#marlos

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.

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.”