Ways to be Wicked - Descendants 2 AU

Chapter 16

 Sneaking back into Lady Tremaine's before opening hours wasn't all that hard to do a second time. The hard part was dealing with the deafening scream the pigtailed tween uttered when she finally caught sight of her two heroes standing on the doorway.

"Alya!" Manon screeched as she came barreling around the cracked and splattered salon seats, her broom left behind in a pile of dyed hair. She wrapped tightly around Alya's waist with a 1000 watt grin spread across her face. Marinette smiled softly at her pure joy. She primarily looked after Manon when she was younger, but the little stylist always had a special place in her heart for Alya and her adventure stories.

"You came back!" Manon cried as Alya wrapped her arms around her with a bright grin.

"It's great to see you too, Sea Breeze," Alya greeted with the familiar childhood nickname. "I've been worried about you."

"Don't be worried about me!" Manon insisted as she pulled Alya towards a styling chair, Marinette lagging behind as she watched them catch up. "You went to Auradon! THE Auradon! Was it all like we imagined? Do they have closets you can walk into? Have you been in a real swimming pool? What does ice cream taste like?"

Alya smiled, leaning onto the stylist chair as if to share a secret with the younger girl. "It's cold and sweet, and if you eat it too fast it gives you a headache."

Manon sighed dreamily, leaning into her hand with a far off look in her eye that made Marinette's heart break. She clearly wanted to go to Auradon, and if anyone deserved a chance to really grow and prosper somewhere, it was Manon.

"It sounds wicked..." Manon crooned, wrapped in thoughts of ice cream and unseen swimming pools. Marinette would have been content to sit there and reminisce, to tell Manon about all the little things that she would have loved to see and experience in Auradon, but they had bigger fish to fry. Or in this case, a particularly slimy octopus.

"Manon, we really came here for -" Marinette started, only to have the mile-a-minute chatterbox beat her to the punchline.

"Wait, Marinette, I have something for you!" The stylist flitted from her chair and into the storage room where the vats of backup dyes and nail polishes were kept. When her pigtails had finally bobbed out of sight, Marinette saw Alya's smile fade to a worried frown.

"It's good to see her, isn't it," Marinette said quietly, leaning up against the wall where the cracked mirrors were hung.

Alya's lips pressed into a tight line, her eyes never leaving the storage room where Manon was puttering around looking for something. "If I could change it, Mari, I'd let her go to Auradon instead of me. I may want to travel, but she could have been eaten alive while we were gone."

"But she wasn't," Marinette pressed despite feeling the same way for their young friend. Manon deserved better. Marc deserved better. They all deserved better than what they had right then. "She'll be okay, Al."

If Alya believed her half-hearted words, she didn't acknowledge it, merely making a noncommittal noise as Manon reappeared with an oddly sheepish smile and holding something behind her back. She looked at Marinette with big cow brown eyes, letting the older girl know that she had definitely done something wrong.

"Don't be mad, okay?" Manon squeaked as she approached Marinette. The VK crossed her arms, raising an eyebrow at Manon as she tried to deduce just what she could have done. She couldn't keep the surprise from her face when Manon revealed a busted sketchbook with a familiar 'Long Live Evil' logo painted across the cover. It was her old sketchbook, one that she had thought was stored away up in their hideaway with all of her other forgotten art supplies from when she left for Auradon.