Two Loves’ True Love’s Kisses - Part 1
True Love’s Kiss would be easier if someone would mention that sometimes you need two of them.
My hella late Secret Santa gift to @benlos. Sorry love, Merry Christmas!
Warning for some dark themes. Ben is depressed, Evie struggles with self esteem and Carlos is abused. Also warnings for neglect, kidnapping, implied rape and suicide.
Despite all those warnings, this fic isn’t that dark. It’s background stuff that is referenced or short scenes.
Someone is knocking at the door. No one ever knocks at the door. Ben doesn’t know what to do.
According to Mrs. Potts, normally, a person would open the door to greet the guest, but nothing about Ben or their castle is ‘normal’. But Mrs. Potts told Ben not to open the door and he isn’t going to.
“Hello? Is anyone home? I’m looking for the prince.”
Ben is the prince, yes. His father, Adam, had been the king, but that was many years ago. He’s probably not the prince this girl is looking for.
“The who is, supposedly, cursed? I think?”
Oh. Maybe he is the one this girl is looking for.
Ben still doesn’t open the door.
He can hear her, so can Mrs. Potts, Lumiere and Angelique, as she walks around the castle and steps over the wild vines and peers in through windows.
Lumiere argues to let her in. “A pretty girl? Open the door! She is looking for you, Master!”
“Don’t you dare!” Mrs. Potts chastises Lumiere. “You know what happened the last time a lovely lady came in through the doors! We don’t need a repeat of…you know who.”
Ben pretends to not hear them. It’s clear Mrs. Potts doesn’t want him to. He follows the young girl through the windows, staying back in the shadows.
“Hello? Hello?” She raps on the glass with her knuckles. “Please, I’m looking for the prince! I have to see him!” She holds her hand to the window and peers in. “Hello?”
He’s fascinated by her. It’s been years since Ben has seen another human. Well, he sees Maurice every few months, leaving a basket of food in the middle of the night, but Ben never says anything to him. Maurice doesn’t like talking to him. So he thinks this girl is pretty, but he doesn’t have a lot of references to compare her to. Her hair is blue and her voice is sweet, it reminds him of Fifi.
“I’m not leaving until I see him, please!”
Ben reaches for the door. He can’t remember the last time the front door was opened.
Mrs. Potts shouts for him. “Benjamin, what are you doing?”
But the door is already open and the girl is running back to the stone path, having heard the rusty hinges creak to life as they opened.
“Holy shit.” She says as Ben stands in the doorway, head tilted at her. “You really are a beast.”
Then she closes her eyes and falls to the ground.
Ben lays her in the library and grabs the books he can find on passing out and fainting, but none of them mention anything about snoring.
Which she does. Kind of loudly.
It’s cute. It’s exciting. There’s a person in his castle!
Cogsworth is not happy about it. But Cogsworth is rarely happy about anything.
“Master! Master!” Lumiere comes running up to Ben later in the day. “She is awake! Your guest, she is asking for you!”
Ben had been in the garden in the back. It’s how they feed themselves, as well as what things Maurice brings once a month. He wipes his claws on his pants and tries to shake the dirt in his fur out.
“Whoa.” The girl says as she stiffles a yawn. The blanket Ben covered her with is know wrapped around her shoulders. “I thought maybe I dreamt you.”
“No.” Ben says. “I’m real.” He studies her. “Are you real?”
She nods. “Are you Ben? Prince Ben?”
She stands and cursties. “Well I am princess Evie.”
Princesses in story books have big gowns and crowns and hair in curls. Evie has on a pretty dress and hiking boots and her hair pulled back.
“Where did you come from?” Ben asks her. “Why are you looking for me?”
Evie sits back down. She yawns. “You’re not the only one who’s cursed. Ever hear of the Evil Queen?”
Ben shakes his head. He doesn’t hear anything. All he has in his castle now are the employees, his friends and family as furniture, and they leave as often as he does.
“Well she’s my mom. And she’s not the nicest.”
His mom hadn’t been nice either.
“She wanted me to find a prince.” Evie says. “But none of them would come to our castle to meet me. She said I wasn’t pretty enough for anyone to travel to meet me.” Evie tugs at the fabric of the couch she’s sitting on, her nails worrying little dents into the side. “So she cursed me. Not with eternal sleep, but close to it. She thought more beauty sleep would help.”
“I think you’re pretty.” Ben tells her. It’s true, he does think Evie is pretty, but he’s not sure what pretty actually is. But Evie is the only person he’s ever met since his mother, so she’s already the best thing Ben has ever seen.
“Thank you. I think you’re quite handsome.” She slowly reaches out and touches the fur of his face. “You’re only half beast, right?”
Ben nods. “My dad was full beast because of a curse. My mother was a human.”
“They’re not around anymore?”
Evie doesn’t ask anymore. Ben would not be upset if she did, though. Everyone in the castle already knows about it, but they all don’t like talking about it.
“If your curse is beauty sleep, how did you get here?” Ben asks as he leads Evie down the hall.
“I’m always tired. I sleep too much.” On cue, she yawns. “But if I was cursed to eternal sleep, I would get lazy and wouldn’t be able to shower or practice cooking and cleaning. It makes it hard to do stuff, but not impossible. I can’t waste my time making friends or reading or daydreaming.”
Ben waits. That didn’t really answer his question. But he doesn’t want to scare Evie off with his curiosity. He hopes she stays for a little while.
“And it can only be broken by true love’s kiss.” She says after a moment of silence. They have reached the kitchen. Evie stares at Chef Bouche, who stares right back.
He’s never been outside the castle walls, but Ben had heard about the forest outside from his mother when he was young. “How did you survive?”
Evie pats the bag on her hip. “I stole my mother’s spell book when I ran away. It’s hard to practice in between…power naps but I manage. It took me months to get here.”
“I’ll walk you out.” Ben tells her. “When you want to leave.” He hopes that’s not for a very long time.
“Actually I was hoping I could stay.” Evie says as Chef Bouche sets her plate down and she thanks him. “It seems we both need to find true love to break our curses.”
Despite what happened with his mother and father, Ben does believe in true love. He sees it with Lumiere and Fifi. He sees love with Mrs. Potts and Chip. He feels it toward all of the people in these walls. There is love in this castle, Ben knows, but none of it has ever broken a curse.
Now that Evie has been here for a month, Ben can see that she doesn’t look like the pictures of people he has in his books. She has dark circles under her eyes. She falls asleep in random places, like at the table and over a chess set. Sometimes she sleeps more than a whole day and Ben will take time to watch the rise and fall of her chest to make sure she’s only sleeping.
He likes her. He really likes her. She’s pretty and soft and doesn’t sneer at his fur or claws or teeth. She isn’t afraid of Ben. She struggles with reading on her own - her mother insisted she only learn how to read enough for recipes and nothing more - but she likes when Ben reads to her.
Sometimes she falls asleep with her head on his shoulder and Ben’s chest feels so tight, he can’t figure out how he’s still breathing.
Lumiere says he’s in love.
“Master, it’s been many years, but I know that look!” He says, hopping to follow Ben as he walks around outside. It is warmer now, nearly summer. “The enigmatic Evelyn is in your every waking thought, yes? Your dreams too?”
Ben has resigned himself to being half-beast. It’s not awful. His father hated it, but his father had also been human once and knew what he was meant to be. The fur and claws are all Ben has ever known. He’s half human too, though. He’s not as large as his father, not as hairy or strong.
He’s afraid to give the other’s hope though. He’s afraid to give Evie hope. He doesn’t want this to crush them if it doesn’t work.
“Speak of the angels,” Lumiere waggles his brows over Ben’s shoulder. “I will leave you two to your…talking.”
He hops away, kissing Evie’s hand as he passes her.
Evie is fascinating. Not just because she’s the first person Ben has talked to in years, but she’s an actual princess. She’s been all over the world. Ben is not the first prince she’s reached. She met a prince from Agrabah whose father had cursed him into a magic lamp, using the prince as genie for whatever he wanted. She met a prince whose mother had mice and birds as companions, speaking to them as easily as they were humans.
Ben may read her stories, but Evie shares her own stories, sparing no detail. She was once also trapped in her own castle, she remembers how exciting anything new is.
The world outside is still waiting for her and Ben feels so selfish that Evie stays with him. He tells her she can leave at any time, as soon as she wants. She’s came of her own free will and she can leave of it too.
She always grabs his hand and says “I was hoping I could stay longer.”
“Are you gardening again?” Evie asks as she stands by his side. She had once been fearful of dirt and ruining her clothes, she admitted one day, but she’s traveled everywhere to find her prince and fallen asleep outside more times than she can count.
“No.” Ben tells her. “I came outside to think.” He hesitates before speaking again. “You can come with me though.”
Evie follows him. “What is this?”
“It’s my mother. Her grave.” Ben says. He looks down at the dirt before them. It had been rounded once, overturned and unsettled, but that had been years ago. Now, it’s just a flat expanse with a stone that Maurice had brought once. Sometimes Ben finds flowers out her and he’s never sure if they’re from Maurice, who braves the woods for a chance to visit his daughter, or from the staff that had cried for Belle more than Ben had.
“No. Mrs. Potts is a good mom to Chip. She’s a good mom to me too.”
“What happened?” Evie asks as she stands closer to him.
“She hated living with a beast.” Ben remembers. “She hated having one for a son even more.”
Everyone says that Belle had been so kind when she first came to them. She treated them with respect and gentleness. She would do anything for her father. She helped around the castle.
But she wasn’t allowed to leave. She missed her father, she missed human interactions, she missed what few friends she had in her village. She was afraid of the beast, who took everything Belle had to give.
She never had love to offer him. She was never the cure for the curse.
The Belle that Ben knew hardly looked at him. The staff had to beg her to feed him as a child, too young to do it himself. She touched him as little as possible, locked herself in a room for days at a time as Ben sat outside waiting for her. She saw the half beast in him - no paws or hooves, but claws; the partial fur on his body as a boy; the lack of horns, but the presence of fangs - and hated him instantly.
When she died, having been found in the bathtub by Adam, Ben was not allowed to see. Fifi and Mrs. Potts kept him in his room as her body was carried out. The staff were all sad, yes, but they hardly wept. They had mourned the loss of Belle many years before Ben was born. The body they found had not been Belle in a very long time.
Adam had dug a grave, only at Lumiere’s pleas, and then left for the woods a few months later.
“If she had given you the chance, she would have loved you.” Evie tells him.
Maybe a mother’s love would have been enough to break Ben’s curse. He’s never thought about it. There was never a chance of it happening.
“You’re kind and gentle, you’re not a monster, Ben.” Evie says as she slips her hand into his. She’s so much smaller than him, her whole hand encompassed by his. “I’m sorry.”
“I’m sorry for your mother too.” Ben looks at Evie. “She shouldn’t be pushing you to find love. Even I know that. She should love you herself.” I do.
“Yeah, but then I would have never left to find you.”
Ben feels his face heat under the warm sun. “You don’t have to stay, you know. You can leave any time you want.”
“I know. But I was hoping I could stay longer.”
“Kiss him! Mademoiselle, please!” Fifi dances around what has been declared as Evie’s room for the past few weeks. She has been here for months now, allowing the her feelings to grow and hoping for Ben’s to do the same. “I beg you! Ze master speaks of you constantly!”
Evie soothes down her dress. For how few people live in this castle, there were plenty of clothes in her size, a leftover from the days before Adam was cursed.
“You need true love’s kiss, ze mast needs true love’s kiss, you are a match made in Heaven!”
“Stunning, gorgeous, the master will not be able to resist you!”
They don’t have a time limit. Adam had one, Evie knows from the stories the villagers still whisper. He had until the last petal fell on his enchanted rose. But Ben has all the time in the world. Adam’s curse has been diluted for Ben, passed down to an innocent child who’s only mistake was being born.
Evie, having a mother who places curses and being under a curse herself, is a bit of an expert in them.
And Ben knows exactly what tonight is. Evie had told him and he had nervously agreed, after reminding Evie a thousand times that he had never kissed anyone.
Evie has kissed a few princes in her travels for her true love. Jay and Chad and Harry, all kind and charming, but not her true love. Last she had heard, Jay was spending plenty of time with Chad, and Harry had met a princess named Audrey. As far as Evie knows, Harry and Jay’s curses have not been broken yet, but she hopes the best for all of the princes she’s met.
This is different with Ben. He’s more than kind and charming, he’s soft and gentle and looks at Evie like she crafted the very world they live on. He adores all of his staff and has put her happiness above his own at every turn, reminding Evie that she can leave the castle at any time to see other people again.
She loves him. She is certain of it.
The ballroom is lovely. Angelique had told her that Adam and Belle had once danced in here, trying to ignite a spark, but it had led to Belle running to her room and Adam clawing up the walls, which are still there today.
They will replace the haunting memories of this castle with brilliant ones, joyous and hopeful and loving memories. Evie loves Ben and nothing else matters.
He’s in a suit, looking so awkward and uncomfortable, but he doesn’t pay his clothing any mind when he sees her on the staircase. She can’t hear him, but from across the room, she can see his lips form her name.
All of the staff are watching on the sidelines. Because their curse originated with Adam, it follows down to Ben, but Evie thinks that they aren’t concerned with their own curses and former lives. They just want to see Ben happy. They love him just as he loves them.
Now is not the time to yawn, but she can’t help it. Ben doesn’t mind. Evie’s tired. She’s tired of being tired. She’s sick of having half her energy and being wiped out from every walk around the castle. She wants to feel awake again, she wants to feel alive and Ben makes her feel alive.
She cups his face gently and he allows himself to be pulled down to her, completely giving up his control. Evie takes a breath and thinks I love you and presses her lips to Ben.
Curse or not, she wants to kiss Ben. His lips are chapped and his fur tickles and Evie smiles into his mouth.
A lifted curse will be lifted immediately. There is no waiting period.
Ben is still a beast and the staff are still furniture and Evie is still yawning.
“I don’t understand.” She looks into Ben’s eyes. “I love you.”
“I love you too.” He says back. Evie believes him completely. “I don’t know what’s supposed to happen.”
He’s not supposed to have fangs and fur and claws. The staff aren’t supposed to be made of candles and feathers. She’s not supposed to want to lie down a sleep on the floor.
“How can it not work?” Evie pulls away from him and looks at the floor.
“I don’t care if it doesn’t.” Ben says as he reaches out his hand and waits for her to come to him. “I still love you.”
Curse or not, she loves Ben. Evie can feel it in her chest and her heart and her blood. She loves Ben.
And Ben’s not hers either.
“I don’t want to leave you.” She tell him.
More months pass. Their curses are still not lifted. But this is the best life Evie has had in a while. She has a home in the castle, she has Ben and friends in the staff. She has a giant bed she can sleep most of her day on. Blankets and pillows have been stored in every room just in case the staff wanders in to find her sleeping on the couch.
Evie asks to go to the village. She wants to pick up hobbies. Maybe she’ll get into sewing again, regardless of the infinite clothes in the castle. Or she’ll try to learn to read better. Maybe she can write a letter to Jay and Chad and Harry and ask how they’re all doing.
Ben takes her through the forest, snarling at anything that gets too close. It’s funny because Ben is not scary, but the animals of the woods don’t seem to know that.
He leaves her at the edge of the trees, staying in the shadows, even though no villagers are nearby. He is technically king of these people now, but he knows none of them. None of them know Ben, their king, exists.
She had passed through here earlier in the year, but now it’s fall, nearly winter, and Evie keeps her hood up. She hopes no one will recognize her. They are all set on food because of their garden and Chef Bouche who preserves everything, but she comes for writing supplies and fabric and maybe a toy for Chip, something he doesn’t need hands to play with.
People pass by. Evie sees Maurice, Ben had pointed her out to him one night as he snuck food onto the ground - some meats and bread - as Belle’s father. Ben has only ever met Maurice a few times in his childhood. Evie has never met him and he does not know of her.
A large man with black hair talks loudly over the marketplace. A trio of blondes swoon at his side, each of them holding the hand of a child that looks very much like this man.
Evie forgot how social she used to be. In her travels to find love, she met many people. She has the grace and smile of a princess. She wishes she had time to speak with more people, but she’s tired and Ben is waiting for her.
“Out!” A woman shrieks across the road. Evie turns to the noise. “Get out, you insufferable brat!”
Furs and Fauxs is a shop Evie had avoided. With Ben in her life, she’d rather not use fur, real or fake, in her clothing. There’s a woman with black and white hair shoving a young man onto the pavement. There is blood on his face and arms. He cowers at her feet.
“I’m so sick of you!” She screeches as she brings her hand down on the man, hair just like hers. “You can’t sell anything! You can’t clean worth a damn! You lazy son of-!”
“Hey!” Evie shouts and takes off running as the woman draws her foot back. “Leave him alone!”
This woman, the owner of the store, pays her no mind and kicks the young man.
Evie drops to his side and yanks his arm over her shoulder. Her bags are forgotten in the street. She hoists him to his feet and grunts under his weight.
“Take him!” The woman screams. “I don’t ever want to see his worthless, shit face again!”
Evie tunes her out. “Hey.” She gasps. “Can you walk?”
The man groans. His face is swollen and he has a lump on his temple. One of his legs is bent and he cradles his free arm to his chest.
When Evie looks around, no one is looking at them. People are making an effort to not look, backs turned decidedly away.
They are completely ignored as Evie guides him to the edge of the village, down a hill and through a field.
She collapses before the edge of the woods, where Ben is waiting. She’s too tired. Adrenaline hit her hard enough to get this guy away from that psycho, but now she’s crashing.
“Evie?” Ben is standing in front of her, crouched down. “What’s happened? Who is this?”
“Don’t know.” Evie sighs. It’s dark out, it’s night time, it’s sleep time anyway. “Didn’t get his name.”
“Okay. Okay.” Ben says, partially to himself and partially to her. “Okay. He looks really bad.” Ben turns around, stays low to the grass. “Can you hop on my back?”
Evie grunts as she does so, wrapping her arms around Ben’s neck.
“I can’t hold you up, okay?” Ben asks as he tries to look at her. “Can you hold on to me?”
Evie nods into his neck. She’s tired. They have to get home. Home is where the bed is. But the field is nice too.
“Yes!” She groans. “I can do that.” She tightens her grip and wraps her legs around his waist.
Ben, with the strength of a beast, scoops up their stranger, one hand under his knees and the other around his back. “Evie, he looks awful. What happened?”
“She was beating him.” Evie looks at the young man over Ben’s shoulder. “I think it was his mom. No one was helping him.”
“Well, we will, okay?” Ben begins to walk into the woods, toward the last bit of sun that is disappearing over the horizon. “Just stay awake so you don’t fall okay? Tell me about the village.”
Evie yawns and mumbles what she saw and what she bought, still laying in the street. Ben walks them through the forest, growling at anything that he sees. The young man in his arms breathes steadily and doesn’t wake up until the next morning.
