Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

The light in the bathroom floods over Ben as he rubs the sleep away from his eyes.

Ben sighs. He scratches a hand through his hair, lackadaisical, and once done, lifts his lips away from his mouth to peer at the teeth within. They’re fine, he guesses, a little too sharp, too many in the back, too white - but it’s his bleeding gums that are the problem, and he spits a fat glob of red liquid into the sink, grinning uglily at the mirror as more drips down his chin. He guzzles water from the faucet, swishing and hawing in the back of his throat, and pats down his newly cleaned mouth with a towel that he discards into a waste basket. Its white surface is ruined with blood.

He’s getting more teeth in, again. He can feel a dull ache in the back of his mouth, and if he peers, he can see a third and hopefully a final row of sharp little needles forming - he’s already a bit crowded up front, dodging his peers’ concerns at his “uniquely toothy” smile and having resorted to merely lifting the corners of his lips in greeting. Ben washes his hands, hair flopping over his face, switches the bathroom light off, and ventures out into his bedroom, where he crawls into his makeshift cave of blankets and pillows, and sleeps, open-eyed, like he does every night.

He doesn’t dream.

When Ben was a little boy, he used to kill and eat birds.

He was never caught, he remembers, with something mixed between fondness and surprise. He used to feel guilty after tearing their organs out, a toddler slurping on raw, bloody intestines in the hidden recesses of a royal garden, so tired of his baby food, and burying their mangled bodies away from where anybody might find them. He was never cruel to them - killing them was not cruel, he thought, because he did it quickly, efficiently, and he could not stop either, because to kill to eat was his inexplicable instinct, and he was nothing else if not an obedient child.

Ben remembers the birds - so pretty and bright, and so tasty. They melted in his mouth whenever he could slip away from his parents’ knees and venture into the grounds of their estate. Some of his fondest memories are of eating - not the cultured french cuisine of his family, never that, but of really, truly, eating, a toddler suckling the chest of a bird, a happy child sequestered away on the windowsill of his room, unfortunate squirrel in between his teeth, or even, he admits sheepishly, now, as a teenager, when he enjoys hunting the field mice of the grounds at night and drinking from them against the beautiful blue light of a full moon. 

There's a particular eating memory he cherishes.

When his parents had been away on royal business to Hanover, he’d been left in the care of Grandfather Maurice, who was kind, but inattentive, and who let Ben out, no servants around, while he tinkered. Ben remembers - fleet-footed, twelve, running into the woods after the nearest stag, a grin cracking his lips. He'd chased the majestic animal for long moments until he finally managed it, sinking his teeth into the deer’s neck and bringing it down from his place stalking atop a tree. He remembers how good it felt, how independent he perceived himself to be, how proud, he was, of that stag, and of how he picked at its body, thankful and hungry, for hours on end, that sun-dappled day in the forest. He remembers looking down at his sharp, bloody nails, and thinking, I have made myself happy today, so I cannot be a monster, not really. No matter what the storybooks might say. 

Monsters aren’t usually happy in stories. Ben is. 

Chapter Text

Ben files his nails bi-weekly. It’s something that he’s mastered, ten years into performing the action - locking himself up in his bathroom after a nice steam, pulling a well-hidden pair of clippers from his cabinet, and beginning to round out the unnaturally sharp tips of his hands.

Once he’s achieved a shape he holds up to the light and deems respectable, he props himself up onto the closed toilet bowl, and worms his freshly declawed hands into the little hole he punched through wallpaper and wood so long ago, covered by the back of the toilet. He comes away with a little bottle, the happy peach of it gleaming in the bathroom light. Naked and still shimmering, Ben goes about the process of painting. He hides the blackness of his talons with three exact layers of peach, and by the end of it all, he looks almost human. 

He smiles when he sees himself, and brings his hands up to the mirror, admiring them. They look just like any of his classmates' nails, or anybody’s hands, really. Maybe a little too well-manicured and long, but still, semi-normal. He's a prince, after all. Any aspects of himself that are too artificial are blessedly forgiven with that context. 

He relishes in his nakedness for a long moment, standing in the steam of the bathroom. He pokes his stomach and flexes his fingers and even clicks his third eye-lid in and out, keeping his eyes focused on the buzz of a fly around the light fixture. In that pretty bathroom, with china-blue walls and floors, Ben stands, naked, and hungry. 

The fly looks fat. It’s been a while since he’s had a chance to eat. Too much schoolwork. Too much prep for a coronation nearly a year away. Too much time spent attending to everyone except himself. The fly does not buzz any longer when he catches it. He rolls the body between his fingers, and pops the whole into his mouth. He takes in the flavor of the morsel, and watches his pupils constrict to thin slivers of black in the mirror. He just feels hungrier. 

Ben has never put stock into stories and their ideas of good and evil. 

He considers this as he sits, knees pulled to his chest, sucking away at the remains of a snake. He’d caught it by the tip of the tail in the gardens, and had bitten the head off in one swoop. Now, he slurped the meat of the thing, rocking back into the window frame as he watched the moon outside the window.

Good and evil - what was it? What made something or someone good? Was it an adjective, or more like a verb? He helped people and smiled and always tried to be there. Did these things make him good? Was it possible to be good? Or what about evil? Was he evil? He killed animals. Well, he amended, with a slight smile, he supposed most people killed and ate animals. Just not as quickly as he did. Did this make him evil? Did his nails or his eyes or the way he marked his territory - did these things make him evil? Certainly not, not in his eyes. It’s a conversation he’s held many times within himself, always rounding back to one answer: instinct.

At the end of the day, it’s all a matter of instinct. Nothing more, nothing less. And maybe his peers would disagree, but, well, it isn't their life, is it?

He finishes the last of the snake, chewing away at the textured skin. He licks his fingers, and watches the moon for a moment more - it’s almost full, and he feels himself excite at the thought of a full white moon, rays shining across the forest. The wind cutting his skin as he tears through bramble branches - the heavy burn in his chest from running. He can tell that his parents are confused but not unpleased that he doesn’t live on Auradon Prep’s campus like most of his classmates. When pressed, Ben might smile, and kiss his mother’s cheek. He might say something about wanting to stay close to home, about missing his parents and all the attendants of the castle, about enjoying having his own room, or the relaxing nature of his morning drive across a half hour of winding countryside to get to school. All of these things aren’t untrue. 

But mostly, Ben loves this place. The castle is his; he’d determined that by his fifth birthday, where despite his nanny’s disapproving looks he’d managed to pee on almost every corner of the property. No amount of floral scrub could fool his keen senses - this castle was his. All of this was his. Even the forest, if he were fanciful enough to think it, could be seen as his. That isn’t to say that he hadn’t been slowly working his way around Auradon Prep - but, well, it was difficult. Fairy Godmother’s watchful eyes are at every corner.

He stretches his damp fingers out across the horizon, beyond the forest, and looks at the sea. At the gray island. When he was a child, he’d asked why he and his parents had never visited - because they’d traveled often to galas and peace talks and conferences about the state of Auradon affairs, and they’d been across the continent and back thrice over by the time he was six. His parents had exchanged bemused looks that they’d thought he hadn’t seen, and told him that the island from his bedroom window was the Isle of the Lost, and that criminals were locked within its dome.

Evil people, his father had harrumphed, and that had been the end of the conversation. And if Ben were ordinary, he might’ve accepted the answer - if he were human, he might feel angry at the injustice of the place. However, Ben is not ordinary, nor is he human. When he puts his nails to the horizon and traces the island’s silhouette with his fingertips, he feels nothing but intently curious. 

And of all the aspects of his being, it’s his curiosity that is most dangerous.  

He feels nothing for Audrey.

He revises the thought. It’s not true - he thinks Audrey is lovely. He watches as she speaks, gesturing emphatically about a newest slight from Mr. Jules, her chemistry instructor. Around them, her parents’ garden is lush with roses and sweet-smelling flowers. Audrey’s calico, Rosalie, is napping in a nearby bush. Despite Audrey's prodding, the cat can't stand being around him - the feeling is mutual, although not for the reasons she suspects. The truth is, Rosalie is old, well-fed, and there are more times than he's cared to admit he's almost sunk his teeth into the graying fur around her bell-collar. 

He watches as a mouse skitters across the gravel, and brings his fingertips to rest on the seat of his pants. 

Audrey is lovely. She’s intelligent, and cunning, and has a certain quick-wit that charms almost everyone around her. She’s powerful - she’s a leader. Ben could love her even if she didn’t have these attributes, but they certainly help. He’s known her since they were both toddlers, and held a deep affection for her almost as long, and that alone would be enough for him to rip a man’s throat out if she were to ever be hurt. In summary, his first thought is incorrect - he feels everything for Audrey, but it’s nothing what anyone thinks it is.

He understands, objectively, that they’re dating. That their parents are banking on an engagement, on marriage, on children. That Audrey has been raised to expect this of him, and that he should expect it of her. But mostly, Ben understands that this will never work out. Not only because Audrey doesn’t really know him, the way he actually is, not the Ben he’s put together for everyone - there’s a million reasons, but mostly, there’s feeling, instinct. Audrey is not on his romantic radar. When he looks at her, he sees a sister.

Audrey is taking a petite bite of her sandwich, and smiles when she catches him looking. She offers it to him, and he takes a similarly small bite, laughing when she rolls her eyes at him. Her manicured hands come up to grip his bicep, squeezing mischievously, and he lets her. He leans back on his hands, and he basks in the gaze of his friend. In the pungent smell of nearby deer. In the chimes of her parent’s garden. In the warm, wet, gasping noise of a dying mole as Audrey’s cat stains it's pretty ribbon collar ripping the other animal open.

He smells copper and Audrey’s perfume. He has a good day.