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starfishstarFANTASTIC BEASTS AND HOW TO WIN THEIR HEARTS: A RETELLING OF BEAUTY AND THE BEAST
by stereolightning and starfishstar
SUMMARY:
A man with nowhere else to turn agrees to live forever in a remote mansion that exists in perpetual autumn, his host a reclusive character known only as the Beast. By turns attentive and taciturn, the monstrous lord of the house keeps his dark secrets close to his chest, yet both host and guest find themselves increasingly captivated by one another. But how can a Beast give his heart while he remains a prisoner of his own curse?
A fusion of Harry Potter with Beauty and the Beast, told in seven chapters.
CHAPTER TWO
The Beast was unused to having guests, for obvious reasons. He’d had friends once, even a best friend, but that was long ago.
He did not understand this man who stood before him now. Brownish hair, average height and an average build, aside from at the moment looking rather on the undernourished side of slim. Nothing remarkable about him, and yet he stood looking at the Beast in all his monstrosity without flinching.
“Thank you, Beast, for your hospitality,” the man said gravely. “Far too many in this world are casually cruel to those they do not understand, and I appreciate your kindness more than you can know.”
The Beast shook his great head in confusion. Kind was not a word often applied to him, even if there had been anyone around to call him anything at all. “You’re welcome,” he said. These were words he had not uttered in many years. “Please make yourself at home. If you are to be my guest here, I want you to be comfortable. I can’t offer much in the way of entertainments, but I can at least offer you food and a roof and a bed.”
The man smiled as if at a private joke. “I don’t believe I need to fear I’ll grow bored here. Er, have you seen your own library?”
Unused to human conversation after so long living apart, the Beast cocked his head, unsure if this was sarcasm or not. The silence stretched between them, increasingly awkward the longer he couldn’t think what to reply.
“But in any case,” the man—Remus—said at last, to fill the silence. “If I’m to be your guest here and avail myself of your hospitality, I don’t wish to sit idle. I would like to make myself useful around the house, if I can. I—er—I don’t wish to imply any negligence on your part, but I did notice a boggart in a grandfather clock, and it looks as though you might have a bit of a pixie infestation. Perhaps I could take care of them for you, as a small token in exchange for your hospitality?”
The Beast blinked, and then was distracted by his blinking. Even after all these years, the sight of his own long, dark and unquestionably inhuman eyelashes still caught him by surprise. “You needn’t to do that,” he said gruffly.
“But I would like to,” Remus replied. “It would be my pleasure to be of some use. My father was an expert on magical creatures, and I learned a great deal from him. Would you allow me to help you in that way?”
“Yes,” the Beast said, his answer startled out of him before he’d had a chance to think about it.
Remus smiled then, and the Beast wondered that he’d first thought the man plain.
#
The day passed as if in a strange dream. There was a man in the house, a fully human man. The Beast, shy of being seen and all too conscious of his grotesque form, hung back out of sight, but watched from discreet shadows as this curious man got to know his home.
He observed Remus’ delight over the rare tomes in the library, which the Beast himself rarely touched, and he noted the quiet competence with which Remus tackled the rogue boggart in the grandfather clock—an ancient timepiece which had, indeed, once belonged to the Beast’s own grandfather.
He watched Remus exploring the house’s extensive gardens, saw how Remus smiled to himself at the sight of two golden snidgets play-fighting on the lawn, saw how he trailed a hand thoughtfully along the branch of an apple tree laden with fruit. The Beast wondered what the man thought of his strange, enchanted home out of time. And he wondered how long it would be before his guest realised what a grave mistake he had made in agreeing to stay.
The man was clearly clever, with a searching mind. Perhaps he would discover a loophole for himself and find a way to leave, despite the curse that trapped the Beast himself here. Surely that was the most likely turn of events, and the Beast would be left alone once again. He tried to harden his heart now, against that future inevitability.
That evening, the Beast instructed the house-elves to again lay a feast for his guest. At first he hadn’t wanted to keep the house-elves—what did a solitary Beast need with servants?—but he had inherited them with the house, and the elves had grown distraught at the mere mention of any possible leaving. Now, for the first time, he was glad of them, because his guest looked like a man who could stand to be fed by a small army of overzealous, underemployed elves.
The Beast watched Remus tread quietly over the threshold into the banquet hall, watched him look around curiously. But this time, Remus didn’t take a place at the table.
“Beast?” he called. “Master of the house, are you there?”
The Beast said nothing.
“Beast, I wish you would join me. I’d rather not dine alone.”
The Beast said nothing. Poor company that he was, surely eating alone would be preferable.
Remus sighed, and ran one hand along the edge of the heavily laden table. “Beast,” he said more softly. “I know I won’t be bored here in this house, but I will be lonely, if I’m never to have your company. Will you dine with me?”
There was a long silence. The Beast, surprised, observed the man and saw that he really meant it. Hesitantly, he pushed aside the tapestry behind which he stood, and stepped into the room.
Remus looked up, and a quirk of a smile played around his lips, at the sight of his host emerging from behind a wall hanging.
“Yes,” the Beast said, his tongue still feeling heavy and hard to manipulate after so long in disuse. “I will dine with you. Please take a seat.”
They sat opposite each other at the foot of the long table. The Beast gestured for a house-elf, who scurried in and poured Remus a glass of wine. Then the Beast and the man lifted their knives and forks and ate in awkward silence.
“Would you tell me a story?” Remus asked at length, as the Beast grew increasingly and uncomfortably aware of all the odd noises his house made when there was someone there to hear them.
“I don’t know any stories,” the Beast said. “It’s a long time since I read any sort of make-believe.”
“Tell me something true, then,” Remus suggested. “Tell me something real that has happened to you.”
The Beast set his wine on the table. It was a sweetish red with notes of persimmon and coriander. When he had been happy enough to enjoy wine properly, he had been too foolish to pay attention to its subtleties. Now the pleasure it gave him felt like a backhanded compliment.
There was only one story the Beast remembered any more. The light amusements, the festive anecdotes, they had left him long ago, and his only remaining story was a painful one to tell. “During the war—” he began, then stopped again. He couldn’t find the words; his past was not something he had any experience in telling. He had lived alone since those cataclysmic events that had changed everything. He looked helplessly across the table at his guest, unable to answer even this simple request.
“It was a terrible time,” Remus said softly. “I took the coward’s way out; I was abroad for nearly all of it. I was...approached, by acquaintances who had allied themselves with Voldemort. They were rather forceful in their insistence that I join them. But my parents were dead and there was no one they could hurt but me, so I left for Algiers, then kept wandering eastwards. I could have done more, should have done more, if I had known whom to contact. I was young and afraid and alone.”
“You were schooled at home,” the Beast said, glad to be back on firmer footing.
“Is it so obvious?”
“We would have met, at school.”
“At Hogwarts, you mean.”
The Beast nodded, and bent his heavy head to stare unseeingly at the plate before him. His Hogwarts schooling seemed so long ago now, those golden days of youth that, in retrospect, he had never really deserved.
Remus, meanwhile, picked at the dregs of his stew. He ate modestly, no matter what the house-elves put before him. And something about his quietly amiable presence invited confidences. Remus had asked for his story; the Beast resolved to try.
“I was at Hogwarts,” the Beast said, his voice sounding rough to his own ears. “I was there when the war began. My friends and I thought our brains and our daring were just what the resistance needed.” He laughed hollowly and added, though Remus hadn’t asked. “Yes, I once had friends.”
He met Remus’ eyes, and saw the question there.
“They’re dead now.” The Beast’s fork clanged against his plate.
“I’m so sorry.”
The Beast stared into the blood-dark stain of wine in his glass. “You wouldn’t pity me if you knew all. How I betrayed them without meaning to betray them. How I failed to protect them and in the process earned myself this curse—” He stopped short. He’d shared too much.
The Beast made the mistake of meeting Remus’ eyes, which were wide with sympathy, his fork forgotten halfway from his plate to his lips.
“Don’t pity me,” the Beast growled. “This outward form is no less than I deserve. I am a beast in form, because I am monstrous inside.”
“Surely—” Remus began, one hand reaching out towards the Beast’s hairy arm.
The Beast flinched away and shoved his chair back. He stalked from the table and exited the banquet hall without a backwards glance. Growling, he retreated with heavy footsteps to a shadowed room on the upper floor, a room plagued with doxies and horklumps, and paced there, back and forth along the lengths of a battered Turkish kilim.
Along the room’s wall, behind sheer emerald curtains, ran a long line of family portraits, who stared and sneered at the Beast as he paced past. There was the cruel aunt who had revelled in twisting children’s ears. There was his mother, her expression permanently fixed in a scornful twist, though the rest of her portrait moved. There was his brother, pale and darkly intense. And, like nearly all the Beast’s family and acquaintances, dead.
And there, at the end of the wall, was a portrait of the Beast himself as a young man, haughty, pale and angular. Human. He’d had all the beauty and joy one man could want, and he had failed to treasure it.
The Beast trod the carpet, back and forth, long into the night. His sharp ears detected Remus’ retreat from the dining room, his paging through books in the library, also late into the night. The Beast could hear, too, the house-elves’ industrious chatter, and the shrill, argumentative voices of the pixies scrabbling along the wainscoting behind the drapery. Something was scrabbling in the Beast’s heart, too, a drowning rat, an ancient fear.
The broken body of his dearest friend. The lifeless eyes of his friend’s wife. The terrified scream of their orphaned child.
“I am a monster,” the Beast whispered to the portrait of his younger self.
His own teenaged, unblemished face stared back at him. The portrait yawned, carelessly bored and insensible of what lay ahead.
The Beast crossed the hall and plucked up the magic mirror that he kept in a dark corner of his bedroom. There was nothing to be seen in it at the moment, only darkness, and the sounds of snoring. The boy was safe, at least. And he knew he had only to call if he were not.
Nonetheless, the Beast couldn’t cease his restless pacing, his wild thoughts. He walked and walked, and didn’t go to bed until dawn.
(continue to CHAPTER THREE)
by stereolightning and starfishstar
SUMMARY:
A man with nowhere else to turn agrees to live forever in a remote mansion that exists in perpetual autumn, his host a reclusive character known only as the Beast. By turns attentive and taciturn, the monstrous lord of the house keeps his dark secrets close to his chest, yet both host and guest find themselves increasingly captivated by one another. But how can a Beast give his heart while he remains a prisoner of his own curse?
A fusion of Harry Potter with Beauty and the Beast, told in seven chapters.
CHAPTER TWO
The Beast was unused to having guests, for obvious reasons. He’d had friends once, even a best friend, but that was long ago.
He did not understand this man who stood before him now. Brownish hair, average height and an average build, aside from at the moment looking rather on the undernourished side of slim. Nothing remarkable about him, and yet he stood looking at the Beast in all his monstrosity without flinching.
“Thank you, Beast, for your hospitality,” the man said gravely. “Far too many in this world are casually cruel to those they do not understand, and I appreciate your kindness more than you can know.”
The Beast shook his great head in confusion. Kind was not a word often applied to him, even if there had been anyone around to call him anything at all. “You’re welcome,” he said. These were words he had not uttered in many years. “Please make yourself at home. If you are to be my guest here, I want you to be comfortable. I can’t offer much in the way of entertainments, but I can at least offer you food and a roof and a bed.”
The man smiled as if at a private joke. “I don’t believe I need to fear I’ll grow bored here. Er, have you seen your own library?”
Unused to human conversation after so long living apart, the Beast cocked his head, unsure if this was sarcasm or not. The silence stretched between them, increasingly awkward the longer he couldn’t think what to reply.
“But in any case,” the man—Remus—said at last, to fill the silence. “If I’m to be your guest here and avail myself of your hospitality, I don’t wish to sit idle. I would like to make myself useful around the house, if I can. I—er—I don’t wish to imply any negligence on your part, but I did notice a boggart in a grandfather clock, and it looks as though you might have a bit of a pixie infestation. Perhaps I could take care of them for you, as a small token in exchange for your hospitality?”
The Beast blinked, and then was distracted by his blinking. Even after all these years, the sight of his own long, dark and unquestionably inhuman eyelashes still caught him by surprise. “You needn’t to do that,” he said gruffly.
“But I would like to,” Remus replied. “It would be my pleasure to be of some use. My father was an expert on magical creatures, and I learned a great deal from him. Would you allow me to help you in that way?”
“Yes,” the Beast said, his answer startled out of him before he’d had a chance to think about it.
Remus smiled then, and the Beast wondered that he’d first thought the man plain.
#
The day passed as if in a strange dream. There was a man in the house, a fully human man. The Beast, shy of being seen and all too conscious of his grotesque form, hung back out of sight, but watched from discreet shadows as this curious man got to know his home.
He observed Remus’ delight over the rare tomes in the library, which the Beast himself rarely touched, and he noted the quiet competence with which Remus tackled the rogue boggart in the grandfather clock—an ancient timepiece which had, indeed, once belonged to the Beast’s own grandfather.
He watched Remus exploring the house’s extensive gardens, saw how Remus smiled to himself at the sight of two golden snidgets play-fighting on the lawn, saw how he trailed a hand thoughtfully along the branch of an apple tree laden with fruit. The Beast wondered what the man thought of his strange, enchanted home out of time. And he wondered how long it would be before his guest realised what a grave mistake he had made in agreeing to stay.
The man was clearly clever, with a searching mind. Perhaps he would discover a loophole for himself and find a way to leave, despite the curse that trapped the Beast himself here. Surely that was the most likely turn of events, and the Beast would be left alone once again. He tried to harden his heart now, against that future inevitability.
That evening, the Beast instructed the house-elves to again lay a feast for his guest. At first he hadn’t wanted to keep the house-elves—what did a solitary Beast need with servants?—but he had inherited them with the house, and the elves had grown distraught at the mere mention of any possible leaving. Now, for the first time, he was glad of them, because his guest looked like a man who could stand to be fed by a small army of overzealous, underemployed elves.
The Beast watched Remus tread quietly over the threshold into the banquet hall, watched him look around curiously. But this time, Remus didn’t take a place at the table.
“Beast?” he called. “Master of the house, are you there?”
The Beast said nothing.
“Beast, I wish you would join me. I’d rather not dine alone.”
The Beast said nothing. Poor company that he was, surely eating alone would be preferable.
Remus sighed, and ran one hand along the edge of the heavily laden table. “Beast,” he said more softly. “I know I won’t be bored here in this house, but I will be lonely, if I’m never to have your company. Will you dine with me?”
There was a long silence. The Beast, surprised, observed the man and saw that he really meant it. Hesitantly, he pushed aside the tapestry behind which he stood, and stepped into the room.
Remus looked up, and a quirk of a smile played around his lips, at the sight of his host emerging from behind a wall hanging.
“Yes,” the Beast said, his tongue still feeling heavy and hard to manipulate after so long in disuse. “I will dine with you. Please take a seat.”
They sat opposite each other at the foot of the long table. The Beast gestured for a house-elf, who scurried in and poured Remus a glass of wine. Then the Beast and the man lifted their knives and forks and ate in awkward silence.
“Would you tell me a story?” Remus asked at length, as the Beast grew increasingly and uncomfortably aware of all the odd noises his house made when there was someone there to hear them.
“I don’t know any stories,” the Beast said. “It’s a long time since I read any sort of make-believe.”
“Tell me something true, then,” Remus suggested. “Tell me something real that has happened to you.”
The Beast set his wine on the table. It was a sweetish red with notes of persimmon and coriander. When he had been happy enough to enjoy wine properly, he had been too foolish to pay attention to its subtleties. Now the pleasure it gave him felt like a backhanded compliment.
There was only one story the Beast remembered any more. The light amusements, the festive anecdotes, they had left him long ago, and his only remaining story was a painful one to tell. “During the war—” he began, then stopped again. He couldn’t find the words; his past was not something he had any experience in telling. He had lived alone since those cataclysmic events that had changed everything. He looked helplessly across the table at his guest, unable to answer even this simple request.
“It was a terrible time,” Remus said softly. “I took the coward’s way out; I was abroad for nearly all of it. I was...approached, by acquaintances who had allied themselves with Voldemort. They were rather forceful in their insistence that I join them. But my parents were dead and there was no one they could hurt but me, so I left for Algiers, then kept wandering eastwards. I could have done more, should have done more, if I had known whom to contact. I was young and afraid and alone.”
“You were schooled at home,” the Beast said, glad to be back on firmer footing.
“Is it so obvious?”
“We would have met, at school.”
“At Hogwarts, you mean.”
The Beast nodded, and bent his heavy head to stare unseeingly at the plate before him. His Hogwarts schooling seemed so long ago now, those golden days of youth that, in retrospect, he had never really deserved.
Remus, meanwhile, picked at the dregs of his stew. He ate modestly, no matter what the house-elves put before him. And something about his quietly amiable presence invited confidences. Remus had asked for his story; the Beast resolved to try.
“I was at Hogwarts,” the Beast said, his voice sounding rough to his own ears. “I was there when the war began. My friends and I thought our brains and our daring were just what the resistance needed.” He laughed hollowly and added, though Remus hadn’t asked. “Yes, I once had friends.”
He met Remus’ eyes, and saw the question there.
“They’re dead now.” The Beast’s fork clanged against his plate.
“I’m so sorry.”
The Beast stared into the blood-dark stain of wine in his glass. “You wouldn’t pity me if you knew all. How I betrayed them without meaning to betray them. How I failed to protect them and in the process earned myself this curse—” He stopped short. He’d shared too much.
The Beast made the mistake of meeting Remus’ eyes, which were wide with sympathy, his fork forgotten halfway from his plate to his lips.
“Don’t pity me,” the Beast growled. “This outward form is no less than I deserve. I am a beast in form, because I am monstrous inside.”
“Surely—” Remus began, one hand reaching out towards the Beast’s hairy arm.
The Beast flinched away and shoved his chair back. He stalked from the table and exited the banquet hall without a backwards glance. Growling, he retreated with heavy footsteps to a shadowed room on the upper floor, a room plagued with doxies and horklumps, and paced there, back and forth along the lengths of a battered Turkish kilim.
Along the room’s wall, behind sheer emerald curtains, ran a long line of family portraits, who stared and sneered at the Beast as he paced past. There was the cruel aunt who had revelled in twisting children’s ears. There was his mother, her expression permanently fixed in a scornful twist, though the rest of her portrait moved. There was his brother, pale and darkly intense. And, like nearly all the Beast’s family and acquaintances, dead.
And there, at the end of the wall, was a portrait of the Beast himself as a young man, haughty, pale and angular. Human. He’d had all the beauty and joy one man could want, and he had failed to treasure it.
The Beast trod the carpet, back and forth, long into the night. His sharp ears detected Remus’ retreat from the dining room, his paging through books in the library, also late into the night. The Beast could hear, too, the house-elves’ industrious chatter, and the shrill, argumentative voices of the pixies scrabbling along the wainscoting behind the drapery. Something was scrabbling in the Beast’s heart, too, a drowning rat, an ancient fear.
The broken body of his dearest friend. The lifeless eyes of his friend’s wife. The terrified scream of their orphaned child.
“I am a monster,” the Beast whispered to the portrait of his younger self.
His own teenaged, unblemished face stared back at him. The portrait yawned, carelessly bored and insensible of what lay ahead.
The Beast crossed the hall and plucked up the magic mirror that he kept in a dark corner of his bedroom. There was nothing to be seen in it at the moment, only darkness, and the sounds of snoring. The boy was safe, at least. And he knew he had only to call if he were not.
Nonetheless, the Beast couldn’t cease his restless pacing, his wild thoughts. He walked and walked, and didn’t go to bed until dawn.
(continue to CHAPTER THREE)
