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foggyfanfic · 6 months

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Mirabel's Super Secret Adventure

Movie AU

Chapter Preview: How many secrets were Tío Bruno and Tía Leandra keeping? First the cracks, then Isabela, now this.

Prologue Prev Next Masterlist

7. Things Bruno Doesn't Talk About

Mirabel’s epiphany made her re-examine her wish to keep the cracks to herself. On the one hand, she really kind of wanted to be the person who fixed all this; on the other, if somebody in her family was really in that much pain…

Shouldn’t Mirabel focus on fixing it fast rather than by herself?

Reluctantly, Mirabel decided she would share what she’d learned with Tío Bruno. He, at the very least, would still allow her to help. If she told Abuela she would be thanked for bringing it to her attention, then told to go rest and let somebody else handle it.

After she finished helping her Pá teach Antonio, she headed over to Tío Bruno’s room and knocked on the door. This time, when she didn’t get an answer, she walked in. Tío Bruno had a tent hidden somewhere in the cave system that ran throughout his canyon, so if he wanted privacy he would just hide in his tent. As such, the kids in the family were always allowed to enter his room and hang out in his storytelling tent in the middle of his canyon’s oasis.

Mirabel ducked under his sand curtain and paused on the landing to shake the sand out of her hair. Octavia was down at the bottom of the canyon, using the sand to practice different gazebo designs. She paused halfway through making an octagon shaped gazebo to wave at Mirabel, then got back to work.

“What do you think?” Octavia asked, holding the sand in the shape that she wanted.

“I like the trellis siding,” Mirabel answered.

“Yeah, I don’t know, feels pretty basic,” Octavia frowned, then she grinned and with a few twitches of her fingers, the diamond shaped holes became hearts.

Mirabel frowned at the hearts.

“What? Too much?”

“No uh, it’s just,” she thought about biting her tongue, but she’d already told Amada, so she might as well keep flapping her mouth, “Isabela doesn’t want to marry him. She’s doing it for the family. Your Pá has a plan to fix things though.”

“Oh,” Octavia paused, then adjusted the hearts so they were in two parts with a jagged line in between them, “so, that better?”

Mirabel couldn’t help a dry chuckle, “Abuela would blow a gasket.”

Octavia giggled, “Yeah.”

Mirabel watched for a while as her cousin made gazebo after gazebo, each one slowly becoming more extravagant. Eventually Octavia was making entire gazebo palaces. It was a far cry from the sloppy houses she’d made in front of the town’s architect.

Most of the time, she wouldn’t have thought twice about it. A gazebo is a whole lot simpler than a house, after all. But with her mind still buzzing away, looking for problems large enough to cause all those cracks, she found herself eyeing the ease with which Octavia molded the sand.

Now that Mirabel was really thinking about it, Octavia seemed to be ten times better at using her gift whenever Abuela wasn’t watching.

“Octavia?” Mirabel asked, slowly.

“Yep?” Octavia chirped, adding another open air turret to the top of the gazebo's right wing.

“Do you… pretend to be worse at your gift when Abuela is around?”

The gazebo palace collapsed in on itself, Octavia slowly turned towards Mirabel, wide eyed. It was all the confirmation Mirabel needed.

She whispered, “Please don’t tell.”

“I won’t, I won’t, but… why?”

“Because I don’t want to end up like Luisa.”

“Like Luisa-? Oh.”

Octavia jerked her shoulders in a shrug, “By the time she was my age, she was already working eight hours a day. Now she doesn’t even get to finish breakfast half the time.”

Mirabel slowly nodded, to show that she’d heard her, then drifted over to the story telling tent. She entered the dimly lit haven and sat down on one of the many floor cushions. The tent flap opened, letting unfiltered light in, then closed and Octavia sat next to her, fiddling with a rock.

There was a long period of contemplative silence.

“Are you happy?” Mirabel eventually asked. Was anyone in their family truly happy?

“I am,” Octavia said, smiling a little, “although, sometimes I feel a bit guilty for hiding what I can do from everybody.”

“So everyday, when you practice with Tía Leandra?”

“We mostly just play around, experiment with my gift and stuff,” Octavia shrugged, “I am actually learning about architecture, I do want to make houses, but I want to be a kid first. You know?”

“When did you start pretending?”

“Pretty much immediately,” Octavia floated the rock in the palm of her hand and began running it through different shapes, “Má has always been-. The first thing I learned was all the ways to make a house poorly, right? Long run it means when I want to make a house well, I just don’t do any of the things I’d do to make it bad. Short term, I know exactly how to make it look like I don’t know what I’m doing.”

“And Tía Leandra has been helping you lie? This whole time?”

“It was my parents’ idea,” Octavia admitted, “well, I think it was Pá’s, but he’s not great at the whole, sneaky subterfuge thing, so Má has been handling it. Oh! Since you know now, you wanna see the Eiffel Tower?”

“Sure,” Mirabel said, faintly, mind still reeling. How many secrets were Tío Bruno and Tía Leandra keeping? First the cracks, then Isabela, now this.

Tío Bruno had said his gift meant he knew a bunch of stuff that wasn’t technically his business, even Amada had learned things through her limited sight that weren’t hers to tell. Dolores was the same way, she knew everything about everyone, and barely ever said a word. As Mirabel followed Octavia back out to the dessert portion of the canyon bottom, she wondered what her life would have been like if she had gotten a gift. Specifically a gift that made her privy to information she wasn’t meant to know.

Would she keep so many secrets too?

“Ok, so! The trick is to lift all the sand up then shape it as it falls,” Octavia said brightly, lifting what must have been a ton or two of sand, she tilted her head, “hold on, that’s a little too much.”

She separated out some of the sand and dumped it, then examined her giant sand cloud. She grinned and nodded and began releasing the sand a little at a time.

“I have to be careful to remember all the big clumps at the top, there’s rooms and stuff up there you know,” Octavia continued to narrate, glancing excitedly at Mirabel every few minutes to make sure she was paying attention, “and then I gotta make all the cross beams. On all four sides, too. See! Then I used to put this part that all the people can stand on half way down, but it’s more like a quarter of the way up. Riiiiiiiiight there! Now the legs are nice and thick, but if I make them too thick it looks really cartoony, so it’s got to be just the right level of thick. And ta-da! The Eiffel Tower!”

She held the tower steady with one raised hand and put the other one on her hip, grinning broadly at Mirabel.

“It’s amazing,” she told her, honestly. Because it was. The tower was about as tall as Tío Bruno’s canyon, and molded with such precision that Mirabel could make out all the little rivets, bolts, and screws holding it together.

“Yeah, I’m really good at this,” Octavia allowed the sand to fall in a controlled implosion, then turned back to Mirabel, “Sometimes I wish I could show off, you know? But I know the second I do I’ll pretty much just be Luisa the Sequel. Má and Pá always do a good job of acting impressed with me, and so do Amada and Gabe.”

“Wait, Gabe knows? And he hasn’t-?”

“Tattled? Of course not, you think he wants the townspeople treating one of his precious baby sisters the way they treat Luisa? Hell, if he could figure out how to get people to back off Luisa, he would.”

“Hold on, am I literally the last to know how overworked Luisa is?”

“Nah, pretty sure that’ll be Luisa herself,” Octavia lifted more sand and started making a statue of the family instead, “and your Má doesn’t know because she’s always working too, and Isabela doesn’t know because she’s always practicing being perfect, and Camilo doesn’t know because he’s always babysitting or entertaining the villagers, and I don’t think Tío Agustín or Tío Félix know because they got so many chores to do around the house.”

“But your parents know,” Mirabel filled in, “and they told you three?”

“Not really, Gabe noticed it by himself, and Má might have noticed it and told Pá. Or Pá told Má when he had that vision. I don’t know. But that’s how Amada and I found out, we saw Pá’s vision-. Wait… I maybe shouldn’t tell you about that.”

“What vision?”

“Um, nothing, no vision. Pá doesn’t have visions, he can’t even see!”

“Octavia, what vision?!”

She waved her hand and suddenly the sand gathered around her in a windowless dome. Mirabel tried digging into the sand, but it actively resisted her hands.

“Octavia!”

The dome didn’t budge.

Eventually, Mirabel put her hands on her hips and looked up towards Tío Bruno’s vision cave. She could barely see it from her place on the ground. Tío Bruno said that it got taller and taller every year, but had slowed down ever since he had started giving weekly story time to the kids.

Climbing up there was still the worst.

Which was exactly why Mirabel suspected that was where he stored any visions he didn’t want anyone to see. Nobody climbed up those stairs unless they had to. Tío Bruno had a secret passageway up there, but, well it was a secret passageway, not a well known passageway.

So, leaving the dome behind, Mirabel made her way to the stairs. She took a few deep breaths, then started the long journey up to the vision cave.

About halfway up, Mirabel wondered if she really needed to see this vision. It was about Luisa after all, not her. It probably wasn’t any of her business.

However, it might be connected to the cracks.

Or, it might give Mirabel some way to help her older sister.

Granted, if the vision could help Luisa in any way, Tío Bruno had probably already tried. But Mirabel would bet good money that the vision was about whatever warning Luisa had been ignoring. Maybe if she knew what was coming, she could give Luisa an extra push.

Three quarters of the way up, Mirabel paused to take a few more deep breaths, hands on her hips.

Almost there, she told herself, almost.

Steeling herself, she kept going.

She had to stop for another breather before crossing the bridge. If telling stories to kids had made the stairs slow in their growth, they needed to start making him tell stories once a day, then the stairs might actually shrink.

The bridge was thin, and felt pretty rickety. It was two lines of wooden planks side by side, suspended by some rough rope. Mirabel was just grateful there was a safety line on either side.

Carefully, Mirabel crossed the bridge, gritting her teeth as it swayed beneath her. She didn’t want to go too fast, but she definitely didn’t linger.

Mirabel could count on one hand all the times she’d been up here. And most of them were before the bridge had slimmed down to its current state. Usually when Tío Bruno gave personal visions, only he and Tía Leandra would come up. If he was giving one of his showy visions about fun stuff, he generally did it in the old river bed, so he could make the sand whirlwind as big as it needs to be to hold everybody in attendance.

As she entered the corridor to the actual cave, her eyes roved over the carvings on the wall. There were shelves full of incense and herbs, and a few vision tablets she recognized as being some of his favorite visions.

None of them featured Luisa.

Next, Mirabel eyed the big circular door. It looked heavy, but when she got her hands on the door knob, it swung open easily enough.

The cave beyond was about as dark as she expected, and, unsurprisingly, filled with sand. The only thing in the room other than sand and stone was a locked trunk. Mirabel propped the door open and walked over to the trunk, kneeling in front of it. The lock was a simple padlock, an old thing with a keyhole.

Mirabel glanced over her shoulder, then reached into her bag. She pulled out two of her thickest embroidery needles and began working at the lock.

Not that Mirabel had any experience with lock picking, of course. She had never ever, for random example, broken into a cupboard Abuela had hidden the good scissors in, or anything like that. It was purely beginner's luck that allowed Mirabel to open the padlock within minutes.

She placed the lock aside and opened the trunk. Sitting inside were three visions, stacked on top of eachother. The first was clearly very old and showed a much younger Tía Leandra wearing very little clothing; Mirabel wrinkled her nose and put that one aside. Underneath it was a vision showing Luisa standing by her pool, easily hefting Mariano over the water with one hand, and Dolores with the other. They were all laughing.

Mirabel cocked her head, she couldn’t think of a single reason why this vision would be hidden. Carefully, she picked it up, but when she held it up and changed the angle, the vision shifted to a much less cheerful image.

Instead, Luisa was now standing among rubble, clearly struggling to lift a section of wall off a crate.

Mirabel gasped as she started shifting the tablet back and forth, watching the happy scene appear and disappear.

Was Luisa going to lose her gift? Why?

Tío Bruno had apparently been telling Luisa she needed to relax, but how could her not relaxing lead to her gift going away?

And what was with the rubble?

Mirabel dropped the vision into her lap, staring into the middle distance. For a few seconds, all she could do was blink dumbly into nothing, trying to figure out what this vision meant. Then something caught her eye.

Was that her?

Slowly, heart beating in her ears, Mirabel reached into the trunk and pulled out the last vision. It was like the one of Luisa, if she held it one way, Mirabel was standing in front of a perfectly intact Casita, if she tilted it the other, Casita was falling to pieces behind her.

This must be how Tío Bruno found out about the cracks. This must be the vision he had that told them Mirabel had miracle magic for emergencies. Mirabel had always assumed the vision showed her fixing whatever was broken, that it ended with a happy image. This vision didn’t look happy, it didn’t even look certain.

She hadn’t even considered the thought that she might not succeed. That she might not fix the cracks. Of course she would, this was Encanto, and she was a Madrigal. Mirabel couldn’t let her familia or the village down.

Suddenly she remembered Dolores’ words of warning, “If you can’t live up to the village’s expectations” she had trailed off but the implication had been that you would end up like Tío Bruno. Hated by many, and blamed for things beyond your control.

After a few seconds of thought, she put the other two visions back, but kept the one about her.

Mirabel re-locked the trunk and hurried out of the cave, closing it behind her. She walked across the bridge as quickly as she dared, and had to struggle to keep herself from running down the stairs. When she was halfway down, she noticed that there were two more people standing at the bottom of the canyon.

Tío Bruno and Tía Leandra.

When they looked up and saw her they both smiled, Tío Bruno raising his hand to wave at her. Then they must have noticed the vision in her hand because Tía Leandra visibly grimaced and Tío Bruno’s hand stopped mid-wave.

To their credit, when she got to them, neither of them bothered to lecture her about snooping.

“I hope that’s not the one of me,” Tía Leandra said, Tío Bruno sent her a look, but she just flashed her cheekiest grin at him and he melted.

“I am honestly trying to forget I saw that, thanks,” Mirabel said.

“I uh I’m guessing that one is-,” Bruno rubbed nervously at his arm.

In answer, Mirabel held up the vision so they could see, “How do I fix things?”

The two adults exchanged a look, but didn’t respond. Octavia leaned as far forward as she could without losing her balance to see the tablet, then frowned, brows wrinkled.

“Do I, I don’t know, pray at the candle? Hug everybody in the family? What? How do I heal the cracks?”

“What cracks?” Octavia cut in. She must have been standing at an angle from which Casita was intact.

“The cracks in the walls,” Mirabel answered, eyes fixed on her Tío, “he’s been patching them for years but they keep growing.”

“You saw the cracks?” Tía Leandra looked a little more surprised then Mirabel would have expected.

“How’d you get past the hole?” Tío Bruno cocked his head.

“I used a ladder to climb down, walked across, then climbed back up.”

“A ladder…? We have a ladder that long?”

“Yeah, it’s not even ten feet deep.”

“Oh.”

They both stared at her in silence for a second.

“Bruno, darling?”

“Sí mi amor?”

“We might be stupid.”

“Sí mi amor.”

Mirabel lifted the tablet again, opening her mouth to insist Tío Bruno tell her more about his vision, but was cut off when Bruno’s door opened and Camilo’s voice bounced off the canyon walls, “Time for dinner!”

#Mirabel Madrigal #bruno madrigal #Encanto #Encanto AU #I have been waiting for 'We might be stupid' 'Si mi amor' for forever #the second I thought of Leandra and Bruno saying that I knew I needed to put it in somewhere #The goal was always for Leandra to make Bruno a better version of himself #but not perfect #so sometimes she's the same brand of ridiculous as him #if Leandra was there when Bruno said 'How do you save a family miracle? You hug a sister'#she would have been nodding sagely as if it was the wisest thing ever said #she may have even said out loud 'That's a good point'#Leandra has watched Bruno build a stage for his rats and her only complaint was that the curtains weren't real velvet

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