#Im straight up story-boarding an animatic for Ernesto to this song

[im-fairly-whitty]

For Whom the Bell Tolls

Ernesto Strikes Back: A Coco Fan Fiction

[Part 1: Fallen]  [Part 2: Anger]  [Part 3:Cursed]  

[Part 4: Doubt]  [Part 5: Remembering]

Part 6: Empty

The house where Ernesto had grown up looked...smaller than he remembered.

He stood on the street across from the courtyard entrance. Everything was so old and worn looking, but the brooding sense of doom he remembered so well was gone.

Two parents followed a little boy who came prancing out from the gate with an armful of long-stemmed marigolds. A chuckling pair of dead relatives followed the young family as they set off in the direction of the Santa Cecilia cemetery.

“Why are we at the Santiago’s house?” Miguel asked.

“You know this place?” Ernesto looked down at him. So it still belonged to the family.

“Well not really, but my papá knows Luis, he delivers our leather for the shop.” Miguel pointed at the father of the receding family as they walked away.

“This is where I grew up.” Ernesto pushed Miguel forward now that the family was gone.

“But, you’re a De la cruz.” Miguel said in confusion.

“Only because I didn’t want to be a Santiago.” Ernesto said coldly. “My father threw me out when I told him I was going to be a musician. After he broke my arm.”

“He what?” Miguel eyes were wide as they walked through the archway.

“My family rejected me. That is why the world was my family.” Ernesto said, lingering on the word was .

He'd found a last kernel of anger to hold onto, a last shred of identity. Ernesto not Santiago. He hadn’t realized how close to his core that anger was until everything else had been stripped away. He gladly held onto it, the very last thin ledge over the abyss that he could still cling to.

The courtyard was empty of any of the dead who might see them, a few living people were gathering up baskets of food and candles, apparently also on their way to the cemetery. Just as well, seeing smiling people in this dark place was jarring. Recognizing familiar facial features, a tia’s smile here, a papá’s nose there, was starting to shake him.

The strewn marigold petals underfoot painted a bright path across the courtyard to an open doorway. An ofrenda room. Ernesto looked over to see that Miguel was starting to fumble with the tin box, losing his grip as the last of the curse descended on him.

“Go.” Ernesto ordered, pushing him to the open doorway. As long as he was here to end everything he might as well do it in the absolute center of irony.

The marigolds underfoot felt like they were pulling him forward, but it was probably just the vertigo of impending damnation as he walked into the room.

He ducked into the room and was greeted by the sight of an ofrenda being straightened by a mother and young daughter. It was a smaller ofrenda than the Rivera’s and had more purples and blues with striped cloth hanging under and around it. There were the same candles though, and a small collection of framed portraits. It looked familiar for some reason, despite looking nothing like the small ofrenda he remembered his mother putting up every year.

At the very top sat a large, framed black-and-white photo of his parents, looking quite grim together and much older than the day he’d been thrown out. He’d never even tried coming back.

Beside him Miguel gently set down the tin box, his fingers passing through it at the last second, causing it to clink against the tile. The two living people didn’t seem to notice though.

“But why is Alejandro on the ofrenda, Mamá?” The little girl asked, she was pointing to a small framed photo on the side.

“Don’t be silly, that’s not your cousin, it’s just one of our ancestors who looks like him.” The mother picked up the girl so that she could look closer. “You know how pictures of Abuelita when she was my age kind of look like me? It’s like that. We’re all connected because we’re family."

Ernesto couldn’t help scoffing. What an appallingly sweet sentiment. Yes, you were all connected, until someone severed the connection. They probably also thought that everyone on the ofrenda were good people. Dying didn’t make you perfect, it just blurred out the bad memories if you waited long enough.

“Then who is he?” The girl leaned forward to squint at the picture.

“Oh, let’s see, I think his name was...” She frowned and took the portrait off the ofrenda to check the back. She smiled and nodded, carefully replacing the portrait. “That’s right, this is your great-great-tio Ernesto, that’s who your papá is named after.”

Ernesto’s breath caught with a sick, jagged feeling. Everything suddenly felt very fragile and brittle, like if he moved or even thought too quickly the entire world would shatter.

“But he’s not old.” The little girl said, looking at the other pictures to compare.

“Yes mija, he and his papá didn’t get along very well, so he ended up leaving when he was young. This was probably the last photo of him they had. His papá was very angry with him, but his mamá still loved him very much. She always made everyone promise to keep his photo on the ofrenda after the papá died because she wanted so much for him to come someday.”

“Did he come back?” The little girl asked.

“I don’t know mija.” The mother said, gazing at the picture. “I think he probably did, his mamá loved him so much.”

“I would come back.” The little girl wrapped her chubby arms around her mother’s neck.

“Oh, good.” The mother smiled and hugged her. “Let’s go help Abuelita carry some flowers alright?”

“Yes!” The little girl cheered as they walked out of the room, leaving Ernesto and Miguel alone with the flickering light of the candles.

After a long moment Ernesto walked forward, pushing through something that felt very solid, but that might have just been overwhelming pain.

There on the side of the ofrenda, an ofrenda he'd recognized from clicking past it earlier that night in Carlos’ office, was an old sepia photograph of a smiling young man. Of himself. Only months before leaving town with Hector, a few weeks before being thrown out by his father.

He dropped to his knees.

He had never come back.

He had never even tried.

The last foothold, the last kernel of identity inside him blew away into dust. After all this time there had been a home waiting for him, his family had gone on being family, he’d been the one to remove himself.

His mother, his quiet and shy mother had held out for him for years, even after she'd heard of his death. Had she followed his career? Had she known that he’d become famous? His father wouldn’t have cared, but she might have. His name had changed, but his face hadn’t. Had she seen it one day on a poster or in a newspaper or in a movie and realized where her runaway son had been all those years?

He had still been part of her family. He’d been part of these living Santiago’s family too, never ever realizing it, his partial story passed down for generations. The story of the son that had disappeared, that had never come back.

How had he ever believed in his own glowing facade, “De la Cruz,” a name he’d chosen as a boy under a pine tree for the future impressive man he dreamed of someday being. It had been such a sweet-tasting lie, a stolen identity, a cover-up. He’d never let himself think about the gaping hole in his soul, instead heaping layers of justification into it for literal generations as it slowly ate away at him year by year, until he was the kind of person who would sacrifice anything, anyone, to feed the growing emptiness inside.

And after all that effort, all those lies and self-deceptions, here he was, in his old home. Feeling even smaller and more broken than he ever had as a child.

And it was all his fault.

“You can go.”

“What?” Miguel asked, still standing frozen behind him.

“Go.”

There was a dashing scuffle towards the door and the boy was gone. Back to his family. Where he should be.

A long moment of flickering candles passed, the soft light reflecting across the glass of the picture frames.

Ernesto reached around behind him and picked up the tin box, the object blurring into two, leaving him with a spirit copy of it to hold. He stared at the corroded metal, then made himself open it, prying the rusted lid off.

Inside was the journal. The journal with so much pain woven into its pages that he’d never wanted to see it again, but with so much of himself in it that he hadn’t been able to destroy it.

He closed his eyes for a moment, then forced them open and forced his hand to open the journal as well. He flipped through it deliberately, slowly, letting each page inflict every bit of pain that it contained, letting it gut him, line by line.

Childlike scrawl in the beginning, words of songs no one had ever heard. After all, Papá had always said every song he wrote was trash. Then there were pages and pages of teenage lists of dreams, big dreams that someone else could someday accomplish, someone larger than life, an imaginary man called De la Cruz.

And far at the back was the final, the damning entry. The one that had made the book too dangerous to handle, too terrible to keep, too raw to discard. The entry that had been Ernesto ripping out his own heart to bury under a pine.

It had to be done.

A shaky and hurried pen had scrawled the words a hundred years ago.

Everything was falling apart and it just, happened. Hector is gone, he’s gone and there’s nothing I can do now, if I look back I’ll burn up. I can still feel him in the room with me and it’s This has to be a beginning, I’ve gone too far, I have to be De La Cruz now. This is my moment.

And there it was.

This last bit of poison dripped into Ernesto and he let the book drop to the floor.

His younger self had feverishly returned to Santa Cecilia only a week later to bury the book during the night, then disappear before anyone even knew he’d been there. Maybe he had foolishly hoped that it if he kept it far away that it would somehow wither and die on its own, taking what he’d done with it.

Ernesto was no one. Not De la Cruz, not Santiago.

No last name, no fame, no fortune, no friends, no family. He’d had bright counterfeits of many of those thing for a long time, but only because he’d become a fake himself.

This invisible and terrible weight bent him forward. He put his hands on the tile, trying to brace himself, but he continued to bend, collapsing until his fractured skull touched his hands, clasped together in an empty prayer, alone at the foot of the ofrenda.

A long moment of silence stretched through the emptiness inside him. Even the passage of time felt heavy, pressing down on the empty shell that was left of him.

He was nothing, and even that was too much.

He had forgotten himself more than a hundred years ago, and that was why he had always felt dead inside.

[Read Part 7]

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Recommended listening for this chapter is "I took a pill in Ibiza" by Mike Posner [clean edit] for maximum Ernesto regret feels:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nYSIK4jpyVA

You're welcome. ;)

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@nerdy-emo-royal-dad @elecmon @memberofthatonefandom @smileyphantomstar @tamlins-stories-and-poems