Archive of Our Own ^beta

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She gets to the Isle of the Lost, and she’s home, she’s home,

she’s home.

But it’s different and wrong, and she doesn’t quite have words for the problem, not until she’s running the roofs like she used to with Carlos, and the light purple tips and bleached strands cover her eyes, not until she’s seeing the world through white instead of purple, that she knows quite what’s wrong.

Less than a minute later, she’s stood outside Curl Up and Dye, hoping that Dizzy is there. Dizzy was the only person Evie trusted with her hair, and so, for now, she was the only person Mal trusted as well. The squeal that the young girl lets out when Mal asks her for something new brings a smile to her face. Dizzy is still a kid, she remembers, and even her bitch of a grandmother hasn’t changed that ( yet ).

But then Dizzy is standing above her with a purple-soaked brush, and-

“Stop!”

Dizzy cocks her head to her side, but Mal can’t just go back to the way she was before, because she’s not who she was before.

“Maybe… green?” she asks tentatively, and Dizzy just smiles widely and nods.

Evie gushes over her hair, short and poisonous green and wild. Carlos nods his approval and Jay just smirks when he sees her. But it’s Ben’s reaction that’s the best. In the early hours of the morning after Cotillion, he grips it in bunches and pulls her towards him.

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From the moment she made the decision to leave, she felt it against her scalp, against her magic. The bleach, weighing her down, making her more human, making her less fae, making her less . And she wants to get rid of it, wants to be back to who she was.

Hell, she’s halfway to Dizzy before she thinks twice, snagging an electric razor from a nearby stall { the instinct, the ability, to steal never really left } on her way back to her { their } hangout.

The white locks hit the floor one by one, and she doesn’t stop until it’s all on the floor, doesn’t stop until each uneven chunk is dealt with, until there are cuts on the skin where she angled the razor wrong.

She feels free .

Her entrance at Cotillion is met with shock, and gasps of horror. She’s not the Auradonian archetype of a girl, she knows , and she knows what she looks like, to these people- she looks other .

But Ben- when he arrives, he doesn’t look at her at all, doesn’t take the slightest notice.

And she can’t decide if that’s better or worse.

A month after the Cotillion, she’d still getting snide looks everywhere she goes. Jane had offered to ‘do’ her hair for her, like Mal had done so long ago, but she’d turned the other girl down. She needed this, this fresh start, and what Auradon thought didn’t matter.

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“ Beware, forswear,

Replace the old

With brand new hair”

She uses magic. She doesn’t consider another option. Before she even goes to the Isle, when she’s putting on her old leathers and feeling slightly like herself again, she cast the spell, one she could cast in her sleep now, she thinks. And she doesn’t even look, but she can feel what the spell does.

She can feel the new hair growing out, can feel the old hair disappearing, and she can feel the long tresses fall in curls down her back.

{ She looks in the mirror, and an unnatural red looks back. Her hair is long, and the colour of blood, and completely new. She smirks and grabs her keys. }

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There’s no one Mal trusts more, in the world than her friends. The only people she’ll let close to her unguarded neck are Jay, Evie, and Carlos, and even that took years of practice. So she doesn’t go to Dizzy, tells herself she’ll let her hair grow out and that she’ll then cut it all off, like cutting out a tumour.

She fights with blonde hair, and when the strands cover her vision and tame her magic and she feels like she might cry, she looks at Ben instead, Ben who never did anything wrong, and she keeps fighting, blowing her bleached hair out of her face.

Evie won’t even let her attend Cotillion with the bleached hair.

Mal has never loved her more.

Evie dyes it. She chooses a darker purple than Mal’s natural colour, so dark it was almost black. And she braids it, using complicated braids that Mal couldn’t begin to unravel and more hairpins and hairspray than Mal knew existed.

She looks otherworldly. She looks like a goddess.

The guests smile at her when she appears. They ooh and aah at her hair, hair that she’d unmade for them, hair that she’s now made for herself.

And when she and Ben are dancing, and he spins her, her hair flies out around her, dark and beautiful and Isle .

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She doesn’t touch her hair. She’d bleached it (albeit with magic). She’d made the choice, and she’d live with the consequences. Instead, she lets it grow out, slowly. Six months in, there are roughly two inches of her roots showing, and she asks Evie to cut off two inches at the bottom.

It’s a slow process, and it takes more patience than she had ever known herself to have. There were many days when she considered magic, had the words on her lips. Once, she’d even asked Evie to dye it, any other colour, and Evie had rolled her eyes and shaken her head, telling Mal that she’d regret it.

Her hair is purple again by the time of her coronation as Queen of Auradon, the Moors, and the Isle of the Lost, Protector of the Realm and the Lady of Magic.

She takes her rightful place in history with a gold and ruby crown on purple hair.