All of you (Patreon)

 I was hoping that you could please do a continuation of an old tumblr snippet from Oct 26, 2019: "a dominant villain who captures their old love who broke up with them. (because they found about them being a villain.) Their old love still loves them but know how dangerous they are and the villain is a sadist." 

---

First part included for ease of reading.

“You think I’m a monster,” the villain said quietly. “But I don’t think I could ever do what you did. Walked away from the life we had together as if it were nothing…”

“Not nothing,” the protagonist replied. They eyed the villain cautiously, instincts tugged in opposite directions. Old memories and new realisations struggled for control. “But you couldn’t possibly have expected me to stay. After what you’ve done…”

“I did it for us.”

“You did it for you.”

“Think you know me so well now, don’t you?”

“Better than anybody.”

The villain hummed at that, considering them, and didn’t exactly deny it but maybe that was the problem. Knowledge was power and the villain wasn’t the type to let someone with that much power over them wander off now, were they?

“I wouldn’t tell anyone anything,” the protagonist added, softer. “You must know that. You don’t have to do this.” They pressed against the magical barrier, but it held firmly, allowing no give. “You don’t want to do this.”

The villain raised an eyebrow.

The protagonist swallowed and looked down because - yes, they now knew the villain better than anybody. Which meant that they knew perfectly well that last comment had been a lie. Their once-lover absolutely wanted to do this. They weren’t watching the protagonist with a remorseful regret, they were watching the way a collector admired a prized butterfly pinned to a cork-board.

Before, their once-lover, though at times sadistic, had always kept behind certain boundaries. They had always shown the utmost respect for the protagonist’s choices, behaved with all due consideration. If there had been an edge, it was a safe-feeling edge at the heart of it. Theirs had been a good relationship. Wasn’t that the worst thing? It had been good. And the protagonist didn’t think it had been a lie, either.

“Did you think me unfeeling?” the villain asked. “Is that it? Did you think it wouldn’t hurt me that you left?”

“Yes. No. I don’t know.” The protagonist met their gaze. “I figured you’d get over it.” Their stomach squirmed. That was another lie, and the villain raised another eyebrow to call them out on it. They both knew that there would have been no getting over it.

“I have held much of myself back for you, over the years,” the villain murmured, prowling closer still. “You didn’t have to look. I would have advised you not to.”

“I always knew you were hiding something. I wanted you to be able to be yourself around me.”

The villain smiled at that. If it wasn’t so awful, the protagonist would have smiled too - hell, they still wanted to laugh in some strange way. They had wanted to know everything, but when they got everything they had ran. What must it be like, to have the person who loved you most run from your everything? And how terrible must your everything be, if that was the reaction?

It was funny, almost, the difference between the secrets they thought they’d find and the truth. It was such a romantic idea to know everything of one’s partner, but perhaps that was foolish. Perhaps humans weren’t supposed to know everything of each other’s brains.

But the protagonist could have dealt with a little ugliness. Not this.

“Let me go,” they tried again. “Please.”

“Mm.” The villain came to a stop in front of them. “I always did like it when you begged.”

Which was why the protagonist did it. This time, however, it didn’t seem to much change anything.

“Do you think I’m going to hurt you?” the villain asked, that smile still on their face.

“No.” It wasn’t that. It wasn’t that simple, for all that they were aware of the dangers. “But I can’t stay, knowing what I know. I can’t be part of that.”

“Which is why it’s no longer your choice.”

The protagonist’s heart hammered as they pressed their hand against that magical barrier once more, and felt it fizz against their skin. Somehow they hadn’t expected their once-lover to put it so bluntly. The danger skittered along their spine, quickening their breathing.

The villain raised their hand, matching the gesture on the other side.

“You wanted everything, my love,” the villain said. “And who am I to deny you? Ask and thou shalt receive.”

They were only just getting started.

***

“You are selfish,” the protagonist said. “You would rather have me in any way that you can, regardless of what I think about it, than not have me at all. Even if we’re miserable. Even if we’re broken. Even if nothing can be the same again.”

They lay together on the large sofa, an episode of something or other playing on the home cinema screen. If not for the magic still twining gently around the protagonist’s wrists, keeping them from bolting off the sofa and doing something as foolish as trying to run again, it might have felt like a normal Sunday evening. Lazy, peaceful. Before revelations were made and hearts were broken.

The villain carded their fingers through the protagonist’s hair, a seemingly idle movement, an old habit.

“I do not want you unhappy,” the villain said, less in disagreement, and more in expansion. “But you have made it clear that captivity is the only option for us. You would not allow yourself to stay, even if you wanted to. Just as you would not fight me, even if you left. If you fought me perhaps I could have let you go then.”

Because then, in whatever twisted way, they would still be connected. The protagonist wouldn’t truly be gone. It all went back to the same point, didn’t it?

The protagonist swallowed.

The villain hummed. Their grip tightened on the protagonist’s hair, tipping their head back against the villain’s shoulder. They pressed a kiss to the tight line of the protagonist’s jaw, their vulnerable throat with the pulse racing.

“You are not who I thought you were,” the protagonist rasped.

“I am the filled in version of the pencil sketch you always knew.”

The protagonist closed their eyes.
“I want everything to go back to how it was, before I knew.”

“I know.” The villain scraped their teeth along the protagonist’s skin. “There are a million fairy tales, my love, that could have warned you not to look.”

“You could stop,” the protagonist dared to say. “Stop – doing what you do.”

“Stop being what I am?”

“It’s what you want from me.”

The villain clicked their tongue.

Wrong.

The protagonist tried to think, but though they knew the villain better than anyone, they couldn’t understand where the comment had erred. What the protagonist was, what they had always been, was the one who ran. They were not brave. They were not a fighter. They hadn't looked because they thought what their lover hid was terrible, they'd looked with the hopes of carrying some of the burden. If anything close to what they got, they'd expected the villain to be a hero, always suppressing their natural inclinations for a greater good. 

“I have no problem with what you are.” The villain released the protagonist’s hair once more, with a final kiss. “Keeping you prisoner only means I get to learn more of you, your reactions, what you are, then I would have otherwise. I would not have taken it, but you have given it now, and I will love everything of you.”

Oh.

The protagonist felt dizzy. They jerked to sit up, with that same urge to flee, and the villain’s arm hooked around their waist as easily as breathing, holding them steady. Holding them there.

There was some strange acceptance in that, perhaps, possibly. A way forward. Because if the antagonist loved all of them, knew all of them, they knew that the protagonist would not easily stomach the full truth of their lover’s villainy. They knew they would try to run when they learned what they did, which meant that though the villain had been hurt by it, they had also forgiven it. This…whatever this now was…wasn’t a punishment for seeing the truth and flinching.

The protagonist released a shaky breath, overwhelmed again by the enormity of the villain’s feeling. They felt like a puddle in love with the ocean. They loved the villain, with all they had, but all they had was still only a few scant drops by comparison. But they knew, privately, that it had also always been that way. The enormity of what the villain felt had never been the lie of their relationship. It had always churned beneath every gesture, in the fact that the villain had been the one who courted, who took control, in the way they looked at the protagonist with such simmering passion.

The protagonist had loved it. (They loved it still.) It made them feel like the most important, desirable thing in the world. But it also left them with a magical tie around their wrists, their safe ship dragged beneath the waves by the arms of the kraken whose back they had been unwittingly riding for years. 

After all, the little luxuries of their life – the home cinema, the nice restaurants, the holidays, the being able to work on the art they loved instead of in a tiny office cubicle – were all because of what the villain did. The money it made.

“I could break you,” the villain murmured against their ear, “and still love the shattered remains because it is simply another iteration of you. I love you happy and I love you hurting. It makes no difference to me. Is that what you need me to spell out?” There was confession in the villain's voice. Intimate. Dark. Hushed. They could finally say the things that had only flickered across their face.

“That’s appalling. That’s –”

“That’s unconditional love, babes.”

The protagonist stayed quiet for a beat, two, three, as the TV episode continued in the background. They mulled the words over, examined them and the villain from every angle, like holding something up to the light to check if it was a counterfeit or not.

“You’re not planning to break me,” the protagonist said, finally. Just as the villain wasn’t planning to go out of their way to hurt the protagonist. There may be hurt, in ravaged feelings and the loss of freedom, but that was more a side-effect than anything else. “Not intentionally, at any rate.”

They weren’t sure if the notion was comforting or disappointing. Being broken sounded less difficult.

The villain petted their hair again; affirmation, approval, praise. A new complicated delight in being known, in being seen, in the protagonist getting the answer right. In some way, they were closer than they had ever been.

“You wouldn’t like it,” the villain said, softly. “And so I wouldn’t like that for you, out of everything you could be. Besides, what you do yourself is so much more interesting than anything I could rebuild you as. I don't need to do that for you to be mine.”

So simple. So devastating.

The protagonist swallowed again, but it did nothing to make their mouth less dry.

They knew the villain better than anyone, but even now, it seemed, they did not know everything. 

So selfish. So not selfish, too. So damn contradictory.

The protagonist tried out another truth, carefully, figuring out the boundaries of their new reality.

“You enjoy this,” they said. “Me at your mercy.”

The villain laughed. “I’ve always enjoyed that, and you have always been at my mercy. You just didn’t see how much." The laugh turned softer, more like an offering, cruel and kind at the same time. "Not as much has changed as you seem to think.”

The protagonist didn't know what to do with that statement, so they ignored it.

“Would you have let me go, before, if I didn’t know who you truly were?”

Maybe that, that, was the question – the truth – that the protagonist had been helplessly orbiting and avoiding since the villain caught them and brought them back home. The question that the villain had already partially answered, answered in every way except the blunt, unmistakable ‘no’ of it. Maybe they needed to hear that no. To know, to find some final peace, in the fact that there was never really anything they could have done. So it was fine to settle. To not feel bad about it. To find some terrible pleasure in being kept.

The villain paused the TV episode.

The protagonist shivered in the silence that fell over the room, resisting the urge to twist around in the restrictive cuddle of the villain’s arms. To see that familiar passion blazing in their eyes.

“Tell me,” the protagonist said, stomach clenching as the silence unexpectedly stretched. “Tell me you wouldn’t have. I know you. You wouldn’t have.”

“If you know, you do not need me to say it.”

The protagonist snarled, and rolled over, with a sudden flare of fury because the villain must know – they had to know –

The villain placed a hand over the protagonist’s eyes, blocking their sight, preventing them from the easy reading of the villain’s expression, in one swift movement. Denying them the answer. The 100% proof of it.

“You really are a monster,” the protagonist said, after a moment. “Tell me.” They hesitated. “Please. Tell me you wouldn’t have.”

The villain kissed the protagonist, deep and eager, and the protagonist yielded instantly to it. The villain kissed them breathless, wordless, until that was all they could think about. 

“Yes,” the villain whispered, and the protagonist’s heart lurched nauseously, before the villain finished the sentence. “I really am a monster, love. Let’s go to bed.”