A/N: I didn't feel like writing her early childhood so I wrote this instead. Chapters in other people's point of view will be labeled as Interludes to make my life easier lol.
To Ilovebotdf111: Thank you for taking the time to leave a review! I hope you enjoy this chapter as well.
To readwithcats: I'm so glad you're liking it so far! I'm taking the take to flesh out her character before she meets anyone canon but Allen is a long way off. Enjoy this chapter as well!
So the translations used to be at the end of the chapter, but someone suggested that I place them next to the Spanish, so I did that instead.
Ayamonte in the late 19th century was a picturesque and calm town- one of the few places untouched by the raging civil wars and political unrest that affected the rest of Spain.
After the disaster of Queen Isabella the Second and the uprisings that happened afterward, the Spanish people could only hope that the new king would be a good change for Spain. No one wanted to relive the wars between Portugal and Spain, and as a border town- Portugal was just across the river- Ayamonte would greatly suffer from any conflict that arose between the two neighbor countries.
The community of the river town was a tightly knit one; residents lending a helping hand to each other in their times of need and standing united as a town.
Maria Elena was known as the town's Bruja, the eccentric but ultimately harmless herbalist that inhabited the small fishing cottage near the riverbank. She ran a stall in the village market every day, from sunrise to sundown and she brought her little grandchild with her on the days none of the fishermen's wives could watch her.
She kept Rénee from getting bored by asking her to grind the non-toxic herbs down into a fine dust, teaching her the right way to hold the mortar and pestle and explaining to her what each plant was for.
Ginger, she would tell the tiny girl, was good for nausea, dizziness, and indigestion. Echinacea was used to treat colds and a great deal of other ailments. St. John's Wort was given in small doses to help deal with melancholy but too much of it was dangerous.
Rénee eagerly drank up the knowledge and smiled with every explanation.
Maria Elena was just glad that Rénee knew when to act like a normal child and when it was safe to show how much she understood. While Maria Elena had grown to accept the oddities of her grandchild, other people weren't so understanding- they would be scared of the small girl.
(She knew it because that fear bubbled up inside her when she met Rénee's eyes.)
The first time Maria Elena laid eyes on her granddaughter, one thought reared its head.
Rénee Lúz Castillo was born with her mother's face and her father's eyes.
It was something bittersweet to Maria Elena- to look at her granddaughter and see Teresa looking back at her. She still had photographs of Teresa's wedding, of her darling girl holding a delicate hand to her bloated belly with a joyful grin as her new husband pressed a kiss to her cheek. It hurt Maria Elena to look at the pictures and remember that the only way she would see her daughter alive again was through a child that looked so much like her.
It might have been wrong of her- but Maria Elena was glad that Rénee didn't take much after her father. That way it was almost as if she had her precious Teresita back by her side.
The first weeks with her granddaughter were unnervingly quiet. The child was silent, never crying, never making noise even when she was long overdue for a change of diapers or a feeding. Maria Elena would have been more concerned by it if she hadn't had to arrange a funeral for the second time in the last year.
(And if during the funeral Maria Elena was too busy weeping to notice that her granddaughter had stared at the tombstones with something akin to horrified realization- then it was nobody's business.)
In the beginning, it had been a relief to not have to care for a wailing child while she was so deep in mourning. In the beginning, it had been easy to pretend that the Rénee was simply quiet for her age, that she was simply a calm child no matter the occasion.
Then Rénee turned one month old and all traces of the calm child she had been vanished.
(How was Maria Elena to know that the first month of silence was simply Rénee in shock, that the implications of waking as an infant had yet to sink in?)
It started with the night terrors. It started with the frantic thrashing in her sleep; with the inexplicable screams that tore out her throat with such force that her entire body trembled. It started with wailing so terrified that Maria Elena jolted out of bed and flew across the cottage to make sure that there was nothing wrong with her granddaughter.
(How was Maria Elena to know that it was just Rénee remembering the day she had been born, that the horror of her mother's scream and father's weeping had seeped in so deeply into her memories that every time the scene replayed it was as if she was living it over again?)
It took Rénee nearly six months to get better and when it was over, Maria Elena was left with more questions than answers- questions she would never get the answers to.
Maria Elena had a tin box filled with pictures, with the faces of the people she loved, stored away under her bed. Rénee was only six months old but so smart already, despite this, Maria Elena planned to wait until she was old enough to understand who the people in the photographs were before showing them to her.
She would tell her stories of the day Teresa and the first Rénee, her father, met. Show her the old photographs she had of them grinning at each other with nothing but adoration in their eyes. She would show her granddaughter the picture of a red faced Rénee, a laughing Teresa, and a grinning Catalina.
She would tell her of her eldest daughter, of how her lovely Catalina who went off and married a Portuguese man but raced back to Spain upon hearing that her little sister was being courted. How Teresa had laughed and laughed at Rénee's look of mortification at the threats her sister threw at him once she met him at last.
Maria Elena would share her simple treasures with her granddaughter because she loved her as if she was her own. And one day, the pictures would become Rénee's treasure too.
Much later, when her mind answered yes to a question which should have been answered no- she would wonder whether or not it was possible to love the same thing you feared and whether that could be called love at all.
Maria Elena had no way of knowing it but her granddaughter would ask herself that same question years later.
(She would ask it as she wiped the blood away from a sleeping man's face; fearing but loving; loving but dreading what the man would become. She would stare into bloody water showing her warped reflection and think that it wasn't normal to love and fear the same thing- unknowingly mirroring her grandmother's thoughts all those years ago.)
Her granddaughter was a year old when Maria Elena realized that there was something off about her.
The child's peculiar behavior wasn't damning in and of itself- there were always bound to be children who acted strange in their infancy- but it was when the first year passed and Rénee remained odd that Maria Elena began to look closer.
Behind the small smiles that Rénee gifted her whenever Maria Elena told her a new story was a certain fragility that had never been present in another child she had ever met. It was as if the child was simply humoring her, babbling and laughing at the right moments even though the smiles never seemed to reach her eyes.
At night Maria Elena could hear Rénee from the nursery, making sounds of all kinds. Most of the time they were mere gibberish, simple sounds that made no sense and put her more at ease because it was something normal for children to babble at all times of the day. Sometimes the nonsense would sound a bit more like words and Maria Elena would be more on edge on those nights.
It was during one of those nights that Rénee relapsed, falling into a crying fit that Maria Elena hadn't seen the likes of in months. It was after she had strung together sounds that made no sense when put together; a made-up word that sounded nothing like real Spanish. The incident served to reassure Maria Elena that her granddaughter, despite all her oddities, was still a child.
Because children babbled; children cried; children made sounds that sounded like words but were nothing of the sort- just things with no meaning.
What kind of meaning would a word like akuma have anyway?
In the end, out of all the quirks that her granddaughter showed that could serve to label her as different- it all came down to Rénee's eyes.
There was something wrong with them.
There was something about them that hadn't been present in the girl's father's eyes despite them sharing the same shade of brown. There was something about them that unnerved Maria Elena when she saw them set in a face so like her daughter's. There was something unnerving about the way Rénee would meet her eyes whenever Maria Elena spoke to her, the way she seemed to understand more than an infant should be able to.
There was an emptiness in her granddaughter's eyes- the kind she had only seen in the those who had lost everything in the war- and it chilled Maria Elena straight to her bones every time she met that vacant brown.
Such look shouldn't be in a child's eyes.
The word to describe the darkened glint Rénee's eyes didn't come to Maria Elena until her granddaughter was almost two years old and they had just closed up the stall in the marketplace.
They often went to church after a busy day to thank the Lord for making sure they had enough money to put food in their bellies. It was on the third Tuesday of May, in the privacy of the confessional walls, that Maria Elena had her epiphany.
"Viejos… Tiene ojos viejos," ("Old... She has old eyes.") Maria Elena said suddenly, voice barely above a whisper. Her hands were clasped tightly together in her lap, her fingers curled around a wooden rosary as she spoke to the wooden screen. Her voice trembled as she continued, "Todo este tiempo no sabia que era sobre sus ojos que me molestaba. Tiene la mirada vieja, como si ha visto más que yo soy capaz de entender… " ("All this time I didn't know what it was about her eyes that bothered me. She has aged eyes, as if she has seen more than I'm capable of understanding.")
"Si la quiero," ("I love her.") she quickly added, "Es todo lo que me sobra de mi Teresita, como no la podría querer?" ("She's all I have left of my Teresita, how could I not love her?)
The priest on the other side of the wood was silent for a moment. Then his voice, pitched low to come off as reassuring, answered her, speaking just as quietly as she had a moment before. "¿Temes a tu nieta?" ("Do you fear your granddaughter?")
Did she fear her granddaughter? Maria Elena thought about the question.
She thought about the aged eyes, the old eyes, that Rénee had; about the instincts that screamed 'abnormal' at her every time the child spoke with clear words and moved with movements much more fluid than a toddler should have.
She thought about the ease in which Rénee picked up the small bit of Portuguese she had been teaching her; about the way she knew words in Spanish that Maria Elena was sure she'd never spoken to the girl; about the mysterious language in the middle of the night.
Maria Elena knew that the answer should be no if only to because she knew that Teresa would be devastated if she were to know but it was wrong to lie in the house of God. There was no doubt that she loved her granddaughter but that wasn't the question, was it?
Did she love her granddaughter?
Of course, she did.
Did she fear her granddaughter?
Yes, she did.
Maria Elena opened her mouth and breathed out her answer.
The truth would be a secret between her and the priest.
The day Maria Elena died, she saw there was something familiar in the blackness of death- she had been seeing the same darkness in her granddaughter's eyes since the very beginning. And so Maria Elena welcomed the emptiness she had feared but grown to love; because if she could love a child whose eyes reflected death, then what had she to fear from death itself?
A/N: So I'll update this story as soon as I write the chapters so updates will be sporadic. Don't forget to leave a review telling me what you think so far!