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Mirabel sneaks back into her room after overhearing her Abuela's confession of fear about the miracle fading on the balcony. The miracle is at risk, Casita is cracking, and she might be the only one who knows about it.
“I will save the miracle,” Mirabel declares aloud. She looks around her room, and notes the time – two minutes before midnight. “…Tomorrow,” she decides, and climbs into bed.
---
Mirabel wakes up at seven in the morning the day after Antonio’s gift ceremony, the same time she wakes up every day. But today, she is determined to find a way to save her family’s miracle, the miracle that is cracking before her eyes.
Except… how does one save a family miracle, especially when one does not know why said miracle is breaking?
Maybe… maybe Dolores will know something? Dolores hears everything, after all. As Mirabel makes her way downstairs, she decides she will ask her prima about it after breakfast.
Except Mirabel isn’t able to get to Dolores before the rest of the family is off to town for the day. “Wait, Dolores!” she hisses under her breath, knowing her prima will hear it. “Dolores, what do you know about Casita cracking last night?”
But if Dolores has an answer, she is unable to turn back and tell Mirabel, so Mirabel resigns herself to wait.
Dinner happens before she can get a moment with Dolores. Mirabel keeps quiet, not wanting to… not wanting to ruin anything else this week.
She hasn’t noticed Casita cracking at all during the day, so. Maybe… maybe it really was some sort of fluke last night? Maybe Mirabel didn’t see it right?
She still can’t get a moment alone with Dolores before everyone is off to their bedrooms for the night, so Mirabel just figures she’ll ask her the next morning, and save the miracle tomorrow.
---
Mirabel wakes up at seven in the morning the day after Antonio’s gift ceremony. Except, wait. Yesterday was the day after Antonio’s gift ceremony, wasn’t it?
Mirabel squints at the calendar in her room. She crosses off the days as they pass, and she could have sworn she crossed this day off already.
“Mirabel!” Her father’s call cuts through her thoughts, and she darts from her bedroom down to breakfast. She’s not late, but it is unusual for her to not be the first one down.
Well – right, she had wanted to speak to Dolores before breakfast. But she’s missed the opportunity again; the family is already sitting at the table. Ah, well, she’ll make sure to talk to Dolores before everyone splits off for the day.
But then Mirabel’s thoughts are cut off again as Abuela asks about when Mariano will propose, and Dolores answers, “Tonight. He wants five babies.” The same way it happened yesterday.
Or… was it yesterday? Was that some… strange dream?
Mirabel doesn’t stop to think about it then, because she’s sprinting after Dolores as the family begins to head off to their daily duties after breakfast has concluded.
“Dolores!” she says, falling into step next to her prima. “Hey, Dolores, did you, uh…hear anything last night? Y’know, when I…when I saw the cracks.”
Dolores gives her an odd look, and replies, “The only one worried about the magic is you… and the rats talking in the walls.” Before Mirabel can even process what that means, Dolores adds, “oh, and Luisa. I heard her eye twitching all night.” And with a squeak, Dolores continues on her way, leaving Mirabel in the dust.
Well, it’s a start. She has no idea what the rats in the walls comment means, but Luisa – talking to Luisa shouldn’t be too hard!
Except, somehow, Luisa manages to avoid Mirabel all day, until dinner. Mirabel did her best to track Luisa down, but her older sister always seemed to be two tasks ahead.
And dinner… well, dinner is the same as last night.
Mariano proposes to Isabela. The family is overjoyed. Mirabel puts on a smile, but just feels confused. This already happened… didn’t it? Or maybe it really was just a dream...
She’s so confused by these events that she forgets to talk to Luisa before she goes to bed.
---
Mirabel wakes up at seven in the morning the day after Antonio’s gift ceremony.
She sits in her normal place at breakfast, confused about how this is all happening again. She almost forgets that she wanted to talk to Luisa about the cracks in Casita, and so after breakfast, she spends the better part of her day trying to track down her sister, but can’t manage to do it before the same proposal dinner as the night before.
---
Mirabel wakes up at seven in the morning the day after Antonio’s gift ceremony.
This is the fourth time she’s woken up to it being the day after Antonio’s gift ceremony.
Something is definitely not right, here. But as Mirabel goes down to breakfast, everyone seems to be acting normal, even though they’ve already lived this day the exact same way for the past four days.
Does this have to do with the miracle, the cracks? Mirabel ponders the question throughout breakfast, and only just manages to catch Dolores before she leaves for town with the rest of the family.
“Dolores,” Mirabel says, in a voice just above a whisper, “have you noticed anything…odd? Like, do you have any… déjà vu?”
Dolores blinks at the question. “Déjà vu?” she repeats. “Uh, no? Are you okay, Mirabel?”
“Well, uh.” Mirabel’s brain stalls. If no one else is experiencing this – this repeating day – she’s not entirely sure how to explain it. She refocuses on the cracks from… is it still last night at this point? “Well, I mean, there were the cracks I saw last night…”
“Oh, yes.” Dolores hums. “Besides you, the only ones concerned about the cracks are the rats in the walls… oh, and Luisa. I heard her eye twitching, all night.” And with a squeak, Dolores is off, leaving Mirabel even more confused than ever.
That was almost the exact same thing Dolores told her two days ago. Except, for Dolores, this seems to be the first time this day is happening.
Well. No time to wonder any further. Mirabel decides that whatever is happening to her, to be reliving the same day over and over, must be linked with the cracks in the wall and the family’s miracle being in danger.
With a renewed purpose, she chases down Luisa, determined to get some answers.
But by the time she manages to talk to Luisa, they’re both heading back to Casita, to prepare for Isabela’s engagement dinner. (This will be the fourth time Isabela has gotten engaged, but no one else seems to remember, so.)
“Mira, everything is fine,” Luisa keeps insisting, but Mirabel is insistent, too.
“No it’s not! I know what I saw, Luisa,” she hisses, lowering her voice as they get close to their home. “Luisa, please. I want to help.”
Luisa chews her lip, glancing between Mirabel and Casita as they draw ever closer. “I did feel… something, when you saw the cracks last night,” Luisa finally admits. (Mirabel says nothing about how, for her, it was five nights ago, now.) “I think it has something to do with Tío Bruno,” she adds, in a voice so quiet that Mirabel barely catches it. “I heard the grownups once – apparently he had like, some terrible vision about it before he left.”
And that’s all Luisa has to say about it before they are at Casita, and they have to drop the subject of their uncle so that no one gets upset at dinner. Mirabel tells herself that tomorrow – or, maybe, today? Today but also tomorrow? – that’s when she will search for answers about what Bruno saw.
---
Mirabel wakes up at seven in the morning the day after Antonio’s gift ceremony.
Mirabel realizes she has no idea how to find out what was in Tío Bruno’s vision, and resigns herself to figuring out how to ask Luisa, or maybe Dolores, what they know.
---
Meanwhile, in the walls, Bruno wakes up with another case of déjà vu.
This has happened to him before, on occasion. He gets small visions every now and then without having to use a big ceremony to call on them. These small visions he gets throughout the day are often quick snippets, snapshots of the day’s events to come. Some happen within minutes of his vision, some even within seconds, and he is always left with the unnerving feeling of déjà vu when it happens.
It’s always a little worse when he wakes up from a dream vision, because he doesn’t always remember the visions from his dreams, but the sense of déjà vu will follow him for the rest of the day.
In this case, he’s quite aware of why he’s getting that horrible déjà vu feeling every time he wakes up, but he’s not sure exactly what he can do about it.
He’s been living the same day over and over for the past five days, and Bruno is terrified that it’ll just keep happening too, because he doesn’t know what started this all.
Well, he didn’t know, anyway. Now, he watches Mirabel from the cracks as she looks at his door, and he hears her mutter, “Did Tío Bruno see this repeating day too, or just the cracks in Casita?”
Something about Mirabel is causing the day to loop over and over again, and it has something to do with the vision he had of her ten years ago after her failed gift ceremony. It’s a start, but he still has no idea what to do about it.
His eyes flicker green, and he sees – Mirabel finding the vision, but not being able to piece it together before dinner. She leaves it in her room, and tries to look into it before bed, but she passes out at midnight and then it’s suddenly the morning after Antonio’s gift ceremony, again –
Ugh. Bruno shakes his head – stupid déjà vu – before knock, knock, knocking on wood. He slumps into his chair and runs a hand down his face.
He wonders vaguely if being immune from the memory reset the rest of the family seems to experience makes his powers worth it, even while trying to figure out how to help Mirabel without revealing his presence to her or the rest of the family. But a headache crashing into him as his eyes flash again make him reconsider that – and he gets nothing but vague impressions, no actual scenes this time, but somehow he knows that the loops won’t be ending until he helps his sobrina.
Wonderful, Bruno thinks with just a twinge of bitterness. But he hates the headaches from being stuck in this time loop more than the thought of being caught, so he resigns himself to his inevitable fate.
---
Mirabel wakes up at seven in the morning the day after Antonio’s gift ceremony.
It’s the eleventh time she’s lived this day so far. She’s tried what she can to get more information from Luisa and Dolores about this mysterious vision Tío Bruno had before he left, but the closest she’s come so far is being told to search Bruno’s tower.
On the eighth reset, she got caught trying to get to Bruno’s tower and had to live in misery until it reset. On the ninth, she got there too late – she would never be able to climb all those stairs before the proposal dinner. On the tenth, she got up there and found all the glowing green shards in the creepy cave, but all she could piece together was that – was that…
She was in the vision.
But then the cave was collapsing, and she was frantically grabbing every shard she could and she barely made it out. She had just enough time to clean all the sand off herself, and stash her bag with the vision pieces in her dresser before making it down to dinner.
Mirabel had waited until everyone else was asleep, before trying to put the puzzle pieces together, but she had passed out at midnight, and now it was day eleven.
She groaned at the thought of having to climb all those stairs again, but she needed to know – she needed to know what the rest of the vision was, why she was in it.
Mirabel isn’t sure if she needs to do the same thing every morning – talk to Dolores and Luisa – so today, she forgoes it entirely. Breakfast goes off fine, as normal. Mirabel stays quiet, and doesn’t say anything to anyone about the cracks.
When everyone else goes off to complete their duties in the town, Mirabel seizes her chance and sneaks up to the tower.
She grabs the vision shards, and recalling how the room collapsed last time, forgoes trying to piece it together there and darts out of the room instead. She doesn’t stop to see if the cave is collapsing behind her – the ominous rumbles tell her enough.
But Mirabel rushes perhaps a bit too much. She runs into Abuela on the way out, and there is a moment when she thinks that she’s been caught – but Luisa rushes by at the last minute, frantic about the possibility that she’s losing her gift, the same as what happened last time and the time before that. She doesn’t implicate Mirabel this time though, because Mirabel didn’t talk to Luisa before going to Bruno’s tower. She’ll have to keep it in mind to bring this up with Luisa if the loops continue, but she hopes she won’t have to worry about it.
She makes the mistake of saying Bruno’s name while Tía Pepa comes into the nursery to collect Antonio’s things. This leads to Tío Félix entering the room and telling her about what it would mean if one was in a vision – disaster.
And then everyone, suddenly, wants to talk about Bruno, right before dinner. Mirabel isn’t sure how much is true and how much is embellishment (alright, she’s fairly certain Camilo’s was all embellishment – he’s only a few weeks older than her, there’s no way he remembers much if she barely remembers Bruno herself), but she keeps it all in mind as she slides the final slot of the shattered vision into place.
She stares at the vision and has immediate regrets. She shouldn’t have brought up Bruno.
Her dad walks into the room before she can even process what she’s seen – a vision of her, standing in front of a cracked Casita, plain as day.
He can’t seem to process it either.
The doorbell ringing cuts through the shock. “We say nothing,” her pá says, frantically gathering up the shards. “Abuela wants tonight to be perfect. Until the Guzmáns leave, you did not break into Bruno’s tower, the magic is not dying, the house is not breaking, Luisa’s gift is not fading. No one has to know, just act normal. No one has to know.”
A soft squeak, and they turn to see Dolores, standing on the other side of the balcony. “I know,” she whispers, and with another squeak, she’s off to dinner.
“She’s gonna tell everyone,” Mirabel states, resigned to her fate.
“Time to eat!” Abuela calls.
“Miércoles,” Agustín sighs.
Dinner is a disaster. Surprisingly, this is the first loop where dinner has ended this way – but this is also the first time Mirabel has found the vision and pieced the whole thing together, so. This is a loop of firsts.
It also ends up being the first loop where she meets her Tío Bruno, after she tracks the rats carrying the shards of the vision back into the walls.
“You’re very sweaty,” are the first words he says to her, clutching her hand as she dangles over the pit in Casita’s floors that he had leapt over moments before. Of course, luck being what it is, the boards under Bruno crack further, and now Mirabel is holding him up as she clutches to the side.
She drops him with a shriek of surprise when a rat pops out of his ruana – she panicked, so sue her – but it turns out it wasn’t that far of a drop, and they both climb back up to the floor above.
Bruno looks down at the shallower-than-expected pit, looks at Mirabel, and then just says, “Bye,” and walks off.
Mirabel blinks for a second, stunned, before calling, “Wait, wait!” and darting after him. Bruno just seems to ignore her, walking along the hallway, knocking on wood as he goes. “Why did you take the vision? What does it mean? Is it why you came back, or…?”
“You were never supposed to see that vision,” he finally tells her after knocking on wood again. “No one was.” He then proceeds to throw salt and sugar over his shoulders, right into Mirabel’s face, before reciting, “Sana sana, colita de rana,” and hopping over the cracks in the floors. Which draws Mirabel’s attention to…
“Wait, have you been back here…patching the cracks?”
“Oh, no no no, I’m too scared to go near those. No, all the patching’s done by Hernando.”
There was someone else back here? “Who is…?”
“I’m Hernando and I’m scared of nothing!” It’s just…Bruno with his hood up apparently. “Heh, it’s actually me. I used to say my real gift was ‘acting’, heheh…” He then puts a bucket on his head and says, “I’m Jorge, I make the spackle.”
Mirabel just…gives her uncle a look. “How long have you been…back here?”
Turns out, Tío Bruno has been living in the walls since Mirabel’s own failed gift ceremony – all because of the vision he had, with Mirabel breaking (or potentially, saving) Casita.
Bruno admits that he left because of the vision, to protect Mirabel – because he had it after Abuela had asked him to, the night of her gift ceremony. And Mirabel – Mirabel is touched, and her heart aches for her Tío, who has been living in the walls behind Casita for ten years to try and protect her from her own future.
“But… Tío Bruno, wait,” she cuts in, as Bruno tries to usher her out. “You saw the house breaking, but, but did you see…?”
She trails off, and Bruno stops, looking at Mirabel with an odd expression. Mirabel takes a breath, and continues, “I keep living this day over and over again, on repeat, and it won’t stop, Tío Bruno. Did you…did you see this happening in your vision?”
Bruno stares at her, mouth opening and closing like a fish for a minute, before he finally finds his voice. “No, I…I didn’t see this,” he says softly. “Not until, well, it started happening, anyway.”
Mirabel eyes him, before asking, “You…you remember it all?”
“Yeah, uh, yeah,” Bruno says with a shrug. “I think, uh, y’know, my gift kinda helps with that… it’s giving me killer déjà vu, though.” And… and yeah, if Mirabel squints, she thinks she can see her Tío’s eyes glimmering a bright green, ever so slightly.
“Oh,” is all Mirabel can say to that. “Oh,” she repeats, and then, “I’m sorry.”
Bruno blinks at her. “Why are you sorry, Mirabel?” he asks. “I know you’re not doing this on purpose. I think its just the magic, trying to get us all on the right track to, well, the right future.”
Mirabel shifts back and forth on her feet, wrapping her arms around herself. “Tío, what if... what if I can’t figure out the right path? What if we’re stuck like this forever?”
“Ah, well.” Bruno looks stumped, as if he hadn’t planned on that eventuality. “I mean, uh… well, look, kid. What is this current loop, number eleven, right? If it still resets tonight and tomorrow, just, ignore doing anything productive for loop thirteen, come find me and we can… we can look into it, alright?”
“Like, look into the future?” Mirabel asks, just to clarify, and Bruno heaves a sigh.
“Yeah, kid,” he says, a bit resigned, but Mirabel notices his eyes are glowing again, and she chooses not to push it, because she figures maybe he’s seeing the future, where he has to show her the future, and wow, time sure is confusing, isn’t it? She wonders how Tío Bruno keeps any of it straight.
“Why the thirteenth loop?” she asks instead, even though she thinks she knows the answer.
“Oh, well, thirteen is supposed to be an unlucky number, you know,” he says, confirming her suspicions. “So, uh, I figure, try not to do anything too crazy on loop thirteen, cuz we wouldn’t want that to stick, and just… you can hang out back here all day for that one, if we need to.”
“Alright,” Mirabel says, with a bit of a smile. Bruno smiles back, before turning towards the wall – the other side of the mural, looking out over the dining room.
“They’re all looking for you, you know,” he tells her. Mirabel sighs.
“Yeah, I know, but. I really… I think I messed up with this loop, anyway, so. Can’t I just… wait it out back here with you?”
“Ah, well… yeah, okay, sure thing, Mirabel,” Bruno acquiesces. And so, that night, Mirabel drifts off, not in her own bed, wondering how to get this repeating day to stop, but curled into her Tío Bruno’s side as they squeeze into his armchair, for once hopeful that she can still save her family’s miracle.
---
Loop twelve isn’t any better, but she feels like, somehow, she may be getting closer. She goes through the motions that she forewent in the previous loop, but forgoes going to Bruno’s room at all. She lets the marriage proposal play out.
But strangely enough, right as Mariano gets on one knee, Casita begins to shake and cracks begin to form.
The look Abuela sends her way in the aftermath of the chaos – Mirabel doesn’t think that Abuela knows exactly what was in Bruno’s vision, but she thinks that Abuela suspects that Mirabel is responsible for the cracks somehow, and – well, maybe she’s not wrong.
---
Loop thirteen brings her to Tío Bruno the first opportunity she gets.
He looks at her with sympathy in his eyes, as she slumps in his chair and watches his rats scamper around.
“Tío,” she says, “I really don’t know what I’m doing wrong – I don’t know what I’m supposed to be doing at all!”
“I’m sorry, Mirabel,” he says.
“Not your fault,” she mutters, curling in on herself for a moment longer. Then she finally sighs, and heaves herself out of the chair.
“Please help me, Tío,” she asks him, and Bruno sighs, running a hand through his hair.
“Alright, kid,” he says after a long moment of staring off into the distance, eyes faintly glowing a neon green. He turns those eyes to look into her own. “Let’s head to my vision cave.”
The vision shows – quite a bit more, once Mirabel encourages Bruno to stay in it, please, there must be something else we’re missing!
It showed the events she’s lived over and over again first, but meshed together – talking to Dolores at breakfast, following Luisa to learn about Bruno’s tower, entering the tower and grabbing the vision pieces, the pieces being revealed at dinner, finding Bruno behind the walls. But then it starts to shift – the Casita cracking, and then not. This is where Mirabel pushes Bruno to look further.
They follow the golden butterfly. It gets all out of order from there – but it seems that, somehow, Mirabel needs to ruin Isabela’s proposal, and then apologize for it, and hug her sister.
Hrmph. Mirabel doesn’t particularly want to – she may or may not have some unresolved issues with her oldest sister – but if it saves Casita, saves the miracle, then she’ll do her best.
---
The next loop, Mirabel tries to do exactly what she saw with Tío Bruno. She makes it all the way to Isabela’s room, but she’s thrown out and left with no chance to apologize, and she can’t get back into the room.
Mirabel then locks herself into her own room, and waits for the clock to tick over to midnight.
---
The final loop starts as another loop seeming to end in disaster.
Luisa’s gift fading, finding the vision tablet, but the vision tablet getting revealed and ruining the proposal. But she makes it into Isabela’s room this time, gets her oldest sister to open up and reveal that she didn’t want to marry Mariano at all (which, honestly, Mirabel had never noticed how miserable her sister was, caught up in her own angst instead).
They hug, and the candle glows so bright, and Mirabel has a moment of hope that this is it.
Then Abuela storms in, yelling at them – at her – about the chaos she’s caused, about how she needs to stop – oh, oh how Mirabel wishes it would all stop –
Mirabel can’t hold it back. She is sure that this loop, too, will reset, because they all have, and maybe this is her gift curse (?), to just relive the same day over and over again – regardless, Mirabel can’t stop the words from falling from her mouth.
“I will never be good enough for you, will I?”
---
After Casita collapses, Mirabel runs as soon as her mamá steps away. She keeps running, at first, before concluding that this pace is unmaintainable, and so she slows to a determined walk, almost a march, through the crack in the mountains of the Encanto and into the world beyond.
She sits at the bank of the multicolored river she had never seen, but heard about. She sits, curling her knees up to her chest and wrapping her arms around her legs, and buries her head into her knees and starts to sob.
This loop had started so promising, and yet, here she is, with a collapsed Casita and her family broken. She sobs even harder. It is both comforting and cruel to know that, come midnight, she will likely pass out and start the day over again.
…Midnight comes.
Mirabel does not fall asleep. The day does not reset. Mirabel just continues to cry, softly now, unaware of the time. She cries well into the night before she finally falls asleep from the exhaustion of the day.
(Elsewhere, Bruno’s eyes flash neon green before fading back to normal, and the splitting déjà vu induced headache abruptly ceases. On the one hand, Bruno thinks, that’s great, because it means no more loops! On the other hand, he thinks, Mirabel is out there, likely devastated over what’s happened, and while he knows she wanted the loop to end as well… somehow, he doesn’t think she wanted it to end like this.)
By the time Mirabel wakes up, the sun has risen, and the river in front of her dances with multiple colors. It’s beautiful, Mirabel thinks. If this hadn’t happened, she never would have known this existed just outside of the Encanto.
…Mirabel’s brain suddenly realizes that she is still here and not back in her bed on the morning after Antonio’s gift ceremony –
The loops are over. Of course, of course, she broke her family and now the loops choose to end –
Abuela finds her, softly sobbing into her arms.
They talk.
Mirabel sees the golden butterfly alight on two reeds sticking out of the water, just like in Bruno’s vision. She thinks she finally understands.
When Bruno finds them, and Abuela interrupts his defense of her by sweeping her into a hug, she can’t help a small smile from crossing her face. It’s a step forward, in the right direction.
The loops were – many things, and not necessarily great – but as she reunites with her family, and as they begin the plans to rebuild Casita, she thinks that maybe – yeah, maybe this was worth the trouble after all.