villains of circumstance

(( PAST ))

He was the God of the Underworld, someone that once used to be both revered as well as feared by humans who worshipped him and his family. Yet he had become a soft heart when faced with children and women; all because of his darling wife. Yet he could never hold it against her, she was the love of his life and kept him from becoming the disaster that he was before her.

And the boy in front of him made him want to go and destroy a specific soul so that she could never make him doubt himself any more.

“Ber would never hurt you Carlos, not only do you have Persephone’s protection but you also have mine” Hades reassured him seriously as he spotted the shudder while speaking about his guardian familiar. “Then you obviously haven’t talked to people who understand that they are lucky to talk to you”

Protection. Having someone’s protection under the curse was a big deal, and so it was a big deal to Carlos - he’d had Mal’s protection on the isle, and with it Jay and Evie’s too. He provided his own, what he could, in return. Here, he was all but alone. Evie... Evie had her father back. She’d forget about Carlos, more than likely, and Mal and Jay weren’t here. Besides, Hades was... He was nothing like people made him sound to be. He wasn’t dark or scary. He was awfully kind.

Just like his wife.

“Thank you,” he replied, too stunned to really say anything else. Aside from his friends, no one had ever really taken an interest in the young man for anything more than occasionally his creations. He was a waste of space; he couldn’t fight as well as others, he was afraid of a lot, and his confidence needed work. He could put on a facade with the rest of them, could hold his ground, but deep down he was always so scared. He was tired of being scared. “Guess maybe this wasn’t such a bad thing to happen to me after all,” he murmured.

The boy was such a sweetheart.

She shook her head with a small sad smile, it was nice that he was trying to make her feel better but unfortunately there was never really a chance for Tadashi to come back to the land of the living. Especially not after the link that brought the majority of the town back to life was now closed.

“If only it was that simple dear one, Tadashi was a good friend of mine when I was in University myself; he passed a few years before the curse was set and was the incident that created my ‘hero’ persona; his little brother was desperate for answers and our team was created” Honey explained lightly “There is no chance of my friend returning to us, but I thank you for trying to make me feel better”

So she’d lost someone, someone who hadn’t made it back out of the Underworld before the connection closed off. Carlos gave her a sympathetic smile and wasn’t sure what else to do. He knew how scary it was down there - at least until he’d met the god and goddess themselves, and he still wasn’t entirely sure how everything led to him being adopted, but there you go - and frankly, it was sad that someone so lovely had gone through that kind of pain.

“His brother was lucky to have you around,” he murmured. That they’d taken their pain and used to to do something productive - to become heroes - said a lot about them. “That’s really admirable, you know. That you took that and became heroes. I can’t say I’d have been able to do that.” He was a villain’s child, after all. He knew he didn’t have that kind of goodness in him.

Ah, there he was, the child that she’d wasted valuable years of her life raising, She thought she was finally rid of him several times over, but when she was resurrected, of course one of the first few people who talked to her would be this obnoxious brat who just kept coming back into her life.

“What do you want, Carlos?..” She sighed deeply, a roll of her eyes as she looked away for any excuse to leave this confrontation. “Don’t expect me to take you back in if that’s what you’re here to ask.”

Of all the things he expected, it hadn’t really been that. He’d always known deep down that his mother didn’t love him. She kept him away from others, and he’d never been able to figure out of it was a desire to keep something to herself (or a fear of something she had been taken away), or something else, but the complete exasperation was somehow still heartbreaking. Deep down, he still always hoped she cared. 

He really needed to stop doing that.

“Nothing,” he replied. “I wasn’t trying to seek you out. You were just- there.” If she didn’t want him, that was just fine with Carlos. “I don’t need you to take me back,” he added quietly, a thin, shaky current of steel in his tone. “I have somewhere now. People who care about me.”

“Well anywhere is better than being stored in that library with the other kids that still have nowhere to go.” He explained with a sigh and a shrug. “You/re doing me a real favour here, Carlos.” Jay explained, “So, are you still keeping in contact with the other two? Or are you just all about your new family now?” He asked, only a slight hint of jealousy in his tone. He knew it was nothing but, Jay had been dealing with being an outcast since he was born so it was something he was used to, he just never expected that Carlos would rather be with people he just met than those he spent the past twenty eight years with. 

A library. They were housing people in a library? He supposed if there wasn’t anywhere else to go, at least it was probably interesting, and it was a rather small town. His smile faltered as Jay spoke to him, registering the jealous tone. “What are you talking about?” he asked, brows creasing. It wasn’t like he was trying to leave his friends behind at all. Mal was staying in contact and she wasn’t happy about the situation, but... "What was I meant to do? I was alone." Evie had been there, but then her dad had turned up and Carlos wasn't going to stand in the way of them being happy. Evie had more important things to worry about. "I haven't tried to stay away from any of you, but you weren't there. It's like the Isle. I did what I had to do to stay safe, and Persephone and Hades wanted to help. I don't know what you're accusing me of."

He’d known it would happen eventually. Ever since he woke up on the Isle of the Lost, with the memories of his past, Carlos had known that eventually he’d have to face his mother. There had been a brief respite, when he’d been dead, but then he’d found out she had died too, that she was down there with him, and he felt like he was trapped all over again. Because that had been the issue; he hadn’t realised it when he was younger, but even being stuck on the Isle of the Lost, he’d had more freedom than he’d ever had with his mother around. And yet here she was, again. He knew she was alive again - it had been the cost of his own life returned to him, after all - but he’d hoped, somehow, that this was something he could avoid.

Apparently not.

“M-mother,” he stammered, staring at the woman he’d almost run into in the street. He needed to pay more attention. He- he could have avoided this and now he had no idea what was going to happen.

“No touchy! Got it!” Honey confirmed as she made sure to keep the information locked in ‘a most important’ box in her head just like she did when she first met her small group of friends. A fist bump would work, that reminded her of Baymax which brought back fond memories and she hoped that Hiro would be able to either find the big comfy marshmallow like robot or would be able to remake him to a degree without the chip Tadashi made.

She shook her head as she tried to clear her thoughts and smiled softly at the young boy “Everything’s fine Carlos, I just had a reminder of a fallen friend” she reassured the boy softly “No matter how long it’s been, I still miss him”

The fact Miss Honey actually cared about how comfortable he was meant more than she’d ever understand. While no one was particularly tactile on the Isle of the Lost, people still had a tendency to touch when they shouldn’t, and he needed to have control over that for his own sanity. It was a sense of comfort he’d never had before, not from someone outside his three best friends. He tilted his head as she seemed sad, though. Sadder than even before. He had no idea what he’d done, but it had clearly upset her.

Carlos wrinkled his nose as she told him she was okay, but the answer was more intriguing. “I’m sorry,” he replied, because that was the done thing. Except he’d died, and now... he wasn’t. “I mean, it’s possible he’s back. So many people died during that earthquake and more than you’d believe came back. I don’t wanna get your hopes up but maybe...?”

Evie knew she had always been the positive one, the one that would try and lift people up whenever they were down. She would always try to be positive, but in moments like now - since her death, it had been harder to be positive. Her grandmother hadn’t helped much either while being in the underworld she had wanted Evie to bring out the anger she had believed was being built inside of her. But, Evie didn’t think she was angry, not really she was just scared now. 

“Rotten to the core.” She recited the words she had spoken so many times, back on the Isle, it even manages to bring the smallest hints of a smile to light up her face. 

“I wish I could forget, pretend it never happened.” She knew it could never happen though, it had to be something she came to terms with, accepted it in whichever way that she could. “You think that we can? take baby steps for it?” Evie knew that with them all together, they were stronger, even if she couldn’t do this alone - maybe with the support of her friends she could, they could all get through this. 

“Rotten to the core,” Carlos repeated; their own safe little phrasing that seemed rather inappropriate now, but would always be close to his heart. He grinned back at Evie, nodding as she continued speaking. He wished he could wipe it all away for her; that he could invent time travel and make it never happen so she wouldn’t have to pretend. Yet he knew it was a futile dream and the important part was making sure she got the support she needed post-trauma.

“I’m positive we can,” he replied. He gestured around at them. “It’s a brand new place with a world of possibility. We can do anything we want. We can go to school and actually learn something, or work, or run away and never look back... Well, once we figure out a way across the borders,” he admitted. He’d heard they were technically trapped by some kind of magical bubble, but he didn’t fully understand it. “So we just go at our own pace and see where we end up.”

Evie knew it was a better life here than the Isle, she had noticed that the second they’d arrived, and other than the family she had made on the Isle, she had another family here, both her parents and a brother, it was everything that she had ever dreamed of having, yet for her it was being tainted by her own negative thoughts and her own inability to get over her death. And no matter how much she had tried to push it away, or pretend that none of it ever happened, she was reminded of it every time she looked into a mirror. 

“I know that, hell, we managed to survive a curse that was made to make our lives terrible, but we all got through it together.” Her fingers tightened in the smallest around Carlos’s, trying to let his words sink into her. They could get over anything. And they always had been stronger together, the four of them. “I just want to be able to move on from what happened, but I’m scared it’ll always be stuck with me.”

Carlos tried to listen and understand what Evie was trying to say, but he had to admit that he wasn’t entirely certain why she was so scared of being stuck in the past. Evie had always been something of the more positive one in his eyes, a balance to his pessimism, and seeing her like this... It made him want to try to be what she had always been to him. “Exactly. Me, you, Jay, Mal.” They’d found each other again, and they could stick with each other. They’d get through this town just as well as they got through the Isle. Perhaps even more successfully.

“You will.” He nodded, trying to add some kind of authority to his words. “I. I don’t think it’s gonna be something we can just forget. The whole Isle collapsing...” For Carlos, it would be killing Harry. It was like it had left a mark on his very soul somehow. For Evie, it had been dying at his hands. “But we’ll push through it. We’ve just gotta make it through the first few steps.” It was like speaking with Persephone while Cerberus was near. She’d helped him start to work on his fears; he could do the same for Evie. “Baby steps, right?”

“That sound’s like no fun,” Harry stated simply, a frown pulling down his lips as he took another glance down to the experiment-thing Carlos had been working on. It definitely was not anything that Harold would consider to be fun, but then again, he couldn’t remember a time when anything Carlos had done that would be known as fun. This was why he needed Jace back, he knew how to have fun. “What could be better when it’s not exploding? It just sounds like a waste of time, what else is it supposed to do?”

The freckled teenager scowled at Harry. He was beginning to remember why he didn’t like hanging out with either of the Baduns - they were as dull as dishwater. It reminded him of how his mother spoke of her own underlings, their fathers, and for a brief moment he had to fight back a sneer. It was at that point he felt awful; he didn’t want to treat people like that. So instead of snapping, he sighed and ran a hand through his hair. “It’s teaching me stuff, so I can make better things. Like maybe make something that can change colours, or hide people, or make people better. Or, I guess, maybe explode,” he admitted.

Everyone else was settling into a life in storybrooke, except for her it seemed. Her murder still haunted her, every shadow, every person that got too close to her, it all terrified her, so much that it had gotten to where she would stay hidden away in the home she quickly learned belonged to her mother, where she would distract herself with different clothes designs because it was easier for her, and kept her at ease than going out there and potentially getting hurt again. 

“Nothing’s changed.” Her words came out, breaking whatever kind of facade she had built around herself. “I’m still terrified —- I just feel like I’m never going to get over this.” Should she have hated how well Carlos seemed to know her? Instead, it was reliving that there were three people she didn’t have to hide from, she could be as open with her best friends, no matter how stupid it might’ve sounded to her. 

Nothing had changed? Carlos stared at her for a few moments, trying to figure out what she meant because absolutely everything had changed - they weren’t on the Isle, they weren’t living off scraps, she had her father alive and well... But they’d gone through some terrible experiences and perhaps that was what she was referring to. Carlos was working hard to pretend he hadn’t seen Harry and that none of it happened; that the pirate’s face didn’t haunt his dreams, dreams where he willingly, delightedly, pushed the pirate into far worse than a bottomless pit.

“We lasted twenty eight years on an island with people who hated us,” Carlos pointed out. The last few days on the Isle, when the portals had appeared... They didn’t count. Everyone had lost it at that point. “If we can survive that, we can get over anything else.” He squeezed her hand. “Do you wanna talk about it?”

((PAST))

“I don’t know, with your smarts young one, I have a feeling you could get further than me in learning about all this stuff” Hades teased half serious, he did actually think that the young man could probably figure out some differences in the blood between Hades and a normal human; although that meant giving the boy some blood and trusting him to keep the sample as safe as he possibly could so that no one else could use it against the God.

Cerberus without the three heads would just be very weird and he didn’t think he nor Persephone could deal with seeing a one headed pup hanging around the house and keeping his wife safe.

“Ber would keep the heads, would be weird if he didn’t and I’m not sure the magic would actually hide his biology from the other realm” He shrugged with a small grin before frowning a little at the question. Why did he start talking to the boy? he was young and reminded him of his son, but then he brought a bit of sass to the table and was a joy to talk too “Because you make a good conversationalist”

Apparently Hades had been following something of all their lives, because Carlos had no idea how he could possibly know whether or not the teenager was smart based on this conversation. Then again, he was the Lord of the Underworld; he was probably meant to know everything about the souls he reigned over. Maybe it was the magic thing again. Regardless, the praise brought a faint flush to Carlos’s cheeks and he took a moment to try and find an appropriate response. “I, thanks?” he managed after a moment, feeling vaguely flustered. At least he wasn’t going crazy.

“A three headed small dog, then,” Carlos replied, trying to picture it and shuddering. He was still terrified of the concept of dogs and a smaller one just meant more agility, he was certain. Once again, the god surprised Carlos, this time enough to laugh. “You are literally the only person to say that to me, like, ever,” he admitted.

Carlos is fine. Honey was beyond relieved that she didn’t have to be formal with at least one of her students; well, she only really had one or two students at this point in time.

“Okay Carlos, bit of warning to you dear one, when it comes to chemical reactions I get extremely passionate and may sometimes hug you or stuff so please please please tell me now if it’s an absolute no go” Honey quickly rambled off nervously before she caught the question where she grinned hyperactivity once more.

“Of course, of course come in” She invited as she bounced on the balls of her feet excitedly, Tadashi and Hiro were the only two people lately to ever show her excitement and passion about chemical reactions even though Hiro moved over to the technical aspects. She missed Tadashi. A wave of sadness washed over her for a moment as she thought about her fallen friend and the need to make sure that his little brother was safe in this new land.

Carlos had never exactly been one for formality at the best of times, although his manners could be second to none when his mother was involved; he knew better than to show her up. But he was staying with Persephone and Hades at the moment, and his worries about his mother were beginning to ebb away, bit by bit. He gave the teacher a brief smile and rubbed his arm as he answered. “Uh, if it’s fine, I’d prefer it if we didn’t. Maybe like a fist bump?” he asked. Personal space was precious to the teenager and, well, he didn’t know Miss Honey well enough to trust her there just yet.

The freckled teen stepped into the room, marvelling at all the new equipment it held within. On the Isle, everything was broken or thrown away, discarded for a variety of reasons. Nothing new ever really turned up, but he knew now why that was. Because the curse had been punishing them. No more. They were free now. “Is everything okay?” he asked, noting the sad expression. “I can come back...?”

Carlos was surprised, if he was honest. The fact that Jay wanted to come stay with him in some stranger’s house was a surprise, but a welcome one. He was pretty sure Persephone wouldn’t mind - she seemed to love doting on him, or talking to him about everything under the sun, including her actual son, Hadie - but he’d drop by and check after he found a way to get Jay in anyway. “Oh, great! I mean, cool.” Carlos grinned at his friend, cheeks flushing lightly under the attention. “Where are they setting people up then? I’ve gotta admit I didn’t go look...”

Carlos’s expression turned sad at Evie’s words, any distraction from her scarring gone in an instant. They were out of hell and, truth be told, Carlos was beginning to enjoy himself. He had a comfortable place to stay, he was doing what he loved the most (learning), and his friends were all here, safe and sound. He wasn’t sure what else he could ask for, but Evie wasn’t in the exact same boat. He’d known the blue-haired girl long enough to know when she was trying to distract herself, reaching out to take the hand she was inspecting. “Hey. Why do you feel like you’re still there?” he asked, concerned.

Carlos rolled his eyes. Blowing up wasn’t the be all and end all of everything, and besides, he didn’t really want to make Miss Honey mad. It was her science lab, after all. He was just borrowing it to do some after-hours studying. “It’s not meant to blow up,” Carlos replied. It wasn’t meant to do a whole lot of anything. He was simply trying to learn what did things in this realm; how to make his own smoke bombs or anything else useful the others might need. “Sometimes things are better when they’re not exploding. I know it’s a difficult concept.”

((PAST))

Hades could hear the question in his tone and had to admit that choosing to stop aging was rather intriguing and he probably wouldn’t have ever wanted to stop aging at seventeen like Hadie had; Hades never really had a choice anyway, he stopped aging when he was given the Underworld to rule over. “It’s something to do with the ichor of the gods that runs through our veins, it’s magic that even I don’t understand fully”

Hearing the laugh of the young man was a relief and he was glad to have been able to make him laugh even if it was him laughing about Cruella being scared of Ber. “He can decrease in size with the right magic but we prefer not to make him small when he’s protecting Sephe”

Ichor. Blood. Blood Carlos could understand, to a degree, and once again his fingers were itching for some proper scientific equipment and a sample of godly blood, but that wasn’t something he could ask for and not something he would be given by anyone with half a mind. Carlos didn’t understand magic, but he knew blood had incredibly powerful properties; it was why so many magic users guarded their blood with so much ferocity. “Guess I should give up now then,” he joked.

“Well, a small dog wouldn’t be as effective, although if he kept the three heads, you might get away with it.” Oh... Well, Hades. He was joking with the god of the Underworld. Was that normal? Had he managed to lose his mind even in death? “So, uh, if you don’t mind me asking... Why are you talking to me?”