Chapter Text
For most people, the Isle of the Lost was nothing more than a myth—a dark bedtime story whispered to frightened children to make them finish their vegetables. They imagined it as a gray, filthy wasteland crawling with bitter souls, a lawless dump trapped beneath an impenetrable magical dome at the edge of the world. They pictured monsters and shadows. But for the people actually stuck breathing its recycled, smog-choked air, it wasn't a fairy tale. It was a concrete, rotting reality.
♚
Ahn Keonho had spent all eighteen years of his life rotting right alongside the place he called home.
He was a product of the Isle's harshest corners. His mother, Ahn Yoojung, was a bitter, resentful woman who sorely lacked any maternal instincts, though perhaps Keonho couldn't entirely blame her. Back when he was just a kid, Keonho had always wondered where the rest of his family was. There were old photographs tucked away in drawers showing a younger Yoojung in the company of a man Keonho assumed was his father, alongside a little girl who shared the exact same facial features as the woman who gave birth to him.
In the cramped apartment with its peeling, water-stained wallpaper, the mere subject of his father and sister was a live wire buried deep beneath the floorboards. Whenever a young, curious Keonho dared to ask a harmless question about the people who shared half his blood, Yoojung would snap. Her eyes would widen, her breathing would turn ragged, and she would spiral into a screaming, hysterical fit that left plates smashed against the kitchen walls and Keonho retreating into heavy, suffocating silence for days.
As expected, the Isle had absolute zero contact with the outside world, meaning Keonho knew next to nothing about what lay beyond the barrier. His entire universe was bounded by rusty iron fences, crumbling asphalt, and drinking water that tasted faintly of industrial waste. The only version of the outside he knew came wrapped in the venomous tales Yoojung poured into his ears like boiling oil.
According to her, Auradon was a disgusting, sickeningly sweet breeding ground for snobs, hypocrites, and cowards. She swore it was the worst place on earth, a nauseating utopia where every smile was fake, every building was lined with gold they hadn't earned, and the grass was kept unnaturally green just to mock the people starving beneath the dome.
Above all, Yoojung reserved a special, undying hatred for the monarchy—specifically Eom Jinsik and Eom Saebi, the rulers of that paradise on the other side. One rainy night, when Keonho was just a kid too small for his own skin, she had grabbed him by the shoulders, her fingers digging into his flesh hard enough to bruise, and looked him dead in the eye. She swore those royal bastards were the direct reason his father and sister had vanished into thin air. “They took them from us, Keonho,” she had hissed, her voice trembling with venom. “They took everything so they could live in their little castle.”
Growing with daily e constante poison and regret, Keonho had naturally morphed into a sharp-edged, cynical young man. He wore his defiance like a second skin.
Things at home were a true pressure cooker, a toxic environment where he felt suffocated within five minutes of walking through the front door. So, naturally, Keonho rarely stayed long enough for the walls to close in around him. Instead, his real life—the only part of existence he could actually tolerate—happened out on the decaying streets, right alongside his two inseparable childhood best friends: Martin and James.
♚
Their sanctuary was the damp, cluttered basement of James's house. It smelled perpetually of dry tobacco, damp concrete, old vinyl records that pumped out entire discographies from their favorite bands through the basement's rough acoustics, and the sweet, herbal aroma of whatever blunt James was currently lighting up.
It was mid-afternoon, though you couldn't tell by looking through the small, grime-caked window near the ceiling. The light down here was always a sickly, bruised yellow cast by flickering overhead bulbs.
"If you ruin this hemline, I swear to whatever dark gods are listening, I will feed you to the stray dogs," Martin muttered, not looking up from the patch of denim resting on his lap. He was sitting cross-legged on an old, spring-sinking sofa, balancing a pair of heavy, rusted tailoring scissors in one hand and a piece of chalk in the other, casually nodding his head to some random Nirvana song playing in the background.
James, slumped on an armchair on the opposite side of the room with his long legs thrown over the armrest, let out a slow, lazy puff of smoke. A thick cloud of gray haze drifted toward the ceiling, blurring the posters of forgotten rock bands peeling off the walls.
"Relax, Giant. It's just an old jacket. Nobody's gonna cry if a couple of threads get loose," James drawled, his voice thick and languid, his eyelids half-closed in that eternal state of high tranquility that defined ninety percent of his personality.
"It’s not just an old jacket, James. It’s art," Martin retrucou, snapping the scissors shut with a sharp, dramatic clack that made Keonho—who was leaning against the peeling wall and tossing a colorful little bouncy ball he had just stolen from a little girl on the street up and down in his palm—smirk.
Martin was the undisputed fashion icon of the Isle's underground. While everyone else wore whatever rags hadn't completely disintegrated, Martin possessed an uncanny, borderline magical ability to turn trash into wearable—and in Keonho's opinion, genuinely gorgeous—pieces. He would spend hours scouring the local market stalls—or outright swindling merchants when nobody was looking—for scraps of leather, velvet, and patterned fabrics. He didn't just stitch clothes for himself and his friends; he secretly outfitted half the younger kids in the neighborhood, giving them a sliver of dignity in a place designed to strip it away.
"Hey," Keonho interrupted. His voice carried that familiar, teasing edge that usually meant he was bored out of his mind and looking to start a fight.
"Martin, stop bickering with James's baked-ass brain, at least he’s got some trace of logic left right now.
We actually have work to do today, or did you forget old man Anderson rolls by with his metal cart today? I'm looking to score a new knife."
James groaned, letting his head loll back against the upholstery. "Bro, leave Anderson alone. The guy’s an ancient relic. Let him sell his useless scrap metal in peace without some neighborhood punk trying to rob him blind."
"Peace? On the Isle?" Keonho let out a dry, humorless laugh, pushing himself off the wall and stepping into the dim pool of light in the center of the room. He wore a dark, oversized hoodie with frayed cuffs and a heavily bandaged arm—the souvenirs of a particularly violent skateboarding session down the broken staircases of the old municipal building the week before. "Nobody gets peace here, James. Especially not merchants who overcharge for literal garbage made of metal."
"You just like the adrenaline rush of dodging the local guards," Martin said softly, a fond, exasperated smile finally breaking through his focused expression as he smoothed down a seam on a dark leather vest. "And you like giving your mother another excuse to scream at you when you come home bleeding."
Keonho’s jaw tightened instantly. The playful smirk flickered out, replaced by a dark flash in his eyes. He didn't answer, just caught the forgotten bouncy ball and shoved it rudely into his pocket.
The mere mention of his mother always felt like dropping a match into a pool of gasoline.
After a stretch of comfortable silence, broken only by the static-heavy audio leaking from their stolen radio, Keonho’s restless boredom finally peaked. Since running scams was out of the question for the afternoon, he dragged himself over to the twenty-inch television James had pulled out of a rotting dumpster years ago. The picture barely worked, and the audio was a harsh, grating buzz, but with zero better options on the Isle, it was the closest thing to entertainment they had.
The moment the battered screen flickered to life, the usual propaganda loop from the pristine paradise of Auradon began to play: excessively luxurious houses, blindingly bright smiles, and a sickeningly flawless picture of a happy life. Keonho rolled his eyes, watching less for actual amusement and more just to fuel his urge to mock it.
"Turn that fake-ass shit off, Kono," James mumbled from the armchair, his eyes bloodshot and half-mast, clearly too far gone to even process what was flashing on the glass.
"Dude, shut up. You can't even keep your eyes open," Keonho shot back without looking away from the screen.
He was about to reach for the power switch to kill the noise forever when a live broadcast popped up, cutting straight through the commercial loop. Sure, Keonho didn't know the actual reality of the outside world, but those royal mugs were plastered across every scrap of propaganda that littered the Isle. So when the annoyingly flawless face of Eom Seonghyeon—son of Saebi and Jinsik, and crown prince of Auradon—popped up on the screen, spewing cheerful, positive bullshit, Keonho felt an immediate, violent urge to punch right through the glass.
"Ugh, I hate this guy so much," Keonho muttered, his face twisting in pure disgust as he stared at the screen. "He looks so damn fake."
"He is kinda hot, though—" Martin blurted out, pausing his stitching for a split second.
At that, Keonho whipped his head around and pulled the ugliest, most offended face he could possibly muster. "You are so fucking weird."
They kept staring at the static-ridden screen, half-pretending they didn't care, until a genuinely shocking sentence spilled from Seonghyeon’s perfectly styled mouth.
“… So, that is why tomorrow morning, I will be officially sending out invitations to three residents under the age of twenty from the Isle of the Lost, giving them a chance to study right here at our renowned YCC High School. I have already personally selected them, and the guests will be provided with their own private dormitories and tailored classes here in Auradon…”
Seonghyeon’s smooth voice kept echoing from the TV, but the three boys were completely frozen in place, utterly stunned.
"Did he seriously just say that?" Martin asked, his voice cracking slightly.
"No fucking way," Keonho breathed out in pure disbelief.
"I think that weed was way too strong because I am definitely hallucinating," James groaned, pressing his palms against his eyes.
Don't get him wrong—Keonho knew he wasn't exactly a bundle of sunshine, but anything involving the royal family made his blood boil in a way he couldn't control. To hear this spoiled brat Seonghyeon—whose entire bloodline had abandoned a third of the population to rot on a garbage heap for over thirty years—try to play the saint and savior, plucking three kids from their homes just to parade them around a place where they'd inevitably be treated like zoo animals... it was the absolute peak of hypocrisy.
Seething with rage, Keonho grabbed the remote, clicked the TV off, and ran a hand roughly through his hair before standing up from the sofa.
"Where are you going, man?" Martin called out as Keonho headed for the door.
"I need some fresh air. My brain is about to melt out of my ears. Catch you guys later."
♚
The moment Keonho stepped out of James’s basement hideout, the damp, suffocating weight of the Isle hit him all over again. He grabbed his battered skateboard and pushed off down the cracked pavement, skating aimlessly through the decaying alleys until his legs burned and he was too exhausted to think straight. But as the dark sky began to shift, a bitter thought crossed his mind: he knew what his mother's reaction to this absurd news would be, and looking at the time, he realized he was going to have to drag himself back home to face it sooner rather than later.
Later that night, the moment Keonho stepped inside his old, mildew-soaked apartment—stamping out a cigarette against the doorframe to steady his racing nerves—he braced himself for an earful of venom. If the broadcast had rattled and disgusted him this much, he couldn't even begin to fathom the apocalyptic scale of his mother's rage.
"I'm home," he muttered, his tone dripping with practiced, bone-deep exhaustion.
Yoojung was sitting hunched over on the worn-out sofa, eating something out of a chipped bowl that looked dangerously closer to stray dog kibble than human nourishment.
"Oh, you're back, Keonho. I've told you a thousand times not to stay out so late," she scolded, her voice already sharp and grating.
"Whatever," Keonho shot back, completely lacking the emotional bandwidth to deal with her tonight. He turned on his heel, already dragging his feet toward the narrow hallway leading to his tiny bedroom, hoping to slip away before a full-blown argument could ignite.
"Wait!" Yoojung shrieked, slamming the bowl down onto the coffee table with a clatter.
Keonho froze, a heavy knot tightening in his stomach.
"Did you see the absolute filth that aired on the screens today?" she demanded, her breathing instantly turning ragged and frantic. "That disgusting little brat, Eom Seonghyeon. How dare he stand there and announce he's dragging three of us into his polished, fake excuse for a kingdom? They always take everything from us, Keonho! Just like they stole your father and your sister away from me!"
She was already spiraling, her fingers clawing frantically at the fabric of her shirt as she hyperventilated on the sofa.
"Yeah, yeah, Mom, they're disgusting and horrible. Good thing we're never going to have to set foot in that garbage dump of a paradise," Keonho hurried out, his voice laced with defensive fatigue as he fought the heavy urge to roll his eyes. He agreed with her hatred for the royals, but he genuinely did not have the psychological endurance to sit through her midnight hysteria tonight. "I'm going up to my room."
Without waiting for her to snap back, he retreated to his cramped box of a room, slamming the door shut to muffle her continued muttering from the living room.
After a short, freezing shower in the house's single, rotting bathroom—letting the ice-cold water numb his skin just enough to quiet his overactive brain—Keonho crawled into his bed dressed only in his boxers, a bleach-stained t-shirt, and a pair of moth-eaten socks. He stared up at the peeling, water-damaged ceiling, listening to the distant, rhythmic crashing of industrial waves against the island's iron barriers.
Letting out a long, heavy sigh that seemed to drain the last remaining ounces of energy from his bones, a dark, cynical thought crossed his mind. May whoever those three poor bastards are tomorrow survive the nightmare they're walking into.
With that final, bitter prayer echoing in the quiet dark, Keonho turned his face to the wall, drifting off into a deep, heavy sleep—completely oblivious to the fact that his own world was about to burn to the ground by sunrise.