fic: Alchemy (the O.C. - Trey Atwood) PG-13
Alchemy
1800 words. PG-13. Originally posted here.
The dawn was breaking behind him and he could see the gold scattered across the incoming waves. Trey grimaced because he'd spent the night on the beach again and hadn't noticed. He wondered briefly what a sunrise over water was like and considered for a second just going east to find out. He could be sitting on a beach in New Jersey watching the sun rise by next morning. Maybe Florida, where he knew it was warm. He wasn't sure how the weather was in the Garden State in May, or if he wanted to spend the night on one of their beaches. A native Californian, he was understandably not fond of the cold.
He ran his hands through his hair (stiff with salt now) and he wondered why he bothered. When he was a little boy, probably even before there was a brother in the picture, he remembered that he liked to bury his toes under the hard crust sand forms as the sea water evaporates from it between high and low tides, to feel the cold, gritty dampness underneath the warm, soft upper layer. The upper layers were golden and sun-dried. Away from the light, the sand was gray and ugly. That was the kind of color a guy found himself washing off of his balls in the shower after a day at the beach. The color of a sweat-stained tank top in August, reeking of some kind of grain alcohol. His brother might have worked his way up closer to the sun, where he could be soft and dry and warm, and he might have been left far below, but they were still the same kind. They were still sand. They were still the same precipitate in different solutions. Melt both of them and they would yield the same glass. Both of them would chafe and itch. A red begonia and a white begonia were still both begonias the same as a purebred Siamese and a ratty old alley tom were still both cats. If Ryan thought that just cleaning up and thinking harder and keeping his nose shiny-clean he could wipe away what kind of thing he was, oh was he wrong. He was still sand. He was still coarse and he was still an irritant. Sand can't just turn into gold. Nobody ever got alchemy to actually work, although he could see Ryan being the one to make the breakthrough, maybe in one small corner of his mind.
He buried his toes under that old crust and smiled as the clammy underlying layer squished up between them. When he was little, he remembered how he had the tiniest little toes. When they were babies, his mother told him, she used to play This Little Piggy with their little tiny baby toes. Truthfully, he still had small feet for his height, and his toes were a bit stubby. They were almost delicate, and he hated them. It was okay for a little boy unaware of the world to have small feet. A man with his kind of shoulder chip wasn't supposed to.
He knew that in a few hours he would probably be leaving Newport behind, with all of its silly, empty inhabitants and their silly, empty houses. If he ever became a millionaire, unlikely as it was, he decided he would not invest it in a huge, empty house. Buying air was stupid, and that's what the trend seemed to be: build a huge house full of expensive air over a little piece of land perched on a precarious-looking cliff. He didn't trust large, open spaces any more than he trusted the government or blue food (even though, if he thought about it long enough on enough of a particular substance, it all became basically the same thing and that made him think that maybe he should just cut back on the coke because it was making him all kinds of paranoid). If he ever became a millionaire, he would probably accidentally overdose on something the very next day.
What he needed was a new start anyway. Maybe that was why he came to Newport, maybe it wasn't. He knew it was stupid of him, but he had to see Ryan and see what his life had amounted to. Even if it was only to prove to his inner skeptic that yes, some kids really did make it out of Chino, and maybe witness a story he could one day tell his children about how people like them really could get somewhere. That was the real American dream, wasn't it? Somewhere out there, the real tired and poor, the real huddled masses were dreaming that very dream.
He had been sitting there all night, forearms resting on his knees, hands dangling limply towards hell, eyes on the sea. Ryan had sea-colored eyes and his were dark. There was a picture he had of the two of them when Ryan was about four or so, arm in arm on a beach. He didn't know what beach it was. They had their backs to the water, something he had since learned to never do, and were grinning manically at the camera. Ryan's eyes matched the color of the water behind them exactly. Their tans were golden and Trey's own smile adorably gap-toothed, but the only thing anyone ever noticed was how very blue the little brother's eyes were. Sometime after midnight, when there weren't any lights around except the ones on the very farthest reach of the horizon where he imagined Catalina was but were probably just boats, he decided that the dark color of the ocean at night was the color of his own eyes. It was almost brownish at midnight, but mostly bluish and mostly angry. The water wasn't angry but its color was. It was trite, but wasn't he the night to Ryan's day?
With the sky flaring up in color, he forced himself up and dusted off the sand that tried to go home with him. He didn't like sunrises. Never had. In prison, his cell's little window had faced east and he woke up every single morning with the sun stabbing his eyelids, even with his back to it. The wall was painted eggshell white and there was no escaping it. When they were little, Ryan no more than eight, their mom had been dating a guy who liked to go fishing. He wasn't a bad guy, and he had been nice enough to the two boys. He didn't yell or hit or even really drink. Ryan was little enough to be granted some kind of reprieve from it, but Trey had been forced too many times out of his bed at the crack of dawn to go throw a length of string into water and hope a slimy, simple vertebrate might bite onto the other end. That was the kind of thing Ryan might have enjoyed in his weird, quiet, intellectual way but it had bored Trey to no end. That relationship hadn't lasted too long-- like Dawn's ever really did--but he took from it a hatred of both fish and the sunrise.
He made himself bacon and had some whiskey when he got home. It wasn't the best breakfast but it worked. He'd always been on good terms with whiskey, at least, and bacon didn't require any thought. It was already dead and it didn't expect anything out of him. He glanced around the room and frowned when he saw the little bag on the coffee table, some of its fine, white contents spilling out. He sat at the little dinette table with rapidly cooling bacon in front of him, staring at the cocaine blankly. He sat that way for a much longer period of time than he had spent on any one thought the night before. It was spilled and he didn't spill it. He was careful with his drugs. Drugs cost money, see, and money was never something he could afford to waste. He got up and righted the bag so no more could get out. He sealed it and set it safely aside. The pile left on the table wasn't even a whole line's worth and he wasn't even tempted to snort it. For probably the first time, he pressed his fingers to the tabletop and wiped it away. The powder didn't stand a chance. It was a good, cathartic moment, although he knew that when that bag was empty and he didn't feel like hunting up more of the stuff, he'd regret the action. Even a little pinch would work in a, er, pinch. It wasn't really the drug he needed anymore, just the idea of it. It was a habit and not an addiction, he liked to say, playing with words like Ryan might. Ryan wouldn't go into philosophy or fiction about drugs, since he'd never really liked doing them. He didn't view them in the romantic light Trey did. Ryan had something else to distract him from what they were, and that wasn't something Trey could hope to touch. So he turned to chemicals like how many other Chino boys before him who didn't have that weird capacity for dreaming that Ryan had.
His bacon was cold when he returned to it. He put his fork down and ran his hands through his hair again. It was standing on end and not in a good way. He choked down the first shot and then went straight for the bottle of whiskey still uncapped on the kitchen counter. It was golden in the morning light. He had one swig and sank to the floor. Sand had come home with him anyway and was scattered all over the floor. It must have been in his socks and had gotten everywhere when he took them off while digging the bacon out of the refrigerator. On his knees, he covered every inch of the floor, using his fingers to sweep it into a tiny pile in front of the chair. He poured a drop of tequila onto it and played with the wet sand, imagining he could make a castle out of it. A tiny castle with no cavernous rooms full of nothing but liters and liters of air. There wasn't room in a tiny castle for such a salon. He shaped it between his fingers, making a lopsided ball, and then a distorted cube and then a pyramid with uneven slopes. The whiskey evaporated into his skin and he was left with a powdery, loose pile of sand before long. Feeling a sort of loss, he lowered himself fully to the ground, resting his cheek against the vinyl floor and closing his eyes to finally sleep.
1800 words. PG-13. Originally posted here.
The dawn was breaking behind him and he could see the gold scattered across the incoming waves. Trey grimaced because he'd spent the night on the beach again and hadn't noticed. He wondered briefly what a sunrise over water was like and considered for a second just going east to find out. He could be sitting on a beach in New Jersey watching the sun rise by next morning. Maybe Florida, where he knew it was warm. He wasn't sure how the weather was in the Garden State in May, or if he wanted to spend the night on one of their beaches. A native Californian, he was understandably not fond of the cold.
He ran his hands through his hair (stiff with salt now) and he wondered why he bothered. When he was a little boy, probably even before there was a brother in the picture, he remembered that he liked to bury his toes under the hard crust sand forms as the sea water evaporates from it between high and low tides, to feel the cold, gritty dampness underneath the warm, soft upper layer. The upper layers were golden and sun-dried. Away from the light, the sand was gray and ugly. That was the kind of color a guy found himself washing off of his balls in the shower after a day at the beach. The color of a sweat-stained tank top in August, reeking of some kind of grain alcohol. His brother might have worked his way up closer to the sun, where he could be soft and dry and warm, and he might have been left far below, but they were still the same kind. They were still sand. They were still the same precipitate in different solutions. Melt both of them and they would yield the same glass. Both of them would chafe and itch. A red begonia and a white begonia were still both begonias the same as a purebred Siamese and a ratty old alley tom were still both cats. If Ryan thought that just cleaning up and thinking harder and keeping his nose shiny-clean he could wipe away what kind of thing he was, oh was he wrong. He was still sand. He was still coarse and he was still an irritant. Sand can't just turn into gold. Nobody ever got alchemy to actually work, although he could see Ryan being the one to make the breakthrough, maybe in one small corner of his mind.
He buried his toes under that old crust and smiled as the clammy underlying layer squished up between them. When he was little, he remembered how he had the tiniest little toes. When they were babies, his mother told him, she used to play This Little Piggy with their little tiny baby toes. Truthfully, he still had small feet for his height, and his toes were a bit stubby. They were almost delicate, and he hated them. It was okay for a little boy unaware of the world to have small feet. A man with his kind of shoulder chip wasn't supposed to.
He knew that in a few hours he would probably be leaving Newport behind, with all of its silly, empty inhabitants and their silly, empty houses. If he ever became a millionaire, unlikely as it was, he decided he would not invest it in a huge, empty house. Buying air was stupid, and that's what the trend seemed to be: build a huge house full of expensive air over a little piece of land perched on a precarious-looking cliff. He didn't trust large, open spaces any more than he trusted the government or blue food (even though, if he thought about it long enough on enough of a particular substance, it all became basically the same thing and that made him think that maybe he should just cut back on the coke because it was making him all kinds of paranoid). If he ever became a millionaire, he would probably accidentally overdose on something the very next day.
What he needed was a new start anyway. Maybe that was why he came to Newport, maybe it wasn't. He knew it was stupid of him, but he had to see Ryan and see what his life had amounted to. Even if it was only to prove to his inner skeptic that yes, some kids really did make it out of Chino, and maybe witness a story he could one day tell his children about how people like them really could get somewhere. That was the real American dream, wasn't it? Somewhere out there, the real tired and poor, the real huddled masses were dreaming that very dream.
He had been sitting there all night, forearms resting on his knees, hands dangling limply towards hell, eyes on the sea. Ryan had sea-colored eyes and his were dark. There was a picture he had of the two of them when Ryan was about four or so, arm in arm on a beach. He didn't know what beach it was. They had their backs to the water, something he had since learned to never do, and were grinning manically at the camera. Ryan's eyes matched the color of the water behind them exactly. Their tans were golden and Trey's own smile adorably gap-toothed, but the only thing anyone ever noticed was how very blue the little brother's eyes were. Sometime after midnight, when there weren't any lights around except the ones on the very farthest reach of the horizon where he imagined Catalina was but were probably just boats, he decided that the dark color of the ocean at night was the color of his own eyes. It was almost brownish at midnight, but mostly bluish and mostly angry. The water wasn't angry but its color was. It was trite, but wasn't he the night to Ryan's day?
With the sky flaring up in color, he forced himself up and dusted off the sand that tried to go home with him. He didn't like sunrises. Never had. In prison, his cell's little window had faced east and he woke up every single morning with the sun stabbing his eyelids, even with his back to it. The wall was painted eggshell white and there was no escaping it. When they were little, Ryan no more than eight, their mom had been dating a guy who liked to go fishing. He wasn't a bad guy, and he had been nice enough to the two boys. He didn't yell or hit or even really drink. Ryan was little enough to be granted some kind of reprieve from it, but Trey had been forced too many times out of his bed at the crack of dawn to go throw a length of string into water and hope a slimy, simple vertebrate might bite onto the other end. That was the kind of thing Ryan might have enjoyed in his weird, quiet, intellectual way but it had bored Trey to no end. That relationship hadn't lasted too long-- like Dawn's ever really did--but he took from it a hatred of both fish and the sunrise.
He made himself bacon and had some whiskey when he got home. It wasn't the best breakfast but it worked. He'd always been on good terms with whiskey, at least, and bacon didn't require any thought. It was already dead and it didn't expect anything out of him. He glanced around the room and frowned when he saw the little bag on the coffee table, some of its fine, white contents spilling out. He sat at the little dinette table with rapidly cooling bacon in front of him, staring at the cocaine blankly. He sat that way for a much longer period of time than he had spent on any one thought the night before. It was spilled and he didn't spill it. He was careful with his drugs. Drugs cost money, see, and money was never something he could afford to waste. He got up and righted the bag so no more could get out. He sealed it and set it safely aside. The pile left on the table wasn't even a whole line's worth and he wasn't even tempted to snort it. For probably the first time, he pressed his fingers to the tabletop and wiped it away. The powder didn't stand a chance. It was a good, cathartic moment, although he knew that when that bag was empty and he didn't feel like hunting up more of the stuff, he'd regret the action. Even a little pinch would work in a, er, pinch. It wasn't really the drug he needed anymore, just the idea of it. It was a habit and not an addiction, he liked to say, playing with words like Ryan might. Ryan wouldn't go into philosophy or fiction about drugs, since he'd never really liked doing them. He didn't view them in the romantic light Trey did. Ryan had something else to distract him from what they were, and that wasn't something Trey could hope to touch. So he turned to chemicals like how many other Chino boys before him who didn't have that weird capacity for dreaming that Ryan had.
His bacon was cold when he returned to it. He put his fork down and ran his hands through his hair again. It was standing on end and not in a good way. He choked down the first shot and then went straight for the bottle of whiskey still uncapped on the kitchen counter. It was golden in the morning light. He had one swig and sank to the floor. Sand had come home with him anyway and was scattered all over the floor. It must have been in his socks and had gotten everywhere when he took them off while digging the bacon out of the refrigerator. On his knees, he covered every inch of the floor, using his fingers to sweep it into a tiny pile in front of the chair. He poured a drop of tequila onto it and played with the wet sand, imagining he could make a castle out of it. A tiny castle with no cavernous rooms full of nothing but liters and liters of air. There wasn't room in a tiny castle for such a salon. He shaped it between his fingers, making a lopsided ball, and then a distorted cube and then a pyramid with uneven slopes. The whiskey evaporated into his skin and he was left with a powdery, loose pile of sand before long. Feeling a sort of loss, he lowered himself fully to the ground, resting his cheek against the vinyl floor and closing his eyes to finally sleep.