Cursed Princess X Witch!Reader
If you enjoy my writing, please consider buying me a Ko-fi.
cw: brief allusions to homophobia and misogyny
In celebration of Pride Month (and because I am a disaster bisexual), I decided to make Beauty and The Beast queer as fuck. Enjoy.
Once upon a time, there was a princess who was praised as the most beautiful of them all. The King and Queen took great joy in their daughter's looks, for it was their belief that beauty was a woman's greatest asset, so they made it a focal point of their daugher's upbringing.
Because of this, the Princess grew up to be extremely vain and developed a serious case of lookism, for her entire life was shaped around being the most beautiful woman in the kingdom. She was cruel to those she deemed ugly, going so far as to openly mock them in the eyes of the court while laughing at their misery.
One day, a grand ball was hosted in search of a husband for the Princess, and it is here that you enter the picture.
You are a witch who specializes in curses and entered the palace disguised as an ugly nobleman. You heard rumours of the cruel Princess but wished to give her the benefit of the doubt. If she were to treat you as a respected guest despite your appearence, you would bless her with longevity. But if she were cruel to you, you would curse her to become an ugly beast.
As you could imagine, the Princess failed your test spectacularly.
Appauled by her cruel words, you revealed your true self and cursed the Princess to wear the shape of a bipedal chimera for the rest of her life. With the head of a lioness, the body of a goat, and the tail of a snake, there was nothing left of the blonde haired, blue eyed beauty from before.
You meant for the curse to be permanent, but started to feel bad as you watched the Princess wail in misery and the King and Queen beg of you to reconsider on their knees. So, you decided to give her a way out.
Presenting her with a magic flower, a violet that would last for a decade, you told her that should she earn true love's kiss from a prince before the flower wilted, she would return back to her human self. If not, the curse would be forever and she would live as a beast until the day she died
Originally, the prince part wasn't specified as a condition for breaking the curse, you were just going to make it so that the curse was broken if she recieved true love's kiss from whoever could fall in love with her beastly self, but the King was furious at the notion of his daughter potentially marrying a commoner, so you included that part to stop his whining.
And so, for the next nine years the King and Queen would search endlessly for a prince to break the curse, promising the Princess' hand in marriage to whomever succeeded. But no prince wanted to marry a woman that looked like a bipedal lion sewn onto a goat with a snake tail, and the Princess grew bitter and melancholy with each passing day.
During that time, you watched the Princess from your magic globe. At first, it was simply to keep tabs on the royal family to make sure they did not send knights after you. But living alone in the woods can get incredibly lonely, and after having one too many drinks one night, you decided to talk to the Princess.
The Princess was understandably enraged when you appeared inside her mirror - the only one she had not shattered because it was a sentimental gift given to her on her fifteenth brithday from her late uncle - yelling at you in vivid detail about how she wished for you to be slowly dismembered by an angry mob.
But when you did not disappear despite her threats and display of violence (half of the furniture in her bedroom was destroyed during her outrage), the Princess calmed down enough to ask you why you had to curse her with a loveless marriage on top of becoming a hideous beast.
You did not understand. You gave her an out by finding true love with a prince. You thought she would be happy about that.
It is then that the Princess reveals that she has never, and will never be interested in men. Her biggest secret, one she had kept from everyone because she was taught that her destiny was to become the prized wife of a noble prince, was that she dreamed of having a wife and not a husband.
Oh. Now you felt really bad (you should have stuck with your original plan of making it so that it did not have to be a prince that kissed her instead of caving to the King's wishes).
You apologize to the Princess, for as much as you wanted to change the terms and conditions for the curse's lifting, the bindings of magic had become permanent. You expected another outburst but instead, the Princess sighs and tells you that it's fine, that she always expected to have to marry out of obligation and not love.
Her voice sounded so utterly defeated, so incredibly human and unlike the arrogant royal caricature she was used to being, that it caught you off guard. That was the first time you saw beneath the mask of vainity, and it made you curious to know more about the person underneath.
Day by day, you would vist her through the mirror, and day by day the Princess warmed up to you. Isolating herself for nine years had made her incredibly lonely and mellowed out, so the Princess grew to appreciate the company of the witch she once deemed her greatest enemy.
You shared stories deep into the knight, you talking about your experiences in the woods and she talking about what life was like growing up in a palace where the only thing expected of her was to look pretty.
"I was the realm's beauty. A face to outshine the stars. That was all that I had, and you took it from me."
Okay, now you felt horrible. Granted, she did need to be seriously humbled and punished for her cruelty, but now that you knew that the Princess' vanity was the consequece of being taught to think that she had no value outside of her looks, you're begining to think that you should have approached this from a different angle and given the Princess a chance to re-educate herself rather than immediately curse her.
"Then I suppose the both of us are arrogant. You for your quick judgement, and me for, well, everything." Is what the Princess told you with a small chuckle when you confided in her about your regret.
That was the first time she smiled at you.
Slowly but surely, the two of you were growing rather close. The Princess smiled more and more with each visit and for the first time since she was born, the Princess felt free to be herself.
The final year of the window to break her curse was closing, but stragely, the Princess did not care. She had you, her greatest enemy turned dearest companion, and maybe, just maybe, she could convince her parents to let her live with you when the curse became permanent. If not, she could always try running away (she's never done it, but she's sure she could barge through some knights with her new beastly strength).
Then, a prince came. This one was different from the others, for he did not immediately run away or draw his sword upon seeing the Princess for the first time. Instead, he simply introduced himself.
He was a kind-hearted man who treated the Princess no differently from any other woman, and everyone was certain that he would be the one to break the curse. Including you.
You knew the Princess did not love men, but you also knew that this prince would treat her right. If the Princess must marry a man, at least this one would be kind. It was a bittersweet feeling.
The Princess, on the other hand, was not fine with this development. She had already made plans to elope into the woods with you, she was not about to settle for a man when she found a woman who accepted her despite seeing her at her worst (both as a wretched beast, and as the epitomy of vain arrogance).
So, she began sabotaging her own dates with the Prince in hopes of him growing disgusted of her and leaving like the other princes.
It does not work. The Prince remains kind and cordial towards her, and the Princess is forced to admit the truth to him as a last resort. That she loves women, that she would not be content in a marriage with him because she could never love him the way he wants her to, that she has fallen in love with the witch who cursed her.
After hearing her confession, the Prince smiles and congratulates her on finding love. He says that he loves her as a friend, and will only ever love her as a friend, for he is a man who does not find comfort in romance.
He kisses her hand and wishes her well, and the curse is lifted. For the Princess had received a kiss from a prince filled with true love for a dear friend.
Immediately, the King and Queen began planning for a wedding between the Prince and the Princess, but the bride and groom have other plans.
On the day of the marriage, the Prince stages the scene of a shipwerck, and it appears that the unlucky bride had drowned on her way back to the Prince's kingdom.
In reality, the Princess had made her way to you, tracking you down based on rumors and the surroundings you had shown her through the mirror once, when she complained that she missed the outside world from being stuck inside her room for a decade.
The two of you finally meet in person after a year of talking through the Princess' mirror, and after a long and heartfelt confession with lots of laughs and happy tears, you two decide to live the rest of your lives as a traveling witch and her beloved wife.
And you lived happily ever after.
