Chapter I: An Unexpected Intruder

"Looking at the stars always spaces me out. Get it?" Luan laughed from backstage, elbowing her sister, Luna, who looked less than amused at her half-baked joke, in the ribs.

Luna merely rolled her eyes in disbelief. "Save it for the audience, dude."

Her joke might not have sailed, as usual, but the spaced-out feeling she'd had was real. Above the stage, stars glowed like little spotlights, or like a crowd of fireflies screaming out her name. She felt a sense of longing to be up onstage, where all lights and eyes fell on her. That was, after all, her happy place.

However, Lola was hogging it again. It seemed as though she had chosen the extra-long ribbon dance routine tonight, the one that lasted for almost thirty minutes.

"It's a stylistic choice, darling," Lola had once said with a flip of her hair when Luan had dared to question if such a long routine was really necessary. "I'm the star of this whole shebang, y'know. Your acts are…cute, but everyone's really only here to see me. I'm just giving the people what they want!"

After what seemed like an eternity, Luan heard applause and cheering-some of which seemed a little half-hearted, like the audience was only doing so because they were glad to finally be rid of her. A minute later, Lola pranced backstage, clutching a tangled pink ribbon in her elegantly gloved hand.

"It'll take me hours to get the knots out of this thing." She gestured to her drooping ribbon, still panting hard from the thirty minutes of dancing. "But it's worth it." Her eyes twinkled.

"What's 'knot' to love about that?" Luan agreed, earning a groan from Lola.

"Luan? You're on, sweetie." Luan recognized the voice of her mother, Rita. The ringleader of their traveling show, Rita was oftentimes the only thing keeping the eleven unruly siblings from killing each other. As a matter of fact, right now she was trying to stop an absolutely livid Lori from marching over to Lola and turning her into a human pretzel.

"But mom! We're literally twenty-two minutes behind schedule!" Lori protested through her gritted teeth, gripping her clipboard so tightly that her nails were starting to dig into the wood.

As the manager of the show, it was Lori's job to make sure everything was on time, and that all of the props, scripts, and costumes were prepared and accounted for. It was a grueling, time-consuming job that Luan knew Lori definitely didn't get enough credit for.

Lori turned her scorching glare on Luan. "What are you still doing back here? You should've been onstage thirty-seven seconds ago! Chop-chop!" She hit herself in the face with her clipboard several times.

"Be there in a jiffy!" Luan definitely didn't want to add to her sister's stress, which was already visibly building up like a volcano about to erupt. Luan definitely did not want to be in the splash zone when that happened.

She ducked and dodged her way past tiny, toddling Lily (the adorable mascot of the show), Lynn, who was doing a quick check to make sure all of her acrobatics equipment was in place for her death-defying stunts, and Leni, the costumes director, who was inexplicably holding a kitchen knife.

"Looking sharp!" Luan said with a giggle, pointing to the knife. Then she paused and raised an eyebrow. "Where did you even get that?"

Leni shrugged. "So what are we supposed be chopping up? Are we making Dad's famous Brocco-Lynn Soup again?" she twirled her knife deftly. "Because I make a mean vegetable stew."

"Sounds great, Leni. But I gotta run!" Although the truth was, Luan didn't have the time, the patience, or the crayons to explain the metaphor to her ditzy sister.

She ran past Lisa, their secretary and amateur special-effects artist, who was herself running just as fast with an overflowing pink test tube, screaming "She's gonna blow!" at the top of her lungs.

Luckily, Lincoln, an aspiring magician and practically everyone's assistant and right-hand-man, was already pulling out a small eyedropper. As he squeezed it, releasing a drop of liquid into Lisa's haywire experiment, the overflowing pink mess immediately calmed.

"Phew. Always forgetting the dinitrotoluene," Lincoln said, affectionately tousling his little sister's messy mop of brown hair.

"Much appreciated, elder brother," Lisa said, exhaling a sigh of relief.

With a loud BOOM, the concoction exploded anyway, leaving Lisa's hair standing on end and her face an ash-covered mess. A dense pink fog filled the air, causing the family to cough and choke.

Lisa wiped the ash off her thick, round glasses. "Still working out the kinks," she grumbled.

"I think you mean, still working out the pinks," Luan corrected. "Get it?"

"You literally could've killed us, Lisa!" Lori shouted angrily. Luan couldn't see her in the fog, but she assumed her oldest sister was still fussing over her clipboard. "And Luan, get your butt onstage!"

"Right, right." In the chaos that was her family's backstage preparations, it was easy to forget what she was supposed to be doing and where she was supposed to be. She felt her way through the fog for the red velvet curtains. Finding them almost instantly, she brushed them aside, moving her way forward to stand right smack-dab in the middle of the stage.

There were the spotlights. There were the lanterns hanging from the stage, letting their multicolored lights glow proudly down on her. There were the audience's bright eyes, waiting for a show.

She grinned broadly. That wouldn't be much of a problem for her at all.

She cleared her throat, preparing to begin her well-rehearsed routine: "Did you hear the one about the fight between the two circus clowns? It was in-tents! Get it?" The audience chuckled, filling her with encouragement.

She continued with a few terrible puns, soaking in the audience's laughter at the end of every punchline. Then she figured the audience was getting a little bored of that, so she called her unofficial assistant: "Lynn, get my pins! Oh hey, that rhymes!"

Lynn pranced out on stage with five bowling pins. Technically, Luan could only masterfully juggle four, but she was feeling a little ambitious tonight.

Lynn threw her one of the pins, which she expertly caught and tossed up into the air. They repeated the process with another pin, and then another, until she was juggling all five as the audience ooohed in awe.

Normally she liked to ride a unicycle while she juggled, but since she was doing five pins tonight instead of her customary four, it took all of her focus just to keep all the pins from falling. However, she could afford to devote a bit of her brain to coming up with a suitable pun.

"What did one bowling pin say to the other? Let's never split!" she said, not letting her eyes leave the bowling pins she was struggling to keep in the air. She could not risk another failure.

As she heard laughter, though, she dared to let her eyes dart across the audience for a moment, looking for a smile to remind her that she was still the competent and funny comedienne she'd always been.

A flicker of light in the distance caught her eye. As soon as she squinted to look at it, it disappeared, and a moment later it reappeared again. It was coming from the window of the spooky castle the family's caravan had passed on the way to the nearby inn. It had looked cold and derelict, and the pathways had been covered by thorns. Luan had assumed it was abandoned, just a bunch of dusty ruins.

Does someone live there? she wondered as she stared at the faint light.

She lifted up her hand to wave, just to see what would happen.

Predictably, what happened was that all five of her bowling pins came clattering down to the floor. One of them conked her on the head, making her dizzy. She took a few steps to reorient herself, only to trip on another pin and lose her footing, falling flat on her face. The audience roared with laughter and applause, probably assuming this was all part of her act.

"Yeah, I totally meant to do that," Luan lied, picking herself up off the ground and dusting off her yellow cloak. She gathered up her pins in her arms, feeling a hot blush creep across her cheeks as she took a bow. The audience might not have known about her mistake, but she knew about it, and she felt the embarrassment of it just the same.

Just before she left the stage, she sought out the tiny light that had made her lose her focus, to make sure it hadn't been a hallucination.

But the light was completely gone. She stared at the vacant window for a minute, but nothing happened. It stayed dark.

That only served to make her even more confused than before.

She raced down the stage's wooden steps and made her way backstage, looking for a certain black-haired sister who might know a thing or two about creepy dark castles with odd, flickering lights.

"Lucy? Um, I really need to talk to you!"

She turned around and gasped as a pale face suddenly materialized out of the shadows. The poet and contortionist was a little too good at being sneaky.

"State your business." Lucy's face was completely expressionless.

Luan took a deep breath to try to calm her nerves after that unexpected jumpscare. "You know that castle we passed today?" she asked

Lucy nodded, saying nothing.

"Do you know if anything weird's ever happened there? Like, I don't know, unexplained flickering lights?" If anyone would know about a haunting, it was Lucy.

To Luan's surprise, Lucy pulled her uncomfortably close, lowering her voice to whisper in a dry, eerie tone.

"I heard the castle is cursed."

…

The Stone Castle was silent, as usual.

Silent, but not vacant.

Inside its crumbling walls, a peculiar creature peered out the window. He was holding a candle, looking at the lights outside.

A wooden stage had been hastily set up in the distance, which made it a little hard to make out some of the details. Multicolored balls of light-lanterns, perhaps?-hung from tree branches and in a garland over the stage. A crowd sat on blankets and folding chairs, watching the performers onstage with interest. He was watching them, too, and wishing he could join them.

It had been years since Benny had performed on a stage like that.

And it was all thanks to that fateful day when he, then just a naive ten-year-old boy, had thrown a pie right into an evil enchantress's face.

Well, he wouldn't have done it if he'd known who she was! But when he'd heard a knock on the door that morning, he'd assumed it was just another messenger, or perhaps a snooty noble looking to take the unruly young prince out for a nice game of croquet or something.

So, he'd opened the door a crack, just wide enough to chuck a pie as a subtle "go away; I'm not interested" message, and as a quick laugh. He'd expected to hear someone shouting in surprise, or even a complaint about ruined clothes, but when he'd heard a shriek of fury instead, he knew he was done for.

That was the thing about amateur comedians. They were always accidentally pranking the wrong person. And it usually didn't end well…

…

Nervously, he opened the door, revealing an absolutely fuming young woman, cloaked in an expensive-looking dress with long, billowing sleeves. Her face was beet red and he heard the ominous grating sound of her teeth grinding. He cringed at her reaction, guilt prickling under his skin.

"Uh…sorry about that?" he tried with an apologetic grin.

Her features smoothed, though not into an understanding smile. Instead, they turned cold and stony, unfeeling, as she slipped a glowing white wand out of her sleeve.

"Normally," she said in a commanding, emotionless voice. "I travel from kingdom to kingdom with the purpose of aiding young princes and princesses. To bestow blessings and gifts upon them to help them become better and stronger rulers. Of course, normally they have much better manners." She scowled. "So it seems something quite different is in store for you."

Oops, Benny thought.

"Don't look at me like that. You brought this upon yourself, after all, you impudent boy."

She lifted her wand, her eyes glowing an unnaturally bright shade of green, and aimed it at his terrified, trembling form. She chanted some words in a language he didn't understand, the powerful sound echoing through the castle walls and pounding against his ears. A blinding beam of white light had shot out from her wand and he stumbled backwards, slipping on a foolishly-placed banana peel he'd carelessly left lying on the floor. In a different setting, he would have laughed at the comically bad timing, but the fall only served to make him blind and helpless as the band of light wrapped around him, ensnaring him as though it were a ribbon or a piece of rope.

He struggled and squirmed against the bonds, trying to free himself, but a young boy was clearly no match for one of an enchantress's most powerful spells. He could hear her cackling, probably amused at his feeble attempt to stop her.

He gritted his teeth in pain as the band became tighter, as he felt himself…changing somehow. Bones snapping and growing bigger, teeth sharpening into fangs, and something particularly weird growing out of his backside.

The lights faded and he opened his eyes slowly, hesitantly, looking down only to cry out in horror as he saw fur and claws. He tried to lunge at the enchantress only to slip again-his limbs had still been bound by the magic band, though now it only had a faint glow.

"Perhaps this will teach you to show a little respect," the enchantress said with a sneer as he struggled to get back on his feet. "Now everyone will treat you like what you are: an unruly, untamed little beast."

He opened his mouth, but no words had come out. He had been too stunned, too frozen to speak. All he could do was stare in shock, his eyes as wide as plates.

"I'm guessing you're looking for a way to fix this?" the enchantress said with a sweet smile that was quite obviously fake.

By then he'd recovered enough from the shock to nod, though he was still shaking with fear.

She looked around, her smile broadening as she plucked a yellow lily from the thickly growing patches surrounding the doorsteps, which his mother had kept busy nurturing and tending to. "This'll have to do." She whispered to the flower, and as she did, the petals glowed with an unnatural sheen, as though they'd been dipped in sunlight. She handed it to Benny and he mechanically reached out to take it, confused, holding it in his now-clawed-and-furry hands…or was 'paws' a better term?

"In five years' time," the enchantress continued, "the flower's petals will start to fall. Once they're all gone, the curse will be permanent. In other words, you'll be stuck like this."

So what am I supposed to do? Benny had thought. Keep the petals from falling off? That didn't seem like something he'd be good at. He was a comedian, not a gardener! With his luck, the petals would only fall off faster.

"The only way to break the spell," the enchantress said, as though she was reading his thoughts (could she read his thoughts?), "Is to get someone to love you. Truly love and care about you. I'm guessing that would've been hard enough already with such atrocious manners, but it's more fun if I make it extra-challenging, just for laughs. A practical joke."

If this was her twisted version of a joke, it wasn't a funny one.

Footsteps raced down the stairs, and Benny's sharp, pointed ears picked up the sound easily. A moment later, his mother and father appeared at the bottom of the staircase, flanked by all the castle's servants, each of them wearing a worried expression.

Benny's eyes met hers, and he saw a storm of emotions within them. Recognition at first, followed by confusion, anguish, rage…and a bit of fear.

She saw the enchantress then, who was still holding her glowing white wand, and she instantly figured out what had happened. Her face contorted in red-hot fury, and she threw off her robes, charging at the enchantress with the obvious intention of killing her.

But she never even got the chance.

The enchantress shouted out another spell, which encircled around everyone in the room. The glaring bright light blocked Benny's view of his parents and servants. He heard several pained, panicked screams that made his heart clench. The ground shook, sending rocks tumbling to the ground, and he instinctively tensed up, covering his head and fearing the worst.

I'm going to die, he thought, not so much in words but in petrified feelings.

The shaking stopped and the lights cleared. He looked up to see an open sky. Sunlight beamed down onto him, hurting his already-sensitive eyes. The ceiling above had crumbled, leaving the still-standing walls cracked and uneven. It looked like a living ruin.

The sight horrified him, but not nearly as much as what he saw when he looked straight ahead. He froze in place, his heart catching in his throat, not wanting to believe that any of this was real. Not wanting to be alone, afraid, and unprotected. He didn't want to accept it or believe it, but it was all there.

Everyone-his mother, his father, the servants, had been turned to stone. Most were frozen in positions of surprise-their eyes wide and mouths twisted, some curled up into terrified balls. They looked like statues: unfeeling hunks of stone that never laughed, or smiled, or whistled, or sang. Or would ever feel happy again.

Tears brimmed in the corners of his eyes, and he felt them fall, his heart pounding. He looked for guidance, for comfort, but all he found was stony faces, and the enchantress's satisfied smirk.

"Maybe this will teach you to take things a little more seriously," she said, just before vanishing in a puff of green smoke.

He was too tired to chase after her. All he could do was crumble to the ground, feeling as ruined as the castle around him.

…

That moment of carelessness had cost him everything. He'd rebuilt the walls as best he could, but there was no one to help him-and he'd tried, but they'd all just screamed and fled in terror, thinking him to be a werewolf or demon, and not their scared young prince. He'd put away his pranks and gags, and hadn't touched them since, even though living without trying to make someone laugh or smile was like being tortured.

He'd taken up gardening, trying to keep the lavish courtyard from becoming as demolished as the castle's walls. He'd figured out how to cook and sew (though he still wasn't perfect). And he did a lot of observing. None of it made him happy, but it kept him distracted.

Outside, someone in a yellow cloak was juggling some pins onstage. He couldn't see their face well, but it looked like they were wearing a bright smile. He heard the faint, lilting sound of the audience laughing, perhaps at something the juggler had said.

The performer's face jerked up, staring straight ahead.

Benny froze, his joints tensed and his mind whirling. Had he been seen? Did he want to be seen, after all these years in the dark? Would everyone react the way they had on the day the curse had been cast? And would finding out make things better or worse?

The juggler stopped mid-routine to wave, looking directly at the castle. He had been spotted. He looked down at the candle he was holding. It had been burning a little brighter than usual, but was it so bright that it could be seen so easily this far away?

He instinctively fumbled to blow out the flame and make himself as quiet and unnoticeable as possible, the way he always did when a wayward villager stumbled a little too close to his castle. However, in his quick, jerky motion, a tiny drip of hot wax had been flung off the candle, landing with a sizzle on the sensitive, fluffy spot where his index finger met his thumb.

He hissed at the sudden pain, tossing the spent candle onto the windowsill. From there he glanced out the window once more-for some reason, he couldn't seem to pull himself away-just in time to see one of the juggler's bowling pins strike them on the forehead. A second later, the distracted performer tripped over another pin, landing with a classic comical faceplant.

The corners of Benny's mouth quirked up in a half-smile. An actual smile. Though he tried to hide it, he still had a thing for slapstick humor.

Feeling a pang of longing in his chest, Benny pushed himself away from the window, forcing the smile off his face. The dramatic stage life he'd always wanted was simply out of reach-it had been for years, ever since the curse was cast that made the world fear him. And it was only growing more distant by the day-he'd seen one of the magic lily's petals start to quiver, as though it was going to fall off soon.

He was out of time, and nothing was going to change that.

But a comedian could dream.

A/N: This is the very first story I've written for this fandom, and I don't know nearly as much about it as some of you hardcore fans might. I'm also very new to , which helps to explain any formatting errors you might come across. I really don't know what I'm doing!

This story came to me on a whim. It's pretty weird, but this particular fandom has produced much weirder things, so I'm probably in the clear. Luan's one of my favorite Loud House characters, and I totally love all the sweet, wholesome interactions she has with Benny. One thing I hate, however, is that sometimes she's portrayed as a really flat and uncomplicated character in the show and in some fanfics. Her defining trait is that she's funny, yes, and at times a little obnoxious, but there's also times where she's genuinely sweet, sincere, awkward, insecure, and even a little shy. I'm hoping to portray some of these more-unseen sides in this story.

I'll admit some of the characters might be a little OOC. I can probably let some of that slide, since some of the characters have TOTALLY different backstories, what with this being an AU and all. It can at times be hard to make Luan seem likeable instead of annoying, and I hope I'm doing okay, especially since she's the main character. It's a hard one to get right.

Thank you for reading this! I'm already drafting the next chapter! :)