Flowers for Your Birthday

Oneshot

Just a short little oneshot I wrote in an hour or so. The idea pierced my brain and wouldn't leave me be, so here! One of my first contributions to the Coco fandom. :3

Oh, and it's not edited or anything. So I apologize if it seems rushed or sloppy. Comments feed my soul and keep me from Fading in the afterlife. :)

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There were many things that Imelda Rivera had learned to live with, even in her afterlife. She'd learned to accept the fact that her husband—the only man she'd ever truly loved—had abandoned her and their daughter. She'd learned how to take that rage and fury and hurt and turn it into something productive in her life. She had even learned how to live with the aching loneliness of an empty chair at the dinner table, or the cold spot in her bed.

But no matter how many times she had to do it, she could not handle seeing Héctor again.

When she'd first died and been picked up by her brothers at the Family Reunion building, the possibility of Héctor having already been dead hadn't even crossed her mind. Her brothers hadn't warned her either, though looking back on it they'd likely tried. So when he'd shown up at her doorstep with a wide grin and a bouquet of flowers, she'd been understandably shocked. He'd hardly gotten a sentence out before her fury ignited and all the anger and hurt and loneliness had swiftly ended whatever he'd tried to say.

Looking back on it, she felt awful. At the time she hadn't noticed the shine of hurt in his eyes, the confusion or fear. He'd kept trying to come back... year after year. He gave up after a decade—once she'd started sending Pepita after him. Even still, he always sent flowers on her birthday.

She threw them away, of course. But they were there every year without fail. If she'd stopped to really think about it, that should've been the first sign that something wasn't right. No man who'd abandoned his family would've been so diligent for decades without fail. But eventually he'd learned to respect her wishes. He stopped coming around.

The flowers were her favorites. Always, and without fail. She never understood how he'd gotten them. Flowers didn't grow in the land of the dead. There were some people who collected them from the Land of the Living during Día de los Muertos and brought them back and sold them among the dead, but they were insanely expensive. Even the fact that things didn't rot or go bad in the Land of the Dead didn't affect the horribly insane prices of things like flowers—something one could only find in the Land of the Living.

Perhaps because flowers always mysteriously turned to dust after a year or so unless carefully preserved.

At first she'd thought it was a bribe from him. A show of how successful his career as a musician had been, and a way of trying to justify his leaving them. But when she'd bothered to look into things a little, she had realized that nobody knew any musician or songwriter by the name Héctor.

And whenever she'd glimpse him on the rare occasions that their paths crossed, he was always dressed in rags and entirely barefoot. How a man like that could afford flowers every year was a mystery to her. But that didn't mean she would accept them. No. They'd come from him so obviously they were thrown away on principle alone.

And it was like that that things went on. More family joined them in the Land of the Dead, and Imelda still threw out flowers on her birthday each and every year. If she was running behind on Día de los Muertos, she would even catch a glimpse of Héctor trying to cross the Marigold Bridge without a foto on the ofrenda. She liked to think that she felt a bit of satisfaction in watching him fail in doing so, but there was the strangest churn of guilt that always accompanied that.