Entry for thebarsondaily's Weekly Drabble Prompt

Prompt: church

Treason

If there was a person Rafael Barba was truly afraid of sometimes, then it was his mother Lucia. Of course, it wasn't the same kind of fear as he'd felt for his late father, but he would still call it fear. Rafael felt very negative about her unpredictability, about how she insisted on everything going her way and obsessed about all kinds of things relating to family. She wanted her son - and everyone she'd kinda adopted as her 'child', if they wanted or not - to have the happy family life that she never got to have.

And Lucia Barba being Lucia Barba, she didn't care if people had different opinions on that topic. She wanted a big white wedding and a bunch of grandchildren, and she had said wedding all planned out already. Probably since Rafael's birth.

And since Rafael knew that, he'd given everything to keep his proposal to Olivia a secret. They didn't want big or fancy, they were too old for that; no, they just wanted a small wedding with their friends and family. Rafael had suggested eloping, but Olivia had reminded him that Lucia would hunt them down if they did that.

Thus, they'd kept a low profile; Olivia was wearing her engagement ring hidden, they were careful not to discuss any plans with Lucia being within a few miles of their location, and Noah had to pledge on his pirate honour that he wouldn't tell his Abuela anything.

It was all so cautiously planned, and they thought they'd succeeded…

Until the day the door to Olivia's office was ripped open with so much force that it banged against the opposite wall and made the framed pictures on the wall tremble. Olivia and Rafael looked up from their lunch in confusion while Lucia positioned herself over them, her brown eyes gleaming in anger.

"What is that? How can you do that to me, to your own mother?" she shouted, and in the squad room, heads were rising and turning curiously, while Olivia and Rafael stared in shock and horror at the piece of incriminating evidence that Lucia was holding up.

"Where did you get that?" Olivia gasped, and Lucia threw the bridal magazine onto the coffee table angrily.

"In your bedside table! Were you even going to invite me? And what is this list in the magazine saying you won't have a church service?"

"Mamí, what were you doing in our bedroom?"

"What were you doing proposing to Olivia and not telling me about it, Rafael Filipe Barba?"

It was obvious that Lucia wouldn't let them address the breach of privacy she'd so obviously committed deliberately as long as they hadn't suffered sufficiently for the treason. Lucia Barba didn't forgive easily, especially concerning things that she deemed this important, and it would be a long, torturous afternoon for Olivia and Rafael.

Rafael felt like eloping and being on the run for the rest of their life would have been the better choice.