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Once Upon a Time, a man.
Not precisely cruel. Hard, yes. Alone—that’s important. Hiding behind what makes him different, what makes him strong (an intellect, a brilliant mind, not fangs or claws) because reactions to that are easy, predictable. He’s never yet disappointed anyone who was only hoping for a deduction.
A prince who gave up on his curse long ago. Stopped trying to be human. He’d say this is all terribly foolish and sentimental, and he’s right, of course, but that’s a thing you have to cede to fairy tales. His mother never told him any. He doesn’t know. He doesn’t know that fairy tales aren’t a voluntary thing, that they spring up on their own wherever something is true. This is true.
The other man would laugh to hear himself called the Beauty. A bitter laugh, even, depending on the day you tried him. Scarred, ordinary, lined in the face. Thrashing at night with memories of a battlefield, so he doesn’t manage “innocent.” Memories of killing men, so he can’t scrape “pure.” But he’s patient, and brave—he’s so brave—and that’s all anyone ever asked the Beauty to be.
Once upon a time, a great man. Once upon a time, a good one.
—-
He’s used to roaring and watching them run. Saves time, saves energy to show them the worst from the beginning. Saves heartbreak, mostly, but he doesn’t know he has anything to break yet. Give him time.
This one doesn’t run, though. He shows up the next day to see the flat, exactly as though he had actually been expected to do so, and isn’t that peculiar. (An answer to a summons, a mixture of honor and curiosity, which are just as important as bravery and patience.) And it’s not a question, not a matter of yes he’ll stay or no he won’t, just a matter of which bedroom he’ll take. (The upstairs room, the tower room. Don’t laugh, John.)
The Beast isn’t used to what he gets in his new castle occupant. He isn’t used to anyone making him eat, or sleep, or care, and he’s been too long alone to be in practice of resisting. Food and sleep are, at least, easy to pretend at, but caring is harder. He doesn’t know how to simulate caring.
If his mother had told him any fairy tales when he was young, he would know that leaving is an essential stage of the story, and he would assume that this is where it happens, that where he’s caught not caring is where Beauty abandons the Beast. And if the Beauty could stop scoffing at his role, he would say so too.
But to both their surprise, he doesn’t leave. The essential stage never occurs. The leaving for home, with every reason to stay and no reason but love to return, that is so integral to stories such as this, is simply skipped over. What home does he have to return to other than this? He came to the castle for lack of anywhere else to go.
They are tested by semtex and flickering laser sights, not jealous sisters and magic rings. And when the Prince’s heart is unlocked, it is not a moment of triumph and fanfare and miraculous transformation. It is ugly and awkward, an inconvenient new liability by the side of a dark public pool.
They nod to each other. His mother never told him any fairy tales, but he must have heard one once because he isn’t worried. He deleted it long ago, but somehow he knows that these things end with Happily Ever After. Cliché. Dull. But he won’t turn it down.
He fires.