A/N: I... Took some liberties with the mechanics of Disney gods, and injected a taste of classical mythology. I had this chapter and the Hades family characterization planned out way before it was announced that Hades was the big villain in the new movie so... I regret nothing.
Present Day: 30 Days After Coronation
When Ginny Gothel stepped out of the limousine and into the air of Auradon, she felt just a little bit bitter, in a way that had nothing to do with the salty air or the spring humidity. It was the cleanest air she'd ever breathed, and it kind of pissed her off a little.
"Hi." King Ben grinned, in his tailored suit, and offered his hand to shake. "Welcome to Auradon."
Everything was golden, from the pots that held the blue germaniums and hydrangeas to the statue of King Adam (and notfeaturing his wife Belle), to the sunny smile on Benjamin Florian's face, and the crown upon his golden hair.
"Put on a good show for the cameras." He'd whispered when he leaned in, as if to hug her. "Mal's waiting for you."
When they realized Ben was in on it, when they realized he was less of a well-informed pawn and more of a useful bishop, Ginny nearly had kittens, and suddenly, everything looked less cloyingly golden.
"Mal's been busy." Hadie laughed, and she didn't bother to whisper, because that could mean anything. But Ginny knew what she'd meant. Mal was groomed to be a ruler, and she'd been supposed to take over with blood and death, fire and steel, but she'd decided to do things the old-fashioned way instead, the way Grimhilde had done it - by marrying into royalty and ingratiating herself with the commoners. She'd done it the way Ginny herself would have chosen to do it.
There used to be a saying among the commoners, that faeries were fallen angels who'd rebelled against God with Lucifer, but were too clever or strong to be cast into hell, and walked among earth with their wings and all their magicks.
On this day, she finally believed that Mal might be clever enough to outwit God or the Devil himself, because Mal had conned the entire fucking country.
It was shown by the crowds of people who thronged to meet them when they walked to the gates of Auradon Prep. They'd all come in droves, but not to gawk at the ragged villains as they'd once done, several months ago, when the inner circle first arrived. No, the crowds showed up to show the common folks' massive support for the friends of Auradon's sweetheart, Mal Bertha.
"How do you know Mal!?" A reporter shouted a question from over the din, and held out a microphone, vaulting over the armored knights who were stationed for crowd control. Ginny took it with a dainty hand, having never used one before, and spoke softly into it with wide, startled eyes, looking almost exactly like a young Rapunzel as she looked into the camera. Ben wanted a good show for the audience? She'd give him one.
"My mother once tried to kill me when I was very young." She pretended to hide a sniffle, to many gasps and sympathetic noises of the crowd, as she looked away, wiping her eyes with a sleeve. "Mal saved me, and she and her friends helped nurse me back to health."
"Mal is the reason I'm alive today, and I'm definitely not the only one." Ginny stated firmly, looking back at the camera with watery eyes that shimmered violet, and freckles that were almost gold dust (to match all the gold accents around them), and she spoke with a solemn voice that echoed in ripples on television sets across all of Auradon. Ginny smiled then, for the first time in her interview, shy and coy, with her dark curls around her face and heavy eyelashes low.
"All four of us are here today, because years ago, she saved our lives. And I know I wasn't exactly raised with the best of examples - but if that isn't heroism, I don't know what is."
And the crowd roared with a standing ovation, louder than the roar of any Beast.
"I'm so sorry about your elder brother." Fairy Godmother had cooed sympathetically as she showed Hadie to the dorm where she would be staying with Ginny.
"Pardon?" Hadie asked, with a hand on her hip, and her hair flaming up with the influx of fresh magic, suddenly more full of life than it had ever been on the Isle. She wasn't actually trying to look intimidating (she was genuinely confused), but scary was sort of the default appearance on the Isle, and the Headmistress cowered back a little with a minor flinch.
"I- I'm sorry to have brought it up dear." Fairy Godmother clarified, straightening her skirt to regain her lost composure. "We saw on the magic map one fateful day, that your mother and father put on an extravagant party to announce the birth of their first child, a boy named Hadrian."
"Extravagant?" Hadie chuckled - she was getting an idea of what was going on now. Her birth name was Hadrian, and it seemed like it might be fun to mess with the infamous Fairy Godmother a bit. "Yes, that sounds like them. My dad would probably bust out any contraband he managed to smuggle to the Isle to celebrate being a proud papa."
In contrast to Hadie's jovial memories of having the only truly loving, doting villain parents on the Isle, Fairy Godmother was terribly solemn when she recounted the next part of her story.
"But after about six years, the son of Hades and Persephone dropped off the map, and we never knew they had another child until we glimpsed a few sightings of you, running around with Mal's gang as a teenager."
"Are you terribly familiar with Occam's Razor, Madam Headmistress?" Hadie asked curiously, with an innocent smile.
"The scientific law which states that the simplest answer is most often the correct one." Fairy Godmother answered, looking a bit out of her depth. In biology class here at Auradon Prep, Occam's Razor was taught with a colorful allegory about the likelihood of encountering a zebra on your porch. For the majority of students, who lived in cities, suburbs, or fairy tale castles, such a thing would be ridiculous, and it would be far more likely that the hoofsteps one heard in the morning were the horses that drew the family carriages.
(On the Isle, Occam's Razor was taught with a brutally sarcastic excercise involving the likelihood of being whisked away to Auradon, and after King Ben's decree, it had to be removed from the curriculum.)
"What I'm trying to say, Headmistress, is that usually, the simplest answer is the truth." Hadie explained. "In this case, your assumption that I once had an elder brother."
She let a slow smirk creep across her face before she continued.
"But the truth is, I never had a brother, and I likely never will. I was born as a male child named Hadrian, and before my fifth birthday, I knew I wanted to be a girl instead." She grinned even wider now. "So I focused all the magic I could gather inside the barrier, and made myself change, transition, transform. I willed it possible with my power."
Fairy Godmother stared. Then she blinked. Then she took a deep breath and did some kind of hand motion that didn't change her aura, and didn't stink of magic. It seemed, for all intents and purposes, like some useless Auradon ritual, and Hadie wondered if she was supposed to respond beyond tilting her head in confusion.
(Fairy Godmother was, in fact, doing a calming deep breathing excercise to deal with the brand new can of worms that had been dumped on her. And she'd thought Malhad issues.)
"You know, Hadie, here in Auradon Prep, we have counseling sessions and support groups for people who don't feel like they fit in with their God given gender." She began, speaking comfortingly, and exuding an aura of welcome. Hadie chose to ignore the phrase "God given" (the greek gods believed in no gods but themselves, but the daughter of Hades didn't look down on those who did, and she wanted to give the Headmistress the benefit of the doubt.)
"Other people like me?" She asked, curious, and smiled just a little. Maybe Auradon wasn't as bad as she thought. Maybe she could find other people like herself, others who felt like they had been born into the wrong body, who wanted to try on their mother's clothes and find a different name.
"Yes indeed! Like Li Lonnie, who acts more like a boy than a girl, or Aziz, who can't bring himself to settle down with a girl in a nice, stable, heterosexual relationship."
Or, maybe she shouldn't have gotten her hopes up for anything other than betrayal, after all, that's what Auradon was fucking bestat.
"I've been working with my group for a while now, but it takes a while to work through these sorts of deep-rooted psychological problems. But if you really want to work at it, there's no reason you can't love the way you were born, and love your other half, the way God intended it!"
"Psychological... Problems...?" Hadie asked softly, in a furious whisper.
Fairy Godmother was so chipper, she didn't notice her listener's interested gaze had turned into a glare.
"Mmhmm, yep. So... Are these meetings and 'counseling sessions' mandatory?" Hadie asked with a look that could kill, and Ginny, who stood in the dorm room behind her was trying her hardest not to laugh.
"Huh? Well, no, but - "
"Then you'll find I'm not interested. Have a nice evening, Headmistress." Hadie announced, loudly, before slamming the door, and collapsing onto her bed.
"It's almost as if she thinks your gender is a disease to be cured, and not an essential part of your personality." Ginny sniped sarcastically at the door, and Hadie huffed. Everything was shaping up to be exactly what they expected, but with twists galore, and it was making her head spin.
"Hey, don't worry." Ginny said in a softer tone, the kind of voice she only used around Hadie, the special voice she saved for her girlfriend, the only person she felt she could be fully safe around. "When your father dies, and you ascend his throne, your worshippers in New Athens will love your duality, they'll say you have knowledge of the hearts of men and women. Your worshippers in New Sparta will say that when you were a baby, your male side and female side did battle, and the female side won. Your worshippers all across Auradon will say that death is a woman - it's a new era, because 'Death is a Woman.'"
Hadie laughed and leaned her head on Ginny's shoulder. "That's ridiculous."
"No it isn't, you can guarantee Hercules, the God of Fuckups is gonna get an epic legend to add to the Zeus mythos when he takes the throne. You can have one too. Plus, you've got the whole princess-from-exile angle that I think really appeals to people." Ginny smirked then, and narrowed her eyes. "Everyone loves an underdog, even if that underdog stacks the odds behind everyone's backs a little."
Hadie nodded a little, thinking about things. Eons ago, they'd learned that the gods could die, but unlike the Norse gods, or the Egyptian gods, or the Sumerians, who'd let their pantheons die out, they developed a way to pass the mantle of godhood, and a number of personal magics to their children, and their children's children, or in times of desperation, through the process of adoption, to a complete mortal. Unfortunately, they hadn't learned this important ritual until after the death of Poseidon, and the seas we're entirely under the control of nature and magic, and with the mediator between Hades and Zeus gone, the fights between them escalated until it came down to the nasty business that was now know as the "Hercules Incident."
Each of the gods took a somewhat different approach to managing their heirs. Zeus tended to sow his seed in increasingly bizarre places, to see which of his offspring would prove strongest and end up back at Mount Olympus. Hera trained the wife that her husband's son would inevitably bring back. In this case it was Megara, who was snappish and sarcastic, and vindictive, just like her, so it worked out alright.
Hades and Persephone were eternally loyal to each other, and had promised to find each other in every life time, and ever since the very first, they'd had one male child, and one female, (sometimes as twins), and they'd married brother to sister for generations. One to become Hades, and one to become Persephone.
As Hadie had once told Ginny: "Zeus and Hera are brother and sister too. And we're gods, not humans pretending to be gods. We've been marrying siblings for centuries longer than the Ptolmies, with none of the consequences."
Until Hadie was born, rocking the boat, and the whole family was banished to the Isle, where Persephone found she couldn't have another child, a result of barrier magic, and the line of her succession was broken for the first time in history. So when magical, lethal, Ginny Gothel appeared one day, without a home, after having been more or less dating their daughter for over a year and a half, you couldn't fault the queen of hell for noticing similarities to her myth, where, if she'd had an heir, she might have seen nothing more than just another mortal.
A girl with a strict, overbearing mother, who wove flower crowns of foxglove and belladonna and nightshade. A girl who could kill, who had an aura of life magic but had run away with the god of death at the first opportunity and never looked back.
It was perfect.
Pulled from her thoughts, Hadie finally turned back to Ginny, and raised an eyebrow. "So if Death is a woman, what does that make the goddess of Rebirth?"
Ginny smirked, a wicked little half-smile, and looked out the window, at all the students, milling about in their clean cut shirts and dresses, making small talk under the shade trees.
"A villain."