OC Fic: Earthquake Challenge
WARNING: Very, very dark.
Title: Forgetting Ryan
One-shot / In response to the Earthquake Challenge by Jonsmom14
Author: ChaseII
Story Rating: PG-13(?)
Disclaimer: The OC Universe, with all its assorted characters, belongs to Josh Schwartz, et. al. No copyright or trademark infringement is intended, nor is any money being made.
A/N: All mistakes are mine, mine, mine...
A/N2: For this story, I chose to have the earthquake occur about two weeks after Dawn abandoned Ryan with the Cohens. We saw in Season 4 how the house and pool house fared during a substantial quake...
Kirsten’s eyes fly open as the bed seems to vibrate unevenly beneath her.
“Sandy?” she whispers urgently, her fingers groping across fine Egyptian cotton sheets to find her husband.
Her pupils try adjusting to the darkness as the bed shakes once again, this time actually scooting a few inches across the floor. A book falls out of the shelving unit anchored against the wall, and framed photos of Seth skitter-step across her chest of drawers.
“Earthquake,” Sandy mumbles, sitting up as a third rumble shakes them, this one stronger and longer than the first ones - like they were simply foreshocks . The electricity flickers off and on and off again, and they are plunged into murky darkness.
She hears a distant shattering of glass, and panics.
“Seth,” she says, fear for her son’s safety allaying any concern for her own. “We’ve got to make sure Seth’s okay.”
Sandy counters, the edge to his voice unnerving. “You stay here. Cover your head with pillows.”
“He’s my son,” she insists. “You know Seth - how sound he sleeps. He could be in danger, Sandy. I’m not taking the chance - not with my child.”
He groans, but then concedes her point. “You’re right. We’ve got to make sure he’s under his desk or against an inside wall - crawl under with him, cover, and hold on.”
She nods, feeling about the floor with her toes until she finds her hard-soled flats and slips them on her feet. She heads toward the door, realizing that Sandy isn’t behind her. She spins around, and sees Sandy’s silhouette against the French doors leading out to the patio. He’s backlit by soft moonlight, the curtains shoved back, but it’s still too dark outside for her to see much of anything beyond him.
“You go. I have to check on Ryan,” he says, answering her unspoken question. His voice seems tight and ‘off’, but she’s too upset to try interpreting. His hand snakes out to grab the door handle, but he just stands there.
Ryan? In her groggy panic, she’s forgotten the boy exists. She freezes, caught between guilt and fear.
“Hurry, Kirsten - this thing may not be over,” Sandy urges.
She circles back, grabbing a flashlight out of the bedside stand, and then hustles toward Seth’s room. She can feel Sandy watching her leave.
Another groundswell strikes, knocking her sideways into a wall. The flashlight flies out of her hands, and smashes onto the hardwood floor. The light disappears.
She begins groping her way up the stairs, screaming when she runs smack into her son.
“Mom?” he says, his voice shaking. “Part of my ceiling just fell in - the fan crashed into the floor right beside my bed and all I could think of was that if it had fallen on me I’d be toast and then I thought it was over but it wasn’t ...”
“Are you okay?” she asks when he pauses for a breath, reaching up to touch his face with her fingertips. She doesn’t feel any blood.
The ground quakes again, this one briefer than the last one, but still strong enough to make the chandelier groan as it sways in the entryway.
“I’m good, but we’d better find some shelter,” Seth points out, urging her to turn back down the stairs.
“Did someone get Ryan?” he asks as they feel their way toward safety.
She ushers him into Sandy’s office, where they crawl under a heavy oak table sitting against an inside wall.
“You’re dad’s getting him,” she answers as they crawl into place, glad she has an answer for her son. Against all odds, and her strong initial objections, Seth seems to have bonded with the troubled teenager.
As for her? Two weeks post-Dawn’s departure, and she’s still wondering if the day won’t soon come when she second-guesses her impulsive decision to let the kid stay…
They wait. She starts to worry when five and then ten minutes pass without Sandy and Ryan making an appearance, but another aftershock followed by several successive loud, long rumbling crashes of metal and block keeps her planted inside Sandy’s office, back pressed tightly against the wall, one arm wrapped securely around her son. She can feel Seth shaking beside her. She’s sure she’s shaking, too.
Fifteen minutes more pass without further movement or noise, and she can’t wait any longer. She orders Seth to stay put, finds another flashlight in her husband’s desk drawer, and heads to the back of the house.
What she sees there stops her breath. There is no wall standing at the back of the kitchen. It’s gone… all that’s left are hunks of what used to be their house - beams of fallen, twisted metal, strands of wire and crumbling stucco.
Outside, the patio is glimmering as though littered with diamonds, each one reflecting light from the moon and stars. Only what she sees are not diamonds. The shining jewels are shards of broken glass.
Thousands of pieces of glass - from the pool house doors and floor to ceiling glass walls. Unlike the tempered glass from the house, where cracks resemble spider webs but the remaining windows haven’t shattered, the pool house appears to have exploded, with glass flying in all directions.
Her heart pounds. The Newport Group always builds up to earthquake code, but certain earthquake building standards don’t apply to structures not designed for human occupation. Structures like a pool house.
Her heart thuds hard inside her chest as she surveys the remains of what once was Ryan’s space - the room that she allotted him.
A space defined and distant… and unsafe.
“Sandy?” she calls, first softly, and then louder. “Sandy? Sandy? Ryan? Are you there?”
She picks her way across the battlefield - a war that nature won. The roof and non-glass walls of the pool house have all imploded, collapsing in a heap of jumbled rubble.
“Sandy?” she screams, as the inevitable starts to register. “Sandy, where are you? Answer me!”
Her flats probably aren’t heavy enough to traverse the daggers of shattered glass, but she doesn’t care. She doesn’t even know she’s screaming incoherently until Seth and several of the neighbors find her on the patio, her hands bloodied from digging through the mélange of twisted metal, glass, and stucco rubble like a woman gone mad.
She doesn’t remember much of what happened after that. Not for days and weeks. Her wounds heal and she and Seth move in with Caleb. She stumbles through her days with the help of anti-depressants and alcohol. She doesn’t care that the two aren’t supposed to mix.
She doesn’t care, period.
Not after Seth goes east to boarding school.
Not after he says what happened was all her fault. He says if she hadn’t stuck Ryan outside in the pool house they’d all still be alive.
Seth is wrong though, at least about Sandy. She knows he’s wrong. She’s read the reports.
The coroner’s report suggests Ryan Atwood, age 15, died when shards of glass from the pool house severed his aorta, and punctured his left kidney and both his lungs, embedding themselves with lethal force. All together, the teenager suffered 47 lacerations from the untempered glass, as well as multiple broken bones and contusions from the falling walls and roof, many of the wounds post-mortem.
Sanford Cohen died from a blow to the head when the pool house roof collapsed.
Kirsten reads the report over and over, like it may change someday, but it never does. She takes a nice, fat swing of vodka every time she comes to the part that infers the Atwood boy was most likely past saving by the time Sandy stepped out of their bedroom onto the patio.
She groans, and gulps down more vodka.
Sandy died for nothing.
If not for Ryan Atwood, her husband would be alive.
There are days Kirsten spends all her time crying, and other days when she drinks a full bottle of vodka, slipping into an alcoholic haze that lets her escape her new reality.
When she sleeps, when she doesn’t just pass out into the nothingness… the void… she longs for, she almost always dreams about that night.
In the good dreams, Sandy lives…
He forgets Ryan, too.
Title: Forgetting Ryan
One-shot / In response to the Earthquake Challenge by Jonsmom14
Author: ChaseII
Story Rating: PG-13(?)
Disclaimer: The OC Universe, with all its assorted characters, belongs to Josh Schwartz, et. al. No copyright or trademark infringement is intended, nor is any money being made.
A/N: All mistakes are mine, mine, mine...
A/N2: For this story, I chose to have the earthquake occur about two weeks after Dawn abandoned Ryan with the Cohens. We saw in Season 4 how the house and pool house fared during a substantial quake...
Kirsten’s eyes fly open as the bed seems to vibrate unevenly beneath her.
“Sandy?” she whispers urgently, her fingers groping across fine Egyptian cotton sheets to find her husband.
Her pupils try adjusting to the darkness as the bed shakes once again, this time actually scooting a few inches across the floor. A book falls out of the shelving unit anchored against the wall, and framed photos of Seth skitter-step across her chest of drawers.
“Earthquake,” Sandy mumbles, sitting up as a third rumble shakes them, this one stronger and longer than the first ones - like they were simply foreshocks . The electricity flickers off and on and off again, and they are plunged into murky darkness.
She hears a distant shattering of glass, and panics.
“Seth,” she says, fear for her son’s safety allaying any concern for her own. “We’ve got to make sure Seth’s okay.”
Sandy counters, the edge to his voice unnerving. “You stay here. Cover your head with pillows.”
“He’s my son,” she insists. “You know Seth - how sound he sleeps. He could be in danger, Sandy. I’m not taking the chance - not with my child.”
He groans, but then concedes her point. “You’re right. We’ve got to make sure he’s under his desk or against an inside wall - crawl under with him, cover, and hold on.”
She nods, feeling about the floor with her toes until she finds her hard-soled flats and slips them on her feet. She heads toward the door, realizing that Sandy isn’t behind her. She spins around, and sees Sandy’s silhouette against the French doors leading out to the patio. He’s backlit by soft moonlight, the curtains shoved back, but it’s still too dark outside for her to see much of anything beyond him.
“You go. I have to check on Ryan,” he says, answering her unspoken question. His voice seems tight and ‘off’, but she’s too upset to try interpreting. His hand snakes out to grab the door handle, but he just stands there.
Ryan? In her groggy panic, she’s forgotten the boy exists. She freezes, caught between guilt and fear.
“Hurry, Kirsten - this thing may not be over,” Sandy urges.
She circles back, grabbing a flashlight out of the bedside stand, and then hustles toward Seth’s room. She can feel Sandy watching her leave.
Another groundswell strikes, knocking her sideways into a wall. The flashlight flies out of her hands, and smashes onto the hardwood floor. The light disappears.
She begins groping her way up the stairs, screaming when she runs smack into her son.
“Mom?” he says, his voice shaking. “Part of my ceiling just fell in - the fan crashed into the floor right beside my bed and all I could think of was that if it had fallen on me I’d be toast and then I thought it was over but it wasn’t ...”
“Are you okay?” she asks when he pauses for a breath, reaching up to touch his face with her fingertips. She doesn’t feel any blood.
The ground quakes again, this one briefer than the last one, but still strong enough to make the chandelier groan as it sways in the entryway.
“I’m good, but we’d better find some shelter,” Seth points out, urging her to turn back down the stairs.
“Did someone get Ryan?” he asks as they feel their way toward safety.
She ushers him into Sandy’s office, where they crawl under a heavy oak table sitting against an inside wall.
“You’re dad’s getting him,” she answers as they crawl into place, glad she has an answer for her son. Against all odds, and her strong initial objections, Seth seems to have bonded with the troubled teenager.
As for her? Two weeks post-Dawn’s departure, and she’s still wondering if the day won’t soon come when she second-guesses her impulsive decision to let the kid stay…
They wait. She starts to worry when five and then ten minutes pass without Sandy and Ryan making an appearance, but another aftershock followed by several successive loud, long rumbling crashes of metal and block keeps her planted inside Sandy’s office, back pressed tightly against the wall, one arm wrapped securely around her son. She can feel Seth shaking beside her. She’s sure she’s shaking, too.
Fifteen minutes more pass without further movement or noise, and she can’t wait any longer. She orders Seth to stay put, finds another flashlight in her husband’s desk drawer, and heads to the back of the house.
What she sees there stops her breath. There is no wall standing at the back of the kitchen. It’s gone… all that’s left are hunks of what used to be their house - beams of fallen, twisted metal, strands of wire and crumbling stucco.
Outside, the patio is glimmering as though littered with diamonds, each one reflecting light from the moon and stars. Only what she sees are not diamonds. The shining jewels are shards of broken glass.
Thousands of pieces of glass - from the pool house doors and floor to ceiling glass walls. Unlike the tempered glass from the house, where cracks resemble spider webs but the remaining windows haven’t shattered, the pool house appears to have exploded, with glass flying in all directions.
Her heart pounds. The Newport Group always builds up to earthquake code, but certain earthquake building standards don’t apply to structures not designed for human occupation. Structures like a pool house.
Her heart thuds hard inside her chest as she surveys the remains of what once was Ryan’s space - the room that she allotted him.
A space defined and distant… and unsafe.
“Sandy?” she calls, first softly, and then louder. “Sandy? Sandy? Ryan? Are you there?”
She picks her way across the battlefield - a war that nature won. The roof and non-glass walls of the pool house have all imploded, collapsing in a heap of jumbled rubble.
“Sandy?” she screams, as the inevitable starts to register. “Sandy, where are you? Answer me!”
Her flats probably aren’t heavy enough to traverse the daggers of shattered glass, but she doesn’t care. She doesn’t even know she’s screaming incoherently until Seth and several of the neighbors find her on the patio, her hands bloodied from digging through the mélange of twisted metal, glass, and stucco rubble like a woman gone mad.
She doesn’t remember much of what happened after that. Not for days and weeks. Her wounds heal and she and Seth move in with Caleb. She stumbles through her days with the help of anti-depressants and alcohol. She doesn’t care that the two aren’t supposed to mix.
She doesn’t care, period.
Not after Seth goes east to boarding school.
Not after he says what happened was all her fault. He says if she hadn’t stuck Ryan outside in the pool house they’d all still be alive.
Seth is wrong though, at least about Sandy. She knows he’s wrong. She’s read the reports.
The coroner’s report suggests Ryan Atwood, age 15, died when shards of glass from the pool house severed his aorta, and punctured his left kidney and both his lungs, embedding themselves with lethal force. All together, the teenager suffered 47 lacerations from the untempered glass, as well as multiple broken bones and contusions from the falling walls and roof, many of the wounds post-mortem.
Sanford Cohen died from a blow to the head when the pool house roof collapsed.
Kirsten reads the report over and over, like it may change someday, but it never does. She takes a nice, fat swing of vodka every time she comes to the part that infers the Atwood boy was most likely past saving by the time Sandy stepped out of their bedroom onto the patio.
She groans, and gulps down more vodka.
Sandy died for nothing.
If not for Ryan Atwood, her husband would be alive.
There are days Kirsten spends all her time crying, and other days when she drinks a full bottle of vodka, slipping into an alcoholic haze that lets her escape her new reality.
When she sleeps, when she doesn’t just pass out into the nothingness… the void… she longs for, she almost always dreams about that night.
In the good dreams, Sandy lives…
He forgets Ryan, too.