Chapter Text
Mirabel woke up with her bed shaking. “Is that you, Casita?” Her bedroom still looked dark. She put her glasses on and saw the floorboards shaking too, but nothing else. Her clock showed her it was 4 a.m. Then her bed just about threw her out of it, though she managed to land on the floor without hurting herself. “Casita?”
The moving floorboards showed her the direction Casita wanted her to go. Following them took her to Tío Bruno’s door, which blazed so brightly it hurt her eyes. Worried, she opened the door and rushed into the sand, running to his hidden cozy bedroom. She didn’t know if his original room had a hidden bedroom, but the current one did.
“Tío Bruno!” she shouted but doubted he could hear her over the roar of the vision tornado of green-glowing sand and images surrounding his bed. Sand from the rest of his room always managed to get in here, and he’d told her not to stress too much over trying to remove it all because it would just come back. She couldn’t tell if he was fully awake or asleep but could see his body huddled into a tight curl on his bed with his arms over his head as if trying to protect it. At the very least, this started while he’d been sleeping since he’d never voluntarily do a vision in bed.
Did she see people and flames in the sand? What was burning?
Although she wanted to go to him, he always told her not to try while the sand flew around him, saying it could abrade skin and flesh. But if this continued too long and started looking more dangerous to him, she’d grab a blanket and wrap it around herself as a shield to do her best to get through it.
The sand stopped flying and fell, while a glowing green vision glass dropped onto the bed. Better the vision hit the bed than the floor, since she didn’t know how much he might’ve seen for himself in the state he was in and appreciated not having to put pieces back together. Once she rushed over, she saw him breathing hard, nearly hyperventilating, in the green light of his vision glass. When he popped up, eyes open and still faintly glowing, he had sweat and tear tracks on his face and looked at his body in horror and confusion, murmuring, “Burning, burning, burning....” She didn’t know whether touching him would help him or just panic him.
“Tío Bruno! You’re safe in bed, not on fire. You just had a vision!”
“It’s dark. Is it night? Is it now? Is it happening right now?” His voice sounded raspier than usual.
“I don’t know!”
He showed her part of the vision glass. “Whose house is this?”
“The Ortegas’ home! You know--”
“--their kids, they’re part of the story time gaggle, yeah. You... you know where in town it is?”
“Yes!” She tried to take the glass from him but he wouldn’t let her, and his hands covered specific parts of the image, which made her worry.
“Okay. Okay. I need to see more. Dios mio, I wish I didn’t.” He knocked on his wood headboard a few times with a “knock, knock, knock, knock on wood,” then twice on his head, then threw some salt over his shoulder from the little pot on his nightstand. He crossed his fingers, held his breath, squeezed his eyes shut... then his head rocked hard as if something hit it from behind. It looked like it hurt.
“Tío Bruno, are you okay?”
“No.” Opening his eyes, he looked a bit dizzy and dazed. A few little embers of burning green remained in his irises. “It’s a fire starting right now. There are three children, a mother, a father, a grandmother, one cat, and one kitten in the house.... I’ll wake up Pepa and go get Juli’s emergency food stock, while you go wake Abuela and tell her what’s going on. Why couldn’t any of us get the Gift of teleportation? Lives are on the line. Go!”
“Give me the glass so I can show her!”
“No. She’ll believe you. I’ll give her the glass personally a bit later; it’s what she wants from me. Go!” He put sandals on in a rush and ran out of his room with the vision under his arm.
Mirabel rushed to Abuela’s door and started knocking. When Abuela sleepily opened the door to give her an annoyed look, Mirabel burst out with “Bruno had a vision in his sleep of the Ortegas’ home burning! He says it’s starting to burn right now! He’s gone to wake Tía Pepa up and package up some of Mami’s food to take to the fire!”
Abuela seemed to fully wake in an instant. “Wake Luisa up. Bruno, Pepa, and Félix will already be setting everything else up to go. I need a few minutes to ready myself. Go.”
“Yes, Abuela!”
The villagers had a firefighting brigade, but for some emergencies it was faster and easier to mobilize certain members of the Madrigal family instead. Mirabel had never been a part of that before.
Luisa came to her door pretty quickly after Mirabel started rapping on it. “Luisa! There’s a fire at the Ortegas’! Abuela wants you to go there! Abuela, Tía Pepa, and Tíos Bruno and Félix are doing their own things to get ready to go.”
“Just give me a few minutes to get dressed!” Luisa threw some clothes and shoes on, then rushed out of her room and down the stairs to the kitchen, where Bruno finished packing Mami’s healing food into a big basket and had a large tote bag that appeared to contain blankets. Mirabel, following her, got to see her quickly and easily pick him up into a princess carry, which he started to object to, then shoot off at high speed into the night with him.
Tío Félix came over to Mirabel to say, “Pepa and I will be taking a horse into town now. There’s another saddled horse outside to carry Abuela when she’s ready. See you later!” Then he ran out.
Walking down the stairs, fully dressed, Abuela looked amazingly put-together despite the short time she’d had. Even her hair looked immaculate.
“Abuela, there’s a horse waiting just outside for you,” Mirabel said. “Please take me with you! Casita must’ve woken me up for a reason.”
“And you’ve already been very helpful but, Mirabel... even despite everyone’s best efforts, fires can be... chancy,” Abuela replied. “I don’t think you should go.” She obviously worried about what Mirabel might see.
“I can be useful! I know the Ortega kids really well and can help keep them calm and safe. If anything gets too intense at the scene, I’ll leave it and move them with me. Please!”
“If I feel that there’s something you shouldn’t see or hear and tell you to leave the scene, you’ll do it without an argument, trusting my judgment?”
When Abuela put it like that, it really put Mirabel on the spot, but if she really wanted to go.... “Yes.”
“All right. I’m trusting you, Mirabel.”
“Yes!”
“But you can’t go there in just your nightgown. Change quickly.”
“Yes!” Mirabel didn’t think she’d run faster in her whole life, even counting the time she ran after Tío Bruno trying to catch him behind the walls. In her bedroom, she took off her nightgown to put on the shirt and skirt in closest reach, then shoes, then ran even faster to get back to Abuela, almost tripping and faceplanting in her haste. “I’m okay!” she said at Abuela’s concerned look.
They mounted the horse and galloped to the village, speeding through the night, Mirabel holding on tight to her grandmother. As Mirabel started to notice a terrible, acrid burning smell, not as pleasant as woodsmoke, and saw more smoke, she really hoped everybody had gotten to there in time to rescue the family. Closer to the house, she could see the yellow and orange glow of the flames and some of the neighbors coming out to see what was happening. “Stay back, everyone, please!” Abuela shouted as they rode through. “The Madrigals are fighting the fire and rescuing the family! It’ll be easier for them to do so if they have space to work and they’re not worried about anyone else.”
When they arrived at the burning house, Mirabel saw Tía Pepa raining on the Ortega home, but in specific places, showing a precision Mirabel hadn’t seen from her before. Tío Bruno stood at her side talking to her, perhaps telling her the places that needed to be hosed down the most? Seeing an occasional green flash from his direction, Mirabel hoped he wasn’t hurting himself. Luisa--dressed in a Luisa-sized protective coat, a helmet with visor, rubber boots, and a filter mask over her mouth and nose--burst out of the building with the two sons in her arms and deposited them in front of Tío Félix and their father and mother before rushing back inside. While it was difficult to injure Luisa, it wasn’t impossible, so Mirabel appreciated her looking out for herself. Abuela immediately started talking to people nearby and further directed bystanders to stay a safe distance away, which shouldn’t be necessary since the incredible heat bursting from the house should be enough to warn them off. Mirabel’s family was awesome!
She immediately started to help Tío Félix with the kids, giving the boys a blanket each to wrap around them and some of her mother’s healing food while doing her best to distract them from everything going on. There was still a little girl, a grandmother, a cat, and a kitten to rescue.
A while later, Luisa came out with Elena, her grandmother, and a cat. No kitten. Mirabel gave them blankets and some of Mami’s food.
“Why did Bruno make our home burn and threaten my family’s lives?” Elena’s father asked loudly.
“He didn’t. He doesn’t make futures happen. He just sees them! He doesn’t want to hurt anyone!” Abuela replied, while Tío Félix had to hold an angry Tía Pepa back from him and walk away with her, before returning to the scene alone. With what her Gift could do, nobody wanted Tía Pepa going off on villagers in a rage.
“Really? Then why didn’t he see the future in time to prevent the fire?”
“He was asleep. Because it is night. The miracle chose when to send him the vision, and he mobilized our family to come here as soon as he woke up. Will you disparage our miracle?”
Mirabel couldn’t see Bruno around anymore and hoped he hadn’t heard Elena’s father’s accusations. Even though that meant he didn’t get to hear Abuela’s rebuttal either. But where did he go?
A few minutes later, Tío Bruno, somewhat sooty, quietly showed up behind them and pulled up the top of the basket to reveal a somewhat sooty white kitten, which he handed over to Elena.
“Lunita! Thank you so much for finding her, Tío Bruno!” she said.
“Why is she calling you ‘tío’?” Elena’s father asked. “Why does she know you at all?”
“Papi, he reads books for us and tells us stories! He does the voices and everything! He draws things for us too,” Elena said.
“She calls him tío because Antonio and I call him tío,” Mirabel said. “All the kids in the story group started to do it too. Group story time, with stories for kids, in public, Señor Ortega! That’s all.”
Mirabel felt so glad that Antonio wasn’t here to see and hear this, his pure, sweet gesture to share Bruno himself and Bruno’s stories and art with his friends and to give Tío Bruno a better reputation with at least some of the villagers turned into something ugly and predatory to attack Bruno with. She’d convinced Tío Bruno to do it, assuring him that it would be okay, even though he’d told her he doubted it would end well, “not that that’s a prophecy.”
“You’re children,” Elena’s father said. “You’re too innocent to know what he could be doing. What he could be... grooming you into.”
Mirabel couldn’t figure out what he was accusing Tío Bruno of doing, aside from it apparently being evil and sick.
“Into what? What do you even mean?” Bruno asked, seemingly as confused as she was.
“You know what I mean!”
“No, I don’t. I’m just guessing by context that it’s something disgusting and evil, so why are you thinking about it?”
“I’m not--!”
Mirabel didn’t know if asking Señor Ortega to spell it in detail for the crowd would make the situation better or worse. (Would Abuela ask him to do that? Would Abuela step in to do anything?)
“This isn’t right!” Elena said.
Tío Bruno’s kids’ stories were full of kind people--even when some of those people were actually animals--who stood up for vulnerable people and against injustice. (When Mirabel had gotten a little too punchy one time and said it was funny that his kids’ stories were like that when a lot of people hadn’t shown him much kindness and justice in his own life, Tío Bruno had answered, “They’re fiction.” Ouch. “And wishful thinking. Maybe I can help people grow up to be better? That would be nice.”) Elena seeing her father be like this and her mother and neighbors not saying or doing anything about it.…
“He’s your father,” Tío Bruno replied.
“That’s right!” Señor Ortega said. “And I don’t want you anywhere near my children! Near any of our children!”
“It was a public group story time.... But I can see my presence here isn’t helping. I’ll leave.”
“Good! Leave! And don’t come back!”
Bruno stood there out in the open in just his oversized pajamas and his sandals, no ruana or hood to hide under, no salt or sugar with him to throw, no wood to knock on, no rats on him to pet, nothing to calm or comfort him, exposed and on his own in front of a staring crowd. Turning himself into Hernando to try to get through this would only make him look worse.
Mirabel waited for at least her family members to rise to Tío Bruno’s defense, but they remained silent and just stared, and from Tío Bruno’s reaction to it all, he didn’t expect them or anyone else to defend him. Her stomach dropped as it reminded her of when Abuela had said such horrible, cruel things to her right before Casita fell while her family didn’t say or do anything about it, just been a silent audience as she stood there alone and unfairly accused of evil, hateful things they knew she wouldn’t do. (And they wondered why she and Bruno had such an instant bond?) She didn’t know if they’d frozen out of shock, fear, awkwardness, peer pressure, the thought that surely someone else would step up to support her, or something else, but.... She’d thought they’d gotten better. She could say something more than she had already, but it shouldn’t have to be her! And Señor Ortega had already made it sound like she and Elena were too naïve for their account of Bruno to be trusted.
Tío Bruno caught her eye and shook his head at her, telling her to stand down, then started walking away, while no one offered him any support or asked him to stay. It broke Mirabel’s heart. He nodded his head to the crowd and walked away, probably hoping that being out of sight would put him out of minds.