Chapter Text
The world was cruel.
It was a fact that Antón himself knew innately well, really. The world took a boy with a decent father, an adoring mother, and a sweet sister and tore that world apart when he was only thirteen. The Revolution of ‘67 took his father, weakened his sister, and threw him into fifteen years of slavery in the tobacco fields.
Even the ashes weren’t safe once cooled. When that boy worked and worked to build himself up again, the world’s cruelty did not cease. It left him without his sister and with her ten year old son, who seemed at every instance inclined to lie and disobey him. A year later, it tore his mother from him--breast cancer that the loss of her daughter left her too weakened to continue fighting as she once had.
And now?
“You are certain, then, Edgar?” Antón Castillo had been El Presidente for less than a year, elected a mere month after his mother’s death.
“Sadly, yes.” His friend smiled at him and refilled their glasses. “Acute leukaemia, and further along than ideal--not that any length is ideal but--”
“I understand what you mean.” He waved a hand, sipping his rum. It was ironic, his mother, his last solace, torn from him from a cancer of one kind only to find himself with another mere months later. He had finally gotten what he wanted--even if his nephew was a ticking time bomb in his house and he had lost the only people he had ever truly lived--and now the world felt that it needed to be crueler yet.
He understood it, for he was cruel too.
“But, I may have a solution.” His friend reached out and placed a hand on his arm. “It’s something I’ve been working on. You remember me talking about those compounds in Yaran tobacco?”
“Vaguely, yes.”
“I’ve managed to get enough of it to create some small batches of what I call Viviro.” Edgar placed a vial on the table between them. “Some tests show that it can halt cancer growth entirely. I don’t know how long, and it’s certainly not a cure but...”
“But it‘s time.” He finished, picking up the glass vial and holding it to the light. Time that cancer sought to take away from the son of Gabriel Castillo, from El Presidente.
Time he could use to ensure that José was not the legacy the Castillo family left behind--a failure of a boy at only eleven years old. But what could be expected when his mother herself had been so cowed by their father’s fate that she thought any strength within her, any Castillo within her had to be buried deep beneath.
“Yes. It’s time. It should get you at least five years, maybe more with chemotherapy, but anything beyond that...” Edgar waved his hand and sighed. “My tests aren’t going well. I hope to be able to improve it before then, though.”
“I see.” Not long enough to raise a child from infancy, at least. If José had a better starting point he would’ve decided to put the work into moulding him into a proper heir, but even that would take more than five years. No, he would need a true blank slate. “Thank you, my friend.”
Edgar nodded and finished his rum. “And on that note--I have testing to continue doing.” It seemed that this was the furthest his friend’s emotional capacity went.
That was quite alright. Antón himself had plans to make.
It was fortunate that Yara’s political turmoil left her with an abundance of orphanages, and Antón’s status allowed him into any of them on a moment’s notice.
Better yet that an old acquaintance he knew he could trust ran one of them.
“Señor Lopez.”
He took slight pride in the way the man did a double take before finally focussing his gaze on him. It meant that he had been successful in transforming himself into someone less recognizable as El Presidente--swapping his usual white and red for a more neutral tan and grey outfit.
“Señor Presidente?”
He curled his lips into a smile. “I think Antón will work for today. May I come in? I have something to discuss with you.”
The headmaster of Esperanza School for the Lost was almost skittish as he led him through the halls--rather loud halls, in fact--toward a small but tidy room that made his office. Esperanza School for the Lost was not, after all, an orphanage for children born to wealthy parents who happened to have died. It was not even an orphanage for the children produced by soldiers who didn’t want them. No, Esperanza School for the Lost was for the children of poor mothers who couldn’t feed them, for those babies abandoned on its steps or in hospitals. It was for those who knew that they had two fates when they grew up--crime or the military. Those known by number and little else.
Those who would not be missed or even noticed missing.
“I never expected to see you here, old friend.” Lopez finally said when he closed the door behind him. Like him, Lopez had been sentenced to the fields as a teenager, his parents supporters of his own. A few years older than Antón himself, he had always been kind.
That was perhaps why he had chosen to waste his life on such hopeless cases. Where the world was cruel, Lopez tried to be kinder.
A hopeless endeavour, but a useful one.
“Nor did I, in truth.” He sat down, waving a hand at the offered alcohol. “But... I am an old man.”
“... I see.”
He smiled and leant back in his seat. “The women that surround me are sharks--as women tend to be, beautiful and dangerous. Not only that, but I don’t typically like infants.”
Lopez relaxed significantly into his seat. “You look to adopt a child? From here?”
“Adoption outside of one’s own family is still rather stigmatized in Yara. The children here... will not be missed, as unkind as it sounds.”
“You wish to pass the child off as your own, then. How? You are El Presidente, the press will not just accept a child from nowhere.”
“The press will not know, at least not immediately.” He pursed his lips. “Nor will the children. I will simply be someone vaguely interested in adopting one of them--perhaps one of those Yanquis who find the idea of taking a child out of their homeland to be saving them. When I do reveal them to the press, I will merely say they have been with my mother all this time, or at a boarding school in America, or something of the sort.”
“I see.” Lopez sighed and stood up. “Let me introduce you to the children then.”
Yet before the man could open the door, Antón rose a hand. “I do not want them introduced to me en masse. Ideally, I would like to meet as few as possible. Show me your favourite.”
Lopez sighed and pinched the bridge of his nose. “Antón, you would not like her.”
He quirked an eyebrow. “Oh? And why not?”
“Because she is the least obedient of them all. She has been grounded for two months and the moment her grounding finished she went and got herself grounded for yet another for sneaking out and causing mayhem in Esperanza. She argues with everything I say and has been confined to her room for everything except school and meals for a week.”
Intriguing. “And yet she is your favourite?”
Lopez groaned but instead of directing him toward the noise, began to guide him up a set of stairs. “Somehow, yes. She was left here as an infant, little more than a newborn, and I’ve watched her grow up. Don’t ask me how, but no matter what she does I can never find it within myself to hate her.”
“Good.” A child like that was exactly what he needed anyway. All of Valeria’s fire had been quenched by their father’s death, and for all José’s rebellion he had no fire either.
He needed a lion, not a lamb.
Lopez looked at him once more and shook his head. “Don’t say I didn’t warn you,” He muttered before rapping on the door sharply. “Dani! You better not have snuck out again.”
“I would’ve if there weren’t bars on my windows!”
He rose an single eyebrow as Lopez grinned at him and pushed the door open.