Work Text:
1 -MUSIC-
Imelda doesn’t think when she gives Miguel the blessing backstage. She is high off singing and dancing for the first time in nearly a century and as she takes the petal from her great-great- grandson’s bony hand the words come out the same way she’s been saying them all night. It isn’t until later when she’s finally settling into bed that she realizes she kept the “no music” condition on the blessing.
The thought causes her to pause and a bolt of regret shoots through her. Miguel may have agreed to the condition earlier that evening but after reliving the exhilaration of music she wonders how she could have asked the boy to give it up. Imelda spends much of the night thinking about the curse, the blessing, and her late husband resting in a nearby guest room. By morning she has gotten very little sleep but has at least come to the conclusion that Miguel will be okay. Her family has lived generations without music, so it shouldn’t be hard for him to continue that tradition.
She comforts herself with that thought through the day as she periodically checks on Hector and relaxes with her family. After the excitement of Dia de Muertos they are all more than happy to take a couple days to recover and be thankful for one another. It’s later that night as they lounge in the living room that Imelda scolds herself for not realizing how similar Miguel and Hector are. Music runs through their very souls. Try as they might, they can’t resist the urge to tap a beat or hum a tune or run their fingers over the strings of a guitar.
That reminder comes in the form of her 12 year old grandson appearing in the middle of the living room in a burst of marigold petals.
For a moment everyone is in shock. Then Imelda is heaving a sigh as the rest of the family shares concerned glances and a groan or two of exasperation. She doesn’t catch it since she’s moved on to checking Miguel over for exposed bone, but her brothers share a far more mischievous glance, matching smirks stretching across their skulls as they whisper back and forth to each other. All the while Miguel is hastily apologizing and trying to make excuses for whatever he’s done to reignite the curse.
Suddenly Miguel gasps and frantically turns his gaze around the room and Imelda knows almost instantly what he’s looking for. She’s quick to reassure him that Hector is upstairs perfectly intact. His near Final Death experience took a lot of his energy and he has yet to wake up since his last spasm but he still exists, Coco remembered him just in time.
Though anxious about him being back in the Land of the Dead, the Riveras are eager to hear about how Miguel was able to save Coco’s memory. Rosita brings him a warmed concha and he dives into a retelling of waking up in the Land of the Living, sprinting back home with Hector’s photo in one hand and guitar in the other, and rekindling his Mama Coco’s memory of her Papá. Seeing her Papá’s face was just enough to get her to perk back to life and share a memory or two but it didn’t last long and Miguel wanted to hear more of her stories.
In an effort to bring that spark back into her eyes, Miguel came up with the idea of playing her the lullaby Hector used to sing to her. That’s what ended him back among his dead relatives -barely plucked the strings before the curse took hold again. At this point his energy seems to drain as he takes another bite of his pan dulce. It is clear he is disappointed by not being able to play music but he isn’t about to complain after all the trouble from the night before and after finding out he’d saved his great-great-grandfather. For now, he’d count his blessings.
There is a moment of silence as the family takes in the story and Miguel finishes his treat. When done, he tentatively looks up at Imelda. He is so sure he is going to get a scolding that he startles when his grandmother wraps him in a hug and explains that she changed her mind about the music ban. A relieved grin stretches across his face and he wraps his arms around her to return the hug.
After that comes a round of goodbyes, Miguel being passed around for tight embraces and fond kisses. Before leaving he hops upstairs to peak in at his Papá Hector just so he can see with his own eyes that the skeleton is okay. When he joins the rest of his family again, Imelda is waiting in front of the group with a warm smile and a petal pinched between her fingers.
“Miguel, I give you my blessing-”
She stretches the glowing petal towards her grandson.
“-to go home-”
His hand reaches out to meet her halfway.
“-to play music-”
The petal is nearly touching his fingertips.
“-and never-”
“-eat concha again!”
Before Imelda knows what is happening, Oscar’s hand joins her’s on the petal, he adds his condition, and Miguel is gone. And before Oscar knows what is happening his skull is spinning atop his spine, Imelda’s boot the only clear thing in his vision.
Imelda hopes that it doesn’t count, that her brother’s nonsense will be ignored by whatever higher power is in charge of curses, that the next time she sees Miguel will be at the next Dia de Muertos in the Land of the Living not the next time he eats pan dulce.
Imelda’s hopes are in vain.
2 -CONCHAS-
Miguel doesn’t think too much on it when he returns home. He barely caught what his tio said at the very end but he figures it’s nothing to worry about, plus he finally has his blessing to play music so that takes priority in his mind and he plays the lullaby for his Mamá Coco.
As his fingers deftly move across the strings and his voice fills the room, he fails to notice his living family gradually join him inside. The song has the effect he’s looking for and he grins as Mamá Coco perks back up and sings with him. The Riveras gather in the small room to hear more of the elder’s stories, Miguel idly strumming soft cords in the background.
It’s nearly two weeks later that he thinks about his Tio Oscar and what he thinks the man said right before sending him home. The family has been putting sufficient time into research lately to the point that it’s become a regular evening passtime. Tonight is no exception and his tia has decided to treat the family to some pan dulce in celebration of the progress they’ve made to save their grandfather’s songs.
Miguel stares down at it contemplating if it’s safe or not. Little does he know his thoughts follow the same trail as his great-great-grandmother’s a couple weeks previous. He finally gives in when he notices his mamá giving him a strange look. To avoid an interrogation he quickly takes a bite. He gets less than a second to appreciate the sweet treat before a yelp and sound of bones scattering across the ground catches his attention.
Staring at him from atop the table is Hector’s head, mouth agape. From behind him, Miguel catches his Tio Oscar and Tio Felipe bent over in laughter. There’s a rattling as Hector pulls his pieces back together, plucks his head back into place, and tries to figure out what is going on. Before he can ask his questions or even properly greet his grandson, the twins are blabbering away and poking at Miguel.
“I can’t believe it worked!”
“I can’t believe it took so long.”
“And look-”
“-no bone!”
“So what next?”
They continue their banter but Hector has learned to ignore them by now. The yellowed skeleton is more concerned by the emotional show going on on Miguel’s face. The boy went from seemingly sad and annoyed (about what, Hector couldn’t quite figure but it must have something to do with how he was grasping at empty air and glaring at his hand) to elated when he looked back at his grandfather, then settling on full blown panic as he actually took in his surroundings.
“Shoelaces!” the exclamation from Felipe breaks Miguel out of his panic and he turns a glare to his uncles.
“Heeey! I don’t want to appear here the next time I need to tie my shoes!”
“Oh, true, at that rate he’d show up when Imelda is around-”
“-and you know how she hates our games.”
“Ay! I got it! New shoe laces.”
“Good idea, hermano , that should take some time.”
“‘Specially if he avoids the workshop as much as Hector.”
They chuckle to themselves and Hector is slowly putting the pieces together but he still has questions. Beyond the kitchen they hear boots making their way downstairs and the twins bolt into action. Hector thinks they must have been preparing for this moment because Oscar has a handful of marigold petals in his apron and already has one pinched between his fingers, the blessing given with an added, “and never touch a new shoelace again,” before Imelda can round the corner.
Miguel appears back where he was in the Land of the Living but there’s much more chaos than when he left. There’s a minute of silence after the petals settle and he awkwardly looks around the room, meeting the shocked and terrified faces of his living relatives with a sheepish grin of his own. The moment is broken when his parents launch themselves at him. The rest of the family is in a frenzy as they crowd closer to make sure he’s okay, questions bombarding him from all sides.
He tries to reassure them, tries to think up some lie or excuse, something to divert their attention, but basically his entire family has just seen him disappear into thin air and he knows he can’t avoid telling them the truth of what happened on Dia de Muertos.
A heavy sigh leaves him as he mentally prepares for a very long night.
3 -NEW SHOE LACES-
They make a note to keep Miguel away from shoe laces. Fortunately it isn’t very hard since his uncles are right, he doesn’t spend much time in the workshop. He’s actually kind of glad that he has an excuse to not be locked inside to learn how to make shoes. Plus music has been slowly working its way back into the Rivera household so now he gets to spend more time playing his guitar and writing songs.
It lasts almost a month, long enough that the family has nearly forgotten about Miguel vanishing into petals or the possibility of it happening again. And with the recent addition of baby Coco to the household, the curse has slipped from most of their minds.
So when Tio Berto absentmindedly asks someone to hand him shoelaces for a recently finished pair of boots, Abel grabs them from the drawer across the room just as Miguel passes through to grab his shoe shining box. Abel barely thinks when he tosses them to his cousin with a, “heads up, primo !” so the younger of the two can pass it to his tio. Instinct has Miguel stretching an arm to catch the laces but they never make it into his hand, instead they plop to the ground where the boy used to be.
“...oops.”
By the time Miguel returns his abuelita has joined the workshop and is threatening her chancla at her eldest grandson. His parents look like they’re just barely keeping it together and he can’t blame them -he’d been gone longer than expected due to his tios having to hide him from Mamá Imelda, running him around the house as the woman stalked after them in attempt to figure out their shenanigans. They barely got him home before she caught up to them.
“Wait wait wait!! Look! There he is, abuelita, he’s back safe ‘n sound,” Abel ducks as Elena swings herself around, the chancla nearly getting him. When Miguel notices the shoe pointed at himself he flounders and hides behind his papá, eyes barely peeking out between the man’s arm and torso.
The woman’s entire demeanor changes when she sees her grandson and she moves in to envelope him in a comforting embrace. Unfortunately she never gets the chance. The second the chancla, still in her firm grasp, comes even close to Miguel the boy is dodging and dashing to the other side of the room, fearfully eyeing the shoe.
Elena is stunned at first. Her Miguelito has no reason to fear her! She’s not angry at him for being stuck with this curse and disappearing at the mere touch of seemingly random objects. If anything she’s angry at her deceased tios for putting her precious grandson through this trauma. But then she realizes he’s looking at her chancla the same way he’d been looking at new shoe laces for the past few weeks and it dawns on her that he’s not afraid of her, he’s afraid of getting sent back so soon.
Her arm falls to her side as she rubs at the bridge of her nose and asks if it’s just the one kind of shoe or if they need to keep him away from all shoes.
Fortunately it’s just the chanclas.
4 -CHANCLA-
The next time is not an accident, not by a long shot. No, Rosa knows exactly what she’s doing when she slips off her own chancla and chucks it at her cousin. The boy had been getting on her nerves all day and, to be quite honest, the family that had caught onto her ire earlier is surprised she hasn’t chucked the shoe sooner.
Miguel’s only warning is from his Tio Berto calling to him as he dished his most recent jibe at his cousin, “you might want to stay there for a couple hours, mijo. She needs time to cool down.”
The boy sends a confused look over his shoulder at his uncle, his mouth open to ask what the man means. He never gets the chance as the air is knocked out of him and he keels over, knees hitting a familiar but different tiled floor, arms wrapping around his stomach, and gasping for air.
In a second Rosita is by his side, rubbing his back comfortingly and asking what happened. It doesn’t take long for Oscar and Felipe to show up, the pair unable to hide their amusement at the situation. They help him up and Oscar retrieves a petal from his apron pocket. Before his tios can agree on what he’s banned from this time, Miguel snatches the petal and crumbles it. An apology slips passed his lips with a brief explanation of why he can’t go back yet.
It’s easy to get the present family to agree to let him stay a while. So far there hasn’t been any negative effects from him visiting the Land of the Dead (not counting, of course, the entire living and deceased family getting a little more annoyed each time this happens) and they conclude a couple hours should be safe, though Papá Julio ensures that at the first sign of bone his grandson will be sent home, no exceptions.
It doesn’t take Miguel long to hunt down Papá Hector’s guitar and he takes the time to play for his family, having remembered that many of them hadn’t actually heard him play before. Soon they’re sharing stories of what’s happened since Dia de Muertos, how Imelda and Hector have finally started acting like their old selves together (part of the reason they’re out of the house this afternoon, to have some time away from everyone else), how Miguel sings to baby Coco every night before bed, and how they’ve finally found someone to authenticate the letters Hector sent home as well as all the other evidence they found to prove Ernesto stole Hector’s songs.
“ What is going on here.”
Imelda’s entrance into the room is sudden and her tone is dangerous. In a flash her boot has knocked Oscar to the ground, leaving Felipe to scramble to grab a petal from his own apron, the tiny thing barely kept in his shaking grasp. He doesn’t have time to remember all the discussions he’s shared with his brother about objects to use in their blessings to their nephew, his mind is too panicked as he dodges his sister’s other boot and the blessing is rushed out in less than two seconds.
“Miguel I give you my blessing -ah!- andstayawayfromforks!!”
Imelda has gathered her boots, one in hand and the other back on her foot, and is reprimanding her brothers. Victoria, Rosita, and Julio escape the first chance they get, all of them hoping the matriarch’s anger will be used up on her brothers before she comes to reprimand them for not sending Miguel home themselves. Hector desperately tries to bargain with his wife, calm her down, give his brothers-in-law time to either explain themselves or run.
5 -FORK-
All Miguel can think is that his uncles are idiots and did Felipe really have to choose the first object he saw? Was there really nothing else for him to choose from? Maybe something just a tad bit easier to stay away from?
It’s been hard to avoid forks, especially since he never actually got around to telling his living family. Apparently a few hours was not enough time for Rosa to calm down, or maybe it was and the sight of him just ignited the flames because he was instantly forced out of the house by her and he spent the next couple hours in Mariachi Plaza.
By the time he got back for supper he was so hungry he forgot to bring it up and it’d been long enough since his reappearance that the rest of his family had forgotten as well. It was pure luck that he didn’t need a fork for supper.
When the issue came up the next morning, he remembered at the last minute, just as he went to grab his fork, what Felipe had banished him from. He paused to look around the table at his family and a feeling of guilt plopped into his gut. His family had done so much to help him work around his curse recently, he shouldn’t worry them with yet another weird condition.
So for days he’s just been avoiding forks on his own. It’s been easy enough considering spoons work just as well and no one’s really paying attention to how he eats his food. And honestly Miguel’s starting to wonder why he hadn’t been using spoons earlier, they’re so much better at scooping more food into his mouth. But just as with the conchas it’s his mamá that notices his weird behavior first.
“Miguel, why are you using a spoon?” The question catches the interest of his nearest family members and now their attention is on him. He halts, spoon halfway to his mouth as he makes eye contact with his mamá.
“Oh, uhm… n-no reason?” Her brows lower, threatening a full on glare if her son refuses to tell the truth again. He sinks lower in his seat as he tries to think of an excuse but he finds he doesn’t need one when Rosa waves a fork towards him with a smirk and he flinches as if the utensil is going to bite his soul out.
Elena slams her hands onto the table startling anyone that wasn’t already focused on the conversation.“That is it! My poor grandson can’t even enjoy a meal without having to worry about being whisked off to the Land of the Dead!”
Abuelita continues her rage as she hobbles out of the room, her voice becoming muffled beyond the walls. Drawers and cabinet doors slamming open then shut echo through the house. Soon the woman returns with a folded piece of paper and a fork. She marches up to Miguel and says, “give this to those troublemaking tios . I may not be able to pass the message myself but this should get the point across. Teach them to terrorize mi pobre dulce nieto!”
She peppers him with half a dozen kisses, pats his cheek and wraps his hand around the note. With one last kiss she uses the fork to send him to their deceased family. Miguel isn’t even phased by the transition anymore. He appears in the seat next to Papá Hector, blinking away the light from the fading petals, and looks straight at his tios across the table.
Wordlessly Miguel hands the note to the brothers.
Hector offers him his own plate and Miguel accepts a bite of tamale, but nothing more since he doubts he’ll be there long. The skeleton ruffles the boy’s hair as Oscar and Felipe finish reading the note. If they still had flesh, their skin would be pale as a sheet.
No one has dared to break the silence since Miguel’s appearance and no one does as Oscar slips a petal out of his pocket and sheepishly hands it to Hector. Absentmindedly Miguel thinks that he should take advantage of these last moments in the Land of the Dead. If all goes according to plan, this should be his last visit until he dies, so maybe he should linger awhile longer.
On the other hand, he’ll have an eternity with them when he does return. He can be content with the fact that he was able to see them a couple more times, know that his Papá Hector is okay, reassure them that he’s doing everything in his power to keep his papá’s memory alive.
“Ay, chin up, chamaco. We’ll see you next Dia de Muertos, eh!” Hector promises as he wraps an arm around his grandson’s shoulders. Miguel smiles up at him, then to the rest of his family. It seems to click with the rest of them in that moment that this will be the last time in a long while that they’ll get to interact with Miguel. They each make their way over to him showering him in kisses, hugs, and farewells.
Finally Hector pulls the boy into his arms, giving him the type of hug Miguel imagines he’ll give Mamá Coco when the elderly woman finally passes into the Land of the Dead. With one last kiss to the boy’s forehead, Hector gives his blessing, no conditions.
In a flurry of marigold petals, the faces of his deceased family are replaced by those of his living family. His Abuelita is still standing beside him and he looks up to her with a sad grin. Understanding flashes in her eyes as she pulls him tight to her chest, “no more conditions, mijo ?”
“No more conditions, abuelita,” he assures as he returns her embrace.
6 -SIDE EFFECTS-
Mamá Coco has been dead for just over two weeks.
In that time the family has slowly adjusted to their eldest member being gone. Elena and Miguel, the two that interacted with the woman the most in her final years, are hit the hardest. They catch themselves turning to speak to empty space, reaching for a wheelchair that isn’t there, prepping food and snacks for one extra person. They are comforted in knowing that Mamá Coco is safe with their deceased family and that they will always have one another to turn to when the grief becomes too much, but that does little to stifle the pain of losing a loved one.
It’s during the hustle and bustle of one morning that Miguel finds himself stopping in the middle of a hallway, gaze caught by a more recent photo of his Mamá Coco. He hardly registers his cousins brushing by him on their way to breakfast or his tia and mamá heading the other way to rouse the younger members of the family.
Gently his fingers brush over the glass and frame and he thinks, I wish I could visit her, see that she made it to her papá, give her a hug and tell her how much I miss her. His eyes slip closed as he imagines being wrapped in her shawl, hearing her say-
“ Mijo , what are you doing here?”
Miguel’s eyes snap open and he ever so slowly turns to look behind him. There stands his great grandmother decked out in nearly the same outfit, the same braids, the same deep brown eyes that he’d last seen her with. In an instant he’s wrapping his arms around her, tears streaming down his cheeks, barely held back sobs shaking his shoulders. Suddenly the pain is just as fresh as the first day after her death.
This is how Hector finds them minutes later, Miguel's tears finally slowing enough for him to pull back and send a smile to his great-great-grandfather. It’s clear Hector has many questions, the main one being how did Miguel get here? But he knows he won’t be the only one with questions and ushers the pair into the dining room where the rest of the family is coming together for breakfast. The sense of deja vu reminds Miguel that his living family is doing the exact same thing right now and he wonders if any of them saw him disappear this time.
Shock runs through the room when he enters. All at once they are expressing their concern for him, their exasperation at this happening yet again, and blame to Oscar and Felipe for any involvement they may have had in this. When it becomes apparent that there’s no clear explanation for the situation and a family blessing can’t send the boy home, Imelda declares they will take a trip to the Department of Family Reunions after breakfast.
Upon arrival they manage to meet with the same short man they’d met quite a few months earlier. They end up sitting there for hours as the clerk digs through files and books in hopes of finding a solution or some kind of similar occurrence in history. To pass the time Miguel catches his family up on what’s happened since his last visit and how their living counterparts are adjusting to Mamá Coco being gone. Throughout the trip he stays within arm’s reach of his grandmother.
Eventually the clerk comes back with a list of possible ways to get Miguel home, mostly ways to break a curse, but in the end they all fail to do the trick. The only thing keeping them from full blown panic is the fact that Miguel’s bones are nowhere to be seen and he’s not showing any other signs of becoming a permanent resident of the Land of the Dead.
At the news that the clerk has run out of ideas and explanations, Imelda’s frustration begins to show. Though she hasn’t reached for her boot yet her fists are clenched and it’s obvious she’s close to giving into the urge as she turns to her brothers to reprimand them for messing with their boy’s curse and possibly making it worse.
Since revealing his lack of explanation the clerk has hung back at the edge of the group, but the new information regarding the curse piques his interest. He creeps closer to the center of the group where Imelda and Hector are. He’s about to take another step towards the matriarch of the family before deciding maybe Hector is the safer option right now.
“Ah, Señor? What does she mean they messed with the curse?”
Hector’s eyes widen and he realizes they never shared that part -they were more concerned with finding a way to get Miguel home. With a nervous chuckle, the skeleton proceeds to update the clerk on the twins’ game the first few months after Dia de Muertos. Word by word the clerk’s demeanor becomes more relaxed, as if a weight has been lifted off him. By the end he’s grinning and reassuring Hector that he thinks he finally understands. He gets confirmation from Miguel that his current visit happened after longing for one of his dead relatives and the short man seems downright giddy now.
By this point, Imelda, Oscar, and Felipe have tuned into the discussion and the clerk explains.
“You see it is actually very simple. Your boy here, Miguel, has simply gained a new ability!”
The Rivera’s give him strange looks. They had hoped his explanation would clear some things up rather than leave them with more questions than before. The clerk is already at his desk searching for a specific set of files when Imelda gathers her witts and dangerously marches over to him.
“What do you mean new ability ? Are you saying this is normal ? And that does not explain how to get him back to the Land of the Living!”
“Weeell I wouldn’t say normal, but there are similar situations. It’s been quite a few decades since the last case and I don’t recall any being quite this extreme, but it isn’t uncommon for individuals to develop, shall we say, supernatural abilities.” The clerk pulls a chunk of files from near the bottom of a stack in the corner of his office and swings it onto his desk. A few flips of paperclipped papers later and he seems to find what he wants. “Most people simply gain the ability to see or communicate with ghosts, maybe even see the bridge on Dia de Muertos.” He pulls out some specific examples and sets them in front of Imelda for her to glance over.
“I was going to warn you come next Dia de Muertos that Miguel might still be able to see and talk to you -a lingering effect of the curse he was under. But seeing as he’s been traveling back and forth between realms quite frequently it is to be expected that would have an even stronger effect on him.”
“All right,” Imelda looks the clerk straight in the eyes and continues, punctuating each word, “so how do we send Miguel home? ”
“Oh! That should be easy! Miguel can send himself home.”
“Wait! So I’ve been able to go home this entire time!” Miguel pops his head around Mamá Imelde, his eyebrows quirked. “Aw man, mamá is going to kill me. Abuelita, too!” He buries his face in his hands and groans as he imagines the scolding he’s going to get when he gets back.
“‘ey, so does this mean he can come here whenever? Without consequences?” Hector asks.
“Sí!” The clerk cheerily replies. “I mean, don’t push it, but he should be just fine visiting whenever he desires. But maybe avoid staying for more than, eh, 24 hours, ya know? Just to be safe,” he adds a wink at the end and grins at the family.
“Okay, sooo how do I get back home?” Miguel looks up to his Mamá Imelda, then to the clerk.
“You got here by thinking of your deceased abuelita, sí?” He asks as he gestures to the woman in question. Miguel nods. “So! You just need to do whatever you did before, but while thinking about a living relative and you should be good to go.”
“Uh, okay then.” Miguel closes his eyes and runs through a mental list of his living relatives. He needs to think of someone he knows will be home just in case he shows up right next to them. As funny as it would be to scare his cousins at school, it wouldn’t be so fun trying to explain to his classmates how he appeared out of nowhere. It doesn’t take him long to settle on his baby sister -it’s just after lunch so she’s probably already been laid down for her nap.
He can see her clearly in his mind. She’s wearing a light onesie with little flowers and vines embroidered on it, her eyelashes flutter as she dreams, chest gently rising and falling. When Miguel opens his eyes, Coco is right where he’d imagined her but now she’s very much real and his hand grazes across her forehead, lightly brushing her bangs away. He lovingly smiles down at her.
Now that he’s home he can actually think about what the clerk said minutes before. His smile widens when he realizes he can willingly travel between the living and dead realms, now. No more adding weird conditions to curses or waiting till Dia de Muertos. Whenever he wants he can visit his family, play beside his Papá Hector, talk to his Mamá Coco.
Miguel has to hold in his excited grito due to his sister napping, but he does throw up his arms and dances a happy dance before reigning himself in to deliver a gentle kiss to Coco’s forehead and run out of the room to share the good news with his living family.