This fic is terrible. Terrible in the way a tragedy is, in the way disaster unfolds before your eyes, compelling and inescapable. It is perfectly written, crafted with such precision that you can’t look away. Like a documentary recounting something horrific, like news footage looping devastation, it grips you with that morbid, unrelenting curiosity…how bad does it get? Does it sink deeper, or is there any way out? Why is this happening?
It’s the worst-case scenario, the nightmare of the abused becoming the abuser, of captor and captive dissolving into one indistinguishable whole. Stockholm syndrome, a love story that isn’t a love story, affection so twisted it circles back around to something horrifyingly tender. And it feels real…so real it becomes surreal, like a fever dream too vivid to be anything but memory, like trauma itself.
It confuses, frustrates, unsettles. It sends chills down your spine even as it does something else, something unspoken, something shameful. It’s indulgent in the most sickly sweet way, in the way trauma tries to rewrite itself, twisting, bending reality into something survivable, something that makes sense.
Every word out of Will’s mouth is a flashback, a visceral tug backward, maybe to personal memories, maybe to something older, deeper. Perhaps to something carved into the bones of every woman ever born, an inheritance of fear, of knowing.
And it is perfectly written. Unafraid. It walks the razor’s edge between exploitation and exploration, between something obscene and something revelatory. The line blurs, dissolves. Was there ever a point? Is this about healing, or is it simply a place where the sickest minds come to indulge?
But it is something. It exists, and that is reason enough to read it. It is bad and dark and awful.
Good luck.