Bruno Madrigal Oneshots

You Try to Stop it Toppling, but On and On it Goes

By CakeBeDamned on Ao3

Warnings: none (idk man correct me if I'm wrong)

Summary: Long before casita breaks, Bruno does.

The first week after Bruno left was a disaster in the casa Madrigal, and that was probably Bruno’s fault. Most things, these days, seemed to be Bruno’s fault. He didn’t need anyone to tell him so to know. Which was part of why he had gone into the walls to begin with. If Bruno couldn’t help his family, he could at least avoid causing more problems for them. It didn’t seem to matter what he did, how hard he tried or how good his intentions were. Everything always twisted on itself and ended up making things worse. 

When his oldest nieces had been born, Bruno had known almost nothing about babies. But Isabela and Dolores had been born only months apart, and while they were easy babies (as these things go), both of Bruno’s sisters had been overwhelmed. Félix and Agustín were, of course, as helpful as could be, and Bruno’s mamá of course was almost frighteningly competent with the babies, but Bruno was the only one out of all of them who…didn’t have someplace else to be. Julieta couldn’t stop cooking for the town, Pepa couldn’t let her exhaustion get the better of her and lose control of her weather. Agustín was happy to help, but remained as accident-prone as ever, and Félix bore up admirably under the strain, but had to help Pepa manage her moods as well as help look after the new baby. Bruno had to give an occasional vision, but to his delight, he discovered that holding a sleeping baby made people think twice about asking him to look into their futures. They’d fall silent, afraid to wake the baby, and give him a conspiratorial grin like he was actually one of them. He wasn’t sure what constituted ‘them,’ whether it was that he seemed more in place among the family, or just that looking after a baby was a universally understood task, but it was refreshing to have people smile at him again. People who asked him for visions were usually so nervous he kept a basket of Julieta’s arepas on hand in his vision cave just to keep people’s stomachs settled. And when he went into town, he’d usually be on the receiving end of a lot of grimacing and whispering–all those awful visions coming home to roost where he’d inadvertently planted them. 

But Bruno didn’t have to be a harbinger much that year. Instead, he changed a lot of diapers. He spent a lot of time washing tiny clothing, picking up the thankless tasks that always needed doing, so that his sisters and their husbands could sleep. And although he didn’t get any more sleep than he normally did, he slept better when he did get to rest. 

For once, Bruno hadn’t had to wonder what his role in the family was. He’d helped. He’d made his sisters and his mamá smile. He’d made faces at the babies until they dissolved into completely out of proportion peals of laughter, and on more than one occasion he’d woken to the sound of a screaming child, shuffled to Pepa’s room, and been handed a tiny, shrieking Dolores with a quiet apology. He’d walked around and around casita until the baby quieted, talking quiet nonsense to her the whole time. Isabela rarely cried like that, but there were a not-insignificant number of mornings that dawned on casita to find Bruno with a baby fast asleep against his chest. Occasionally, he and Agustín would make a pair. Sometimes it was him and Félix. On a few memorable occasions, it had been him and his mamá, watching the sunrise with a pair of sleeping infants. And while tío hadn’t been anyone’s first word, it had been Dolores’s third. Bruno was quite certain he could die a happy man.   

It wasn’t until Luisa was born that the trouble started. Dolores and Isabela had been three by then, and Luisa was colicky. The whole household ran ragged trying to keep the peace, keep helping the community, and keep themselves from going entirely insane. Bruno devised silly pantomimes to keep the two older girls occupied–both of them brutally early risers–and it seemed like he wore a track in casita’s tiles trying to keep Luisa asleep. For months and months it seemed like she would only sleep in someone’s arms, and only if they were in motion. When it became clear that no single person could handle the duty of keeping her asleep, the adults took turns at it. Bruno’s turn usually came after Félix’s, and no matter how gently Félix handed her off, she would always wake up and start crying again when she was passed off. Félix would offer Bruno an apologetic wince, and took to simply bringing him coffee when he brought in Luisa. Félix’s coffee wasn’t quite as good as Julieta’s cooking, but it was surprisingly close, especially on those mornings where the moon hadn’t set yet and the sun wouldn’t creep over the horizon for hours.