ADAM PARRISH + RONAN LYNCH
BOYFRIENDS IN THE CONSERVATORY WITH A PLASTIC PLANT
LOW | COMPLETE
The bird thing had been bugging Ronan since it happened, like an argument happening in the next room. Ivy had known the tail shape difference between crows and ravens so it was probably fine. He refused to believe Chainsaw was stupid enough - mundane enough - to run into a window and die in this weird ass place anyway, but.
He had to check. He’d snagged Adam with stealth kisses to his neck and fingers digging into his ribs, leading him to the Conservatory. At least the furnace was back on and their teeth weren’t chattering. The ordeal with Connor played in the back of his head on mute, but that was a small price to pay. He paused in the doorway to the Conservatory, one foot inside, and leaned back to murmur close to Adam’s face.
“We’ll go grab something to eat in a minute, I just want to sneak a look. Maybe the monster plant takes naps and won’t even see us. Weirder shit has happened, right?”
Weirder shit has happened sounded like both famous last words and an accurate description of their lives over the past year. Adam would have pointed that out if Ronan's voice hadn't been shivering down his spine and raising the hairs on the back of his neck, electric even talking about monster plants. Maybe because he was talking about monster plants. There would always be a part of Adam that missed living with a forest under his skin.
The smile he flashed Ronan was the sort of thing usually only witnessed before downhill races in shopping carts. His voice was just as soft, quiet enough that only Ronan could hear him. "You could dream weirder without even trying."
Gently, more an excuse to touch him than a real attempt at making Ronan move, he nudged him forward. It wasn't the worst thing he'd followed Ronan into, after all.
Adam smiling would’ve been enough to earn him a smug grin, but the compliment to Ronan’s dreaming skill made it a lock. Ronan didn’t even let the disconnected feeling his gut get in the way. So he missed dreaming? So what. He preferred focusing on the points of contact between them, Adam’s hands on him and a dangerous plant only a few feet away.
Letting himself be pushed inside, Ronan reached around behind Adam to shut the door behind them. Carefully. Quietly. Although, the room seemed eerily quiet already. He’d expected a hungry plant to make some noise. Burst into song or some shit. Instead it sat in the late afternoon shadows of the room, a large, unmoving shape. He pressed a hand to the base of Adam’s spine.
“Ookay...,” he whispered. “This isn’t eerie as shit or anything.”
Adam frowned around the room, eyes darting from plant to plant; his brows drew together, more concern in the crease between them than he’d shown in the entire walk to the Conservatory. This was their lives (life, singular, because Ronan’s was Adam’s now and Adam’s was Ronan’s, no matter where they were or what else happened). Deliberately walking in range of a monster plant was nothing to worry about. Getting there and nothing happening was.
“They look wrong,” he told Ronan. He hadn’t seen them before, didn’t know what he should have been looking at. He did know that now they seemed a little…
Fake.
There was a fake plant in the small waiting room at the garage where Adam worked, job number one. It was a decent fake, good enough that if you didn’t spend much time looking at it you might even think it was real. But if you really looked at it even for a few seconds, there was something about it that was too stiff. Too still, he thought, except that plants didn’t exactly move much anyway.
Ronan grunted a wordless agreement and creeped closer to the big one. The one everyone had warned about. It didn’t so much as twitch. As he got closer, he looked around for something long to poke the plant with, but there wasn’t nothing useful. He cast a quick glance over his shoulder at Adam.
“I know it’s not your thing,” he whispered, “but maybe toss up a little prayer.” And with that for a warning, and Adam cursing and grabbing for him a little too late in the background, he darted forward into the late evening shadows and poked the giant plant, quickly hauling backwards out of range.
The plant swayed slightly from the jab but was otherwise still.
“How fucking anticlimatic,” Ronan complained, like he would’ve rather been chewed on.
Since his boyfriend hadn’t gotten eaten by a plant, Adam stepped forward to get a better look for himself. Not without pausing long enough to knock his knuckles against Ronan’s shoulder, though, a wordless scold that was too gentle to actually hurt.
His fingers lingered a little longer on the leaf he touched. The plant still didn’t move, and Adam announced, “It’s plastic.”
He wondered if he should have been relieved. They didn’t have to creep around to get a look at the birds if there wasn’t anything alive in the room, after all. It would be easy, the way that nothing had seemed easy since he’d walked through the door to his apartment and found himself here instead. Adam should have wanted easy.
What Adam had actually wanted was to see a monster plant try to eat one of them. There was a reason he’d fallen for Ronan Lynch, after all.
Ronan’s grin was sharkish and unapologetic. But he did stay close to Adam’s side, like brushing the back of his hand against Adam’s was sorry enough. Of course, he recognized the disappointment in his boyfriend’s expression and his instinct was to tease him.
“Hey, cheer up. I’m sure you’ll get another chance to rescue me from the jaws of death soon enough.” He ruffled a hand up over Adam’s hair and stepped around the giant plastic plant to stare out the windows. The string of bird corpses outside made him scowl. They were smaller than Chainsaw, and that was a relief, but it was still so fucking senseless. He nodded towards the birds. “Now if only that could’ve been fake too.”
They didn’t mean as much to Adam; he’d have preferred that they hadn’t died, but in a vague way in which he didn’t feel it deeply as much as he logically knew that what happened to them hadn’t been their fault, hadn’t been something that they deserved.
He rested his chin on Ronan’s shoulder anyway, hands settled at his hips. What mattered was that it bothered his boyfriend. That was it.
“There’s still a chance it isn’t,” he offered. “It could be some kind of illusion.”
The chances of that seemed slim, if not nonexistent. If it hadn’t been real, Adam was sure the small black bundles of feathers would have faded away already.
Adam at Ronan’s back was instantly soothing in that stealth way that Adam had perfected. It still always caught Ronan by surprise, the way his heart settled and thumped out a special rhythm just for the boy behind him. He rested his head against the side of Adam’s and breathed out.
“Could be. This fucking whole thing could be. Probably isn’t.” Shifting, he lifted an arm up over Adam’s head and hooked it around his neck, pulling him close to press a kiss against the side of his head. “Sorry I can’t dream us up something to get us out of here. It’s so annoying that the outside is right there.”
That kiss still drew a smile to Adam's face, probably always would, no matter where they were trapped. He wanted to announce to the whole house that he, Adam Parrish, was worth wanting… was worth being wanted by Ronan Lynch who could have had, could have dreamed, anyone he wanted.
"The world doesn't revolve around you, Lynch. You're not the only one responsible for getting us out." His voice was softer than his words. "If the whole thing is an illusion, the outside isn't right there anyway."
It was who knew where. And who knew when they'd see it again.
“Excuse you. The world does too revolve around me.” Ronan being Ronan, he bent Adam’s head forward and gave him a noogie, then quickly released him before an elbow could fuck up his ribs.
He didn’t want to look at the dead birds anymore, so he turned back around to face the plants. There was nothing else in the room that set off any spooky warning bells. In fact, it was pretty peaceful. If it weren’t for the view and the boring ass plants, it might’ve even passed for cozy. Romantic. Ronan glanced sideways at Adam and chewed on his lip.
“I bet you were into the idea of an Audrey II.” He’d deny knowing a musical to his dying day, but to be fair, Little Shop was vicious and cool. “You want me to sing what I remember of the feed me song?”
It wasn’t anything that had ever crossed Adam’s mind before (of course Ronan knew it, it wasn’t surprising only because Ronan Lynch made a habit out of surprising everyone around him), but suddenly he did want it, intensely, because it was another piece of Ronan that he could claim. He couldn’t say that he wanted it though; it was a joke, probably, and even if it wasn’t asking for what he wanted wasn’t a skill that Adam possessed.
Taunting each other into what they wanted, though, that was something they’d always been good at. “Do you even actually know any of it?”
Because Ronan was right: Adam had been into the idea of the giant, hungry plant. Getting Ronan to sing something that wasn’t the Murder Squash Song for him made up for the disappointment.
Ronan grinned. If anyone else had been around, he’d have rolled his eyes and changed the subject or more likely, not made the offer at all. But he could be silly for Adam. He could do a lot of things for Adam. He crowded up close, hands on his boyfriend’s hips and his mouth next to Adam’s good ear.
Feed me, Seymour. Feed me alll night looong,” he sang. Or well, growled really, but that was the tone of the song anyway, and he could hardly be blamed for playing up the sexual undertones of a weird ass murder song. A slight nudge and he had them spinning a little in a lazy circle. “Cause if you feed me, Seymour...I can grow up big and stroong…”
Adam didn’t dance, but this wasn’t really dancing. Even if it had been there wasn’t anyone there to watch. Not even the plant.
No one was going to make him admit that it was, in a faintly embarrassing way, nice to lean into Ronan and let him move them without worrying about whether he was doing something wrong, whether it would be obvious just from watching him that this was one more thing he’d never learned to do. It didn’t matter if he looked ridiculous. Everything about this was ridiculous, even if the growl of Ronan’s voice in his ear was…
There were several words for the sound of Ronan’s voice right then. ‘Ridiculous’ wasn’t one of them.
Ronan felt his nerves fire up at Adam’s silence, even though he knew full well if Adam wasn’t enjoying himself, he’d say so. He pressed a kiss below Adam’s ear and pulled back to scowl at him.
“Just remember, you pretty much dared me to do that.” He’d have sang the entire song - making up all the parts he didn’t remember - if it would put a smile on Adam’s face. “Fits that I am actually hungry.” Trailing a hand down Adam’s arm, he twined their fingers together without looking down at their hands. “You wanna raid the kitchen?”
Adam wasn't smiling; he did, however, delay answering to press a short, hard, hungry kiss to Ronan's lips that left absolutely no question as to whether he'd enjoyed the results of his dare. He didn't know the words that would let Ronan know how he felt about it. He had, however, gotten much better at saying what he needed to with a kiss.
His fingers squeezed Ronan's before they held tight. "I could eat something."
He could also use some time alone with Ronan, but that was harder to come by here. Maybe later.