Learn to Be Lonely
Title: Learn to Be Lonely
Pairing: none yet.
Rating: PG
Genre: AU.
Disclaimer: I don't own a Himchan. I kinda wish I had one, but I don't.
Note: Based on Beauty & the Beast.
Once upon a time, there lived a prince in a beautiful castle. The prince, whose name was Himchan, was well-known to be beautiful beyond compare; both men and women in his kingdom spoke without restraint about his good looks, and it was said that there was not a single person in the kingdom who did not know his face. It was unfortunate, then, that behind the prince's handsome face were equally well-known traits - he was cold, and cruel, and vain. He had yet to take a wife, despite being past the age where one would normally have been married off, for every time a woman was presented to him as a potential mate, he goaded her with cruel remarks in regards to her face and body.
The young man had no control of his tongue, and it seemed he would grow into a lonely, miserable old man before he found a woman who filled his expectations. When his father had passed on, and the prince had taken control of the castle, many of the servants had been removed from their posts, banished for being 'blemishes' on his wonderful castle; he kept only a handful of servants who he deemed met the minimum requirements of attractiveness, as well as an older woman who had taken care of him since his birth. Eventually she too passed away, and Himchan was indeed left alone. He rarely left the castle, not deeming it worth his time to do so, and instead holed himself up as he waited for someone to finally appear that would be worthy of him.
It was in the middle of a dark, stormy night when a knock came on the heavy door of the castle; Himchan heard the loud banging on the door and, curious as to what person would dare to venture to his castle, made his way from the study to the foyer to investigate.
The door swung open, and before him stood a miserable old crone. Her back was bent, probably from years of crouching to work; her hands and face were thin and gaunt, an air of death circling around her sagging, wrinkled, gnarled skin. She was spotted with age, her thinning grey hair hanging wispy from her hood as she hobbled forward with the help of a tall walking stick that almost seemed to perfectly match her in its twistedness. Himchan didn't bother to hide the look of disgust as she trailed droplets of rain from her cloak onto the floor.
"What do you want?" he asked shortly, crossing his arms; the woman stumbled a bit, her staff screeching against the floor as it slid and threatened to let her fall, but Himchan made no move to help her. The crone managed to stay on her feet, and as she drew closer she looked up at him. One of her eyes was nothing more than a milky white orb above her long, crooked nose, and Himchan physically recoiled at the sight of it. "Speak quickly, old woman."
"I seek refuge from the cold and the rain, young man," she answered. Her voice seemed to scrape at the boy's very soul, and a twitch ran up his spine. "I have no money, and so I beg for your kindness. Please, allow me shelter for the night, until the storm has passed?"
She wanted to spend the night in his castle? The young man fixed the half-blind old woman with a hard stare and shook his head vehemently.
"I could never allow someone as hideous as you to stay here," he sneered, gesturing idly to her face. "Your countenance even being inside the door is enough of a stain on my castle, to open my rooms to you as a guest... my walls may as well come crashing down around me."
A frown stretched across the woman's face, further distorting her features. Himchan pointed toward the door, indicating she should turn back the way she had come. Outside, the rain pounded down, and the cacophony of it could be heard inside despite the thick stone walls. The woman did not move.
"Be gone, old woman! On you way, may the rain wash away the faults you carry." He turned away from her, intent on going back to his nightly routine.
"The rain couldn't even begin to wash away your faults, dear prince." He made to turn back to her, his anger bubbling up his throat, and her rough hand caught his wrist. "You are nothing more than a self-aggrandising child."
His skin felt as if it had been lit on fire in her unexpectedly tight grip; Himchan gasped, wincing at the prickling pain, and jerked his arm free. The skin of his wrist almost seemed to glow red, the imprint of fingers clearly visible.
He'd angered a witch. The realisation hit him immediately and he looked at her in horror, stepping back to put space between them.
"There's a lesson to be learned here, Kim Himchan," the old crone whispered, eyes fixed on his pulsating wrist. "And you will learn by my hands."
"Please, dear lady," Himchan stammered, stepping back again as she inched closer. "I didn't mean-"
"Dear lady, he says," she hissed, and reached to slap his arm. "I didn't mean it, he says. If you knew respect for others you wouldn't need to know fear now. It's too late."
His skin radiated pain where she touched, immediately going red as well. To his horror, the affliction seemed to be spreading; the glow was working its way down his hand, across his palm and toward his fingertips. On the other arm, he could feel it working its way up his shoulder.
He turned to run, and her staff slammed against the back of his knee. He collapsed to the floor, a small whimper of fear and pain escaping him as fire raced across his skin. The witch stood over him, watching him without a hint of remorse.
"I've heard tales of your beauty and the arrogance it has instilled in you. I appeared before you this night to test you, to confirm the truth behind the stories... and to make you see the error of your ways."
She bent over the trembling prince and pressed her hands to the back of his shoulders. Her magic seemed to work even through his fine clothes, and he writhed under the burst of pain. She ran her hand down his back before lightly touching touching the backs of his thighs. The redness was spreading faster, filling in the spaces between touches as Himchan cried out for help.
No one would come.
"Your skin will carry the true hideousness of your soul." Himchan lifted his head as the witch knelt in front of him. His breaths were coming in short bursts, his entire body in too much pain for him to attempt escape. As the red light crept slowly up his neck, having already covered the rest of his thin form, the witch whispered to him. "Prove yourself changed, or your body will continue to grow uglier to match."
She cupped Himchan's face, palms pressing to his cheeks, and he let out an inhuman howl of agony before slipping into darkness.
It would be hours before Himchan finally woke, curled up on the floor of the foyer, his cheek pressed against cold, ungiving stone. His eyes flickered open slowly; the torches that lit the castle had long since burned out, and everything around him was cloaked in darkness. He groaned softly as he rolled over, his fingers moving to massage the soft rise of his hip. The red glow and excruciating sting had disappeared from his skin, only to be replaced by soreness and stiffness in his muscles from lying on the stone floor. The witch seemed to have gone; there was quiet all around him, only punctuated by the soft patter of raindrops outside the large doors several yards from him.
He stumbled to his feet, closing his eyes when his head started spinning. He touched his face, hand pressing over his eye and his forehead as he waited for the dizziness to pass; it was a moment before he realised that there was something that felt like a cut on his forehead. It snaked between his eye and his nose, barely missing the edges of his eyelids before continuing across his cheek. It didn't feel as if it was bleeding... it didn't even feel like an open wound, and he wondered if it was just a strange indentation in his skin from the floor. He staggered toward the grand staircase on the other side of the wide hall and, leaning heavily on the bannister, moved upstairs to the second floor.
The entire encounter with the witch was a blur in his mind. He fought to remember it as he made his way down the sweeping hallways toward his quarters, a frown on his lips. He could remember the heat in his skin... the pain of it. He could remember how close she had gotten to him, and how her face had seemed to change as she had touched his; his last memory of her before everything went dark was of a young, beautiful face... and a cruel smile.
He fell through the door of his bedchamber and managed to brace himself on a table before he landed on the floor. The large room was just as dark as the rest of the castle, and he felt his way along the wall until he found his bed. There was a candlestick on the bedside table, and with shaking hands he groped around for the wooden box of matches to light it. The flame burst to life as he struck the match, and he blinked at the sudden brightness of it before moving to touch it to the wick.
He picked up the lit candle and carried it to the table, using it to light the others arranged on a candelabra there. With every new flame, the room grew a little brighter, and Himchan could feel the fog clearing from his mind. He could remember her lips moving. He could remember her speaking as her witch fire had seared his skin. But what had the words been? What had she...
The light caught his hand, and he blinked slowly at it before setting the candle down and turning toward the south wall. When he'd moved into this room, he'd had a large looking glass placed there; it was several feet taller than him, reaching from floor to ceiling, its perfect surface making his chambers seem even larger. Tentatively, Himchan moved closer to it, though he dared not look. His hand... when the light had revealed it to him...
He lifted his eyes to face himself in the mirror.
The mark he had felt on his face was neither an indentation from the floor nor a wound; it was a scar, badly healed and puckered, which stretched across the normally soft, clean plane of his cheek. His nose was all wrong and appeared to have set wrongly from an old break he couldn't ever remember having had. His hair had gone white, and it hung limply into his eyes; he leaned closer, his horror making his stomach churn has he realised that one of them was green, while the other was a hazy shade of blue that hinted at potential blindness.
"That's... that's not my face," he whispered, raising his hand to touch his pockmarked cheek. His fingers were long, almost inhumanly long, gnarled and marred with scars down along the back of his hand. "That's not my... that's... that's not..."
His screams resonated through the castle as he ripped at his clothes; even before his shirt was off, he could see the scars that marked him. His chest heaved and he ran his fingers over marks that had healed red, their colour out of place against his previously soft, flawless skin. His nails scraped at them, leaving reddened trails behind and sometimes adding to the damage with self-inflicted wounds as he tried to tear them from his body. The witch's words resonated through him, seemed to echo all around him along with his own panicked screams as he stripped himself completely bare before the giant mirror. There had been trails of jaggedly-healed tissue over his hip bones that had promised to lead lower, and indeed they did. Even his thighs and calves were marked, his skin peppered with ugly flaws that he couldn't claw away.
Himchan's disfigured body shook with a heaving sob. He found that he could not break his gaze away from the twisted, deformed creature that stared back at him from the glass, its own face a mask of his horror and rage. Breathing grew more and more difficult as his hands rubbed over his arms and chest, intent on trying to push the marks off of them despite the fact that they were embedded so deeply in his skin. Outside the glass doors that led onto a balcony, the storm raged on, and a flash of lightning ripping across the sky momentarily turned the room to daylight. The apparition before him grew even more hideous with the added brightness, and Himchan let out a wail of despair as he grabbed a chair from the nearby table and sent it sailing into the looking glass.
It shattered, littering the floor with shards of its reflective surface as Himchan sank to his knees; a large part of the mirror fell just feet from him, and he looked toward it. Though tears of anger and horror had made his vision blur, it was easy enough to see... smashing the mirror did nothing to make the horrible creature disappear. It was him. He was it. And there was nothing within his power he could do to make it go away. He collapsed to the floor, body landing on top of the scattered remnants of the mirror, and his eyes closed once more as panic overwhelmed him.
Pairing: none yet.
Rating: PG
Genre: AU.
Disclaimer: I don't own a Himchan. I kinda wish I had one, but I don't.
Note: Based on Beauty & the Beast.
Once upon a time, there lived a prince in a beautiful castle. The prince, whose name was Himchan, was well-known to be beautiful beyond compare; both men and women in his kingdom spoke without restraint about his good looks, and it was said that there was not a single person in the kingdom who did not know his face. It was unfortunate, then, that behind the prince's handsome face were equally well-known traits - he was cold, and cruel, and vain. He had yet to take a wife, despite being past the age where one would normally have been married off, for every time a woman was presented to him as a potential mate, he goaded her with cruel remarks in regards to her face and body.
The young man had no control of his tongue, and it seemed he would grow into a lonely, miserable old man before he found a woman who filled his expectations. When his father had passed on, and the prince had taken control of the castle, many of the servants had been removed from their posts, banished for being 'blemishes' on his wonderful castle; he kept only a handful of servants who he deemed met the minimum requirements of attractiveness, as well as an older woman who had taken care of him since his birth. Eventually she too passed away, and Himchan was indeed left alone. He rarely left the castle, not deeming it worth his time to do so, and instead holed himself up as he waited for someone to finally appear that would be worthy of him.
It was in the middle of a dark, stormy night when a knock came on the heavy door of the castle; Himchan heard the loud banging on the door and, curious as to what person would dare to venture to his castle, made his way from the study to the foyer to investigate.
The door swung open, and before him stood a miserable old crone. Her back was bent, probably from years of crouching to work; her hands and face were thin and gaunt, an air of death circling around her sagging, wrinkled, gnarled skin. She was spotted with age, her thinning grey hair hanging wispy from her hood as she hobbled forward with the help of a tall walking stick that almost seemed to perfectly match her in its twistedness. Himchan didn't bother to hide the look of disgust as she trailed droplets of rain from her cloak onto the floor.
"What do you want?" he asked shortly, crossing his arms; the woman stumbled a bit, her staff screeching against the floor as it slid and threatened to let her fall, but Himchan made no move to help her. The crone managed to stay on her feet, and as she drew closer she looked up at him. One of her eyes was nothing more than a milky white orb above her long, crooked nose, and Himchan physically recoiled at the sight of it. "Speak quickly, old woman."
"I seek refuge from the cold and the rain, young man," she answered. Her voice seemed to scrape at the boy's very soul, and a twitch ran up his spine. "I have no money, and so I beg for your kindness. Please, allow me shelter for the night, until the storm has passed?"
She wanted to spend the night in his castle? The young man fixed the half-blind old woman with a hard stare and shook his head vehemently.
"I could never allow someone as hideous as you to stay here," he sneered, gesturing idly to her face. "Your countenance even being inside the door is enough of a stain on my castle, to open my rooms to you as a guest... my walls may as well come crashing down around me."
A frown stretched across the woman's face, further distorting her features. Himchan pointed toward the door, indicating she should turn back the way she had come. Outside, the rain pounded down, and the cacophony of it could be heard inside despite the thick stone walls. The woman did not move.
"Be gone, old woman! On you way, may the rain wash away the faults you carry." He turned away from her, intent on going back to his nightly routine.
"The rain couldn't even begin to wash away your faults, dear prince." He made to turn back to her, his anger bubbling up his throat, and her rough hand caught his wrist. "You are nothing more than a self-aggrandising child."
His skin felt as if it had been lit on fire in her unexpectedly tight grip; Himchan gasped, wincing at the prickling pain, and jerked his arm free. The skin of his wrist almost seemed to glow red, the imprint of fingers clearly visible.
He'd angered a witch. The realisation hit him immediately and he looked at her in horror, stepping back to put space between them.
"There's a lesson to be learned here, Kim Himchan," the old crone whispered, eyes fixed on his pulsating wrist. "And you will learn by my hands."
"Please, dear lady," Himchan stammered, stepping back again as she inched closer. "I didn't mean-"
"Dear lady, he says," she hissed, and reached to slap his arm. "I didn't mean it, he says. If you knew respect for others you wouldn't need to know fear now. It's too late."
His skin radiated pain where she touched, immediately going red as well. To his horror, the affliction seemed to be spreading; the glow was working its way down his hand, across his palm and toward his fingertips. On the other arm, he could feel it working its way up his shoulder.
He turned to run, and her staff slammed against the back of his knee. He collapsed to the floor, a small whimper of fear and pain escaping him as fire raced across his skin. The witch stood over him, watching him without a hint of remorse.
"I've heard tales of your beauty and the arrogance it has instilled in you. I appeared before you this night to test you, to confirm the truth behind the stories... and to make you see the error of your ways."
She bent over the trembling prince and pressed her hands to the back of his shoulders. Her magic seemed to work even through his fine clothes, and he writhed under the burst of pain. She ran her hand down his back before lightly touching touching the backs of his thighs. The redness was spreading faster, filling in the spaces between touches as Himchan cried out for help.
No one would come.
"Your skin will carry the true hideousness of your soul." Himchan lifted his head as the witch knelt in front of him. His breaths were coming in short bursts, his entire body in too much pain for him to attempt escape. As the red light crept slowly up his neck, having already covered the rest of his thin form, the witch whispered to him. "Prove yourself changed, or your body will continue to grow uglier to match."
She cupped Himchan's face, palms pressing to his cheeks, and he let out an inhuman howl of agony before slipping into darkness.
It would be hours before Himchan finally woke, curled up on the floor of the foyer, his cheek pressed against cold, ungiving stone. His eyes flickered open slowly; the torches that lit the castle had long since burned out, and everything around him was cloaked in darkness. He groaned softly as he rolled over, his fingers moving to massage the soft rise of his hip. The red glow and excruciating sting had disappeared from his skin, only to be replaced by soreness and stiffness in his muscles from lying on the stone floor. The witch seemed to have gone; there was quiet all around him, only punctuated by the soft patter of raindrops outside the large doors several yards from him.
He stumbled to his feet, closing his eyes when his head started spinning. He touched his face, hand pressing over his eye and his forehead as he waited for the dizziness to pass; it was a moment before he realised that there was something that felt like a cut on his forehead. It snaked between his eye and his nose, barely missing the edges of his eyelids before continuing across his cheek. It didn't feel as if it was bleeding... it didn't even feel like an open wound, and he wondered if it was just a strange indentation in his skin from the floor. He staggered toward the grand staircase on the other side of the wide hall and, leaning heavily on the bannister, moved upstairs to the second floor.
The entire encounter with the witch was a blur in his mind. He fought to remember it as he made his way down the sweeping hallways toward his quarters, a frown on his lips. He could remember the heat in his skin... the pain of it. He could remember how close she had gotten to him, and how her face had seemed to change as she had touched his; his last memory of her before everything went dark was of a young, beautiful face... and a cruel smile.
He fell through the door of his bedchamber and managed to brace himself on a table before he landed on the floor. The large room was just as dark as the rest of the castle, and he felt his way along the wall until he found his bed. There was a candlestick on the bedside table, and with shaking hands he groped around for the wooden box of matches to light it. The flame burst to life as he struck the match, and he blinked at the sudden brightness of it before moving to touch it to the wick.
He picked up the lit candle and carried it to the table, using it to light the others arranged on a candelabra there. With every new flame, the room grew a little brighter, and Himchan could feel the fog clearing from his mind. He could remember her lips moving. He could remember her speaking as her witch fire had seared his skin. But what had the words been? What had she...
The light caught his hand, and he blinked slowly at it before setting the candle down and turning toward the south wall. When he'd moved into this room, he'd had a large looking glass placed there; it was several feet taller than him, reaching from floor to ceiling, its perfect surface making his chambers seem even larger. Tentatively, Himchan moved closer to it, though he dared not look. His hand... when the light had revealed it to him...
He lifted his eyes to face himself in the mirror.
The mark he had felt on his face was neither an indentation from the floor nor a wound; it was a scar, badly healed and puckered, which stretched across the normally soft, clean plane of his cheek. His nose was all wrong and appeared to have set wrongly from an old break he couldn't ever remember having had. His hair had gone white, and it hung limply into his eyes; he leaned closer, his horror making his stomach churn has he realised that one of them was green, while the other was a hazy shade of blue that hinted at potential blindness.
"That's... that's not my face," he whispered, raising his hand to touch his pockmarked cheek. His fingers were long, almost inhumanly long, gnarled and marred with scars down along the back of his hand. "That's not my... that's... that's not..."
His screams resonated through the castle as he ripped at his clothes; even before his shirt was off, he could see the scars that marked him. His chest heaved and he ran his fingers over marks that had healed red, their colour out of place against his previously soft, flawless skin. His nails scraped at them, leaving reddened trails behind and sometimes adding to the damage with self-inflicted wounds as he tried to tear them from his body. The witch's words resonated through him, seemed to echo all around him along with his own panicked screams as he stripped himself completely bare before the giant mirror. There had been trails of jaggedly-healed tissue over his hip bones that had promised to lead lower, and indeed they did. Even his thighs and calves were marked, his skin peppered with ugly flaws that he couldn't claw away.
Himchan's disfigured body shook with a heaving sob. He found that he could not break his gaze away from the twisted, deformed creature that stared back at him from the glass, its own face a mask of his horror and rage. Breathing grew more and more difficult as his hands rubbed over his arms and chest, intent on trying to push the marks off of them despite the fact that they were embedded so deeply in his skin. Outside the glass doors that led onto a balcony, the storm raged on, and a flash of lightning ripping across the sky momentarily turned the room to daylight. The apparition before him grew even more hideous with the added brightness, and Himchan let out a wail of despair as he grabbed a chair from the nearby table and sent it sailing into the looking glass.
It shattered, littering the floor with shards of its reflective surface as Himchan sank to his knees; a large part of the mirror fell just feet from him, and he looked toward it. Though tears of anger and horror had made his vision blur, it was easy enough to see... smashing the mirror did nothing to make the horrible creature disappear. It was him. He was it. And there was nothing within his power he could do to make it go away. He collapsed to the floor, body landing on top of the scattered remnants of the mirror, and his eyes closed once more as panic overwhelmed him.