Archive of Our Own ^omega

Her first reaction—after her tears and the sinking hole in her chest ignite the flame, and the flame ignites a house, a mountain-range-turned-sanctuary—is relief. Her second is fear.

She hugs her children, of course she does, as she carries them into the house, but keeps her eyes firmly on the other refugees, even as the casa dances around her in welcome. At the moment, her compatriots are grateful for their new refuge, the way the mountains and hills block out anyone who might pursue them. But for how long? Will they not notice, once the initial shock has faded that she and her family has a house, and they have none? Will they not become jealous? And might not that jealousy transform into something else, the way it had in their old home, the way it had summoned and emboldened the soldiers…

And if they do become jealous, wouldn’t they be justified, on some level? After all, what right does she, do her children, have to this magic house, when the others have only empty land on which to build? What right does she have to be alive, when so many others…not only Pedro, but so many of the community caught up as they tried to flee…

She shouldn’t be here. She should be dead in the river, Pedro shouldn’t have—

But he did. And, whether she should be or not, she is alive. Now, there is nothing to do but strive to be worthy of it. Strive to be worthy of it, and keep her children safe.

Alma forces her lips into a smile, dimples burning her cheeks at the strain—no one must ever know that it is a strain—and steps outside to where a crowd is waiting. “My friends! We have been given safety. Let us transform it into an encanto!”

When her children are five years old, the house seems to construct individual bedrooms for each of them, just as it had for her, and when they each reach for the doors, golden light blooms over each of them. Then, it becomes clear that what casita has given each of them is more than just a bedroom. Bruno’s eyes glow green, and suddenly he sees his sisters manifest remarkable abilities just before they do: a rainbow appears over Pepa’s head, and when Julieta takes a bite of the torta negra Alma had helped her to bake the paper cut on her finger disappears.

The children revel in their newfound abilities. Every temper tantrum becomes a source of delight because it means that Pepa inadvertently transforms their house into a waterpark, and Julieta's clumsily-made milk pudding heals every bruise they acquire while playing in it. But while they lean into their excitement, Alma has no room for such wonder. Bad enough that they were simply given a house while the rest of the town had to construct them. Now, her children are being granted super-human abilities? Surely, now, the envy of the town will rage. And won’t this mark them as different? And when envy and anger bubble over and turn to violence, aren’t those that are different the first ones to become targets?

The only way to keep themselves safe is to be proactive, get out in front of this, show the town that these powers are not for her family alone but rather gifts for all of them.

“Children,” she summons them, and they come bouncing, sopping wet, off the staircase-turned-water-slide. “These abilities we were given, these gifts—”

“You mean the gifts we were given, Mamá,” Pepa interrupts.

Alma blinks, then regains herself. “Yes. They’re not just for our amusement. And they’re not just for us. We must use them to serve the community.”

The cloud over Pepa’s head darkens. The smile falls from Bruno’s lips.

Alma continues: “Go get cleaned up. Then, Julieta, come. I’m going to give you some cooking lessons so that we can start using your gift to help our neighbors. Bruno, Pepa, we’ll begin to think of ways yours might be of use to them. Once we’ve done that, we’ll invite the town here to announce these new gifts.”

The triplets eye her, then each other, before finally scampering off to their respective rooms to change.

It’s a good sign, she thinks, when two young men from different families in town announce their romantic interests in Pepa and Julieta. In the decade-and-a-half since their gifts manifested, they’ve been able to serve their neighbors enough for relationships to be more or less cordial between them, but these young men—Félix and Agustín—will surely serve to cement those relations. After all, if they join the family Madrigal, move into the Casa Madrigal, should any of the rest of the town decide to turn on them it will be that much more difficult, given that two one-time townspeople are now part of their unit.

Marriage, Pedro had taught her twenty years ago, means protection. Not from everything, not always for every party involved, but it’s a safeguard, she decides. A way to extend and fortify the miracle of their deliverance. And this time, they’ll earn it.

“Welcome,” Alma smiles at the two young men, eagerly gripping their hands and pulling them into the house for dinner. “Julieta and Pepa will be so pleased that you are here.”

Far from helping, Bruno’s gift terrifies the community. It has become alarmingly clear, every time he sets foot beyond the casita, in the way others view him. He’s become something of an omen to them, a forecast of misfortune to come, and it’s only a matter of time before this image they have of him spills onto the rest of the family as well if they don’t act to contain the damage.

“Bruno.” She summons him after dinner one evening, as his brothers-in-law clear the table, and his sisters began to wrangle the children back to the nursery. “Sit.”

He’d already risen, but he clenches his hands, skitters back to his chair, squeaks: “Mamá?”

“I think,” she crosses her hands in front of her. “That moving forward it may be best if you restrict your gift to the family.”

He arches his eyebrows in surprise. “What? But…but what about helping the community? I…I can help!”

“The best way for some of us to help is to step aside.”

“Step…Step aside?” A swallow. “So you don’t want me to use my gift?”

“You may use the gift within the family. However, I think it best to not prophesy for anyone outside the house.”

He looks down. “Yes, Mamá.”

On Dolres’s fifth birthday, casita manifests a new door for her, just as it had for her mother, tio, and tia, and when it appears on the wall, Alma wants to cry out in relief. Since the girl’s birth five years previously, her own mortality has weighed on her mind. That she is having grandchildren—a miracle in and of itself, undoubtedly—nonetheless signifies her own aging, and when she is gone, without her to orchestrate a strategy to keep the family Madrigal in the town’s good graces, what would stand between them and the same sort of destruction they faced over thirty years prior?

That Dolores—and therefore, presumably Isabela and Lusia—will have the ability to continue to keep serving the town will ensure the continuance of good relations, even after she, Alma, is gone. These blessing will assure that they continue to earn the safety they have enjoyed these past decades.

As the golden light, spreads across the door at Dolores’s touch, Alma lifts the girl up, beaming.

On Mirabel’s fifth birthday, when the door disappears into the wall at her touch, Alma screams.

On the third day after the encanto comes together to rebuild the Madrgial family home, Alma sits, grateful but nonetheless wearied by the work that has to be done. Her knees, her head ache. The destruction of their home–and the revelations of the past days, however cathartic, however needed—have taken a physical toll on her body, and she feels it in each one of her joints. The dust parches her throat.

“Here.”

Alma looks up from the ground to see a woman standing beside her. In one hand, she holds a large goblet full of water, in the other a basket of hot mogollas.

She knows this woman. They are the same age—or very nearly—she is among the group of fled villagers that Alma arrived with, and she too has been a staple of the encanto since it burst into fiery being all those years ago.

Alma simply gazes at her quizically.

“Here,” the woman repeats. “Take it.”

“What?”

“The water, the bread, it’s for you! You look weary, and I don’t blame you. My kitchen is still functioning, and I have food and water. I made some for you.”

Alma’s eyebrows shoot up in surprise. “Oh.” She hesitantly reaches for the goods, takes a small sip of the water and a nibble of the mogolla. Both are sweet. “Thank you.”

Her neighbor sits down beside her. “Why the surprise? You and your family have been helping us for fifty years.”

“Well, yes, but—”

“But what? I’ll tell you. Nothing. You have helped us. It is our turn to help you.”

But it was our role to help you, not the other way around. We had to earn our safety. Helping you was the price.

Though she says none of these things aloud, her companion seems to sense something of her thoughts. She reaches for her hand, grips it tight, says in gentle refutation: “We’re a community, Alma. We’re friends. We help each other.”

Well, Alma thinks to herself, as she feels her neighbor’s hand on hers, as she watches the town help her family reconstruct their home, there is so much that she has been wrong about, these past fifty years. What’s one more item? Even one that has dominated her mind as much as this?

“Yes,” she responds finally, a smile threatening to pull at her lips. “I suppose we do.”

Her first night in their new casito, she dreams of Pedro. This is not new, of course; she has dreamed of him often over the past decades—more nights, in fact, than she has not seen him, more nights than her mind has been quiet. But generally, in these dreams, he doesn’t speak. He kisses the children—infants in her arms—then her, and then turns back toward the soldiers, arms raised before everything in her sleep-mind’s eye becomes a cracking black and red.

Tonight, however, while they begin at the river, it is the sun is rising over the water rather than stars and smoke, and they are quite alone—nary a soldier in sight.

“Alma,” he says.

She collapses into his strapping arms. He is as young as he was the day he died, and she is old, every one of those fifty years radiating, burning, through each line on her face.

“Alma,” he repeats, returning her embrace.

They walk silently, hand-in-hand, back to the town, to their new house, up the stairs, past the rooms where she knows each branch of her beloved family tree sleep more soundly than they ever have, until finally they reach her bedroom. She leads her husband inside, sits down on the bed, and he sits beside her.

“Do you…do you regret it?” she whispers.

“What?”

“What you did, all those years ago. Saving us. At the cost of…giving yourself to the soldiers. Do you ever regr—”

“No! Never! Not even for a single moment!”

“But,” she blinks the tears out her eyes. “Why were we saved? Why us, and not any of the countless who perished? Why me, Pedro, and not you? I did nothing to earn—”

“Alma,” he interrupts. “Amor. Mariposita. Safety is not something one needs to earn. It is not something taken away from the undeserving.”

She swallows.

“What happened was not your fault.” He pulls her closer to him. “It was no one’s fault, except the soldiers. And I don’t know why I was put into a position to be able to stop them. I am only grateful that I was. But it was not a transaction, mi amor. It was a gift. You, the children, their children—none of you has anything to repay.”

“I was just trying to keep them safe,” Alma rasps.

“I know, mariposita. And now they are. And you can rest.”

“Yes.” She leans into his embrace. “Yes…”

Eventually—and she cannot say precisely when—the dream ends. She wakes up in her bed, sun shining brightly into the room.

As she sits up, a butterfly flies past the window, its wings gleaming in the morning light.