(no subject)
A little over a week into the whole ordeal, Ryan was starting to believe it wasn't actually a dream, and he hadn't just hit his head in Portland. There was so much about this place that just couldn't be happening, not really, but he was running out of other options. A dream would've been preferable, but they worked differently. They got all blurry and weird and details overlapped, so that you'd be looking at someone who looked like some celebrity but really, you knew he was actually supposed to be your next door neighbor, and --
Okay, so that was, actually, exactly what was happening on the island right then. But things were still too real to believe otherwise, whatever Ryan would have preferred -- even if that meant believing in a Summer from the future. Future Summer was pretty cool, though, even if Ryan was still sure there was stuff she was leaving out. The girl was allowed to have her secrets. He couldn't bug her about it forever. If Seth had been there, he'd probably have had some crazy bunch of theories concocted, but all Ryan could come up with was, sooner or later, he had to get back. If he never returned to the moment he'd come from, he wouldn't have made it to the future Summer was talking about. It was simple as that.
So he held to that and he waited. Eventually, he had to go home. It had to happen. With how long people waited around in this place, he knew the logical thing was not to hope so hard, not to waste his time dreaming, but it was hard not to wish himself somewhere else.
With everyone running around like they'd gone crazy, which he kinda thought they maybe had, Ryan had left the Compound and the chaos in favor of a jog on the beach. Even out there, it wasn't really what anyone would call peaceful. Looking out over the water, he got the sense again that things here just weren't really right. Out on a beach, it shouldn't have been all that different from home -- and he'd started thinking of Newport as home again, or started letting himself -- but it was. He couldn't figure out how or why, but it just was.
Maybe it really was a dream. It'd jumped around and he'd filled in the blanks without ever knowing; he was in a hospital bed somewhere, and it had been hours, not days. He'd wake up, and it'd all go back to what it was supposed to be, to the future Summer promised, however vaguely she did so.
He slowed to a walk and then, hardly realizing it, stopped altogether. The sun was hot, though, under his feet and on his arms, and he could feel the sand sticking to him and the salt that made the breeze sort of sticky, and there was the familiar crash of waves beneath it all. If this was a dream, he had one hell of an imagination.