Summary: The amigos help Mateo move his grandfather's things out of his old basement, and Naomi uncovers something personal that he had forgotten about.
"I still can't believe I've been back in the country for over a week and I'm just now finding out that you've moved into the palace," Gabe said, adjusting the box of books in his arms.
Sitting across the room and surrounded by his own small forest of boxes and book stacks, Mateo shrugged. "What was I supposed to do, write you a letter? Address it to Gabriel Núñez: Somewhere in the Wilderness?"
"You could have said something when I got back."
"He didn't tell me right away, either," Naomi chimed in from over the crate she was packing. "I found out when Elena brought it up a week after the fact."
"Funnily enough, I wasn't actually trying to do a grand reveal," Elena said. She hopped down from the stepladder and deposited another armful of books onto one of the piles. "I thought that Mateo would want to tell everyone himself. I really thought you would've said something by then," she added, turning to him.
"It never came up!" he protested, waving a book around. "Besides, I thought it would've been obvious something had changed when I was suddenly spending the night at the palace all the time."
"But you do that normally," Naomi and Gabe said in unison, and they shared a grin across the room as Mateo rolled his eyes.
Gabe shifted to hold his box with one arm. "I think you can forgive me for not realizing," he went on, swinging his free arm out toward the half-empty basement, "considering that none of your stuff made the trip with you."
Mateo opened his mouth with a sharp breath, and then closed it again, pouting. "Well, I guess I can't really say you're wrong…" he finally said.
Cleaning out Mateo's old basement wasn't really how Naomi had planned to spend her Saturday. She assumed he would've taken everything he wanted with him from the start, but apparently there'd been some confusion between him and his mom about who was actually keeping his grandfather's things. It had taken half the winter to get it straightened out, and after his mom picked out some personal effects to keep as mementos, she finally told Mateo to clear the rest out. From there, all it took was an offhand mention to Elena for her to volunteer everyone's help with the task.
Not that Naomi was really complaining. The four of them had fallen into an easy rhythm as they worked, bantering playfully all the while as Elena unloaded shelves, Naomi packed crates, and Gabe hauled them up out of the basement. Mateo did a little of everything, bouncing around the room as needed and keeping up a running commentary on his history with every item they packed.
"I really do appreciate the help," he said. "You guys didn't have to do this."
Elena scoffed. "Oh, it's no trouble. It's not like you've never dropped everything to help the rest of us." Handing off a book to him, she knelt down and began to divide a small book pile by size, looking for ones to fill the remaining gaps.
Instead of packing it, though, Mateo cracked the book she'd given him open with an intrigued sound and started to flip through. Naomi chuckled.
"Besides," she said, humor in her tone, "someone has to keep you from getting too distracted. If you had to do this alone, you'd stop to reread every single book along the way!"
"What? No I wouldn't!" He snapped the book shut again, flustered, and quickly tucked it into the box before standing and fumbling with trying to pick it up, his attempted burst of efficiency ruined by his surprise at the box's weight.
Gabe came back down the steps, another round-trip finished, and jumped into the conversation without missing a beat. "And someone was gonna have to help you with the heavy lifting." He winked, teasing, and then hoisted another full box with a grunt. He balanced it on his shoulder, watching for Mateo's response.
Straightening up, Mateo scowled, until he made a big show of drawing his tamborita and clearing his throat. "Llévaluq!" he called, striking the drum, and he smugly faced Gabe again, arms crossed, as a quartet of packed crates all drifted off the ground, hovering around him in the air. "You were saying?"
Gabe frowned and adjusted his own crate. "Yeah, well, you don't have to show off." He made for the stairs, with the still-grinning Mateo and his gaggle of floating crates close behind, and had barely made it two steps up before a wayward box thumped against his back.
"Ow! Mateo! Watch where you're going!"
"Sorry, I guess I couldn't see you around all these heavy boxes I'm carrying by myself."
"Then just carry one like a normal person!"
Their bickering receded up the stairs, and Elena met Naomi's eyes across the room, pressing her lips together to poorly conceal a smile. The two burst into a fit of giggles at the familiarity of it all as the boys' voices faded out completely—it was good to have everyone back together again.
"They seem like they're having fun," Naomi remarked.
As if to dispute her, there was a dull thud from the yard above, followed by the distinctive, shrill yelling of a very unhappy Mateo.
With a resigned sigh, Elena pulled herself to her feet and brushed off her skirt. "...I'll go check on them," she said, and Naomi waved her off, laughing.
"Good luck!" she called after her, and turned her attention back to the room, taking stock of what they'd accomplished so far. Distractions aside, they'd gotten through a sizable chunk of Mateo's belongings, leaving half the shelves barren. The workshop looked unbalanced and strange, the absence of Mateo stark in the emptiness and the thin lines of dust disturbed by their activity. Empty crates and stacks of still-unpacked books were scattered on the floor, bringing an uncharacteristic chaos to the room that still somehow felt intimately familiar. Naomi was nothing if not used to moving house.
Rolling her shoulders, she pulled herself to her feet. The crate she had been working on was full, which left her to get started on the next one. She stretched her legs out, cramped from sitting on the stone floor, and looked around for a good place to pick back up, until her eyes fell on the desk against the wall. That could work—depending on how long damage control took upstairs, she could possibly get the desk cleared out herself before anyone came back down.
Grabbing a loose satchel from an otherwise empty box, she headed over and started rifling through the drawers. There were a lot of old notes that Mateo would have to go through on his own to decide if they were worth keeping, so she set them aside and focused on the other contents. Pens, pencils, a heavily dogeared pocket dictionary, and a mysterious vial of purple goo that Naomi knew better than to question all got stuck into the bag where it was propped open on the back edge of the table.
The deeper she got in the drawers, the larger and more childish Mateo's handwriting got. It was like a time capsule of his studies, and Naomi found herself fondly examining one of the older pages from near the bottom. It looked like one of Mateo's earliest attempts at writing in Maruvian. He'd repurposed one of the heavily-lined pages of a basic writing primer to print the same runes over and over again the way one might practice their alphabet. His name, large and nearly illegible, was scrawled in the upper corner like it actually was a school assignment.
Naomi chuckled softly at the sight, conjuring the image in her head of a young Mateo, too little to even write yet, valiantly trying to master a second set of letters anyway. It was no small wonder he was so dedicated to magic now; if he had started studying that early, then it really had been his entire life. Still smiling, Naomi carefully folded the page and tucked it into the satchel.
The desk shuddered when she opened the next drawer, and before she could stop it, the satchel tipped backwards against the wall. Naomi snagged the edge of it before it could topple completely, but she heard a clatter against stone as something spilled out anyway. Groaning, she righted the bag and set it on the floor to keep it out of the way, and then crouched onto hands and knees herself, wedging between half-packed boxes and peering into the dark space below the desk.
As tidy as Mateo normally was, even he wasn't immune to letting dust pile up in hard to reach places. Feathery clumps of it caught on Naomi's fingers as she crawled further under, clinging to her skin like a layer of fur, and she sneezed as she disturbed it, sending it billowing around even more. Scraps of paper were buried completely under the dust, long since lost and forgotten, and she unearthed stray bookmarks and what looked like an old algebra assignment as she felt along the edge of the wall.
"Amazing magical powers, and you can't be bothered to clean under your desk every once in a while," she muttered as she retrieved a pair of fallen pens. Well, that was what she had dropped; if Mateo wanted anything else from down there, he could dig it up himself. She gathered up everything she'd found and gave her hand one last pass along the seam between the wall and floor, just to be sure. Suddenly, her hand caught on a stiff paper corner, jutting out from where it was wedged behind the sturdy leg of the desk. A firm tug pulled it free, and with a quick shake to loosen the dust from it, Naomi finally backed out from under the desk and pulled herself to her feet.
Setting the collection on the desk, she brushed off her skirt and examined her latest find. It looked like an envelope, tightly sealed and ignored. She turned it over in her hands, curious about who it was from, and froze, her mind racing as she saw that it wasn't a letter for Mateo.
The name Naomi Turner stared up at her from the front.
It was an envelope, tightly sealed and addressed to her.
Her breath caught, and she glanced at the door at the top of the stairs. The commotion outside had died down to murmured conversation that she couldn't make out, save for Gabe's chastising tone. She hadn't even opened the letter and she still felt like she was doing something wrong just by holding it, the guilty thrill crawling up her spine like she used to feel as a kid when she snuck out to borrow her parents' ship. It was addressed to her. That meant it was hers, right? She could totally open it without a crisis of conscience.
It had occurred to her briefly while she was digging through the desk that she might stumble across something meant for Mateo's eyes only. Something personal. She wasn't actively looking for anything like that, and she'd figured if she ran into it by mistake, she could put it aside as quickly as possible and plead forgiveness when Mateo came back downstairs. Opening this letter would be a direct invasion of his privacy—he'd never sent it, for whatever reason, and that meant it wasn't her business.
But it was addressed to her, and she had never been more curious in her life. Biting her lip and steeling her resolve, she cast one last look to the stairs before sliding her thumb under the flap and carefully prying it open. Hands shaking from a small surge of adrenaline, she took out the letter and began to read.
Naomi,
If you're reading this, then I'm in trouble. Big trouble. I-might-not-be-in-the-country-anymore kind of trouble, in one way or another. But don't worry too much! It might not be as bad as it sounds. Well, maybe you weren't worried. I don't know if you've even noticed that I haven't been around lately.
Either way, I know it sounds like I'm about to ask for your help, but I promise that I'm not. I'm not even sure what you could do about this. I know we don't know each other that well, but I just want someone to know why I'm gone.
I'm actually a wizard.
Naomi sucked in a breath, and then let it out just as quickly, her shoulders dropping. Why was she gasping? She already knew that. The first two paragraphs had wound a tight coil of equal parts fear and hurt in her chest: fear for Mateo and whatever unsolvable disaster he was expecting that could cause him to flee the country; hurt that he thought so little of their friendship he didn't think she'd notice if he disappeared. I know we don't know each other that well had burned like acid after years of confiding things in him she'd never told to anyone else. But the announcement of the obvious had her skimming the rest of the letter, confused.
There were a lot of apologies and explanations that went nowhere—even in writing, he tended to ramble—but Naomi got the gist as she pored through. It was a tell-all, describing his secret research and explaining his grandfather's legacy and insisting that Shuriki couldn't be trusted under any circumstances, obviously written well before Elena had returned. It got more frantic and disorganized as it went, and between the clumsy reassurances and backtracking was a heartbreaking plea that she look after his mother. Assuming they didn't get her too, he'd written. I know I said I wouldn't ask for your help but I'm all the family she has left.
And he'd chosen to say all this to her.
Footsteps creaking on the stairs yanked her back to the present and she jumped, wondering if she had time to hide the evidence of her snooping.
"Okay! It's all good!" Mateo said as he bounded down. "No broken boxes, no broken bones." Humming a simple tune to himself, he scanned the room like he was deciding what to do next. His eyes settled on Naomi, still clutching the letter and standing by the desk like a startled deer. "You okay? What's up?"
She debated lying, and saying that he had surprised her, but reading something personal and pretending that she didn't seemed more cruel than being upfront. And besides that, she had to know. "Mateo, what's the deal with this letter?"
He raised an eyebrow, confused, but not offended. "What, you're going through my mail, now? And you used to call me nosey."
"You wrote it to me," Naomi explained, feeling defensive anyway.
Mateo's confusion only seemed to deepen, his mouth twitching up into a lopsided, baffled smile. "Why would I write you a letter? I see you almost every day." He accepted the page from her, and his eyes only flickered across the first few lines before his eyebrows shot up, recognition flooding his face. A choked sound wheezed out of him, and he flushed deeply. "Oh! Ohhhh. This is, uh. Wow, fifteen-year-old me was dramatic." Quickly folding it up, he made like he was going to throw it out in the waste bin near the desk, but Naomi caught his wrist as he tried and pulled the letter back, smoothing it out between her fingers.
"You were gonna tell me," she said, her voice soft.
Mateo paused in his attempt to grab the letter again. The mortification on his face dampened into a more general discomfort, and he rubbed at the back of his neck, avoiding her eyes. "I almost told you a couple of times, actually," he admitted. "Remember the night of the storm?"
Can you keep a secret? he'd asked, and she still sometimes wondered how different their lives might have been if he'd been able to follow through.
"Yeah, but I thought that was a spur of the moment decision. This…" She panned a hand down the letter. "You were actually planning this. How long were you—why were you planning this?"
"I think it says right there, doesn't it? I wanted someone to know what had really happened to me if I ever got caught. And I just thought that maybe you would…" He trailed off with a shrug, still not looking at her, and he let out another dismissive, uncomfortable laugh. "Anyway, sorry you had to see that. It's probably super weird."
She shook her head emphatically. "That's not why I'm—Mateo, I'm not bothered by this, I just don't understand why—" Why her? Her memory skipped through their rocky first year, incident after incident of her yelling at him, or avoiding him, or playing along with her classmates' mockery of him. "I was awful to you when we were in school! The fact that you wanted to tell me and not literally any other friend…"
It was weirdly flattering, that he'd trusted her so much despite it all, above anyone else he might have known longer.
His blunt response smothered that kernel of warmth. "I didn't have any other friends. I thought you knew that." He swung an arm out to gesture at the piles of magical equipment littering the floor. "I couldn't exactly make any when I was spending all my time down here, doing things I wasn't allowed to talk about."
Naomi didn't know how to respond, and just cast her eyes back down at the paper clenched in her hands. The image of young Mateo, alone and dutifully practicing his Maruvian, flashed through her mind again. Where it had been charming before, in the way kids were when they tried to act serious and grown-up, it seemed impossibly lonely now. Naomi wasn't sure she could've taken it.
Mateo heaved out a sigh, and when Naomi looked back up, he was gripping his arms like he was hugging himself, looking around at the disarray of the room. Years of repeated moves had trained her to identify the dazed look on his face—no matter how much a move was for the better, there was still an acute sense of loss that came with uprooting a part of your life so thoroughly. Each time his eyes caught on some of the barren furniture, he was no doubt digging up a slurry of memories of his time down there, complicated by a blend of wonder and solitude.
"I didn't actually think I'd ever get out of here," he said suddenly. "Back then, I mean. I thought I'd have to lock myself down here for the rest of my life to keep my magic secret. I don't know how many more years of this I could've done without being able to talk to anyone about it." He let out a breathless, shaky sound that might have been a laugh. "I'm really glad Elena came back when she did. I'm not sure what I would've done otherwise."
"If it was that hard for you, why not just… stop doing magic?" Naomi asked. It was the obvious solution, and also the incorrect one. His own interest in the subject aside, if he'd given it up before Elena's amulet had landed in his lap, the country might have still been under Shuriki's rule. As much as she sympathized with the dread of isolation, it was a thoughtless question, and she braced for Mateo to get upset.
Rather than take offense, though, Mateo let out a huff of laughter, his expression turning wistful. "I'm not sure I could have. The first time I held a tamborita, I thought I was going to explode from how excited I was. Practicing magic felt right in a way that nothing else did, and as time passed, I couldn't even imagine doing anything else with my life. I won't pretend it wasn't… difficult, sometimes, but if I didn't even have this to come home to…" Something strained at the edges of his smile, and he held his arms a bit tighter. "I don't know. I think it would've been worse."
The statement hung ominously in the air before Mateo shook his head to clear it away, fixing her with a wry smile. "Besides," he went on, forced humor in his tone, "it's not like I stopped being weird once I could start talking about this stuff. I'm not sure it would've made a difference." His awkward air returned, and he softened his voice, squirming. "So, um, about that letter—"
Naomi cringed and glanced down at it again, having almost forgotten what had started the whole conversation. "Yeah, I'm really sorry about that. I shouldn't have read it without asking." His choice to write it to her seemed less personal now—not a confession to a friend, but an act of desperation to anyone that would listen—and she felt ashamed for having pushed the issue.
"Well, it is technically yours. You can do what you want with it." He scratched at his head again and hesitated. Glancing up at the door with a wary expression, like he was worried he'd be interrupted by the others, he carefully went on. "I know we weren't really that close back then, so I hope this doesn't sound too clingy, but I was really happy that you kept trying. I know I wasn't the easiest to get along with—and I'm still not, sometimes—but you were nice to me anyway. I really did feel like I could trust you, and I really wanted you to know. And—and even when we met, I'd really hoped that we could be friends someday." His hand still resting on his neck, he pulled his face into a tentative smile. "I hope that's not too—"
Naomi didn't get to hear how that sentence ended. She closed the distance between them and gripped him in a tight hug, and he cut off with a surprised grunt at the sudden contact. She didn't know what to say—thank you or I'm sorry or I'm glad we're friends or anything else flimsy and incomplete—but Mateo seemed to understand anyway, returning the gesture after a beat and a quiet laugh.
"You know," he finally said after they'd been standing like that for a moment, "you can just throw the letter out."
She squeezed him tighter, squishing out another grunt. "No, shut up, I'm keeping it forever."
When they broke apart, she retrieved the envelope from where she'd left it on the desk and slipped the letter back inside. She tucked the whole thing into her vest, just in time for chatter at the top of the stairs to announce Gabe and Elena coming back.
"You guys sure took your time," she said as they headed down, steps creaking.
At the bottom of the steps, Gabe made a show of looking around at the still-messy basement. "Well yeah; some of us were doing actual work. You two didn't get all this packed up yet?"
Naomi rolled her eyes at how he grinned. "Har, har."
Gabe just shrugged and took another bite of the empanada he'd brought down with him. Naomi perked up at the sight as her stomach gave a faint rumble. Before she could ask where he'd gotten it, though, Mateo had wheeled on him from where he was bent over a new crate, like the sound of chewing had assaulted him.
"What are you doing?" he demanded.
Gabe jerked back at the abruptness of it. "Ea'ing?" he said through a mouthful of empanada. Quickly swallowing, he added, "Your mom made snacks."
Mateo wasn't having any of it. "You're eating in my workshop?"
"It's not even gonna be your workshop anymore after today!" Gabe protested. "Come on, it's not like you're doing magic right this second."
"Workshop or not, I don't want to be cleaning your crumbs out of my books when we get them to the palace!" Mateo marched across the room and pushed against Gabe, trying to corral him back up the stairs. "Out! You can finish that outside."
Gabe half-stumbled up the steps. Mateo wasn't strong enough to actually push him around, but trying to stand his ground on a staircase could have easily led to disaster. As it was, Elena had to flatten herself against the wall as they passed to keep from tripping anyone. Mateo paused as he reached her, and his eyes flickered to the plate she held in one hand and the empanada she held in the other before settling back on her face, disappointed.
"Really, Elena? You too?"
She took a delicate nibble from the corner of the snack before setting it on the plate, looking contrite. "Well, it seemed rude to refuse…"
"I can't believe you guys had snacks upstairs this entire time and you didn't tell us," Naomi cut in.
Elena grinned. "Consider yourself told!"
Mateo had a hand on her shoulder, gently trying to urge her back upstairs as well. "Okay, fine, we can take a snack break," he said. "Just not down here, please."
Gabe and Elena finally retreated back upstairs, and Mateo shook his head dramatically as he watched them go, crossing his arms. For all his fake annoyance, though, he was smiling, something affectionate in his eyes. Naomi started up the stairs herself, bumping against him and giving him a gentle nudge.
"C'mon, you need to get out of here, too," she said, and Mateo chuckled.
"Yeah, I know."
The two of them headed outside, and Naomi could feel the outline of the envelope pressing against her chest the whole way up.
You would not believe the trouble this chapter gave me, oh my goodness. I can't believe I forgot that Gabe isn't even in the country during the events of Movin' On Up. I'd say that the first part of this chapter is the other snippet I wrote when I was applying to be in the zine, but I actually ended up scrapping the first ~800 words entirely and rewriting it because I had to do last minute timeline adjustments. Bajeezus.
Technically this fic still isn't canon compliant anymore anyway, because we see in Coronation Day that the basement still has all his stuff in it, but I'm going to chalk that up to the animators not wanting to re-model the room. I mean, even his desk has the exact same stuff laid out on it every time we see the room. Realistically, there wouldn't really be a reason for him to keep a bunch of spellbooks in a house he was no longer living in, with someone who did not practice magic. I've technically bent the rules of show models in this fic before, anyway, by giving the Turners living room furniture back in chapters 3 and 4 - I can understand them not having a bunch of upholstery on their ship, but if they'd been living in Avalor for a while, they'd presumably want somewhere to sit down.
Also, I know it's been heavily implied in the fic thus far, but now that Mateo's explicitly said it, I genuinely believe that he Did Not Have Friends pre-series. Even in the show proper, he's the only amigo that doesn't seem to have a social life outside the main cast (you could maaaaaybe argue Marlena, but even when they're "hanging out" in Navidad, they don't really interact), and it's very difficult to make meaningful connections when "bond over common interests" isn't an option on the table. It'd explain a lot of other stuff, too - how quickly he clings onto anyone that gives him attention, how possessive he gets over the title of "best friend", how frequently he's willing to help or humor his friends at his own expense, how he's particularly sensitive to when his friends are behaving strangely (it's Mateo who first questions Naomi and Gabe's behaviors in My Fair Naomi and The Curse of El Guapo, respectively) or to when they reject him for something outright (again in My Fair Naomi, it's Mateo who wonders if Naomi cares that they're not there, and in Crash Course, he makes a hell of a logical leap from "Gabe doesn't like my method of teaching magic" to "Gabe doesn't consider me a friend"), ...the list goes on.
On a final note, I uh, I know I haven't exactly been keeping to the weekly schedule anymore. In hindsight, it was a bit over-ambitious. I way underestimated how long editing would take me and how much time/energy I'd have to do it. I'm still gonna try and keep to it when I can, because I would like to finish this fic sometime this summer, or at least this century, but I think it's safe to say that any kind of official schedule is officially "off". As always, I appreciate the patience.