adam parrish (_themagician) wrote in thedisplaced, @ 2018-09-15 23:17:00 |
|
|||
Entry tags: | adam parrish, ronan lynch |
WHO: Ronan and Adam
WHAT: Ronan disappears because faeries
WHEN: Friday evening
WHERE: The Barns
WARNINGS: Mask horror
All morning, everywhere in the house, Ronan kept seeing the mask out of the corner of his eye.
He knew it wasn’t there. He had gotten rid of it, put it in a box and buried it in the ground way at the back of the Barns. Yet it kept appearing in his peripheral vision all , and then when he turned his head to look, it wasn’t there.
After he went out into the fields, it stopped happening, and he forgot about it by the time he came back in for dinner. He pulled the leftover pizza out of the fridge and stuffed a piece of it in his mouth. He grinned at Adam when his boyfriend came in, and swallowed his bite.
“Hey,” he said. “Want--”
And then, out of nowhere, the mask attached itself to his face. He knew it was the same mask because of the feel of it in his hands when he tried to pull it off. He stumbled and would have fallen forward except that he was only a few inches from the counter, which bumped his hip painfully and dug into his stomach when it caught him. A muffled string of curses came out of him from behind the mask, which felt like it was digging into his skin and pulling against it, all at the same time.
--
Adam felt that they should have been getting more accustomed to the unexpected by now, but Adam was still shocked by the image of a horrifying mask latching onto Ronan’s face.
Adam didn’t know exactly what was happening, but he knew that it was bad.
“Ronan,” Adam said sharply, rushing forward to try and get his fingers underneath the edge of the mask, where it was pushed flush against Ronan’s skin.
…
Ronan panicked when he felt Adam’s hands trying to touch the mask. It was bad enough on him, but in his nightmares, this mask always attacked his loved ones. Why he had fixated on this particular mask for that, he didn’t know, but all of his associations with it now were horrible.
“No!” he said, or tried to. The words came out almost unintelligibly muffled, because the mask seemed to have attached itself directly to all the skin of his face, including his lips. He jerked backwards, trying to get out of reach. He hit his head against the cupboard and the back of his hip against the other counter, and cursed again. Just as unintelligibly, he added, “Don’t touch it!”
--
“Ronan!” Adam snapped, because he was scared. His pulse was thrumming in his throat and ears, and he just wanted to grab Ronan by the shoulders to hold him still. He kept moving about erratically, hurting himself, and Adam couldn’t get at the mask -- even though he knew that Ronan didn’t want him to. He didn’t try again yet, but he remained near.
“Be still!” Adam commanded. “Tell me how to get it off.”
…
Ronan couldn’t answer. His limbs were getting cold and stiff, and he felt disoriented, more than he should have been from hitting his head on the cupboard. He heard Adam’s voice as if from a distance, or as if they were speaking underwater.
Something was very wrong. The mask wasn’t actually supposed to be dangerous, it was just a mask, even though his mind had assigned it a horrible symbolism. He had never brought back a nightmare version, he was sure of it. But here it was, taking his face off. Taking all of him, maybe.
He fell to his knees, distantly aware of the echo of pain as they hit the floor. And then he was just falling, falling down through the floor and into the earth, and then everything went black.
--
Adam was on the ground as soon as Ronan collapsed, grappling for the mask again -- but it made no difference because Ronan disappeared as he reached for him. Adam’s heart stopped.
He remained on the floor for an additional moment, as if half expecting Ronan to suddenly reappear or for what had just happened to make sense. It didn’t.
Down the hall, Chainsaw let out a piercing cry, which was both awful and reassuring. If she was awake, Ronan was alive. Ronan could be saved. They just had to figure out what had happened. He ran to get his phone to call Gansey.
**
Adam was angry, and his anger felt unsteady inside of him. The sort of frantic feeling that had filled him when Ronan had disappeared was unfamiliar to him. Suddenly, it had been hard to formulate plans and figure out the most logical course of action. He was scared. And he had to wait for this ball, so he’d been forced to sit with the fear until it blossomed into angry.
Adam didn’t want to be playing along in this game; he didn’t want to be dressing up and trying to win Ronan back from faerie. He wanted his boyfriend to not have been taken in the first fucking place.
But, as usual, it seemed he didn’t have a choice.
So, Adam stepped inside. And started looking.