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Rating - T (for swearing and allusions to past relationships)
Summary - Mal provides Carlos with an enchanted truth gummy. He takes it at the worst time, and ends up not being able to hide his feelings when encountering an old flame.
A/N - I decided to do small chapters instead of writing one giant fic, just because I'm eager to get it started and get it out there. I've never really written a multi chapter story before so we'll have to see what the update schedule looks like together.
Hope you enjoy!
Chapter 1: A Favor
Carlos groaned, slumping back against his headboard and exiting out of one of the dozen tabs he had open on his laptop. All of which had some variation of “how to ask a girl out” typed in the search bar, with all the infinite unhelpful results that followed.
Apparently in Auradon, the best way to strike a match with a girl was to be her predetermined soulmate and whisk her away to her happily ever after.
Sure, they had advice for those who weren’t so lucky in love, but Carlos didn’t understand how it was supposed to help him.
“Start a conversation with her.”
Duh. Was he supposed to stare her down in silence until she agreed to be his girlfriend? Besides, they’d done nothing but talk so far in their relationship. Carlos was tired of talking. That's why he was trying to do something for a change.
“Be vulnerable.”
Carlos was an expert at that. After all, he’d been plucked from his home and thrust into a new life with zero preparation and all eyes in Auradon on him, watching his every move as he tried to adapt. He couldn’t imagine himself in a more vulnerable spot. If that was all it took to earn a date, everyone in the country should be lining up to get a piece of him right now.
There were so many angles to how he could ask, but none of them felt right.
He couldn’t play it casual. He tried that, and had been misinterpreted to Hades and back with Jane thinking he was asking her all these things as a friend.
The “funny” pick up lines were corny, and Carlos cringed every time he imagined himself using one of them.
And the flirty ones… Those all sounded like they’d be more natural coming from Jay, he thought, and would only work if he had Jay’s looks to back them up.
Carlos sighed, but couldn’t help but smile when he heard Dude let out a huff of his own from his spot on the bed next to him. He reached over, gently scratching behind the little canine’s ears.
“I see you reading over my shoulder,” he joked, trying to lighten the mood with himself. “Alright, how about this one?” He cleared his throat, and looked over at Dude. “You know what you would look really beautiful in? My arms.”
Dude just stared up at him with his usual blank stare, but it still made Carlos feel judged.
“Yeah, it’s not good,” he groaned, closing his laptop and setting it on the bed.
He’d already made up his mind for a little… enchanted assistance to help him make his move. Nothing major, just a temporary truth charm that he’d convinced Mal to concoct for him. Something to give him the push he needed to ask Jane out, and not let himself be shut down by another misunderstanding.
And speaking of Mal…
The news station he had on for background noise switched to another story about Mal, just as the girl herself came barreling into his dorm.
She slammed the door behind herself, leaning against it and panting hard as her eyes flashed a bright green.
“Whoa, easy, girl…” Carlos soothed, hating seeing her so stressed out.
“What? You think this is so easy?!” Mal snapped, pushing off of the door and starting to pace around his dorm room. He snatched the remote off his nightstand to turn the tv off before Mal could see herself on the screen. Thankfully she was still in too much of a frenzy to have noticed. “You don’t have people taking a photo of you every single time you open your mouth to say boo! I mean, not that I can even say ‘Boo’, but you know what I -”
“I know. I’m sorry,” Carlos said softly.
“Carlos, don’t you ever miss screaming at people and making them run away from you?”
Carlos frowned at that.
Back on the Isle, villain kids fell between two categories - prodigies or punching bags. Those with powerful parents that once possessed magical abilities ended up on the top of the heap. Their parents took control, and they raised their children to do the same.
And at the bottom of the heap, there were kids like Carlos. Kids with ordinary parents that were looked down upon just because their ambitions were anything less lofty than cursing, killing, or enslaving whole kingdoms at a time.
Those villains had less pull, and subsequently ended up treating their own children more like minions.
Maleficent was obviously the one who ran things on the Isle, which meant Mal had free reign to do whatever she pleased. And despite not having powers to rival Maleficent’s scepter, Jafar and the Evil Queen had a magic all their own. The three of them were a trio to be feared, admired, and respected, and it was the same with Mal, Jay, and Evie.
If Carlos could say anything positive about his mother, it was that she was conniving enough to figure out a way to align herself with three of the biggest players on the Isle.
That had kept Carlos safe from being tormented by other villain kids, even if nothing could’ve saved him from being tormented by his own mother.
“You’re thinking of my mother,” he replied dryly. “And I was usually on the other end of that, so… no.”
That seemed to permeate through Mal’s anxiety haze, and she looked at Carlos - really looked at him, instead of just letting her eyes dart over to him for a split second as she frantically looked around the room.
“I’m sorry.”
For the first time since she entered the room, Mal stilled. Carlos made some room for her on the bed, and she sat down on the edge of it.
“I wasn’t thinking, I -”
“No, no, it’s okay. I mean, I get it,” Carlos replied. “With everything you’ve got going on, it’s a wonder you even remember to feed yourself.”
Mal’s stomach growled almost on cue, and she reached up to clutch it.
“Crap, I think I forgot to eat breakfast…”
“Here, I’ve got you.”
Carlos hopped off of the bed, going over to his backpack and fishing out a protein bar.
“Here,” he said, offering it to Mal, who just wrinkled her nose up at it. “It’s good, I promise. Better than the ones that tasted like sawdust that made it over to us.”
She hesitated before taking it, opening the wrapper and taking a bite.
“See? Not so bad,” he smiled. “Oh, and hey, I’ve got the report I promised you.” He went back to his bag, pulling out a folder and getting some papers out. “As well as your chemistry homework. And I’m almost done with your history project, but I know it’s not due til Friday, so I promise I’ll finish in time. It's crazy that they still make you do homework on top of all your princessy work.”
“Ben can do it, and he's the king. No reason I can't too. But thank you,” Mal sighed, managing a weak smile as she looked up at Carlos. “All this for one tiny charm - it almost seems like too much… Are you sure there isn’t anything else I can do for you? Just a little spell, a potion, anything?”
“Whoa, slow down, one truth spell is more than enough,” he chuckled. He set the papers on the bed next to Mal, before sitting down on her other side. “You’re really itching to do some magic, huh?”
“You have no idea." She stuffed the rest of the protein bar into her mouth and wadded up the wrapper, tossing it into the trash can by Carlos’s bed. Carlos watched her as she chewed and swallowed, hoping she’d say more when she was done.
But she stayed quiet.
“I know you’ve got a lot on your plate…” he said when he knew he wasn’t getting anything else out of her. “More than any of the rest of us could imagine. I mean, I’m lucky my biggest source of stress right now is giving Dude his semi-weekly bath. Well, second biggest source, maybe…”
Mal got the hint, reaching into the pocket of her skirt and pulling out a little mint tin, handing it to Carlos.
He took it eagerly, opening it up and seeing what looked like an ordinary piece of red candy sitting in a nest of tissue paper.
“You… made it into a gummy?” he asked, an amused smile tugging at one corner of his lips.
“Yeah. Cherry flavored. That’s still your favorite, right?”
“You remembered,” Carlos smiled. He gently bumped his shoulder against Mal’s as a way of saying thanks. “How long is it supposed to last?”
“A few hours, max,” Mal replied. “I tried to dilute the charm as best as I could. Because I know how dangerous the truth could be, and if you took it at the wrong time you could say the wrong thing to the wrong person and everyone would look at you like you were crazy and you could get into some serious trouble or even sent back to the Isle-”
“Gods, Mal, what do you think I really think about Jane?”
“I’m serious!” she exclaimed, pounding her fist onto the comforter.
“It’ll be okay, I promise,” he said. He closed the tin, placing it on the nightstand. “I’ll save it for later. Jane’s been so busy with cotillion committee lately, I probably won’t see her til tonight. Then it’ll give me the boost I need to get my feelings out, and secure a date with her. Easy as that.”
“Easy. Right,” Mal said with a slight nod.
“Thanks, Mal, seriously,” he said, smiling at his friend. “You don’t know how much this means to me. And if you need any more work taken care of for your classes, I’ll be here.”
“I can’t ask all that of you…”
“Hey, what are lackeys for, right?” he teased, bumping her shoulder again. This time she bumped him back.
“Thanks, ‘Los.” She got up from the bed, grabbing the stack of schoolwork Carlos had done for her. “You don’t know what this means to me…”
She managed another small smile for him before turning towards the door to head out.
Carlos stretched back out on his bed, petting Dude and grabbing his laptop again.
“Oh, hey,” he called, and Mal turned around at the door. “Maybe you could do a magic salon thing this week. When the girls come to Evie to get their cotillion dresses, you could do their hair. It’d help you scratch that magic itch a little don’t you think?”
Mal smiled, and Carlos was too far away to see just how pinched it looked.
“Yeah, good idea,” she replied with a nod. “Thanks again.”
“You too,” Carlos replied happily, turning back to his laptop as Mal left.
That went better than expected. Mal really came through for him, and he got to help her out in return.
And in just a few short hours, he’d ask Jane to be his girlfriend, and everything about his life in Auradon would be perfect.
A Study in an Utter Lack of Regard for Personal Safety, featuring Mal Bertha and Carlos De Vil
“I don’t know why I agreed to this,” Mal says.
“Yes, you do,” Carlos replies, hefting the duffel bag over his shoulder. It clinks dangerously as he moves, and she eyes it with suspicion.
And, okay, he has a point. Mal may be the leader of this gang, but if Carlos said ‘jump’, Mal would say, ‘how high?’. It’s a side effect of all the gang activity; you learn to trust each other with things that normal people have never even thought to trust another person with.
“Okay, revise: I don’t know what we’re doing here.”
Carlos meets her eye, gaze as sharp as she’s ever seen it. He smirks like an Isle boy, wide and wicked, and says, “Science.”
“Science?”
“Just trust me.”
Without anymore preamble whatsoever, Carlos begins traipsing through the woods. With single-minded purpose, he stomps over the weeds and roots, directly into the belly of the beast. Mal swears, rushing to follow.
“I just don’t understand what kind of science,” she smacks at a branch before she can run right into it, “we’re going to be doing in the Enchanted Forest.”
“The magical kind,” Carlos says, not pausing in his trek. “That’s why I brought you.”
“Isn’t that a contradiction?”
He abruptly stops. She nearly runs into him from behind. He whirls around on his heel and says, “No, it’s not. There’s actually an entire field of scientific study here in Auradon dedicated to the way magic interacts with things like biology and chemistry. And cosmology, but that’s more philosophical… Anyway, you,” he sticks an accusatory finger into her face. “didn’t tell me that there’s a special magic lake that washes away curses!”
She blinks at him. His phrasing is very interesting, given that all she’d said was that it washed away the love spell they casted on Ben, all that time ago. “It doesn’t just wash away curses.”
He rolls his eyes. “Spells, then.” He huffs theatrically. “The point is, you’ve been holding out on me!”
“Okay, wait,” she holds a hand up. “You dragged me all the way out here so you can do some freaky science experiment—“
“It’s not freaky.”
“—on the Enchanted Lake?”
“Yeah,” he says, easily. “Are you coming?”
“Obviously.” She scoffs. “I’m just wondering what all the secrecy was about.”
“Revenge, obviously. For holding out on me. Now, can you just show me where the damn thing is?”
“You don’t know? Then why were you leading?” She groans. “Is this part of your ‘revenge’?”
He rolls his eyes. “I thought I heard water.”
“Well, you’re shit out of luck, because Ben made me close my eyes when he showed it to me.”
Carlos stares at her, genuinely scandalized. “And you did?”
“Ben is like if a kitten were a person. I wasn’t worried about it.”
He frowns. “Whatever you say, killer.” And, it’s like, yeah, on the Isle closing her eyes just because someone had asked would’ve been a fast way to get a switchblade buried in her gut, but she’d been playing the part of sweet-girl-with-a-crush, just the way Evie had taught her, so closing her eyes had just made the most sense.
“You gonna tell FG about those ‘Isle instincts’ you got going on right now?”
He smiles at her, all kinds of smug. “FG loves me. I don’t got any ‘Isle instincts’, didn’t you know?” He bats his eyes at her, expression suddenly the picture of shattered, wide-eyed innocence. “My mommy hurt me and kept me inside all the time. Gang violence? Oh, evil, I wouldn’t have been caught dead doing anything like that!”
“You know, puppy,” she laughs, reaching forward to ruffle his curls. “sometimes you scare me.” He ducks from the affection, shooting her a tilted grin.
It takes them the better part of an hour to find it. By the time they do, Mal is sweaty, dehydrated, and adorned with at least two scratches from thorny plants. They had run into a total of three (three) weird, fucky-looking creatures that Mal didn’t know forests in Auradon could have. Weird, lithe, rodent-like things with sharp teeth and too many eyes... She’d had to do some creative magic to avoid them. Overall, she’s not pleased with the experience.
Finally, though, they find it.
Just how she remembers it: granite arch on a silver dais. Ivy crawling up the sides, flowers dotting the bank. It’s... deeply picturesque. The sun hanging high in the sky above it, framed by mountains. Even the breeze smells like flowers, like this is some sort of fucking romance novel.
The fact that Auradon has places like these, just, sitting around, and nobody even bothers to visit them half the time drives her slightly insane. It makes her want to grip Ben by the back of his skinny neck and shove his face in the wild, freezing, rocky surf of the Isle. But that isn’t very ‘good’ of her, so she pretends the feeling isn’t there.
Carlos drops the duffel bag onto the dais, just by the edge of the water. He seems completely unaffected by the beauty around him, and truly, that’s half the fun of doing anything with Carlos; he’s dressed in Isle clothes like he doesn’t give a shit, an old ratty pair of studded combat boots, a shirt covered in patches and pins, hair haphazardly dyed. He breaks up the serenity of the fairytale image of this place, a smudge amidst all the pastels.
The inside of the duffel appears to be, almost entirely, small glass vials. He pulls out a thermos and dunks it into the water, twisting the cap shut.
“Is that legal?” She asks, plopping down beside him. He’s crouched over the lip, hands braced on his knees as he stares impassively down at the crystalline water. It’s reflecting the sunlight, and somehow the glittery light is shining off of it in hues of pink.
“Definitely not,” he replies, gently setting his thermos of contraband back into his duffel. “Technically, we aren’t even supposed to be here.”
“Wait, seriously?” She watches as he pulls vials of various liquids from the bag. “But Ben brought me here?”
“Special privileges. Those of royal blood are permitted to enter public property that would otherwise be restricted, providing it has substantial religious significance. And by ‘religious’, they just mean—“
“—fairytale-relevant.” She finishes. “I can’t believe you memorized that whole damn book.”
“‘S not a book.”
“I can’t believe you memorized the entire Constitution of the United Kingdoms of Auradon,” she drawls. “Still, it’s weird. Somehow I can’t imagine Ben doing something like that. He just, hates breaking the rules.”
Carlos finishes laying out his perfectly even line of glass vials, before selecting one carefully. “It’s easy to hate breaking the rules when the rules for you are so lax.”
“Preach,”
He hands her the vial. “Put a spell on this.”
She takes it, raising her eyebrow at it critically. It’s clear, sloshing around in the sealed vial as she eyes it. “I don’t have any love spell cookies on hand.”
He rolls his eyes. “I already know it works on the love spell. Put another spell on it.”
“This seems like a very lax way to conduct an experiment,” she says. “Any requests?”
“I’m just satisfying my curiosity, not writing for a scientific journal. And, I don’t know. Make it sweet or something. It’s just water.” He pulls out a notebook and a pencil, opening it to a fresh page with confident, practiced motions. With ease, he makes a table with five columns. On one side, he writes, substance. Then, spell. Then, time submerged. Then, observations. Then, effects.
“Does anyone know we’re out here?”
“You think I would tell people we’re going to go flagrantly ignore Auradon’s laws regarding private religious property?”
“Fair enough,” she mutters. “Evie and Jay?”
“Yeah, I mentioned it.” He gestures with the eraser of his pencil. “Now hurry up.”
She rolls her eyes, but acquiesces. She doesn’t need her spellbook to do magic anymore, which is nice, because FG’s been way sweeter on them since they put the spellbook and the mirror in the museum. No, magic isn’t about some arbitrary collections of poems in a book; it’s about intention, power, the sleek possibilities of the meaning they’ve given to the things they say.
Power gathering in her clavicle and leaking hotly from her eyes, she says, “Sweet like candy, sweet like cake, make this water so sugary it aches.”
Words and rhyme schemes was how she learned magic, and so it is what her magic associates with power. The legends of fae and contracts and names speak for themselves, after all. Magic itself does not require words, but for her, half-faery she is, there is nothing more powerful.
“Did it work?”
“You doubting me, De Vil?”
He rolls his eyes. “It’s science. I have to be sure.” And then he yanks the vial from her fingers. He sets it down, twisting open the cork. He pulls an eyedropper from the bag and gently sets it inside, sucking up some of the water. Then, he sticks his tongue out, and drops a glob of it onto his tongue.
“Well?”
He smacks his lips. Holds up the eyedropper. Rolling her eyes, she sticks her tongue out for him. He lets another drop fall, and saccharine sweetness explodes on her tongue. It tastes like funfetti cake, which is exactly what she’d been picturing when she spelled it.
He takes it back and hands her a stopwatch. He holds his hand over the lake and says, “On three.”
He inhales, eyeing the lake with eyes that sparkle. With a wild, manic sort of excitement. In another life, she’s absolutely sure he would’ve been some kind of mad scientist. Maybe he’s already on his way there. “One,”
The water laps gently at the lip of the dais, perfect and undisturbed. It looks like an oil painting; the kind she’d see in Ben’s castle, ten feet tall and set into a gold frame. Pure opulence. “Two,”
It’s funny, she thinks, how all he had to do to get her to come with him was ask. He’d even made her drive. Yanked her phone from her back pocket and set the address into the GPS. And she’d done it, because she knows he hates driving. “Three,”
He dunks his hand underneath the surface. She clicks the stopwatch on.
“We’re going to do ten seconds to start. Then twenty. Then thirty.”
She groans. “When you said ‘science’, I thought we were gonna do something fun.”
“This is what you get for holding out on me—“
“Time.”
He pulls it from the surf. He goes through the motions of testing it again, before announcing, “I fucking knew it.”
“What?”
“It’s still sweet,” he shakes the vial gently. “The glass protected it.”
He makes her spell another vial, and this time, he pulls a dropper full of water from the lake. Then, he drops it into the vial. When he tests it that time, it’s not sweet anymore.
“Is it safe for us to be testing it like this?”
“Oh, it’s a flagrant violation of every lab safety rule ever made.” He’s not even looking at her, scribbling notes down.
Her eyes fall onto the water. Perfect. Clear. Gentle and glittering pink in the sunlight. Auradon. “What d’you think would happen if I drank it?”
He looks up from his notebook to deadpan, “What?”
“Like, if you drank it, it would probably just taste like water. But I’m a magical creature.”
He opens his mouth. Doesn’t say anything. Narrows his eyes in thought. Sets his pencil down with finality. Closes his mouth. Opens it again.
“Maybe it would make you, like, not able to do magic?”
“Like the barrier.”
He presses his lips into a thin line. “Yeah, like the barrier.”
“Or maybe it’d be like poison.”
“Didn’t you say you swam in it, when you were with Ben?”
‘Swam’ is a charitable word for it. She’s not going to argue, though. “Yeah, but I didn’t swallow any of it.”
He pauses for a moment, seemingly contemplating this. Then, he goes digging through his duffel, arms shoulder deep. He emerges with two empty vials. “You wanna find out?”
“Hell yeah,” she swipes one. Together, they fill their vials with the liquid. And together, they shoot them back like it’s booze.
It tastes like the way sunlight feels on her face, like the way the vines look where they climb up the granite. She hates it.
Gently, Carlos takes the vial back when she offers it, their fingertips brushing. He pulls his notebook into his lap, eye glittering as he pierces her with his gaze. “How do you feel?”
“Normal.” She says. “Well, I can sort of feel the water.”
“Feel it?”
“Like the way you can feel booze. Except it’s cool, not warm. It’s in my stomach.”
He hands her a vial. “Spell it.”
She does. It’s not sweet. She could tell as soon she said the words, though; the power didn’t gather in her, didn’t leak from her eyes like hot steam. He could tell, too. But that’s because the magic didn’t turn her eyes green, because there wasn’t any magic.
He scribbles furiously. She says, “You know, you should dunk the Anti-Magic Machine in here.”
The ‘Anti-Magic Machine’ being their awful, pre-teen colloquialism for the machine Carlos had once been developing to try and tear an exit in the barrier. He’d only just gotten it to work— put a teeny tiny hole in the sky, letting in a strange dot of unfiltered sunlight— when they were brought to Auradon. The excitement had been electric, she remembers. She’d really thought he was going to break them out.
He mumbles, “Possible effects: mind wandering,” and she snaps, hey! But then he digs around in his duffle again and emerges with a black box about a foot long and half a foot wide. It’s got ANTI-MAGIC MACHINE V3 written haphazardly one the side in metallic, silver sharpie. “I brought it to use as a control, but,” and then his eyes land on the water.
He drops it in.
It, predictably, explodes.
A fountain of water and sparks shoots upward into the air. Mal grabs Carlos by the shoulder, shoving him as hard as she can away from the explosion, jumping after him, shielding him with her body. The shockwave bursts past her, rippling through every inch and plane of her body. She gasps, heart hammering, body screaming in pain.
Then, all is quiet. Her ears pop painfully. They are laying on the riverbank, Carlos pressed into the dirt by Mal’s weight. Her arms are braced on the soil beside his temples, framing him. She attempts to catch her breath.
Carlos blinks up at her, expression only mildly put-out. The ends of his hair are smoking, and she pats them out with a shaking hand. It smears ash over his forehead. He says, very calmly, “Interesting.”
It explodes again. They’re far enough away that the shockwave is only kind of painful, and they turn to watch it. Fire sprays into the sky, surrounded on all sides by a cacophonous shower of water.
It explodes a third time, this time less intensely. The shockwave still makes her ears pop and her eyes water, but it’s nothing she isn’t used to. She pulls herself from on top of Carlos, standing. She gives him a hand up, brushing dirt and grass from his clothes.
Together, they creep over to the dais. They peer over the edge at the water. Carlos drops to his knees and sticks his arm in the water, searching blindly; eventually, he pulls the Anti-Magic Machine from the surface.
As soon as it touches the air, it catches fire.
He yelps, throwing it to the dais like it’s a roach he caught crawling on him. He hops back, hissing in pain, waving his hand back and forth. She grips his wrist, pulling the wound to her face.
It’s a third-degree, but it’s on his fingers, which sucks. She says as much.
His eyes are on the AMM. “It’s soaking wet. Why the fuck did it catch fire?”
“Beats me.” She nearly casts a healing spell on the wound; she belatedly realizes that she’s still under the Lake’s effects.
His eyes are glittering with that manic excitement again. His staring at the fire with violent passion in his face, licking his lips like a predator sizing up its prey.
On the Isle, Carlos had always been hungry for knowledge. Starving, even. He had gripped whatever he could learn in greedy hands and put it all to use as soon as he could. But on the Isle, it’d been about survival. It was about keeping their enemies off their backs, finding creative ways to save food, making a machine to escape the island.
But as soon as he came to Auradon? It stopped being for survival and started being for sport. For fun. A game he plays. Hours spent in the library, late nights in the school’s lab, doing experiments he’s not supposed to be doing with materials he’s not supposed to have. She was wrong, earlier; he already is a bit of a mad scientist.
She kicks the AMM away with her boot.
He opens his mouth to argue.
She says, “Next weekend. You make a new AMM, I bring the spellbook.”
A smile breaks across his lips. Stretches wide over his face, crinkles his eyes at the corners, bells his cheeks, warps his freckles; his hair is singed and there’s that smudge of ash on his forehead in the shape of her thumb. They’re gonna have to dress that burn, but goddamn. He’s never looked so beautiful.
He may smirk like an Isle boy, but his smile is all his own. He says, “You’re on.”
“Am I forgiven for holding out on you?”
She cradles his burned hand. He says, “Killer, I was never mad.”
She knew that already. Still, though. For that smile? She’d do anything. Not that she’d ever tell him. His head would get too big.
Mal: Carlos is a perfect cinnamon scone who’s never done anything wrong in his entire life!
Diego: Never done anything wrong?! He's set a city block on FIRE!
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Anyway, Jay trying to get them all to come to the gym with him and Carlos throws a cushion at him.
Jay and Evie at the gym are a force to be reckoned with. Evie likes showing up all the men and she is just running faster each time whilst maintaining a very indepth conversation with Jay about how they liked to stab people for fun. Evie and Jay being competitive with one another and having daily competitions, loser does the dishes or pays for coffee.
Mal likes staring people dead in the eye as she lifts weights and keeps adding big ones. She doesn't really like talking whilst she's there. She likes wearing the headphones she stole from Carlos and playing death metal really loudly. She pops all of the yoga balls and "accidentally" puts spells on the exercise bikes kicking them into full speed and terrifying Chad into falling off (she regrets nothing). Carlos facetimes Mal and only encourages her chaos.
Carlos getting dragged to the gym, only to hide behind vending machines. He sits on Jay's back reading whilst he does push ups. Finding a dance class that he likes the look of and Evie going with him to ease his anxiety.
Mal finding out she can actually do yoga and delighting in rubbing Audrey's face in it. She cackles when Jay can't do the posing.
Just, all of them finding out what they're good at and thriving and not giving a shit what anyone else thinks of them. Them all being slightly chaotic and reveling in it.
A/n: So I'm gonna try something a little bit different and post my full fic on here. I don't normally do this cause I assume people won't bother to read it but yk, I think some people will appreciate it, so here it is. I'm choosing this fic cause it seems to be the most popular recently. Enjoy!
Tw: abuse mention, attempted sexual assault mention, porn mention(this makes the fic sound really intense, I promise it's not, these are all just mentioned in passing. Basically the isle was not a good place)
Word Count: 1881
Summary: "Couldn't sleep either?" She asks. He heaves a sigh, sitting down next to her, she lays her head on his shoulder.
"Nightmares." Is all he says and Mal hums.
Carlos had always had awful dreams. Worse even, because most involved Cruella and very real things she had done to him.
Or
Two isle kids can't sleep well in their new home.
---
It's odd how quiet Auradon can be. So unlike the isle that it makes her uneasy. Soft chirping crickets and Evie's steady breaths, that's all Mal can really hear in this place at night.
Nothing like the endless noise back home.
Mal remembers hearing screams on the isle, in the middle of the night. Out in the streets, with no castle walls to protect them. No walls in general. Not like the ones her mom provided for her. Large and sturdy.
Sometimes, when Mal was a little girl, Maleficent would threaten to throw her into those streets. With those wailing faceless strangers. She would tell her that one day, one night, those damned screams may very well be coming from her next. That way, Mal knew who was in charge. Who was really keeping her safe.
Her fists grip the fabric of the duvet that covers her, gritting her teeth. The almost quiet fills her with a jittery anxiety, worse somehow then the screaming on the isle. At least then, she could hear the chattering of busy late night markets to distract her.
Mal rips the sheets from her chest, sits up and swings her legs over the edge of her bed. Her foot bounces where it meets the floor, and she delegates, looking between Evie's sleeping figure and the too smooth too pink door to the hall.
Doors on the isle were always dark and splintered, nothing like the ones here.
She creeps to the door, desperate to get out of the stuffy Auradon bedroom she knows she'll never really be comfortable in. The sound of footsteps outside stops her from grasping the knob. Night staff, patrolling the halls to make sure everyone is in bed by curfew. She suppresses a groan, tapping her fingers lightly on the doorframe.
Cursing under her breath, she resigns herself, backing away. She doesn't want to risk getting caught so soon.
She worries her bottom lip between her fangs, knowing she can't stay cooped up like this, not with so much energy inside her.
Back on the Isle, she never had to worry about the restlessness. If she wanted to leave in the middle of the night, she would leave. Maleficent could be terrifying, worse then any threat the streets ever had. Sometimes she just had to get out.
Her lip is bleeding. Had she been biting that hard?
She looks around briefly, like she worried someone would catch her unguarded, and wipes the blood away with the back of her hand. Her eyes lock onto the window, an easy out, even if it is three stories high. They've jumped from worse on the Isle. Risk was a necessity if you wanted to survive.
"You're lucky it isn't broken." Evie had said to Jay, smearing salve around his ankle. It was only a sprain, but Mal still paced around the room like she thought he was dying. He'd only jumped off the roof because he was running away from some goons she had pissed off.
"I'm fine princess." He had said back, always aiming for nonchalance. Evie squeezed his ankle hard enough to make him wince, and then smiled all innocent-like. In a way only a princess could manage.
Mal had laughed at the time, stopped her pacing to smack Jay on the back of the head. But she was berating herself inside. Yelling and screaming.
She couldn't keep them safe.
The campus walls we're far too easy to climb. Why were there so many ledges? She hardly even needed to balance her footing. It's like they wanted students to sneak out.
She lands on the grass with a soft thud, barely even needing to bend her knees. She doesn't bother worrying about the open window, even when everything in her body begs her to go back and close it, to keep Evie safe. This isn't the Isle anymore, nobody has to worry about the wrong people sneaking in here. Hell, half the student body leave their windows open by default.
The Isle wasn't kind. Mal has a very brief, very clear, recollection of a man sneaking into her bedroom one night as a child, very nearly doing things to her she would never had been able to forget. Her mother and her goons had heard her scream, and the man was found dead the next morning.
It was still hard to forget his silhouette. His crooked smile.
She takes her time walking across campus, less staff outside to catch her. They're too pompous, too arrogant, to think anyone would manage to get past them.
Too trusting. She thinks, Far too trusting.
Their new hideout isn't really that. It's more of a dusty nook nobody knows about, tucked away in an old library nobody visits anymore. Behind bookshelves and old stained novels.
It was their safe space, they had established. A place to retreat to whenever things got rough. A place quiet and hidden and safe.
Except when she walks in and turns their corner, there's a knife pointing at her chest.
For a moment, no longer then a second, she has an internal battle. The Isle kid in her screams to fight. To hurt, to protect. To get that damned switchblade out of her face. The Auradon girl she was so afraid of becoming, felt a spark of fear, telling her to run, to tell someone, wondering how the hell someone snuck something like that onto campus.
Then, she realizes, as the knife lowers, that the blade is one of theirs.
"Sorry." Says Carlos, letting his body sag, "Didn't know it was you." He looks sheepish, lips bitten and shoulders hunched.
"Don't apologize." She says, letting the adrenaline fade, she makes her way over to their spot. The blanket laid out on the floor, surrounded by new Auradon pillows, is dusty and stained. An old raggedy thing that they had brought from their isle hideout. Something that smelled like all of them. "It's good to be alert."
"Yeah I guess." He looks as tired and restless as Mal felt.
"Couldn't sleep either?" She asks. He heaves a sigh, sitting down next to her, she lays her head on his shoulder.
"Nightmares." Is all he says and Mal hums.
Carlos had always had awful dreams. Worse even, because most involved Cruella and very real things she had done to him. He had always preferred to sleep in the warehouse, away from anything that reminded him of home. Sometimes, he'd wake up screaming. Those were the worst nights.
Mal grabs his hand gently, rubbing her thumb over one of the smallest scars Cruella had left on him, a long gash over his knuckles. "You wanna talk about it?"
He stays silent for awhile, twitching his fingers between Mal's.
"Same old." He says, which meant it was a very particular nightmare, memory really, he could never seem to escape. No matter how far away he was from his mother.
"There are no dog's around here," Carlos had said, voice hoarse. Evie was dabbing away his tears, drying them with an old rag they had found months ago. He had wiped his nose with the back of his hand, not yet scarred by Cruella. "None with spots." His eyes went hazy and distant, "But I have freckles you know? And mom needs spots for her new coat."
He had stopped there, but the bandages wrapped around his shoulder made them wish they had asked a lot sooner. Jay paced back and forth, jaw set and fists clenched, like he wanted to hurt Cruella in all the ways she had hurt their pup. Mal gave him a warning glare and Jay only grunted in frustration. He wanted to punch something. Someone. But loud noises and sudden movements scared Carlos when he was like this, so he settled for pacing.
"Normally I can take care of it myself." He said, "But it started getting infected, and I didn't know what to do." There was an unspoken apology in his words, like he was sorry he didn't tell them sooner, but Isle kids never said sorry. No matter how much they cared about each other.
Jay paced faster, trying desperately to stop himself from going and killing Cruella himself. Mal would stop him if he tried of course - couldn't risk both their boys being hurt by that bitch - but she was bleeding with just as much rage herself, really only reigning it in because Carlos was more important right now.
"Its ok Pup." Mal had said, "We're here now. She's not gonna hurt you while we're around. I can promise you that." She wouldn't let that woman get anywhere near him.
Carlos shifts uncomfortably, the bookcase behind them digging into his back at all the wrong angles, in all the worst scars. Mal lifts her head from his shoulder, and sighs, "Lay down."
Carlos raises a brow, breathing out a laugh. "What?"
She pats her lap, "Lay down."
He eyes her dubiously, like he thinks she's gonna try something while he's down. She would never, of course, not when he's so vulnerable, but the hesitance is still there, might always be there. Effects of the Isle, she supposes.
He lies down anyway, because he trusts her - because he knows her - and she cards her fingers through his curling hair. His whole body goes slack, and he sighs.
They sit there, indulging in each other, not saying anything for a good while. Honestly Mal thinks he'd finally fallen asleep until he speaks again.
"So what about you?" He finally asks, fingering one of the strings in Mal's sweatpants. "Why are you up?"
Mal laughs, "It's too fucking quiet here."
That pulls a grin out of her boy, "Yeah. Makes everything else so loud."
"I can actually hear myself think. It's awful."
This time, Carlos actually snorts. "Must be hard for you."
Mal flicks at his forehead. He laughs harder.
"What were you doing here this whole time?" She asks.
He points over to his laptop and a box of metal scraps and wires by the window, "Trying to upgrade some stuff."
Mal hums, "Trying to watch porn without getting caught by the school?"
Carlos smacks her arm, laughing. "God shut up."
They dissolve into a giggling fit, sleepy and half delusional, wrapping around each other at awkward angles until Carlos pulls at her to lay down with him.
"We really should try to sleep." He says, pulling a pillow under them "I can play some music so it's not so quiet?"
Mal huffs out a laugh, shuffling around until she's clinging and wrapping around him. "That sounds nice."
He grapples for his phone somewhere behind her, playing some song soft enough to distract them both. He wraps an arm around her like he always does, just as needy as she is. Though, that's not something Isle kids ever admit.
And just like that, they finally fall asleep.
-
The others find them the next day, Evie cooing at the way they hold onto each other. Jay taking pictures that he can mock them with later. And Ben, who was watching the four of them with something akin to awe, something a little too close to envy.
