Why isn't Casita an option in the character dropdown?
The vision depicts Mirabel. She's older, proportional, but there's no mistaking the shape of her face, the set of her chin, though the usually expressive eyes of Bruno's youngest niece are blank. Behind her, the beloved Casita spiderwebs in cracks. Fear thrums in his heart, weakens his fingers. He fumbles the plate, snatches it before it hits the sand, but something catches his eye.
The cracks are gone, and there is just Mirabel.
That… that's never happened before.
He tilts the plate back and forth, cracks shifting in and out like ghostly afterimages, but Mirabel remains present no matter the angle. Just as it had been in the midst of his vision, things are clouded and unclear. Imprecise. The only constant is Mirabel.
As he stares at the picture in green glass, cracks phasing with the tremble of his hands, Bruno doesn't need precognition to know what will happen next.
The plate finally escapes his fingers as his reality, along with the glass, shatters.
His body moves automatically, even as a thousand thoughts cram his head. Mami will want to know. She asked for this vision. He can't say nothing. He'd never been able to resist her requests anyway, too scared, too eager to be of use.
But Mirabel. Mirabel, who is only five tomorrow, who listens to his stories with already-huge eyes magnified behind the glasses she was so excited for. Mirabel, who trails barefoot after her older sisters and cousins as they work in the Encanto, helping wherever she can make herself useful. Mirabel, who, just this afternoon, had sat on his lap and expressed her anticipation at the gift ceremony tomorrow, little toddler arms waving in her exuberance.
Mirabel, who would be cast out, if not physically, then emotionally if he revealed she would destroy (save?) their home.
He knows what that kind of treatment does to a child. He can't allow that.
If he stays, the prophecy will be revealed.
By the time Bruno realizes he'll have to leave, he is already packed.
The bang hangs heavily from his shoulder, Pepa's dark green stitching winding unevenly around the seams. He hasn't added much. A few of Julieta's buñuelos, smuggled to him under the dining room table when she noticed the dark bags under his eyes. An extra pair of sandals. He expects he'll be doing a lot of travelling. Bag of salt. Bag of sugar. Bag of sand. Two extra ruanas, the same colour as his current one. He has several, all identical. They make him feel safe.
He needs to feel safe right now.
He casts one last look to the shards of green in the center of his seeing-circle, glowing eerily in the darkness. Better to just leave them where they lay, and let time hide his shame. Throwing away pieces of a mirror is bad luck, after all, and (while not technically a mirror) he takes no chances.
Stairs blur by in a haze of uncertainty (am I crazy, am I really doing this), but every rebuttal is met with Mirabel's blank face staring resolutely back at him from a green-tinted window into the future. He passes through the curtain of falling sand, letting it settle for a moment over his dirty hair, his sweaty skin, his worn clothes, and the sensation of water without being wet calms his racing heart a fraction. He can do this. He can. It will hurt, probably forever, but he will endure.
He'll do it for her.
He holds his breath, steps out his door, shuts it quietly behind him. The night is warm and Casita is quiet, and Bruno sees by the light of the glowing doors on either side of the second floor.
He tries not to look at them as he passes, heart squeezing painfully inside his chest.
Bruno is halfway down the stairs when Casita brings up a lantern for him, and the squeeze constricts to a vice grip. "Shh, shh, no," he motions frantically with his hand, like trying to turn down the sound of the light (he wildly hopes Dolores is in her room, where she can't hear him).
Casita dims the lantern again, the fixture tilting in the same way Mirabel (poor Mirabel) tilts her head when confronted with a puzzling concept. The wooden railing twists like a question. Casita doesn't know, has no control over, what happens behind its glowing doors. He doesn't have to say anything.
"I had a vision," he says anyway.
The lantern flickers once, excitedly, anticipatory. Several mosaic tiles pop up like attentive dogs at his feet as he steps into the courtyard. They rise and fall, keeping pace with him as he hurries towards the door.
"T-the magic—you—were in danger. And, I don't know how, but someone in this family is going to be the cause. Or the cure. It wasn't right, the vision wasn't clear, and I-I think that's going to put that someone in danger so I'm… I'm leaving." He stresses the last word, like saying it louder will make it easier. It doesn't.
Casita's wall tiles shiver, rippling in a wave that passes down the wall and into the floor to stand on end directly in his path.
He frowns, then marches past the ankle-high barricade with barely a broken stride. "You can't stop me, I'm doing it to protect her. And—and, come on, it's not like anyone here will notice I'm gone anyway." The villagers might, after a while, when they begin to wonder why all their goldfish are still alive.
(Bruno's seen the bowls they're kept in. He'd give them a week, tops.)
He thinks about this instead of how his family might react when they find out he's missing. But he regularly retreats to his tower every now and again, they probably won't get suspicious until he's well over the mountains. More than enough time to…
To get wherever he's going, supposedly.
He's reached the front door, but as he approaches Casita shuts them. Gently. Not loud enough to wake anyone. The window shutters on either side open and close.
"Casita," he says with more conviction than he feels, and the shutters still. He tries the door handle, relieved (disappointed?) that it opens easily.
The path to the dark village seems strangely ominous under the circumstance. And Bruno knows ominous.
(At least, he ought to, if they villagers have any say in the matter.)
He glances up to the second floor—easier now that he feels they're not staring at him—etching each golden depiction of his family into memory. Who knows when he'll see them next? Then, he takes a deep breath, crosses his fingers, and steps into the night as an official runaway.
He gets three paces before his feet halt on their own accord.
A sound rattles the quiet darkness, and it takes him a moment to realize it's not the chatter of his teeth or the wild rhythm of his heart. Bruno turns. Above the doorway, Casita's shingles reach towards him, trembling like the fingers of a clay hand.
What little resolve still exists in his heart cracks away like dry mud. His shoulders slump under a new revelation.
"I don't want to go." His voice is small, plaintive, he barely hears himself.
The shingles relax, then settle back into their respective places. The door opens wider, inquisitorially, welcoming.
Bruno holds his breath and crosses his fingers and the sigh he lets out once he's back across the threshold is more relieved than he wants to admit.
At a loss, he wanders. Up one staircase, past each door, avoiding the wooden eyes of his family, until he finds himself at the one place he doesn't always feel like he's being watched or weighed or judged. He cracks this door open, one of simple wood and green paint, and peeks in.
Mirabel sleeps alone, one last night in the nursery, before the ceremony tomorrow. It was always nicer to visit her after the whirlwind of energy that is Camilo moved out eight months prior. Soon the nursery will sit empty, unless Pepa decides to keep the rule of threes in the family.
He doesn't dare mention the vision to Mami, but a lonely, desperate part of him wants to wake his sisters and let the entire story spill from his shoulders to theirs. The three of them can handle it, they can handle anything. But… Pepa would worry until the vision came to pass (or didn't?), and there isn't a house in the Encanto that can survive multiple years of tornadoes. Julieta would do anything to protect her daughter.
Old memories resurface unbidden, of concerned (suspicious?) expressions, both from the villagers and his own family, and Bruno decides against it. Another doomsday prophecy won't help his family.
(Besides, even if they knew… none of them can refuse their Mami if she decides something needs to be done about Mirabel for the protection of the family. Bruno will not do that to his niece.)
Doomed either way.
He looks at little Mirabel in the moonlight. How can something so small, so wonderful, be the cause of such destruction? What would happen tomorrow night that could put the fate of the Encanto into her five-year-old hands, already so clever, so skilled with a needle? Would her gift bring joy, like his sisters, or would it bring terror and curse the family, like his?
As much as the thought pains him (a dull pain, an old wound), he would've liked to be there for her ceremony.
He shuts the door.
The problem remains. "I—I don't want to leave, but I can't stay. Mira—I mean, the person, the person in the vision, would be in danger."
He speaks mainly to himself, but Casita taps the lining of a windowsill like someone tapping their chin in thought, tap, tap, tap, tap (he counts along, one, two, three, four).
The floor under his feet heaves. It's a subtle motion but to his senses, already raw from the intensity of his vision, the sensation is similar to imbibing in too much aguardiente. He cuts off a startled noise in his throat, and Casita helps him get his feet to their correct position before he can fully topple. The sensation ends as abruptly as it began.
"Casita," he hisses, "what was that?"
In response, Casita brings up gentle light on the lantern beside Dolores' room.
His face scrunches. "Dolores?" How was she supposed to help?
The lantern tilts sharply, pointedly, to the left: towards a large painting.
He approaches slowly, on silent footfalls, and it's only when he's inches from the painting does he feel the draught. He touches the frame, cool under his fingers, and pulls it away from the wall. It swings open easily, as if it were always meant to.
The wall behind the painting… well, there isn't one. It opens into a narrow passage, big enough to walk through. Dark, quiet, out of the way, it seems like it runs around Casita's perimeter (and perhaps farther). Neither here nor there, didn't leave or stay.
"Oh," he breathes (but not too close to the threshold). "It's perfect."
The picture frame rattles with Casita's delight.
He expects after he enters the walls he won't come back out for a very long time. Mirabel looked older than twelve in the vision. Seven years.
Bruno turns over his shoulder. From this angle, he can see the gentle shine of his own door against his tower's dark plaster. "They need to think I'm gone."
A beat passes, and he gets a distinct sense of sadness through a warm breeze (not his though, this one tastes bittersweet. There is nothing sweet about the ache in his chest). The residual glow sputters before dying, the carving on his door nothing more magical than wood ought to be.
He can't help but think it's more fitting this way.
That's… that's everything then.
He pats the wall, which doesn't make him feel as silly as he should. "Thank you, Casita. Can you do me one more favour?"
He hears a word in the soft clatter of the floor tiles. Anything.
"Take care of Mirabel for me?"
He passes through the painting (with held breath, of course), and Bruno Madrigal disappears.
END