[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."

[photophobic]

"Can you."

It's soft, Kylo's response. Deceptively soft, like the velvet welcome of a carnivorous plant just before the trap springs shut.

"Right now. Whatever I want."

[nightmarist]

"Yeah."

Is he fucking deaf?

"Name it, man. Make a goddamn wish."

[photophobic]

Surely everyone knows the first thing you wish for is infinite wishes. Kylo lets the quiet stretch just long enough for Ronan to hear the promise of his own words. Then:

"What could I possibly want more than that?"

[nightmarist]

To a boy as honorable and noble as Ronan Lynch, the cruelty of the situation is impossible to fathom. He knows - he's been told - that this is what people would do to him if they had any idea what he could do for them, but he realizes in this moment that he'd never truly believed it. Who would do something like this? Who would drag a person into a windowless cage and lock them in there for... forever?

A sound escapes Ronan's throat, anguished and incredulous, a whimper wrapped in a laugh and choked down. He's arrived at the place where bargaining turns to begging, but he won't. He will not do that.

"You're going to lose everything," Ronan utters, low and dark. "You think you can have it all, now, but when you look back, you'll see this is the day you decided to give up everything. And you never even knew you had something left to lose."

[photophobic]

"This is the day?" Kylo asks, leaning in so close now his lips are barely a breath away from Ronan's ear. "Really. Of everything I have ever done. Every choice I have ever made. This. This is what condemns me."

He means it, of course. The contempt, thick in his voice. The bitterness, too. So why is his pulse slamming a warning? Is it as simple as the way he hears his own words spilling out of his mouth without the costuming of a digital filter?

[nightmarist]

If Kylo thinks that avoiding his gaze means avoiding his curse, time will prove his error. He can sneer as much as he likes about his worse sins - there are many, Ronan's sure - but today is the day he invited retribution into his home. Some part of him must know it, too, or he wouldn't have been terrified of the dream.

Whatever it is he's trying to bury inside him, the Greywaren will bring it out.

"I am what condemns you."

[photophobic]

It isn't quite a laugh. But Kylo's lips twist as he straightens up, staring down at his prize. His way out. And, apparently, his downfall. He can't say he takes the threat particularly seriously.

"You can't even lift your head," he murmurs. "Come. Let's see if we can make your box a little more comfortable, shall we."

[nightmarist]

Ronan swallows his refusal. His brother could have abandoned him years ago. It would have been easy for Declan to slip into society, pass for ordinary, live in peace and maybe even prosperity. Instead, he had given up everything for Ronan. Ronan won't make him give his life, too.

There's nowhere to go but the path Kylo allows him to take, so Ronan takes it. The invisible weight on his back keeps him close to the floor, so that he doesn't simply crawl on hands and knees - he slithers, dragging his body back to his cage because he can't pick himself up enough to do otherwise. It takes all his strength to keep from being outright pinned to the floor.

[photophobic]

Kylo's heavy boots come to a stop just inside the saferoom, barely even noticing the low steel lip of the threshold until he's watching Ronan's struggle to clear it— but he doesn't lift the weight of his will bearing down between his shoulders.

Nor will he be satisfied with Ronan's obedience until he's demonstrated it in full. What was it, that he had told Ronan he would do? He doubts he's forgotten. All the way in. Right to the far wall. He'll wait.

[nightmarist]

All the way in. Ronan hasn't forgotten.

By the time his forehead touches the far wall, every muscle in his back has knotted and locked up. He reaches his destination, for Declan's sake, and then his trembling arms give out entirely. Heaving an exhausted cry, he collapses. His chin hits the floor. His limbs splay. With or without the weight pressing him down, now, he won't be moving anytime soon.

[photophobic]

It doesn't vanish, the impossible pressure keeping Ronan down. It eases. Slow, smooth, and entirely satisfied, Kylo's power rolls over Ronan's spine as indulgent praise, resting at the small of his back briefly before lifting away.

He is, actually, genuinely impressed. Not that he expects that to matter a great deal to Ronan, of course. But he is impressed.

"Well?" He leaves a pause for Ronan's laboured breathing. "Aren't you going to make a wish?"

[nightmarist]

"Wish you'd stop touching me, Creepfuck McMouthbreather."

Ronan did what he said he'd do. Now, since he's already as low as he can go, he might as well stay here. He only rolls his head to rest on his cheek instead of his chin, which is a small degree more comfortable.