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[mal_contented]

Warning for Spoilers for Isle Of The Lost and Descendants.

CW: for angst, food gross, some violence and horror, abuse, possible animal cruelty mentions (One of her best friends is Cruella's son....) and a lot of other things you'd probably be shocked to realize is actually fairly canon for Disney after all....

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[mal_contented]

History:


Mal was born on the Isle Of The Lost, a magical isle were all the villains had been sent as punishment. Some were even brought back to life specifically to punish them on this isle. She was raised by her Mother, Maleficent, who was not only known by all to be the worst of the worst but also the leader of the Isle.

When Mal was five, the only person to seriously challenge her mother for leadership (the Evil Queen) decided to make one big play for rulership, because Maleficent was without magic like the rest of them, what could she really do to her? So EQ had a huge birthday party for her daughter, Evie, and held it right outside Bargain Castle (where Mal and her mother lived). Every child on the Isle except Mal was invited. Every parent except Maleficent.

Unsurprisingly, given her history when not invited to parties, Maleficent's rage knew few bounds. EQ and her daughter were banished to Castle Across The Way, not allowed to leave their crumbling home near **** Hall (Where Cruella lived. Not by any stretch of the imagination a nice neighbor.)

The next ten and change years were fairly routine for Mal. She grew up working towards being the evilest brat of her generation. Where her mother ruled the adults, she ruled the next generation. Everyone either was cared of her or toadied to her. Or both in some cases. Even some of the adults treated her as something other than just another brat.

But it wasn't enough. Not for Mal's mother. Nothing Mal ever did was ever bad enough. she got horrible grades despite being smart (or good grades in bad classes, depending), she left her graffiti all over the isle, she was one of the two best thieves there (constantly warring for first with Jay, Jafar's son). She tole what little candy there was from children. She stiffed the slop shop on her morning sludge. Nothing worked. Her mother constantly told her what a disappointment she was. Her father was even less help, not only did he actively avoid both her and her mother, but her mother only ever discussed him when she was making it clear that her time with him, leading as it did to having Mal, was the biggest mistake of her life.

Things were pretty rotten for Mal, but she grew up on the Isle. None of them exactly had good parents. So she kept trying, and used the pain to make her meaner, crueler, colder.

She had a few "friends" that she knew weren't friends at all. The first had been Ursula's daughter, Uma. Uma and Mal had been partners in crime and nearly inseparable when not in school (they went to schools on opposite ends of the Isle) and were true terrors. That is, they were until a prank gone wrong led to Mal sliding down a pier and into the ocean, nearly dying. Uma was one of the few good swimmers on the Isle, since the barrier kept most of them from having enough space to learn. Instead of saving Mal, Uma stood there and watched, and laughed. And when Mal didn't seem to come up, Uma kept laughing. Mal dragged herself to what passed for a beach, climbed up the pier behind Uma, saw her still laughing, and dumped a bucket of rotten chum over her head. They were enemies from that day forth, especially when Mal got everyone on the Isle to call Uma "Shrimpy".

There was Mad Maddy (Mad Madam Mim's daughter), but Maddy went to the witches' school and Mal went to Dragon Hall, so they drifted apart. After Uma, Mal wasn't letting herself get close to or care about anyone again.

Finally there was Jay. Who went to the same school she did and was almost as bad in his own way. Both were well aware that the other would betray them for anything, without warning. Accepting that, and always watching their backs, they made an interesting duo, and other than Uma and Maddy, Jay was the closest thing she had to a friend for most of her life.

Then one night she had a very disturbing dream. Very. She was somewhere outside the Isle in the dream and that did NOT happen. The barrier kept them all in, kept them apart from the rest of the world. But she was off the Isle. She was in a ruin, but a beautiful and clean one. She'd never seen anything clean before. There was a lake, and the water was actually clear. There was food in front of her. Fruit. And none of it was spoiled, moulding, rotten.

Worst of all there was a boy there and he was like the rest of this place. Tall, handsome, princely. She knew where she had to be. Auradon. The kingdom of good across the ocean, the kingdom whose king and queen had revived and banished all the villains, the kingdom whose trash the Isle residents fought over because it was all they had. The prince said that he was her friend, which made it even more clear this was a dream. Mal had no friends, and she told him as much.

The horrible dream ended about there, but it stayed with her in the way a nightmare might stick with a good person. It disgusted her, even if the food had been amazing.

Not long after that horrible dream something new happened. There was a new student in school. This didn't happen. Not on the Isle. The Witches stayed to their school, the pirates and such to theirs, and all the truly vile villian kids went to Dragon Hall. The Barrier had been up for decades, more or less. There should have been nowhere for a new kid to come from. Except there was. There was one kid their age who had been castle schooled since she was five.

Evie.

Evil Queen and Evie figured there was no way that the mistress of all evil - who it should be recalled sent out a curse that lasted sixteen years, and then wound up waiting another hundred in her quest for revenge over not being invited to a party - must have certainly gotten over it by now. She wasn't. And perhaps worse for Evie, neither was Mal.


It probably didn't help matters that Evie was dazzlingly pretty and that she sat down in Mal's seat in class. Mal needed a project for Evil Schemes class anyway. So revenge on Evie was going to be it. To have her proper revenge she had to do something horrible that went against her very upbringing. She had to... ugh... throw a party.

Or rather, she had to bully someone weak and terrified of her into throwing it for her. She picked Cruella's son, Carlos, as Cruella was across the Isle for the weekend and he was a pushover of a coward. She told him he was holding the rager of the year, and that everyone was invited. Everyone... except Evie.

But this wasn't evil enough. Just doing to Evie what had been done to her wasn't enough. She'd never get her mother's approval that way. She had to step it up, be more evil. So she let Evie think she wasn't invited - that she was the only one not invited - until the end of the school day, at which point she invited her. Everyone was confused. Good.

Mal had been to ***** Hall before, and she knew all about the horrors of Cruella's fur closet. While what Cruella would do to anyone who harmed her precious furs was terrifying all on its own... the closet was dark, confusing and the floor was covered in rusted metal animal traps. Mal had almost lost a limb there as a kid. She intended for princess blueberry to lose far more.

The party was both a success and a failure. It was an absolute rager. Carlos really pulled it off for all he complained. But while Mal was, of course, fashionably late, Evie was even later. And Mal had no clue what to do at a party while she waited. And when Evie finally did show up and Mal did trap her in the closet...

Somehow... SOMEHOW the little blue twit not only escaped the closet but she and Carlos did... SOMETHING that punched a hole in the barrier. Just for a moment there was magic. Not that Mal and them knew it just then. All they knew was that Evie had somehow escaped more or less unscathed.

Things only got worse for Mal when she got home. Her mother was waiting up for her, which was... a shock. Her mother would hardly care that she was out late, right?

Sadly, she was right. Her mother didn't care that Mal had been out late or that her revenge had failed. Because her pet raven, Diablo, missing all this time was back. And he bore news. Maleficent's scepter, the Dragon's Eye was somewhere on the Isle. She charged Mal with finding and fetching it. Or else.

Mal had no choice. But she did see an evil little light in all this for her. The staff was cursed. Whoever other than Maleficent touched it would sleep for a thousand years. Her perfect revenge. She had to find the staff... but make sure that Evie was the one to trigger it.

In the end, the party that set out included Mal, Evie who wasn't sure why she was invited, Carlos because he had a machine that could track the Dragon Eye, apparently, and Jay. Jay was planning to steal the Dragon Eye, she was sure of it. Made for a good plan B. Either way one of them was touching it first. And if all else failed, she could throw Carlos at it.

But getting to the staff was no easy task, and as it happens on such adventures, the four kids who all had similar horrible childhoods bonded. They had to work together and came to understand each other and Mal had to fight a constant rising unfamiliar sensation. Guilt.

When the moment came and they stood before the staff, she saw Jay hesitate. But Evie didn't. The little twit went right for it...

And Mal, with a surge of this new and unnamed emotion, moved, getting there first. Her fingers closed on the staff.

Mal awoke on the floor of the crumbling fortress, the staff gone. They had failed. But oddly... as much as she feared her mother's reaction to their failure, she had found something new. For the first time since she upended a bucket over Uma's head as a small child she had friends.

Of course they got back and the staff had not been destroyed, but rather had used the last of its magic, when awoken by her touch, to return to Maleficent. The magic was gone, but her mother had her staff and her raven and... despised Mal more than ever. Mal had clearly been foolishly weak, touching it herself when there were three victims there and waiting. She had no way to know that she was mostly immune to sleep spells because of who her mother was. So to Maleficent, Mal had been the most unforgivable of things - self sacrificing. Kind. Things became even more strained, but that just meant that Mal now spent more time with her crew. Her friends.

Together the four started to bleed over into each other. Carlos got some of Mal's confidence and Jay's swagger. Evie picked up some of their edge. Mal picked up some of Evie's friendliness. But only within the group. Jay... well Jay was Jay. But Mal and Jay went from the most feared kids at Dragon Hall to two of the four members of the most feared Crew in Dragon Hall. And it quickly became clear that no one messed with Carlos or Evie without taking on Mal and Jay.

Then one day Maleficent stopped the four on the street. She had evil tidings. They were to go to Auradon on a mission for her. The king to be had declared that four kids from the Isle would leave their home and move to Auradon, going to school there. An experiment. Mal didn't know what strings her mother had pulled - or cut - to make it Mal and her crew, but there it was. She didn't want to go. That didn't matter, of course. The four of them were to go and steal Fairy Godmother's magic wand. OR ELSE.

Plan after plan failed. Worse yet the king to be, the prince who met them when they arrived in Auradon? The boy from her dream. And his girlfriend... The granddaughter of the people who had pushed Mal's mother to cursing their new born. Audrey, daughter of Sleeping Beauty and Prince Philip, Granddaughter of Queen Leah and King Stephan. Both girls knew by heart the history that lay between them. And Audrey's boyfriend, Ben, couldn't stop staring at Mal. So clearly Mal and Audrey hated each other on sight.

Auradon was everything Mal feared it would be. It was terrifyingly clean, disgustingly pink, the people were suspiciously nice - for the most part. While not everyone was happy they were there, the adults, at least, seemed to be genuinely trying to help them fit in. And Mal couldn't figure out their angle. FG taught them Remedial Goodness. The science teacher even apologized to Evie when she passed a test without cheating. The Tourny couch scouted Jay and Carlos for the team. Mal had to pretend to befriend Jane to try and work on a plan which led to people actually seeking her out to use magic on their hair, an olive branch. She was used to classmates fleeing before her, not offering to pay her for magic.

More and more she found small doubts growing. She watched Evie learn how smart she could really be, and sae her realizing that maybe a prince wasn't her answer. She watched how Jay came alive as part of a team, how he actually seemed more himself on the field than stealing. Saw Carlos... adopt a dog! Back on the Isle most people who wanted to bother Carlos in passing just barked in his ear, the scrawny boy had always been terrified of dogs.

As for Mal herself. She mostly stayed mission focused until the mission took a sharp turn. Because they found out that the wand would be vulnerable at Ben's coronation. But the only ones close enough to touch it would be FG herself, Ben's parents - King Beast and Queen Belle, and Ben's girlfriend.

So Audrey had to go.

One love spell later and Mal was now his girlfriend and in position to take the wand and help her mother destroy all of Auradon. But there was time between then and the coronation, and Ben wasn't the sort to sit idle. He took Mal out on dates. And where just being in Auradon hadn't been able to push much past her defenses... he was breaking her down, bit by bit. (The strawberries helped, though.) Their first date was in the ruins where she had first seen him in her dream, and the fruit was better in real life than it had been in a dream. Not just the fruit. Everything. Talking to him, being with him, and that amazing jelly donut. But then he wanted to swim, and she refused to admit that she couldn't, so he swam while she devoured the strawberries and had a musical soliloquy.

When she realized he hadn't come up for a while, she rushed into the water, trying to find him. But as he could swim and she couldn't, he rescued her. A lot of crucial things happened on that date that Mal didn't realize util much later. The water of that lake wore away her spell for one. And he, reeling from having realized he had been spelled, had been reassessing... when she tried to save him without thought for her own life. He didn't tell her that the spell was broken though, and she was too busy feeling like an idiot to notice the way he now watched her.