Title: Heart of the Home
Disclaimer: I don't own anything that Disney owns.
Summary: Casita has thoughts on its family.
Author's notes: So, I got out of Encanto with impressions. I read a few fanfics and these impressions are not necessarily consistent with some other people's views of some characters, particularly Camilo. This is not a criticism of those views, but mine are not those. So, I'm using the house's PoV as the perfect inside outsider to talk a little about those impressions of mine.
Casita had long since decided Mirabel was its favourite.
Back in the beginning, when it was first created out of Pedro's bloody sacrifice and Alma's grief, it had adored Alma. She trusted and believed and talked to Casita all the time. It was how Casita had learned. When Alma asked for help with caring for the children, with help entertaining them or when the two and three-year-old toddlers started to get into everything, Casita listened to what Alma asked and suggested and figured out how to keep the children safe and well. The one thing that Alma did not believe was that the magic was hers. It was Alma who kept both Casita and the candle strong. But, so long as she was there and part of Casita it didn't really seem to matter to the house what Alma believed so long as her wonder and love fuelled the encanto.
The children, however, didn't seem to understand Casita. Perhaps it was that they had always lived there and could not see the house as Alma did - with wonder and joy - and perhaps there was something too prosaic about Pepa and Julieta to look that bit beyond, while Bruno was always looking too far. But the thing about growing up in and around magic was that it had a tendency to infuse and then exaggerate. Pepa's tendency to open emotion came out in her affecting the weather around her and Julieta's constant caretaking tendencies and her interest in cooking came out in her ability to heal with food she prepared. Bruno was forever thinking ahead, trying to work out where troubles were waiting so he could steer his sisters clear of them. Forethought turned to foresight in his case.
Casita was quite proud of both the way it had channelled the power dormant in the children and the way it had caused the rooms to come to reflect that power. After all, Alma had her own room to herself that Casita had made when Alma had begged for a quiet space all her own, so the children should have their own spaces.
Casita couldn't reach into those rooms once they were made unfortunately, generated as they were with a single burst of magic that generated a pocket of space outside of the real world. It was a house after all, and it existed in the valley created by the encanto, not in the pockets of magic created for the children. That didn't matter though, Casita would be able to see and help and play with the youngsters the rest of the time. It was quite startled when they began treating them as new bedrooms. Bruno's room in particular was not well-designed for anything but practising his powers and there was a perfectly good nursery for the children to stay in.
Pepa and Julieta's rooms weren't so well-designed for it either. All three simply dragged mattresses and whatever else they wanted into their rooms and made them into bedrooms. It puzzled Casita as Julieta's room was more a second kitchen, pantry, storage and kitchen garden than anything else and Pepa's room was designed for her to storm and rain without worry about damaging anything.
The whole thing was puzzling to Casita. It would have made proper bedrooms for the children as they grew older but, well, it was clear that humans were a little weird.
The first tiny cracks appeared when Alma chose to be more strict with Pepa. It was difficult for the child as every single mood she had was now not merely written on her face but in the very air around her. While anyone else could have pasted a smile on and pretended to be happy if needed, Pepa had to make herself be happy. Casita did its best, tried to keep Pepa happy and tried to let Alma know that she needed to allow Pepa the occasional cloud, but Alma . . . didn't always listen. Pepa having to actually be happy all the time to get her mother's approval started to make her a little neurotic, something that had not been so until the pressure was placed on her by her gift.
Well, by her mother as a result of her gift.
Alma began to retreat into her room more, the room that Casita had made out of the same pocket space as the children's rooms, and couldn't reach her alone to communicate.
Julieta never received the worst of Alma's corrections because her gift was proper, feminine and always useful. She was demure, calm, a constant caretaker, beautiful and accomplished as a cook and a woman. Only her efforts to stand between Alma and her siblings kept their resentment of her unscathed existence from reaching a breaking point.
The next cracks came because Alma had always spoiled Bruno. He was The Boy and he was Special because of it, but his gift didn't mix well with his tendency to joke and put on characters for people. They started to see him as the affectations and Alma started to suffer the strain of how that reflected on the family. More cracks appeared, and then even more yet when Bruno's humbling experiences with people blaming him for the tragedies he foresaw – because of course the silly humans confused his seeing something with his making things happen – it caused him to become much more withdrawn and to hide from people at the top of the stairs of his tower. When he became withdrawn, when he began to refuse to try to make the predictions that warned people of good growing years or bad, the predictions that let them know to prepare for the worst or whether the Almeidas would be having a boy or a girl so that the baby clothes and nursery could be ready and when he refused to make any sort of prediction at all, Alma became angry with him and his refusal to serve the community.
And there were even more tiny cracks.
Casita closed them all, because they were uncomfortable and most of the time the family was well and happy and most of the time there were no cracks.
When Pepa and then Julieta married Casita felt itself fill with all the joy in the hearts of the familia Madrigal.
Julieta produced a new baby, Isabela (and Casita wasn't totally sure how all that noise she made with Agustin made a new Madrigal, but it was a house and didn't need to) and then another, Luisa, and Pepa produced one little girl, Dolores, and a little boy, Camilo, and when each of them was old enough, Casita made them rooms. It had learned from the eldest three and made sure each room was able to properly be a bedroom as well as a place to safely use and learn their magics.
Mirabel was born after Camilo and by her birth the cracks had been happening more frequently and with more staying power. The first signal that something was seriously wrong came after Luisa received her gift. They celebrated, but it wasn't long at all before Luisa began to grow bigger, taller and Alma began to nag the little girl about being more feminine. No matter what Luisa tried to be like her mother or sister Isabela, she could not hide that she was not shaped like the other girls in the valley of the encanto. The only time she received Alma's praise was when she was using her gift. In time even that was conditional both on her always doing her best to look like other village girls and always using her gift for others.
Isabela was more gently treated, but it was partly from her watching Luisa and Pepa and seeing what happened that led to it. Isabela was careful to never go where she was not to, never used her gift without following her abuela's implicit and explicit directions. She basked in the constant praise, of course, but a tiny web of reappearing cracks could be seen every time she went against her own inclinations to make more things Alma wanted.
Camilo was the first boy born, and with the appearance of his gift he could do no wrong in the eyes of his grandmother. So long as he showed up in town and helped people in the ways he could with his gift Camilo could make jokes, cause trouble and was just as spoiled as Bruno had once been.
Casita could feel the cracks of resentment from the girls every time Camilo got to do or say something they could not for fear of Alma. Camilo was thankfully good-natured and generous, but he never saw past his abuela's kindly generosity and never received what were becoming gently venomous corrections the way the girls did.
His sister, Dolores, had a gift with few uses in a small village. She was pretty and personable and feminine and Alma could rarely find a use for her gift. When she did, Dolores was as much in demand as the others. The rest of the time, pretty, clever Dolores, who had this powerful gift for hearing because she was the one in the family who looked and listened truly and deeply to everyone and had been seeing the cracks even as a small child – Dolores made herself as invisible as possible. She was compliant whenever Alma asked something of her, and the rest of the time she went almost unseen. She saw Isabela's dwindling happiness with every long-stemmed, dethorned pink rose she produced and heard Luisa crying at night from exhaustion and made sure she would balance on a knife's edge of invisibility.
Mirabel, by the time she was four, was Casita's new favourite. She laughed at Camilo's jokes but stamped her little foot in ire when he went too far. She tempted Bruno back down from his tower with her laughter and joy. Mirabel asked Isabela to make her flowers that were not roses, then made wreaths to decorate Isabela's room with them, lifting her sister's heart every time that something was in her room that wasn't her endlessly practised perfection. Mirabel would shoot disappointed looks at others in the encanto's village when they asked Luisa to move something else heavy or carry donkeys around, pointing out that if they'd built the church in the wrong place then it was their fault and it wasn't Luisa's job to fix their mistakes, and that the donkeys were perfectly capable of being walked by a normally strong person back to their enclosure.
But most of all, Casita loved that Mirabel took after Alma and saw the house as a person, just like everyone else in the family were people. Still, sometimes it was hard. Human people were so different from Casita that it couldn't always understand them or what they needed. Like there was a small barrier between it and them. Likewise, Casita could not speak and often what it was saying in the movement of the tiles or the waving of shutters was unclear to its inhabitants. Only Alma could consistently understand.
When she went forth to get her gift, Casita knew what it would be. Mirabel would take after Alma and understand the house. But where Casita had made its mistake was in making Alma her own retreat and it would not repeat this with Mirabel. It took away the door, because Casita and Mirabel's connection with the fundamental magic of the encanto itself, the magic of love, family and sacrifice were not something that could be shown in some magic room that cut her off from the house. In that moment Casita tried to show that Mirabel's gift was the very power of trust, belief and family that was Casita's essence. Her gift was the house.
The humans didn't understand. In her shock, Alma's faith in the candle flickered, then she demanded that Bruno read the future, ignoring what Casita was trying to tell her. Alma retreated from the granddaughter that was most like the young woman she had once been and began to mistrust the house as well. Others in the family took their cue, Isabela developing a cruel streak overnight in response to Alma's disapproval of the girl without a visible gift. Luisa and Julieta responded by becoming overprotective of Mirabel in ways that were obvious and hurtful, assuming the girl was helpless simply because she did not have a power.
Dolores heard, but Dolores was frightened. If she were to stand by Mirabel's side, she whispered, Alma would see her. She did not want to be seen. Bruno saw something in his vision that made him run and hide within the walls.
He was family, so Casita allowed it, making him space, and appreciating the efforts he went to over time to try to patch the cracks.
Casita tried to make itself understood, tried to build out a room for Mirabel that existed inside the house properly, rather than in the pocket space of the magic rooms. Alma ignored the house, the others couldn't understand and Mirabel, her self-confidence shaken and surrounded by those who did not see her as a whole person, could not see truly either.
That room that was to be Mirabel's was turned into a storage room for Julieta's cookery supplies.
Mirabel stayed in the nursery.
Still, her gift for home and family, love and understanding, the feel of the encanto itself, that grew every day until it matched Alma's. And unlike Alma, Mirabel did not ignore Casita when it suited her.
The fault lines in the family grew. Alma stopped listening to anyone but herself, driving her two daughters slowly away, one with resentment over the treatment of herself, and one with resentment over the treatment of her daughter. She twisted and drove Luisa and Isabela to match their mother's effortless calm and femininity, determined to live through Isabela.
Camilo saw nothing and heard nothing, feted as he was by being a boy, but that continued to cause a split in the ranks of the grandchildren, all the girls resenting his lesser burdens.
Clear-eyed and always listening, Dolores continued to hide in plain sight, while Mirabel was always at the centre of everyone's attention for not being gifted.
Julieta, ever the apple of her mother's eye, struggled to counter Alma, but could not. She rarely saw the worst of Alma's words, though she knew of them and saw their effects, but her cooking healed illness and injury. It could not that which had not been physically injured. She discovered this when Mirabel's eyes could not be healed from astigmatism as there was no injury. She also could not heal the heart or mind and it wore at her to see that in her three daughters, in her sister and in the way Dolores was forever trying to go unseen in plain sight.
Pepa began to crack herself. Every time she suffered upset, someone was there to make it worse by reminding her that she was upset. Even when she was calm the family walked on eggshells, saying things that ultimately made her upset by treating her as though she were already so. The clouds became worse and worse as she tried harder and harder to be happy all the time without fail and Alma ignored every suggestion Casita made to let Pepa be.
When Antonio arrived things changed a little. Mirabel was in the nursery with him and raised him as much as his parents did. Julieta and Luisa were too busy to help, Isabela did not dare the imperfections that would result from time with a small child, Dolores was worried about being seen and Camilo did not see it as his responsibility.
Mirabel did and was there for Antonio when he scraped his knees or drew a new picture. She held him through nightmares when his mother was too upset and no one wanted to risk Pepa hitting her own son with lightning when her mood swung wildly into upset again.
The years passed and Alma no longer listened to Casita at all. For the love the house had held for the woman from the beginning Casita still did Alma's bidding, but Mirabel was the one Casita communicated with and the one who had the closest bond with the house.
That was why, when Mirabel's heart was breaking after Antonio's ceremony, Casita could no longer hold back the cracks. As everything spiralled over the following days Casita struggled to stay together as Mirabel tried to hold the family together.
In the end, all it could do was protect its heart as she cradled the candle and say farewell when it fell apart.
Everything faded from Casita's senses.
There was nothing.
There was nothing, and then suddenly there was sensation and a burst of light. Casita felt itself as the house, newly built with love and care in the walls made of real brick and wood, real nails (that seemed to smell like a small child and a lot of coffee) and real tiles were able to move once again. Unlike the first time it awoke fifty years before, Casita felt . . . solid. Real.
Before it had not been wholly real, made of the encanto rather than of things. Now, the power that had rested in Alma alone and her belief in the candle was in the bones of the house, left there by Mirabel and Alma as each touched and helped with every part of the building. It was when Mirabel placed the final doorknob that Casita felt the magic truly return. The heart of the house had returned home, taking her place with the door that was properly hers and should have been hers ten years before.
The house was again filled with joy, the cracks that had so nearly shattered the family had mended while Casita was gone, and though it did not know how, it just knew that Dolores was being seen, that Pepa was feeling without worry, Bruno was not scared, that Luisa and Isabela were now free to do things they wished and Mirabel was the heart she was always meant to be.
Casita was happy, though it still didn't understand the humans and their refusal to enjoy the comfortable non-magical rooms for sleeping in. Surely all that sand was itchy and got everywhere?