A/N:Stuff from Novelization used. It's awesome and expands on stories. :D Also last names? They just use Rivera in everything I can find, but what is Julio's? Anyway
Coco Rivera pushed one of the handy shoe making stools over to use it to reach boxes on a shelf. Not boxes of shoes; well assumed not...
There was a sash she had owned that she knew her daughter would just love, and was probably at age to care for, at nine. Maybe not, but Elena was a sensible girl and sort of old for her age. Old Soul as it was called; and of course Coco couldn't be more proud.
Once able to peek, Coco rummaged around amidst boxes (as shoe makers all her family gathered up so many!) and tipped one. She righted it but not before catching a peek of shine.
Her heart all but leapt.
Oh right! But hadn't she tossed these?
Coco reached the box down and, after a glance, opened the lid. Shoes. But shoes of which her mother hated and they never made. Dance shoes with steel for tapping out rhythms and to rhythms.
Like Papa's...
She'd thought at sixteen when her twin uncles' absentmindedness made one too many and Coco danced for the first time in ever!
Until Mama saw her.
She had caused her own ban, no more making dance shoes, though really it was the same ban.
No Music, Dance or Joy because most of those things had left with her papa.
It was hard for all of it to leave. Julio and their two girls were blessings. And Julio and her had danced still when they met...before Mama found out and moved him to shoe making for keeping.
Mama's cat had helped there. Honestly...the thing seemed to knowing at times.
Coco did not recall saving the shoes, yet somehow they had escaped her mother purging them same as she had Hector's, and all, instruments from their home. She ran a hand along them, lost in thought.
When she heard a noise, Coco was convinced history was repeating itself and her mother catching her dreaming and hoping on foolish things again; but as her frightened eyes landed on the doorway she found, instead...
"Julio! Oh you startled me...", Coco breathed.
"Apologies, mi amor...", the stout man looked confused, but not as much as he should have been as he entered, and some sort of intuition saw him close the door of the back storage room. "Did...um...the shawl?" He half asked, but Coco of course followed. It was why she was supposed to be here. Not the dance shoes.
"No...I...I found possibly the only pair of shoes in the whole world Mama hates...", Coco smiled, at her own forgetfulness, and gave a breathless laugh, yet as she finished tears threatened for some reason and she blinked.
She knew why if she thought. These shoes and Papa...
Julio stepped over to look at the box and Coco came down once more. The man could have already guessed, but nodded as he saw. "Ah, dance shoes. Yes". Coco knew he was thinking of what she was. Their first meetings dancing in the plaza and when he was told the conditions of the Rivera family if he was serious about Imelda's daughter.
"Julio...", Coco's voice went very serious in its quiet, "you don't...actually like having to put all of your attention to shoes instead of the furniture you did before?". She glanced to the door after saying this as if afraid that very breach of Rivera Family Etiquette would bring repercussions. Yet given how things seemed to go, she wasn't paranoid and the cat was probably somewhere...
It wasn't, not at the moment anyway. Julio smiled and shrugged, but as his wife, Coco thought it looked forced, "Shoes. Couches, it is all the same", he didn't actually answer the question, about liking anyway. "I have just been putting all of my time to helping you and your Mama, I can make a couch soon as I feel and...when there's time". Julio and Coco both knew there would probably never be time. No, he would make shoes.
Coco glanced to the box again, "I wish I could have danced in them for you, just once", she said, but smiling, "I got up a pretty good rhythm and I know...", she broke off, not sure where she was going. I wish we could have danced some times after our wedding too, not just the courtship.
As if reading her thoughts, Julio leaned over to deliver a small peck to Coco's cheek, "You didn't need tapping, obviously". He said no more, but still, and partly something in the brief that said so much, Coco flushed slightly yet again even this many years later.
"Well", she snapped the lid back on the box and suddenly it was like as well as husband and wife the two were secretive children hiding, well, a secret, "I shall put this back where it went and we won't tell Mama it's here".
"Won't tell Abuela what's here?" A young voice asked and Julio and Coco glanced over to see that Elena had somehow opened the door her father had just closed moments before unnoticed and now stood in the doorway.