Healing/Redemption10 min read
I Woke Up in the Villain’s Body — I Chose to Fix Him
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“Carry him inside!” I shouted before I even knew who I was anymore.
Snow hit my face and tasted like metal. I followed Finch Deleon and two burly guards through the courtyard toward a boy kneeling in the white. He was thin under a too-large robe, one hand buried in snow, the other wrapped in filthy bandages. Blood bled through the wrap and freckled the drifts.
“He’s losing feeling,” Finch said, breath steaming. “Miss, should we—?”
I straightened. My whole chest felt like it had been pulled by strings.
I hated this story. I had read it on my sofa at midnight, furious at the villain who had ruined everything for the boy everyone called Donovan. Then lightning hit my phone, the usual trope, and I woke up with cold in my veins and the villain’s name in my mouth.
“Bring him in,” I said. My voice came out too small and too steady at once.
They carried him in. Donovan lay on the rug and gritted his teeth until his fingers trembled.
“You should be inside,” Finch said. “He won’t last the night.”
Donovan looked at me through the fall of his hair. For one instant I saw a fierce, naked dislike in his eyes.
“You made him freeze him out here,” Finch whispered to me. “Miss—”
“I know,” I said. My hands shook. “Help me with the coat.”
I had been Hallie Cao in my life before this. I was twenty-two, a college dropout with a soft spot for guilty pleasure novels. Now I sat in a pilot version of that villain’s life—rich rooms, a heavy family name, and a boy named Donovan Luo whose life had been ruined before he was even twenty.
“He won’t forgive you,” Donovan rasped when the doctor wrapped fresh bandages. “You like the show.”
I swallowed. My heart wanted to run like a child’s. My head knew the book’s ending: me as the villain who broke him and lost everything. I had to stop that.
“I’m not the same,” I said. “I… I don’t want that to happen.”
He stared at me like I had invented a language.
“You don’t decide that,” he said. “Don’t pretend.”
I almost laughed. “I’m not pretending. Let me help.”
He scoffed and turned his face away. I sat and watched the way his jaw tightened and the way the skin at his wrist caught under the light. The thought of his hand never working right again made something inside me split open.
That night I did one thing the villain never did: I learned his hands.
“Do you do rehab?” I asked Finch the next morning while Donovan slept.
“He refuses,” Finch said, washing a cup. “Miss, he hates it. He hates everyone.”
“I’ll set it up,” I said.
When I walked into Donovan’s room, he had his face buried in the pillow. He heard me come and pushed himself up, scowling.
“Don’t touch me,” he said. His voice held a small, tired warning.
“I know.” I stood in the doorway. “I’ll bring a physiotherapist.”
He laughed, that tight, bitter sound. “Save your charity.”
“You don’t have to forgive me,” I said. “I only want your hand to heal.”
He blinked like someone seeing a stranger draw the curtains. There was a pause, a shift, a small slackening that could have been hope or mistrust.
“You won’t promise anything,” he said finally. “You’ll just—” His voice broke.
“I’ll do the rehab,” I answered. “I’ll learn. I’ll come.”
He let his head fall. “Fine. Don’t tell anyone I agreed.”
“I won’t lie.” I left feeling both small and resolved.
Word spread fast in our house. The servants exchanged glances when they saw me waiting at the clinic door with a notepad and a pair of gloves. I had printed schedules and watched dozens of online tutorials the night before.
The therapist, Kenneth Brandt, was a broad-shouldered man with kind eyes. He gave me two hours of training: gentle joint work, graded strengthening, stretches to prevent scar tightening.
“You can do this,” he said. “But he needs to want it too.”
“I’ll make him want it,” I said too loudly.
Donovan returned from treatment pale and exhausted. He moved slower, and each movement looked like it cost everything he had.
“You'll leave now,” he told me when the staff left.
“No,” I said. “I’ll help you at home. I learned the exercises. I can remind you to do them.”
He stared at me, something indecipherable in his eyes. “Why?”
“Because you deserve better care than you’ve had,” I said. “Because you write beautiful things with your hand. You shouldn’t lose that.”
He almost smiled, but the smile broke into a grimace.
“Keep your pity,” he muttered. “I don’t want—”
“You don’t have to want me,” I cut in, “just let me help with the work.”
He pinched the bandage at his wrist. “You caused a lot more than a bandage,” he said quietly.
I took that in like a blow. “I know. I’ll spend the rest of this life fixing it if I must.”
He made a noise that could have been a laugh, sour and small. “Good luck.”
School was a battlefield. I slipped back into the villain’s skin at first—sharp words, careless cruelty—before my foreign memories and guilt took over. I changed. I started doing my homework. I studied physics for hours, chemistry at night, woke early to do vocabulary.
It shocked everyone. My old clique—Amelie Espinoza and the girls—hovered like flies, waiting for the old Hallie to return. Instead I kept my head down and my textbooks open.
“Soft-core, you’re acting weird,” Amelie whispered one lunch, doctored smile in place.
“I’m studying,” I said. I pushed a plate of vegetables across the table and told Leah Flowers to add an extra portion to Donovan’s tray. Leah blinked like I’d handed her a small sun.
At school a boy from first-year—Armando Barker—pushed Donovan and mocked his wrist. People laughed. The old Hallie would have laughed with them. New me stepped forward.
“Pick them up,” I said, pointing to the books on the floor.
Armando glared. “What? You telling us what to do?”
“Pick them up,” I repeated. I grabbed his jacket and dragged him forward with a shove that left his knees on the ground. The crowd quieted. The terror of that silence was delicious and foreign.
“No one laughed after that,” Finch told me later, a little stunned.
Back at the house Donovan watched quietly. He didn’t thank me. He didn’t praise me. Sometimes he didn’t even look in my direction. Most days he tolerated my presence like a distant weather.
But a change happened, small and stubborn. He let me sit near when he did practice exercises. When his hand clenched in pain he did not push me away. The first time he forced a smile when I showed him a trick to steady the pen, his fingers felt alive enough for me to hope.
“You’re stubborn,” he told me once after therapy, when we walked in the blue-gray dusk to the car.
“You’re the one who won’t let go of his grudge,” I said, huffing.
He glanced at me. “Why do you care?” he asked.
Because I had read the ending and I could not stand it, I wanted to say. Because you are a person, I wanted to say. Because my body carries a history I had to redeem, I wanted to say.
Instead I shrugged and said, “Because I can.”
We fought like strangers who wanted to be kind. He would push. I would push back. Sometimes he would say cruel things and I would feel the old skin of the villain shrink inside me. But mostly, there was a slow thaw.
One night he did something I had never seen in the book: he went out into the cold and prostrated himself in the old town temple to collect beads he had hidden after a fight years ago. I found him there, picking up the beads one by one from the dust-covered floor, his fingers clumsy, his jaw set.
I knelt down without thinking and helped.
“You don’t have to,” he whispered weakly.
“I want to,” I said. “You deserve them.”
We sat on the cold floor until the night turned white. Dawn found us stumbling back home like thieves with a holy prize, my legs numb but my heart full.
After that the household noticed more changes—me bringing soups that tasted like healing, Leah Flowers coached to add bone-broth and warm porridge to Donovan’s diet. Finch would carry an extra blanket. Even the cook started to make a separate dish.
“You’ve changed,” Finch said one evening, eyes wet. “Your father will be pleased.”
My chest tightened. “This is not for him,” I said. “It’s for Donovan.”
The first time Donovan let me put a bead on his wrist, he didn’t snatch it away. He looked at the small black bead and then at me.
“You think helping me erases everything?” he asked.
“No,” I said. “But it’s a start.”
He closed his eyes and said nothing for a long time. Then he tightened his fingers around the bead like a promise to himself.
The school tests came. I took the weird route of studying like I wanted something. I surprised the teachers. My exam for literature scored me top marks. My critics whispered “cheat” until they had nothing left to say and then had to swallow their words.
“You studied?” Donovan said once when I leaned over his shoulder in the car, paper between our hands.
“Yeah,” I answered. “I didn’t want the villain’s life to ruin mine. I want to be someone who stands for something, not just a foil.”
He hummed. “You’re strange.”
“You’re healing,” I said. “You get stranger too.”
On a gray afternoon a group cornered Donovan near the locker room. I was there—of course I was there—and my voice cut through the noise.
“Leave him,” I said.
They turned, and for once the world looked like mine. There was a thinness in the air: no one moved. One of them—Paul Alves—stepped closer.
“You gonna make us leave?” he sneered.
“Pick up his books,” I ordered.
Paul shrugged and turned his head away. Donovan didn’t fight either. He let me handle it. Afterwards he looked at me and for a moment his guard lowered.
“Why are you doing this?” he asked.
“For him,” I said.
We grew into a strange companionship. Donovan’s hand improved, little by little. He practiced exercises in the park until his fingers could hold the pen long enough to write a full paragraph without cramping. He learned to carve smooth letters again. Once, in the clinic, he wrote a short poem and showed it to me.
“You wrote?” I asked, surprised.
“Yeah,” he muttered. “Not great.”
He read aloud: “I forget less now.”
I felt like crying. I held back. “That’s good,” I said simply.
He stared at me and then, unexpectedly, poked my arm with two useless fingers. “You’re not as annoying today,” he said.
We had small, sharp laughs sometimes. He teased me about odd things: the way I hummed under my breath, the way I tried to braid the beads into a bracelet. I told him about the stupid novels I used to read. He asked about the real world beyond our mansion façade, and I answered with things that made him blink.
“Do you want to know a secret?” he asked me once, late at night in the study when the house was quiet and our breaths fogged the air.
“Only if it’s a cute secret,” I said.
He did not smile but there was a softness in him. “I kept these beads because when my grandmother gave them she said: ‘Don’t forget the pain.’ He said, ‘It keeps me honest.’”
I felt my heart trip. “Then keep them honest,” I said. I reached and took his hand. His fingers were warmer now, the bones less brittle. I slid a finished bracelet over his wrist and tied a knot.
“Not forgiveness,” he said quietly.
“No,” I said. “Not today. I won’t ask for it.”
He looked at the beads—black beads, smooth, full of dust and healed edges—and the light in them was different now.
“Maybe later,” he said. Then, almost like a dare, he leaned his forehead against mine.
I froze. My whole life tilted.
“Later,” I repeated.
He closed his eyes. “Don’t leave,” he whispered.
I didn’t.
Winter loosened and the world thawed. Donovan kept his appointments. He laughed more, small and private things that no one else saw. He confided a little. He still had hard days—flare-ups that left him pale—but he kept coming back.
One afternoon the city sent a storm warning, and I watched him through the window as he sat in the snow in our courtyard, hands in his pockets, head down. I ran out and pulled my coat tight.
“Donovan,” I said, because it mattered that he heard his name from my mouth.
He lifted his eyes. “Why do you keep showing up?”
“Because I don’t want your story to be the ending,” I said. “You aren’t a character for others to hurt. You’re a person.”
He closed his mouth like he was trying to swallow a knife. The wind stole his words.
“You’re annoying,” he managed.
I laughed. “I know.”
We built small rituals. Sunday soup, morning flashcards, a string of beads on his wrist that I would rearrange with clumsy fingers. I learned to ask simple questions: “Did you do your stretches?” “Do you want extra soup?” He learned to answer.
One evening he called me in with a soft voice. “Hallie.”
I came.
He pointed to the desk where an old, faded notebook lay. “I tried writing today,” he said. “Could you… read?”
I took it carefully. His handwriting was jagged but steady. He had written a page about a childhood winter, a promise his grandmother made, something about a lost dog and a found name. It was honest and small and alive.
“I like it,” I said. “You should write more.”
“I write to remember things,” he said simply. “To hold onto them.”
“So keep me in your stories,” I said, half a joke.
He looked at me, and the world narrowed. He put his hand over mine. It was not dramatic. It was not a movie. It was two people who had decided to be a little kinder every day.
“You saved my hand,” he said once, voice low.
“You saved yourself,” I said. “You showed up.”
He stayed. He healed in ways the bandages could not measure. He learned to trust a person who used to be his tormentor and had now become his constant. The old villainous scripts had been ripped. We wrote a new scene every morning.
By spring he could hold a pen and write his name without pain. He placed his hand over mine and laced our fingers together—the first time, without flinching.
“Donovan,” I whispered.
He leaned close and pressed his forehead to mine.
“Later,” he said again, but this time his voice was soft and sure.
I tied the last bead knot with both hands: a simple loop, a stubborn tie, the darkness of black beads against his warm skin. The knot was not theatrical; it was precise and final in its smallness.
“Don’t forget the pain,” he murmured, half to himself, half to me. The words had become less of a command and more of a reminder.
“I won’t,” I promised.
He smiled then—full and private—and the curve of it felt like the world tilting into place.
Outside, the garden was emerald and wet. Inside, the beads caught the light like small, honest moons. I tightened the knot and tucked the raw end under the string, then, because endings matter and beginnings do too, I left one tiny tail sticking out.
“Why that?” Donovan asked.
“So it’s real,” I said. “It shows what took work. It shows who made it.”
He looked at the bead knot and then at me.
“You stayed,” he said.
“I stayed,” I repeated.
We held that silence a long time, letting the house breathe around us. No forgiveness declared. No neat lessons. Two people who had learned how to repair what had been broken.
When I closed the window, a cold breeze swept the beads and they chimed softly, a little like a bell.
“Later,” he said again, smiling.
“Later,” I answered.
I ran my thumb over the knot until the tail softened. The beads were his and ours now.
And I—stranger once in this gilded skin—never let go.
The End
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