Disclaimer: none of this franchise is owned by me.
Summary: To breathe some life, context, and meaning into the numerous teenage characters possibly inhabiting the Isle of the Lost, these vignettes offer insight into the characters that appear in "let the shadows fall behind you."
Drawn from canon hints and contexts from the movie and books, incorporating author theorizing and/or ignoring other established parts of the canon universe.
Warning: life on the Isle is a life surrounded by villains, and not much about that could be pleasant.
Author's Notes: The Leaders of the Isle Gangs, and what motivates their choices.
Title and content influenced by the song "What's Wrong" by PVRIS.
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what's wrong (never sold my soul)
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"...Forget the poems of saints and ghosts
I'm the one I fear the most
Little did I know that I was only crying wolf...
...I don't need a metaphor for you to know I'm miserable
No, I never sold my soul..."
"What's Wrong" by PVRIS
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The Leaders
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acting :: Harriet Hook
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There are times she can see herself acting, like she's outside of her own body, nothing but a puppet on strings of fire. Mania, she's heard in whispers, and they don't have a word for the opposite part of it on the Isle but there definitely is one. She's not always in that state, unlike her brother, and often, it's an act. The contrast is as sharp as lightning and feels like a thunderstorm. Gray and wild.
She never exposes her weakness outside of the safety of her hideout. Sometimes when Uri's around (though only when he's sensible, when the pain in his knees and ankles is milder, when he can see the people in front of him and not his own sparking agony). Occasionally when a few of the less tempestuous members of her gang are with her, on the street for a few nights (not cared for they're just underlings, they still return to their parents sometimes).
But never does she falter when her family crosses her path: not since she was denied their father's hook in a twisted competition and lost a half-built half-wrecked ship in his rigged game; not since her baby sister disappeared into the streets and turned feral; not since their middle brother with too similar a name began cackling hysterically anytime punishment was unleashed on either of them for their failures.
Not since she failed to protect them. Harry, in particular. She's older but she can't do it all, and he never saw it the same.
Not since her father lashed out one final time, barring her from his own ship while ranting about her rumored promiscuity among his men—and she finally put her foot down on top of his sword. She escaped that night, to the sound of him shouting for her to never return to the docks, never come back into their crumbling house again, go be a whore on the streets as it's all a pretty thing like her can be.
The act doesn't keep her own turmoil concealed, but that's not the point. Every day she gets up and controls her section of the city, and leads her own gang, and has never once been desperate enough to fall into the profession her father accused her of being in.
Calista Jane sneers when she comes within earshot on the far side of her territory, and Harry's own mania carries him further from her with every begrudging moment a turf war simmers under the surface of her street aligned with his wharf, but there is no answer in Isle life for how siblings keep each other. Every person is either in alliance or an enemy, and having a blood link means nothing, in the end.
She doesn't know why she thinks it should: the Isle raised her stronger than that.
Still, she maintains her territory without infringing on either of their splinters. Still, Uri draws strands like pearls from his sister, small bits of information about both their siblings' lives, even though he and Uma are also constantly at odds. Still, when the biggest alliance between the Isle gangs starts, she allows their voices to be heard in Council (in that she does not protest, instead feigning glee as Mal and Uma snap and snarl at each other, tracking her brother's gleaming grin in the background).
No one questions her or suspects that she could be crueler to them, could upset their little schemes and wicked wanderings. But she's a gang leader for a reason, and it's because she acts like it. Gang became family, but blood ties linger underneath her act.
So, when Maleficent comes back in all of her wrathful glory as she's negotiating at the territory line with Anthony, when she hears that the docks went aflame and that an old pirate's ship in particular was destroyed, she almost doesn't turn up.
Almost.
Yet, maybe in the desire to stand victorious over the ashes, maybe because she's just that foolish, she goes when Asya summons her to the docks. She finds her brother at the makeshift hospital. He is in bad shape but at least has his own compatriots nearby and looking over him. Their sister is unaccounted for, which on an island this small, either means she's an unrecovered body or she left for Auradon with the other villains. She searches the burning wharf and drags her father out of the wreckage of his crumbling ship. Her father's crew is destroyed and he's not waking up.
They hate each other and it still hurts that he's wasting away without being dead yet. That her baby sister is missing. That her brother is injured but wouldn't want her nearby if he does wake.
There are times she is grateful that she can pretend to care, and times where she wishes that it were all and only an act.
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dust :: Anthony Tremaine
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There is dust in his mother's room, on top of a bookcase in the corner. Nothing appears to sit atop it, but there are clearly cobwebs there in a room where all else is kept impeccable. One day, he decides to stand on a chair and look. There, he finds a photograph laid flat, facedown, and turning it over he finds a smiling royal couple dressed all in shining white. They are running down the widest set of stairs he's ever seen under sunlight brighter than any that can surely exist and smiling a way he's never seen anyone smile before.
He replaces it quickly and dusts himself off outside of her room, determined that she not know.
It's only a few weeks later that he recognizes the woman in the photograph. And then he understands.
Grandmother hates the woman in the photograph, the step-sister who got it all and left them with nothing. Nothing but the world's oldest profession. Yet Grandmother had a title of her own, separate from her long-deceased husband and nothing could take that away from them, not even this dirty waste-basket island. Or their work.
"Blood is blood, whether heroes respect it or not," she'd murmur to him at bedtime. He knows what his grandmother wants him to pretend. There's one lesson she taught him without compromise, and it's that appearances matter.
There are other things he understands by watching his mother. He knows why his mother so carefully sneaks extra stiff rolls into his young female cousin's hands and why her laughter takes on a higher pitch with the younger two boys. Their fathers were memorably belligerent, after all, and don't tend to take no for an answer when it comes to his aunt's availability, and also demand time with their sons. The boys are learning things and their fathers are painful memories. Dizzy's father had been better to the woman with whom he spent a handful of nights, but he's also never come back.
He knows why she keeps his sister inside as much as possible, and why their rooms are in the back of the house and separated by an extra door with a second lock. He's eleven when his mother entrusts him with it, eleven when she teaches him how to block the door with a chair as an extra measure. The front rooms are for business, after all. And his mother will do anything to keep his sister out of the family's line of work—including screaming matches, outright defiance, and, in compromise, additional days and nights given up to the work. (She teaches him to do the same for his sister, though he observes that's not how siblings tend to be on the Isle).
He knows why she bows her head whenever Grandmother speaks. He knows because he watches, so still in corners and around doorways and under bridges, keeping himself so still that dust could scatter across his shoulders and back with ease if he watches and listens long enough.
But his mother also teaches him the subtle art of caring for another person, even while pretending that your attention and drive stem from elsewhere—because this is the Isle, and all the things Anastasia Tremaine is inside have been hidden for so long, forced down by her mother, that Anthony thinks she doesn't even realize all that he learned from her.
He doesn't have a name for it when he meets a young Gaelle, freshly scarred and stubborn, a lingering seasick feeling coiling in his stomach. It's like he's on the barge, water is moving underneath his feet and gloved hands quickly pawing for the most useful materials. But he knows not to pay attention, knows that this is not safe, knows this could be a weapon used on him. Appearances matter.
Gaelle sticks around, though certainly not with intent to be a part of the youthful work-minded of the Isle. His gang is the rabble that knows how to work with their hands in labor or acquisitions, or how to work with their bodies. A number are semi-employed in the front rooms in his Grandmother's house. Girls like Freddie, irregular, leveraging her need for extra pennies into a deeper alliance between their two gangs. Boys like Diego, who comes and goes at will and without seeming to care why he's there.
And as the man of the house, it falls to Anthony to make sure the girls don't receive such awful treatment that they can no longer work. There are too many girls like Claudine, whose mind is so beaten that the times she shows up, he has to lay down her rules and keep an ear out for her. He's the one to drag customers kicking and punching from their house, the one whose bruises come more from Friday nights than gang fights. He's the muscle and Grandmother coldly smiles down from the landing of the stairs.
Anthony goes by his mother's lessons far more than he'd ever admit: he quickly establishes a reputation and a protective ring, leveraging the labor-minded workers as muscle. The move earns him more leeway with his Grandmother.
And Gaelle starts coming around more, dusting off the edges of his practiced ruthlessness. Wedging herself into the corners of his very being until he can no longer remember a life without her in it. Until he no longer remembers what it felt like to stand on solid ground without an anchor in her eyes, in the twist of her lips upwards, in the dance of her fingers.
Isle life has no room for this secret. If he had a dusty bookshelf of his own, he'd have to place a photograph of the two of them there.
There's a salon on the side of the house, a small storefront that could be considered reputable. It's Anastasia's pet project, a hopeful business venture allowing her to bring in more bargained goods without needing to be at her mother's beck and call. Anthony notes his grandmother's disdainful eyebrow and knows that the fledgling business might not last a few more years, but she's allowing it for now. They get some profit, but it's a rare villain who cares much about looking nice anymore.
This is none the more evident than the fateful day that the sky alights with dragon's fire. Maleficent never much cared for them at all, and he's not surprised that his home bursts into flames with one blast to the storefront. It's pure luck that Dizzy was in the middle of the structure instead of the shop, her mother having sent her back into the house for a forgotten bucket.
Anastasia's the one who covers her tiny niece when the fireball hits the salon. She's the one whose back and hair are burned, who screams for her sister—a sister who will never answer, again. Part of the house collapses from the inside, grandmother in her chamber, the boys in their beds, Asya flinging herself to the front of the house as it remains standing along the main street.
Anthony makes it back through the streets from a negotiation with Harriet at the edge of his territory. He takes Dizzy from his mother's arms and gets Asya down, and they douse the weak flames as quickly as they can. Half the house is gone but it's been less-than-stable before, and only visible from the back. Now open directly into his territory, his gang has taken shelter in the ashes left behind.
Their family, they finish burning in the pyres. His sister and cousin go lead the wounded in recovery, and he remains behind to take charge of the living. Their alliances are all that is left, as the dust settles around them, smudged as any picture too well-handled and forgotten in time. Whether they will be disturbed from this state remains to be seen.
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scar :: Gaelle Gaston
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Her father's hand. Baby brother Gil, pale, crying. Sharp stabbing silver. Pain. It's all she remembers of that night. There's no doubt where the scars came from, who put them there, how much she fought back. Before defeat.
She doesn't like remembering.
The world itself was scarred for a long time. Fractured into gray angles and dark shadows, a wretched island even more treacherous and damnable for a girl with no voice. A lost place, where she can't bring herself to ever really face her youngest sibling, only watches him closely from the shadows because his own scar can't be seen and she failed him when he was too young to know it. A wicked place, where she actively avoids and attacks the twins in turn, because they might be younger than her but already mimic their father down to the walk, talk, and stalk. Their father didn't shake them they were in the crib, not like Gil, and she couldn't stop him then and she didn't succeed in saving herself.
That scar in her heart has always hurt more than the one on her face.
But there are rays of color, muted though they are, that glimmer along the lines that bind her existence. Threads like the young faces that look up at her, similarly scarred or silenced, speaking without words—in hands, letters, gestures. They can talk across the market, around each corner, from rooftop to alley. Walking wounded, broken as they are, yet not alone.
Not all of her gang is scarred on the outside, but then, no one on the Isle goes through life with all of their pieces put together.
And not all of the cracks in her composure happen at a glimpse of her twisted father. No, there's the gentle wave of dark hair framing an aristocratic face of high cheekbones and a neatly-pressed suit. Never mind that those locks tend too long, that even Anthony's skin bruises and breaks, that the threadbare suit needs mending in a top-story window of a grand yet battered house.
She watches, after all. "The only way to survive is to keep your eyes open and your footsteps light." Doing so earns her fewer scars, after those first, most ragged ones.
Mirrors are few, but the smudged house windows work just as well when dimly lit and slightly warped. From the corner of her eye, there are thick lines on her cheek and jaw. In the flash of her hair and the shade of her eyes, she sees her other parent.
Mother is a woman lost to ramblings. Formerly tight hugs dissipated long ago into complete stillness, a vague inclination to resist survival altogether and drift into a void. The woman no longer keeps her name, let alone her memory or her expressions. She's a hollow shell that wants to be a wisp of air. She wasn't always this way, but Gaelle cannot recall any expression approaching affection on her mother's face. She does recall the utter devastation in those so-similar eyes the day they saw each other again after the scars. After that moment, all the rest of her animated light fluttered away, a final magic act from the daughter of a circus magician (and now, she's no better than her circus-born sister who fell under a Judge's clenched fist).
All she has left now is a weathered scrap of a letter addressed to someone else.
Her mother has scars, too. They've always been on her belly and hands. Like mother, like daughter, they spoke more than they should and paid for it. Unlike her mother's doused embers, Gaelle's fire has turned into an inferno.
She can never forget. And she will never forgive.
When a roaring dragon fills the sky, and she knows her bastard father and the copycat twins will be tailing her back across that sea, Gaelle does not pursue. She takes care of her own. Wraps their burns. Makes sure the other gangs are still standing, stands firm at Anthony's side in Council. Slips that old letter into one pocket and a hunting knife into her belt, preparing herself to find a way off the Isle.
He left her with scars. She's going to leave her own on him before their story ends.
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faith :: Freddie
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Of all the ideas lost on the Isle, for faith to be sticking around always struck Freddie as particularly cruel. With a father like hers, thinking the world devoid of gods and goddesses is laughable. And to be stuck in a rotating spiral of hellfire and damnation like the Judge is more hilarious than any half-choked out joke in the Slop Shop.
After all, the fact that gods and goddesses exist doesn't mean that they ever think about this wretched pit of an island.
Freddie watches her father cackle his way past the mad priest at the occasional gathering of terror, falling in the midst of autumn before the coldest months begin, and she knows. They're all mad, here, in their own ways—either full of rage like Doctor Facilier, or full of insanity like Judge Frollo, or full of disbelief like everyone who thinks there is nothing beyond their world. The heathen and the crusader are the same kind of ever-looping song, stuck together even while flinging barbs and blades. Perhaps that's what drives them.
Her family used to be under the care and watch of the darkest of deities, her father taught her, the followers of the gods who played life and death itself like toys. He trains her to know his gods and their vile, turbulent, exquisite power lies out of their reach, to his ever-increasing fury. Even as he rages, he reminds her that to be given powers by the Other Side is to be at their command, not the other way around. Not prized and protected by them, but watched the way a cat considers its prey.
No, the gods are not human, and neither are the goddesses, but someday maybe the dark mothers will hear her offerings, left in a dark rooftop altar her father doesn't know about. Maybe someday they'll hear her chants and give her a chance. An escape.
Devotion isn't the word Freddie would use, because the Isle works this way: no loyalty, no companionship, and no meagre attempts at goodness. Here is: alliances for as long as it suits both parties involved; roaming with someone at your back and waiting for them to stab it; and survival at its dirty, grimy, chaotic worst. She's not above using any part of herself to keep on top.
And yet, her altar has the look of a devotee, if she takes the time to pause at the tail end of a long night, another offering joining the rest on the low-set table draped in symbolic trinkets to call for the watching, the following, the divine blessings. She pushes the boundary of Isle normalcy with this secret altar, and never once considers abandoning the faith. Her thumbprints of blood on the edges of the offering dish soak in the misshapen candles, made from the remnants of burnt candle wax and a thick wick of thinly torn cloth. When she has no valuables, she gives offerings of her own body.
She's tied herself in with all the assurance of a person who has nothing to lose. Nothing exists on the Isle for her, not even a raging father whom she fears and avoids more than she works alongside, now. There was the time that she learned at his feet, soaking in the very knowledge laid out before her on this altar, taking in the names of their gods and goddesses into her bones where they won't be lost.
The lessons must have ended between the fourth or fifth time that Facilier and Frollo murdered each other in yet another explosion of intense religious fervor—but she can't remember.
The altar's not the only secret she keeps from the shadowed doctor and from her gang. The goddesses know, if they happen to be hearing her prayers.
Freddie started watching the Judge's daughter just before the third time their fathers clashed, because life with the Judge has no other possibility but to be a nightmare. Claudine's mother is a zombie in all ways possible without Facilier power behind it, just like Gaelle's mother—strung out into small pieces that no longer truly exist.
(They were sisters, the two daughters of a poor circus performer who got caught up in the glory of Hermie Bing's show. To have fallen to pieces in such a similar manner—it's a story that repeats itself, out here.)
Since she has no one, Freddie began to keep track of Claudine, not to carry on their father's grudges, but because her secret is an altar and Claudine's is a broken cross and somehow, it doesn't look too different to her. Not when they both end up on their rooftops and pray to a silent, uncaring sky. When Claudine's shattered inside, clinging to tales in battered hardcover books to escape from reality. When Freddie pretends that her eyes don't linger on any human form in appreciation. It doesn't look too different, for either of them, when they do whatever it takes to survive (at the Tremaine house, a few extra pennies in trade, no shame in necessity).
But Freddie would never admit that any of it makes her feel more than a casual acquaintance with the girl. She's a ghost in her territory, a leader who gains followers of the orphans and the homeless, because they know she'll cast her shadow wide and take them in, knows she'll keep an eye out and rarely, if ever, stabs any of her own allies in the back. Just like her father, there's a mystery to her fierceness and a chaos in her eyes that comes from the root of a secret no one else believes.
She has to believe she'd walk with blessings and weapons from the Other Side if the barrier was down. Faith keeps survival meaningful.
When the barrier does fall and she's suddenly hyper-aware of strange little currents in the air, of the ground roiling and seething under her very feet, of the crashing ocean singing an ancient mother's wrathful harmony in her ears, at once she knows that her prayers were heard all along—but it's too much, too strange, beyond her will to touch, only witnessed in overwhelming capacity.
Her father was not devout the same, making his faith a display and a battlefield. His power is different, and he can't sense hers, doesn't even ask, because the madness that has guided his footsteps all this time turns into violence.
Her father steps out of the shadows with a blade. Her father asks her to prove herself his child, and when she can only stare dumbly over the sheer volume of ocean waves in her ears, his eyes twist with disgust and disappointment.
She loses the fight before it begins, in those few dazed minutes of trying to understand that the very world around her screams.
Darkness.
Voices in the darkness.
They speak to her, shake her bones and twist her into a tool, a weapon, a goddess's presence in the world.
Because she has, for most of her short life, given tokens of her own blood in offering.
She had nothing else to give them but herself.
And then the Other Side spits her back out into her rapidly-healing body. The ground still swims underneath her feet and the ocean's motherly chiding is fierce and soothing at turns, and a few streets down she finds Claudine clinging to life with her beloved books scattered on the cobblestones underneath her bleeding body.
A poetry in their fathers has always existed, a synchronicity despite their conflicts.
They are not the only abandoned, left-to-die children, intentionally-made-orphans rather than murdered. There must have been just enough lingering barrier magic to cling to their bodies as they were injured, because those on the Other Side weren't trying to save them all. Gods and goddesses don't particularly care like that, don't interfere with human affairs unless their devotees ask, and even then, don't always answer.
That they answered Freddie—she can't even think about it for long without a headache.
Freddie takes Claudine to Asya's makeshift hospital, on the whisper that the goddess who demanded her allegiance also demanded Claudine's. When that particular conversation will happen, she isn't sure, but the pale weary face of her ally-friend-partner unnamed-something… She wouldn't be able to turn away, even without the Other Side prodding.
And it's definitely prodding the one who had any faith on the Isle: there's a mad Doctor to take back into the shadows, in exchange for her devotions.
