Disclaimer: Encanto does not belong to me. This story is not for profit.

Author's Note: Julieta's Gift in the film appears to be making food that when eaten heals physical injuries, such as the villager's broken wrist, her husband's bee stings, and Mirabel's cut hand. That is the interpretation I am going with. I wanted, however, to address screenwriter Jared Bush's Twitter comment answering the question of: "Why doesn't Julieta 'fix' Mirabel or Agustín's eyesight. It's who they are & she wouldn't want to change it." That is very noble of Julieta, but her not wanting to change them is not why their eyesight hasn't been fixed, at least according to the demonstrations of her Gift in the film. Whatever can be healed by eating the food is healed with no input from Julieta. Therefore, everything that can be "fixed" is.

CW: Mentions of psychological abuse

Chapter 6

October 22nd

When Abuela joined them at the church after breakfast, she clapped her hands for attention. Everyone immediately fell silent. "It has been too long since we have had a family meeting. In the midst of this chaos we must remember that we are a family. We are the Madrigals." She inclined her head. "I must thank Mirabel for reminding us that we are not our Gifts. Indeed, Gift or no Gift, miracle or no miracle, we are still la familia Madrigal, and our name still means something in this village. We must be strong for the village and for each other." Satisfied with the effect her speech had, she gestured to Isabela. "For example, we must pick up with our lives where we left off. Isabela, what is this about you rejecting Mariano's proposal? He is still interested in you. I have made sure of that by speaking with Señora Guzmán."

Isabela stood at attention with military precision, tense, chin high. Mirabel caught her gaze, and she relaxed, taking a deep breath and rolling her shoulders. She met Abuela's gaze with new strength. "I should have spoken up about it sooner, but the truth is, me and him together would have been for appearances."

"Why is that such a bad thing?" Abuela asked. "You are beautiful. He is handsome. The Guzmáns are an esteemed family."

"Madre," Julieta murmured in a warning tone.

"I want something real, like what my mother has with my father," Isabela said.

"I have never understood why you married him," Abuela complained to Julieta.

Agustín's jaw dropped. Then he frowned. "Now wait just a minute. I love your daughter, I love Julieta, and I demonstrated my love and my loyalty for this family for over twenty years. Half my life has been spent with this family. I am as much a Madrigal as I am a Peña. And my family isn't exactly unimportant in the village. We're no Guzmáns, but we're somebody, and I refuse to have my place here trivialized." He took Julieta's hand and squeezed it tightly.

Julieta laid her other hand over their joined hands and smiled at him. Then she frowned at her mother. "That was uncalled for, Madre."

"Mariano could have given you that kind of loyalty, if you had given him a chance," Abuela said to Isabela.

Isabela was unfazed, but starting to look a little angry. "But I couldn't have given him that in return. That wouldn't be fair."

Abuela pressed her lips together tightly and took a deep breath through her nose, composing a smile. "Then who do you like instead?"

"No one."

The corner of Abuela's mouth twitched, and angry lines appeared around her eyes. "No one? Why would you reject a perfectly good marriage proposal from a handsome man of an upstanding family if you have no one to replace him?"

"I haven't had a chance to get to know anyone in the village. They all know me as the perfect girl who makes flowers. But that's not who I am – I'm more than someone who makes flowers." Isabela lifted her chin. "I want time to show the village who I am. Then someone who cares about who I really am will step forward, and I will make my decision about whether or not to date them then. Not sooner."

Abuela gave an exaggerated shrug. "Who am I to say what goes on in this family?" She tucked her shoulders inward as she turned away. "Apparently, I am not needed anymore. Everyone can make their own decisions perfectly happily."

Mirabel glanced around the room swiftly. Julieta looked struck through with a sword. Pepa's expression was pinched with anxiety. Bruno picked at a loose thread on his left sleeve with nervous dedication. Félix wore a grimace. Agustín looked confused. Camilo's face was an angry mask, revealing nothing except a cold-eyed stare. Antonio was hiding behind his older brother. Luisa had frozen, her right eye twitching, an insipid, meaningless smile tortured onto her face. Isabela looked small and lost. Dolores' eyes were wide and her mouth tight and tiny.

Mirabel stepped forward and spoke up. "That's right. We can all make our own decisions perfectly happily."

Julieta gasped. "Mirabel!"

"If you think your role in the family is to tell us what to do, then you're right, you're not needed," Mirabel said. "But that's your choice. You never had to occupy a position of power over us like that. We are all wonderful people who love each other and love the village and the Encanto. Why do you need to control us? It's like you don't trust us. You said you were sorry that you held on too tight. But you're doing it again. Apologies don't mean you can just do it all over again and nobody is going to notice. An apology is supposed to mean that you'll stop."

Abuela lowered her head, and no one could see her face. Her deep voice caught as she said, "I'm sorry that I've been such a horrible mother and grandmother." She walked toward the door.

Julieta dashed to her, cutting off her escape. "No, Madre, wait!" She dropped to her knees in front of her mother. "We all love you. You're not a horrible mother and grandmother. You've gotten us through so much." Tears ran down her cheeks. "Please stop saying these things. Mirabel didn't mean it. She's just a child."

"Pedro did not give his life for this family for us to squabble," Abuela said.

"He didn't give his life for this family so that you could control all of us and take our lives away from us, either," Mirabel snapped.

Abuela turned away from Julieta and faced Mirabel. "You don't even know Pedro! You weren't even born!"

"What happened to me being sent by Pedro?" Mirabel shouted back.

"I was clearly wrong! Pedro would never be so cruel to me!"

"What started as protection turned into a trap! You made this Encanto to keep the soldiers out, but it turned into a way to keep everyone in. You made Casita to be a shelter, but then you turned Casita into a way to lock people in their rooms – their roles in the family – and never let them grow!" Mirabel gestured with both hands. "Look at us! Look at us for real! We have all been invisible to you, all this time. We outgrew our doors a long time ago! Including me. I am not a child anymore. I don't deserve to live in a nursery."

"I don't have to stay here and hear these accusations." Abuela strode out the door with a lot of strength and swiftness for someone her age.

"Madre, please don't go!" Julieta stretched out a hand toward her mother as her mother passed, but her fingers faltered away from clutching her mother's skirts.

Abuela acted as if she didn't hear Julieta's cries.

Julieta collapsed in on herself, sobbing.

Mirabel was stunned. "But I told her the truth." Despite her best efforts, her breaths hitched, and tears filled her eyes. She stubbornly refused to shed them. Her mother's sobs may as well have been physically battering her. She felt each one as a stab of pain.

Bruno came up beside her and touched her shoulder. "A single person can't heal a whole family. I learned that the hard way. I'm sorry that you had to learn it, too. I wish I could've told you what I knew, so that you didn't go through this."

Mirabel wiped her nose. "I would've done it anyway. Who're we kidding? I wouldn't have taken no for an answer. The minute I learned our family is in danger, all I wanted was to save everybody."

Agustín came over to Julieta, knelt down beside her, and wrapped his arms around her, but his expression was one of helplessness.

"If we heal, we're going to have to all heal together," Bruno said.

"Does that include Abuela?" Camilo asked. His father elbowed him. "What? I can't ask a simple question? Why can't I ask if it includes her? Because if it includes her, then I don't think this family's going to heal. We all want to, but she doesn't."

Julieta sobbed harder. "It's not true! Madre…"

Pepa shakily petted her hair, mumbling, "Clear skies, clear skies, clear skies…" She seemed to have forgotten she had lost her Gift. Her slender frame shook.

"Ay," Félix sighed, making a dramatic gesture. "Me da cólera. Everyone is upset now, no one is having fun, no one is going to feel like working on the house…"

Julieta rose. Agustín clung to her as if she might fall back down. She faced Mirabel with an angry expression. "That was too much for Madre to bear all at once. You have no tact! Bájale dos rayitas, Mirabel."

"We've been gentle," Mirabel retorted. "We've tried asking her a nice way to stop being so controlling. You've tried and failed your whole life to get her to stop by being nice."

"Cruelty isn't going to solve anything!" Julieta retorted. She rounded on Bruno. "And you! What have you been telling Mirabel? She wasn't acting like this before she met you."

Bruno massaged his temples. "Me caigo al mar y no me mojo. I should have stayed in the walls."

"Casita literally fell down," Mirabel reminded him. "You would have been crushed."

"I stand by my assessment," Bruno said. "What's the difference between being crushed in there and crushed in here?" He continued rubbing his temples.

The anger drained out of Julieta's face. "Oh, no," she said softly. "A migraine?"

Mirabel looked from her mother to her uncle. "Tio Bruno gets migraines?"

"What's a migraine?" Camilo asked. He looked scared, his pose of superiority forgotten.

"It's a kind of headache," Julieta said. She groaned. "If only I could still make my food."

"Bad ones," Pepa said, stepping forward. She was still obsessively petting her hair, but she didn't look like she was going to combust into yelling or tears. "¿Te encuentras bien, Bruno?"

"It's too bright in here," Bruno mumbled.

Julieta suddenly took charge. "Everyone, clear away. Give him room." She grabbed Bruno and made him lie down on the floor. "Someone, give me a blanket."

Mirabel and Antonio acted at the same time, both grabbing blankets and giving them to Julieta.

Julieta laid the blankets over Bruno, including his head. She took his right hand and squeezed it. "Don't try to stay on your feet. You'll fall and hurt yourself."

"I remember," Bruno mumbled from underneath the blankets.

Antonio burst into tears. Mirabel hugged him. "I'm sure Tio Bruno is OK. He just needs some rest."

"Great, you've killed Bruno," Camilo said. "Now what?"

"I'm fine," Bruno said.

"Then why are you on the floor with blankets over your head?" Camilo said.

"If migraines could kill Bruno, he'd be dead a long time ago," Pepa said.

Julieta abruptly looked furious. "Madre is in a mood, now Bruno has a migraine, and Antonio is frightened."

"If you all blame Mirabel for this, I'm getting up," Bruno said.

"No, don't!" Julieta and Pepa said in near-perfect unison.

"Then leave Mirabel alone." Bruno stuck his arm out from under the blanket and gestured, even though he couldn't possibly see anything. "We all know this started with Madre punishing Isabela for making her own decisions."

Pepa trembled and resumed petting her hair. "Do we know that? We don't know that."

Mirabel took a deep breath, clenched her jaw and her hands with resolve, and dared to speak up again. "You are all terrified of her."

Pepa literally jerked, as if she had touched a hot stove.

Julieta looked tired and frustrated. "No, that's not true."

Félix looked a little guilty and a little relieved. "Well, now that you mention it…"

"We're not talking about this," Pepa interrupted. "Talking about Madre never does any good, so let's not talk about it. Why do we have to talk about it?"

"Because not talking is one of this family's problems!" Mirabel turned to everyone and gestured broadly to take them all in, letting go of Antonio. "Whatever this family doesn't like, they don't talk about. We don't talk about Abuela verbally abusing us and trying to take our lives away from us. We don't talk about Tio Bruno's disappearance. What else are we not talking about? Because those are the only two things I've noticed, but that doesn't mean there aren't other things."

Pepa, Julieta, and Agustín now wore almost comical expressions of terror.

"You know she's right," Félix said. "This family has a big problem."

"I can't handle this," Pepa said. "My house is gone. I have nowhere to hide to recover from this."

"Why do you have to hide?" Camilo demanded. "Why do you always have to hide?"

Pepa stared at him with an expression like a lost child. Then she glanced at the others. "I…"

"Let your feelings out properly and they won't scare you so much," Bruno said from under the blankets.

Félix took her hand and kissed it, then massaged her fingers. "Mi amor, you know he is right. Holding in your feelings is what makes them worse."

"I'm scared!" Pepa flung herself at her husband and sobbed against his shoulder. "Madre is all we have! She can't abandon us too!"

"Abuela is not all you have," Camilo said, looking more and more annoyed. "I'm here too. Antonio is here, too. Your sister's here. Your brother's here. Papa's here. What do you mean, your mother is all you have?"

Julieta looked as if she were staring into a bottomless chasm. Agustín gently took her by the shoulders, turned her toward him, and hugged her. "This can't be happening. How long will she refuse to talk to us this time? I can't handle those looks. She'll stare, and she'll stare, until I apologize enough."

Mirabel snapped her fingers. "Then this is what she's been holding over you. Every time you do something she doesn't like, she threatens to abandon you."

"It's not a threat," Bruno said. His voice sounded hollow. "She left, didn't she? She's gone. We're hanging around this church all by ourselves."

Camilo gestured with his hands similarly to his father. "But when she's here all she does is make you upset. She's only happy if she can control everybody and tell them who to be. I'm tired of being whoever she tells me to be. I've been everyone in the village but myself."

"By hearing everyone in the Encanto, I couldn't hear myself think," Dolores whispered.

"If I wasn't 'perfect,' I was nothing to her," Isabela said. "When I stopped growing pretty things, she destroyed my plants."

Luisa rubbed the back of her neck. She couldn't meet anyone's eyes. "She did make me try to carry things that were too heavy for me once my Gift started fading, and she didn't listen to me when I said things felt heavy."

"She made you cry in front of the Guzmáns," Camilo said.

Antonio looked at the floor while everyone else was talking. Finally, he whispered, "She doesn't like animals. She's scary."

Pepa dashed to him. "My baby." She picked him up and held him tightly against her, rocking him and stroking his hair. "I'm sorry. I didn't know she was scaring you. I should have made her stop."

"We have to stand up to her now," Bruno said. "Together. As a family. Not for us. For them. All of my sobrinas and sobrinos. We didn't have the guts to protect ourselves. But we have to find the guts to protect our children."

Julieta crossed the room to Mirabel slowly. When Mirabel didn't glare at her or move away, she slowly took Mirabel's hand. "I'm sorry." She cupped Mirabel's cheek with her other hand. "I wish I could go back in time, before all this happened. I knew things were getting worse and worse, but I didn't try hard enough to intervene. Maybe it's inevitable that arguing over you would have brought Casita down. You were the one part of Madre's plan that was an obvious flaw. From the beginning, I should have protected you. When she made you cry and took away your glasses and told you that you had to learn to see without them, it should not have been Bruno who intervened, it should have been me."

"What?" Mirabel's voice cracked. "I don't even remember this."

"You were only three years old." Julieta rested her forehead against Mirabel's, tears slowly running down her cheeks. "You were just a baby. I should have done more. I would understand if you hate me."

Mirabel sighed. "I don't hate you. That's not the point of what I'm doing. I'm trying to protect you. Is that so hard to accept? I didn't want you to lose your healing magic. I didn't want anyone to lose their magic. Tio Bruno will tell you, I made him have another vision about how I could save the magic. It was Abuela not listening that destroyed Casita. I was already saving it – with Tio Bruno's guidance. If Abuela had been willing to listen to me, we never would have lost the magic."

Julieta lifted her head and stared at her blanket-shrouded brother. "What?"

"She was very convincing," Bruno muttered. "Antonio gave me his room to use since my room – my room suffered a bit from me not using my Gift in so long. In my vision, I saw her helping the candle. Isabela, too."

"What?" Isabela said, startled.

"The moment you and Mirabel hugged helped the candle," Bruno said.

Isabela looked to Mirabel. "When I hugged you because you helped me release my feelings?"

Mirabel nodded. "Tio Bruno saw it. And you weren't looking, but I was. The candle burned brighter. It helped the miracle to let your feelings out."

Julieta looked horrified. "Then –" She looked around the room. "Then we did kill the miracle. The more we held in our feelings –" She clapped a hand over her mouth.

"I've been a fool," Agustín said. "I kept pretending that none of this was happening – and I asked you girls to pretend, too. That is not what a father should be. My own father, if he were still alive, would be disgusted with me. If he is looking down on this from Heaven – and Madre, too – then they aren't happy." His parents had died when Mirabel was 6 years old.

"It's OK, Papá," Luisa said, looking stricken.

Agustín shook his head, looking at his feet. "No, it's not." He adjusted his tie. His tone wasn't combative, but very quiet and matter-of-fact. "I got stuck on how much my family cares about appearances." He let out a sad laugh. "I do yardwork in a vest and tie. I never allow myself to be seen wearing anything except the best clothes. I measure my mustache every morning and if it's even a hair off on either side, I trim."

"You're just…neat." But Luisa cringed as she said it. "Tidy."

He glanced around the room. "I fit in with this family: I cared more about how things look than how they are. But you, Mirabel, you truly see the way things are. Appearances don't work on you." He paused and looked at Bruno, who was still lying motionless under the blankets. "You're like Bruno that way. Bruno sees through us all. He always has."

"Maybe I didn't do such a good job either, cuñado," Félix said. "When I married into this family, I thought what this family needed was a good dose of cheer. I spent my time trying to cheer everyone up. El alma de la fiesta, that's me." He tapped his chest with both hands and then gestured palms up. "But this family needs more than cheer. This family needs a change."

Pepa kissed Antonio's forehead. "Maybe I could stop being so stressed out if I could stop trying to be perfect. If I could stop caring that everything isn't perfect."

Julieta wiped her cheeks. She looked older and more anxious than Mirabel had ever seen. She was used to seeing concern, not this bone-deep uncertainty. "Maybe it's wrong to keep saying everything is fine all the time…"

"That's what I was doing to myself," Mirabel said.

"Me, too," Luisa said.

"Because of…me?" Julieta looked horribly guilty and ashamed. "I had no idea I was hurting the miracle."

Mirabel took her hand and squeezed it. "Mamá, you didn't hurt the miracle alone. Tia Pepa was trying to hide her feelings, and Tio Bruno was hiding. And the reason you were all in hiding is because of Abuela. That's why we've got to stop hiding."

"Stop hiding," Julieta whispered.

"The night of Antonio's party, I finally leveled with myself that it's not fine that I didn't get a Gift," Mirabel said. "It's not fine that the miracle didn't bless me, too. It made me an outsider in my own family. When you all took the birthday picture with Antonio, I wasn't even there. Instead of waiting for me, I got pushed to the side, and no one even asked where I was. That's how I ended up downstairs seeing the cracks. And that's not fair."

Félix looked shocked. "¡Qué va! I cannot actually believe we left you out of the picture."

"Well, the picture was destroyed when Casita fell apart, so I can't prove it," Mirabel said.

"We'll have to take the picture over, with you in it, when our new home is finished," Agustín said. He looked guilty. "I knew something looked wrong, but I couldn't figure out what it was. I couldn't see my own daughter's face was missing?" He stuck his hands in his pockets dejectedly.

"All right, let's stop wallowing and start doing something useful," Camilo said. He looked cranky.

Mirabel glanced at him. "This is a good first step, though. We're actually talking about what's happened in our family."

"Step two, give me something to do about it, or I'm going to explode," Camilo said, fidgeting.

"We could use that energy out at the building site," Félix said.

"Yes, let's go," Pepa said with a sigh of relief. "I need something to do with my feelings, too."

"I'm feeling better," Bruno announced. He sat up, letting the blankets fall away from his head and upper body.

"That's because you laid down and took a rest before it was full-blown," Julieta said.

Bruno smiled sheepishly. "Yes, hermana."

They walked together as a family to the site of their new home, for the first time no one pulling ahead or stopping to talk with anyone along the way, staying a tightknit group. When they arrived, the last two sections of weight-bearing wall making up the perimeter of the first story were going up. The inside was nowhere near finished, but seeing the outline of their new home gave Mirabel a thrill, even without glass in the holes that had been left for windows and a hole where the front door should be.

For the first time, Julieta didn't separate herself to cook, and Bruno worked as Bruno. They moved from task to task as a family, laying floor tiles, putting up interior walls, discussing with the other villagers minor changes to the floor plan as they thought through how the new house would fit together. Eventually, they learned that Abuela was in her favorite coffee shop.

That evening, Abuela did not join the building site for dinner, snubbing them to eat at a fellow village elder's house on the far side of the village, as if deliberately placing herself as far away from the family as possible.

"Oh, let her sulk," Bruno said, sounding unusually bold. "She'll get over it when she feels like it. Unlike her, we're not going to force her feelings."

Notes: Me da cólera literally means, "It gives me cholera," and refers to upsetting situations. Bájale dos rayitas means, "Tone it down." Me caigo al mar y no me mojo means a situation is frustrating and hopeless, and anything you do somehow makes it worse. El alma de la fiesta means, "The life of the party." ¡Qué va! is a surprised denial without being aggressive.