[CLOSED]

[photophobic]

Who: Kylo Ren & Ronan Lynch
What: Kylo's stolen the Greywaren, a magical object that grants wishes. This object also happens to be Ronan Lynch.
When: Following Kylo's theft of the Greywaren from the Black Box Fight Club, some time before Victor Vale's live broadcast of Apollo's unveiling and the subsequent terror attack
Where: Kylo Ren's apartment
Warnings: Heavy and plentiful. I'll update as necessary. So far: forced imprisonment, mind-control...



Kylo hadn't planned on keeping a prisoner in his own home. He hadn't, in all honesty, planned on ever having guests here at all— his apartment is his sanctuary. But there's nowhere else he can reasonably take his prize without risking its loss— and so, once he's certain no-one is following him from the scene of the kidnapping, he has Ronan pull over. The stop is just long enough for Kylo to reverse the switch, reclaiming his own identity and the driver's seat. It takes nothing more than a gentle nudge to push Ronan safely into pliant cargo unconsciousness, and nothing further than a satisfyingly quiet drive to reach the relative seclusion of his apartment. He carries Ronan inside, his nerves singing with the thrill of an unexpected triumph.

Safely vacant, Ronan makes no protest as Kylo lays him down on the floor in the dark, windowless safe room he uses for meditation. It's little more than an oversized closet in terms of dimensions, but Kylo had it reinforced and soundproofed over a year ago and until he can make better arrangements, it seems as good a solution as he's likely to come up with at short notice. He'll install a ring in the wall, later, as an anchoring point for Ronan's... leash. Rope, he thinks, rather than the uncomfortable weight of chains. Nothing inherently punishing, unless Ronan decides to make it necessary, but something physical— all the successful liberations of prisoners Kylo can remember have exploited weaknesses in the very technology designed to prevent them. No. All he needs is a way to store Ronan securely during the hours he'll be occupied with other commitments and unable to intervene should his captive decide to make a bid for freedom.

Still. It's a pity he doesn't tend to take his work home, he thinks, eyes tracking over Ronan's sprawled, heavy body one last time before pushing the door shut and listening to the lock click into place. Perhaps he's grown a little over-reliant on the versatile convenience of the adjustable, flexibly hinge-waisted interrogation tables found in any decently equipped government facility.

But wouldn't Ronan look inviting, stretched out for him on one of those?

Distractingly so. But for now, once he's freed himself of the weight of all his costuming, it's time to get to work covering his movements for the evening with the usual parade of check-ins and reports— though it's hard to concentrate on anything but the slow, steady rhythm of Ronan's breathing as he waits to feel his acquisition stir awake.

Comments

[nightmarist]

It's the kind of unconsciousness that's either too shallow or too deep for dreams, but as the memories of the past few hours come flooding into Ronan's mind, it all might as well be a nightmare. He wakes with a start, sucking in a sharp breath, scrambling before he can even fully make sense of his limbs. Wild as any caged animal, he backs up until he hits the wall, loses his footing, falls on his ass. Other people might start screaming at this point, but not Ronan. The only sound out of his mouth is shivered gasping, like the terror's dropped his body temperature to freezing, though the sheen of sweat on his skin proves otherwise.

Where the fuck is he?

The last thing he remembers is pulling over, though he remembers it from outside himself. Disembodied. Something else was inside him, piloting him, and he was less than a passenger. He was an outsider, an observer, the audience to his own kidnapping. And if he remembers all of that, then he must have been knocked out when he was in the car. The lack of physical injury tells him the method had been supernatural, therefore something that can happen to him again, without warning, any minute now.

[photophobic]

Kylo feels it immediately. The sharpness of Ronan's awakening, his fear— it has him sucking in an equally sharp breath, his own skin prickling as he stands, turning towards Ronan's prison. When he stretches out through the thickness of the door, he can see him. Collapsed. Gasping, his back up against the scarred steel of the far wall.

His focus is a formless weight, steadying and securing like an invisible hand falling on Ronan's shoulder, though he intrudes no further than that. He could, yes. He's here, oppressive in his potential. But for now, Ronan's will is his own. He can choose to crush his own fears into submission, if he prefers to spare Kylo the effort.

[nightmarist]

Ronan recoils from - can it even be called a touch? - from the presence that inflicts itself on him. "No," he snaps, but the room is empty. And even if his captor can hear him, he doubts his boundaries will suddenly be respected.

He has to make his move now, before that influence pushes further into him and evicts him again. Ronan steadies his breath, steadies his focus, shuts his eyes and reminds himself that he is not a body. He doesn't belong to blood and bone. He presses his palms flat against the floor, splays his fingers, stretches himself beyond them. He trades the frantic pulse of his heart for the pulse of the stars. With the next exhale, he dissolves into light.

[photophobic]

Unfortunately for Ronan, Kylo's power is far from limited to control over blood and bone— and in many ways, the space beyond the corporeal Ronan chooses to melt into is more, rather than less, of his preferred arena.

What is the Force? Some would describe it as an energy field, generated by and flowing through all living things. Perhaps, it's an invisible, infinite network of connection between all the places where it gathers and condenses, every manifestation of itself as entity bound to every other. In any case, the replication of the Force that exists here in this reality allows Kylo to spread the power of his will through the intangible, seizing hold of the light Ronan becomes as easily as he could halt a blaster bolt.

He's slow, unhurried, endlessly curious as his attention surrounds the novelty. A thought without anything to contain it, cut loose and untethered. Held together, it seems, by little more than a memory, of what it is to be Ronan Lynch. An idea. What is he going to do with this? It feels like he could change it, stretch it, crush, break, twist or shape it into... anything...

[nightmarist]

And he could.

What Kylo has seized is raw potential, the essence that gave birth to the universe and still burns in the stars. In catching it, he draws the dream straight to him, and now it flickers right before his eyes: a cold flame, a whispered secret, a blurry reflection, fingertips brushing against fingertips, a storm rolling across the horizon.

All of it shot through with whatever panic becomes when there's no one to feel it: the pressure of containment, a coffin too small to hold a body, a noose tightening around a throat.

It has nowhere else to go, so it seeps into the one who summoned it. Following the threads of the net cast around it, the dream slowly pours itself into Kylo's veins.

[photophobic]

Kylo Ren is no stranger to panic.
But it's other people's, these days. The kind he can tease out from where it hides, twist and tune just enough to use as a lever to pry out secrets, and the kind that rises unbidden when he strides into the room as if it recognises its king. Kylo feels it as he works, saturating the air around him. He sees it, trapped, floating in wide staring eyes.

But this fearful dream turns and rushes for him, looking for a home in his mind, among his thoughts, and Kylo only just has enough time to realise the danger he's in as it begins to seep through his skin. He staggers back, unsettled and furious about it, then draws his will into tight focus to freeze it out.

No more movement. Whatever it is that Ronan's become, it will obey him. It will cool and condense. Solidify. Submit. It will stay down. Stay. Down.

[nightmarist]

Ronan falls out of the space between things, dropping to his knees before Kylo. The moment of his being again gets lost in the shuffle, but all of him is safely distilled into mortal form, at no risk of sliding into Kylo's mind now. He's just a boy, shaking violently with terror at the force that holds him physically to the floor while his mind is still present enough to understand all of it.

He bares his teeth and snarls, "What do you want from me?"

Why even steal the Greywaren if he's afraid of its power?

[photophobic]

"Don't try that again," Kylo warns in a tight, irritable snap, pressing the weight of his will down harder. Heavier. He doesn't want Ronan looking up and seeing... him. Let him feel this instead. This is all Ronan needs to know about him and what he wants.

"Am I understood."

[nightmarist]

Ronan sinks further, bent lower and lower by the gravity of Kylo's command. He tries to put his hands out, to push himself upright again, but his arms see no reason to obey him. His head remains bowed under Kylo's invisible grip, the very picture of submission.

It's the most humiliating thing that's ever happened to him. And he knows it's only going to get worse from here.

"Don't put me in a box again," he hisses, "and I won't have to."

[photophobic]

It's a familiar pattern, for Kylo. Ronan knows, as all of Kylo's prisoners always do, that all he'll earn himself with that attitude is punishment. He's waiting for it now. Aching for it, on some deep level he might not recognise— because he needs it to happen. He can't simply choose submission.

"I will put you wherever I want," Kylo says. It's not a threat. He leaves Ronan all but pinned to the floor as he paces, unhurried, around him. The heavy door groans on its hinges, yawning open. "But you can crawl back in and wait for me to want to take you out again. If you'd prefer it."

[nightmarist]

"Go fuck yourself."

Ronan won't just take punishment. He'll take death. If there was a gun pointed at his head, he'd pull the trigger himself. But the only part of this that's under his control - for now - is his spirit. Kylo may take everything from him, but Ronan will give him nothing.

[photophobic]

Kylo drops, suddenly, into a crouch right beside Ronan's bowed head, as if to better study the trembling strain across his shoulders from a closer, more intimate viewpoint.

"Do you know why you're going to do it?" he asks, low and smoothly rhetorical. "I do. You're going to crawl into that box, all the way in, until I feel your forehead touch the far wall. And you're going to do it, because you know I must have had a reason not to simply stretch out my hand and crush it. The BMW. With him inside. I must have decided it wasn't necessary, to get what I want."

[nightmarist]

Declan.

Valiantly, Ronan fights to keep the horror from spreading to his features. He maintains his glower, his eyelashes giving only the slightest tremble, his jaw hardening with the grind of his teeth. Declan wouldn't want this, to be used as the reason Ronan chooses a cage. He may have spent his whole life trying to teach Ronan to be cautious, but he never taught Ronan to be a coward.

"Let's talk about that," Ronan growls. The muscles of his neck tense with the effort to turn his head, to look at Kylo properly, though it's futile. "What you want. Why keep me here? I can do it right now, get you whatever you're looking for. You don't have to fucking do this."

[nightmarist]

If Ronan lets himself die, then Declan will survive.

He holds that thought lightly. He knows his captor could easily overhear, if he's listening. But Ronan comes to that conclusion right as he feels himself beginning to nod off. Just don't dream, he realizes. It's as simple as that. A supernatural hunger strike. Eventually the sickness will seize him, rot him from the inside out, leave his thief with nothing but a puddle of impossibly black sludge for his trouble.

That's the last time Ronan lets himself think about the plan. After that, he puts his sole focus into staying awake. He paces the cell, and when his legs grow tired, he refuses to let himself even rest his weight against the wall. When hours and hours and endless hours pass, and he starts to waver even on his feet, he turns to self-harm. Whenever he slouches in the direction of sleep, he picks himself up and punches the wall, slaps his face, tears at his skin with his teeth and his nails.

It's possible that entire days pass like this, but he doesn't know. Anyway, eventually he stumbles to the floor and slides right into a nightmare.

When the nightmare returns with him, he's too paralyzed to fight for the life he suddenly remembers he wants very badly. At least, what he doesn't want is slow strangulation, and he's getting it. The creature - if it can be called that - arrives in the world already wrapped around Ronan's neck. From certain angles, it looks like cowl his captor was wearing during the kidnapping. But it's also thick black smoke, yet solid somehow, though in the dream Ronan's fingers slipped right through it and failed to pry it away every time he tried.

Now he can't even attempt it. The shawl of smoke tightens and tightens around his throat until his lips are blue and his muscles seize with the desperate need for oxygen. As he returns to his body, the only thing left to do is convulse in agony until it finally ends.

[photophobic]

Kylo wakes to a kind of alarm he can't make sense of, at first— there's an immediacy to the flood of semi-conscious panic that doesn't fit with his surroundings, an oddly foreign, paralysed distress—

And it's Ronan.

He's on his feet instantly, lightsaber in hand, tearing through the apartment and flinging open the saferoom door— where a half-formed approximation of his battle-torn cowl is twisting around Ronan's neck as a living, animated creature of rolling black smoke.
Confusion can wait for later.

Kylo flings a hand towards the thing as the furious red of his blade twists in a fluid arc into combat readiness in the other. If he can't tear it away from his dreamer, he's ready to attempt some very precise maneuvers to cut him free...

[nightmarist]

Kylo might be the only one capable of tearing that thing away. Ronan had scrambled and clawed and managed to do nothing but rake his fingernails down his own neck while the smoke evaded his grasp. At Kylo's unspoken command, however, the knotted creature unravels and slips away as softly as silk.

Still mostly paralyzed from manifesting it, Ronan remains on the floor, a helpless mess of splayed limbs. But now that he can drag air into his lungs, he gasps and gags in shuddering bursts. The sparks that clouded his vision begin to clear as oxygen makes its way through his body.

The nightmare hovers in the air above him, thrashing violently against Kylo's telekinetic hold on it. Judging by the way its tendrils of smoke keep reaching for its dreamer, all it seems to want to do is finish the job, and as long as he or it remain alive, it's never going to stop trying.

[photophobic]

He isn't entirely sure what to do with it, now. Ronan gasps on the floor, shaken but largely unharmed in terms of permanent injury... which leaves Kylo staring up at the malevolent fury of the creature seized in his invisible grasp.

Is it a creature? It's more animate object than animal, little more than the mindless desire to choke the life out of Ronan Lynch given form. But it isn't simply straining to reach him. It's tethered to him. A part of him. Kylo's brow furrows as he tightens his hold and drags at the thing, pulling with increasing determination as it writhes and fights. It's made of Ronan, yes. But its refusal, its inability to let go even as the forces acting on it threaten to tear it apart...

He knows exactly why it wears this shape. Just for the briefest flash, he sees the miserable hunger twisting at its core with absolute clarity— the very moment the nightmare loses all integrity and rips itself open with a terrible, hollow howl.

[nightmarist]

Though it's composed of Ronan, the dreamer doesn't disintegrate with the dream. He watches with wide eyes as the fabric of its being withers and vaporizes, but even after every last speck of it has dissolved into the air, Ronan remains whole. In fact, even the part of him that went into manifesting it has now been restored. He shakes off the last of his paralysis and pushes himself up on his elbows so that he can drag more air into his lungs.

While he's catching his breath, his gaze finally lands on Kylo.

Irrationally - maybe due to the prolonged lack of oxygen - he doesn't recognize his rescuer as his captor. Logic would tell him there's only one person who knows he's here, and though he hadn't been allowed to look at him earlier, this is obviously that person. Everything about the man seems different from the one who stole him, though. This is some kind of fairytale prince, with wild curls and a gleaming sword and a heroic stance, like a storybook illustration. Someone who saves people. Someone who saved him.

Ronan's throat is too swollen for a laugh, but he grins and tosses his head back, shoulders trembling with giddiness. He thinks, Thank God you're here.

Then he collapses.

[photophobic]

It's a strangely stark contrast. Ronan's nightmarish manifestation of his captor's violently desperate, possessive greed tears apart— and behind it, as the thick black smoke dissipates: Ronan. Looking up at him with wildly relieved delight.

Kylo's caught completely off-guard, stunned into immobile silence as Ronan smiles, worn out and grateful, then keels over under the weight of all this exhaustion. That feeling, that singular moment is burned into his memory. When Kylo extinguishes his blade and the darkness rolls back in, something of the last thing he saw remains as persisting afterimage. Ronan's eyes, yes. But it's the reflected image of himself as seen by those eyes that he can't seem to shake.

In the quiet now that the nightmare is over, Ronan lies dormant and still, decorated with a collection of superficial injuries that Kylo finds he can no longer tolerate. He hardly thinks before stooping down to scoop him up, carrying him through to the low light and relative comfort of his own bedroom and laying him down, drawing the medkit out from under his bed.
They're self-inflicted, Kylo realises as he begins to clean the mess of grazes across Ronan's knuckles with a sterile pad. The vast majority of Ronan's cuts, scrapes and bruises are. Maybe, all of them. He hadn't even noticed.

[nightmarist]

Ronan isn't out for long. After a few minutes of calm and steady airflow to his lungs, his body stabilizes into something closer to working order. The sting of antiseptic to one of his cuts draws him back to waking. His lashes flutter, his eyebrows twitch, and then he's fully alert. His eyes fix immediately on Kylo.

Halfway to a request, a plea to find his brother, his lips move but stop before he even finds his voice. The comfort of the bed had him fooled that he'd been relocated, but it all comes together now, and he realizes that the hands tending to his wounds are the same hands that had dressed him in the locker room.

Ronan isn't saved. He's just being repaired.

[photophobic]

He doesn't speak, at first. He doesn't look up from his work, tightly methodical rather than particularly gentle, caring, or even possessive. The tension of his jaw suggests irritation.

But for once it doesn't translate into even the beginnings of rough treatment, grinding away in silence instead as he tears open the protective wrapping of a long strip of gauze, taking Ronan's hand and beginning to wrap it as if preparing him for a fight.

Round the thumb. The breadth of Ronan's hand. His scarred wrist, then up to loop round the first of his grazed knuckles. He exhales. Down to the wrist, round, up to to the next. Repeat. Smooth. Mechanical.

"Did it surprise you?" he asks eventually. He is, it seems, an entirely new kind of angry. "When you didn't want it."

The death he's apparently been courting for days.

[nightmarist]

Ronan says nothing.

It's not the soreness of his throat that keeps him silent. His despair, as the truth of his situation sinks in, keeps his lips sealed for fear of the pathetic sounds that might spill out of him if he opens his mouth. He's been here too long, but not long enough to start begging.

It wasn't really hope he felt, anyway. Just an oxygen-deprived delusion. He didn't have hope in the first place, so he hasn't lost anything, actually. There's nothing to mourn in an expectation lost almost as soon as it formed.

In answer to the question, Ronan flicks his gaze toward the medical kit. There must be some kind of blade in there. Something sharp enough to undo all this careful work. Are you so sure I don't want my death? his eyes say as they slide back to Kylo. Maybe he just didn't want to die helpless, strangled to death in his sleep.

[photophobic]

He feels the slide and pause of Ronan's gaze despite his own very careful, deliberately unbroken focus on the hand in his. The misery of him, the despair— it's nothing new, it's nothing more, nothing worse than anything Kylo's felt hurled in his direction before. And he hates how none of any of that matters.

Round and round again, binding Ronan's hand. Hiding the marks of his useless, destructive defiance under the sterile, protective gauze. He twists and tucks the last of the length, then pulls his gaze up to Ronan's face. Seeking out his eyes despite there being absolutely no need is the defiantly foolish statement Kylo makes in return.

"Give me the other."

It isn't any of the questions he knows he should ask.

[nightmarist]

Ronan still doesn't understand how this face can belong to the man who forced him to crawl on hands and knees into his own prison. He holds Kylo's gaze now that it's found him.

"Why?" he replies, his voice a gravelly ruin. "You don't need my hands to make you your shit."

[photophobic]

Kylo's eyes drop away as he snatches up another antiseptic wipe to continue his work. If Ronan won't give him his hand, he'll take it.

"You don't need to do this to register your displeasure," he bites back.

It's a little too raw. He swallows irritably, presses his lips together and focuses back on the task. Or, he attempts to. But the seal's been broken, now. He has to regain control. It won't be easy.

"I know you didn't choose to make it," he attempts sharply. "That thing. How did it happen."