Peroxide (Peterick)

I've chosen not to acknowledge the things I put at the beginning

"Ryan, there's someone here with me."

The phone line stills, bewilderment clouding my friend's cognition. "Patrick, I don't know what you mean."

"No one ever does." Hysteria caps my voice, mutilating a laugh while it's at it. "I mean there's someone in this house that I haven't seen in two years that shouldn't be here."

"Two years..." Ryan's words crunch with aposiopesis, rebuilding themselves later. "Wasn't that—"

"Yes, now you need to help me."

Noises from the other end vary, a few ruffling sonatas, a few creaks of the chair below my companion. "How so?"

My tone commits to a brontide, wholly serious. "If you see a man you don't know, that's the one. There are a few new people here, but you'll know him when you see him."

"How am I supposed to—"

I kill the line.

~~~~~

"Brendon! Ryan!" Gerard greets, welcoming the two men into his quite lovely home with a grand smile plasticizing his face.

They're as homosexual as I've seen them, hands like satin in each other — natural and smooth — which suggests that they've finally admitted their obvious feelings for one another, and though I have been rooting for them since the beginning, something sinister maledicts my stomach and warps any sort of affection for them to bile.

Expeditiously after Ryan steps inside, his vision cycles to a mysterious man reclining on the sofa, and his fascination is piqued — but not favorably. His glances are pendulums swinging my way, and without acknowledging anyone else — such as Lindsey and Frank and Pete, the people he's never met — he tugs me aside.

"You saw him, did you?" I prompt.

"The tall one with the gloves?" Ryan gestures around his head in a poor imitation of Dallon's coiffure, and I simply nod.

"That's the one."

My friend's mouth swipes back and forth, disconcerted. "Patrick, I'm glad that you're finally sharing the details of your attack with me, but why the hell is he still here?"

"Because."

Ryan sighs, opting for a different engagement. "What's his name then?"

"Dallon James Weekes."

"Precise." His brows cuff to his forehead in sway.

"You tend to know these things when litigating someone."

"You never filed a lawsuit, though."

"I prefer practices within the mind." I tap my skull twice, gesturing like my mother tells me I should. "I usually imagine him in a cell among grimy prisoners."

"As long as you're content, I'm fine," Ryan confirms, grinning proficiently, but thunderclouds roll in soon after. "But you should tell someone about this. Maybe Gerard should know."

My head strikes to the side, denouncing the proposition. "No way. That's where I draw the line."

"You have to take care of yourself," Ryan prays, creases materializing on his regularly youthful face, which reminds me of the fact that he's the only one who seems to be authentically involved with my worries and will go to great lengths to solve them, but that's not what I need now, even if I normally would regard it as a helpful thing.

The moment people start suggesting what I should and shouldn't do with my life, I have to put my foot down, because I've witnessed what it's like to have someone reign over every aspect of my life and evoke the feeling that I'm being watched, because I am — and, though perhaps accidentally, they have inflicted the obsessions of surveillance in my brain and doomed me to their own OCD diagnosis as a ploy to make me dependent on them.