#feat. me trying to write past tense and hating it (did it anyway bc i wanted to try something new lmao)

[mayhemwrites]

beauty

Everybody's heard of Razrusha'ya, the Ruined One, who lives alone in a castle in the forest, but nobody's heard of Genya Safin, the young woman who managed to piss off a sorcerer. Alina Starkov goes out looking for her best friend who went missing in a blizzard, and ends up stranded, trapped with Razrusha'ya - but what if the Ruined One didn't deserve to be cursed?

read on ao3 here! written for the AU roulette challenge, with the prompt "fairytale AU"

full fic under the cut - beauty and the beast au, one-shot, if I ever wrote this as a full fic it would be genyalina, 595 words

Why had Mal volunteered to go out hunting in the middle of a blizzard? If he was still alive when she found him, she was going to kill him.

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Alina trudged through the snow, cursing idiot men who were too damn heroic for their own good.

But the longer she walked for, the more afraid she was that she wouldn't find him alive at all - that just like everybody else who went out into the woods in a snowstorm, he'd have been killed. If he was dead, then she'd be all alone in the village. Alone with everybody who would have been happy to leave her to die. So that really wasn't an option. She had to find him.

It didn't matter if the snow was getting deeper as she got further into the woods, or that it had started raining. She was going to find her stupid best friend and get back home, preferably before the rain turned into an all-out storm.

She searched for another three hours before stumbling across a castle in the middle of the woods. Who puts a castle in the middle of a forest?

Anyway, Mal might be in there, she guessed, so she walked up to the front door and knocked as hard as she could, hoping she'd be heard over the storm.

The door swung open.

It was creepy, but not as bad as being stranded in a storm, so she walked in.

The castle was lit with candles and a roaring fire, and despite her wariness, she sat down in one huge armchair. Just for a few minutes. Just to get warm.

Before she knew it, she'd fallen asleep, and she only realised once she was being shaken awake.

She sat up blearily, peering at the face of the person shaking her. Their face was turned to the side, but she saw the strap of an eyepatch and a long scar down one cheek.

“Who are you?” she asked.

The person blinked their one eye at her. “I live here. Who are you?” Her voice was rough and raspy, like she hadn’t spoken at all in years.

“I’m sorry. I didn’t realise anybody lived here,” Alina explained. “I’m looking for my friend. Have you seen him? He was out in the forest last week during the blizzard, and he hasn’t come home.”

The person shook her head. “I haven’t seen anybody. When the storm eases off, I can help you look. Or you can borrow a horse.”

“I, um. That’s okay. I should get going, actually.”

Then she looked out of the grand windows. The storm hadn’t stopped. If anything, it had gotten worse.

As if reading her mind, the person shook her head again. “Please don’t. I’d hate if anything happened to you.”

This whole thing was incredibly creepy, but Alina supposed that she could see the sense in not leaving the only shelter for miles in the middle of a thunderstorm.

“Alright. Are you sure it’s okay for me to stay here? I wouldn’t want to intrude, if this is your home.”

“No, it’s perfectly alright.”

Her face turned towards the light of the fireplace, and Alina saw it properly for the first time. The one scar she’d seen before hadn’t been all of it. Her entire face was covered with deep black gashes, burned into her flesh. Immediately she regretted agreeing to stay.

She should have known. This was no ordinary castle in the middle of the forest. This was the castle of Razrusha’ya, the Ruined One, and now she was stranded there.