Chapter Text
“so how are things going with your latest squeeze?” Slim asked, taking a sip of his cherry coke. Edge couldn’t hide his cringe, even if he tried to pretend he was only watching Razz try to throw gummy bears into people’s drinks down below in the yard. The roof was so peaceful before these two decided to show up and start pestering him. Edge took another deep sip of his beer, one of several he’d had so far, to steel himself.
“We broke up,” Edge finally said, tersely. To his dismay, Slim refused to leave the statement be like a normal, polite monster and instead started cackling at him.
“shit, this is a new record for you, right??? how long were you together, three weeks?” he hooted. Edge placed his head in his hands.
“…Two weeks.”
“and how many adorable little subs have you gone through in the last few years?” Slim asked. Edge didn’t have to look at him to know he was raising his eyebrow at him.
“…A lot,” Edge concluded, sinking deeper into his seat. He knew exactly how many, but he refused to state the number out loud. Slim clicked his tongue.
“dude, why do you even start dating them if you’re just going to dump them in a few weeks? you know you can have hookups without dating, right?”
“I do go in trying to make it work, you know!” Edge exclaimed, gesticulating towards Slim with his beer bottle. “I do want a sub, but in the context of a proper relationship. I’ve had flings or subs without dating them, but it wasn’t my thing and it’s not what I’m aiming for long-term. And some of the ones I broke up with were for a good reason! And some dumped me, I didn’t dump every one of them.”
“Good reason like that one chick that showed up to your office and had to be escorted out?” Razz interjected, pausing his important task of annoying the partygoers below to instead annoy Edge. “What was up with her, anyways? I had a day off that day and missed the show.”
“She was very jealous and insecure and tried to ban me from going to munches or talking to other women,” Edge said, rolling his eyes. “Which, given that my boss is a woman and also my best friend, didn’t work out great. So I broke up with her, and she…didn’t take it well, to put it mildly.”
“i’d say. isn’t Dyne a huge lesbian, anyways?” Slim asked. Edge just rubbed his sockets.
“She didn’t exactly seem to accept that explanation, no.”
“Alright, but she’s just one of two or three people you dumped for really good reasons. What about all the other ones, huh?” Razz interjected, holding a gummy bear like a throwing dart. He closed one socket as he took aim before he threw the gummy, observing for a few seconds before snorting out a laugh and running away from the roof edge to hide. “Heh, your bro got beer splashed in his face, edgelord.”
“However will he survive,” Edge drawled, rolling his eyes. “I mean…the relationships usually start out promising. We communicate our limits for scenes and have them, we go on dates, we get to know each other properly. And it’s great at first, I’m enjoying myself, they’re happy, and then it starts feeling…bland. The scenes stop being engaging to me, and once they start feeling lackluster the dates become a drag, and eventually I start putting in more effort to salvage the unsalvageable and try to make it work for me. I keep thinking if I just try a bit harder things will click into place, but it never works out that way.”
“so you dump all of them cuz they suck in the sack?” Slim asked. Edge let out a deep sigh, gearing up to argue, but Razz interrupted him.
“Do you even want to be a dom?”
Edge paused, face creasing in confusion. “Of course I want to be a dom, I’ve been one for years now!”
“I mean, yeah, you’ve been one, but wouldn’t you find at least some subs that worked well with you if you were into them? Like, if domming everyone gets old quick, are they the actual problem or are you?” Razz concluded, leaning onto his brother with one hand and gesticulating with his other. Slim sputtered a bit as he got lightly elbowed in the face in the process, but otherwise seemed to give up and accept his new role as an elbow rest. Edge scoffed.
“Please, I’d know if I was a sub. I’m not new to the lifestyle, I’ve talked to many subs and doms and I’ve even subbed for a few while I was learning. It never clicked for me.”
“not like domming did, huh?” Slim asked, draining his can of soda and crushing it between his hands. Edge kept his mouth shut, because he knew that if he opened it the answer would be ‘domming didn’t quite click, either’.
This wasn’t the first time he’d thought about it. Back when he was first starting out with BDSM, he knew damn well he was interested in the scene-interested in the bondage rigs, the plays of dominance, the leather-but he was unsure which part of the spectrum he sat on, and tentatively claimed the label of switch until he figured himself out. He hated being a sub, hated letting someone else have control over him and the fear of having someone who might hurt him have him in such a vulnerable position, and the few doms that he learned from and trusted treated him like he was either some delicate little sex object, eager to be broken and looked after and put on a pedestal like a glorious piece of art, or like they were expecting him to be a brat and fight back tooth and nail, bare his teeth at the ones holding the whip.
In contrast, domming was…easy. He was a control freak by nature, as his own brother loved pointing out, and the process of planning and preparing for scenes meticulously was soothing. Knowing exactly what would happen and what he would do was calming, in a way scenes where he was a sub never were, and there were clear rules on how to act to take care of his subs. It brought them pleasure, and he liked giving them a good experience. It Didn’t terrify him.
But was Razz right? Edge enjoyed the subs enjoying themselves, yes, but when he thought about it…did he actually enjoy his role for itself? Or did he just like giving someone what they wanted, while it did little for him to control him? He’d always liked the preparation he did beforehand more than the scenes themselves, and he never quite understood it when fellow doms talked about how excited they were with their plans for the subs. He always chalked it up to not being a sadist, but…
His thoughts were interrupted by his brother throwing open the door to the roof, teeth bared in a menacing grin. “hey, party’s winding down. wanna head back home or ya wanna stay here with these assholes?”
“God no, please, take me home,” Edge concluded, Slim flipping him off in reply. With a few choice insults to Razz’ mother for the gummy bear, Red led them both out and, after saying goodbye to a half-asleep Sans and a beaming Papyrus, they made their way home.
It took a few hours for Edge to sober up and the headache next morning lasted until he caved and very reluctantly took a painkiller. But his thoughts about what Razz said lingered. Picked at his thoughts when they wandered to close to his bondage class program, snagged in his mind when he tried to do paperwork for his job. Edge had enough clarity to realize that, after a few days of this distraction, it was time to do some soul-searching.
The first thing he did was take a break from running scenes. He still held his bondage classes, those were always a delight, but he decided to take a break from domming in scenes until he got his head on straight. Recently he’d been jumping from relationship to relationship and having some time to himself was a good idea, but the subtle and pervasive relief he felt at not needing to run any scenes just made his thoughts snag more. He did itch to wear his leathers, and he missed working with his tools, but he realized he didn’t miss running scenes as much as he thought he would. It unnerved him, that he’d been in the BDSM scene for so long and he was only now realizing how much they drained him, and not in a good way.
Next, he decided to do some research. These thoughts and doubts about his role felt fragile in a way that felt like a vulnerability to hide from other people, so asking his brother or some of the other subs he knew for advice was not an option. He didn’t want to make people think he was a sub until he was certain he was. The issue was, the only other place to learn about it was on the internet, and he knew damn well how awful a source it was for learning about BDSM.
His experience looking subs to learn from was painful. First the porn videos made him want to gouge his sockets due to either not being real BDSM at all or being painfully inaccurate to the point of bad praxis, and he was allergic to people not respecting consent or proper BDSM techniques. This was why he couldn’t handle porn, his suspension of disbelief couldn’t handle it. Next came blog posts, some equally bad and some delightfully enlightening, well-written and educational. Edge jotted them down for as references for his students, but none of the subs he stumbled upon spoke of their experiences in a way Edge could identify with.
Some wanted to be humiliated, be living sex toys and slaves, and while Edge met many such subs in his life he never felt like his pride could handle that. He’d sooner stab his dom than be treated that way, and it certainly didn’t appeal to him, sexually or emotionally. He’d come too far in his life by fighting back to be able to just roll over and let people push him around, even in the context of a scene.
The bratty subs never made sense to him either, and while he respected them he never did like working with them. It always felt disrespectful to him to have someone get bratty at their dom, not to mention it tickled his sense of self-preservation the wrong way, and as a dom he was never sure how far their bravado extended, were they still within their limits or were they past them and pretending to be fine. He’d had some bad experiences in the area and learned that was a limit for him, and he was happy to hold it firm.
He’d looked up other kinds of subs too, and even some switches to see if anything clicked, and while every now and again he saw some ideas that made him feel a pang of want (and brought about some pretty intense bouts of self-knowing, if one used the biblical meaning of the word know) but nothing that really felt like him. Still, it did help him learn some kinks he might be into as a sub, which gave him courage that he wasn’t just wasting his own time exploring this.
What did finally make things click for him wasn’t a BDSM blog or YouTube channel, though. It was a webcomic about a princess and her knight, one he’d stumbled upon while scrolling through his social medias during his lunch break and that reminded him of his childhood books of knights and battles that he loved. The knight was a beast, all corrupt magic and terror, but he was brought to heel for the princess by her kindness and love. He was still a terrifying creature, capable of just as much destruction as he always had been, but he dedicated his life to his princess and would have given his life, dignity and body to keep her safe and happy, and she loved him in return.
Edge had been so absorbed in the comic he forgot to eat dinner when he got back home and then promptly threw a small tantrum when he realized the comic hadn’t been updated in months when he reached the end. Once he stopped pouting, though, he wondered why he was so enamored by it. He thought he wasn’t so interested in children’s stories anymore, and the way the author wrote the magic was painfully inaccurate in a way he would never tolerate in a different work. The worldbuilding and plot were good, but not so amazing to leave such an impression on him, and the princess wasn’t bad, but was pretty generic in the end.
What he realized was that he adored the idea of the knight. Strong, feared, respected, willing to kill for his loved ones, and brought to his knees by his chosen one, not by force but by his own choice, and met with adoration from the princess in return.
Edge went to sleep very late that night, kept up by thoughts of a shadowy someone holding his leash, keeping him from tearing limbs off, gently caressing him when they didn’t need his protection, kind and caring. The daydream plagued his waking moments, making his face heat up whenever his mind wandered in that direction. He grew fond of the idea with time, feeling it less like an alien impulse filling him with heat, desire and trepidation, and more like a nagging part of his soul, reaching out quietly, insistently, to be fulfilled.
Three months after he got dumped, he signed up to Fetlife with a new account, one that had no connection to the one he usually used as a dom and teacher, and tentatively wrote out a bio with some very basic info about him, some outlines of what kinks he realized he was into, that he was an experienced dom but was interested in exploring subbing, and that he wasn’t interested in casual hookups. Satisfied with his work, he went to make himself a cup of tea, and when he returned to his laptop half an hour later he already got 6 new message requests.
He was excited right up until he read through the first three and realized they were all either asking him to step on their balls or demanding (without any introduction or asking for permission!) that he submit to them, and in general not having read his bio where he said ‘no hookups’.
He sighed deeply. He forgot that he hated the internet, sometimes, but it sure didn’t take long to remind him why. The messages he got after that were for the most part similar in nature or more polite but from people he did know in real life and knew he didn’t want to start anything with. The most promising of them was a young domme interested in educating a sub, who was very respectful and a good communicator, but ultimately they both realized they were looking for something different and bid their farewells. He added all the shitty, demanding doms to his blacklist for future reference, but her he offered a discount for his classes for being a good sport. She seemed delighted, so at the very least he got some new acquaintances.
It was another month of sloughing through shitty DMs and dead ends with more tolerable people before he got a message from a new account, one with a picture of a fireplace as the profile pic.
KingOfN00ds: “Hello! I read in your bio that you are an experienced dom who is interested in subbing, I am also new to the BDSM community but I have zero experience!!! I’m looking to make friends and talk to people and learn, and you wrote in your bio that you teach people so…hello!”
Edge raised a brow. This person actually read his bio before sending him a message. The bar was painfully low, but he was still one of the very few people to clear it so far. Edge’s interest was piqued.
The stranger’s bio provided a bit more context. The person seemed just as peppy there as he did in his DMs, where he learned he was also from Ebbott, that he was a man, that he was a dom-leaning switch and that, much like he mentioned, he was very new and looking for some guidance. Overall, respectfully worded, respectful in his approach to Edge, and seeming open to learning instead of throwing his weight around and bossing people around without asking. Edge was satisfied. That was certainly enough to give at least a conversation a shot. Edge went back to the messages.
ProtectAndService: “Hello. I may have experience as a dom, but being a sub is very new to me as well, so I’m looking forward to learning together. If you have any questions feel free to ask and I will try to answer them or point you towards sources I feel explain things well. It’s nice to meet you.”
Edge looked at the message after he sent it, wondering if perhaps he worded it a bit too seriously, but it wasn’t long at all before he got a new message in return.
KingOfN00ds: “Oh, thank you!!! I actually have some questions if you’re willing to help me out. I’ve been researching things on my own, but some things might be better to ask an actual person with experience!”
What followed was an endless fountain of questions, ones Edge answered from his own experience (which wasn’t negligible), from the experience of people he knew, or by linking YouTube videos or blog posts on certain topics he felt were well-explained. This person had obviously done their homework, the fact apparent in the way he had enough baseline knowledge to hold a conversation with Edge and make some very astute observations that surprised him as well.
It was after a few hours of back-and-forth conversation, some about kink theory and tips and some about complaining about work, before Edge had to excuse himself from the conversation to go sleep, leaving behind a promise that he’d get back in touch. By the time he turned off his laptop his hand was cramped from typing but he was smiling. This person was hungry for knowledge, humble in his learning process and never once in the whole conversation pushed his boundaries or tried to make the conversation more sexual than first established, while also having a bubbly personality and an understated but very snarky sense of humour. They were a delight to talk to, and they sure did make time fly.
Edge went to the bathroom to get ready for bed, putting on his silky red pajamas. He wasn’t sure the other person was interested in any kind of relationship with him apart from mentoring, and Edge could respect that, welcomed it even in his own confusion in figuring things out. He did really like talking to him, though.