jal supremacy!

a silly little something i wrote for jalentines!!

When Mal opens the dormitory door, Jay is standing in the hallway in his workout gear, hair tied up in a bun. He’s already grinning in that way he does when he wins a fight. Mal rolls her eyes at him. Grabbing her bag, she says bye to Evie, and joins Jay in the corridor. 

She scowls as they walk, her workout clothes tight on her skin. Jay had insisted they’d do things properly, and not in their usual leather. 

The hallways are decorated for Valentine’s Day, making Auradon Prep even more gaudy and colourful as usual. Pink and red hearts plastered across the walls, boasting the abundance of love here in Auradon. Jay’s had a thousand notes in his locker. Mal’s had none. Every morning, she watches Jay approach his locker like he would a target on the Isle. Weight forward, shoulders squared; ready to fight if needs be. And the paper falls to the floor like blood, only sickly pastel. Scrawled glittery gel pen. Words confessing passionate love, or asking him on dates, or doodles of hearts. Jay smiles the whole time. Greets and winks at girls. Scrunches those notes up in a fist. 

“Everywhere looks disgusting,” Mal says as they approach the sports hall. Heart-shaped bunting crests the doors.

Jay holds the door open for her. “It’s fun.”

“You would think that.”

"You're still growing," Evie says, making a note on her tablet. "Impressive. I thought we were the only ones who would have last-minute growth spurts. You are...two inches taller than the last time I took your measurements."

Ben ducks his head. The floor is lovely this time of year. A really nice shade of dirty beige. The housekeeping staff is doing a wonderful job. 

"I'm sorry?" 

"No, no reason to apologize. I didn't mean it as a complaint, just a comment." Evie says, waving a hand. "You're very tall and kingly. It's a feature. I just need to lengthen some sleeves." 

Tall is fine. Plenty of people are tall. 

"I have a tailor," Ben tries, shoving away the and kingly part. Evie means it as a compliment. He knows that. She's striving to be as perfect and royal as possible, so he will take her words in the spirit that they were intended, and accept the compliment. "You really don't have to take time away from your commissions to work on me." 

"Your tailor styles your father," Evie says, landing right on the heart of the matter with the same flawless precision as her needle. "He makes you look about eighty years old. All you need is some extra gray hairs and you'd be the spitting image of your father." 

"He's not so bad--" 

"I don't like your father." 

"You can't say that." Ben says, around the rock that seems to have gotten stuck in his throat. "Not in the castle. It's not safe." 

"A people who cannot express displeasure in their government aren't a fairly governed people," Evie says, making another note on the tablet. It's like she doesn't even care that she's skirting the edge of treason. She's never been in a room alone with his father. She doesn't know that it's not his political power that she should be afraid of. "I don't like him. I think he wears unflattering suits to evoke his image as a war hero, and his unwillingness to evolve in his fashion is just a symptom of his larger inflexibility and fascination with a past that won't come back just because he never stopped dressing for it." 

Breathe. 

In for three, out for three. Let the tingling in his hands recede. Keep breathing. Slow and steady. 

"You really shouldn't say things like that," Ben says, once he's got the riptide of anxiety under control. Technically, his father has access to the school security cameras, but the odds that he's checking them, especially with sound, are low. Most of the dorm cameras don't even have sound. The VK dorms probably do, and Ben's own dorm does, but most of them don't. His father might not even remember that sound is an option, if he does check the tapes. "Auradon doesn't like to talk about it."

"You mean your dad doesn't like to talk about it." 

"My dad is Auradon."

Evie shrugs, still tapping away. She's looking down, and the fall of her hair is probably obscuring her mouth from the security cameras. "Well, I grew up isolated on a prison island because of the war, so I'm going to keep talking about it. If your dad doesn't want to hear about the consequences of his actions, maybe he should retire about it already." 

"Maybe," Ben agrees. His voice feels thin. "But in the meantime, can you make me look better than him?" 

She looks up.

"Ben. Babe. Was that even a question?" 

"Hey, I had to ask--" 

"I am going to make you look so much better than he could ever hope to be," Evie says, "I'm going to tailor the hell out of you, and by the time I'm done, they're going to think you're the original, and he's the crappy knock-off version." 

Slow breathing. He's not being hunted for sport. It's okay to look like his dad. It's okay that he's somehow still growing, and that his dad stands head and shoulders above a crowd, and if he passed on his height and his looks, than who knows what else he passed on, and Ben's never allowed himself to get angry but his body is just like his dad, and--

"Ben. Ben!" 

Breathe. 

"I'm fine," Ben tells Evie's hand, which is about a centimeter in front of his face all of a sudden. "Just zoned out for a second." 

Evie frowns. "Right. Well. I'm going to make you look gorgeous, and if you're so tired that you're zoning out--" 

Oh, right. The isle doesn't have psychology courses. The VKs never learned about all of the weird things that human brains will do to protect themselves, so they say they're 'just thinking' when they tune their professors out in class, and 'zoning out' is specifically reserved for when one of them needs to tune out so badly that their body takes over and starts dissociating. 

Evie pushes him off her fitting stand. "--go sit down and drink something sweet. It's too warm today anyway, and you've been in a suit all morning, you deserve a break." 

Experimenting with my art, tryna become less of a perfectionist when drawing

Ruby Red Wishes and Impenetrable Shields

Coach lifts his hand, palm out. "Stop right there. You can't run on my field with those."

Jay stops. He doesn't actually give a shit about authority, or whatever, but Coach is a big guy, and he's not dumb. He's not gonna risk aggravating one of the few teachers who doesn't actively hate them yet. 

Coach points at his shoes.

"Go get your cleats on, kid. You can't be on the field in those. It's the rules. No street shoes on the field." 

Jay looks down at his feet. He hasn't actually read the rulebook. He has a copy now, sitting on his shiny new school desk along with the textbooks he got from math class and science class (Biological Sciences, whatever that means), and the packet of papers that Fairy Godmother gave each of them after their first Remedial Goodness class. 

He's looked at the rulebook. He's looked at it a lot, actually. It's got a black cover, with white writing on the front, and the whole thing has diagrams inside, along with all of the rules for Tourney written out in a long list with things like i and il and iu at the start of them. 

It's not like he doesn't want to read it. He's just been busy with other stuff. 

"I, uh."  Jay tells his boots, before wrenching his eyes up. He's from the Isle. He's not scared of some boring Auradon guy. Coach can't actually kick him off the field for wearing the wrong shoes, that's stupid. "I forgot 'em."

Coach looks at him. 

Jay glares back. 

Coach breaks first. He jerks his head towards the locker room. "Okay, kid. There's a bucket of spares in the shed. Go take whatever fits for now, and let Sammy here know what size you need after practice. If you wanna stay, that is."

A round-faced kid waves at them. Jay files this away as the mysterious Sammy, who probably stole his first pair of cleats out of his fucking bag in the first place. There's no other logical reason for him to have a spare, but what-the-fuck ever. He's not gonna stir up any shit about it. 

He pops off a messy two-finger salute to Coach, the kind that his father fucking hates. Adults here are weird though, so he might get results from being a smartass. "Yessir! Will do, sir!"

Coach laughs. "Call me Coach, kid. We don't do sir on my field. And go get your cleats on. These warmups aren't going to run themselves." 

"Yes, Coach," Jay tries. The words don't feel right, but it's what the other boys shout whenever Coach tells them something. "Will do." 

He swallows the sir that tries to come out at the end. This man isn't his dad. He's not some little lost goose, imprinting on the first not-white adult he's seen here. He's sixteen fucking years old. (Probably. Ish. He's not really sure). He doesn't need to pretend he's got a dad again. He's better than that. 

He runs. 

First to the shed, where sure enough, there's a bucket of cleats. Most of them are scuffed up, but there's no holes in the toes, and the laces aren't broken. It's better than most of what they got back home. There's still numbers on the flaps too, but it's not like Jay's ever had a pair of shoes with the size still on them, so he doesn't actually know what number will fit. 

He's a normal size guy. He picks a pair that looks normal-ish. There's one spike broken off on the bottom, but he's already faster than most of the guys he was outrunning yesterday. He can still beat them with a broken shoe. 

What he can't do is lose his boots. According to Fairy Godmother, Auradon Prep is a school full of goodness and rainbows and pretty princesses who would never hurt a fly. He should be able to put anything he owns down, and come back later to find it in exactly the same place, no matter how many people walk by it, no trouble at all. 

Which means, obviously, that his last pair of cleats grew legs and walked out of his bag on their own. Because nobody at Auradon Prep would ever dare stoop to stealing from another student, not even them. Because of the goodness and princesses and happy sparkles and shit. 

So. Either Jay's magical now, and it's spreading to all his stuff like a virus through a preschool, or Fairy Godmother is wrong and somebody's fucking with his shit when he's not looking. 

He's willing to put money (not his own, he doesn't have any of that shit) on the second option. 

So. 

His boots fit in the bottom of the bucket with the spare cleats. They're the only black ones in the pile, but you've gotta be looking for them to see it, and he'll take those odds. If someone wants to take his shit again, they can grab the first shoe-shaped thing they see out of his bag, which is about to be a second pair of fucked-up spare cleats. Then the pretty princes can have so much fun explaining where they got stolen school property from, and-- 

who is he fucking kidding. It's not like any teachers give a shit about other kids stealing their stuff. They're villains. They get what they deserve. 

Jay runs back to practice. 

He spends a lot of time running. 

"Kid," Coach calls. "Hey, kiddo. Come over here."

Jay jogs to a stop in front of Coach. He's wearing his cleats. They're a little darker than they were when he started practice, but that's what happens when the hole in your sock lines up with the ripped part of the cleat and the plastic sticks into your heel and fills the shoe lining with blood. It's barely visible from the outside, so that can't be why he's getting singled out again. He's following all the rules he can figure out. He only slammed into one guy today. He's blending in. 

"Nice job out there," Coach says, clapping a hand on his shoulder. "Good hustle. You've got some speed on you." 

Jay stands up straighter. "I try."

Coach claps his shoulder again. He's got big hands. Strong. He could probably get one most of the way around Jay's neck if he wanted. "You did good. You read that rulebook yet?" 

Jay laughs. He knows how to react to this one. Keep it light, keep complaining, like he's a spoiled princeling who can't be bothered. 

"Hah. Not yet, Coach. Too much homework to get through first." 

Coach frowns. "Kid. The rules are important. Take some time this week, sit down with the book, and lock in. It's not long. You didn't loose it too, did you?" 

Jay must've been pushing too hard with all the running today, because his stomach hurts all of a sudden. Probably from running too hard and stopping too fast. He's gotta do something to wind down, like how he used to spend some time after a hard thieving run doing backflips off his favorite roof for a while, until his heart stopped pounding and he wouldn't drip sweat on the goodies. 

 "Uh. No, Coach. I have it. Just need the time, y'know." 

"Well. Maybe once you've read it, you'll understand why it's so important to remember your cleats," Coach says. "You need to wear them to practice every time, not just when you feel like it. We had the loaners here for you today, but you need to get in the habit of bringing them with you."