It had been five years.

Five years since she and her brother had stayed the summer in Gravity Falls, Oregon. On the dot. She'd crossed out the day on the calendar over her bed when she had woken up, and then she had stared at the empty bed across from hers.

Five years might have been a long time, but when you'd had someone by your side for the first twelve years of your life, five years of their absence felt like forever.

Her parents did her best to cheer her up, but they tactfully didn't say why they bothered making dinosaur-shaped pancakes that morning, or why there had been whipped cream and sprinkles all over her morning mocha. Mabel appreciated the gestures, even if they didn't do much. They'd stopped going to the graveyard two years ago, and now the only thing marking this day was her calendar and the general quietness of their household.

They didn't talk about it. Which had been fine for the first couple of years. Mabel never wanted to talk about it. She never went back to Gravity Falls, either, but she wrote letters to Grunkle Stan as often as she could. She knew it wasn't his fault, even if her parents frowned every time she brought him up, like she couldn't see the disapproval in their eyes.

It wasn't Grunkle Stan's fault. It wasn't.

She had to work that day. Her first summer job, and she was working at a crepe place in the Rockridge area of Oakland. It had been fine, but not the exciting step into adulthood that she hoped it would be. But her hours didn't start until the afternoon, so she stayed inside after her parents left for work, and she laid on the couch, their cat Cupcakes curled up on her stomach. She played with his feet. He was so old, now.

It had taken a long time to recover as much as she had. She still wasn't totally recovered. It felt alien to look at all the drawings she'd done when she was little, all the fairy princesses and unicorn fairy princesses and endless drawings of boy bands. She hadn't drawn for the first year, after. It had been hard. She'd gotten better, though; she still thought about Dipper every day, of course she did, but it didn't break her anymore, the knowledge that they never found the body and that they would never really know what happened to him. That had been exhausting for a twelve year old girl to handle. So exhausting she'd blocked most of it from her memory; she remembered crying until she could barely breathe, until she passed out. She didn't remember very much else from that summer at all.

It had been a normal summer for them, too, up until they'd realized Dipper was gone. Working in Grunkle Stan's shop. Mabel, teasing Dipper about his crush on Wendy. Getting into trouble with Wendy's friends. What little Mabel remembered was classic, the most basic summer vacation a person could ask for; then Dipper had disappeared into the woods and never come back.

They told Mabel they'd searched for days. She couldn't remember. All she could remember was panic and tears. Dipper was her brother, her twin, her constant companion. All she'd wanted at the time was for Dipper to be back.

At the end of the summer, the search had been canceled. Her parents had driven up to take her back personally. She remembered fighting them, trying to cling to Grunkle Stan, because in her head somehow he had been the only one who really understood.

It didn't matter, though. They'd taken her back home, they'd held the funeral, and she had to try to figure out how to keep getting out of bed every day when her twin's empty bed sat across the room as a grim reminder that she was alone.

She learned, at first, to hide it for her parents. It was hard to remember how she'd been before, but she put on the big empty grin a year after his death, trying to cheer them up. She threw herself back into her eighties phase, all neon colors and retro cartoons, and it was a good way to draw the attention away from how hollow she was. She collected stickers with twice the fervor, sang karaoke with friends because it was something to do, and she did her best to keep herself busy. There was even a phase for a while where she'd gotten cheap secondhand plush animals and sewn them together to make hideous chimeras that she gave away as presents. The busier she was, the less time she had to focus on her missing half.

It got easier as time went on. Little by little she started enjoying things again, though it took years. She realized it one night when she was fourteen, at her friend's birthday party - she had sung an entire song in karaoke and had actually enjoyed it. She actually started caring about her grades again, at least in part because she know Dipper would have wanted her to care. She started to be a little less empty inside.

There were still bad days. Days where she didn't want to be around anyone. There was a night not too long ago where she ran away in the middle of the night, drove into San Francisco in the old car she'd inherited from her dad, and walked around ocean beach until the sun came up and she realized she'd be stuck in rush hour traffic. And even five years hadn't dulled the pain of the day that Dipper had been declared dead. But there were good days, too. Having a job helped. She was supposed to be saving money for when she went to college, but there was a part of her that wanted to go back and visit Grunkle Stan. Even if visiting Gravity Falls alone scared her, she missed her Grunkle, and he sounded lonely in his letters.

After a good hour of moping and playing with Cupcakes' paws, Mabel dragged herself off the couch. She had to change into work clothes. She made it upstairs just in time to hear her cell phone, left charging on her bedside table, finish ringing.

She stepped over, picking up the phone and unlocking it. The missed call was from an Oregon number, and she frowned at it for the half moment before her voicemail notification pinged. Thumbing over to the voicemail menu, Mabel wondered if maybe Grunkle Stan had finally gotten a cell phone, or if it was just a telemarketer.

Her question was answered as soon as she brought the phone to her ear; Grunkle Stan's voice played, and even though she hadn't heard his voice since last year when he'd called on her birthday, there was something about the rough tone that was soothing. "What? Voicemail? What the… alright, fine. Hey, kiddo. I finally got one of those cell phones Soos has been badgering me about, and I figured, knowing what day it was… well, I just wanted to check up on you. I've been...thinking about some things, and, well." There was a long pause. Mabel expected something else, something more. Instead, there was just a heavy sigh. "Be safe, kid."

That was it. The voicemail ended. Mabel pulled the phone away from her ear and stared at it sternly, like that would make the voicemail make more sense. It didn't, of course. For a moment, she considered calling Grunkle Stan back, but a quick glance at the time made her change her mind. If she didn't get ready to go now, she'd be late for her shift, and if she was going to talk to Grunkle Stan she didn't want it to be rushed.

A soft meow drew her attention, and Mabel glanced down as Cupcakes started twining between her ankles. "Yeah," she said, leaning down to scratch underneath his chin. "These days are always weird, aren't they, buddy?"

Cupcakes gave a heavy mrow, wandering over to Dipper's bed. Mabel let him. It made her feel a little more hollow, but, hey. No one else was using it.

She got changed quick, shoved her phone and wallet - both covered in puffy stickers - into her pockets, and went downstairs to fight with her inherited car. She made it to work without the car stalling, which was good, and she clocked in on time. If any of her coworkers noticed that her smile wasn't as big as it was normally, or that her peppiness was on the low end, none of them mentioned it.

She clocked in just before the lunch rush, and today, lunch was very much a rush. She and the other waitresses went as fast as they could, taking orders and delivering food and beverages to tables, but only years of practice kept the smile on Mabel's face. Everything else was exhausting. Not in a physically tiring way, but a soul-sucking, retail-worker sort of way. They ran out of soymilk to make lattes with halfway through lunch, and Mabel had to endure with a cheerful grin as six different people scowled like she'd ruined their entire day and ordered 'black coffee if that's the ONLY vegan coffee you have'. Partway through, Mabel switched herself to autopilot; even though she was taking down orders and waiting on tables, she focused on different animal combinations, like a snake and a badger becoming a snadger, or a bird and a wombat combining to become a wombird. Right after the lunch rush died down, she doodled her favorite on a napkin - the giraffican, half giraffe and half pelican. She resolved to find some plush animals that she could take apart to create the giraffican, when she had time in the future.

It may have been frustrating - any customer service job was frustrating - but by the end of the day, Mabel was thankful for it. There had been too much to do. She hadn't had any time to stop and think, and that was what she needed; constant, intense, mind-numbing work. She stayed a little over, just to help clean up. She was sure her manager would talk to her about it the next day, but she didn't care. She'd had four triple shot zebra mochas during her shift and her brain felt a little bit like it was vibrating, and the cleaning needed to get done.

Her shift had only been eight hours, and the amount of caffeine and sugar in her body should have kept her going for a long time. The jittery, overcaffeinated feeling stuck with her as she was driving home, and Mabel indulged in some road ragey name-calling when she got stuck behind someone going five miles under the speed limit, their turn signal stuck on for three whole blocks before they actually turned down a side street. Aside from that, she got home without incident, and completely bypassed her parents, going up to her room.

She kicked off her shoes, and she pulled her phone out of her pocket, flopping onto her bed. She had ten smiling cell phone puffy stickers stuck to her phone case, and they all stared at her expectantly. She should probably call her Grunkle Stan back, but now that she'd hit the bed, all of the energy went out of her.

"I'm sorry, cell phone friends," she said, sinking deeper into her bed. She felt Cupcakes jump onto the bed, and then climb onto her lower back, purring softly. "I'll call him back tomorrow, I promise."

It would just be a nap. A tiny little nap, and then she'd get up and brush the thick coating of sugar and espresso off of her teeth, and the next day she'd call Grunkle Stan and they'd commiserate over Dipper.

Mabel shut her eyes, and she fell asleep.

It's a coming of age ritual. She has to go through it. Capturing and training her own kittycorn was imperative, otherwise she would never be seen as a grown woman. This, however, was easier said than done; all she has is a grappling hook, and the kittycorn roost is at the very top of the cliffs of certain doom.

Mabel grits her teeth, gathering all of her determination. She makes sure the grappling hook is strapped to her hip, and she starts to climb, hand over foot, up the sheer cliffs. It's tough going. The rocks bite into her hands, and finding toeholds is difficult. Halfway up, a feathered snake slithers out of a hole in the cliffs and spreads its wings, hissing at her. She bats it away, and it falls down the cliff.

She keeps going, no matter what, until she gets to the overhang at the top of the cliffs. This is it, this is the place. She pulls out her grappling hook, aiming for the lip of the overhang where one lone, ancient tree hangs. She aims, and she fires, and by some miracle the grappling hook catches the tree. She gives a few experimental tugs on the rope, and when she's certain it's caught, she swings off of the cliff. She has to wait for the rope to steady itself, and then she climbs up, climbing into the branches of the tree. She's so close that she can hear the purring of the kittycorns.

Mabel pauses to take a few deep breaths. This is the moment. If she can wrangle the golden kittycorn, then not only will she prove herself a woman, she will ascend to royalty. If she's quick…

She climbs up the tree, onto the ledge, and rolls out onto the kittycorn roost.

Only, in that moment, everything flickers. The grass changes. It's shorter, now, and in the distance instead of roosts there are trees. Evergreens, reaching to the sky. The sky is a flat gray. She stares at it for a moment, a creeping feeling slithering down her spine.

The sky flickers again as she stares at it. Like clouds parting the gray moves to the sides, but what's behind them isn't any more comforting. It's stars, but too bright, too intense. She grew up in the city, her night sky was handfuls of tiny stars peeking through clouds burnt orange by light pollution. This night sky is so thickly detailed that she can see other galaxies far away, eddying, whirling, burning away.

Then those stars start falling.

It's just one or two, at first. Sparks wafting away in the breeze, they slip away and disappear. Then bigger ones. A flash and a streak across the sky, and they're gone. Mabel wants to move, but when she tries she feels like her feet are rooted to the spot. A wind starts to rise, whipping her hair away from her. She can't look away as all the stars fall from the sky, streaks and flashes of light too bright to look away from. They go, in twos and threes, and then fives and tens, until the sky has no more stars but pinstripes of blazing glory that vanish near as quick as they begin.

The wind keeps rising, too, until even the evergreens that hadn't been there before are waving with it. Her hair is caught in the wind, her clothes too, and suddenly as the last stars tear away from the sky the wind becomes too much. Her feet aren't rooted to the ground anymore, and she's blown away, head over heels.

As the gust knocks her over the edge of the cliff, she hears a voice screaming after her.

WHERE ARE YOU, SHOOTING STAR?