Good evening everyone.

Once again, Taylor Swift has come in with new content to help inspire me. Last time ya'll got Kor?, and to be fair, I didn't know how that was going to end when I started writing it either.

I have literally no idea where this story is going, but it is going, and I want you to have it. Especially because I have not responded to any comments or posted anything new since Maleficent. My bad.
Either way, I'm having fun with this, I'm experimenting with writing styles, and I will finish it. Mostly because even if it takes me five years, I can't stand unfinished works.

I don't think this will take five years, though.

Still, everyone please enjoy the goop that dripped out of my brain after I failed two exams I don't know what's going on but neither do you so we're all in this together.

I hope everyone is staying healthy and safe and WEARING A MASK and SOCIAL DISTANCING and SANITIZING EVERYTHING.

Love,
Harley


Many scholars speculate that 6 is the most magical number. Myth calls it the devil's number and said scholars are inclined to agree.

The more devout amongst them like to argue that the most magical number is, in fact, seven. It is God's number, they say, and God is the most magical of all.

A third school of thought claims that the most powerful magical number is three- there were three fates, three Graeae, three Erinyes, and three squared muses.

All of this is wrong.

The most magically powerful number is four. There is no reason for this. God was most likely having a laugh when She decided it.

{Then again, the narrator was born on the fourth, so perhaps this, too, is a lie}.

Regardless, for the point of this story, the most magically powerful number is four.

That's why Mal le Fey is one of four children born at 4:44 am on the fourth of April.

{This event, in and of itself, is rather messy. All four of the children are born on the Isle of the Lost, which has bad internet and worse sanitary habits on its best days. When four women, one of whom is a powerful fey and also the Isle's best midwife, go into labour, it's never particularly wholesome. This being said, only three goblins died on the fourth of April, so perhaps that is a good omen, or an argument for three being the most magically powerful number. Most likely, it is just a coincidence}.

We'll discuss the other three children later, but for now, let's talk of Mal le Fey.

Mal le Fey (born, as we've established, on the fourth of April at 4:44 am) will grow up to be a nuisance. Other things too, but mostly that. She will grow up with horns and purple hair and claws and she will leave the Isle of the Lost.

But when she's born, she's an average-sized baby (7 pounds, 1 ounce, 19 and ? inches) who refuses to breastfeed {this is the first way in which she is a nuisance, because it is very hard to get baby formula on the Isle. When she can speak English, her mother will tell her this}.

She performs her first magic five hours after her birth {the number isn't particularly magical or important, but it does help paint a better picture}. Her eyes flash green and everything in the room floats about an inch off the surface it rests on.

This is not particularly impressive, but it is the second way in which she is a nuisance.

She starts smoking when she's fourteen, which doesn't make her a nuisance so much as it makes her unhealthy, but cigarettes are more common than food on the Isle, and nicotine helps stave off hunger pangs when it's been too long since she's eaten.

Carlos is normally the one to provide her with cigarettes. We'll discuss him later, but for now all you need to know is that Carlos de Vil is another of the children born at 4:44am on the fourth of April. The cigarettes are always a bit stale, but those are the only kinds of cigarettes that get sent to the Isle in the first place. It's mutually beneficial for them- he supports her addiction, and she puts out the word that he's untouchable- if he gets hurt, someone else will get hurt too.

The first time she kisses him, they're fifteen, and he's found a mostly-empty box of really good cigars. When he pulls back, he rests his forehead against hers, and she can feel his breath on her lips. When she opens her eyes, he's smiling.

"I've been wanting to do that for so long," he says, and she laughs, because no shit. He isn't, by nature, subtle- he gives her the best of his score. He brings extra for her mom. He flirts incessantly.

She laughs, and takes a drag from her cigar. It's good quality (Illusione Epernay- according to The 12 Best Cigars to Smoke in 2018, it has "distinct floral notes give way to honey, coffee and cedar", and it's the Best Cigar For Special Occasions), and she holds the smoke in her lungs until they burn. Then she leans over to kiss him again, blowing the smoke into his mouth when she does.

Mal and Carlos become practically inseparable. He never spent much time at Hell Hall in the first place (didn't live there for the first nine years of his life, after his mother left him in the hospital on the fourth of April and Maleficent brought home two babies instead of one).

There are rumours about them, around the Isle. People like to whisper that Carlos isn't actually Cruella's, that he's Maleficent's son that she forced Cruella to claim, with the eventual goal of "breeding" her children to strengthen her bloodline. These are the kinds of rumours that are bound to start, when four children are born to different parents on the same day, at the same time.

It is not true.

Probably.

It does have humorous results though. Most specifically, it terrifies Hades, when he hears the rumour and sends him all the way across the Isle to Bargain Palace to confront his lover.

Carlos sits on the kitchen counter. Mal leans between his legs. They spectate, as Hades begs Maleficent to confirm, for him, that Carlos is not his son. Maleficent, in return, asks him why it would matter.

This is a valid question. Hades' brother and sister are married. He himself is married to his niece. His parents were siblings. Greek mythology is full of incest.

But, to be fair to Hades, none of the aforementioned people was quite sane.

Anyway.

This confrontation ends with Hades laughed out of Bargain Palace without any answers, and Carlos and Mal recommitting to making out in public.

It's fun to cause chaos.

Speaking of Carlos de Vil, it's about time we get back to him.

As we've established, Carlos de Vil was born at 4:44 am on the fourth of April, on the Isle of the Lost, at the same time as three other children, and that he's probably not Mal's brother.

As a matter of fact, Carlos Oscar de Vil was born to Cruella de Vil and an insignificant man (for the sake of the story, we'll call him Clayton). His parents are only significant insofar as their nature being the direct cause of some very important events in Carlos's life.

More specifically, one very important event in his life.

I am, of course, talking about him being left at the hospital when he was born.

The sequence of events that ends with Carlos de Vil being left at the hospital starts a great deal earlier that one might expect.

It starts in 1980 with a Seeress named Adelaide Camm, who told a young Frenchman that he should take up smoking in order to change the world, and handed him a pack of Gitanes.

Now, this was technically true. And she had seen it. But, in truth, she told every one of her customers the same thing.

She was, after all, getting paid 3 nouveau francs per prediction. This time, the prediction just happened to be true.

Because the young Frenchman did take up smoking, and later took up with an angry mob determined to kill a Beast for kidnapping a woman.

This puts him in the Isle of the Lost. A nicotine craving puts him on the main street at 5 am with a cigarette in his mouth and a lighter flickering in his hand.

So when Cruella de Vil, a known smoker and madwoman, came out of the nearby building in a ratty nightgown, looking at him with an almost-hungry look in her eye, the Frenchman offered her a cigarette without hesitation.

Now, cigarettes aren't known to cause blackouts in the way that alcohol does.

But Cruella de Vil isn't known to be particularly consistent.

When she steps outside for a smoke, she leaves her new baby in the crib with Maleficent's girl, because she isn't really ready to be a mother at all anyway and she doesn't know what to call it and she really really needs a cigarette.

Within a few seconds, the silence around her grows too loud, and she strikes up a conversation with the Frenchman, who looks like he'd really rather be anywhere else in the world.

Cruella de Vil notices this and continues talking anyway. She prattles on about an old coat of hers that's falling to pieces that she wants to repurpose, but into what, she asks.

"A bra is just gauche. There won't be enough fur for a new coat." She rambles. The Frenchman stares in confusion and a slight amount of awe, and the suggestion slips out without him really meaning for it to.

"What about a skirt?"

Cruella de Vil scrutinizes him with a look in her eye that most would call madness, that Anita might call inspiration.

They'd all be right.

Because Cruella de Vil grabs the Frenchman's hand and pulls him off with her, asking for specifics and ideas and cuts and idly mentioning that she needs a new protégé.

{As it turns out, the Frenchman has no real talent for fashion at all, and after several days in a creative fugue, Cruella de Vil realizes this and kicks him out of Hell Hall. By the time she goes back for her son, he's gone, and she shrugs it off. He wasn't really a problem she wanted anyway}.

Now, while Cruella de Vil was desperately avoiding responsibility, Maleficent had been stuck in the pseudo-hospital room, staring at two babies.

She wasn't the mothering type. This was something Maleficent knew quite firmly about herself. She'd had a daughter so that her daughter could inherit the moors after her, or perhaps so that her granddaughter could inherit the moors if her daughter never got off this god-forsaken island.

Maleficent's only other foray into parenting had involved sending a crow in to fix everything.

But now there were two babies in front of her, and while she knew which one was hers, it didn't really seem fair to just leave the other one here. His mother was a bitch, but he hadn't done anything wrong.

She leaned down and picked up the boy, rocking him back and forth. Cruella hadn't even bothered naming her son before she went in search of a smoke, so the boy was currently nameless.

She stared down at him and racked her brain. She'd never expected to need to name a son. Well, it never hurt to be direct. Adam might be good. It very clearly laid forward what he was. Or Charles, maybe, but she thought that Aurora's grandfather on her mother's side might have been named Charles, and that didn't seem like a fun name to saddle a child with.

Eventually, she names the boy Oscar, after Oscar Wilde, a man that she had actually quite enjoyed when he was alive.

{Two years after this, two years after the creation of the Isle of the Lost, the crown of Auradon realizes that there might be children being born on the Isle, and send in a couple of underpaid workers to take a census. By this point, Cruella knows her son is with Maleficent and doesn't really care, but when the harried-looking federal employee shows up at her door with a birth certificate, Cruella decides that Carlos was still her son, and that he was going to have a name that she gave him.

She calls him Carlos, mostly because it sounds like her name. She writes Oscar after that because the boy still responds to Oscar, and it makes sense.

As Carlos later discovers, his name means man, just like Maleficent wanted. He just finds it funny}.

Maleficent does not let Oscar (and then Carlos, when he turns two and his mother actually legally names him and then refuses to let anyone call him anything else) think that he is her son. The fey don't have sons, only daughters, and Carlos is human above that. He is not of her bloodline, and she does not let him think he is. He knows from the time he can comprehend that she's not his mother, she's just kind of looking after him.

It works for them.

Of course, in spite of Maleficent's insistence that he know that he is not her son, the rumours flow anyway. That he and Mal are secretly siblings is popular, but people also like to suggest that he's a changeling, or that neither of them are Maleficent's children and that they were both kidnapped from Sleeping Beauty.

Most of these rumours aren't really rumours. Everyone on the Isle knows everyone else, and everyone knows everyone's secrets.

But the crown sends in a spy on a semi-regular basis (her name is Marissa, and she thinks she hasn't been caught yet, but the golden road that stretches out from the Isle for no apparent reason days before she shows up from the 'woods' casts some suspicion amongst the locals) and the best way to get her gone is to feed her as much information as possible.

One of the easiest ways to do this is to just tell her whatever's in the rumour mill at the time. Maleficent may be secretly breeding her children to ensure a stronger bloodline? They already think she's evil. The Evil Queen and her daughter eat human flesh in a complicated highly illegal magical ritual that keeps their youth intact? Sure why not.

{Evie's only eaten human flesh the one time, and all her friends were doing it, so she thought it was okay. But it kind of became a running joke after that}.

Another easy way to do this is to claim that Marissa is just in time for their town hall meeting, wherein they discuss all of the business of the people of the Isle including how they're doing to deal with their finances.

{They steal most of their speeches from episodes of the 1990 TV series City. There were only thirteen episodes}.

This is when our story starts.