~Benlos~

The glowing green code on Carlos’s triple-monitor setup reflected in his dark eyes, casting sharp shadows across his dorm room. It was 2:14 AM. The rest of Auradon Prep was dead silent, but Carlos was wide awake, his fingers flying across his mechanical keyboard in a rhythmic, comforting click-clack. Dude was curled up at his feet, snoring softly.

Carlos took a sip of his dangerously cold energy drink, wincing. He was deep into an optimization patch for the school’s security mainframe when his primary screen suddenly flickered.

The green code vanished.

In its place, a single line of bold, crimson text burned into the center of the monitor:

> RUN PROTOCOL: BEAST_FALL.EXE > ACCESSING ROYAL ARCHIVES... ACCESS GRANTED. > DOWNLOADING: COUNCIL_MEETING_MINUTES_CONFIDENTIAL.PDF

Carlos froze, his heart slamming against his ribs. “What the...” he whispered, his fingers instantly shifting to a counter-hack sequence. “No, no, no. Not on my watch.”

Someone was bypassing the royal firewall like it was made of wet paper. Carlos’s fingers became a blur, throwing up emergency digital roadblocks, tracing the IP address, and trying to lock down the royal server before the intruder could siphon out the data. For three tense minutes, it was absolute digital warfare.

With a final, aggressive slam of the enter key, Carlos forced a hard encryption reset.

> COMPROMISE DIVERTED. USER ISOLATED.

Carlos slumped back in his gaming chair, letting out a breath he didn’t realize he’d been holding. He rubbed his face, his mind racing. That wasn’t just a random student prank. That was a high-level, targeted breach on the crown’s private data.

Before he could even process the adrenaline spike, a sharp, heavy knock echoed through the quiet room.

Dude bolted upright, barking once. Carlos jumped, nearly spilling his drink. He scrambled out of his chair, padding over to the door in his oversized flannel pajama pants and a faded graphic tee. He cracked the door open, expecting a grumpy disgruntled dorm supervisor.

Instead, he found himself staring directly into the tired, incredibly stressed hazel eyes of King Ben.

Ben wasn’t wearing his usual royal suits or his crown. He was in a simple grey hoodie and jeans, his hair slightly disheveled, holding a sleek, encrypted royal tablet in one hand and a cardboard carrier with two massive cups of coffee in the other.

“Ben?” Carlos blinked, rubbing his eyes to make sure he wasn’t hallucinating from sleep deprivation. “What—what are you doing here? It’s the middle of the night.”

Ben offered a weak, immensely grateful smile, lifting the coffee slightly. “I saw the firewall alert from my office. The system log said the counter-breach originated from this room. Can I come in?”

“Oh. Right! Yeah, of course,” Carlos stammered, stepping aside quickly.

Ben walked in, setting the coffee down on Carlos’s cluttered desk, right next to a half-disassembled drone. Dude immediately trotted over, sniffing Ben’s sneakers, before deciding the King was safe and returning to his dog bed.

Ben turned to Carlos, his expression turning serious but gentle. “The royal tech team has been baffling over these server glitches for three days, Carlos. They told me it was just a server migration issue. But whoever just tried to get in five minutes ago... they almost got the private council logs regarding the Isle’s trade routes.”

“They would have, if I hadn’t initiated a localized loop,” Carlos said, a sudden spark of confidence replacing his usual social anxiety as he stepped back to his monitors. He pointed at the lingering strings of red code. “Look here. This isn’t a glitch. Someone used an internal bypass key. Ben, this leak is coming from inside the castle.”

Ben sighed, running a hand through his hair, looking every bit the weary young king carrying the weight of the world. “That’s exactly what I was afraid of. If the press gets hold of those documents before the council finalizes the new VK integration funding, the whole project will be ruined. The board will pull out.”

Carlos looked from the screen to Ben. He could see the dark circles under the King’s eyes, the slight slump in his shoulders. For all his status, Ben was just a guy trying to do the right thing, completely isolated by the people he was supposed to trust. Carlos felt a sudden, fierce urge to protect him.

“I can find them,” Carlos said softly, his voice steady. “I can track the digital footprint of that internal key. It’s encrypted, but... well, I’m better than whoever wrote this.”

Ben looked at Carlos, a soft, genuinely warm look breaking through his exhaustion. “I know you are. That’s why I’m here. I can’t trust the castle IT staff right now, Carlos. I need you. But to do this quickly and without raising suspicion, you’d need to work directly from the royal wing at the palace. I’ve already cleared a secure room right next to my private study.”

Carlos’s breath hitched. The royal wing? Forced proximity with the King?

“I... uh, wow,” Carlos rubbed the back of his neck, his cheeks flushing slightly. “Yeah. I mean, yes. I’ll help. Let me just pack my external hard drives and... and change out of my pajamas.”

Ben let out a soft, melodic laugh that made Carlos’s stomach do a strange, fluttering flip. Ben handed one of the warm cups of coffee to Carlos, his fingers briefly brushing against Carlos’s hand. The warmth of the contact lingered far longer than it should have.

“Take your time,” Ben said softly, his eyes locking onto Carlos’s with absolute trust. “Drink your coffee. We have a long night ahead of us.”

Carlos wrapped his hands around the warm coffee cup, the heat seeping into his palms as he nodded toward his closet. “Give me five minutes to grab my gear,” he said, offering a small, nervous smile before stepping into his adjoining bathroom to quickly change into a fresh hoodie and dark jeans.

As the running water splashed against his face, clearing the last fog of sleep from his brain, Carlos looked into the mirror. His heart was still beating a little too fast, and it wasn’t just from the adrenaline of stopping a high-level cyber attack. It was the way Ben had looked at him—like Carlos was a lifeline.

Splashing his face one more time, Carlos let his mind drift back to how this chaotic mess had even started. It hadn’t begun tonight. It had begun exactly three weeks ago, during what was supposed to be a routine mid-afternoon study session.

~ Three Weeks Ago ~

The Auradon Prep library was usually peaceful, but that day, Carlos had been completely buried under a mountain of data. He had volunteered to help Ben organize the registration logistics for the upcoming wave of Isle of the Lost transfers, a project close to both of their hearts.

Carlos had been humming to himself, typing away on his laptop at a secluded corner table, when Ben had practically collapsed into the chair across from him.

“Everything okay, Your Majesty?” Carlos had teased gently, not looking up from his screen.

“If one more council member tells me that we don’t have the ‘administrative infrastructure’ to support thirty more students, I might actually lose my mind,” Ben groaned, burying his face in his hands.

Carlos smiled, sliding a piece of scrap paper across the table. “Well, tell them they’re wrong. Because I just finished building a completely automated scheduling and housing allocation algorithm. It handles the dormitory spacing, class schedules, and dietary restrictions seamlessly. It turns a six-week paperwork headache into a three-second click.”

Ben raised his head, his hazel eyes wide. He pulled the laptop toward himself, scanning the clean, flawless lines of code Carlos had written. A massive, brilliant smile broke across Ben’s face—the kind of genuine, unfiltered smile that usually didn’t make it into the royal press photos.

“Carlos, this is... you’re a genius,” Ben breathed, looking up at him in absolute awe. “Seriously. You just saved this entire initiative.”

“It’s just math, Ben,” Carlos muttered, his cheeks burning a bright crimson. He looked down, suddenly very interested in the lint on his jacket. He wasn’t used to people looking at him like he held the answers to the universe.

“It’s not just math, it’s incredible,” Ben insisted. He reached across the table, impulsively placing his hand over Carlos’s.

The contact was sudden, sending a jolt of electricity straight up Carlos’s arm. Ben’s hand was warm, larger than his, and grounded. Carlos froze, his eyes snapping to their joined hands, his breath catching in his throat.

Ben seemed to realize what he had done a second later. He didn’t pull away immediately, his thumb giving a tiny, subconscious brush against the back of Carlos’s knuckles before he smoothly retracted his hand, clearing his throat with a faint blush of his own.

“Anyway,” Ben had said, his voice a pitch lower than usual. “I’m incredibly grateful. I just wish the rest of the castle ran as smoothly as your code.”

That night, Carlos had gone back to his dorm with a strange, fluttering sensation in his chest that he couldn’t quite shake. To ensure the new transfer algorithm was completely secure, he had set up a silent, background monitoring protocol linked directly to the royal servers. It was just a safety measure. He wanted to make sure nobody messed with the project Ben was working so hard to protect.

But three days later, the anomalies started.

Carlos had noticed tiny, almost invisible packets of data being siphoned out of the royal network during the dead of night. It wasn’t the transfer files they were after—whoever it was was using Carlos’s secure pipeline as a cloaking device to dig deeper into the crown’s private archives. They were hunting for dirt. Budgets, private text logs, security weak spots.

Carlos had quietly patched the leaks one by one, keeping a watchful eye, hoping it was just a rogue server testing its boundaries. But tonight’s bold, aggressive digital assault proved that whoever was behind it had realized Carlos was onto them. The stakes had officially been raised.

~ Present Day ~

Carlos blinked, shaking himself out of the memory as he grabbed his backpack, stuffing three high-capacity external hard drives, his favorite glowing mouse, and a handful of cables inside.

When he walked back into the dorm room, Ben was standing by the desk, curiously inspecting a miniature robotic bird Carlos had built from scrap metal. Ben looked up, a soft expression overtaking his face as he noticed Carlos was ready.

“Ready to go?” Ben asked quietly, swinging his car keys around his finger.

“As ready as I’ll ever be to sneak into a palace in my favorite hoodie,” Carlos joked weakly, hoisting the heavy backpack over his shoulder.

They slipped out of the dormitory into the cool night air, the campus completely deserted. Ben’s sleek, dark royal sedan was parked in the shadows of the faculty lot. Ben, ever the gentleman, hurried forward to open the passenger door for Carlos before rounding the hood to hop into the driver’s seat.

The drive to the castle was quiet, filled only with the soft hum of the engine and the low, comforting lo-fi music playing from the car’s speakers. Neither of them spoke, but the silence wasn’t awkward. It was charged with a heavy, mutual understanding. They were in this together now.

When they arrived through the private underground garage of the palace, Ben led Carlos up a set of velvet-carpeted back stairs, completely bypassing the main security checkpoints and grand halls.

Ben pushed open a heavy oak door at the end of a long, secluded corridor, stepping aside to let Carlos in.

“Welcome to your temporary headquarters,” Ben said.

Carlos stepped inside and let out a soft gasp. The room was spacious, featuring a massive mahogany desk, an incredibly plush leather rolling chair, and a state-of-the-art server terminal that looked like it belonged in a sci-fi movie. But what caught his eye was the adjacent wall—there was a set of connecting double doors.

“My private study is right through there,” Ben explained, pointing to the doors, rubbing the back of his neck with a slight, nervous chuckle. “I figure if we’re going to be pulling all-nighters, it’s easier if we don’t have to walk down the halls to find each other. Plus, I have a hidden espresso machine in there.”

Carlos turned to look at Ben, the soft lighting of the room catching the sharp angle of the King’s jawline, the gentle curve of his smile. The reality of the situation hit Carlos all at once. He was miles away from his cramped dorm room, tucked away in the most private wing of the palace, inches away from the boy who made his heart do backflips.

“An espresso machine, huh?” Carlos squeaked out, trying to keep his voice steady as he set his heavy backpack on the mahogany desk. “Yeah. That... that might actually keep me alive.”

Ben walked over, standing just a bit closer than necessary, his hazel eyes locking onto Carlos’s. “Thank you for doing this, Carlos. Truly. I know I’m asking a lot.”

“Hey,” Carlos said softly, stepping up his courage as he met Ben’s gaze directly. “I told you. I’ve got your back.”