Warnings; implied/referenced child prostitution, implied/referenced childhood sexual assault, implied/referenced severe child abuse, implied childhood sexual slavery, referenced past suicide attempts, implied/referenced violence towards a child, referenced starvation, tell me if I need to add more
"I think you've noticed," Rose said, shattering the horrified silence that followed Ace's story. She was making herself a distraction. Jay reached out, tapping Ace's knuckles lightly to signal for it to move back. It did, stepping as far away from the spotlight as it could without drawing attention to itself, and Jay brushed the back of his hand against the back of its hand to ask if it was okay and if it needed to get out. Ace grabbed his hand and squeezed twice, signalling that it was okay, and Jay tapped his foot slightly to let it know it was acknowledged. He saw Mischa relax out of the corner of his eye. He had been watching, ready to cover in case Ace needed to leave. "That we haven't talked about the guy who started this whole meeting yet. You've heard from pretty much every Isle kid in this room except for Mischa Rasputin. There's a reason for that." The glare Rose levelled at Beast was downright lethal. "Misch?"
Mischa and Ivy stepped forward. Jay didn't miss the subtle calming breath Mischa took before he started signing. "Kira, can you go wait in the hall with Nikita?" He's practically raised Kira, just like he'd raised Polina and Nikita. While she was a teenager now, nearing her fourteenth birthday and thus losing the protections afforded to children on the Isle, she was still his little sister. He didn't want her listening to his trauma. The only reason Polina wasn't asked to leave, Jay guessed, was because she already knew. She was always the one who fixed Mischa up. Mischa was, without a doubt, the most stubborn man on the Isle when it came to his refusal to seek medical attention. Polina had taken it upon herself to fix what she could. Considering how many broken bones came from Jay's time as a prostitute, he wouldn't be surprised if Mischa's experiences had left him with wounds and broken bones Polina had needed to fix.
Kira nodded and turned towards the door. After a reluctant look around the room, skipping between a few specific people, Mischa continued. "Jay, Ace, Polina-"
"Not a chance," Polina snapped. "I swear to the gods, Mischa, if you try and kick me out I'll teach Pasha how to swear in every single language I can possibly think of."
"For the last time, man," Ace stepped towards Mischa threateningly, though they all knew there was no real danger in it. "You get to benefit from our 'you can always come to me if you need to talk' thing, too. You aren't our therapist, you're our friend. We have a mutual arrangement. Stop self-sacrificing because you think we don't know how to leave a room when it gets too much. We come to you every time we have a problem and need help, have for years, and you listen to every single problem and work with us to come up with solutions. If you won't let us pay you-" Mischa's eyes widened in horror. The guy was oddly opposed to them paying him for helping them when he very much needed the money. "Then you deserve to talk about your problems with us and we deserve to help you and try and come up with solutions. After all you've done for us, it makes us feel like shit if we can't give you something in return, like we're stealing from you when you've been nothing but helpful to us. Let. Us. Help."
Ace was usually a person of few words, words not coming to it easily. Barring the few times it got so upset that its emotions turned off, it usually spoke in fragments and paused a lot to put its thought into words. He knew that its speech about what had happened in its life had been rehearsed. Did that mean- Mischa smiled. "And exactly how long did you rehearse that?"
"Fuck off." While Mischa did look slightly less apprehensive, his eyes were still shifting nervously. He was too worried about triggering them. Were they going to have to leave the room? They wanted to be there to support him, but that would require him to be comfortable with saying what had happened to him in front of them. If he couldn't say it in front of them, no matter how much they wanted to support him, Jay knew that he, Ace, and Polina would have to leave.
Mischa deserved to say his piece. No matter how much they wanted to be there for him and he'd been there for them, they couldn't take away his chance to finally air nearly twenty years of trauma to the people who had caused it. They couldn't deny him that.
As Mischa paused, clearly agonizing over whether to send them away or let them stay, Rose surprised all of them by speaking up. "Godospin Mischa Rasputin-" his confusion towards whatever the hell that first word meant barely registered against the shock he was feeling. Rose had never really interacted with Mischa before. As far as he knew, she'd never even spoken to him. She knew of him through Ace, probably, but he'd never seen her speak to Mischa in more than one or two polite but cold words. But now, her voice was casual. Her accent morphed to something closer to Polina's as she said Mischa's name. Her eyes were... not exactly gentle, but nowhere near as hard as they usually were. And she turned her back on the council to face Mischa and speak directly to him.
Rose Hearts turned her back on a room full of potential enemies to speak kind of gently to a man she didn't know.
"When I couldn't be there for Ace," She continued, pain glittering in her eyes, accent transforming into the proper British reserved for when she was truly upset, "You were. What it couldn't say to me it said to you. Where I couldn't help it, you did. When it couldn't feel safe in its own home, you offered it shelter. You treated the wounds it couldn't let me see, gave it a place to let out emotions it couldn't express in front of me.
"At first, I was hurt. Ace is my twin, but it went to you for help instead of to me," Her British accent was thick with shame, but her eyes stayed on Mischa. "But I understand now. You understand Ace in ways I can't. You've sacrificed so much to protect your siblings, just as it has done for me. You tried, failed, and kept trying to take your father's cruelty to keep it from getting aimed at your sisters, like how Ace does to keep me safe. And you understand the type of trauma it has, because you have the same trauma. You know exactly what it's going through while I would only ever be able to guess. You gave it someone to show its pain to. How could it talk about what it was going through to its younger sister?
"You have saved its life more times than I know. You're always the first one there when it tries to kill itself-" Jay nearly jumped out of his skin as the White Queen finally broke, leaping out of her seat and running to Ace. It cringed hard, arms flying to protect its face and body curling to protect its stomach, but froze when her hands gripped its shoulders instead of aiming blows at its face. When it looked at her, Jay could see its fear turn to shock. The White Queen had tears in her eyes.
It glanced over at Rose, who nodded to say she thought the situation was safe. The White Queen let it make the first move, opening her arms rather than pulling it into a hug. If Jay saw it sob when it leaned against her and those arms wrapped around it like a vice, he wasn't going to say a word. After all Ace had gone through, all Jay hadn't known it had gone through, it deserved to let go, to be weak.
"You were the one who figured out," Rose continued, tears thick in her voice, "That transfusing your blood extends your miraculous curse to others, and you found that out because of one of your many courageous efforts to save my sibling. You gave it your food, even when it meant you couldn't eat- you were emaciated, but you still gave it your food the day before we left the Isle. You've given it money you couldn't afford to lose, even if it meant a winter's night on a street corner. You put yourself between my sibling and Him, never fighting as if you knew violence from you would just lead to its punishment being worse, just standing there. Taking every blow, every knife, every bullet, just to spare those same pains from sinking into Ace. When Ace tells me to run and I go running to you, you run straight to the palace no matter what. Even if it's Him, even if it's Mother, you go to help Ace and you've never asked anything in return.
"It makes me feel bad," she admitted, "And I know it makes Ace feel bad. You invite us into your home, feed us, medicate our illnesses, treat our wounds. You heat water over the fire pot by pot to fill the washbasin, or even the tub. And then you give us some of your clothes to sleep in so that you can wash ours so perfectly I swear you make us brand-new copies- if you do, I'm sorry about the annoying-ass beading on mine- you show us to our own room that locks from the inside, not the outside, with the keyhole on the outside filled with old tar so that we know you can't unlock it from the outside, and you let us sleep. When we wake up, even only a few hours later, our clothes are right outside the door so that we can leave whenever we want. And then you ask nothing in return. It feels almost like we're stealing from you. You put so much effort into helping all of us, and you refuse our help as if you would be burdening us. And it feels like you took us into your home, treated us like royalty, and then we snuck out in the wee hours with a rucksack full of your shit on our shoulders like a fucking cartoon."
"You guys are like family," Ivy translated, nodding to her husband to show she agreed with him. "I don't charge my sisters, I won't charge you."
"There's things other than money you can ask," Rose replied. "To be honest, the first time I met you, I thought the thing you would charge would be sex-" Mischa seemed to choke on his own breath in his horror. His signs came out sharp and dramatic as he protested, saying that he would never even think of doing that to anyone, much less a child. Ivy missed translating, her focus having shifted entirely to Rose to say something in Spanish that Jay couldn't understand, her words fast and her accent heavy, tells that told him that she was saying the same thing as Mischa. To his surprise, against two non-English languages even he struggled to understand, Rose didn't look even slightly confused. She clapped her hands together, interrupting them. "Well, I know you would never now, but I was eleven and, let's face it, most adults on the Isle would. It threw me through one hell of a loop when you two didn't. But that's not my point. You refuse money, so Ace has spent years trying to figure out a way to repay the two of you. The way it felt was best, that I think most people feel is best, was helping you.
"But it's more than just wanting to repay you, Godospin Rasputin. Ace considers you to be its brother and, over the years, I've kind of started to as well. Seeing how the others interact with you, I know they feel the same. They care about you and they want to be here to support you as you have supported them. Because siblings are there for each other." She smiled slightly. "Also, I think we all want to be here for when you eviscerate King Beast. You've got the worst abuse on the Isle and I know that we all wanna see you say your piece both because we love you and because there is no way he's gonna recover from this. It's going to be brutal and we all hate the fucker-" Ace broke away from its aunt as Beast tried to speak, moving its hand in a clear "shut up" motion. When Beast didn't speak despite the blatant disrespect, Jay noticed a faint glow in its eyes. Oh gods, it was really using its magic on the high king of Auradon in front of the whole council. "So we wanna watch that happen. Please, gods, let us watch it happen. I swear we all know how to leave the room if we're upset. The door is that way-" she pointed behind him, "Or the frame is, anyway. Super badass, kicking the door out of the frame, by the way."
Mischa was silent for a moment, considering her, then the rest of them. Most of his apprehension seemed to have vanished, and Jay delighted when the last of his hesitation vanished. None of them were afraid of what he might say. If they needed to leave, they could, so there was nothing for them to be nervous about other than Mischa's well-being.
His eyes flicked up, glancing around at the council, and Jay watched them widen when they reached King Beast. Jay whipped around to see Beast giving Mischa a terrifying look. He didn't know how Mischa didn't take a step back- if that look had been directed at Jay, he would have.
But that murderous look made the last of his anxiety leave his eyes. Mischa grinned, straightening and looking Beast straight in the eye as he finally made his decision. "King Beast put me through this," he signed slowly and deliberately, making sure Jay could read what he was saying without Ivy's translations, even though she was back to translating, "And I'll be damned if I can't have my family with me while I lay every single second of suffering out for him."
