This Time for Sure

It's been a while since I've written about what I've been reading. If you followed my other blogs, you may have noticed that I had a rough few years. Between school and just dealing with life, I didn't have much time to write much of anything outside of papers and legal documents. I'm hoping to rectify that in the future. We'll see how that works out.

So let's dive right in, shall we?

This Time for Sure by Deejaymil is the story I have just finished reading. It is a Criminal Minds fanfiction that is hosted on the site Archive of Our Own (known colloquially as AO3). In this alternate universe (AU), Spencer Reid and Aaron Hotcher are similar in age and have a different first meeting. Seems simple enough, right? Well, buckle up, because the wild ride is just beginning.

Deejaymil describes the fic as the one where they managed to be remarkably silly for three decades. After reading the story, I have to say that I agree, but I would also defend them by saying they had a lot of growing to do and even more healing. She has wonderfully captured the downward spiral life can take when something traumatic happens. What happened (to both boys) is entirely believable and so are their reactions.

My favorite part of the story was how Spencer and Aaron were so co-dependent, obsessively so. Having lived in such co-dependency, I feel that she captured it perfectly. You feed off each other--both the highs and the lows. Towards the end of the story, Spencer says something that is so accurate: "When it was good it was all I’d ever wanted, and when it was bad I would have still burned for it." When you love someone that completely, that obsessively, it becomes dangerous, and it did for Spencer and Aaron at that point in their lives. They fell into a negative feedback loop and the only way to stop a feedback loop is to break the loop.

In a lot of stories, co-dependency is painted as vile or as the ideal. To see both the wonderfulness and the horribleness in the same story is my ideal. Because it can make you great or it can destroy you, even when your partner(s) are right there beside you.

From a writer's perspective, I love the bookend feel to the story. The story opens with two boys desperate to not be alone deciding to build a fort together and then beginning to write a story together. It ends the same way, two different boys equally desperate to not be alone (for slightly different reasons) deciding to build a fort together and then beginning to write a story together (following the advice of boys who have been there). The echo gives the reader both resolution and hope that there's going to be a happy ending this time for sure.

If you are looking for your next epic fic (word count is given as 131K+ words) to read, this one definitely has my recommendation. It is a real--oh, what do you call it if it's not a print book?--Sitting aside the linguistic void, it will keep you riveted until the very end, making you want to know what they will do next.