Work Text:
Carlos had had siblings, once.
The thought followed him around for ages after his mother's trial. It was the one thing that bothered him. Not the fact that all of Auradon had had a front-row seat in the revelation of what his childhood had been like. Not the cold fact that his mother cared nothing for him, not even over the fact that it had been his testimony that had doomed her to prison.
But then, he'd always known that, hadn't he?
No, it was the discovery and description of the bodies that haunted him. It would come out of the blue. He would be studying, or tinkering, or in the midst of a blessedly ordinary conversation with the friends who were more family to him than Mother had ever been, and then suddenly, apropos of nothing, it would come to him.
It wasn't the fact that he'd had siblings, or the fact that they were all dead. It was that he had never known of or even suspected their existence, and had no memory of it.
And it was also that it was only the merest, slightest chance that his fate had not been theirs. He accepted it with more equanimity than he'd have thought he would. He'd always known it, maybe.
There'd been six of them, and the first one had died only two and a half years after the Isle was created. Even if they'd all been born one right after another, how was it that he remembered nothing? Surely he should have a vague impression of at least one or two older siblings?
But none of them had lived to be very old.
Had they all been older than him? That was another thing that haunted him. Had some of them actually been younger than him, born and killed before he was old enough to remember them, three or four years old at the most?
Carlos' earliest recollections were of shadows and screaming and smoke. And pain, and terror. Those did not create very clear childhood memories to work with. Had all of the distant, far-off crying that echoed in his ears been his own? He hoped so.
Broken neck, bludgeoned skull, strangled to death. He knew Mother's fits of rage very well. He had only survived his early childhood because she had wanted someone to take care of the house, and her. His life had depended on doing all of his chores perfectly. If he hadn't-
Well, those were memories that even he did not like to think about.
He'd been desperate all his life to prove his usefulness to her, to show he was valuable to her, to make her proud of him.
So she would not kill him, because if there was one thing he'd known on the Isle it was that if he died, it would not be through illness or in a battle or any of the other common ways to die on the Isle; Mal and Jay and Evie would make certain of that. No, his end would come from the one thing they couldn't protect him from, and that was, of course, his mother.
The end had come for the siblings he'd never known he had, though.
What had their names been? He wished he knew. Had they even had names? Mother had referred to him as "the pup" until he was six or so; all the small bodies had been much younger.
He asked his cousins if they knew anything of his siblings, anything at all, even just the fact that they'd existed. They said they'd known nothing, except for Ivy, who shook her head and refused to answer.
"You do know something," Carlos said, and he remembered how Ivy was the eldest of them all, and how, even though Ivy was the leader of their generation's band of de Vil children, for as long as he could remember she had refused to set foot in Hell Hall, and had avoided his mother like the plague.
"I do," she agreed, her voice an uncharacteristic haunted whisper. "And it is better that you don't."