Chapter Text
Chapter 1 — The Gift and the Weight
The first thing Pepa remembered, about that day, was the colour of the dress.
Yellow — canary yellow, with a little white trim at the collar that Abuela had ironed three times that morning because it kept folding over, and she had kept at it until it lay perfectly flat. Pepa remembered staring at that collar and thinking it looked like the edge of a cake. She remembered almost laughing.
She was five years old. She didn't know yet what was about to happen.
-000-
Nearly nine years had passed.
Sitting on the edge of the fountain at the centre of the Casita's courtyard, feet not quite reaching the ground, hands wrapped around a blade of grass she kept pulling up and dropping without noticing, Pepa stared at the mid-afternoon sky with the expression of someone trying to convince herself that everything was fine.
The sky, for its part, seemed undecided.
There was sun — of course there was sun, it was May, the mountains around Encanto gathered light like cupped palms — but in the left-hand corner of the small cloud floating directly above Pepa's head, something grey was gathering, faint and barely there. Like an idea that hasn't yet decided to become a thought.
"You've been staring at nothing for twenty minutes," said Julieta from the doorway.
"I'm thinking."
"With your brow that furrowed?"
Pepa twisted her mouth, managing a tired smile.
"It's how I think."
Julieta crossed the courtyard with her unhurried stride — she had that quality, her sister, that ability to fill space without disturbing anything — and sat down beside her on the fountain's edge. She was still wearing her kitchen apron. There were traces of cooking on her face too, but she didn't seem to know it.
"Julieta?"
"Mmh."
"You have a flour smudge on your ear."
"I know."
Pepa let out a small laugh.
"And you're not going to wipe it off?"
"Later." She turned to look at her. A slightly more serious tone. "How are you, Pepa?"
It was a simple question. Three words. And yet Pepa felt something contract in her chest, small and uncomfortable as a fruit stone, because the honest answer was long and complicated and would have required arranging words into an order she still couldn't find — and so what came out instead was:
"Fine."
The cloud above her darkened, imperceptibly, by half a shade. A breath of wind rose, moving light and invisible between the walls of the house, ruffling her fair curls and the folds of her skirt.
Julieta looked at her. Said nothing. Then lowered her eyes to the blade of grass between Pepa's fingers — the third in twenty minutes; she had been counting — and didn't comment on that either.
It had always been her form of kindness: not to push further, but to be quietly present for everyone.
-000-
On the day of the gift, none of the three knew quite what to expect.
That was the difference, thinking back on it now: there was no story before them. No older sibling who had already climbed those steps, no cousin with a gift to use as a reference point, no whispered rumours circulating among the village children about what it felt like to touch the door of the Casita. They were the first. They were alone in that specific way one is alone when facing something that doesn't yet have a name.
Pepa remembered little, and what she did remember had the soft, warm texture of dreams: the courtyard full of people, the adults impossibly tall, the mingled scent of flowers and food, Abuela Alma watching her with an expression she couldn't read at the time and would only learn to recognise much later as restrained hope.
She remembered Bruno's hand in hers — sweaty, as small as her own, gripping with a force out of proportion for a five-year-old.
"Will it hurt?" he had asked under his breath, before they climbed the steps.
"I don't know," she had answered, trying to reassure him. "I don't think so."
"Me neither." A pause. "But I don't know."
Julieta, on her other side, had said nothing. She had simply drawn a slow breath, tugged up the collar of her dress — identical to Pepa's, canary yellow, with the white trim — and stepped forward as though she were simply deciding to go.
Pepa had watched her sister's back and thought: I want to be like her when I'm grown up.
She was only five. She didn't know yet that growing up happens in ways you don't expect.
What she remembered of the moment itself was even less: the surface of the door beneath her fingers, smooth and warm as though the wood had held the whole day's sun inside it. A sensation that began in her palm and travelled up her arm — not painful, just different, like touching something electric and feeling your entire skin become aware of itself all at once.
And then the sky.
She couldn't describe it better than that, even now, even with nearly nine years between them: the sky had changed, and she had been the reason. Saturated orange, full, impossible — and then the wind, and then the voices of the people around her, and then Alma pressing a hand to her cheek with that precision she had for moments that mattered.
Pepa remembered looking down at her own open hands and not quite recognising them. As though they had become something else in the time it took to breathe.
Then Bruno sneezed — the worst possible moment, a sharp, loud crack in the middle of solemn silence — and Pepa laughed, and the sky turned blue again, and everything became a celebration.
It was easier to laugh at that age.
-000-
She was nearly fourteen now, and the sky above her was not something that could be taken so lightly.
She understood it better these days than she had at ten, at eleven, even at twelve — those years when the gift had still been a fairly simple thing to manage, when emotions had been fairly simple things to manage, when the sun and the rain had followed feelings that had a name and a fixed duration: happiness, boredom, excitement for the village festival, sadness when she had scraped her knee falling off the garden wall.
Things that lasted an hour. Things that passed.
Now the emotions had stopped passing so easily. They had grown denser, more layered, harder to separate from one another — arriving in strange combinations, joy and melancholy in the same afternoon, irritation and tenderness so close together they seemed like the same thing, nostalgia for moments still happening that she already felt slipping through her fingers without being able to explain why.
And the sky followed all of them. Without exception. Without discretion.
The problem — she had understood it gradually, with the uncomfortable slowness of things one would rather not understand — wasn't the gift itself.
The problem was that feelings didn't wait to be ready.
They arrived whenever they pleased: at the family lunch table, while she was helping at the market, in the middle of a perfectly ordinary conversation about what to have for dinner. They arrived small and slippery, unannounced, and before Pepa could catch them they were already out, already in the sky, already visible to anyone who thought to look up.
She had never understood, before, how much her emotions had been hers. Private. How they had lived in an interior space that belonged only to her, that no one could see unless she chose to show it.
That space no longer existed.
Or rather — it still existed, but it had stopped having walls.
Every feeling was already public before she had understood it herself. Every nuance, every hesitation, every moment of confusion or boredom or mild embarrassment wrote itself above her like a marginal note penned by someone else — visible to all, impossible to erase.
This, she had come to understand over time, was the strangest thing about the gift.
Not the grandeur. Not the July sun summoned in January, not the storm that could rise in five minutes. That part was spectacular, yes — that was the part that made people look at her wide-eyed and say what a miracle and press her hands between theirs. That part was large enough to be honoured as such, visible enough to be held apart from her — as something she had, not something she was.
The hard part was everything else. The sandal strap that wouldn't thread through the buckle. The dull afternoon. The small irritation at the market when someone stepped on her foot and didn't apologise — and there came the wind rising between the stalls, scattering the merchandise, and there was Señora Vargas lifting her eyes to the sky with that expression — not angry, worse: resigned — as though this were simply something that happened, something one simply had to get used to.
Like bad weather. Like the rainy season.
Like something that didn't depend on anyone in particular.
-000-
"Stop pulling up the grass," said Julieta.
Pepa looked at her fingers, nails still dirty with earth. She was holding what remained of the fourth blade of grass. She didn't remember picking it up.
"I didn't notice."
"I know." Julieta stood, stretched her back with a small grimace, stood for a moment looking at the fountain. The water made its round, continuous sound. "Mamá said we're all having dinner together tonight."
"Good."
Julieta hesitated — just barely, the length of a breath — then added:
"She said Don Aurelio will be there. The one who manages the fields in the upper part of the village."
Pepa looked up.
"Why is he coming to dinner?"
"I don't know." But the way she said it — flat, careful, without inflection — meant that perhaps she did know, or at least suspected, and was waiting for Pepa to work it out herself.
It didn't take long.
Don Aurelio had been coming often lately. He came with the same frequency with which talk arose, in Abuela's conversations with the other families, about droughts and harvests and how useful it would be to count on someone who could bring the rain when needed, and the sun when that was needed instead. Reliably. Under control.
Pepa sat still for a moment. Then she looked again at the cloud above her — still there, that small grey obstinate thing — and said nothing.
She drew a breath, brief but enough to take back hold of her body.
"I'll be there," she answered at last.
Julieta nodded. Added nothing. It was her form of kindness, Pepa told herself — but sometimes that kindness had the exact shape of something neither of them wanted to say out loud.
-000-
That night, in bed, while Julieta slept with her steady breathing and the Casita made its nocturnal sounds of wood and stone settling, Pepa lay awake staring at the ceiling.
Eleven beams. She had counted them so many times by now that she counted them without meaning to, the way one breathes.
Outside the window, the sky above Encanto was full of stars — that particular density of mountain nights, where the air is thin and clean and the stars have no artificial light to fight against. The same sky as always. The same one she had looked at all her life, from the same window, with the same eyes.
Except that now that sky looked back.
She tried to do what Abuela had taught her in the early years — breathe, find the centre, keep your feelings within their boundaries — and managed well enough to hold the cloud still above the Casita instead of letting it grow. That was progress. One of those things that could be called progress if you looked at it a certain way.
She thought about the canary-yellow dress. The collar ironed three times. Bruno's hand in hers, sweaty and small. Julieta stepping forward as if she were simply deciding to go.
How simple it had been, then, not knowing what was coming.
Now she knew. Or she was learning. And learning, she was finding out, was a far messier thing than the stories made it sound.
She turned onto her side. The Casita creaked softly, in the way she had learned to recognise as reassurance.
"I know," — she murmured, to the dark. "I'll try."
The sky outside the window remained still.
For now, that was enough.