AN: Warning: This collection would be Devie-centered. Also, I'll be very loose with the timelines as to how each chapter fits in with the franchise as these are one-shots that may or may not be connected with one another. Ideas come and go with this brain of mine.

This particular chapter was written with the idea that this happened sometime after Descendants 2, with each of the Core Four's first time with the mistletoe. Hope you enjoy!

Mistletoe Madness

Jay smirked when a girl stopped in front of him with a blush gracing her cheeks. "Well, hello there," he greeted.

Murmurs erupted all around them, which the VK was used to by now, as he focused on what the girl was stuttering to say. "H-hi. I, umm - we accidentally - "

The murmurs around them were replaced by a unanimous chant of, "Kiss, kiss, kiss, kiss!"

He curiously looked around and saw the grinning faces of his schoolmates asking him to kiss the girl. "What?"

"Mistletoe," said the girl, "we have to kiss." She wasn't opposed to the idea, of course, but she was embarrassed she had to explain it to him. Did he not see the mistletoe when he blocked her path?

"Miss who?" he asked, then recovered. A girl just asked him to kiss her, why would he hesitate? He flashed his usual smirk. "Cheek or lips, my lady?"

"A-any is fine." Her blush spread to the tips of her ears. Usually, boys would just kiss and be done with it, not ask first where.

With one fell swoop, Jay wrapped an arm around the stranger and kissed her soundly on the lips, to the whoops and cheers of the onlookers. He went on his merry way after that.

/-/

Ben grinned as he waved a small green plant above Mal.

The purple-haired girl looked up from her book. She and Ben were in the library, supposedly studying, when he decided to grin like an idiot and wave a plant over her head. Is this another one of those Auradon things? "What's up?" she asked.

Ben's mouth hung open as his hold on the mistletoe loosened, dropping it to the table in between them. He thought it was a good idea to jest Mal into kissing him in the library, but it turned out the joke was on him. "Umm, we were under the mistletoe?"

"Okay?" She tilted her head to the side, waiting for him to explain the punchline.

He reminded himself the Isle rarely celebrated the holidays, if at all. "It's kind of tradition…" he ventured, then proceeded into telling Mal the gist that when two people are underneath the mistletoe, they're supposed to kiss or it's bad luck.

"You're telling me this plant forces people to kiss each other? And it makes the difference between good and bad luck?" she asked, incredulous at the story.

He rubbed the back of his neck. When she said it that way, it did sound ridiculous.

When Mal noticed how Ben's face fell, she got up from her seat. Crossing over to his side of the table, she bent down and gave him a kiss on the lips. "I don't need a plant to tell me when to kiss you, silly." They were already confirmed as each other's true love, who needed a stupid plant?

/-/

Carlos ducked out of the way of yet another one of those semi-hidden odd plants. He was trying to make things serious with Jane and the presence of that plant everywhere was proving to be a deterrent to that.

What would Jane say if she spotted him kissing another girl? He didn't know why people were kissing, or being forced to kiss by onlookers, under said plants so it was best to keep away.

Carlos skidded to a stop when he saw the girl of his thoughts being kissed on the cheek by one of the freshmen. "Wh-what's going on?" he asked.

"Carlos!" Jane turned away from the freshman, who promptly turned tail and left.

"Why did you let him kiss you?"

She shuffled her feet. She didn't want to admit she believed in bad luck. Instead, she pointed up at the mistletoe hanging above her head. "I didn't notice until he bumped into me."

He glared at the offending plant. Somehow Jane was in on whatever it was that was making everyone in Auradon Prep kissing everyone else. "What is it, anyway? It's just a plant." He briefly wondered if it had magic that made everyone temporarily love struck.

She blinked at him before her lips formed an O. "It's a mistletoe, Carlos," she said, half hoping that if she said the plant's name, it would jog the VK's memory.

"A what?"

She smiled at him before pulling him into a hug. "It's tradition," she looked up at the plant directly above their heads, then back down into Carlos' curious eyes. With courage she didn't know she had, she swiftly kissed Carlos on the cheek.

/-/

Evie huffed as she plucked yet another viscum plant off the top of a pillar. Who did this? Someone could easily mistake it for an ordinary berry-bearing plant! Granted some of the viscum plants she confiscated so far were bare of any berries, she gathered them all up regardless.

She tossed her bag over her shoulder and was determined to find more and confiscate those vile things. She didn't walk far when she spotted Doug walking through an arch with a viscum plant stuck in the middle.

"Hi, Evie," greeted Doug, raising a hand to wave at her.

"Excuse me for a second," she murmured, walking to his side. Evie grabbed hold of a pillar and used it to steady herself as she jumped up on a nearby ledge. Stretching herself to her full height, she grabbed the viscum plant from the arch and jumped back down. "There," she said with a satisfied smile, shoving the plant inside her bag, then looked at Doug. "Hello," she said as if she did nothing out of the ordinary.

"What do you have there?" he asked, eyeing her bag suspiciously where the mistletoe disappeared into.

"Oh! You could help me!" she held his arm and led him to the outdoor picnic area. Once she'd chosen a table, she set her red box bag on top of it and flipped the cover open. "Look at this," she complained, gesturing to the stuffed green plants inside her bag.

Doug leaned over the table and spotted the mistletoes all smashed together. He furrowed his brows in confusion. What was he supposed to be looking at that he could help her with? "You're collecting mistletoes?"

She frowned and shook her head. "These aren't… what did you call them?" That only confirmed her theory AKs might mistake them for something harmless. "These are viscum plants, Doug, and they're everywhere! I mean," she raked her fingers through the ends of her hair, "who would do this?!"

"Evie," he paused, thinking of a way to address the situation delicately, "these are part of the Auradon holiday tradition, umm - "

"What?! How is it part of the holidays to want to poison everyone?" And everyone said the Isle was bad.

He blushed, realizing Evie knew about and feared poisons while Doug and everyone else in Auradon focused on the unsubstantiated fear of bad luck.

She crossed her arms tight in front of her chest. "We need to do something about this. Doesn't anyone know viscum plants can cause drowsiness, blurred vision, vomiting, and even seizures or death for children?"

"If ingested," he said, making his way over to where his girlfriend stood and laid a hand on her shoulder. He knew, of course, but like everyone else in Auradon, the mistletoe (or viscum, as Evie uses its alternative name) was only meant to put into play the silly, supposedly fun, practice of having to kiss someone when you end up beneath it. He directly looked at her brown eyes before saying, "No one ingests it."

She pouted. "How can you be so sure? Some of these still have berries on them."

Doug sighed to himself then looked around. He spotted a couple a few tables away from them sitting side by side, chatting excitedly. He dug through Evie's bag, grabbed one of the mistletoes she collected, and beckoned for Evie to follow him as he made his way to the other couple.

"Excuse me," said Doug, the mistletoe behind his back.

The couple stopped talking and looked up at him expectantly.

The half-dwarf raised the plant high above the couple's heads and waited for a few seconds. The boy recovered from his shock first, then landed a kiss on his sweetheart's nose, then her lips, much to her delight.

"Happy holidays!" greeted Doug, waving at them as he and Evie walked back to their table.

"Happy holidays!" the other couple waved back.

"Okay…" Evie sat down with a huff, eyeing her boyfriend as he took a seat across from her. "What was that?"

"Tradition?" he said, his voice squeaking at the end.

"You said that already."

"The mistletoe…" Doug cleared his throat, "or viscum, it symbolizes this tradition that when you're caught under it, you kiss for good luck."

She stared at him as if he'd grown another head. "Why?"

He awkwardly pushed his glasses up the bridge of his nose. "Urban legend turned - "

"Tradition," she cut him off, looking at him dead in the eye. The Isle certainly didn't have these kinds of 'tradition' nonsense. You did what you wanted to do, regardless of what anyone else said. She pursed her lips and popped open her bag, dumping the plants she collected onto the ground. "This is certainly new information," she murmured.

Doug stared at her deflated demeanor, her furrowed brows, and her slight pout. He knew she meant well, but then it backfired all because of an odd but widely accepted practice on this side of the bridge. He became fixated on her lips as she dumped the last of the mistletoe from her bag. She's always been the one to kiss him on the cheeks, nothing more. He gulped. Could this be the perfect segue to finally take the lead and kiss her?

Evie closed her bag again and took a deep breath. "So," she forced a smile, still ashamed of her misunderstanding, "dinner?"

Idiot! He scolded himself. You haven't even told her you love her! "Uh-uh, yeah, sure," he stammered, then escorted her to the dining hall.

"Psst, E," they heard on the way there. They spotted Mal standing on a ledge, green eyes bright with mischief, holding up a mistletoe in her hand as she dangled it high above Doug and Evie's heads.

"You might fall from there, M," scolded Evie.

Doug was too focused on Mal's smirk to verbalize anything. He knew that smirk. He knew that look. That was the look that would either get him into something he wasn't prepared for but had to deal with (because it's Mal) or get him running back to his dorm room and hiding until the next day (because it's Mal). And then the scenario hit him like a ton of bricks. He pushed his glasses up further, his green eyes following the trail from Mal's smirk, to the tips of her fingers holding up the mistletoe. Shit. He blushed, the heat creeping up all over his face to the tips of his ears.

"It's for a good cause," said Mal, raising an eyebrow at Doug knowing the latter already figured out what was going on.

"For wh- ah!" Evie crossed her arms and stepped out from under Mal's extended hand. "Get down from there or you might fall."

"Dragons don't fall." The purple-haired girl redirected her arm above Evie's head. "Now you know what to do or it's bad luck," she said, significantly lowering her voice to sound ominous.

Evie glared up at her best friend, forcing herself to look angry enough so that the blush heating up her cheeks could be attributed to that instead of the butterflies in her stomach at the thought of Doug kissing her. She wasn't sure if they were at the point of their relationship where they could kiss on the lips, wasn't that reserved for true love like Mal and Ben? More importantly, did she even know what love was? Did she love Doug? Did Doug love her? Could Doug even feel that towards her?

Doug saw Evie's internal debate, saw that she wasn't ready to say or do anything related to 'love,' and decided to nip Mal's mischief in the bud. He stepped up in front of Evie, much to Mal's giddiness, and kissed her on the cheek for the first time. His lips hovered over her warm face longer than he intended, then ultimately pulled back as he shoved his hands deep in his pockets. "There. No bad luck." His heart hammered against his chest so hard he thought it would grow legs and walk out.

Mal and Evie blinked at Doug, processing what just happened.

"Damn," mumbled Mal. Didn't see that coming.

"Dinner?" asked Evie, beaming at Doug. He was the best. She kissed his cheek too, latched on to his arm, then called after her friend still standing dumbfounded on the ledge, "You're free to eat with us, M."

AN: 'Til next time!