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A part of him that knows that none of this is normal. That he’s a victim. That he should be running for the hills and never look back. That Josef is, for all intents and purposes, holding him captive. That he’s suffering from Stockholm Syndrome.
He’s no Patty Hearst, buying into some outlandish belief system, being forced to go against his own country. He’s not staging coups, or taking part in any anti-government demonstrations. And yet...he’s still trapped. Buying into the idea that Josef really cares about him, and that he’s come to care for him.
He has come to care for Josef, even after everything the man has put him through. Even after the drugged nights of sex where Aaron knows he begged and begged for Josef to stop and the man hadn’t.
It’s rape. Non-consensual sex.
And even though he doesn’t remember the drugged nights of forced sex in full detail, he does remember how it made him feel. Weak. Unclean. Broken.
It was wrong. His will had been subverted over and over again until one day, he simply gave in and his will became that of Josef’s.
Josef who, after it was over, always comforted him and praised him. Held him while he wept. Offered him flowers and candy and stuffed wolves. He’s got a room filled with nothing but stuffed wolves.
Intellectually, he knows how wrong all of it is, and yet he can’t make himself leave. Even when Josef dangles opportunities to do so right before his eyes.
There’s the time he left Aaron for a week while he went to some kind of convention in a nearby city. Instead of running like he should have, Aaron spent the week reading several of the books that were lining the walls of the remote cabin Josef had found, tending to the overgrown garden, and tidying the place, making it more than just a lost and lonely cabin and more like a home.
There’re all of the times that Josef has left him in an idling car while he popped into a store to purchase this and that. And instead of slipping out of the passenger seat, he’d adjusted the heat or changed the radio station, rested his head on the window, and closed his eyes, waiting for his captor to return.
He doesn’t know when the shift from unwilling captive to willing participant began, but he thinks it’s sometime after the third time that Josef drugged him and fucked him. He remembers the event in dark images that are fuzzy around the edges, nothing overly clear, just a suggestion of pain and horror and the repetition of no, stop, no, stop, don’t.
He doesn’t know what makes the third time any different than the two that proceeded it. It wasn’t any less painful. Any less horrifying. It was just as terrible as the first two times Josef had raped him.
Maybe it was the way that Josef cared for him afterward. The tender way in which his hands skimmed over his body. The way he held him and whispered, ‘I’m sorry,’ over and over again. Like he really meant it. Or the way that he made love to him afterward, guiding him and praising him for his active participation, pressing bruising kisses all over his heated skin, and bathing him afterward.
It wasn’t unpleasant when Josef made love to him, and Aaron knows that it was a turning point in their captor/captive relationship, but he doesn’t know why. It sometimes keeps him up at nights, Josef lightly snoring, curled into him, arm and leg thrown over Aaron’s naked torso and hip, thinking until he falls into an exhausted sleep, no wiser than he’d been when he first started thinking about it.
Perhaps it will always remain a mystery, like much of life. A mystery that keeps Aaron right where he is, standing by Josef’s side, blood spattered over his face as he looks at their latest kill, a mountaineer on his final adventure.