Chapter One: Lost Kids

Sometimes she regretted it.

Choosing good, it'd seemed so simple at the coronation. Stop her mother, give back the wand, be with Ben. No more evil, no more being rotten, maybe actually finding happiness.

Reflecting on it now, Mal wished she'd thought about it more. It hadn't been an easy choice, that was her entire childhood she was leaving behind, the Isle wasn't luggage she could just abandon, it was, in its own twisted way, home.

The only real home she'd ever had.

The Auradon kids walked around the topic like it was a white-hot iron, they never mentioned where Mal, Carlos, Jay and Evie grew up. Maybe they thought ignoring it would mean it had never happened, but it had, Mal still had the scars and the memories to prove it if she ever tried forgetting.

Not that she could. Even if she wanted to, even if she cast a spell to get rid of her scars, to wipe her memory clean and start over. Magic could erase some parts of who you were, it couldn't erase all of it.

The Isle was who she was, the scars and the broken bones and the bruises and loneliness, those were the ABC's of her. They were the ABC's of Jay, Carlos and Evie.

Jay still stole things sometimes, kleptomania didn't just go away, no matter how many declarations of goodness a person made. He always returned everything he took, but it messed him up inside. Mal had once caught him with six wallets, five phones, and even a diamond ring on the school's roof, he'd been having a panic attack.

She'd never asked him what he'd been doing up there, half of her hadn't wanted to know the answer, the other half knew she climbed up there sometimes too. They'd sat on the ledge together, and she'd spelled all of the objects to go back to their owners' and he'd thanked her. She'd held his hand, had wanted to say she understood, but the words had never made it past her lips.

Since then, she'd watched him more, she wasn't ashamed to admit it. And if anyone ever caught them sneaking up to the roof together every few months, well, that was their business.

Evie was easy to keep an eye on, she shared a room with the girl, and unlike Jay, Evie wasn't an expert at hiding things. Mal had always been able to read her like her mother's spell book.

It'd started when Chad had made an offhanded comment at lunch one day, about how much Evie had eaten. On the Isle, food was scarce, good food practically non-existent. In Auradon, you could eat as much as you wanted, whenever you wanted.

It was one of the things Mal had made Ben swear to change. They might've all been villains on the Isle, but she'd seen too many people starve for her to not do anything about it now that she actually could.

It'd started with that, and it'd ended with Evie trying out for the cheer-leading team as a flyer, only for Audrey to tell her she was too heavy. Mal had wanted to turn Audrey's hair grey the minute Evie had repeated the conversation to her, but in Audrey's defense, she'd meant too heavy to be a flyer, not to be on the squad.

Also, turning people's hair grey was frowned upon in Auradon, Mal would never totally understand these people.

From then on Evie had been on an insane diet, that went straight passed obsessively healthy and head-first into completely unhealthy.

Mal had let it slide for a few days, making sure Evie ate at least the minimum at meals, because this was her best friend and Evie was too smart not to know when something was bad for her. It was her life, Mal had had enough of people dictating their lives.

But then Evie had fainted during a Tourney game.

She'd missed two days of school, and Fairy Godmother had signed her up for counseling sessions, because of course, everyone wanted Evie to 'get better' and regain her 'self-confidence.'

Mal knew it wasn't about that at all, Evie had been raised her whole life with self-confidence instilled in her, because the Evil Queen hadn't raised an insecure daughter. To have survived with her mother for so long, Evie had known on some level that she was beautiful, or else her mom wouldn't have bothered with her at all.

This ran deeper, this was about Evie gazing into her magic mirror every night, and pursing her lips when she was about to smile or laugh, this was about her thinking of what her mother would say if she could see her now.

Mal had sat by her side that second night in the infirmary, had held Evie while she cried and said things like "She'd disown me" and "Call me a failure" and "I don't want to get wrinkles, she wouldn't like me then."

Mal hadn't told Evie that their parents had never really liked them at all.

Instead, she'd pressed a kiss to Evie's forehead, and let her eyes flash green. "She doesn't matter." Mal had said. "You matter. You matter to me. You'd matter even if you had wrinkles, even if you didn't have a tiara. You'll always be fairest of them all to me. To Jay, to Carlos."

"You're just saying that," Evie had sniffled, and Mal had never wanted to kill her mother more, to rip the Evil Queen's eyes out so she could never look at Evie again.

"E, I'd love you even I were blind."

She'd broken into sobs, Jay and Carlos had spent the rest of the night with her, until the early hours of the morning when they'd all had to go back to their dorms.

Since then, on bad days, Evie crawled into bed with her. Once, she'd done it every night for two months.

She did it so often, Mal gazed at her sometimes and wondered how many consecutive bad days a person could have before they snapped.

She thought, if there was a limit, she, Jay, Evie and Carlos would have shattered long ago.

Carlos had more than the rest of them.

It was an unspoken thing among the four of them, they never mentioned how Carlos had had it the worst.

It'd startled Mal when Lonnie brought up once how horrible it must've been for Mal to have been the worse off of all the Isle kids. And it wasn't just Lonnie, everyone at Auradon Prep thought she'd had it the hardest.

Her mother might have been the mistress of all evil, but Cruella had been insane, and Carlos had lived with her for sixteen years.

He had more scars than the rest of them.

Sometimes, he counted them. Mal had caught him once, and it'd scared her in a way not even her mother had.

It was etched into her memory, she had nightmares almost every night, sometimes, she had them about him.

Carlos scared her, and admitting any sort of weakness wasn't her strong suit, but she'd admitted it to him.

"Why are you counting them?" She'd asked. "Carlos, how many do you have? That's..." In that moment, she'd promised herself; she'd kill Cruella De Vil.

Screw Auradon and goodness and even Ben if he tried to stop her, she'd go back to the Isle if that was what it took, but she'd kill that bitch. She'd skin her and make her into a coat for Carlos, would do worse, if he wanted.

He'd turned to her then, looking away from the mirror. His voice had chilled her, but his words froze her over. "It's how I remember. I forget sometimes, I need to..." And he'd dug his fingernails into one of the scars on his arm, re-opening it, drawing blood. "I need to remember what she did to me."

"Why? She was a rotten bitch, and I swear Carlos, one day I will-"

"Because she was right."

And that was when she knew, she might've been fucked up, but Carlos had the nightmares and the bruises and the broken bones times ten.

"Right about what?" She'd asked, and her voice had trembled in a way that not even Ben had heard it.

"I'm dirty," He'd said, and stretched his arms out, putting himself on display like a morbid painting. "This is what I deserve."

"My God, why would you want to remember that?" She'd cried, on her knees at that point, and she'd pulled him onto the floor with her. Cradled him in her lap, and she'd never wanted to let him go.

"It's all I have from her."

The saddest part was how true the statement had been. Ben, Lonnie and Jane, they all had things from their parents. Gifts, passed down, to remember where they came from.

All Carlos had from his mother were scars. All she'd given him was hell and pain.

Mal had put a sleep spell on him, because he'd been near hysterical in her arms, and she'd carried him to his bed, sat next to him, and waited for Jay to get back from Tourney practice.

She'd asked Jay if Carlos had ever done that before, and Jay had told her he did it every week on the same day.

The realization struck her then, this wasn't some weird form of PTSD, this was was a ritual, a routine. Cruella must have forced Carlos, once every week, to show his scars, and convince himself that he deserved them. Until, one day, he'd started believing it.

She'd told Jay she wanted to kill Carlos' mom, Jay told her if Carlos hadn't stopped him, he already would have.

Blood and bruises, broken bones and scars, that was what made them up.

A half-assed, split-second decision to turn good wasn't going to change years of thinking evil was the only way to live.

Mal regretted it sometimes, regretted Auradon just like she regretted the Isle.

There were days when she didn't feel like either, not bad but definitely not good, there were days when the four of them sat in circle on the floor of the boys' dorm and just held hands.

Villains. Heroes. Good and evil. Sometimes, Mal just felt lost.