Got Your Back
(Not part of my usual continuity, this story was written for Wendip Week 2018, for the prompt "Moving in With Each Other")
Mabel, her tongue stuck out, said, "Eww! You guys! Get a room, why don't you?"
"We got one," Dipper said. "Wendy's moving in with me."
"What? Oh, that's great for you, but where will I sleep?" Mabel asked. OK, it was 2016, and as sixteen-year-olds, she and Dipper were really too old to be sharing a room, but then it was Gravity Falls, and what happens in Gravity Falls stays in the Bottomless Pit, as far as parents ever know.
"It's cool, Mabes," Wendy said. "You sleep in your own bed. Dipper and I will share his."
"Uhh. . . awkward! I . . . think I'll go sleep in the guest room," Mabel said. She chuckled in an evil way. "Wouldn't want to distract you crazy kids. You're so stuck on each other!"
"Mabel, no jokes," Dipper warned.
"OK, OK, I'll just get my stuff and clear out. You guys look really cute in bathrobes, by the way. Did you enjoy your shower?"
"Mabel!"
"Sheesh! I'm going already!" Mabel packed up a few necessities—three trips down and up and down the stairs—and then standing in the doorway, she said, "Well, I'll just leave you two alone, so you can get rid of the bathrobes, or whatever."
Wendy threw something at her. It was only a stuffed animal, and a giggling Mabel closed the door before it hit.
"Man," Dipper sighed. "How did we get into these messes?"
"You know, dude," Wendy said.
Yeah, he knew. They'd been exploring the crashed space ship, when Dipper had opened a hatch—evidently never previously opened—and they entered a cabin with a cryotube in it, like the one the Shapeshifter had been frozen in. In fact, Dipper suspected that the cryotube in Ford's bunker had been looted from here to begin with.
However, once they opened the door, the cryotube deactivated with a hiss, they felt a wave of heat, and then it opened, and a strange creature, three feet high with three short arms and three negligible legs and shaped sort of like an extremely obese bowling pin, waddled out. It looked up at the two of them and asked, "Zgrfmck nzzpl vmqms?" Well, at least it had a rising inflection and sounded like a question.
"We come in peace," Dipper said.
And the alien creature drew a ray gun and fired it. And divided into two. Which divided immediately and made four, then eight, then sixteen—
"Grunkle Ford!" Dipper said into his transmitter. "Are you seeing this?"
"Yes!" said Ford, who was watching everything from the comfort of his lab, while the GoBo camera that Dipper wore clipped to his cap caught it all. "These are very dangerous creatures—the Poppaparts! Get out of there and seal the door! They don't have object permanence and they'll forget you once they can't see you!"
"We're surrounded!" Dipper yelled.
Wendy stood back to back with him. She wielded her axe, and he swung a length of pipe. So many of the Poppaparts crowded them that they found it hard to pick a target. "Edge toward the door!" Wendy yelled, swinging the axe and pressing tight against him.
And they almost made it—but just as they fled through the hatch, a burst of hot orange radiation from one of the guns hit them, "Gah!" Wendy shouted.
They stumbled out through the hatch, Dipper slammed it shut, and then he said, "What now?"
"Nothing now," Ford said. "They'll reabsorb and go back into their sleep chamber."
"Reabsorb?" Wendy asked.
"Yes. As they divide, so they unite. They press together, adhere, and gradually shrink back so there's only one. They were shock troops."
"Uh-oh," Dipper said. "Grunkle Ford, I think we have a problem."
Cutting their clothes off was embarrassing. Then without even thinking to provide the teens with a sheet or towels, Ford and McGucket conferred, and Ford said, "Well, the good news is we can fix this up. I know the technology required. The bad news is it will take us approximately seventy-two hours to create the device. Wendy, call your Dad and tell him you're staying with Mabel for the next couple of nights. Say there's an illness in the family. Oh, sorry. Meanwhile, I'll get you a couple of bathrobes. Fiddleford, get two bathrobes, scissors, and a needle and thread."
"So," Wendy said when Mabel had left them alone. "Guess we're bunkin' together tonight, dude."
"Yeah," Dipper said. "I'm sorry."
"Not your fault, Dip. Well, make the most of it. Let's get out of our robes."
That was a little tricky, considering how the robes had been cut and sewn together, but they did it and then, carefully, both of them naked, they slipped into Dipper's bed. "Dude," Wendy said, "which side do you sleep on?"
"Left," Dipper said. "You?"
"Uh. Awkward, but—I can't sleep unless I'm laying on my back."
"OK."
They talked late into the night, and ordinarily it would have been heavenly for Dipper.
But ordinarily they weren't fused together from the napes of their necks down to the ends of their spines.
Anyway, Dipper finally got to sleep with Wendy pressing down warm and soft on him from behind. But he couldn't help wondering—
Wouldn't it have been better if we'd been standing face to face?
The End