Categories > Celebrities > Panic! At The Disco > To Each His Own
Ryan hears yelling downstairs.
He's sick of it, really.
For the past week, every friggin' night, all there seems to be is yelling. Yelling and glass breaking and crying.
And Ryan can't figure out why his dad blames it all on him.
He hears his father shouting at his mother about how much of a worthless, difficult burden he is.
How much he'd be better off without Ryan. How much he wishes he'd never agreed to keep him and just dropped his two-year-old son into an adoption agency and saved a lot of worries and money. How much he wishes he could just sometimes “kill the kid” to get him to stop his “ridiculous behavior because nothing else seems to be working” (“Nothing else” in his father's eyes is apparently beatings and countless Catholic church services, Ryan notes).
Ryan knows his father doesn't really mean it. Ryan knows his dad is just drunk out of his mind and won't remember a word in the morning. Ryan knows that this is the main reason for most of his mother's yelling, too.
His mom replies to his father's earsplitting statements with shouts of her own: “You don't know what you're talking about; you're so trashed!” she yells. “Maybe his behavior is a way to break free of the way you're treating him!” she screams. “Maybe, just maybe, he actually loves you and cares about you, and pours out all your godforsaken alcohol `cause he doesn't want you to keel over one day from liver, brain, and kidney failure!” she suggests.
Ryan chuckles when she screams that last one.
But, in truth, he thinks that is partly the reason why he dumps out the bottles and bottles of his dad's vodka and wine into the cool, metal sink, watching the cursed liquid flow in a beautiful, sick circle down the drain.
The other part of the reason why he does it is that he just loves blowing his dad's top. He loves when his dad's eyes narrow and his dad runs forward with that look and he loves it when his dad slams him against the wall and his pale face is covered in deep violet, sky blue, and sea green colored bruises the next morning so badly that he has to put three layers of foundation on just so his overly annoying Catholic school teachers don't ask him that ever-frustrating,
“Are you all right, George?”
To which Ryan smiles cheekily and jovially responds,
“Why of course, Father Insert-Overly-Used-Fancy-Last-Name-Here. But thank you for your concern.”
Ryan once asked Spencer when they were fifteen getting water at the water fountain at the park if Spencer thought that was weird. If he thought the fact Ryan liked his dad's abuse and laughed with amusement when he poked his bruises or cleaned his cuts with alcohol was weird. If he thought it was weird Ryan got a thrill-ride out of it and liked to provoke his dad to see how far he would go “next time”.
Spencer just stared at him, and Ryan changed the subject and never asked again.
Ryan plops painfully down on the hard, carpeted floor of his would-be-pitch black bedroom two years after he asked Spencer that question and flops out his limbs. He stares at the ceiling with that creepy (or, “creepy” according to Spencer and a handful of his arrogant classmates) blank stare of his he apparently uses too much. He starts listening to what's going on downstairs, again.
Now, surprisingly, it's not just his mom and dad arguing about money or why his mom left in the first place (the fact she was having an affair with some other guy apparently wasn't a good enough reason for his father, Ryan bitterly thinks) or when his mom's going to find time to visit in her oh-so-busy schedule to visit more or why Ryan's always covered in cuts or bruises or how they're going to deal with Ryan's reckless behavior and if they're going to put him in therapy.
There's another voice.
It's a boy's voice.
A teenage boy's voice.
It's his younger half-brother (younger by a year, which makes Ryan feel a little lousy that his mom oh-so easily got over ditching her past family and went on to have another son so quickly), Kyle.
Kyle looks like Ryan.
Kind of.
He has Ryan's brown hair (it's just not as soft as Ryan's), Ryan's brown eyes (but they're an unexciting brown; not big and hazel and green and orange and other amazing hues thrown into one like Ryan's), and his similar facial features (“angelic”, as people call them, which Ryan thinks is really funny). But the one thing Kyle doesn't have in common with his half-brother is Ryan's skinny, somehow attractive body type. His dad was a muscle builder or something, and Kyle is almost six foot and works out.
Ryan thinks Kyle's better looking.
But being better looking than Ryan, in Ryan's opinion, isn't hard to do.
Anyway, regardless of similar looks, the two don't really get along. They didn't really get along from the start, actually.
Ryan remembers.
--------------------------
“Ryan, this is your brother, Kyle.”
Ryan stares at Kyle.
He doesn't like the shirt he's wearing. It's a really bright yellow polo. It hurts his eyes.
Ryan glances at his father out of the corner of his eye. He's got his hands clenched on the counter edge so hard that they're white, and he's avoiding looking at his son, Kyle, and his ex-wife. Then, slowly his features turn and he, for a split second, catches Ryan's gaze. His one short look is filled with a multitude of emotions: fury, disgust, and pity.
Pity for him.
For Ryan.
Ryan now looks at his mother, immediately noting the look of expectancy and anxiousness on her face. She thinks he's crazy. She thinks he'll snap and go whacko and utterly destroy this “supposed-to-be picture-perfect first meeting” with Kyle, his half-brother.
Ryan thinks the woman is rather rude; she just shows up one day after only associating with him and his dad for barely a week after God knows how many years of silence with this boy who's his relative and one freakin' year younger than him and expects the two to somehow click and get along just peachy.
Ryan snorts inwardly.
Well, that's one thing he's sure won't happen.
He smiles, his lips parting to reveal nice, white teeth.
“Hey, Kyle,” Ryan greets, lifting up a hand from his lap in a wave.
Kyle twists his lips in uneasiness or disgust (Ryan thinks that Kyle must think his mom is pretty low too, for making them meet like this), but he waves back nonetheless.
“Hey, Ryan.”
There's awkward silence.
Kyle and Ryan's mom aren't sure where to go from here, and Ryan's father was never in this conversation in the first place, so Ryan takes the liberty of speaking for all of them.
“I'm surprised she hasn't abandoned you yet, too.”
--------------------------
Ryan just can't stop staring at her.
Jac Vanek is Kyle's girlfriend.
She's dating his half-brother.
He shouldn't be feeling this way about her.
But he is, so Ryan figures there's no point in trying to deny it any longer.
Ryan has a crush on Jac.
“Hey, babe, I'll be right back, okay?” Kyle says, motioning towards his cell phone. “I gotta go see Travis real quick about this thing, but I'll be back in like fifteen.”
Jac, seated in Ryan's living room, nods, her blonde hair falling in front of her face. “'Kay.”
Kyle waves and then scampers out of the front door.
Ryan takes this moment to slither into the living room, silent. He thinks it's funny how he has to be so stealthy in his own house, but then again, he's spying on his brother and his brother's girlfriend so he thinks he kind of has to be. Biting his lower lip suddenly, he's simply standing there, admiring Jac's pretty face that's being illuminated by the moonlight coming in through the side window.
Kyle had come with Jac earlier that evening for his weekly visit that his mother made him take to “get to know Ryan better”. Ryan wasn't sure how Kyle thought it was going, but Ryan thinks that he doesn't like Kyle anymore than he did when he first met him. But regardless, Ryan got bored of watching Jac and Kyle flirt and kiss for two hours and decided he'd go up to his room before coming back down fifteen minutes later because he realized he liked watching Jac even if she was making out with his half-brother two-thirds of the time he was observing her and he was peeking at her from behind a wall.
“I know you're there.”
Jac says something, and Ryan lets out a breath he didn't even know he was holding. He starts chewing on his bottom lip.
Jac turns around. She smiles at him. Ryan's not sure if the feeling fluttering in his stomach is nausea or excitement.
Ryan nods his head.
“I'm sure you did,” he says, sarcastic as ever. (He loves sarcasm, even though it's considered the “lowest form of humor”, which Ryan thinks is a load of crap.)
Jac stands up. She walks to the piano in the corner near the window. Ryan follows her, feeling like a zombie as he robotically saunters across the carpet in the darker room.
They stop at the piano, Ryan in front of the instrument and Jac at the keyboard.
The moonlit window right behind the bench is spilling silver onto the ivory and ebony keys, and Jac turns from looking out the window, letting her hands dance across the keys gracefully.
“Do you play?” she asks, her voice sticky-sweet.
Ryan stares at her.
“Yeah.”
“Can you play something for me?”
Ryan narrows his eyes at her. But he sits down on the cool bench.
Immediately, his hands take their rightful place on the keys, and soon the haunting melody of “Moonlight Sonata” is flowing through the Ross' house.
A quarter of the way through the song, Jac kisses him.
Ryan keeps playing, believe it or not. He's played the piece so many times before, that even though his face is currently occupied and he's not looking down at his hands, he still presses all the right spots and the song doesn't miss a beat.
It's beautiful, in a way; background music as Ryan enjoys the moment.
But the excitement doesn't last long.
Jac's tugging at his shirt, and Ryan feels excitement run through him as he kisses her deeper and then—
“Oh my God, Jac—what are you doing with him?”
It was the disgust and true shock as Kyle spat out the word “him” that really got Ryan mad. It was as if Kyle thought he was better than Ryan.
Like Ryan was just a small little scum that wasn't worthy of anything like Kyle's time or love and especially not worthy of his girlfriend.
The rest of the night was kind of blurry in Ryan's memory.
Something about Jac throwing Ryan off of her, causing Ryan to fly off of the bench and crack his skull against the window pane and get a minor concussion that no one really cared about, Kyle screaming and almost attacking Ryan if it weren't for Ryan's mom who came in at that very moment shouting at Ryan how “inconsiderate” and “ridiculous” and “horrible” he was once she found out what he had just been caught doing and stopping her son from attacking him. Then it was Kyle and Ryan's mom screeching at Ryan's dad as Ryan's dad came home from “work” (More like a bar, Ryan thought) as they explained what “that son of yours just did”, and it was Jac (who didn't look at Ryan the rest of the time she was in the house; not once) who blamed it all on Ryan and then it was Jac and Kyle and Ryan's mom who stormed out of the home and sped away into the night, not coming back for two and a half months.
Ryan lies in the corner by the piano, still with his head resting on the window pane that he previously banged it on, eyes staring off into the darkness of the living room.
He's watching his father's still form.
Since the visitors had stormed off, Mr. Ross hadn't moved or said a word at all. Even when he had been getting yelled at with accusations of his son and the way he was raising him, he remained quiet.
Finally, Mr. Ross walks towards his son, and hovers behind the piano bench, the only thing keeping Ryan and his father separated. The moonlight can't even make Ryan's father's red eyes and tired face look better, and Ryan expects to be yanked up by the hair and chucked across the room before getting attacked numerous times, so he closes his eyes, preparing for the pain.
“We don't need them, Ryan. We're okay as we are. You're okay as you are.”
Ryan's father truly surprises him sometimes.
One minute he's throwing Ryan against the wall, screaming at him how he's such a burden and the next he's…well…saying things like that.
Ryan's hazel eyes fly open. His father's form is gone. Ryan wonders vaguely if the whole thing was a dream.
But once again his father's words echo.
We're okay as we are. You're okay as you are.
Even thought they weren't “okay” (far from it, actually), Ryan still appreciates what his dad did. It was things like that, those few golden moments where Ryan's father showed that he loved, or at least cared about, his son that made Ryan not call the police on him. Not let Mrs. Smith, Spencer's mom, dial 911 or march down to the police station whenever Ryan came over with huge bruises and deep cuts several times a week. What made him not want to attack his dad or kill him. What made him care about, give a crap about, (not quite love, though, keep in mind) his dad.
Ryan gets up back on the piano bench and picks up where he left off in “Moonlight Sonata”.
He's sick of it, really.
For the past week, every friggin' night, all there seems to be is yelling. Yelling and glass breaking and crying.
And Ryan can't figure out why his dad blames it all on him.
He hears his father shouting at his mother about how much of a worthless, difficult burden he is.
How much he'd be better off without Ryan. How much he wishes he'd never agreed to keep him and just dropped his two-year-old son into an adoption agency and saved a lot of worries and money. How much he wishes he could just sometimes “kill the kid” to get him to stop his “ridiculous behavior because nothing else seems to be working” (“Nothing else” in his father's eyes is apparently beatings and countless Catholic church services, Ryan notes).
Ryan knows his father doesn't really mean it. Ryan knows his dad is just drunk out of his mind and won't remember a word in the morning. Ryan knows that this is the main reason for most of his mother's yelling, too.
His mom replies to his father's earsplitting statements with shouts of her own: “You don't know what you're talking about; you're so trashed!” she yells. “Maybe his behavior is a way to break free of the way you're treating him!” she screams. “Maybe, just maybe, he actually loves you and cares about you, and pours out all your godforsaken alcohol `cause he doesn't want you to keel over one day from liver, brain, and kidney failure!” she suggests.
Ryan chuckles when she screams that last one.
But, in truth, he thinks that is partly the reason why he dumps out the bottles and bottles of his dad's vodka and wine into the cool, metal sink, watching the cursed liquid flow in a beautiful, sick circle down the drain.
The other part of the reason why he does it is that he just loves blowing his dad's top. He loves when his dad's eyes narrow and his dad runs forward with that look and he loves it when his dad slams him against the wall and his pale face is covered in deep violet, sky blue, and sea green colored bruises the next morning so badly that he has to put three layers of foundation on just so his overly annoying Catholic school teachers don't ask him that ever-frustrating,
“Are you all right, George?”
To which Ryan smiles cheekily and jovially responds,
“Why of course, Father Insert-Overly-Used-Fancy-Last-Name-Here. But thank you for your concern.”
Ryan once asked Spencer when they were fifteen getting water at the water fountain at the park if Spencer thought that was weird. If he thought the fact Ryan liked his dad's abuse and laughed with amusement when he poked his bruises or cleaned his cuts with alcohol was weird. If he thought it was weird Ryan got a thrill-ride out of it and liked to provoke his dad to see how far he would go “next time”.
Spencer just stared at him, and Ryan changed the subject and never asked again.
Ryan plops painfully down on the hard, carpeted floor of his would-be-pitch black bedroom two years after he asked Spencer that question and flops out his limbs. He stares at the ceiling with that creepy (or, “creepy” according to Spencer and a handful of his arrogant classmates) blank stare of his he apparently uses too much. He starts listening to what's going on downstairs, again.
Now, surprisingly, it's not just his mom and dad arguing about money or why his mom left in the first place (the fact she was having an affair with some other guy apparently wasn't a good enough reason for his father, Ryan bitterly thinks) or when his mom's going to find time to visit in her oh-so-busy schedule to visit more or why Ryan's always covered in cuts or bruises or how they're going to deal with Ryan's reckless behavior and if they're going to put him in therapy.
There's another voice.
It's a boy's voice.
A teenage boy's voice.
It's his younger half-brother (younger by a year, which makes Ryan feel a little lousy that his mom oh-so easily got over ditching her past family and went on to have another son so quickly), Kyle.
Kyle looks like Ryan.
Kind of.
He has Ryan's brown hair (it's just not as soft as Ryan's), Ryan's brown eyes (but they're an unexciting brown; not big and hazel and green and orange and other amazing hues thrown into one like Ryan's), and his similar facial features (“angelic”, as people call them, which Ryan thinks is really funny). But the one thing Kyle doesn't have in common with his half-brother is Ryan's skinny, somehow attractive body type. His dad was a muscle builder or something, and Kyle is almost six foot and works out.
Ryan thinks Kyle's better looking.
But being better looking than Ryan, in Ryan's opinion, isn't hard to do.
Anyway, regardless of similar looks, the two don't really get along. They didn't really get along from the start, actually.
Ryan remembers.
--------------------------
“Ryan, this is your brother, Kyle.”
Ryan stares at Kyle.
He doesn't like the shirt he's wearing. It's a really bright yellow polo. It hurts his eyes.
Ryan glances at his father out of the corner of his eye. He's got his hands clenched on the counter edge so hard that they're white, and he's avoiding looking at his son, Kyle, and his ex-wife. Then, slowly his features turn and he, for a split second, catches Ryan's gaze. His one short look is filled with a multitude of emotions: fury, disgust, and pity.
Pity for him.
For Ryan.
Ryan now looks at his mother, immediately noting the look of expectancy and anxiousness on her face. She thinks he's crazy. She thinks he'll snap and go whacko and utterly destroy this “supposed-to-be picture-perfect first meeting” with Kyle, his half-brother.
Ryan thinks the woman is rather rude; she just shows up one day after only associating with him and his dad for barely a week after God knows how many years of silence with this boy who's his relative and one freakin' year younger than him and expects the two to somehow click and get along just peachy.
Ryan snorts inwardly.
Well, that's one thing he's sure won't happen.
He smiles, his lips parting to reveal nice, white teeth.
“Hey, Kyle,” Ryan greets, lifting up a hand from his lap in a wave.
Kyle twists his lips in uneasiness or disgust (Ryan thinks that Kyle must think his mom is pretty low too, for making them meet like this), but he waves back nonetheless.
“Hey, Ryan.”
There's awkward silence.
Kyle and Ryan's mom aren't sure where to go from here, and Ryan's father was never in this conversation in the first place, so Ryan takes the liberty of speaking for all of them.
“I'm surprised she hasn't abandoned you yet, too.”
--------------------------
Ryan just can't stop staring at her.
Jac Vanek is Kyle's girlfriend.
She's dating his half-brother.
He shouldn't be feeling this way about her.
But he is, so Ryan figures there's no point in trying to deny it any longer.
Ryan has a crush on Jac.
“Hey, babe, I'll be right back, okay?” Kyle says, motioning towards his cell phone. “I gotta go see Travis real quick about this thing, but I'll be back in like fifteen.”
Jac, seated in Ryan's living room, nods, her blonde hair falling in front of her face. “'Kay.”
Kyle waves and then scampers out of the front door.
Ryan takes this moment to slither into the living room, silent. He thinks it's funny how he has to be so stealthy in his own house, but then again, he's spying on his brother and his brother's girlfriend so he thinks he kind of has to be. Biting his lower lip suddenly, he's simply standing there, admiring Jac's pretty face that's being illuminated by the moonlight coming in through the side window.
Kyle had come with Jac earlier that evening for his weekly visit that his mother made him take to “get to know Ryan better”. Ryan wasn't sure how Kyle thought it was going, but Ryan thinks that he doesn't like Kyle anymore than he did when he first met him. But regardless, Ryan got bored of watching Jac and Kyle flirt and kiss for two hours and decided he'd go up to his room before coming back down fifteen minutes later because he realized he liked watching Jac even if she was making out with his half-brother two-thirds of the time he was observing her and he was peeking at her from behind a wall.
“I know you're there.”
Jac says something, and Ryan lets out a breath he didn't even know he was holding. He starts chewing on his bottom lip.
Jac turns around. She smiles at him. Ryan's not sure if the feeling fluttering in his stomach is nausea or excitement.
Ryan nods his head.
“I'm sure you did,” he says, sarcastic as ever. (He loves sarcasm, even though it's considered the “lowest form of humor”, which Ryan thinks is a load of crap.)
Jac stands up. She walks to the piano in the corner near the window. Ryan follows her, feeling like a zombie as he robotically saunters across the carpet in the darker room.
They stop at the piano, Ryan in front of the instrument and Jac at the keyboard.
The moonlit window right behind the bench is spilling silver onto the ivory and ebony keys, and Jac turns from looking out the window, letting her hands dance across the keys gracefully.
“Do you play?” she asks, her voice sticky-sweet.
Ryan stares at her.
“Yeah.”
“Can you play something for me?”
Ryan narrows his eyes at her. But he sits down on the cool bench.
Immediately, his hands take their rightful place on the keys, and soon the haunting melody of “Moonlight Sonata” is flowing through the Ross' house.
A quarter of the way through the song, Jac kisses him.
Ryan keeps playing, believe it or not. He's played the piece so many times before, that even though his face is currently occupied and he's not looking down at his hands, he still presses all the right spots and the song doesn't miss a beat.
It's beautiful, in a way; background music as Ryan enjoys the moment.
But the excitement doesn't last long.
Jac's tugging at his shirt, and Ryan feels excitement run through him as he kisses her deeper and then—
“Oh my God, Jac—what are you doing with him?”
It was the disgust and true shock as Kyle spat out the word “him” that really got Ryan mad. It was as if Kyle thought he was better than Ryan.
Like Ryan was just a small little scum that wasn't worthy of anything like Kyle's time or love and especially not worthy of his girlfriend.
The rest of the night was kind of blurry in Ryan's memory.
Something about Jac throwing Ryan off of her, causing Ryan to fly off of the bench and crack his skull against the window pane and get a minor concussion that no one really cared about, Kyle screaming and almost attacking Ryan if it weren't for Ryan's mom who came in at that very moment shouting at Ryan how “inconsiderate” and “ridiculous” and “horrible” he was once she found out what he had just been caught doing and stopping her son from attacking him. Then it was Kyle and Ryan's mom screeching at Ryan's dad as Ryan's dad came home from “work” (More like a bar, Ryan thought) as they explained what “that son of yours just did”, and it was Jac (who didn't look at Ryan the rest of the time she was in the house; not once) who blamed it all on Ryan and then it was Jac and Kyle and Ryan's mom who stormed out of the home and sped away into the night, not coming back for two and a half months.
Ryan lies in the corner by the piano, still with his head resting on the window pane that he previously banged it on, eyes staring off into the darkness of the living room.
He's watching his father's still form.
Since the visitors had stormed off, Mr. Ross hadn't moved or said a word at all. Even when he had been getting yelled at with accusations of his son and the way he was raising him, he remained quiet.
Finally, Mr. Ross walks towards his son, and hovers behind the piano bench, the only thing keeping Ryan and his father separated. The moonlight can't even make Ryan's father's red eyes and tired face look better, and Ryan expects to be yanked up by the hair and chucked across the room before getting attacked numerous times, so he closes his eyes, preparing for the pain.
“We don't need them, Ryan. We're okay as we are. You're okay as you are.”
Ryan's father truly surprises him sometimes.
One minute he's throwing Ryan against the wall, screaming at him how he's such a burden and the next he's…well…saying things like that.
Ryan's hazel eyes fly open. His father's form is gone. Ryan wonders vaguely if the whole thing was a dream.
But once again his father's words echo.
We're okay as we are. You're okay as you are.
Even thought they weren't “okay” (far from it, actually), Ryan still appreciates what his dad did. It was things like that, those few golden moments where Ryan's father showed that he loved, or at least cared about, his son that made Ryan not call the police on him. Not let Mrs. Smith, Spencer's mom, dial 911 or march down to the police station whenever Ryan came over with huge bruises and deep cuts several times a week. What made him not want to attack his dad or kill him. What made him care about, give a crap about, (not quite love, though, keep in mind) his dad.
Ryan gets up back on the piano bench and picks up where he left off in “Moonlight Sonata”.
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