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The knock at his door is expected and yet, it startles Bruno thoroughly.
In the month and eight days since the familia moved into their new Casita – three months and twelve days after old Casita’s collapse and Bruno’s return – someone has always knocked on his door in the morning to wake him up for breakfast. It’s not that he needs a chaperone or someone to make sure that he doesn’t hide away in his room, it’s really not that. Bruno loves breakfasts with his family. By dinnertime, he’s often already a bit overwhelmed with the strain of actually interacting with people all day, even if it’s people he loves, and with trying to tone down all of his…quirks – knocking on would, murmuring under his breath, the urge to hide away when he hears steps in the hallway – but at breakfast, he usually feels up to anything. He relishes the newfound freedom. He loves getting to know the kids again and really seeing how similar they are to their younger selves, and how much everyone is growing from the family loaded with responsibility and purpose into something a little softer, shoulders hunched not quite that high. He enjoys sitting at the table a moment longer with Felix, sharing another cup of coffee and conversation, when the rest of the family starts filing out, just before he joins one of the kids in the kitchen to dry the dishes.
So, Bruno likes breakfasts, but it’s a little hard to tell night from morning when you’re living in a room without any windows. Hence the whole ‘someone getting him down there’ thing in the mornings. Hence, expecting a knock to come.
Today, though, Bruno thinks he could have easily flinched his way into the sun if he had been able to move an inch. As it is, he barely manages to shrink back into his pillow.
“¡Buenos días!” someone says, the door creaking with the force of being opened by an aggressively cheerful morning person, and Bruno thinks that this must be what being Dolores is like. Every sound resonates in his skull, rolling around somewhere deep in his brain, and combined with the streak of light the door lets through Bruno briefly considers throwing up.
Throwing up right now sounds about as impossible as flinching into the sun. He settles for turning his head away from the door.
“We’re eating outside again, Abuela thinks it’s the last chance before the season really changes,” the voice continues, and this is usually the point where the person leaves again, but something in Bruno’s lack of any kind of acknowledgment stops them in their tracks. Bruno hears them stepping closer and he thinks he can actually feel someone hovering right next to him.
“Tío Bruno? You up?”
It’s Mirabel, Bruno finally realizes and makes a sound deep inside his throat, something between a hum and huff, and hopes that this is enough for Mirabel to leave him alone again.
It would be for, say, Camilo, who is also very much not a morning person and would easily interpret the sound as disgust for being woken up. It might also work for Luisa, who kept a close eye at everyone these past months to do things in their own time and relax, and who would probably let Bruno skip breakfast if she thought that he wanted to sleep in.
It doesn’t work for Mirabel. She rounds the bed to face Bruno, and her voice is close enough to him that he thinks she must have leaned closer to him to get a good look at his face.
“Tío Bruno?” Mirabel says again, now sounding a bit worried.
Miércoles. He must really look a number if she can tell in the semi-darkness the open door provides.
He cracks open his eyes and shuffles a little into what could be, with a lot of optimism and goodwill thinking, called leaning up against the backboard of the bed. Mirabel’s green glasses seem to glow a little in the dim light.
“I’m up,” Bruno croaks, and makes a face at his voice.
“You don’t look too good, tío,” Mirabel says with a frown, and Bruno snorts. He’s pretty sure that’s an understatement. For a moment, he’s tempted not to say anything since Mirabel didn’t exactly ask him what’s the matter, or to tell her that everything is fine, but there have been enough evaded conversations to last him three lifetimes in this family.
He mulls a little on what he wants to say, and then finally sighs and rests his head against the backboard.
“Headache,” is what he settles on.
Mirabel straightens up. “I can bring you something to eat, from mamá?” she offers in a low voice. Bruno shakes his head minutely, and even that is enough to make the room spin a little. He presses his lips together and closes his eyes until things settle again, and when that doesn’t help, leans forward to press his hands into his face, desperate to ground himself. He feels Mirabel hovering closer and manages to wave a hand in her direction.
“Stand down,” he says quietly and takes another deep breath. “I’ll be okay. Vision woke me up, and that usually messes with – “ he gestures at his head.
The bed dips down next to him – Mirabel sat down. After a beat, she says: “Dolores used to get these headaches when she was younger, because of her gift. Mamá’s cooking also didn’t help with these.”
Bruno remembers – Dolores must have been seven or eight at the time, and he wonders who told Mirabel about it since she had really been too young to remember them today. Dolores grew out of them, luckily, or rather learned to focus her gift rather than always hearing a cacophony of everything happening in the town.
“Can I ask…?” Mirabel starts and stops again. Bruno opens his eyes again and the light doesn’t hurt as much as before. He hums lightly and Mirabel continues. “I didn’t know visions hurt you like that.” Her frown deepens. “No, wait, you said that a vision woke you up. But I thought you had to do the whole ritual thing.”
Yet again, Mirabel manages to ask a million questions without really formulating a single one.
“I do the ritual to have a vision. Sometimes, the visions rather seem to have me.” He sits up a little, stills, waits if this makes things worse, and straightens a little when the new position doesn’t send an additional wave of pain straight into his skull. “I had more of these – ah, involuntary visions when I was younger, but with the ritual, they became less and less. Still have one once in a while, though. But they're rare.”
Now that sounds don’t feel like they’re piercing his skull anymore, he reaches out and gently knocks on his nightstand, mumbles his phrases, and taps against his own head so lightly that he doubts that it counts as knocking. He rolls his shoulders and repeats the procedure, this time with a bit more force, and regrets it a little when the pounding in his skull that was retreating until now retraces its steps and settles again in his head.
“Can I bring you anything else?” Mirabel asks, and something in her voice makes Bruno look up again. Her face looks carefully neutral, and Bruno’s heart once again sinks at the thought of when and where Mirabel learned to hide her feelings like that. Despite her efforts, he knows what’s troubling her. Mirabel usually takes to a problem like a duck to water, unrelenting until she finds a way to fix it. Her problem-solving skills are exceptional and in a way that makes total sense to Bruno. Most people in the family try to solve problems one way and one way only, with the help of their gift, and since Mirabel obviously never had that option, she seemed to have turned the concept inside out, being able to see many different approaches.
She doesn’t have an obvious approach to this problem, and Bruno doesn’t really have the heart to tell her that there’s not much to be done, open communication one way or another.
“Maybe a glass of water?” he offers instead and presses his hands on his face again when she quickly leaves.
Now that he thinks about it, he is rather thirsty. He’s lost all feeling of time, but he’s pretty sure he woke up sometime in the undefined space between late night and early morning, the weight of a vision forcing its way into his brain behind his eyelids. Afterward, he couldn’t go back to sleep, caught between his pounding temples and trying to make sense of what he saw, neither helping the other.
Mirabel comes back with the water, and she’s not alone. He has to squint a little to identify the outline standing in the open doorway, but luckily, Agustín’s shape is pretty recognizable. He lingers for a second and only comes closer when Bruno already takes a grateful sip.
“Holá, Bruno,” he says, sounding very much like every morning, and the normality of it makes the corners of Bruno’s mouth rise into something like a smile.
“Holá,” Bruno says and puts down the half empty glass on the nightstand. “I hear I’m missing the last breakfast outside?”
“It’s already a bit too mild for my taste,” Agustín says and comes even closer to stand beside Mirabel, who leans slightly into her father. “And I hear you’re having a vision-headache?”
“Yup.”
“Should I get a book?”
Bruno frowns at that and then has to snort when he sees the same expression on Mirabel’s face. His frown returns, though, when he finally remembers, and he wonders how ten years is enough time to forget these little moments.
“I used to sit with you tío when he got these headaches,” Agustín explains to Mirabel, “and read to him. That’s actually also what we did when Dolores had her headaches so that she could focus on one sound.”
That’s also why he read to Bruno, but he’s kind enough to stop his explanation there. Bruno’s fingers find the frayed edge of his blanket, and he thinks that this is what his mind must look light after a vision like this. That’s how he explained it to Agustín, a long time ago – he only has these threads of the future, and he tries to weave a picture out of them, something that makes sense of the random images he sees, but the longer he tries to come up with something and to understand what he saw, the more he’s running in circles. The more he’s tangling the threads and getting caught in them in the process. The more he worries about what he’s missing and what’s important enough for the visions to force their way into his brain. What he’s not seeing and what could hurt all of them if he doesn’t make sense of it.
He knows that this is not the way the visions work. He remembers how his family had to tiptoe around him for three days when he had a particularly bad headache after an involuntary vision years ago, and all he had seen was the perfectly fine cake Julieta would bake a week later. But knowing that his worry was unfounded did nothing to dissuade them, and so Agustín had suggested reading to him to try and take his mind off the visions.
“That sounds nice,” Bruno manages to say around the sudden lump in his throat, “after you’ve had breakfast, maybe?”
“I can start if you want to, and Papá takes over after breakfast?” Mirabel suggests, and Bruno reaches out to give her hand a squeeze. “Thanks, Mira.”
“Any preferences?”
“Nah, I trust your taste.”
As Mirabel leaves again to look for a good book, Bruno’s eyes meet Agustín’s - or at least, Bruno’s eyes meet Agustín’s glasses, metal frame reflecting the low light. He purses his lips in the direction where Mirabel just took off. “You’ve done a great job as a dad, you know?”
“Yeah,” the other man replies, sounding so fond and proud that Bruno can’t help but feel a bit better, despite the persistent pounding in his head. Suddenly, what he told Mirabel earlier isn't that hard to believe. Maybe he really will be okay.