Work Text:
It isn’t that Evie wants to leave. She doesn’t wake up one morning, feel the sun streaming in through the half-open curtains in her room, hear Jay and Carlos chattering to each other in the kitchen, and decide that’s it. I’m out of here.
But it’s so much easier than staying.
///
Evie’s heart has been breaking for the last six years, and it’s honestly been so long that by now she’s used to it. This is what she was made for, after all, to want and want and want, to be an empty vessel trailing after other people for her entire life, begging them to give her enough attention to make her feel full.
The trick is that no one else can actually fix her.
Evie’s okay with this fact, mostly. She came to terms at the end of high school that there are some things about her, about the way she was raised and trained and made, maybe something fundamental in her blood, that she can’t change. She’s a little broken, too hollow and too searching and missing enough pieces to make her mother proud.
Evie was raised to be an empty canvas, someone for other people to paint all their hopes and dreams onto, in the brightest, most vibrant colors they can find.
The colors disappear when they do.
It doesn’t matter that if any of her friends ever said that I’m just too broken, that she’d fight tooth and nail to prove how wrong they are.
Evie’s heart has been breaking for as long as she can remember, which is perfectly okay, because she was made for this, except that one morning she wakes up and the sun is too bright, and she hears Mal laughing in the other room, and she can’t breathe.
Breathing is sort of essential, for being alive. And Evie’s perfectly fine with having fault lines spread across her entire body, but she’d like to keep breathing.
So, she has to do what she has to do.
It’s sort of poetic, sort of romantic, right? The princess flees in the middle of the night, and no one knows exactly where she went?
Her mother, she thinks, might actually be proud. For once.
///
Mal and Evie meet when they’re so young that the world doesn’t exist without them together. Evie tries to remember, some nights, a world without her best friend, and it never amounts to much of anything. If she tries really hard, shuts her eyes and holds her breath, she can almost imagine something cold, a chill sweeping down her entire body.
And then, one day, light.
But that doesn’t mean very much, does it?
The point is that Evie and Mal have known each other for as long as they can remember, that they’ve known Jay and Carlos for just as long, and the Isle of the Lost might be a cold, cruel, unforgiving place, but somewhere in the torture chamber that serves as the only home they’ve ever known, four villains band together out of necessity, or pride, or a desire for something softer than any of them really deserve.
And their children don’t have much, but they have each other.
///
In the shiny, clean, impossibly fancy limo that takes them from the Isle to Auradon, Mal grips Evie’s hand so hard that it almost goes numb. Evie squeezes back, knows that Mal has to be the tough one, that she’s letting Evie know how scared she is so that no one else has to find out.
We’ve got this, Evie tries to tell Mal, like they’re telepathic or something.
Mal turns to her and smiles, I hope you’re right.
Best friends isn’t like actual telepathy, but it’s pretty close. Mal doesn’t hope much, and Evie doesn’t promise much, but they’re supposed to try new things, right?
The thing that Evie is absolutely, 100%, completely sure of, is that she and Mal and Jay and Carlos are the best team in the entire world. And even if this new adventure goes sideways, it won’t be anything they haven’t dealt with before.
She doesn’t count on Ben.
///
When Mal is seven years old, she stops sleeping. It’s not unheard of, for that to happen on the Isle, it’s not particularly different from when Carlos shakes for a week straight the following year, or when Jay stops talking for two months, or when she compulsively scrapes her fingernails along her thighs for an entire winter.
It’s just that their lives are stressful, and no one’s really telling them how to deal with it.
Mal stops sleeping, which Evie notices because it’s them against the world, and also they basically live together.
Mal sits by the window, staring out at the stars that they can barely see through the cloud cover, or plays silent hopscotch on the floor of her bedroom, or braids her hair over and over and over again. Evie sits with her, tucks her head against Mal’s shoulder, and tries to get enough sleep for both of them.
When Mal misses things, almost gets hurt because her reflexes are slow or loses focus in the middle of a raid because she’s just that exhausted, Evie covers for her.
Maleficent probably notices, of course she notices, but she nods silently at Evie, when Evie goes to grab Mal’s hand, and it’s the first time in her life that Evie actually feels proud of something.
Like she can do this, she can take care of someone, she can protect the people she loves. She doesn’t have much, but she’ll always have that.
She whispers her new realization to Mal that night, I’m never, ever, ever leaving. Mal hums under her breath, softly.
The next night, Mal falls asleep. Evie clings to her hand, curls up next to her so their heads are on the same pillow, and thinks about how right this feels.
///
When Evie leaves, she tries not to feel like she’s breaking a promise.
She goes when everyone else is asleep, after Carlos finally heads off to bed and before Jay wakes up. They’re all in the same big house now, one they bought together after high school ended. It’s the perfect kind of college student place, and all their own.
They’ve never had anything all their own before.
Mal has a room too, even if it’s mostly for show, because she’s been spending nights at the palace since senior year, but she makes sure to come home often enough that they all pretend she actually lives there.
That’s what she always calls it, home.
Evie smiles when she does, which might be half the reason Mal does it to begin with, but she likes to think that nothing feels like home unless they’re all in it.
She doesn’t know what that means then, if she’s leaving. All she knows is that she has to go.
///
Mal might be the dragon, might have superheated blood and fangs hiding behind her gums, but Evie’s the protector. Mal is flash, and Carlos is fear and Jay is smooth ice sliding down your spine in the middle of the night, but Evie is all steel and armor and a shield wrapping around the only three people she really loves.
Evie would throw herself on a blade, or under a car, or in front of a gunshot for her friends. And none of them would ever let her.
That’s how this whole thing works
///
When she turns eight, Evie’s mom makes a new house rule: you can’t leave the house without makeup. It’s not a surprise, even when Evie complains that no one even cares what I look like, because she was made for this.
It goes poorly, at first, her hands are unsteady and she sticks mascara wands in her eye, and her foundation shades never match.
Mal shyly says that she looks beautiful. Every single day.
///
The first time Evie remembers seeing Mal cry was on her tenth birthday. They don’t cry really, none of them ever have, the Isle is too cold and cruel and dry for any of that. But Mal has a perfectly fine birthday, gifts that Jay stole and that Evie made, with a card from Carlos and food that isn’t quite as terrible as usually from their parents.
It’s a good day.
And then, halfway through the day, Mal’s sitting on the floor of her bedroom and Evie’s next to her, examining different nail polish colors, when she realizes that Mal is shaking, and it’s such an unprecedented shock that Evie just stares at her for a minute.
Mal just keeps sobbing, tears tricking down her cheeks like water bubbling over in a pot, and Evie wraps her arms around Mal’s body and holds her as tightly as possible.
///
Six years later, when they get the offer go to Auradon and be something other than all of this, Evie thinks about that night on the floor with Mal. She thinks about the strongest person she knows, how none of them are really strong enough to survive this.
She thinks about Carlos’s twitchiness, the shiny, emerging cruelty in Jay’s eyes, and how Mal hasn’t smiled in a month.
They go, and she hopes that this might be what normal people call salvation.
///
The first time Evie kisses Mal, they are fourteen and it doesn’t seem like anything can tear them apart. They’re fresh off a run, terrorizing a group of men who looked at Evie too long yesterday, because all they know how to do is fight with teeth and claws and bruised knuckles.
Mal is laughing, and Evie is too, and she thinks that it would be worth any amount of too-much eye contact from strangers on the street to hear Mal laugh like that again.
They are little monsters, terrible and fierce and practically born knowing how to fight.
But then Mal looks at Evie just a breath longer than usual, and Evie finds Mal’s mouth with her own, and Mal’s hands tighten on Evie’s waist like they’re both drowning, and it turns out they know some other stuff too.
///
Mal is hardly ever kind, there’s no room for that kind of thing on the Isle.
There especially isn’t room if Evie insists on being nice once in a while, if Carlos backs away from a fight or two.
Jay and Mal pick up the slack, they save any lingering softness for just the four of them, and it’s like they’re protecting a dying species, cultivating the smallest amounts of care from each other in the safety of their home.
When they get to Auradon, everyone is nice and no one knows how precious it is. Evie’s hard-won softness looks harsh and sharp compared to the fluffy ease that everyone else smiles with. Carlos’s controlled temper doesn’t look like much against kids who’ve never had to fight.
Ben meets Mal, and says he sees something new in her, something good. He needs a poster child, they all know that, but he likes Mal and she might like him, and Evie just needs to tell herself that Mal doesn’t owe her anything.
If they cared about each other on the Isle, it’s because Mal didn’t have any other options. Here she has a prince, a boy who smiles like the sun was put in the sky just to please him, who coaxes gentle things out of her like a gardener.
Evie’s killed every plant she ever tried to grow.
She doesn’t hate Mal for going with Ben. She was taught to do the same thing, after all.
///
It strikes her, once, in their second year in Auradon, how unfair it is that Mal got the prince. It made sense at the time, back when they were new and needed to get the wand and Mal was the criminal mastermind who thought she could seduce a future king.
She was right, of course, but that doesn’t meant Evie wasn’t cheated.
Being the princess was her thing, it always has been, and Mal’s shared enough of her life to know that. Mal got to be the villain, the thing that goes bump in the night, the queen bee of their tiny little hellscape.
Evie is none of those things, not conniving or brave or rash, she’s just supposed to be beautiful. A venus fly trap, ready and waiting, sticky and sweet and soft enough to get anyone else stuck inside her web.
But Ben, sweet, innocent, idiotic Ben had taken one look at Mal and decided that she was the girl for him, teeth and all, and Evie can’t even fault him for it because he really does love her.
///
After the first kiss, there are a lot more. It should scare Evie, should make her stomach churn and her skin crawl the way it does when her mother talks about princes and snaring a husband and using people.
But Mal is none of those things, not scary or distant or full of too much weight, she’s just Evie’s very favorite person the way she always has been, only now it feels like their relationship is allowed to have follow-through instead of just raw wanting, and Evie thinks that maybe she’s been waiting her whole life to do this.
She doesn’t really believe in fate, or destiny, none of them do. The world is far too uncaring for that. If fortune is keeping a book of destinies, everyone on the Isle was written out a long time ago, and Evie’s not even sad about it. They have a lot more freedom this way.
Still, with Mal’s hand in hers, the warm press of Mal’s lips and the soft grasp of her fingers, Evie wonders if she might have ended up in exactly the place she belongs.
///
The Isle is terrible because it’s meant to be, and not that bad at all because it’s the only thing they’ve ever known.
Mal and Evie and Jay and Carlos are fine because they have to be, and vicious for the same reason.
In another light, the one that Evie prefers, they are the best things in the entire world, brave enough to care about each other and able to survive because of that.
///
When Mal kisses Ben for the first time, she tells Evie two hours later. They’re sitting on their beds, different ones, which is still so totally foreign that Evie can’t wrap her head all the way around it, and Mal’s face is aglow, the kind of happy, only-in-Auradon expression that Evie’s growing to love.
Mal describes it, E it was so perfect, and Evie’s stomach drops all the way down to her toes. She didn’t think that this would happen, that Mal would ever actually like someone else, and Evie feels like an idiot because she’s been too trusting, she didn’t spend enough time being jealous the way her mother taught her, and now she’s lost the only person in the world who knew her all the way down to the ground.
She says as much to Carlos, whose eyes get big and sad and deep, like he feels Evie’s pain in his own chest, and right this is why she can’t tell Carlos everything because it gets under his skin too much. He says it probably won’t last, and Evie wants to agree.
What do the most despicable girl from the Isle and the crown prince have to talk about, anyway?
Evie forgets every lesson her mother ever tried to teach her when it comes to Mal, and she thinks that this is why all the best songs are about heartbreak, because it’s the most all-consuming thing she’s ever experienced.
She wants to say something, in their bedroom that first day, something about betrayal and I thought this was about us, about us getting out and being okay for once, but the words get stuck in her throat.
It doesn’t matter how real she thought they were, it doesn’t matter if she might have loved Mal when Evie is, by blood, not supposed to love anyone.
All the matters is that Mal didn’t think anything of the sort, apparently. All that matters is that she picked the prince, the golden boy, and Evie loves being her best friend but she thinks that this might actually destroy her.
///
On Evie’s fifteenth birthday, Mal takes her up to the roof of their building. It’s flat, and Evie’s run across it a thousand times before, but this time Mal takes her hands off of Evie’s eyes and glow-in-the-dark stars are painted under her feet.
None of the constellations are accurate, but they’re still beautiful, exactly the way that Evie and Mal have imagined that they might look. Mal looks directly into her eyes, says happy birthday, E, and Evie thinks, not for the first time, that she’s secretly the luckiest person in the world.
The next morning they have to paint the roof over, since the glow is more of a beacon for attention than any of them need, but Mal and Evie do it together, splashing paint on each other and giggling and kissing because they can.
Evie knows that she’s not supposed to like it here, that the Isle is supposed to be a punishment, but she’s happy.
She thinks that they might just all be okay.
///
Evie starts thinking about the Isle the year after they all graduate from Auradon prep. They’re outside of the artificially smooth school environment, and everything’s still lovely, but she has an itching under her skin to do something real.
She thinks back to the Isle, which should hold nothing but bad memories and still, surprisingly, is the keeper of her entire childhood, the last time she felt really, truly loved.
She’s glad they got out, but it starts to feel unfair. Like her friends can be happy, or she can be safe, but nothing comes without a cost.
It shouldn’t be true, that she was happier on the Isle, and logically Evie’s pretty sure she wasn’t. The Isle is built to destroy, to hurt and rip and suck out all the goodness that anyone dares to bring over. It was killing her friends, it was probably killing her, she thinks that she remembers how much it ached all the time.
But she aches here too, whenever Mal leaves with Ben, and at least once ache might take her home.
///
Ben asks Mal to marry him and Mal comes right home to tell Evie after. Evie can’t breathe, she can’t look at Mal, because this wasn’t supposed to happen.
She should have been expecting it, probably.
Evie can’t keep waiting.
///
She goes home.
It feels like the greatest heist of her life, like being sixteen again but in reverse, because the girl she loves is supposed to be a queen and everyone else has outgrown her and all Evie has ever been meant to do is protect her friends.
They don’t need her anymore.
Luckily, some people still do.
She brings food home, food and cleaning supplies and a little bit of magic and a sharp enough bite that people listen to her.
There’s nothing as scary as an escapee who comes back, and Evie still has all of Mal’s old tricks up her sleeve.
She says things will be different now, implores and begs and demands, pulls children away from houses that offer nothing but pain and feeds everyone and says we’re better than this.
Surprisingly, they listen.
Everyone is surprised, Evie is surprised, because her plans really aren’t supposed to work this well.
She thinks that Mal would have seen this coming. Mal would have laughed, told everyone to get in line, and listened to Evie along with the rest of them.
Mal always saw her, except for the most important thing, except for that annoyingly broken heart.
///
Carlos comes back first, Jay close on his tail. When they arrive, the sun is shining and the whole Isle is warm, cooled at the edges by a breeze that no one knew existed.
Evie’s waiting for them, smiling, and they scoop her up in tandem, pulling stories about her time here and why she left and E it’s beautiful here.
Evie grins, softer than she ever has before, and nods. Making things better is sort of my thing.
Carlos laughs and Jay’s eyes widen and they both stay.
///
Mal comes the latest, almost a year after Evie vanished in the middle of the night. It’s not enough time to forget, or even heal, and Evie’s starting to think that she’ll always have a Mal-shaped hole in her body because that’s how she was made too.
But then, one morning, early and brighter than the Isle ever was before, she catches a glimpse of purple hair, and a sharp smile that she knows in her bones.
Mal, wedding ring free and tough as ever, is looking at Evie like she hung the stars.
After that, it’s all a lot better.