let him win his spurs

Title: Line of Best Fit
Author: sunsetmog
Fandom: The O.C.
Pairing: Ryan Atwood / Seth Cohen,
Rating: R
Word count: 23,600.
Notes: Beta by asmallbluedot. Thank you, bb! This was mainly written 4-5 years ago and I recently unearthed it from the depths of my hard drive after deciding to rewatch s1. It's been tidied up a bit and given an ending, but mostly it is how I left it four years ago. I would imagine that it counts as an AU from about the end of s2, although it does contain reference to a couple of things that happen at the beginning of s3, I think, which is about when I stopped watching. Writing this feels about a million years ago.

Summary:

He was just that kid from school who no one really spoke to, and one morning he woke up so sick of Newport that even Ryan wasn't enough to keep him there anymore. - Or, the one where Seth goes to university in Scotland*.

*Yes, I wrote a St. Andrews AU. Yes, I also wrote one in LOTRIPS too. :D?




But now he lives inside someone he does not recognize
When he catches his reflection on accident
Brothers on a Hotel Bed - Death Cab for Cutie

Seth really didn't know who was more surprised when he told his parents he wanted to go to school in Scotland, his parents or Seth himself.

It wasn't something he'd always wanted to do or even something he'd been thinking about for a while. He couldn't trace his ancestry back to the Mayflower and further back to Edinburgh or Manchester or Plymouth and beyond. He was just a kid from California who listened to far too much music and read far too much into the lyrics and kept too many well-thumbed paperbacks on the shelf inside his closet. He was just that kid from school who no one really spoke to, and one morning he woke up so sick of Newport that even Ryan wasn't enough to keep him there anymore.

He'd been sitting outside the guidance counselor's office at Harbor, one interminable Wednesday afternoon during that long, difficult period after Trey got shot and Marissa got expelled and Seth finally realised that his life was even more like a soap opera than he could enjoy. Slumped in the chair and bored of the career magazines and healthy eating fliers, he'd noticed the poster on the wall opposite. Study Overseas, it suggested, above pictures of Paris and London, but Seth hated following the crowd and he'd crossed both Paris and London off his mental list of possible places to go to school even before he'd been called into the counselor's office and had to spend another forty-five minutes of his life trying to convince the guidance counselor that he was a-okay.

Seth being Seth and not one to do things by half, he'd gone to the bookstore right after school got out and spent an hour in the travel section. He narrowed his search from as far away from here as possible to English-speaking destinations after he realized he might have to understand French well enough to actually write papers. Seth was pretty good at bullshitting, but even he doubted his capabilities in another language. He bought a UK travel guide and spent the rest of the evening reading articles on the internet about going to school in Britain. He spent about four seconds debating whether to tell Ryan he was going, but by the time he'd taken his courage in both hands and headed downstairs to the kitchen, Ryan was arguing with Sandy about his own finances for college, and neither seemed to notice Seth's arrival in the room. Which was kind of crappy, Seth thought, considering one place he'd never really seemed invisible was in his own house.

Seth detoured to the fridge and poured himself some juice and went back up to his computer to read about credits. Ryan was always busy at the moment - off fighting Marissa's corner for her because no one else was - Summer was getting it back on with Zach, his mom was drying out in some clinic and his dad was trying to hold everything together. Seth was back being lonely and spending his evenings in his bedroom like the past two years had never even happened.

~*~

Picking Scotland was a pretty random decision, apart from the fact that it was even more difficult to get to than London. The university was older than his country, which kind of made Seth feel small and insignificant. He was sick to death of vying for a leading role in his own stupid life, so he scrolled through the university website and felt the beginnings of warmth creep through his belly.

Seth spoke to a couple of his teachers and filled in all the forms. He didn't bother applying for any of the other schools he'd always thought he might end up at - Brown, Boston University or any other school that was only half a country away and not on the other side of the world.

He thought about what he might say when his friends asked him where he'd applied, but none of them asked. He thought again about telling Ryan, but Ryan was one of his so-called friends who hadn't asked him about college, so Seth just continued with the applications and tried not to think about where things had gone weird.

Marissa still wasn't back at Harbor, and even though Seth was pretty sure that Marissa and Ryan were over for good, asking Ryan to think about anything other than Marissa's problems was too much like hard work. Summer was back to treating him like a nobody again, something to do with Seth being a dick and reminding her too much of that awful night they'd seen Marissa wielding a gun.

Seth swallowed. He was sick of Newport and sick of California and right now America wasn't big enough for him to escape everything that had happened in the last year. He wanted to go someplace where the website said 'If you are used to temperatures of above thirty degrees, then you are in for a chilly time'. Seth figured out what that was in Fahrenheit, shivered, and did another re-write of his application form.

~*~

When his acceptance letter came, Seth gave it to his mom.

Kirsten was home and dry and overcompensating, but when she read the letter she cried and told Seth she didn't want him to go. Seth bit his lip and left the letter on the table for Sandy to read when he got back from surfing. He took his skateboard and bummed up and down the pier for a couple of hours. He didn't think about Scotland once.

Sandy was waiting for him the kitchen.

Seth tried to explain what Newport meant to him, what it represented. He tried listing dead grandfathers and undiscovered half-aunts who dated foster-adopted-brothers (which, dude, meant Ryan could have been Seth's uncle) and too many drugs and far too much alcohol and too many run-ins with the police. He tried to explain that it didn't matter how much Seth loved his parents, he was going crazy here and he needed to get out before he broke into little bits, like Marissa.

And at no point during his breathless explanation of his hows and whys and wherefores did Seth mention Ryan, and how Ryan had moved on and forgotten him and left him behind, and how more than anything else in the whole wide world, Seth couldn't stay here and watch that happen any longer.

Sandy nodded and Kirsten started crying again and Sandy wiped his eyes.

Seth looked out of the window at the swimming pool and wondered why he didn't cry.

~*~

Summer was speaking to him again, which made school just that bit more bearable. One day she sat down beside him, started applying lip gloss and told him that hers was a tall, skinny latte. Seth went and lined up at the coffee stand because hello, Summer. She poked him in the leg with one perfect fingernail and told him that if he wanted to come around and watch The Valley that evening she had a gap in her schedule.

Seth turned up wearing his new t shirt, which said hustle, loyalty, respect across the chest. He'd got it from Hot Topic and it probably meant something if you were into wrestling. Seth was turning into the type of guy who was all about the subtext, though, and right now he had things to say and he seemed to have forgotten how to vocalize what it was he was thinking. Clothing seemed to say it better than he ever could.

Summer seemed to get it, but she just rolled her eyes and said, "Whatever, Cohen."

She gave Seth the best spot on her couch, though, the one with the best view and the best access to the popcorn, and Seth sort of thought that that was as much of an apology as he was going to get for her freaking out and leaving him and trying to forget he existed after Trey got shot.

He wasn't planning on telling her he was leaving, but by the time the episode finished and Summer had put in the DVD so he could catch up on the episodes he'd missed, she had her head on his shoulder and his chest ached from it all. After the titles played he smoothed her hair (she batted his hand away and said "Seth!") and said he'd been accepted to school in Scotland and his major was going to be English and History and he was leaving at the beginning of September for four years.

Her fingers tightened around his sleeve.

Seth closed his eyes and felt closer to tears than he had in months. "It's closer to London and Paris than California is, you could come visit," he said. He stroked her hair again, but she didn't say anything, just buried her face in his shirt.

Summer said, "I'm sorry I flaked out on you."

Seth hugged her awkwardly, arm around her shoulder, dragging her closer. "It wasn't just that," he said eventually. He thought of Ryan, Marissa, Summer and Seth. The four of them. Those few months when he'd thought they were in it together for the long haul. He hugged her harder.

"It's a long way to go." Her voice was muffled against his shirt.

Seth thought of isolated Russian huts and settlements in the Himalayas and sheep farms in the empty wilds of Australia. "It isn't far enough," he said.

Summer went quiet and turned the volume up on the TV.

Summer was still seeing Zach and Seth thought he should at least care. He should have been planning to split them up and win her back and best Zach at his own game. But—he wasn't. Maybe there was something to be said for just wanting Summer around.

Maybe they'd all changed.

Seth kissed Summer on the mouth, soft and sweet. She kissed him back for a moment before pulling away and wiping her mouth carefully on her sleeve. "I'm with Zach," she said, but her voice shook.

"I'm leaving the country." Seth said, and he kissed her again.

~*~

When Seth got home he went outside and sat down by the edge of the pool. He lay on his back with his hand trailing in the water and stared at the night sky until he got cold and started to shiver.

He tried not to look at the pool house, empty and silhouetted against the darkness.

Everything waited for Ryan.

~*~

Seth kept putting off telling Ryan he was leaving.

His parents kept watching him sadly, but Seth just couldn't do it. Ryan was making such a big deal of supporting himself through college, and was refusing to apply unless he was sure that it was what he wanted, and that he could live up to Sandy and Kirsten's expectations. Seth wanted to tell him to sit back and take whatever his parents were offering, because Ryan was smart and intelligent and would do really well in college and would probably be able to pay Kirsten and Sandy back ten-fold by the time he finished up and actually got a job. Plus, Seth knew his parents and they'd only buy another 4x4 or plumb in another bathroom or give it all away anyway, so Ryan really ought to just take the money and run. Still, Ryan had all these ideas about being beholden to people and proving his worth and he kept trying to get Kirsten and Sandy to agree to him taking a year off and working as proof he would pay them back for their college tuition.

Seth listened to the discussions with half an ear, watching as Ryan steadfastly held to his position and his parents gently yielded to his point of view.

He went upstairs and started making a CD for Ryan, a CD that would explain why Seth was so fixated on leaving. It was a cheap way out and Seth knew that CDs were old school as far as Newport was concerned. It should have been an mp3 playlist loaded onto Ryan's iPod, but so far Ryan had avoided becoming part of the iPod generation and Seth was beginning to venerate the CD in the same way he did vinyl. He started with Death Cab's Brothers on a Hotel Bed - which probably said a lot about Seth's mental state - until he realized it sounded like a declaration of love just from the title alone, so he moved it partway down the playlist and decided against giving Ryan a CD inlay for him to analyze. Not that Ryan would, but that wasn't the point. Seth didn't want to give him the opportunity. He moved Jeff Buckley's Hallelujah up the playlist to open the CD. Rufus Wainwright reminded him of his Grandfather's wedding and sailing out of the bay, reminded him of Ryan leaving and his iPod playing it on repeat as he didn't look back at Newport fading into the distance. Jeff Buckley meant that somehow it was his goodbye and not Ryan's.

He wanted to pick songs that told Ryan that having Ryan come into his life was pretty much the best thing that had ever happened to Seth, that having Ryan move in had changed his life and made it better - not because it had changed things so that it ended up with Seth and Summer getting together, which Seth had wanted since he'd heard Summer read her poem aloud in elementary school, but because it ended up with Seth and Ryan. Best friends. Seth wouldn't change any of that for a million bucks, or backstage passes to his favorite band's show or for a trip in a time machine so he could go back and hang out with the beat writers and do the whole Jack Kerouac thing before all the kids were doing it.

He couldn't find the right lyrics to say exactly what he wanted to say, so he made the best of it and filled a CD.

And when Seth had finished compiling the CD and he'd burnt it and put it in a green jewel case, he went out to the pool house and handed Ryan the box. He said, "I'm going to school in Scotland," and sat down on the edge of the bed.

Ryan didn't say anything, but a muscle twitched in his cheek and he stared at the CD for longer than Seth considered strictly necessary. Seth had drawn on the CD with permanent marker, scrawling Ryan in big, cartoon letters across the top of the CD. He'd deliberately left off the track listing.

Ryan clenched his jaw and said, "Why didn't you tell me before?"

Seth wanted to say when? but instead he just said "I made you a CD," which was kind of obvious and didn't answer Ryan's question. Seth knew that, okay, things had changed recently and Ryan had forgone Ryan and Seth time in favor of Ryan and Marissa time, or just Ryan time, or Ryan and Kirsten and Sandy time, but still. They had kind of been each other's saviors and now Seth was leaving.

Seth knew that Ryan was notably not very vocal at the best of times. He watched Ryan swallow and look the other way and sit down on the step. Finally, Ryan said, "Seth, you're my best friend."

Seth nodded, and just said "Me too, I mean, you're mine too. The best I've ever had, actually," whereas Ryan could actually do the minimalism thing, whenever Seth tried it just ended up being wordy.

Seth was too young to feel this old.

~*~

Graduation came and went and then it was summer and all too soon it was time for Seth to get ready to leave. He packed his Nintendo and he carefully copied all his CDs onto his new laptop and onto his iPod. He spent the best part of an afternoon staring at his DVD collection and picking out the most necessary discs - filling a CD wallet and leaving the empty boxes in his closet. He took a pile of well-read paperbacks, stuffed a handful of photos into an envelope and down the side of a box with some new sweaters (from his Mom) and a blanket (from The Nana). He packed too many t-shirts and not enough jackets - his Mom ordered him a black wool coat from this place in New York, and he had to try it on in blazing August heat by the side of the pool. Ryan stared at him for a long moment as he stumbled out of the pool house in the direction of the kitchen. His dad gave him the money to get a new cell phone when he got there, to go with his new laptop, and gave him overly simplified instructions on how to set up a British bank account and get a contract for his phone. Seth took one look and stuffed the instructions into his suitcase.

Summer came round the afternoon before Seth left to say goodbye, coming to his bedroom and hugging him too tightly and kissing him quickly before running downstairs. Seth watched her leave from his window, watched her climb into Zach's car and drive away.

His chest didn't feel as tight anymore.

He went to the Bait Shop that evening, looking for something to fill the gap until he had to leave for the airport. Marissa was there, still hanging with the kids from her new school and looking kind of like she fitted in. Seth saw her from the bar and raised his glass. Marissa watched him for a long moment, silent. She nodded, and waved awkwardly. Seth waved back, but didn't go over.

Even thought Marissa and Ryan weren't together anymore and Marissa was conducting her own version of West Side Story for the second time in three years, there was still something between Seth and Marissa. Something Ryan-shaped. Too much gun-toting, brother-shooting, Ryan-loving, territorial attachment to be friends again right now. Anyway, Seth read too much into it all. He'd watched too many movies and read too many comic books.

Seth sometimes thought that he and Marissa were too similar. Marissa drank to make it hurt less; Seth left the country.

He wished he could take more breaths, but as it got closer to leaving Ryan, he felt his chest tighten in a strange, painful mixture of desperation and relief. He wanted it to hurt less, he needed to leave.

~*~

Ryan wouldn't go with him to the airport. He was leaving himself in a couple of days - for a six month internship at an engineering firm in San Francisco. He flat out refused to go to college until he had more of a fixed idea what he was going to do when he got there, he'd said, ignoring Kirsten and Sandy's protestations that finding out what you wanted to do with your life was what college was for. So, internships it was, and Sandy and Kirsten were setting him up with the best.

Seth ended up in the pool house at ass o'clock in the morning, just before he was supposed to leave with his parents for his flight. Ryan was lying on the bed staring up at the ceiling, fully dressed.

"I'm going," Seth said, finally.

Ryan nodded. "Are you ready?"

"You know me," Seth said, nervously, "I'll have forgotten something important."

"Got Captain Oats? Your iPod? Airplane tickets?"

Seth smiled. "Yep."

"Well." Ryan sighed. "You've got everything you need."

Not everything, Seth thought. He bit his lip, looking around the room. It was still almost hot, despite it being the middle of the night, and he itched to be out of California.

"Did I ruin things for you?" Ryan asked, finally. "Do you wish I'd never come here?"

Seth shook his head. "Are you kidding me? You're the best friend I've ever had. You coming here was the best thing that ever happened to me, dude." Seth shrugged. "Before you came, I was so fucking lonely, you wouldn't believe."

Ryan sat up in bed. He rubbed his face with his hand. He looked exhausted. "Seth, why are you going?"

Seth shrugged and remembered how he used to be able to talk. He wanted to say, because my life revolves around you. Even when I loved Summer and you loved Marissa, everything in my life was still about you. Because you came along and fucking saved me and you didn't even know what you did. You didn't know that I couldn't have carried on like that, that you were my fucking savior. I was just this fucking stupid loser kid who listened to too much music and read too many comic books and who could go a whole day at school without anyone saying a single word to me. You came along and made everything better but you didn't make me better.

When you're not here, I'm still the same Seth Cohen, the same loser kid who fucks everything up. The only thing Newport's got going for it is the fact that you're here. And Summer. But Summer really only counts when you're here, because without you there wouldn't be a me and Summer.

But mostly, it's you. Because I love you, and most of the time it's the normal, best friend, brother kind of love, but sometimes I just look at you and I want to touch you. Once I wanted to kiss you, just to see what it was like, and I've got to get away before I fuck us both up by doing something irredeemably stupid like only I could do. Plus, you know. I need to get away.

Seth opened his mouth, but he couldn't bring himself to say anything. Instead, he kicked the couch leg and said, "You should come visit me. I'll show you around. Once I'm settled."

Ryan nodded. "That'd be good."

Seth swallowed, and nodded, and said "Don't do anything I wouldn't, Ry."

Ryan smiled. His face looked shadowed. "I hope it works out for you."

Seth's fingers itched. His mom called him from the kitchen, "Seth, time to go."

He didn't look back.

~*~

Seth had been in Scotland six whole days before he got the internet in his dorm room hooked up. He'd spent one whole day sleeping, emerging half-awake into the hallway one evening to find himself carried along on a pajama-clad pub crawl. He'd met his dorm mates and learnt that he'd been pronouncing Edinburgh wrong, like, his whole life. They'd laughed at him and he'd laughed back and it had sort of been okay.

He'd lined up to pay his fees and to have his photo taken for his ID card, and he had to remind himself to call it his matriculation card without taking a couple of seconds to think about it.

He realized that his Newport upbringing had its upside when he heard his new friends pointing and laughing at the other new American students passed out on the sidewalk after indulging too heavily in legal alcohol. Seth could definitely hold his own when it came to drinking, although at the back of his mind he could still see his mom swigging from the vodka bottle and then he put his glass down and tried not to miss her.

Everything was so different here; so much smaller, so much more grayer, so much better than Newport. He didn't miss living in California at all. He wandered around the grocery store in sheer amazement at the size of everything. The local metro supermarket was about the size of Casa Cohen - no kidding - and it was so stupid it had to be funny. He went to the Student Union on Friday night and danced to stupid pop songs - half of which he had never heard of - and kissed a girl whose name he didn't catch but who had tasted like cigarettes and sweet peach schnapps. She was sweet and he was drunk, and they danced and had fun for an evening. He started out calling his hall his dorm, and he only understood his mistake when his new friends laughed at him over dinner, and told him that he was in hall, now. Not the hall, or his hall, but hall. It sounded weird to him at first, like he was leaving a word out, but everyone else said it like that so he tried to remember.

Seth had thought that he'd had enough of people laughing at him in his life, but there was something different about this. There weren't any water polo players entertaining each other at his expense for a start; his friends laughed at him, but they laughed at everybody else too - it was friendly ribaldry that cemented his enjoyment right from the start.

He got talking to a girl called Katie, who had the room opposite him on his floor in hall. She was from Wales, and Seth loved her accent so much he kept asking her questions just so he could hear her talk, over and over. She smiled at him and laughed, and introduced him to this guy, Matt, who had a room the next floor up. He liked the way Matt talked too, all short vowels and rounded corners. Seth only realized how shitty his geography was when he had to ask him whether Yorkshire was in England or not. Matt just snorted and hit him around the back of the head with a rolled up newspaper. Seth kind of flinched, which was embarrassing, but he didn't grow up in Newport going to Harbor and get this far in life without learning to expect that the first blow - however soft - wouldn't be followed by more.

Matt looked at him quizzically for a moment, then suggested they go to the pub.

Seth couldn't get used to the pubs. He couldn't imagine going to a bar at eleven in the morning and having it be okay and normal. If he had been back at home the Newpsies would be talking about him like he was the new Marissa or something. They'd likely do it whilst making themselves cosmopolitans, but there was nothing like Orange County hypocrisy to teach you about the world. Katie and Matt introduced him to the world of pubs in daytime. They'd order chunky fries - chips - and slather them in mayonnaise and read the papers and cheer when the bar staff put Neighbours on the big television screen. From what Seth could pick up, Neighbours was an Australian soap which was some kind of tradition.

He'd started classes and because he was Seth Cohen, he'd been ridiculously overenthusiastic. His English class was about Ghosts and Doubles in nineteenth and twentieth century literature, and he'd bought all his set texts and was already half way through Wuthering Heights and loving it. He had Orlando stacked up on his desk by his bed, waiting until he was done with Bronte. He was taking two history classes this semester, both eras he'd never done anything on before. Early Modern Europe and an overview of the Mediaeval period, and he couldn't be more enthusiastic or impressed. He'd run to the bookstore right after class was over, clutching his reading list and overwhelmingly grateful for his mom and dad's allowance. Katie was waiting for her aid to come in - student loan, she said meaningfully - and wasn't sure how far that would stretch anyway. She'd already scoured the second hand shops and had rushed to the library to find some of the reading materials for her classes there, and was worried about having to buy some of the texts new. Seth got back to his room laden down with carrier bags and more books than he had bookshelves for. He didn't want to think about how he was going to get them back to the States at the end of the year. Instead, he piled them haphazardly by the side of his wardrobe and thought about buying some little shelves to keep them on.

Seth's greatest moment came when he realized that his professor for his mediaeval class was the same guy who'd written the textbook Seth had been reading avidly since he'd bought it a couple of days earlier. When Seth found out that he was actually going to be taught by Professor Greenwood, he just about collapsed right there and then, because hello, so cool. Katie had giggled and slipped her arm through his. Seth laughed out loud for the first time in what felt like weeks and they went back to hall via the pizza shop, bringing pepperoni pizza for the two of them and for Matt. They ate it sitting on Matt's floor listening to old Oasis albums and sharing two cans of lager between the three of them. Afterwards, they leaned back against the bed and watched Star Wars IV on Matt's computer. Seth secretly thought that they should just called it Star Wars I and forget about all that Jar-Jar Binks bullshit, but he was secretly a completist at heart, even though the prequels were terrible.

Matt and Katie might laugh at him for his enthusiasm, but Seth didn't care because nothing hurt like it used to anymore. They laughed and made him laugh too, tickling him when they realized he was ticklish and poking him just for the fun of hearing him squeak. Newport and California and guns and drugs and suicide and brothers and best friends all seemed a million miles away, and Seth couldn't help but think that was the best place for all of them.

~*~

When they'd first compared timetables, Matt was taking Seth's history classes and Katie was taking his English one, but by the end of the second week Katie had dropped her French class in favor of Seth's mediaeval one. At the end of class a couple of weeks into term, after Seth had done his weekly geeky line up for a word with Professor Greenwood, Matt and Katie dragged him off to explore the town. They wandered up and down the cobbled streets and in and out of the cathedral grounds and down to the sea. It was too cold for Seth, used to warmer climes, but Katie took her shoes and socks off and wandered up and down the water's edge. Even Matt shook his head and called her crazy - because it was October, in Scotland, but Katie just laughed and splashed them in retribution.

Seth wondered what the surf was like in Newport and wanted to call his dad.

Instead, he went to a cafe with Katie and Matt, where they forced him to sit down and then disappeared off to the counter to order for him.

They came back carrying a pot of tea and a tray of muffins - buns, like they weren't talking about asses - and said he couldn't have coffee until he'd had at least one cup of tea.

Seth prepared himself to suffer, but it wasn't actually that bad.

It didn't stop him ordering a large latte the moment he'd drained the cup, though.

They sat in the corner of the cafe, upstairs at the back, and talked. Katie talked about her A-levels and her stupid summer job stacking shelves in a grocery store, about the friends she'd left behind and how much she missed them. Matt had spent the summer backpacking across Europe, and he'd finished up in Greece the week before he'd come to Scotland. Seth had, like, a million questions. Matt told them funny stories about running out of money in Barcelona and getting sick on the shortest, flattest ferry journey between Venice and Croatia. Seth asked him about traveling, about Europe, and Seth wanted to do it all.

When it came to Seth's turn to speak, he stirred his drink with a long spoon and talked about comic books and superheroes.

He didn't talk about Newport at all, about Orange County or his parents or Summer or fires in mobile homes or shootings or best friends who were kind of brothers but kind of the greatest thing that ever happened to you. He didn't say much at all, actually, and it was nice that no one said hey, what's going on with Cohen? Because Seth didn't know what was up with him and he didn't really care because he was sort of happy and contented. Plus, maybe this was who Seth Cohen was supposed to be all along, and the past few years had just been a long reaction to living in Newport for so long. Whatever.

But Matt and Katie didn't call him out on why he wasn't talking. Katie just asked him why he'd wanted to go to school over here (except they both laughed when Seth called it school; school stopped after your A-levels, apparently, and Seth was trying to get used to calling it university).

Seth took a long gulp of his coffee, leaned back in his chair and said he was sick of living in a country ruled by Bush, which was a pretty reasonable excuse for wanting to leave.

They laughed, so that was okay.

Seth deliberately didn't think about his alcoholic mom, or Ryan, or Ryan's alcoholic mom, or about his dad, or his dead grandfather, or the fact that his foster-adopted-brother had dated his grandfather's alcoholic, suicidal stepdaughter, his grandfather's girlfriend (almost) and his grandfather's illegitimate daughter. He didn't think about Luke, or Luke's gay dad, or about Zach, who'd been cool and then hadn't been cool and had ended up proving that all water polo players were just about the same.

Even though Seth really wasn't thinking about Newport, he didn't really feel like hanging out when they got back to hall. He went back to his room and lay down on his bed and stared up at the ceiling and deliberately didn't think about Ryan.

Even if Seth's normal monologues were notably absent nowadays, his internal one was doing just fine.

~*~

Summer came to visit in November, which basically gave Seth just enough time to forget about Newport before she came along and reminded him of everything he'd tried to leave behind. She'd hitched a ride over with her dad, who'd come to play golf and could probably put the whole shebang on expenses. She was skipping out on a week's worth of classes, and just shrugged loudly when Seth asked if that was going to be okay. "It's Paris, Cohen," she said. "And you."

Seth's immediate and over-arching reaction to Summer's impending arrival was to ask her if her coming over meant he had to sit through another excruciating meal with Mr. Roberts.

"Maybe it'll be less painful now we're not dating," Seth said finally, after he interpreted Summer's silence as a definite yes. "Maybe he'll be storing up all his energy to make mincemeat out of Zach, right? Right, Summer?"

Summer pointed out that Seth's verbal diarrhea wasn't typically limited to her dad, which Seth took to mean as yes, it will be painful. He didn't think to point out that he wasn't much with the verbal overload these days, but Summer was the one on the other end of the telephone line and she could probably already tell. He wanted to make some stupid joke about Ryan, to ask Summer if Ryan was babbling inanely all the way through his internship in San Francisco. He wanted to know if Ryan was waving his hands and saying stupid and inappropriate stuff, because Seth had turned quiet and introspective and maybe there was some weird body swap thing going on, like in Big. Seth couldn't ask though, because he didn't know if Summer and Ryan kept in touch, and he didn't want to draw attention to his radio silence, and he also didn't want Summer to know that he hadn't talked to Ryan since he left Newport.

Seth hadn't emailed or called Ryan, but then Ryan hadn't emailed or called Seth either.

It had been weeks and months and Seth was happy, but there was a giant Ryan-shaped hole in his life that he just couldn't fill, no matter how hard he tried.

Summer asked if he was okay or if he'd been hit on the head and turned into Ryan Atwood, like in that film.

Seth just laughed and said, "They made a film about Ryan Atwood?"

Summer said, "Dumbass", and explained the storyline of this made-for-TV movie she'd seen the previous week when she should have been at a Psych seminar.

When Seth finally hung up, he realized he kind of had a large Summer-shaped hole in his life, too, and he started to look forward to her arriving.

~*~

Summer arrived on Thursday evening in mid-November. Seth didn't have classes on a Friday, plus the pub behind Seth's hall had its happy hour on Thursday, so Seth and everyone else from hall were doing their best to drink the pub dry.

He'd pulled out his suitcase from under his bed the previous weekend and unzipped the front pocket. Inside the pocket was the envelope of photos he'd stuffed into a box back in Newport. When he'd arrived he hadn't wanted to look at anyone from home, and he'd dropped the package into his empty suitcase and hadn't been tempted since. But last weekend he'd stuck his head around Katie's door and asked if she had anything he could stick pictures up with, and spent the rest of the evening attaching his photos to the front of his closet.

When Katie came in later, bringing him a cup of tea and a biscuit, she stared at his photos for a long time. "Which one's Summer?" she asked eventually, and Seth called Matt on the phone and got him to come downstairs so that he wouldn't have to explain twice.

Seth was in the pub with Katie and Matt and pretty much the rest of his hall when Summer called him to tell him she was in town.

"It's raining, Cohen."

"It does that," Seth told her, and tried to stop himself grinning at the way he was beginning to feel warm right from his toes upwards. "Where are you?"

She'd gotten a cab from her dad's hotel to where Seth had directed her to, and when he came out to meet her, she was standing opposite the bus shelter outside the high school, tapping one high heel and shivering in a short jacket. Seth ran across the road with his collar turned up and his hands over his head to ward off the rain. He clung to her for longer than he wanted to, sliding his hands under her jacket, holding her too close and shutting his eyes at the familiarity. He felt her breath warm against his neck.

She didn't tease him about hanging on too long, not even when he pulled back and kissed her on the mouth.

He'd talked so much about Summer in the past few days that Katie and Matt were probably sick to death of the sound of her name, but they were both on their best behavior when Seth introduced her. So were most of his hall buddies, who didn't make any jokes about bad pronunciation or about Americans or anything. Seth was proud of them, although their radio silence could probably be attributed to the fact that they were bowled over by how pretty Summer was.

He couldn't let go of her; he had his arm slung around her shoulder and she had her arm around his waist. Seth couldn't stop smiling.

His friends made room for them both at the table and Summer didn't wrinkle her nose and ask if they could go anywhere cleaner, or more upmarket, or anywhere more like the places in Newport. The pub was a student one, grubby and peeling at the edges, and Seth loved it. Summer talked to Katie and Matt and fell in love with their accents and asked them questions just to hear them talk. Seth bought her gin and tonics and splurged on on a cocktail, and Summer smiled at him and Seth felt something warm unfold in his belly.

He'd missed her. When he put her in a cab at the end of the evening, he hugged her and told her he'd had a Summer-shaped gap in his life.

She hugged him back and said, "Missed you too, Spiderman."

~*~

Seth took her dancing at the Student Union on Friday night. Seth hadn't really been one for dancing back in Newport, so Summer had raised a perfect eyebrow at him when he'd suggested it and asked him where the real Seth Cohen was.

Seth grinned and said, "It's a lot of fun. You'll like it."

When they got into the union, the DJ was playing Is This The Way To Amarillo, which had been new to Seth when he'd arrived a few weeks earlier. Matt had downloaded the video from YouTube for him so Seth could understand the dancing, and now Seth knew all the words after spending too many Friday nights out with his friends.

He'd forgotten to explain the phenomenon to Summer.

"Um, Cohen?"

Seth tried to keep a straight face. "Yes, Summer?"

"Why is everyone-" she stopped. "Why are they marching, Seth? Are they all crazy?"

Seth grabbed her hand and pulled her into the throng to join in.

~*~

They had a lazy day on Saturday, with Seth wandering over to Summer's hotel late in the morning and spending the rest of the day watching films on pay-per-view, looking out of the window occasionally to see if the sun had come out. They talked about Summer's school and how much she was loving her psych seminars but biology sucked ass and how next semester she was taking social anthropology because her roommate said it was amazing and the professor was hot. She told him about Marissa's descent into alcoholism (again? Seth asked, bored of Marissa's teen crises, but Summer just punched him in the arm to shut him up) and how she was about to get thrown out of college. "She's trying, though," Summer says. "I think she's actually getting herself cleaned up."

Seth wasn't as inclined to laugh at Marissa's crises anymore, not now that his mom was an alcoholic too, but he couldn't help but feel something akin to relief now that he was so removed from it all. The closest he'd come to trauma here was one of his friends occasionally accidentally making out with someone in one of their tutorial groups, and even then it was usually fixed by the end of the week. Real Trauma seemed a hell of a long way away, and Seth was overly thankful for that.

Katie rang him on his cell around eight in the evening, saying that Matt had been invited to a beach barbecue right down at the end of East Sands. It was probably a mile out, Katie said, because of the local laws about drinking alcohol within the city boundaries, but it was probably going to be a lot of fun.

Summer grumbled about walking that far and why did no one have a car in this stupid place, and fun didn't usually mean walking a mile in the freezing cold.

Seth grinned and threw her scarf and woolly hat at her.

~*~

They ended up sitting up in the dunes down by the fire, with their own single-use barbecue and a bag of kindling for their own miniature bonfire because it was so cold. Seth thought about the grill they had back in Newport, by the edge of the pool, and compared it to this - freezing to death in the middle of winter on a beach in Scotland. He missed his parents, but he wouldn't change this for the world. He was where he was supposed to be. He slid his arm around Summer's shoulders, and dropped a kiss to the top of her head.

Katie and Matt had been to the supermarket to buy snacks and cans of beer, and they were toasting marshmallows and wrapping bananas stuffed with chocolate in tinfoil, poking them with sticks to roll them off the grill and onto the sand.

Seth cracked open a can of beer and said without thinking, "Hey, Summer, it's a beach barbecue and there's no one fighting or throwing a punch."

Summer smiled and pulled down her woolly hat over her ears, cradling her own can of pre-mixed gin and tonic. She'd already made Seth promise not to tell anyone she'd ever drunk this. She looked adorable, and Seth's chest ached a little for everything that had been. She said, "Yeah, Seth, that's because Ryan and Luke aren't here."

Katie laughed, and pulled a gooey marshmallow off the end of her skewer. "Luke's the one with the gay dad, right? Seth showed us a photo last week, told us all about him."

Matt poked him with the toe of his sneaker. "You never mentioned Ryan though, spill."

Summer opened her mouth and Seth closed his, and fuck. He'd been found out.

"Okay, Cohen. Tell me what they did with the real Seth and I'll let you live." Her voice had taken on a steely edge.

Seth shrugged uneasily and thought, fuck, found out, again and tried to imagine what Ryan was doing now. The tiny, miniature Ryan who lived in his head smiled and shrugged too. Seth wanted to smile back.

"Seth," Summer said, again. "Seriously."

Seth shook his head. "Nothing to tell, guys."

Summer spluttered, hitting him in the arm. It hurt. Seth remembered the rage blackouts, and an echo of their former relationship punched him in the arm again.

Seth desperately didn't want Katie and Matt or any of his other new friends to know about Ryan. People seemed to like him here without Ryan being around, and Seth wasn't really used to people liking him without liking Ryan as well. Ryan had left him behind, Ryan had other stuff to do and other fish to fry and there wasn't time for Seth in that equation anymore. His head ached.

"Seriously," Seth said, trying to look reassuring, "Ryan was just some guy we used to know."

Summer just shook her head and said, "Oh, Seth," really sadly.

Seth dug his marshmallow skewer into the sand and tried not to think.

After a minute Summer clambered up onto her knees and hugged him; Seth buried his head in the curve of her neck for too long a moment, and didn't say anything.

Afterwards, when Katie and Matt had gone quiet and then all of a sudden started talking about some movie that was out at the moment and was coming to the movie theater on Thursday, and arranging to go and see it, Summer leaned over and held Seth's hand tight. They toasted the remains of the marshmallows over the cooling barbecue and got sticky fingers picking at the chocolate-y bananas in their tinfoil packets.

Later, when Seth walked Summer back to her hotel, she squeezed his hand too tight. He wanted to talk to her about Ryan, about what he sometimes felt and how hard it had been to leave him behind, and why he'd had to leave in the first place, but he couldn't find the words. In the hotel lobby she kissed his cheek sadly, saying, "It'll be okay, Cohen."

Seth kind of wished she'd never come, because Newport wasn't something he wanted to think about, not now or ever again. Summer was Newport personified right in front of him, Summer was Marissa and Harbor and his alcoholic mother and the Water Polo team and she was Ryan.

And that was just a tiny bit disturbing.

He wished he didn't have a life where the only way to make the best of it was to move half a world away.

on to part two.