Fanfic / Help Me Hold Onto You

Help me hold onto you is a Ready or Not (2019) fanfic by MagicClem, posted here.

The story's premise takes the form of a What If? situation, essentially looking at how Grace's life with the Le Domas family might have turned out if she had gotten any game other than Hide and Seek (in this case, the game is Monopoly). The result is...not Hunting the Most Dangerous Game like in the movie. What we get, instead, is a fairly standard romantic drama story as Grace struggles with her growing issues with her husband Alex and the rest of the Le Domas relatives, leading her to find a kindred spirit in her brother-in-law Daniel.

This story contains examples of:

• Adoption Is Not an Option: One of the key issues affecting Alex and Grace's marriage is the former's insistence that any children they have must be their own natural-born children, and adopting a child is out of the question as that child won't "really" be theirs. For Grace, herself a foster child, such a statement is a slap in the face, especially when Alex takes to saying it more often and with less apology each time.
• Alternate Universe: Basically, if Grace had gotten any game except Hide and Seek, the movie as we know it wouldn't have happened. This story explores how things might have turned out in that case.
• Bedroom Adultery Scene: A variation that's not in an actual bedroom, as Daniel and Grace catch Charity being adulterous on a table in the piano room.
• Deal with the Devil: Because Daniel believes so strongly in the Le Domas family's history with Le Bail, Grace takes it upon herself to research what exactly goes into pacts such as this one. She ends up finding a lot of contradictory information, but a few nuggets of common detail keep cropping up, one of which states that a person cannot be tricked into signing away their soul without knowing what they are signing to (since a pact is between two consenting parties, after all). On the strength of this, Grace figures that if the pact with Le Bail is real, then she was never in danger from it because Alex never told her about it prior to their marriage.
• Divorce Requires Death: According to Daniel, this trope is why nobody in the Le Domas family ever divorces their spouses—because it goes against the rules of the deal their family ancestor made with Le Bail. However, if one asks for a divorce and seeks to gain nothing else from the family...
• Dysfunctional Family: With the movie's main theme excised from this story (except for a few little hints here and there that Alex and Daniel are contemptuous toward their relatives for some initially unspoken reason), the Le Domases come across as this, at least as far as Grace knows. Given what she saw of them firsthand shortly after getting married to Alex, what with both his father and aunt being jerks, Fitch being an idiot, Charity being cold and arrogant, the kids being obnoxious little snots, and Daniel being The Alcoholic, she's not wrong.
• A Family Affair: Grace and Daniel end up getting involved while still technically married to their respective spouses. In fairness, said spouses were cheating with each other first.
• Foster Kid: The fact that Grace was one of these makes Alex's declaration that adopted kids won't be "really" theirs sting all the more.
• Gamer Chick: Grace at one point wishes she could just be this way all the time.
  Why do I have to be an adult and grade my students when I could play video games all day? Life is very unfair.
• Good Adultery, Bad Adultery: Daniel is implied early on to be cheating on Charity, given that he brings different "friends" with him whenever invited to dinner with Grace and Alex, but he's treated as a sympathetic guy since his marriage is already loveless. On the other hand, Charity—who's likewise cheating on Daniel—is vilified for it, helped in large part by how unsympathetic she comes across as.
• I Need a Freaking Drink: Both Daniel and Grace seek the bottle after catching Charity in the act of cheating with Alex.
• Jerkass: Alex gradually becomes this after the first year of his marriage to Grace, with increasingly unrepentant pot-shots at the idea of adopting children even while he knows Grace was a foster child.
• Locked Out of the Loop: Apparently, since Grace never picked the Hide and Seek card in this story, Alex never intended to bring her in the know about the truth behind the family tradition. Daniel is appalled when he realizes this, after Grace voices confusion when he casually mentions the game.
• My God, You Are Serious!: When Daniel tells Grace the truth about the family's history, Grace's initial reaction is to laugh it off...then when she sees his expression, this trope is her response while her laughter dies.
• Obnoxious In-Laws: The rest of the Le Domases treat Grace with varying degrees of respect or lack thereof, ranging from coldness to rudeness to outright contempt. Even Daniel, the nicest of the lot by far, makes a lousy showing of himself at family get-togethers with his alcoholism (though Grace notices he drinks significantly less when not attending said get-togethers).
• The Paragon Always Rebels: It's remarked on a few times about how Alex had initially tried to distance himself, as well as Grace after they got married, from the rest of his family, though Grace doesn't know the real reason until later. Ironically, Daniel—despite what he himself wants to believe—is more of a White Sheep than Alex is.
• Precision F-Strike: There are quite a few F-bombs dropped throughout the story, both in the narrative and in dialogue.
• Screw the Rules, I Have Money!: Daniel flatly tells Grace at one point that the Le Domas family can just pay off anyone to make any evidence of wrongdoing disappear.
• Secret-Keeper: After Daniel realizes that Alex never told Grace about the reason behind the family tradition, he takes it upon himself to tell her the whole story, including the part he played in it in the past. She ends up being this for him after she hears the whole tale (though they both pointedly never mention it to the rest of the family, not that either of them would be minded to do so anyway).
• Tranquil Fury: When Grace sees firsthand that Charity has been cheating on Daniel with Alex, she's so furious she can't even speak. Attempted denials of the fact only piss her off even more.