CW : psychological horror, gothic, yandere, obsession, unhealthy relationships, power imbalance, stockholm syndrome,dreams, kidnapping, forced proximity, angst, hurt/no comfort, religious imagery, guilt, dubious consent, toxic love, monster lover, broken protagonist, ambiguous ending, forced marriage
notes : this is a short fic, kinda experimental even. i know this fandom isn't super active, but i still wanted to write something of my own. maybe if someone really likes it, i'll make a longer one. english is not my native language and i use a translator
In Orlok's embrace, which wrapped around you but gave not a single drop of warmth, his body exuding only cold and the stench of a family vault, you still pressed against him as if he were your saviour. You tried to remember how long you had been here. Had much time passed, or not? The count of time here seemed an empty absurdity, for each evening bled into the next, identical to the one before. And besides, you would never escape this place anyway.
Sometimes you wondered whether your mother missed you. Perhaps she had already shed all her tears and now only gently recalled you in moments of idle thought. And your betrothed, who had sworn you his love and fidelity, did he still remember you, or had he found another? Someone who would not run from him, someone who would not be subject to carnal sin, a nosferatu who had dragged you into the bowels of his hell.
Hell was what you called this castle. Vast, grotesque, and far too empty, reeking of dampness and decay. Sometimes it seemed that the drip of water on the floor was the tread of someone's footsteps, and each time you flinched in fearful anticipation that it was him, the demon. In time you realised that his steps were inaudible to ordinary ears; he seemed to glide through the castle like a shadow.
Ah, that demon, your personal demon. You could not understand what he had found in you, a timid girl who would not even dare to go out into the street without good reason. Why had God punished you with this? Why did this nosferatu come to you in dreams and do to you what any well‑bred maiden should have beseeched the Lord to forget as the gravest of sins, dismissing it as an affliction of the mind?
And the worst part was that you liked what he did to you. It was something primal, animalistic, and for that you berated yourself every day, mentally calling yourself a depraved harlot, unworthy of a normal life. For who would want a girl already tainted by a monster? Your mother had always taught you that the Lord punishes wanton women, and that there is no one worse than them.
And now you had become the very thing you despised.
You could never have imagined that you would agree to be wedded to the monster of your nightmares, but it had not been your choice.
One of those many restless nights, he came to you at your most vulnerable moment. His voice was like thunder rolling, his accent sending a strange, tingling dread low in your belly. With a voice so loud and yet so deep at the same time, he rasped only a few words that made you renounce the vows you had made to your betrothed and surrender yourself wholly to the fiend.
His words were a promise. A promise that he would turn the lives of your loved ones into hell, the same hell he had already made of yours.
And that was how you ended up here. You recalled these details, though you wished you did not.
Now, standing here in his embrace, in this castle that had become your cage from now until forever, unwillingly you fixed your gaze on one point, vacant. All your tears had been shed in the first days; now you could not even weep. You reproached yourself: was it because, deep down, you wanted to stay with him?
No, no, you could not possibly want that, could you? But despite it all, you kept pressing yourself to him as to a last hope.
Perhaps it was because he was the only creature here. Perhaps even though he loomed over you like a dark fate, he was your only islet of comfort, one that brought only pain, yet still. Did you have any other choice but to cling to the sole being that followed you like your own shadow?
You did not know whether he could love you. But the fact that you were here, in his such as they were embrace, gave you a faint, intangible hope that this monster might feel something towards you beyond mere consumption, beyond a vessel for blood. Something perversely tender, if that word could ever apply to such a creature.
"Do you love me?" It was a foolish question from a foolish woman who, having no other recourse, sought warmth from the monster who had stolen her happy life.
Orlok merely passed his bony hand along your neck, inhaling the scent of your hair. You would never know the answer, not because it was a secret, but because you were not yet ready to hear it.
my first work, which i probably won't delete 'cause i'm pretty happy with it (not 100% but still). it was pretty easy to write i wrote it on the way home out of boredom (bro, literally 10 hours in the car with my annoying cousins, it was terrible) and also 'cause there were no other nosferatu fics