full name - luz esperanza fuentes dedios
nicknames - none
gender / pronouns - she/her
date of birth - august 12, 1990
place of birth - yakima, washington
citizenship / ethnicity - american, irish, mexican
religion - catholic
socioeconomic status / political affiliation - working class; liberal.
marital status - single, though may depend on verse.
sexual & romantic orientation - bisexual.
education / occupation - phd in bioarchaeology ( in progress )
languages - spanish, english, asl
parents - dolores fuentes dedios and donald kennedy ( deceased )
siblings - jose fuentes dedios ( missing )
offspring - nayeli guadalupe esparza fuentes
pets / other - none
notable extended family - stepmother, linda ( married to dolores )
faceclaim - lindsey morgan
hair color / eye color - brown, brown.
height / build - 5′6″ / athletic
tattoos / piercings - earlobes x 2. a stick and poke ‘mi vida loca’ three dots on her hand from middle school.
distinguishable features - big beautiful eyes and a muscular frame.
medical history - none.
known allergies - none.
visual impairment / hearing impairment - none.
nicotine use / drug use / alcohol use - alcohol and marijuana on rare occasion.
traits - tenacious, brave, compassionate ; juvenile, sensitive
tropes - the ace, tomboyish ponytail, disappeared dad, brainy brunette, badass adorable.
temperament - choleric
alignment - chaotic good
celtic tree zodiac - hazel, the knower
mbti - enfp
hogwarts house - gryffindor
vice / virtue - envy / diligence
likes / dislikes - sneakers, color-coded lecture notes, abuelita hot cocoa, basketball season, joggers, showering at the gym and stashing a gym bag in the back of her car, tamales with her mother in christmastime, la virgen de guadalupe / people who look down on others, dudes at the gym, science deniers, thunderstorms, sorting the recycling.
quote - “i aim to be lion hearted, but my hands still shake and my voice isn’t quite loud enough.”
food - lucky charms or tacos al pastor
drink - cafe au lait with cinnamon sprinkled on top
pizza topping - pepperoni and olives with tabasco
color - red / orange
music - hip hop / r&b
books - partner to the poor by paul farmer, parable of the sower / parable of the talents by octavia butler
movies - friday, resident evil, black panther
curse word - goddamn
scents - mole on the stove, old spice deodorant
trigger warning ⋯ death, apocalyptic themes, divorce
AEGEAN BRONZE AGE ( 3,000-2,000 BCE )
when luz is small, she hears the story of her birth a thousand times. she can recite it by heart. it is a perfect day in may and her mother dolores has been walking for days, tired of carrying around a belly so swollen with life that she is certain she could fit her own body inside of it. it has been five months since dolores has seen her husband and she does not think he’ll ever come home from some godforsaken war across the sea. the truth is that he never does–not even for his only daughter. donald kennedy dies alone on the same day his daughter luz takes her first breath after an arduous labor in the back of an ambulance on the way from pioneer park to saint mary medical center.
dolores tells the story as if she was in both places at once. at her husband’s side as a fatal bullet cut him down like a blade of grass and holding her own hand as she pushed and screamed on the rigid gurney. luz thinks that her mother must see everything. it is that childhood belief that protects her from the troubles that follow her cousins like black cats and shadows. it’s different as an only child, she knows that her mother has only one person in the whole wide world and she must live up to her mother’s need to be whole.
next door, the abandoned house sits behind a chain link fence. dozens of stone animals litter the yard and porch and it becomes young luz’s playground. she digs in the dirt, unburying hidden treasures and her cousins laugh and call her indiana jones. the book of greek myths her father left behind is never far from her mind and even as a small girl, luz knows she will walk in the colosseum and excavate along the mediterranean.
school is easy for luz who is an avid reader and an energetic learner. she quickly earns playful jeering from her cousins for being a pocha as she works hard to fit in. despite focusing on student government and basketball, luz is well regarded among her peers. she is the kind of girl that makes it hard not to like–an easy going, laid back girl with a jock’s ponytail and a sharp wit. the girl is made for something great and her mother works tirelessly to afford uniforms and ap textbooks. luz fuentes dedios is going somewhere.
dolores finds love again while luz is in middle school. linda is a woman like no other and she tends to her own son, jose, lovingly. he is a few years luz’s senior and goes to a charter school in oregon for the deaf, but they become as thick as thieves. the pair shoot hoops every weekend that jose’s in town and the little family feels more like home than it ever did before.
MINOAN PALATIAL PERIOD ( 2,600-1,400 BCE )
it’s not the dream she had far away in the esteemed halls of colleges like cambridge, oxford, or harvard. no, whitman college–so named for the whitman incident in which a missionary is forced to pay for his crimes and yet is remembered as the white hero–is just down the street from her modest childhood home. it’s strange, then, how different of a world it seems to her. the liberal arts college is not the place she belongs as she did in high school. it’s an entirely different world. she works in the cafeteria to offset the costs her scholarships don’t cover, plays basketball for the team, and has dinner with her mother every sunday if not more. it’s not a bad life.
the classroom and court are the places where luz feels like she can really be herself. pieces of her are lost in conversations among classmates that she does not relate to and she plunges herself head first into work and family, which is the most she’s ever known. when she finds her true calling, she’s paralyzed–they don’t offer a major in bioarchaeology. with the help of a couple of advisors, she makes her own–blending anthropology, biology, geology, and chemistry together in a blissful salve that mends even the deepest wounds gained in the thirst to prove that she can be everything her mother needs. her sacrifices will not be for nothing.
when she graduates, luz feels a whirlwind sense of accomplishment. she is accepted to field school in crete where she can study the minoan and mycenaean cultures to her heart’s content. it is there she develops her fascination with bones and death and focuses her interest on funerary archaeology–a subject she will study at length at the university of tennessee’s bioarchaeology doctoral program. she can sometimes hear her father calling her and she knows that she must reunite the dead with their loved ones.
THE HEROIC AGE ( 1,600-1,100 BCE )
on a quiet, hot summer night she falls in love with another doctoral student a few years her senior. they drink raki and let the waves and sand massage their weary feet. they return to tennessee and luz feels her stomach swelling with the prospect of life. rodrigo is a warm heart and though he is not prepared for fatherhood he takes to it, like he does with most things, with gusto. if there is apprehension in her heart it is quelled by the worry in her mother’s voice through the telephone lines–please tell me you are going to marry him, mija.luz fuentes dedios has never broken her mother’s heart.
nayeli guadalupe esparza is born, much like her mother, on a summer’s day and is named for rodrigo and luz’s grandmothers. luz holds her so tight that rodrigo is afraid she might break her. the young parents find that they love nayeli enough that it doesn’t matter if they love each other half as much. it won’t be long before they find out that they don’t love one another at all anymore.
weddings and motherhood do not stop a determined woman. luz knows that women have always persevered more obstacles than their male peers and she is determined to not let her dreams fall by the wayside. their lives are not easy–both spend long hours teaching and learning while preparing their own research. dolores moves from walla walla, selling their home by the house with the stone animal statues, the train tracks and the cornfield–which is now a burger king and a dollar tree. she does sewing and odd jobs while she cares for her granddaughter naya with her chubby cheeks and bright brown eyes.
in their final years, the couple move to crete to finish their research in the field. both grow tired of working, living, and raising a daughter together and the break-up is messy. nayeli is five years old when they realize they can no longer make their relationship work and when the grant money runs out, luz is forced to return to the united states to finish her doctoral thesis with no funding and no job prospects. rodrigo stays on at the research center and there is no arguing that naya is better off living with a parent who can provide for her. luz is crestfallen.
a friend from field school hits her up one lonely afternoon in tennessee where luz is drowning her sorrows in the bottom of a tequila bottle. melissa has focused her interests on the early settlements of nebraska and has secured a lovely grant investigating cave systems out of omaha. dolores agrees to move with her daughter into a two-bedroom apartment in the nebraskan city.
in her spare time, luz works on her own thesis, but pays for it with melissa’s paid post-doc position. the exploration reinvigorates her and she remembers how to breathe again. it’s hard to wake up everyday without braiding her daughter’s soft curls and listening to a giggling tale of the girl’s dreams from the night before. she misses greece and, on her worst days, she thinks she might even miss rodrigo.
THE MYCENAEAN PERIOD ( 1,300-1,000 BCE )
as things fall apart in europe, so does the spite behind the custody battle. luz has a stable income and home once again and, more than that, she has family and routine. rodrigo grows worried that the reports of sickness are more than just coincidence and as his anger melts it is replaced with guilt from having kept a daughter from a mother he knows would rip apart the moon itself for her. the phone sits warm in his hand after choking up and breaking down with luz on the other line, he sends his little girl to stay with her mother with the promise to move himself to omaha to finish his thesis when the research portion is complete. he never walks on u. s. soil again, but naya does.
the airport seems like a warzone when luz picks up her daughter, finally reunited she seems so much older in such a short span of time. they quickly settle into a routine, but as the time between phone calls from rodrigo grows, so does the sinking pit in her stomach. something is wrong in the world and it is spreading. some nights dolores wakes the apartment up wit nightmares about satan devouring the world and she says her mouth is full of sand. luz knows in her bones that something is slithering its way to devour their new found happiness and she feels helpless to stop it.
AFTER DECEMBER 25th, 2017,
DARK AGE OF GREECE ( 1,100-700 BCE )
even in the dead of winter, luz is driven into the snow by melissa’s work. a bootlegger’s cave on the edge of private farming property is in danger of flooding when the snows melt after irrigation plans by the owner have broken ground. they have a weekend to explore the caves and collect data before the owner completes the project and fills in the entrance and exit. with the stirrings and rumors of an epidemic, luz is reluctant to leave naya, dolores, and linda alone for a weekend, but her mother insists that the pair will do just fine.
they set off, three women and two men into the bowels of a harsh december, beneath dirt harder than stone. melissa takes point with dave, juan, and sarah close behind. luz and emily follow behind, both reluctant to disappear in the dank darkness disguised by pure fallen snow. while blood spills on christmas day red against the crystalline white, luz is not with her mothers and daughter making tamales and setting out milk and cookies for santa claus. instead she is regretting her commitment to her friendship while shivering in a seemingly endless bootleggers cave that had, more or less, proven to be a wash.
it’s not four hours in when dave, who had been looking sickly and pale since the beginning of the trip–and as luz suspected, had been vomiting up his dinner as he started to trail behind even emily–collapses over onto himself. luz had been avoiding him since they set out because he had seemed cagey and aggressive. unwilling to leave a man behind, emily and juan work to make an impromptu stretcher to bring him out while sarah stays faithfully by his side.
as he worsens, dave throws a scraggly punch at sarah and scratches the side of her cheek. inside the cave, screams are muffled and fear is suffocating. luz’s heart beats against her ear drums so loud that she worries they might burst. as they push forward in the cave system, melissa assures them that the exit is closer than the entrance, but dave rapidly deteriorates and sarah seems to be growing weaker now too. melissa is headstrong and determined that the trip not be in vain, but as the pair worsen, everyone agrees they must send someone for help. emily and juan stay behind with sarah and dave, while melissa luz head for the exit.
half an hour longer of walking has melissa and luz feeling no closer to the exit than before when the screams start behind them–magnified in volume by the cavernous acoustics of the bootlegger’s path. melissa and luz both want to check on their friends, but something primal within them tells them they must push forward and not backward. there are some sounds that, no matter how brave or kind a person is, will make you run.
it’s not a straight shot to the exit and the climb slows them down as their pursuer seems to keep a constant speed. there is the distinct sound of something wet against the cave floor; each thud makes her stomach turn. as they grow closer to the exit, she realizes that she does not hear melissa’s footfalls falling evenly behind her and turns as her friend calls out in surprise ‘dave, my god–’ as luz watches on, paralyzed by fear she is a stalagmite more than a woman.
when melissa lets out a hearty scream as dave bites into her throat, luz rushes to meet them and shoves dave to the ground. he is unrelenting and the face she can hardly make out in the darkness barely looks human. he doesn’t stop until she shoves her hand trowel through the back of his neck. it startles her how easily the blade slides through flesh. when her breathing regulates, she stands and finds melissa is dead on the ground.
THE GEOMETRIC PERIOD ( 900-700 BCE )
the drive back to town takes hours against the chaotic traffic and abandoned cars. hell rains down on omaha, nebraska like ash on the city of pompeii and the ground below even seems to shake with the force of mount vesuvius. all luz can think of is getting home to her mother and daughter and she curses herself for having ever listened to melissa in the first place. some stupid nsa sponsored project cost the lives of their entire research crew and maybe dolores and naya’s too. luz promises god that she will never put work before family again.
when she finally reaches their home, luz is horrified that the chaos outside has slithered its way into a home that still smells faintly of pork and chile california. there is blood sprayed across every surface of every room and dolores is nowhere to be found. clumsily formed letters spell out in blood on the kitchen wall by the calendar with little cats on it ‘lo sie–’ as an unfinished goodbye. naya does not come when called and luz collapses upon her daughter’s small bed–breathing in the smell of her as she sobs, unable to catch her breath.
beneath her desperate gasps for breath, she hears the small whine of a young girl from the closet door. behind it, naya emerges from her modest mountain of stuffed animals and screams when she sees her mother. the two fall into each other’s arms and then they fall apart. when the dust has cleared, luz packs bags for them both, says a prayer for her mother’s spirit ( wherever it may be ), and sets out in the path of a safe place. she finds that in the charles b. washington library, but for how long–only time will tell.
