Book 1: Korë
Mal her mother's voice says as she breathes in and closes her eyes. Fae she reminds herself. You are fae. Your word is truth. Your Promises are always fulfilled.
Korë her father's name for her echoes through her mind as she exhales. You are half goddess. Don't forget. Never let anyone hold something over you.
She opens her eyes.
"Every child currently on the Isle of the Lost will be given a chance to come to Auradon if it pleases them," she swears. Uma's eyes narrow and she completes her vow, "I Promise."
She feels the weight of the Promise settle on her. Underneath her tongue, in her bones and her teeth. It thrums in her blood. She will keep this Promise, or she will die.
She has come too far to die.
From the moment she was born, Mal's mother made sure she knew that she was fae. She was a fairy, and that meant things. It meant keeping the power balance in her own favour- if someone did something nice for you, you repaid them instantly so they couldn't ask for more from you. Hold their Promises close to your heart, take them at their word even when they don't mean it. Don't promise them anything, Maleficent would remind her every night. Never owe anyone anything, Mal, because that's no way for a fairy to live.
She also liked to snap at Mal- don't give handouts. We're not Seelie. We don't do favours for friends. We're fae, and we have pride.
Of course, it wasn't that simple. Mal wasn't just fae, couldn't be. Because her magic worked on the Isle. She could cast and conjure and curse people to her heart's content. But she didn't say anything, never asked, because her mother would never tell her the name of the man she'd allowed into her bed.
Mal doesn't really mean to start helping the kids of the Isle of the Lost.
It starts with Carlos de Vil, six years old and on the verge of death (he cannot die on the Isle of the Lost, but tas long as he doesn't get food, he will not get better, so instead she lets her magic- magic that she shouldn't have- find him and heal him).
She does his chores too, without even having to lift a finger or say a word (she comes back the next night, fully intending to only check up on him. Instead, she does his chores again, as he is asleep and whimpering {she tells herself it's because she can't stand the pathetic whispering noise, but she's lying to herself}).
She starts helping Uma, Ursula's daughter, next. It's still not something that she's doing on purpose (her mom thinks that she's out all night committing crimes. She refuses to disavow her of this belief). But she hears a wet smack on her way back from the hideout she's started creating near the docks, and she can't help herself.
Uma has a throbbing welt on her cheek, and she's mopping the floor of the fish and chips shop. It's not hard for Mal to put two and two together (she's lazy, and doesn't bother waiting for Uma to fall asleep to start casting. She stays out of sight, though {Uma must be well-read by Isle standards, because the next night, she leaves out milk and honey. The milk isn't spoiled, and the honey is sweet, if raw. Mal wonders how she got it, and doesn't ask).
She creates a collection of VKs that she secretly helps. She leaves trinkets for Jay so that he always has something to give to his father (he leaves her liquor, which she drinks even though she shouldn't). She does Harry and Uma's chores, and they leave her milk and honey. She helps Carlos, and he leaves her nothing (he's her favourite, for this, because she doesn't want to acknowledge what she's doing, that she's acting Seelie). She does Evie's sewing for her mother so that Evie can focus on her own pieces (Evie leaves her acorn shells filled with brown sugar. It's a witch's gift, and Mal smirks and says nothing).
She helps them and pretends she doesn't, but when she's around them, her magic echoes one word. Mine, it says. Mine tattoos her heart. Mine.
It goes on for years. She wonders how she pulls it off every night, slipping out and fixing problems. She wonders how her mother doesn't catch word of it. She's scared that one day, she will. Mal tries to not think about that day, and what she'll do when it comes. Although she helps her VKs, they owe her nothing. She keeps it that way. She's doing favours, but she's not like Celia, who holds the favours over people's heads. She doesn't want payment.
A year into her scheme, she realises that it might be helpful to have her VKs officially on her side. She doesn't call in any debts (they don't owe any). Instead, she starts courting each of them, slowly. She starts with Carlos, who is desperate for any sort of protection- from his mother, from the others on the Isle. She gets Jay with wild exploits and adventure and theft. She pulls Uma in by regularly tipping at the fish and chips shop (with other people's money, but still). Harry and Gil follow Uma like it's the most natural thing in the world for them.
She gets Evie with sweet words and a promise from her mother to lift the banishment (Evie does owe her for that, but Mal doesn't tell her).
It works, for a while. Two other gangs form across the Isle- the Huns, Harriet and the rest of the pirates- but her people are stronger, better, faster than everyone else. Mal doesn't tell them about the magic running in her blood like a wildfire. She's recruited them, but she doesn't trust them, Not yet.
Uma leaves her several coins. She doesn't know what sparks the change (Uma's mother found out she was wasting the milk and honey and hid them). They're probably worth less than the milk and honey, but Mal refuses to help her after that. She's not a servant, she doesn't want payment. She doesn't want to be owned (those coins are the reason she kicks Uma out of the gang. She can't look at the girl without feeling like she serves her, now. Harry goes with Uma, and Mal says good riddance even as Carlos and Evie look at her reproachfully).
Mal is twelve when she meets her dad for the first time. It explains a lot of things. Why they'd never met. Why she could do magic on the Isle when no one else she knew could, not even her mother, who was the Mistress of All Evil.
She had been at Coward's Market, walking aimlessly. Thinking, she liked to say when people were stupid enough to ask (before staring them down with luminous green eyes). Really, she was feeling. Letting the tendrils of her magic swirl out across the market, picking up emotion, secrets, power. People cleared out of her way as she walked, which was how she managed to quite literally bump into her father (not that she'd known it then).
Hades swung around to glare down at her, hair flickering into fire and eyes pitch black. Mal had stared up with wide eyes and had braced herself for the first hit. The villains were temperamental, every child on the Isle knew that, and Hades had a reputation amongst the villains. No one on the Isle could die, but she'd heard stories of people left for worse-than-dead (she'd been told those stories, as something akin to bedtime stories, by her mother- on the Isle, age was no measure of what someone could handle). The blows never came- nothing, not even a smack across the cheek. The god bent over, to stare into her eyes, and went as far as to push her chin up so that he could see better before saying, quite loudly, "What the fuck has that woman done to you?"
Mal had bit the inside of her cheek and said nothing. If she'd learned anything in her short, ugly life, it was that talking ill of Maleficent lead nowhere. But Hades had grabbed her wrist and pulled her back to Maleficent's palace, holding tightly enough that there would be bruises for a week.
The god burst through the door and Mal finally managed to pull her wrist from him. She rubbed it and glanced around for her mother.
"Maleficent!" He roared, voice shaking the foundations of the crumbling house that Maleficent insisted was a palace, "Maleficent! What the fuck have you done to my daughter!?"
Mal let the words wash over her, closing her eyes to hear the words thrumming in her veins. My daughter. My daughter. My daughter.
It was how she missed her mother as she sauntered down the stairs, laughing softly {not the wild cackle that sent cowards running for the hills. The soft, sinister laugh that chilled Mal to the bone}.
"I made her fae," Maleficent said, and Mal could remember every time her mother had said it. I'm making you fae. Be grateful. If it weren't for me, you'd be human. You owe me. She opened her eyes to see her mother smirking, to see Hades (her father) glowing with the effort of keeping his power contained.
"You made her you," Hades growled, stepping forward, closing the gap between them.
"Mal isn't me, unfortunately. It's a shame, but that's what I get for reproducing the human way."
"Mal?" Hades scoffed, lip curling, "That's not even a real name, Maleficent. And it's not her name. We agreed on her name."
"You decided," Maleficent shot back, "But I was never going to name my daughter after your wife."
"If I'd known you just wanted to remake yourself in our daughter, I'd have told you to go fuck yourself when you came to me."
Our daughter.
"Well, I guess you made the wrong choice when you fucked me instead," her mother had snapped. Hades' eyes had glowed, and Mal had been certain that her mother was about to die.
But instead, her father had rolled his eyes and stepped back (not a victory for Maleficent, but mercy from Hades). His eyes landed on her, and she'd felt his power (that felt like iron against her skin) settle around her. She'd looked up at him through blue hair and black eyes and magic that was like hers but harsher, and he had knelt to her height and looked her in the eyes.
"Your name is Korë," he told her.
"You are my blood. The daughter of Hades. I expect you not to waste the gift I've given you."
He turned to leave, and she was perfectly happy to let him, but- "How do I do that?"
He grinned wickedly at her.
"By doing whatever the hell you want."
Mal (Korë) takes her father's message to heart. She lets herself run wild in the street of the Isle. She burns down buildings and ruins people. She runs with Evie, Carlos and Jay in the day, and does chores for them at night (she doesn't tell anyone, but now, she refuses to be shamed by it).
In private, her hair is blue and her eyes and wings are black, but no one with any sense of self-preservation says anything (she learns to cast glamours like it's breathing, and switches between purple and blue like it's what she was born to do).
Mal lives vicariously on the Isle, she does stupid shit and knows that she'll be bailed out by her mother's name (and her father's, if necessary). She makes alliances (Dizzy, Celia, CJ) and she runs the Isle's teenage underground.
She kisses Carlos first, at midnight (the year they'll be sent to Auradon, even though they don't know that). She kisses Evie within the same minute and Jay after that.
They make sense, the four of them. They run together anyway, and they spend most of their nights together, curled up in their hideout (it's a miracle they haven't figured out where she slips away to yet- or maybe they have, and are granting her a small mercy by pretending they haven't)(it's the second one). They love the same way they fight- wild and magical and angry (at the world, at their parents, at Auradon). They do whatever the hell they want, and they're beautiful while doing it.
They promise each other that it won't change when they go to Auradon. Mal spells Ben and then falls in love with him*. Evie finds someone for whom she can be Princess Charming. Jay finds a new family in like-minded people. Carlos finds solace in animals and being away from his mother. And in all of this, they hold tightly onto each other, as if the other three are the only reason they still exist.
*(she thinks)