Title: for this is the beginning of forever

Author: Cath

Disclaimer: Characters don't belong to me.

Summary: the beginning of four relationships

Notes: Title shamelessly stolen from a line in the wonderful song "Glory Box" by Portishead.

Having watched most episodes I realise that the timelines are completely screwed, and hence have tried to incorporate as many parts of episodes and timelines as possible while attempting to retain a coherent narrative. This is particularly pertinent to the Sandy/Kirsten section, so I hope I've done canon at least some justice.

As always, reviews are appreciated.

---

Seth & Summer

They meet on his first day at Kindergarten. He still remembers how her dark hair was tied back tight in a braid, a red ribbon floating freely at the end.

He remembers their first words. "You dropped this," he hands her the errant red ribbon.

"Oh," she replies; her face screws up into a moue of disdain well practiced for a five year old. And then, the ribbon taken, placed in her bag, her back is turned. "Marissa! Come look at my new bracelet! Mom bought it me from Italy!"

He remembers what she had for lunch: a ham sandwich on white bread with the crusts cut off. An apple. A yogurt (strawberry).

He remembers her answer to the question the teacher asked: "Does anyone know what this letter is? Summer, can you take a guess?" "Uh, e?" (He remembers that it was an o).

She remembers… She remembers the pain of having her mom brush her hair and tie it back in a braid even though she wanted to wear it down.

She remembers losing her red ribbon somewhere along the way home as it fell out of her backpack. She's not sure how it made the transition from her hair to her bag.

She remembers sitting with Marissa at lunch while some older kids tried to sit at their table and ask them questions in order to intimidate them.

She remembers looking at the alphabet and recalling her dad quiz her on it, but when asked in front of everyone else she messes up and is embarrassed for the rest of the afternoon.

Later, as he tells her the story of their first meeting, she tries to remember him being there, and eventually her memory inserts images of him into the story. But the reality is that she doesn't recall his presence.

It doesn't matter, though. Because what they have is now and is real and is tangible and doesn't need to rely on a history of forgotten moments. Because what they have now is the beginning of a future together.

---

Julie & Jimmy

It is two hours after the wedding and he still can't get her out of his head.

He can still see her walking down the aisle, alone, smiling despite Caleb's absence.

He can still hear her voice proclaiming herself forever someone else's wife.

He can still see her dancing her first dance with her new husband; can still see her laughing as her new husband tries to feed her wedding cake; can still see that smile she gives for no-one but Sandy. A smile reminiscent of the one she used to give him. But somehow, not quite the same.

The images continue to bombard him with increasing ferocity and they lead him to wonder where it all went wrong; they lead him to think about what could have been; what should have been.

He needs to clear his head. Needs to obliterate all thought and memory of her: of Kirsten Cohen.

He picks up his wallet and impulsively drives to the nearest bar with no plans other than drinking as much alcohol as his body can take.

An hour later he is more than a little worse for wear, but allows the alcohol to envelop him as though it is his whole reason for being.

And then, when she walks up to him - this young, attractive brunette who is nothing like Kirsten Cohen – he offers to buy her a drink. She accepts; places a hand on his arm, and moves it slowly, meaningfully down the side of his body and onto his leg. He raises an eyebrow briefly, and she tosses back the shot of vodka that he offers her with well-practiced ease. She has another two, her hand lingering ever higher on his leg until he has absolutely no doubts about her intentions.

There is very little challenge to this and he likes that. She is the opposite of Kirsten in every way imaginable – she is the anti-Kirsten he thinks, amused, in his inebriated haze – and he breathes this freshness in like purifying air.

"Want to go back to mine?" he offers and she smiles.

He doesn't even know her name. He barely cares.

She looks mildly impressed with his house, an eyebrow raised, a remark of "nice house". He shrugs. His father helped him buy it, and it's smaller than what he's used to.

He starts undressing her in his hallway as soon as the door is closed. They barely make it to the bedroom before all clothes are removed. They have sex; hard, gasping, emotionless, fulfilling. He doesn't think of Kirsten once until it is over. It is a strange relief; a release.

Surprisingly, she calls him less than a week later. He thought of it as a one-night thing, although he had given her his phone number as much out of courtesy as anything else. But he agrees to meet her again; he likes her well enough and the promise of easy, good sex is not something he wants to turn down.

The meetings increase in regularity until he can jokingly call it a relationship but to him it is nothing but a charade that is easy to play out; it is but a distraction when thoughts of Kirsten Cohen overwhelm him.

And then, one day, it becomes real. There is a baby on the way, Julie informs him one Thursday evening at 7:47pm as he is drinking his second beer of the night.

Two weeks later they are engaged. It is the right thing to do, he tells himself. He can learn to love Julie, he decides. He likes the idea of the baby. He likes the idea of being in a relationship.

He invites Kirsten and Sandy to the wedding. And then there is no going back; he has a wife, a baby on the way and this is forever, he tells himself.

Somehow though, it all seems an uncomfortable parody of how his life was supposed to be.

---

Ryan & Taylor

When he thinks about their first meeting, he thinks predominantly of his first impression of her.

She is in his pre-calculus class on his first day at Harbor and immediately she stands out. For all the wrong reasons.

She answers all questions with a hand raised triumphantly in the air. Even the questions that no one else has even the beginning of a clue how to answer. Mr Schmidt beams at her; she is obviously a model student.

As the grades for the pop quiz are calculated, an assignment that he can only imagine other students found equally as challenging as he did, she turns to students either side of her, across the table, asking how well they did. Their responses of low marks, of Cs, Ds, only cause her to smile wider as she announces her sorrow entirely falsely before demonstrating her own A.

Ryan can see immediately that winning and being superior to all is her only aim in life, and he finds himself instantaneously disgusted with her.

Back in Chino, good grades were never to be celebrated, or lorded over others, and he finds this reaction entirely alien.

"What did you get on the test?" she asks as they walk out of class.

"What does it matter?" he asks her.

She shrugs; an attempt at nonchalance that he sees right through. "I'm just interested," she replies.

"No, you just want to know that you did better than me," he responds.

She raises an eyebrow. "My, aren't we tetchy? Obviously someone is a little unhappy with his mark. It's okay, Mr Schmidt does tests all the time, you'll have time to prepare for the next one," she informs him in a tone that is more than a little patronising.

"I've gotta get to Eng Lit. Can you tell me where this room is located?" he asks, pointing to his schedule, changing the conversation.

He wouldn't have believed at this point that Taylor Townsend would end up being his girlfriend. He would have denied vehemently that it was even a possibility.

But as he lies with her on his bed now, showing her the A+ that he got on his first pre-calc class at Harbor, a paper which he filed away and only recently rediscovered, he cannot think of her as being anything but a part of his future.

---

Sandy & Kirsten

She is not ready for a relationship. She is not ready for anything but friendship. There is too much going on in her head; memories retained from a month of longed-to-be-forgotten moments.

She tells herself this even as she meets him.

And still she is drawn to him immediately. He is nothing like the boys back home.

And as he speaks, talks to her in this easy manner of his about the Mondale/Ferraro ticket of all things, she cannot help but fall under his spell. She cannot help but accept his invitation for coffee.

He buys the coffee despite her protestations, and he talks at length about a variety of topics - Mondale/Ferraro, life at Berkeley, the law, literature, music, some magazine about the revolution – and she drinks it all in. Her constant thought of awe and wonder repeats that he is nothing like the boys back in Newport.

He apologises for monopolising the conversation, but she doesn't mind; even at this early stage she believes that she could listen to him speak for hours on almost any subject and still be interested. She doesn't tell him this, of course. Instead she responds, one eyebrow raised, "do you always talk this much?" She tries her best to hide a grin.

There is a moment when he smiles self-consciously, and she cannot help herself from finding even this an attractive mannerism. "Only when I'm nervous," he replies, his eyes fixed upon hers.

And she smiles shyly, bemused.

Eventually she has to excuse herself; she has been invited out to a party that evening and needs time to get ready. He passes her a piece of paper with his number on it. "Call me," he says.

She nods, sincerely.

She walks back to her dorm with a smile on her face. Coming to Berkeley already seems like the right decision.

Two days later, on the day which she has planned to call Sandy, her roommate Lori greets her with the message that Jimmy has called.

And suddenly her temporary euphoria begins to fade as rapidly as it occurred, and her past becomes dauntingly real once again.

She closes her eyes, sighs. The mention of Jimmy's name brings back a whole host of haunting memories which she attempts to brush aside.

She starts to dial Sandy's number, but cannot bring herself to complete the dialling sequence.

She is not ready for a relationship, she tells herself, despondently. She is not ready for anything but friendship. And this is why she doesn't call him.

And yet, still, she thinks about him. And almost dials his number countless more times.

He didn't think that he was ready for another relationship after Rebecca until he met her. He put himself out there once more, and felt that they connected on some level over coffee, but he has heard nothing since. She promised to call him and yet, nothing. He is never going to let himself even feel remotely interested in another woman again, he tells himself.

And then there is Halloween. Paul insists that Sandy take his girlfriend Lori's roommate, as much to ensure that he is not the depressing third wheel to their party as anything else, he feels. Lori does her best to sell her friend as attractive, interesting, intelligent, but he wonders cynically why if she is all these things she should be so desperate for a date that he is her only option.

He refuses to go to the party; it'll be lame and he doesn't just want to go out and get drunk and pretend to entertain some random freshman. It is this reason that he doesn't sort out a costume.

Somehow, Paul manages to convince him on the night. There is some cajoling, some attempt at guilt, some bribing, and in the end, Sandy agrees as much to shut Paul up as anything else. With thirty minutes to go until they are due to pick up their dates, Sandy reluctantly agrees. He is more than a slight bit suspicious that Paul knew the whole time that he would be able to convince him, as no alternative date seems to have been arranged for Lori's roommate.

Paul wears a make-shift pilot's outfit in an attempt to look like he's from Top Gun. Sandy sifts through his wardrobe and picks out a pair of jeans and a shirt. "I'm going as a homicidal maniac," Sandy intones. "They look just like everyone else."

With a sigh, Paul looks round the apartment and realises that with such a short time span there are incredibly few costume options.

"You've gotta make more of an effort than that, Sandy!" Paul exclaims.

Sandy takes a few beers from the fridge and picks up a paper bag in which he intends to place them. He pauses for a moment. "Fine, I'll put a bag over my head."

"And be what, exactly?"

"A homicidal maniac who is overly self-conscious about his looks?" he grins sarcastically.

As they walk to Lori's dorm, he can't help but feel that this is all some huge mistake; he doesn't want to go out, he really doesn't want to have to attempt to entertain some date, he wants to stay at home, listen to a tape, read a magazine, study.

They arrive at Lori's dorm, and he nearly tells Paul that he's going to head back to their apartment, but Paul heads inside before he has change to protest, and then Lori's roommate greets them at the door to the room.

"Hi Paul," she says, "Lori's still getting ready."

"Thanks," Paul replies, and he enters the room.

Sandy is stood there, for once in his life speechless.

"Hi," she greets him with a false smile. And it is obvious to him that she is reluctant to go on this date as he thought he was.

"Kirsten," he replies.

"I'm sorry, have we met?" she asks, taken aback.

And he realises that he has a paper bag over his head. "Sandy," he informs her, for some reason not removing the bag.

And then her face melts into a smile as beguiling as he recollects. "Sandy," she remarks, and he believes that she looks happy about this revelation, despite the fact that she never actually called him.

"I've never been more glad to have agreed to a blind date in my life," he admits unthinkingly, before considering that she may not share this feeling.

"I'm sorry I didn't call," she tells him.

He shrugs; not entirely his true emotion regarding the matter.

"I'm glad you're here," she says quietly, almost embarrassed. "It's just, well, before we met I had this boyfriend and I wasn't in a good place and… I'm sorry."

He shakes his head; it doesn't matter right now.

And then Paul and Lori join them and there are no more words that need to be shared.

He walks her back to her dorm room at the end of the night and she removes the bag from his head and hesitantly draws him towards her. He completes the distance and they kiss; the first for either of them since their last relationships.

"Good night Kirsten," he tells her with a smile.

"Good night, Sandy," she replies.

And finally they both realise that they cannot deny this attraction.

And although they do not yet appreciate it, this thing will eventually develop into a relationship that will become more important to either of them than those of the past.

For this is only the beginning.

---

Fini.