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On the one hand, Mal mused, getting help for a random classmate was a sign of kindness. Weakness. Goodness. Nobody on the Isle was good. Especially not Maleficent's daughter.
On the other hand, if she did help him, he would be in her debt. Sure, he was just Carlos, terrified of everything, jumping out of his skin at the slightest noise.
But even having him indebted to her was better than him not being indebted to her. He would owe her a favor. His life, even.
And what he lacked in strength, he made up for in smarts. There was a reason that Mal had chosen Carlos to be her partner for this school project, and that was so Carlos could do all the work instead of her.
She was a villain. What did people expect?
All right then. Next step: let someone know that Carlos was probably bleeding to death in his mother's fur closet.
It would have to be someone who would actually help Carlos, of course.
Cruella was out, obviously. That de Vil woman was unpredictable; the fur-obsessed maniac cared more for her furs than for her own son. She would probably work herself into a rage at her fur closet being trespassed into anyway. Mal didn't want to be around when that happened. Mal didn't get scared, but if anything did scare her, it might be Cruella de Vil.
Besides, Cruella wasn't anywhere near Hell Hall; apparently she'd gone to Curl Up and Dye. That was why they were doing the project and Carlos' house instead of Mal's, because her mother was home and she couldn't invite anyone over for the same reason Carlos couldn't have anyone over when his mother was home: because of "the whole flying crockery issue."
Cecil de Vil, Cruella's older brother, was a lot more stable and sane than she was. He was probably one of the most normal people on the Isle. Then again, that wasn't a hard contest to win, what with the older generation's habit of going on and on about their evil plots and how they had been foiled and how they were going to get revenge on the heroes who'd defeated them as soon as they escaped this island. "When I was your age I was cursing entire kingdoms..." Blah blah blah. Mal could recite her mother's speech by heart.
Cecil wasn't like that. He actively avoided conflict, unlike his sister. In fact, many of the residents of the Isle paid him to act as a mediator in their various petty conflicts. He listened to both sides and was usually able to find a logical compromise-it was a wonder he and his maniacal, unstable, unreasonable, hysterical younger sister, who had been known to declare lifelong vendettas against people because they had "looked at her funny" were even related. In fact, he was the only one with any influence on her, who was ever able to calm her down when she was in one of her rages, much more so than Carlos.
Rumor had it that he had volunteered to live on the Isle, preferring to accompany his sister Cruella rather than be separated from her forever.
Mal wondered, though, if he would have made that decision if he had known he would have sons.
He would help his nephew...if he had the will to.
From what Mal could gather, when the Isle was first created, most people thought it was temporary.
Then children started being born, and they realized it wasn't. Because if Auradon wouldn't take the children off, what hope did the adults have?
Cecil had none anymore. His wife, Carlos's aunt, was dead. His children-not just his sons, but his niece and nephew as well-were stuck on the Isle, with no hope of a better future. His brother was dead. And his sister...
Apparently, Cruella being the way she was had played a major factor in his-"clinical depression," Monsieur Frederic D'Arque had called it, before Cecil had roused himself enough to throw the so-called doctor out of his house-very few things could cause such a strong reaction in Cecil anymore, but D'Arque had, several times, attempted to incarcerate Cruella in his Maison des Lunes. Some things were unforgivable.
How did Mal know all this? Her mother had a raven who spied on people. That's how.
Anyway, there were other de Vils Mal could find.
Ivy de Vil? Nope. The daughter of Cruella and Cecil's long-dead brother was one of Uma's pirates. There was no way Mal was going to the Lost Revenge just to get help for Carlos when she could easily find it somewhere else.
That left Hunter and Diego de Vil, Cecil's sons.
So she'd look for them by their home. If not-hadn't Hunter been hanging around with Harriet's crew lately? She could leave them a message there or something.
Diego answered the door to find Mal on the other side of it.
"M-Mal?" he stammered in astonishment.
"Yes," Mal said. "Carlos got his leg caught in a bear trap at his house. He's bleeding pretty badly. You should probably go help him."
"How-Carlos-what-" Diego stammered in a panic. Carlos-what had he been thinking? The bear traps were only in his mother's closet, and Carlos was forbidden to go in there. Had Mal done something? Diego knew it had been a bad idea for Mal and Carlos to work together on that project.
"You should go now," Mal advised, already turning to leave. "I don't know how long it takes someone to bleed to death."
"Bleed-but Carlos-Hunter!" Diego yelled.
Carlos was lying on the floor of the cavernous, empty parlor, having managed to drag himself out of the fur closet. If he stayed in there nobody would ever find him until Mother came in to organize her furs again. Also, blood might get on them. Mother got very angry if her furs were sullied in any way.
He lay on the floor, staring up at the wooden ceiling.
The walls of the house were painted gray and black. Uncle Cecil used to say it was gloomy, before he became too gloomy himself.
There were fancy designs carved into the ceiling, a reminder of when their family had been wealthy enough to afford to pay people to carve designs into the ceiling. He wondered what his great-grandparents had been thinking. He couldn't make out what the designs looked like, anyway.
The parlor was full of elegant furniture that no one ever used. Mother liked everything to be pristine, and that meant that this parlor and half the house wasn't for living in. They used the furniture in the rest of the house-the junky, common, rickety chairs and tables and couches. Hell Hall was an odd mixture of wealth and poverty, elegance and gracelessness, antiques and...well, pretty much everything was an antique.
Carlos didn't know why he was thinking about this. It wasn't important anyway, unless Mother said so.
His leg was on fire, being carved with rusty knives; it was wrapped in ice and stabbed with nails. Pain shot up from it into his chest with every breath he took, making him gasp, but that just made it hurt more.
Mal had informed him that they were partners for the Unnatural Biology science project, and they were doing it by his house, and he'd agreed, because who was he to say no to Mal? So they'd come to his house, and Mal had decided to explore Hell Hall-which was how you knew that she was not only the evilest fae on the Isle, she was also the bravest, because no one dared to explore Hell Hall, no one even broke into Hell Hall, despite its abundance of resources. Not to mention the wrought-iron bars. And Mal had opened the fur closet, and he'd scrambled after her, because if she went inside, if she so much as touched one of Mother's furs, Mother would-well, she wouldn't kill him, of course, but-and he'd ran after her, forgetting where to place his feet in his panic, and suddenly there was white-hot pain and he couldn't walk and the sound of his own voice screaming.
He didn't actually remember how he'd managed to drag himself out here.
He didn't know where Mal was either.
The bear trap still had its iron jaws clamped around his leg. He tried not to look.
There was a lot of blood. The rug was going to be stained, probably permanently. Mother wouldn't like that.
The blood wasn't gushing out, though, which meant that an artery hadn't been damaged. That was good. It meant he had some time.
This room had no windows. There were no drapes to fashion makeshift bandages out of. And even if there were, he didn't think he was able to. The slightest movement sent waves of pain shooting through him.
The average adult had four to six liters of blood, and could die from losing two and a half to four liters of it.
But Carlos wasn't an adult. Carlos was a small almost-twelve-year-old boy, and he had much less blood in his body than an adult would. He might die just from losing one liter. He already felt weak and faint. Lightheaded. Dizzy, like the nickname of that little Tremaine girl, Drizella's namesake. It was odd that she'd named her youngest daughter after herself, since she seemed to hate her. It didn't matter. Everyone called her Dizzy anyway.
How much blood had he lost so far? A lot. He didn't know exactly how much.
Devil, devil, devil child. They said the de Vils were cursed, that many of them died violent deaths and the ones that didn't lived miserable lives...you had only to look at his own mother and uncle to see that.
Were the de Vils cursed?
Was he going to die? He didn't want to die, he didn't think.
He lived on the Isle. What did he have to live for?
He didn't want to die alone, at least. He wished his cousins were here.
He had his cousins, he supposed, to live for. He would have wanted to say goodbye to them.
He would have wanted to say goodbye to Claudine Frollo, the dark-haired girl with carefully empty eyes, who flinched from the slightest touch or sound. They were friends, sort of. They'd never spoken, but sometimes they would just sit near each other and think. If he was going to die, he would want to speak to her before he did.
He would have wanted to say goodbye to the blue-haired girl who lived in the castle across the way. He'd never spoken to her either, because she never came out. But if he was walking by, and she was looking out of her window (she always did) and saw him, she would wave at him and he would wave back.
He didn't know her name. If he was going to die, he wanted to know her name.
"Carlos?"
At first, Carlos thought that his wishing for his family had caused him to hallucinate Diego standing before him. Then Diego dropped to his knees and touched his shoulder with real, warm, solid fingers, and Carlos knew that this was no hallucination.
At least he would not die alone.
"Carlos!" That was Hunter, running into the room right after Diego and kneeling next to him. "What happened?"
"Bear trap," Carlos explained.
"I can see that! I mean-never mind. Okay." He took a deep breath. "We need to stop the bleeding-put pressure on it-Diego, go find something we can use for bandages."
Without a word, Diego sprang up, his face much paler than normal, and did as his brother had ordered, which only showed the gravity of the situation. The way the de Vil cousin dynamic worked was that the younger ones listened to the older ones, but with a lot of bickering and protesting. Diego hadn't even made a joke about the "pressure" of the situation....
"How bad is it?" Carlos asked. He didn't want to look. The amount of blood he'd seen already made him feel queasy.
"Not too bad," Hunter said. He shifted, trying to block Carlos's view of his leg.
"Liar," Carlos accused.
Diego came running back in with an armful of maroon fabric: the window drapes from the front room. "Here," he panted, kneeling beside Carlos again. "So do we wrap it around his leg? But the trap is still on-"
"Let's stop the bleeding first and then take it off," Hunter suggested. Both of them took a fistful of fabric. "Okay, on my count, press down. One, two-"
"Wait!" Carlos rasped.
"Three."
Diego and Hunter pressed down on Carlos's leg, and Carlos screamed as the pain skyrocketed; he jerked and thrashed, trying to fight his way out of his cousins' grip. Logically he knew that putting pressure on a wound helped the bleeding stop faster, but it hurt so much-
Everything went black.
"-need to keep him still," someone was saying when he resurfaced into consciousness. "It'll just bleed even more, otherwise."
"We know!" someone else said, and he had the feeling he should know these voices, but he couldn't focus. "We tried, he just-"
A snort. "Well, the alternative is cauterizing it! I'm not that stupid! Diego, go get a bucket of seawater."
"Why-all right," a third voice said.
"To disinfect it after we get the trap off," the voice Carlos now recognized as his oldest cousin Ivy explained as Diego ran out of the room.
Carlos opened his eyes.
Ivy and Hunter were standing over him, gesturing wildly as they spoke in harsh whispers.
"Don't," Carlos whispered.
They stopped immediately. "You're awake!" Ivy knelt next to him, Hunter beside her. He didn't know when Ivy had come here, or how she had known to, but he was glad she was. "Don't worry," she tried to reassure him. "You'll be fine. We just need to get a few things..."
If anything, this worried Carlos even more. Ivy was very rarely reassuring.
"Don't," he repeated.
"Don't what?" Hunter asked.
"Take off...the trap," he rasped. "It's in now-pressure. On the wound. If you take it off-bleed. More." He didn't have the strength to speak in full sentences anymore, so he didn't say what he was afraid of: And it'll hurt more.
But they could see it in his eyes.
Ivy bent over him. She took his hand in hers in a rare gesture of affection. "It'll be fine," she promised. "But we need to take it off, Carlos. We can't bandage the wound with it on, and it's rusty-didn't you say your mother specifically doesn't want you to clean it, so it'll be more harmful to intruders with all the rust on the blades? But once we take it off we'll clean your leg and bandage it and you'll be good as new."
Ha, Carlos thought, but he didn't say anything.
"It'll be fine," Hunter told him, echoing Ivy's words, but his face was unnaturally pale; both of theirs were. Carlos could feel Ivy's fingers trembling.
Diego staggered into the room, clutching a wooden bucket with water sloshing over its edge and onto the floor. He set it down onto the floor with a thunk.
"Okay," Ivy said, sucking air through her teeth. "I'll take this side. Diego, you take that side. Hunter, hold him down." She squeezed Carlos's hand and moved to his leg, opposite Diego.
Hunter placed his hands on each of Carlos's shoulders.
"Wait," Carlos whispered.
"We need to do it now, Carlos," Ivy told him gravely. "We don't have much time. Okay-" She and Diego each held onto one side of the trap with their bare hands.
Hunter pressed Carlos down.
Ivy and Diego pulled.
Carlos screamed.
His leg was on fire again, it felt like it was being stabbed with knives; he felt the jagged teeth of the bear trap slowly tug away from his flesh, ripping; his vision flickered, red and gray dancing before his eyes, until finally, mercifully, he blacked out again.
While he was unconscious, his cousins managed to clean the wounds on his leg and bandage them, which was a lot easier than it would have been if he'd been awake and thrashing around.
They didn't actually have any pain medication, after all. Just another thing to hate Auradon for.
Hunter actually considered knocking Carlos out if he woke up before they'd finished tending to his wound. It would be easier for all of them that way.
But Carlos didn't wake for nearly two days. He'd passed out from the pain, but he'd lost a lot of blood and needed to replenish his strength.
Meanwhile, his cousins took turns treating the wounds on his leg until he woke up and was able to do it himself.
They also tried to clean the bloodstained carpet before Cruella got home.
It was a month before Carlos was able to stand, two before he was able to walk unsupported, nearly a year before the limp began to fade. The scar never would.
But he had Ivy to show him how to change his bandages and to get him some rare, prized antiseptic medication; he had Hunter to support him when he was testing out his leg; he had Diego to tell him what had been going on at school and to bring him his schoolwork and to tell him what antics the Gaston twins had gotten up to.
He was not alone after all.