Chapter Text
The light in the bathroom floods over Ben as he rubs the sleep away from his eyes.
Ben sighs. He scratches a hand through his hair, lackadaisical, and once done, lifts his lips away from his mouth to peer at the teeth within. They’re fine, he guesses, a little too sharp, too many in the back, too white - but it’s his bleeding gums that are the problem, and he spits a fat glob of red liquid into the sink, grinning uglily at the mirror as more drips down his chin. He guzzles water from the faucet, swishing and hawing in the back of his throat, and pats down his newly cleaned mouth with a towel that he discards into a waste basket. Its white surface is ruined with blood.
He’s getting more teeth in, again. He can feel a dull ache in the back of his mouth, and if he peers, he can see a third and hopefully a final row of sharp little needles forming - he’s already a bit crowded up front, dodging his peers’ concerns at his “uniquely toothy” smile and having resorted to merely lifting the corners of his lips in greeting. Ben washes his hands, hair flopping over his face, switches the bathroom light off, and ventures out into his bedroom, where he crawls into his makeshift cave of blankets and pillows, and sleeps, open-eyed, like he does every night.
He doesn’t dream.
When Ben was a little boy, he used to kill and eat birds.
He was never caught, he remembers, with something mixed between fondness and surprise. He used to feel guilty after tearing their organs out, a toddler slurping on raw, bloody intestines in the hidden recesses of a royal garden, so tired of his baby food, and burying their mangled bodies away from where anybody might find them. He was never cruel to them - killing them was not cruel, he thought, because he did it quickly, efficiently, and he could not stop either, because to kill to eat was his inexplicable instinct, and he was nothing else if not an obedient child.
Ben remembers the birds - so pretty and bright, and so tasty. They melted in his mouth whenever he could slip away from his parents’ knees and venture into the grounds of their estate. Some of his fondest memories are of eating - not the cultured french cuisine of his family, never that, but of really, truly, eating, a toddler suckling the chest of a bird, a happy child sequestered away on the windowsill of his room, unfortunate squirrel in between his teeth, or even, he admits sheepishly, now, as a teenager, when he enjoys hunting the field mice of the grounds at night and drinking from them against the beautiful blue light of a full moon.
There's a particular eating memory he cherishes.
When his parents had been away on royal business to Hanover, he’d been left in the care of Grandfather Maurice, who was kind, but inattentive, and who let Ben out, no servants around, while he tinkered. Ben remembers - fleet-footed, twelve, running into the woods after the nearest stag, a grin cracking his lips. He'd chased the majestic animal for long moments until he finally managed it, sinking his teeth into the deer’s neck and bringing it down from his place stalking atop a tree. He remembers how good it felt, how independent he perceived himself to be, how proud, he was, of that stag, and of how he picked at its body, thankful and hungry, for hours on end, that sun-dappled day in the forest. He remembers looking down at his sharp, bloody nails, and thinking, I have made myself happy today, so I cannot be a monster, not really. No matter what the storybooks might say.
Monsters aren’t usually happy in stories. Ben is.