#full disclosure I have not watched Atlantis the Lost Empire in so long

[a-mad-scientist-approaches]

The Mural

Based off @astriiformes and @saisai-chan‘s Atlantis AU of Gravity Falls. I found it recently and it’s stolen my heart! I tried to write these events out just as you guys said it would go down, but as it turns out, I completely misremembered the water-fight scene. Sorry XD.

It's super interesting that Ford can read. No one else in Atlantis can, after all. With this in mind, Dipper and Mabel think he can probably put that cool skill to use, especially since they know of a certain underwater mural that's fascinated them for some time.

They'll do that just as soon as they beat Stan at this water fight.

AO3

Part 1    Part 2

“Ford, do you wanna see this nerd mural or not?” Said Stan impatiently, following Dipper and Mabel towards the edge of the pool.

“Yes, yes, just a second,” Ford replied from his half-crouch where he was having one last-minute flip-through of the Journal.

“By ‘nerd mural’ I hope you mean ‘the eons-old history of our people that should be duly treated with respect’,” Dipper glared at Stan, pausing on his way down the submerged steps. Mabel was already treading water a little way out.

“Uh, yeah. Definitely. That’s what ‘nerd’ means,”

Dipper narrowed his eyes, not convinced.

“Hurry up, hurry up!” Urged Mabel enthusiastically, spitting out some water as her treading splashed her in the face. “You gotta see it, it’s so shiny and cool! Come on! Oh, you two know how to swim, right?” She asked as an afterthought.

“Yeah kid, we know how to swim. We might be a thousand years younger than you, but we’re not newbies at this.” Unconcernedly, Stan stripped off his shirt and trousers, leaving them in a pile by the water’s edge, his gun folded up carefully inside them. He made a face at the slimy feeling of the cool, mossy ground between his toes.

Both sets of pale blue eyes looked at him doubtfully.

“We’re not!” He protested.

“Okay, okay . . .”

The water wasn’t freezing, thankfully. It was actually quite pleasant. As he made his way down the slippery steps, however, Stan’s boxers filled up with air like the pond was using them as balloons. He awkwardly squashed them back down, wincing at the loud farting noise the action made.

“HA!” Mabel called in delight. “You call that a pool fart?” She drew up her tunic and made her own big air bubble, pushing it underwater with an even louder PPPPPFFHHHHRRRRRP sound and such a victorious expression that Stan had to laugh.

“You guys are both wrong,” Dipper rolled his eyes. As Mabel stuck her tongue out at him, he continued, “This is how you do a pool fart.” He clapped a hand under his armpit and squeezed his upper arm over it. Against how Stan felt science or whatever was supposed to work, it made a very loud squeeeeeeeeeeBLAT, winning the competition and making Mabel inhale some water again as she laughed.

Distraction over, Stan barked, “Sixer!” over the backdrop of her chokes and I’m fine!’s.

“Coming, Stan,” said Ford irritably, snapping shut the Journal. He pulled off his boots and socks . . . and that was it.

“You don’t want anything dry to get into afterwards?” said Stan flatly, as his brother hovered one foot over the pond’s surface, still clothed head to ankle.

Frowning, Ford conceded the point and took off his coat.

“Scandalous,” Stan rolled his eyes. “Look, the gremlins aren’t gonna care, Ford!”

“No, they won’t!” encouraged Mabel.

“What’re gremlins?” questioned Dipper.

“They’re you,” answered Stan.

“So . . . what are we?”

“You’re gremlins,”

“But, like . . . does it refer to Atlanteans, or children, or what? What are they?”

“I told ya kid, they’re you,”

“What?! But- But that’s not an answer-” Dipper said in frustration as Stan openly grinned at him. Back on the shore, Ford undressed down to some more appropriate swimming gear, revealing (gasp!) stripy boxers and a dark undershirt, which he indicated with a glare were his absolute limit.

“You can’t just say that we’re gremlins and gremlins are us! Stan, come on, what does it mean?”

“I keep telling ya kid, but it’s not my fault you’re not listening. Jeez, what’s his deal?” Stan said, not even attempting to hide his laughs to a paddling Mabel, who giggled.

“Ford!” Dipper complained.

“It’s a term of affection for someone mischievous,” Ford informed him, coming down the steps.

Stan crossed his arms defensively at what he knew was coming.

“Aww!” Mabel beamed at him.

Dipper was suddenly smiling happily at Stan. “Really?” he asked. He looked at his sister for a moment, and then said matter-of-factly, “Well, gremlins to you too, Stanley and Stanford,”

Stan felt his face warm up slightly. “Ruin all the fun, why don’t you Sixer?”

“And if he’s stubborn feel free to splash him,” Ford continued, kicking an explosion of white water into Stan’s face.

When his eyes (and nose, and throat, and lungs, and possibly brain – that had been a lot of water to breathe in) had finished stinging and he could see clear enough again, he saw Dipper looking at him slyly. Mabel wasn’t anywhere in sight.

“No, no, NO-!”

And he was underwater in a flurry of bubbles again, discovering that while Mabel may have been small, she had a ton of force behind her. The steps slipped out from under him, and he couldn’t find them again. When she started tickling him, he thought it was probably the greatest self-control he had ever showed in his life that he didn’t breathe in and end up drowning. As it was, he spasmed in the water until he caught both of Mabel’s hands in one of his, pinning her tightly to his chest in an inescapable grip. They surfaced like a sea monster.

“Holy Moses, kid,” he gasped. Mabel was cackling breathlessly as she strained to wriggle away. Opposite them, Ford stood with a self-satisfied smirk on his face.

Ha, we’ll see about that . . .

Stan determinedly shook his hair out of his eyes and grinned evilly back.

“Ready?” he asked Mabel, hefting her slightly. She violently shook her head, but shrieked “YES!!” all the same, so he figured she was fine.

“INCOMING!” He shouted, and launched the girl at his brother. With an expertly executed water bomb, she splashed right in front of Ford, drenching him all the way up to his glasses. Stan didn’t see what happened with them next though, because all of a sudden Dipper was laughing triumphantly in his ear as he scrambled onto Stan’s shoulders. Knowing exactly what this called for, Stan grabbed the boy’s legs firmly, then hurried up a couple steps before falling backwards into the pool again with an almighty tidal wave.

The next few minutes were a blur of activity, laughing, yelling, and of course, splashing, but it ended when Mabel, by that point on Ford’s shoulders, managed to push Dipper off Stan’s shoulders and Stan subsequently cheated and pushed Ford over as well. He would have been proud that he was the last one standing, if he hadn’t been so winded.

Gasping, Ford surfaced and collapsed next to him on the upper steps. Mabel crawled up towards them as well, hiccoughing and giggling, to settle in his brother’s lap with a squelch. Dipper lay across Stan’s legs and stared at the sky, taking deep breaths and letting them out with the occasional laugh.

“I see you still play dirty,” Ford said to him, straightening his glasses.

“And you still lose,” Stan grinned back, unthinkingly clapping (well, slapping) him on the shoulder and bumping their heads together affectionately.

Ford stiffened. Stan hurriedly took his hand back and cleared his throat. There was a silence which wasn’t quite as tense as the occasional angry, post-argument silences they had had previously, but regardless, neither of them knew what to say.

It’d be much simpler if I didn’t actually want to go back to being . . . well, like the kids, Stan reflected, frowning at the rippling surface of the pool.

“Stan?” Ford said quietly.

“Yeah?” He said gruffly, wishing that Ford would just leave well enough alone. He got it, okay? Ford didn’t have to tell him to stop acting like everything was fine, he understood that it wasn’t. Yeah, maybe he’d forgotten that for a moment, but he was back on track again. No need for him to actually say anything.

“We should . . . talk. When this is all over. We should talk properly,”

Dipper had gone very quiet and was obviously eavesdropping, and Mabel was trying to pretend that she was too engrossed with fiddling with Ford’s fingers to notice what else was going on.

“Yeah. That . . . yeah.” Stan even managed a nod. And it wasn’t even a sappy nod. Just a plain, normal nod and agreement, a solid acknowledgement about what was the best course to go forwards with, nothing in the slightest to reveal that all of a sudden Stan might, hypothetically, be feeling an intense sensation of relief and happiness pulsing through his heart.

“Okay,” said Ford, looking at him.

“Okay,” Stan replied, looking back.

Ford gave a nervous sort of smile and nudged Stan’s shoulder with his own.

“Alright,” he said, lifting Mabel off him and standing up. “We really should see those ruins now. No more delays,”

“You’re the reason we had both delays,” Mabel pointed out as they re-entered the depths of the pool and swam off the edge of the last step, treading water in the very centre.

“Finally,” Dipper peeled himself off Stan and headed out towards them as well.

Stan stood up too, and then realised something: it was very likely that by the end of this, Ford wouldn’t want to speak to him any more. Maybe even for good, this time.

No. No, he could figure something out, talk him around to seeing things like the rest of the crew. It wouldn’t be pleasant either way, but one alternative left him with a brother as good as dead to him (again). However much Stan might be feeling uncomfortable about Rourke’s plans now, that scenario was number one on the list of things he didn’t want to happen.

“You coming?” Dipper raised an eyebrow quizzically at him.

“Yep, be right there,” Stan said, snapping out of the thoughts. Taking a deep breath, they all sank into the dark depths.

The underwater silence pressed oddly against his ears, especially after the loudness that the water fight had brought. The darkness was only broken by two bright blue lights shining out of the crystals tied around the kids’ necks. Not for the first time, Stan found himself thinking that he had to get his hands on some of them.

The lights guided him and Ford deeper and deeper, colder and colder. On the edge of visibility, he caught flashes of ancient ruins, the stairs from above continuing down where they swam. He was starting to get nervous. How long did they have to hold their breath? Would he be able to find his way back if he had to?

Suddenly, the cloud of white hair that was Mabel changed direction, tilting upwards. Feeling the pressure increase on his lungs, Stan followed her as quickly as he could, Dipper and Ford rising with him.  

His head broke into open air, and then thunked off something metallic.

“Ow!”

“Watch your head!”

“Thanks, sweetie,” he groaned.

“Everyone okay?” asked Dipper, coming up into the tiny, enclosed space as well.

Ford gasped for breath, seeming to have the least lung capacity out of all of them. “I’ll survive,”

It really was cramped now. All four of them were touching in some way or other: Dipper’s cheek was jammed against Stan’s shoulder, Mabel was squashed against the stone wall between him and Ford, and speaking of him and Ford, they kept kicking each other’s shins as they tried to keep their heads above the water.

“Okay, the mural’s just down there,” If Dipper pointed somewhere, none of them saw it. “The writing’s just above the star,” he told Ford.

“Alright,” Ford nodded. They both ducked underwater again. Mabel went after them, leaving Stan no choice but to follow – unless he wanted to wait alone in the tiny, utterly dark, cold space.

Mural was an understatement. Was mega-ral a word? It should have been for this thing. Stan had never seen one so big. He felt his jaw drop, and a bubble of air escaped him.

The edges stretched away into darkness, but the light provided by Dipper and Mabel showed the section immediately in front clearly. Giant stone people were depicted with their arms outstretched, guarding an enormous white pointy ball thing – the star, Stan guessed.

A tap on his arm made him turn to Mabel, who grinned broadly and gesticulated wildly, somehow managing to convey without words the scope of her ecstasy at the beautiful, faintly glimmering, work of art. Stan nodded and gave her a thumbs-up.

Ford floated close to the mural, putting a hand out to touch it. Dipper swam close to him, holding up his glowing crystal so Ford could see. Like he had said, runes – Atlantean writing – had been carved above the star in faded golden letters. From what Ford had shown him, Stan could pick out a few letters, maybe half a word, but nothing more.

Ford started gesturing excitedly and grabbed Dipper’s crystal, brandishing it at the confused boy. They headed back up to the pocket of air.

“That star!” Said Ford in a spray of water. “It’s the Heart of Atlantis! It’s keeping everything here alive! And it’s not a star, it’s a crystal!”

“Like these?” asked Mabel, holding up hers.

“Exactly like those! I should have realised earlier; that’s the power source we’ve been looking for, Stan! It’s also most likely the cause of the light you two remember seeing!” He added to Dipper and Mabel, who looked at each other wide-eyed.

“But it’s huge!” said Stan.

“Well it would be,” said Ford, as though that was obvious. “It’s an immense source of energy! The opportunity to study it-” He shook his head, water flying everywhere again. “We just have to find it first,”

“Right,” nodded Stan, glad that the bobbing shadows mostly obscured his expression.

“This should have been in the Journal,”

“Maybe it was, and you just didn’t see it?” suggested Dipper.

“Perhaps. But I’m getting a bad feeling about those missing pages now,” said Ford grimly. Stan stayed quiet. Now that this had come up, he had his own suspicions about where those pages were.

Glancing uneasily at each other, Dipper and Mabel led them back to the surface. By the time they reached it, Ford was back to being wildly eager about what they had found.

“Kids, that was amazing! There aren’t any more places like that, are there? Preferably above ground?”

“Sorry,” said Dipper, stroking towards the steps.

“We could show you the throne room, if you want,” said Mabel. “It’s got a pond, and a couch,”

“Sounds fantastic!” Grinned Ford broadly, splashing onto the steps and scooping both kids up. He forgot about how slippery the submerged surface was though, and plunged right back under water again.

“For cryin’ out loud,” Stan muttered, rooting around in the water until he found Mabel and drew her up to lighten Ford’s load. He plopped her on one of the shallower steps as Ford resurfaced, coughing. Dipper thumped him on the back. Stan couldn’t help but start to smile again.

“Alright. Journal,” said Ford, wiping the water and hair out of his eyes. In doing so, he saw what was happening around the pool. Stan looked at his expression and turned.

“Alright. Heart of Atlantis,” responded Rourke, emerging out of the shadows with his hands on his hips, those oddly unblinking eyes and too-wide smile present on his face. With him came the rest of the crew. Not only Soos, and Wendy, and even Susan, but most, if not all, of the masked armed forces that had come with them. They were all carrying guns, and one or two had explosives on bandoliers across their chests. Mabel and Dipper stirred uneasily.

The recently-recovered smile slid off Stan’s face. Rourke met his eyes and gave an almost imperceptible jerk of his head. Slowly, Stan stepped out of the water and made his way over to his bundle of clothes.

“What’s going on?” said Ford warily.

“You’re taking me to the Heart of Atlantis, Fordsy. Then we’ll just chuck it on our good ol’ submarine and be away with it,” answered Rourke easily.

“What? No, no, we can’t do that,” said Ford immediately. Stan silently cursed as he pulled on his shirt. His brother really needed to learn when to shut up. “The Heart keeps Atlantis alive! If we take it away . . .” Ford seemed lost for words for a moment, “the city – the people could all die! We have to study it here,”

Rourke raised a finger. “Could. They could all die. I’m A-OK to take that chance. Oh, don’t look so glum, kiddos! I’m sure you’ll be fine.” He added, noticing the way the younger twins were tensing, Mabel’s fists closing and one of Dipper’s hands straying closer to his thigh.

“Stan?” Mabel asked quietly. He didn’t answer, concentrating hard on pulling on his boots.

“You – you can’t be serious,” Ford said in disbelief.

“Deadly,”

Stan stood up. “Ford,”

His brother’s eyes flicked over to him. Stan picked his gun up off the stone floor. He didn’t aim it, but regardless, the message couldn’t have been clearer.

“Do what he says,”