Ryden Oneshots

It's Always Cloudy

Time travel!fic

Ryan Ross carefully closed his front door. His shaking hands made turning the lock difficult, but after a moment he managed. He toed off his sneakers in the front hall and checked the clock on the VCR. It was a little after three, and his father wouldn’t get home from work until at least six, thank god. Ryan didn’t think he could deal with him on top of everything else.

He padded to his bedroom in soft, white tube socks, slipped inside, locked that door and pressed his back against the wood. He looked at his room: the Blink 182, My Chemical Romance and Fall Out Boy posters taped to the walls; the CDs strewn across every available surface; his weathered, secondhand guitar balanced against the side of his desk; his pale green bed sheets crumpled up at the end of the bed; Spencer’s Playstation with the controllers still on the floor from when they had played last week, the day before Spencer left for vacation with his family. It all seemed so…small now, so immature.

His cell phone rang again and he clenched his jaw shut, determined to ignore it.

He could have been in Florida with Spencer right now, visiting Disney World and trying to get out of babysitting his little sisters, but instead he chose to stay home and spend the three weeks with her. He thought she was worth it, worth almost a whole month alone with just his dad and no Spencer to escape to when things got rough. God, what a fucking joke.

Ryan had been in love, and it turned out he was only a stopgap for Brittany; someone to keep her occupied until she could hook up with one of the preppy guys going to UNLV next month. Ryan let himself slide down the length of the door until he was on the floor, knees pulled up to his chest. What if he hadn’t showed up to her house early today? His stomach turned at the thought. Would she have smiled at him? Kissed him? Would she have laughed inside when he talked about how great their senior year was going to be, all the while thinking about the college guy she just fucked? Would she have even felt bad?

He rested his forehead against his knees and sighed, the sound coming out long and shaky. In his hand, his phone vibrated, telling him he had a text message. He flipped it open and read what it said:

sry :(

He grinned mirthlessly. It pissed him off that she obviously wasn’t sorry enough to spell out the whole word (she was only three-letters apologetic for breaking his heart. What would warrant all five, he wondered, setting fire to a nursery?), but the condescending frowny face is what finally sent him over the edge. He hurled the phone across the room, feeling vaguely satisfied by the crunch it made against the wall, even though he knew that if it broke his father would kill him.

Why was it always him? What was it about him that made it easy for people to cheat on him, fuck him over and generally screw up his life? His mom was gone – Ryan hadn’t talked to her in almost five months – and his dad still looked at him like he was either a mistake or a huge disappointment (when he was sober enough to look like anything other than a drunken wreck). Spencer wouldn’t be back for two weeks. He thought he had something with Brittany, and god, could he get any more pathetic? Could his life get any more pathetic?

Taking advantage of his dad’s absence, he cranked his radio up all the way, letting the first strains of Take Off Your Pants and Jacket drown out his thoughts for a while. His journal was in the third drawer of his desk, stuffed in the back. He dug it out along with a pen and sat down on his bed to write.

Over the speakers, Tom DeLonge was singing, everything has fallen to pieces.

At first, Ryan couldn’t write anything. His hand stood poised above the paper, still trembling, while his mind raced. With a shout of frustration, he brought the pen down hard and scribbled a dark blue line that ripped through three pages of the notebook. He tore those out, dropped them on the floor and stared at the next clean page. Biting his lip, he managed to write I’ve got more wit, a better kiss before something strange happened.