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Jay hadn’t actually been in Auradon for that long, and he hadn’t felt like he’d changed all that much, but apparently he’d been here for long enough. Auradon felt like home now, more than the Isle of the Lost ever had. Still, he wouldn’t say that he had gone completely native. Jay still considered himself an Isle of the Lost kid through and through. But he had changed, that much was clear when he saw the new isle kids, and how they reacted to Auradon. He had almost forgotten what it had been like to be new to Auradon, the way that everything had seemed so impossibly different than they’d been on the isle.
It was interesting, to say the very least, to see the way that new kids reacted to Auradon. It had been fun to see Celia, Dizzy, and the twins enjoy themselves in Auradon, but they were all still so young. They’d had friends on the Isle, and decent relationships with their parents. Their lives hadn’t been in any particularly obvious danger, and they hadn’t exactly grown up to adulthood on the Isle. No, the kids would adjust to Auradon just fine, it was the older villain kids that Jay was worried about.
Fortunately, a week after the barrier had been torn down and almost everybody from the Isle of the Lost had come over, nothing terrible had happened yet. There was still an adjustment period, but no one had been killed, maimed, or spelled yet, so it seemed to be going pretty well.
Jay kept an eye out for trouble, but didn’t spend a lot of time around the new villain kids. He had nothing against them, he used to be them, but Mal and Evie were much better at breaking up conflicts than he was, and Carlos and Ben were definitely better at helping those who were having a hard time adjusting. Jay was willing to help where he could, but he was mostly just content to stay back and watch.
Of course, this meant that he was often the only one of his friends who wasn’t constantly busy helping the others. Jay knew how to entertain himself, so boredom wasn’t the problem, but if anybody came by for one reason or another, he was often one of the only people around to help them.
Jay didn’t mind helping people, he just wasn’t exactly the best at it. He had been raised to be a thief, to only look after himself, because it wasn’t like anybody else was going to have his back. He knew better now, and he definitely didn’t feel the need to steal (most of the time), but it was so hard sometimes to really know how to help others, to put them first. He knew it was the right thing to do, but it just didn’t come naturally to him.
“Hey, Jay,” He smiled and turned when he heard Gil’s excited greeting. Of all the new kids to come to Auradon, no one was as eager about it as Gil was. Jay had been confused and a little cautious about Gil’s enthusiasm at first. The Isle of the Lost was such a dark place that the kids from there weren’t prone to looking on the bright side of things. That was why Jay’s first assumption had been that it had been a trick or something. But Gil had shown appreciation for little things even when nobody was paying any attention to him. If it was a trick, it had to be a pretty elaborate one, and if Gil was anything like his older brothers, he didn’t exactly have the smarts to come up with something like this, let alone pull it off so thoroughly.
Back on the Isle, Jay hadn’t gotten to know Gil very well. He’d known that he associated with Uma and Harry, and that had been enough to see him as a bit of an enemy. Jay had also known that Gil was a son of Gaston, which caused him to come to the assumption that Gil was all brawn and no brain, just like his brothers. Not exactly the type of person that Jay used to associate with, so he hadn’t even bothered.
But things were different now. Jay had seen that Gil was more than just Uma and Harry’s muscle and lapdog. He was much more than that.
“Hey, Gil,” This past week, Jay was always more than happy to spend some time with Gil. The blond always seemed to have found something new that he wanted to share. Jay was never nearly as excited about these things as Gil was, especially when he was nearly always already familiar with it. But Jay did really enjoy seeing Gil’s enthusiasm. It was nice to see just how happy Gil could be from hearing birds chirp, or seeing a type of flower he’d never seen before.
“Jay, you’ve got to come see this,” Gil said, his eyes shining brightly, like an Isle kid who had eaten chocolate for the first time. It was the same look in his eyes that he’d had every time he found something new to him. Gil had yet to find anything that didn’t impress him. “It’s the most amazing thing.”
“Alright, I’m coming,” Jay laughed slightly. His grin dropped slightly when he saw small cuts on Gil’s hands. They didn’t look especially deep, but there were a lot of them. Jay was pretty sure that he saw small thorns and needles on his fingers. “What happened to you?”
“What?” Gil looked down at his hands in confusion, like he hadn’t noticed they were hurt. “Oh, this? It’s nothing,” Gil began to rub his hands on his pants, but immediately flinched and drew them away. He must have accidentally pushed the thorns deeper into his skin.
“Hang on,” Jay took one of Gil’s hands. “We need to get these treated first,” Gil frowned slightly as Jay began to pull out the small thorns and spines that had pricked his skin. Fortunately there didn’t seem to be too many of them, and they weren’t too deep, but Jay couldn’t help but wonder what had happened. “What did you do, shove your hands into a thorn bush?”
Gil rolled his eyes. “Of course not, that would be stupid,” Yes, it would be, but Jay had the feeling that he and Gil had different definitions of ‘stupid’. “Come on, I’ll show you,”
“Just wait a minute,” Jay finished up with Gil’s one hand and moved on to his other. Gil fidgeted slightly, making it a lot harder this time around, but fortunately there were less thorns in this hand. “Where are your gloves?” They wouldn’t have protected his fingers entirely, but his palms would have been safe.
“Oh, I took them off,” With his free hand Gil reached into his pocket and pulled out his leather gloves. “I didn’t want to rip them up,”
“So, what, you thought that it would be better to rip your hands up instead?” Jay tried to ask sternly, but there was no real heat behind his words.
Gil frowned and rubbed his free palm against his leg, smearing blood onto it. Jay didn’t think this was the best thing to do, but he didn’t say anything. He just pulled the last two thorns out of Gil’s fingers.
“Can we go now?” Gil asked when Jay finally let go of his hand.
“Yeah, okay, I’m coming,” Jay said. Gil seemed completely set on showing him what he had found. Besides, Jay was curious to see what was so important that Gil would hurt his hands like this. Gil grinned eagerly and took Jay’s hand, getting blood on it, not that either of them cared. Gil began to pull Jay towards the gardens, where he’d been spending most of his time.
“You find a new plant?” Jay asked. Gil shook his head as they went.
“No, it’s an old plant,” Gil said. “But I noticed something new about it. Come on, you have to see for yourself.”
“Alright, alright,” Jay said. He let Gil pull him into the gardens, right to the area where the flowers were. Gil went straight to the roses, and Jay immediately guessed what the source of the thorns had been, though the spines were still a mystery.
“You touched rose thorns?” Jay raised an eyebrow at his friend. Gil smiled sheepishly.
“I just wanted to get a closer look at them,” Gil said. “Look, come see for yourself.” Gil knelt on the ground and gestured to the rose stems, though he was at least careful to not touch the thorns this time around. “The flowers are so pretty, so people might want to pick them. But if they pick the flowers, they won’t be able to grow anymore, and they’ll die, right?”
“Right...” Jay nodded, waiting for Gil to continue and get to the point.
“Well, the thorns keep people from touching the flowers and hurting them,” Gil said. “It’s like nature’s natural defense mechanism,”
“Did you really feel the need to test those defenses for yourself?” Jay asked.
“I just wanted to see how effective it was,” Gil looked down at his hands, which were still bleeding a little bit. “It worked really well,”
“Yeah, I can see that,” Jay couldn’t help but grin slightly. Somehow he wasn’t surprised that Gil had put his excitement above his concerns about hurting himself. He remembered the spines that had been in Gil’s fingers as well. “Did you decide to test the defense mechanisms of cactuses too?”
Gil paused and looked back at Jay, a slightly guilty look in his eyes. “...no?”
Jay laughed and knelt next to Gil. He put his arm around Gil’s shoulder and pulled him up to his feet. “You, my friend, are unlike anybody else I’ve ever met.” And that was the truth. Many Auradonians felt fake and forced in their friendliness, while most of the kids from the Isle of the Lost hid their emotions, because that was all they knew how to do. Gil was none of that. He was sincere, open, and completely unashamed.
To Jay’s shock, Gil’s smile dropped. He could feel the blond stiffen under him. “Uh, yeah, that’s ‘cause I’m a, uh, changeling.”
Jay frowned and look at Gil in concern. He hadn’t actually known Gil for that long, but his tone, his sudden nervousness, it just didn’t seem like him. Jay didn’t know what he’d said, but it was obviously something wrong. “What...what’s a changeling?” Last Jay had heard, a changeling was something like a shapeshifter. Maybe Gil had some hidden powers of transformation, like Mal did, but Jay thought it was incredibly unlikely. Besides, if Gil was a shapeshifter, why wouldn’t he have just said so?
“It’s, uh, a fairy,” Gil pulled out of Jay’s grip and crossed his arms. Jay blinked in shock. The thought of Gil being a fairy, even one like Mal, seemed even more unlikely than the thought of him being a shapeshifter. “It takes the form of a human kid, and then replaces them.”
“Wha-hang on,” Jay put his hands on Gil’s shoulders and turned him around, forcing him to look into his eyes. “Why would you think that you’re…” Jay trailed off, he didn’t want to repeat Gil’s words. He didn’t completely understand them, but he definitely didn’t like them. He especially didn’t like that Gil had referred to himself as a changeling, and then used the word ‘it’ to describe changelings. Gil was a lot of things, but he definitely wasn’t an ‘it’.
Gil looked shocked at Jay’s defensive and almost insulted tone. “Maman told me I was one,” Jay didn’t understand French, but he had heard Ben call Belle ‘Maman’ a couple of times, so he knew what it meant.
“Why would your mom say that?” Jay asked, feeling disgust twist up in his chest. Most kids on the Isle of the Lost had less than ideal parents, so it wasn’t all that shocking that Gil’s parents hadn’t been the best. Still, Jay just couldn’t understand why a parent would tell their child that they weren’t truly their child, but a mischievous fairy that had replaced them. What was even the point of telling a child that they weren’t human?
“Well, like you said, I’m different from everybody else,” Gil said as though he was reciting something that he had been told hundreds of times, and Jay was beginning to fear that was exactly the case.
“You say that like it’s a bad thing,” Jay raised an eyebrow.
“That’s ‘cause it is,” Gil said like it was obvious, which just made Jay feel worse. “I don’t learn things as fast as I should. I always say the wrong words that I don’t mean to say, and I can’t tell when I’ve upset someone else because I said the wrong thing. I-I get confused all the time, and-”
“-And you get excited about the little things that people take for granted,” Jay interrupted before Gil could put himself down anymore. Gil really seemed to believe all of this stuff about him being a changeling, but Jay couldn’t blame him for that. If Gil had grown up being told these things, of course he believed it, just like how Carlos had believed that dogs were blood-thirsty monsters. But just because he had been raised to believe it didn’t mean that it was true. It just meant that it would take some time to convince Gil that his mom had been wrong.
“You’re enthusiastic, and loyal,” Jay said, remembering how Gil had followed Uma and Harry everywhere. It wasn’t because he was too dumb to think for himself, it was because he wanted to be near them. “You may use words that you don’t mean to sometimes, but you still say what’s on your mind. Not a lot of people are upfront about their feelings the way that you are, but that doesn’t mean that it’s a bad thing.”
“And most importantly,” Jay smiled slightly and gave Gil’s shoulders a small squeeze. “You’re nice , not because you feel like you should be, but because you want to be. I don’t care if that’s not how most kids from the Isle of the Lost are, and I don’t care if I don’t entirely understand why you’re so good when you have every excuse to be bad, It’s just who you are, and there’s nothing wrong with that.
“Look, you may be different from most people,” Jay admitted, because it was true. “But that doesn’t mean that there’s anything wrong with you, or that you’re a...a shapeshifting fairy. Different doesn’t have to be a bad thing.” It was because Gil was so different from others that Jay liked him. “And it definitely doesn’t mean you’re a changeling.”
“B-but Maman said…” Gil stammered slightly, but Jay wasn’t about to let him get another word in.
“I don’t care what your mom said,” Jay said sternly. “I really don’t think you’re a changeling, but…” Jay held up a hand as he saw Gil opened his mouth to argue with him. “But if you really want to know though, we can ask Fairy Godmother. She’d probably be able to tell if you have fairy blood in you.” Jay didn’t exactly want to do this though, because either Gil would learn that his mother was right when she’d all but called him a monster, or he would learn that his mother, who was supposed to care about him, had seen him as inhuman for no good reason at all. Either way, Gil would just end up getting hurt.
“But the thing is, I don’t think it matters if you’re a changeling or not,” Jay said. “Because you’re still you , whether you’re a human who’s maybe a little different from others, or if you’re actually a fairy that just looks this way. As far as I’m concerned, you’re still just Gil, and that’s not going to change.”
Gil silently stared at Jay with wide eyes He swallowed thickly. “R-really?” Gil’s voice cracked slightly, revealing just how vulnerable he felt at that moment.
Jay smiled reassuringly and nodded. “Yeah, of course,” Gil let out a small noise that resembled a choked laugh. He rushed forward and wrapped his arms around Jay, pulling him into a tight embrace. Jay stood frozen in shock as Gil clung tightly to him, like he never wanted to let go.
“No one’s ever said anything like that to me,” Gil said quietly. Jay frowned slightly and slowly put his arms around Gil’s back. “Everyone things that I’m too dumb, and slow, and unfocused, and-”
“You deserve better than that,” Jay said quickly, before Gil could begin to speak badly about himself again. It seemed that it would take awhile to convince Gil just how great he was. Gil seemed to have a limitless amount of bad things to say about himself that he’d heard from others, and at that moment Jay decided that he would just have to give Gil as many compliments as necessary until it balanced out the insults. Jay didn’t care how long it would take, Gil deserved nice words, and he had no problem being the one to give them to him.
Gil seemed to see the good in everything around him. The least that Jay could do was point out the good in himself, even if Gil couldn’t see it. Especially if Gil couldn’t see it. Because someone who saw so much good deserved to have it given back to them.