he hadn't made fun of him for being wary of the open ocean, just eyed the way he was eyeing the deep water and handed him a life vest—"Safety first, and you know, a guy's gotta worry about liability these days," he'd said, mouth quirked into a kind of mischievous half-smile, and Ryan had snickered at that, the thought of the Atwoods getting litigious if he went and got Ryan lost at sea.
And then when they were trading notes about their lives, Seth had acknowledged that he didn't really have any friends, had never really had any friends.
"But you know, if things don't pan out for me here, I figure I'll be one of those guys who comes into his own in college, you know, finds my people,"he'd said, ducking his head, face flushing a light pink, seeming embarrassed by the moment of vulnerability.
Ryan didn't like the thought that Seth would be consigned to a miserable life if he hadn't come to Newport, that he'd go off to Brown and apparently wouldn't find a single friend there either.
Seth always gave him credit for bringing Summer into his orbit, but Seth was the one who won her over, just like he was the one who befriended Anna on his own and who really had found his people at RISD, artists with asymmetrical haircuts who were as deeply passionate about comic books and obscure anime as Seth was.
Ryan had already decided that one: that awkward earnest kid would've come into his own in college, even if they'd never met. Maybe he'd be serial dating mixed media sculptresses right now, but he wouldn't have been the bitter, lonely, angry kid he'd been in Ryan's dream.
"And I'm sure I wasn't with Summer, right?"
"No, not so much," Ryan admits. "She was...getting married to someone else."
"Ouch," Seth says. "But that tracks."
Then there was the Summer of Ryan's dream: vapid and shallow and without a real thought in her head.
Ryan didn't appreciate that either, his dream's conclusion that Summer needed Seth to become a real person, let alone to become the person she was now: passionate and opinionated and kicking ass all over the country fighting for the environment.
It felt like one thing to imagine that Summer would end up with someone she liked less than Seth, who shedidn't quite fit with in the same weird way that she and Seth fit; it felt like entirely another to imagine that she'd never grow into a person of any substance without him.
It diminished her, the idea that she needed Seth to discover her own value, that she'd be doomed to be a Newpsie without his intervention.
Maybe it wouldn't have been Brown and GEORGE and the environment, but it would've been something that got her attention, that triggered her fierce intelligence and her fierce empathy.
He'd already decided on that one too: maybe she'd done all of these things and grown as a person with Seth, but it wasn't because of Seth.
"Wait, what was I doing in Newport?" Seth asks abruptly.
"You were on break from Brown."
"Well there's your first sign that your coma dream's got some holes in it," Seth declares. "Once I got out, there was no way I was coming back to Newport."
"Yeah?"
"I know Mom likes to deny it, but before you came to Newport, I was going to run away, no question. The week before you showed up, I was getting my affairs in order."
"Affairs?" Ryan can't help the hint of amusement that creeps into his voice.
"You know, plans and contingency plans and the like," Seth explains. "I even took my GED."
"Your GED?"
"I knew my parents would freak out about school, so I wanted to be able to cut that concern off at the knees," Seth says. "They couldn't be worried about me falling behind in school if I'd already graduated, so I took it two weeks before you got there."
Ryan's eyebrows raise. "So you're telling me that for your last three years of high school you were…"
"…technically a high school graduate? Or...graduate equivalent or whatever?" Seth amends. "Yes, Ryan, yes I was."
Ryan thinks on that for a moment.
"Your mother would've lost her mind if she found out," he concludes.
"Possibly my father too; we'll never know," Seth says. "But my point Ryan, is that this wasn't like, packing Captain Oats and a few peanut butter sandwiches. and coming back as soon as it got dark." He pauses. "I mean, I did that too, when I was little, but this was different." His voice goes low, serious. "One way or another, I wasn't going to survive another year in Newport."
Ryan's not sure what to say to that.
"So I guess what I'm saying is that I wouldn't have been in your It's a Wonderful Life knock-off. My parents weren't going to be able to drag me back once I left."
"You guys are so close though," Ryan says. "Even if you'd left, you could've worked things out with your parents and come home for the holidays."
"Maybe," Seth says, "but I doubt it. We weren't that close back then. If I left, especially with my mom, it probably would've been like The Nana and my dad. She wouldn't have forgiven me and I wouldn't have come back, and, maybe like with my dad and The Nana, a convenient cancer diagnosis would've brought us all together again, but ya know-" he blows out a heavy breath. ..."maybe not."
"Oh." Ryan frowns, thinking back to the countless mornings in the Cohen house, mornings they recreated each time they were both home from college: bagels and banter and callbacks, inside jokes that only made sense to the four of them, the four that would become five as Sophie grew up and did more than gurgle and coo.
"Believe it or not Ryan, I've actually given considerable thought to what my life would've been like if I'd never met you." Seth's voice is quiet, uncharacteristically solemn.
Ryan's not sure he can think of anything to say to that either.
"So I mean, thanks, for stealing that car and all," Seth adds. "My virginity might've remained intact much longer, unless maybe I met some frisky island babe who couldn't resist the Jewfro." He pauses. "Hmm. That's some kind of Butterfly Effect there, huh?"
Ryan laughs.
There was only so long Seth could maintain sincerity.
He appreciates that about him too.
"So what else we got?" Seth asks.
"Well, your dad was married to Julie Cooper…"
"Nope, no way," Seth declares. "Would never happen. That's a casting issue right there."
"A casting issue?"
"It's like your dream is a tv show, right, and they couldn't afford to hire another actress, so they had to use whoever they already had on set. Julie's one of the very few age-appropriate leadactresses we have."
It's probably a testament to their friendship that Ryan can actually kind of follow this logic.
"There's no other way for such an unholy pairing to develop...my dad and Julie Cooper? My dad, boldly going where Luke Ward had gone before?" He pauses. "I mean, assuming Luke and Julie got together in your timeline."
"There's a nice thought."
"Even still Ryan, my dad and Julie wouldn't happen. I mean, they're kind of friends now, but back then, before Julie got all that sweet, sweet character development? Maybe they'd have like, one truly gross night of just disgusting, hateful-"
"I got it," Ryan says quickly. "You don't see them together."
"No. What else?"
"Your mom was married to Jimmy Cooper."
"Ah." Seth clicks his tongue. "Sadly plausible. Jimmy could really stare longingly over a hedge, and there were a few moments there where having a Hanukkah and a Christmas in separate houses was a real concern for ole Seth Cohen."
"No Chrismukkah?"
"A divorce really would've put a damper on the whole interfaith thing."
"So you could see your parents getting a divorce? And your mom and Jimmy together, really?
"Things were pretty different before you came around. My parents fought a lot more. And sometimes it seemed like Mom had some kind of nostalgia boner for Jimmy, the whole high school sweetheart thing. Gross, I know." Seth pauses. "And I mean, all the stuff they fought about was stuff Jimmy Cooper would've been just fine with. Working for grandpa, having an ungodly amount of money, sending me to an elitist private school and restricting my access to my working-class New York Jewish roots? You wouldn't have to twist Jimmy's arm on any of that. Zero class tension in the pairing."
Ryan's brow furrows. "Your parents always talk about it like it's a good thing though, how different they are."
"Sure," Seth agrees. "It keeps things interesting or whatever, and they could easily compromise on some things, like not getting me a car or me having to earn my own money with sailing lessons, the kind of things that were really only annoying to me."
"Ah. Jimmy Cooper would've bought you a car," Ryan affirms.
"And probably a horse, and I would've had a lot of fun with both before they got repossessed."
Ryan laughs.
"But they had bigger fights. Dad would campaign hard to move back to Berkeley, and they'd argue about Grandpa, and Mom used to kind of blame Dad for me not having any friends. She acted like he'd poisoned me against the Newport crowd because he was so terrified I'd become like them."
"I mean didn't he, kind of?" Ryan was pretty familiar with Sandy's spiel on the social cesspool that was Newport Beach, the phrase "den of inequity" somehow invoked more than once.
"Oh for sure," Seth agrees, "but it wasn't like he had to. I'm a gangly Jew with zero athletic ability; I never had a shot with that crowd. But you know, when you came to Newport, and then with everyone shunning Luke because of his dad...it was like Mom finally figured out that it wasn't just me, and that maybe it wasn't such a bad thing, Dad trying to mold me into a social outcast."
"I dunno, man. Your mom knew what Newport was like."
"Yeah, but was always a little bit in denial about it too, still clinging to just a touch of WASP exceptionalism, if only because Dad getting all self-righteous about it pissed her off."
"I...could see that." Ryan is struck by a memory, Kirsten's eyes narrowed, more irritated than angry after some kind of interaction with Sandy, but rolling her eyes at Ryan and declaring "That man is infuriating when he thinks he's right."
"You helped break the uh, the cultural tie in the household: Newport on one side, the Bronx on the other and me in the middle." Seth pauses, his tone having shifted, again sounding more serious. "So, uh, thanks for that too."
Ryan thinks about something Seth had said in passing once, something about how often he'd overheard his parents arguing about just why it was that he was "such a friendless loser." Like a lot of what Seth said, it was delivered with a kind of wry emotional detachment, and it wasn't clear if it was true or a hyperbolic twist on a real story or just meant to needle his parents a little, each of whom immediately started to protest that no such arguments had ever taken place.
Now, with that earnest undertone in Seth's voice, Ryan gets the sense that there was at least some truth to the claim that Seth's social life was a source of tension in the Cohen household.
"And I mean, Mom deciding she couldn't raise Sophie in Newport...I give you credit for that one too. Wait..." Seth gives a low whistle. "If my parents got divorced, I'm guessing that means no little sister."
"No, I guess not." Ryan blinks, trying to imagine that.
It was kind of a wild experience, watching Sophie grow up. It felt like every time he came home, she'd picked up some new skill or habit that they could all marvel at. She'd even found a way to fight for relevance during Cohen family banter. Whenever they all broke into laughter, Sophie would burst into high-pitched little baby giggles too, grinning at all of them like she didn't want to look like she didn't get the joke.
"That would be too bad too," Seth sniffs. "I've kind of grown fond of the little meatball."
Ryan snickers.
Seth played sardonic and emotionally detached when it came to their little sister too, but he did actually seem quite fond of her. Whenever he was home, he made it a point to read to her, both from the expected graphic novels-"You've gotta start them young, Ryan"-but also from some classic children's books that were apparently Seth's favorite as a kid.
He kept odd hours at home, up late working on his graphic novel, and so sometimes he'd volunteer for the late shift with Sophie. One night Ryan got up to use the bathroom and did a double-take as he shuffled past Sophie's nursery, finding Seth and Sophie rocking on her rocking chair, Seth readingStrega Nonato her.
It was almost so endearing that Ryan didn't tease Seth about the high, witchy warbling voice he adopted to sing Strega Nona's incantations over her magic pasta pot.
Almost.
"But is that why you wanted to unpack your coma dream, Ryan? Summer never falling for my charms and my parents splitting up?"
"There's...something else," Ryan admits, hesitant now that the moment has arrived. "Marissa."
The end of the line goes quiet for a few beats.
"Was she..." Seth trails off.
"...she was still..." Ryan feels something twitch in his jaw. "But it happened differently..." He swallows, feeling a heat coursing through him, nearing the point of no return. "...in Tijuana."
"Oh." Seth makes a noise at the back of his throat. "Oh."
"Yeah."
"Okay. Huh."
"What do you think?"
There's a long silence on the other end of the line.
"It wasn't your fault, man."
Ryan closes his eyes.
He'd known this was coming, he was prepared for it to come, and still, it felt like rolling a boulder up a hill every time he had to do it, had to respond to that well-meaning sentiment from the people he loved, a sentiment that would drive him crazy if it weren't so well-intentioned and so sincerely meant and didn't come from people who loved him so much.
"I know," he says, and although he thinks he'll never really and fully know that, he's also gotten to a place where it feels truer than he ever expected, or at least more possible.
Marissa is gone and it's an awful ache in his chest that he wakes up with every morning, but he can't change it, and though he thinks some part of him will probably always wonder what he could've done or not done differently, how he could've saved her, he'd only recently started to think that he could learn to live with that part of the ache too, the not knowing.
It was his coma dream that came along and complicated it, offered him an answer that he's not quite sure he can accept.
"It just..." Ryan trails off. "It made it seem like I gave her more time or something."
"Maybe you did." Seth swallows. "I mean, you probably did."
"I don't know if that makes sense though," Ryan says. "It's like what you said about telling a story, how people try to tie things up really neatly but it ends up being trite or not feeling real."
"Yeah, but I mean real life can be just as trite as fiction," Seth points out. "I can think of a dozen examples from our lives alone."
"I don't need you to fix this for me, Seth,"Ryan says. "I appreciate that you're trying, but I'm okay."
"I just…I think you should believe whatever's most helpful for you."
"Don't do that." Ryan shakes his head. "That's not what I want. I want you to do the thing you did, like with your parents and everything. Pick it apart. I want to know if it even makes sense."
There's a long pause, and Ryan imagines Seth, weighing his choices and whether it felt like a good idea against his enthusiasm for the task, enjoying as he did the invitation to pick something apart.
"So where do we start?" Seth asks.
"I've been trying to figure out how she'd get there," Ryan says.
"Right. Marissa and Summer drove down with us, but we were apparently their last and only option, and I don't see a scenario where I'm driving the girls to Tijuana without you, or like, significant bribery." Seth sighs. "As much as I hate to admit it, if I hadn't already taken off for parts unknown, I was definitely at Comic Con with my dad."
"That's kind of what I figured," Ryan admits. "So then what, did she ride down with Luke?"
"Plausible," Seth declares, "but then what, Luke grabs Holly to grind one out when Marissa goes to powder her nose?"
"Seth, don't say grind one out." Ryan's face scrunches. "But yeah, I'm kind of stuck on that too."
"Maybe she saw one of the waitresses squirt gunning a shot into Luke's mouth and stormed off in a jealous rage," Seth suggests. "Sidenote: Ryan, I can't believe we let that happen to us. There is no way that that's hygienic. It's basically biological warfare. I mean, how often do you realistically think they were deep cleaning those squirt guns?"
Ryan's formulating some kind of response about the folly of youth when Seth stops suddenly in the middle of a sentence. He sucks his teeth in a long slow contemplative sound.
"What?" Ryan asks.
"I just…I wasn't thinking about it before, but let's say everything roughly played out the same way it did in real life, right?" Seth pauses. "The step-monster's pills, Luke grinding up on Holly…"
"Okay," Ryan says slowly, not sure where Seth is going with things.
"Summer and Luke…that would be a lot to live with, huh?" Seth makes another little back of his throat sound, and Ryan wonders if he's reliving Tijuana then, those panicked moments, when Summer realized the pills were gone, when they were stumbling through the streets, desperately searching for Marissa. "I don't think she'd ever have forgiven herself."
Ryan blinks, simultaneously thinking that there's a lot a person could somehow learn to live with, and imagining how devastating it would've been for Summer, to have killed her best friend with a moment of carelessness, a purse filled with pills left out on a bed.
And not even carelessness, not really. It was just that of course she wouldn't have thought...none of them had thought...
And then how casually his coma dream had lifted the responsibility from his shoulders and dropped it onto Summer and Luke, like that made it all okay for him.
He has a flash of a memory, riding back from Tijuana, Summer crying quietly on Seth's shoulder, Seth whispering something to her that Ryan couldn't hear,and then the two of them at the hospital,Summer clinging to Seth's arm as they stood in the hallway, slumped against the wall, waiting for any kind of word from the doctors.
"Not Luke either, probably," Ryan says.
"True," Seth agrees. "He flipped his truck when he was caught banging Julie Cooper. I can't imagine what he'd do if he…" he trails off, mind perhaps catching up to his mouth.
Ryan smiles a little. He wouldn't have minded if Seth had finished the sentence,probably with something like "...killed Marissa with his errant pelvic thrusts."
Seth had a bull in a china shop way of speaking, and while it could be maddening at times, it was one of the things that he could find strangely comforting, and sometimes it was what he wanted-someone who, after the obligatory assurances that Marissa's death wasn't his fault, wouldn't entirely mince words with him.
"But that doesn't really change what would happen, that they'd feel so bad about it."
"No, it doesn't," Ryan agrees. "But it maybe changes how I feel about it. It's like the dream was trying to make it all better, but it just made it worse for Summer and Luke."
"But isn't that the point, that you made it better for everyone, that Summer and Luke didn't have to deal with that either?"
"Yeah, but..." Ryan trails off, swallowing thickly, not sure he should say what he's thinking. "It feels more like it was saying that it was okay that I killed Marissa, because it was just inevitable that she was going to die."
"You didn't-"
"I know I didn't," Ryan interjects firmly. "But still,."
"Too neat and tidy?" Seth ventures, voice hushed and tentative.
"Something like that."
"There's no reason you shouldn't be the one with the hackneyed ending that ties everything up all nice and makes you feel better though," Seth points out. "You deserve it as much as Summer and Luke, you know."
"I don't know if I want it though," Ryan says. "I don't know that it makes anything feel better."
He doesn't want to simplify Marissa in his mind, reduce her to some tragic figure who was spiraling towards death, with or without him. If this were some trite little story, maybe that would be what her whole life amounted to, being some kind of perpetual damsel in distress, but she wasn't that. She was many things and she could've been many more and he thinks maybe it doesn't comfort him to think she might've died alone in an alley in Tijuana.
Even if that somehow absolved him, it added so many new and fresh layers of pain and complexity and confusion.
His dream had diminished her too, made her a plot device in his life, provided that sickly satisfying moment in the narrative arc when you realize that the main character's life had meaning because he'd given that poor girl a few extra years of life.
"What do you think though?" Ryan asks.
"What do I think?" Seth exhales a long breath. "Honestly Ryan, I don't know. Her life was such a mess back then that it's definitely possible that it would've happened that way. They caught a different ride, or something else upset her on the trip...but it also seems possible that she went down with Luke and Summer and partied and came home."
"That's kind of where I landed too," Ryan says. "I just don't really know."
Maybe she would've died in Tijuana, but maybe that only would've happened in the timeline where Ryan had come to Newport, where he haddisrupted her relationship with Luke and thrown a wrench into her existing plans to spend the weekend before school in Mexico.
Where Marissa had chosen to disrupt her life and her relationship, where they had chosen each other.
And he thinks maybe he'd rather learn to live with that, the ambiguity, the not knowing, than lean into the neat and tidy.
"You know Ryan, kind of the only thing we know for sure is that I was at Comic Con with Sandy Cohen."
Ryan smiles at that image, Sandy and Seth weaving through the colorful stalls, bantering and bickering, Sandy getting a kick out of embarrassing Seth by loudly and enthusiastically praising strangers for their cosplay efforts and butchering the names of every superhero he could.
"Maybe that's how it should be," Ryan offers.
"The one certainty in life being me being completely pathetic?" Seth asks.
"Exactly."
"Hm." Seth takes a minute to mull this over. "Well, it does track."
"Afraid so, buddy."