Say goodnight not goodbye

[wongsideofcreek]

Joey sits on the beach, sand running through her finger tips.  The sand feels warmer than she might expect on her numb skin.

New Years Eve.  She'd been avoiding one of her best friends since childhood (one of her only friends until recent years) for two months over something petty and immature.  The very things that Joey Potter claimed to be against

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[pocketfullowit]

"Hey." He could tell by the way she sat, idly letting the sand sift through her fingers, that something was up, but it wasn't until he sat down next to Joey that he noticed she was crying. "Hey," he repeated, laying a hand to Joey's shoulder. He wasn't very good at this and they'd only talked once or twice, but Seth already felt like she was a good friend. "What's wrong?"

[wongsideofcreek]

When it boiled down to it, Joey was not used to strangers worrying about her. She grew up in a town where people had given up being concerned for her and her family a long time before. It was only friends who cared and this non golden boy, non pretentious, non Dawson-ey movie watcher was doing more for her than most people she knew before.

"He's gone." She spoke quietly, her eyes focusing on the crashing waves and not the kind boy beside her.

[pocketfullowit]

Seth almost asked who, but he didn't have to, did he? Not when Joey looked that way. Seth knew very little about Pacey, but he did like him the few times he'd talked to him. Pacey was, in fact, one of the first ones he'd talked to when he'd arrived.

"Oh," he started, blinking a few times as if that would help it sink in. He drew a knee up and followed her gaze to the ocean for a moment, but he turned right back to her again. "I'm sorry. Are you okay? I mean," he sighed, "I know you're not, but is there anything I can do?"

[wongsideofcreek]

Joey shook her head. There was little she could think of that would rectify the situation.

"I..." Joey's voice faltered as she attempted to think of ways to describe her gratitude to this boy. To Seth.

"Where I'm from not many people would care about me one way or another. It's strange here..." Joey wondered if there was something deeply wrong with Capeside that the strangest thing about this island would be that people were nice.

[pocketfullowit]

Yeah, Seth had been there. Now he felt he was well versed in the art of popularity because having two or three friends was popular to him. "It's not Newport," he agreed. When she looked at him, he smiled a little. "See? Those people just don't know what they're missing, right? They just don't see the importance of The Goonies."

[wongsideofcreek]

"The Goonies are very important." Joey agreed, as serious as her melancholy mood would allow.

"I always wanted to leave home," Joey confessed, "I dreamed about it for longer than I could remember. Now I'm here and there's no one to connect me to who I once was and..." how could Joey explain that being alone wasn't nearly as liberating as she had hoped? How could she explain something that she didn't even understand?

[pocketfullowit]

"No..." Seth paused, smiling more "kidding?" That was awesome, or not really awesome since he'd always thought a mirror image of himself was literally in the mirror. "So did I. I just always wanted to get away from those pod people and go live somewhere that people were actually, I don't know, human? Then I came here, and Summer said I sailed away and everyone's older than me." He sighed and shrugged up one shoulder. It wasn't quite what he'd been hoping for.

[wongsideofcreek]

"You have friends here." It wasn't a question. "They're from the future?"

Joey always wondered how much had changed in Pacey's future and why it caused him to look at her that way. She looked over at Seth and wondered what his future friends had told him. Judging by his actions it seemed far worse than Pacey just acting a bit more comfortable with her.

She was briefly distracted from her pain.

[pocketfullowit]

"Yeah," he replied, pulling a bit of a face. "It's complicated. There's a whole bunch of he said, she said stuff happening, a rabbit named Pancakes, and me not getting into Brown." Had he just said all that? He didn't like talking about this stuff, so why was he? Maybe it was that whole Marissa dating the Marine Corps Seth Cohen thing that he was trying to get his mind off of.

[wongsideofcreek]

"You want to go to Brown?" One of the things Joey Potter respected the most in a person was intelligence and ambition (the two were tied together in her mind). It didn't surprise her that this kind island boy seemed to possess them both.

[pocketfullowit]

"Yeah," Seth answered, wrinkling his nose a little. "But want in one hand..." Who knew Summer Roberts bettered him in that? He had that one thing over her. That one thing...
It didn't matter now, though. It wasn't like Brown would suddenly show up on the island, radiating magic powers of an admissions office.

Not wanting to go into it, Seth looked back over at Joey. He thought about saying it was going to be all right, but would he have felt the same way if Ryan or Summer had disappeared, or, God - even Marissa Cooper? He was so, so bad at this. "You know," he said, shifting a little in the sand. "I think we're all here to learn something, as cheesy as it sounds. We just have to figure it out, you know?"

[wongsideofcreek]

On a normal day, Joey might have replied with sarcasm, but with her heart as dented as it was, her reply was pure sincerity.

"What are you here to learn?"

[pocketfullowit]

How to talk to girls crying on the beach, he thought, but shrugged. "I don't know," he answered honestly. "But, you know, I think we'll find out when we're not even paying attention. Kind of like playing Mortal Kombat and discovering how to take someone's head off by accident."

[wongsideofcreek]

"Maybe we're just supposed to be away from home." She said thoughtfully. The idea wasn't unappealing.

[pocketfullowit]

"I," Seth drew out a little, "hadn't thought about it that way." She had a fair point, a fair point indeed, but there were still other issues, as in those people who didn't like being away from home. Truth told, Seth missed his parents, but he wasn't about to tell her that. "Que sera, sera, huh?"