Written for RecessiveJean for Yuletide 2014, originally posted to the Archive of Our Own. This was a wild and delightful ride! Hope you like it, FFNet.
The summer of 1930 was a strange one for Dipper Pines, but maybe that was the beauty of it. He had a hand in a wide manner of adventures and shenanigans, did all sorts of things he swore he would never do, fell in love, saved the world (had to be convinced once or twice that it needed saving in the first place). He even saw the Hidebehind—really, he did!—and got into a fistfight, a real one, one where you're doing it for something you care about. And the best part of all of it was that he and Mabel still got to share a room.
"Your great uncle is going to take such good care of you this summer," their mother had promised them with subtle tears in her eyes. Their father was down the street, talking somberly with a pickup truck driver.
Mabel, willfully optimistic as ever, had proclaimed her excitement and promised to write every day on the most interesting postcards she could find, but Dipper, suitcase of belongings too heavy for his suddenly weak-feeling arms, had murmured, staring wearily at the ground, "Just this summer, huh?"
"Oh, come on, Dipper," Mabel had teased him, brightly grinning, slinging an arm around his shoulders and jostling him. "Haven't you ever heard of keeping on the sunny side of life?"
Dipper had heard that once, or twice, or five hundred times, living under the same roof as Mabel all his life.
"Don't make me sing it, Dip," his sister had continued, poking him right between the ribs until he squirmed and yelped. "I know how much you hatesinging. Laaaaaa!"
"Ow, Mabel, knock it off!" Dipper had snapped, swatting her hands away and wriggling out of her reach.
"Just because you've got a tin ear—"
"Have not!"
Out of the corner of his eye, Dipper had seen their mother wipe at her eyes with one hand, her drab dress making her look years older, but she had been smiling, weakly, unsurely, as though she'd forgotten how.
"Oh," she might have whispered. "Oh, please promise me you'll stick together."
Dipper wouldn't be caught dead saying it, but, in some small and unexplainable way, Mabel's incessant singing (the bane of his twelve years, consistently) made the journey to Gravity Falls, Oregon not so bad. The ride was long and rickety and Dipper was sure that his bum would be bruised for weeks, and he could barely even talk over the rattling and bouncing and being thrown around like ragdolls.
The driver, a portly man with funny teeth and a cap just a mite too small for him, had offered to let them ride in the cab with him, but they had both agreed that the bed was best, where they could feel the air change from Piedmont to Gravity Falls and wave at passing folks and make crude fart noises with their mouths without worrying on being judged (the latter was mostly Mabel's idea).
Aside from which, Dipper had firmly wanted to avoid familiarizing himself too much with strangers until he could no longer avoid it.
He and Mabel played all manner of games—Detective, Cloud Shapes, Guess the Tune (Dipper lost, repeatedly), Alphabet, Twenty Questions, Hangman, Riddle Me Ree, Ulam's game (at which point Mabel shouted, "Crumb game!" and withdrew)—and sometimes the driver would try to join in with off-the-wall guesses through his open window. When they ran out of games, they tried to count how many trees they saw on the road, but this became increasingly difficult as they got closer to Oregon and began riding through forests upon forests.
Now, the sun was sinking to the west, and the Oregon border sign was far behind them, and Mabel was singing. Dipper was lying against his duffel bag full of beloved books (he'd packed more of them than actual clothes), staring at the clouds overhead. About half an hour ago, the driver had said that they were almost there, and that had made Dipper's stomach do a rather unpleasant backflip.
"In the big rock candy mountains," Mabel trilled cheerfully, kicking her legs off the edge of the open bed Ford pickup, "You never change your socks, and the little streams of apple juice come a-tricklin' down the rocks…"
"I don't think those are the words, Mabel," Dipper muttered, amused.
"Dipper," Mabel retorted in an aghast voice, "I am not going to speak of the very thing that is tearing our fine nation apart. What if I get arrested?"
"Is this town big enough to have coppers?" Dipper wondered aloud, sitting up and craning his neck around as though expecting that police officers would spring out of the thick woods on either side of the road. "I'll be surprised if it even has a post office."
"I'll bet it has all kinds of great things," Mabel said, spreading her hands apart as though envisioning a marquee. "Like… pancakes. And boys."
Dipper wrinkled his nose. "Yuck."
"You're yuck," Mabel retorted, sticking her tongue out at him. Dipper stuck his tongue out right back.
"Hey, now, don't fight," the driver said, sounding more imploring than reprimanding. "Are you fighting? I cannot tell. Anyway, uh… don't fight. Fighting is bad." To himself, he muttered, "That's what you say to kids, right…"
"Yes, Mr. Ramirez," Dipper deadpanned and Mabel sang.
"Aw, heck, enough of that." He waved a hand at them, causing the truck to swerve and Dipper to roll, arms flailing for balance. "I am but a simple Soos."
"Soooooos." Mabel drew it out until her lips were pursed, and then finished it with a laugh. "That's a funny name, mister. But I like it! Henceforth, you shall be Soos!"
"Don't say it like you picked it, Mabel," Dipper groused as he pushed himself back up on his dirty palms, but he smiled all the same.
"I mean, don't get me wrong," Soos continued, now chattering animatedly at the rear view mirror, "Mr. Pines loves fights. All kinds! But usually when he sees a fight he feels an urge to place a bet on it, and that's bad, because then he doesn't have any money."
"He's broke?" Mabel asked. She sounded fascinated.
"Only slightly less broke than we are," Dipper sighed with crossed arms, slumping against the duffel bag again, "But still better off enough to get passed along to, I suppose."
There was an ensuing silence that was altogether painful, but Dipper didn't care (or told himself he didn't). Bitterness had never really been his lot in life, but it had gotten hard to shake as the months since October wore on, further and further from anything like happiness. He preoccupied himself with staring up at the dimming sky, trying to spot the North Star before Mabel did, which—
"North Star!" Mabel shouted, pointing extravagantly. "Beat you, Dipper!"
Dipper clapped as sarcastically as he knew how. By the time he finished, Mabel had scooted over to sit with crossed legs next to him (never one to memorize their aunt's etiquette and posture lessons), leaning down and conspiratorially cupping a hand around the side of her mouth.
"What do you think he's really like?" she whispered. "Great Uncle Stanford, I mean."
"Old and stupid," Dipper grunted.
Mabel whacked his head so that his cap dislodged and landed on his eyes.
"Dipper, really," she scolded him. "Could you at least try to smile? It would be doing everyone a favor, you know."
Dipper didn't say anything, letting his cap lie where it did, hands clasped at his stomach, one leg crossed in the air. When Mabel was actually spurred to the point of being cross with him, that was how he knew he was being unreasonable.
So he sighed, and then, mischievously (more easily than he'd thought), he smiled.
"I'll bet he's… a mobster. With fifty guns."
Mabel gasped, hands flying to her mouth. "No! Not Great Uncle Stanford!" She paused, making a face. "That's an awful mouthful, isn't it. We should just call him Grunkle Stan."
"I'm sure he'll warm up to that real quick," Dipper snickered, finally fixing his cap.
It was their father's, and it was too big for him, and it smelled a little musty, but anybody who wanted it would have to pry it from Dipper's cold, dead fingers, to put it simply. Mabel's rather moth-eaten cloche, beige with tattered and tufty feathers that might have once been colorful, was their mother's. Those were about all they'd been afforded, that and Great Uncle Stanford's pocket watch, which they had been ordered to return to him upon arriving. It was in Dipper's shirt pocket now, polished and buffed into looking brand new (the only thing in this lousy truck that could fool anybody into thinking it was all right).
As he set the cap properly on his head again, he gazed distantly at the slowly appearing stars. It felt darker out than it actually was because of the thickening trees, and his whole nose was filled up with the scent of pine needles and moss and fresh dirt and dusk. Frogs were starting to chatter and burble, somewhere far off, and the keening crickets with them. Dipper had never heard such unrepentant sounds of nature. They were making him all at once dizzy and calm.
Mabel laid down next to him, folding her hands behind her head and following his stare skyward. Her shoulder nudged companionably into his.
"Dip?" she whispered after a while.
He hummed in response. She took a deep, steadying breath—and it was so uncharacteristic of her, so filled with thought and hesitation, that Dipper rolled his head slightly toward her, eyebrows furrowing.
"I'm scared," she said.
And Dipper, because he was still struggling to negotiate the clumsy and newfound adulthood that had been foisted upon him the moment the banks had foreclosed on the family's house and his own instinctive, childish honesty, was silent for a moment. I'm scared, too, he wanted to say, which was the truth, but he didn't want to make her feel worse, but he also wanted to be tough and say, Don't be scared; I'll protect you, but that seemed like an insult to Mabel, bold and beaming, who looked at hard times and turned them into an arts and crafts project—no, it seemed like an insult to both of them.
"Really? I'm excited," he decided to lie, because Mabel could always be ensnared by excitement. "Spooky old cabin in the middle of the woods, quirky gift shop, new places to explore, the always slight chance that we could get kidnapped by bears and raised as one of their own… what's not to like?"
Mabel's smile was weak, but it stayed there.
"Yeah," she said, and then, standing swiftly up, she cried, stronger, "Yeah! This summer is going to be solid aces!"
Just then, the pickup went jolting over what must have been a rock, jostling the whole bed and the already ill-balanced Mabel with it. With a yelp, she toppled over, arms flung, and smashed right into a crate labeled FRAGILE.
Dipper heard a shattering noise—glass, thankfully, and not any of Mabel's bones—followed by a few unsavory words that he knew their parents would probably swat her for.
"Owwwww," Mabel whined. "Applesauce! Humbug! Horsefeathers, and similar!"
Dipper, despite his weary sigh for keeping up appearances, was already beside her, prodding at all of her crucial joints and searching for signs of damage. Nothing drastic except for a scrape on the inside of her elbow.
"Oh, you're fine," he declared with a shake of his head after he had satisfactorily glanced over her. "…Are you fine?"
"A-okay," Mabel replied feebly, raising a thumbs-up.
With a groan, she set her palms flat on the floor and began to push herself up, but as she did, she wrinkled her nose and yanked her hand up as though it had been burned.
"What the—aaaaah!" she shrieked. "It's wet! Dipper, I'm bleeding, I'll perish to death!"
"You're not bleeding!" Dipper had to yell over her histrionics. "It just looks like some funny water or something. You must've broken whatever was in the crate."
Mabel, possessing the sensibilities that she did, frowned dubiously at him before licking her wet hand.
Her eyes bulged and she proceeded to make a series of hacking noises ("blech, blech, blech!"), shaking her head rapidly with her tongue lolling. Her grimace was like none Dipper had ever seen.
"Fire water, more like," she finally managed to choke, shaking her hand out.
Dipper sat bolt upright, swiveling his gaze to the amber-colored puddle now seeping out from the damaged crate. "Wait, you mean that's—"
"There she is!" Soos announced jovially, and the truck gave a slight lurch as it wheeled around a turn. "The ol' Mystery Shack! Feast your eyes, my new little pals. Is she not a shining beauty?"
Needless to say, the suspicious puddle was henceforth forgotten. Dipper and Mabel tripped and fumbled over each other in their haste to reach the left side of the truck bed, elbows and arms bumping roughly together when they gripped the wooden rail for support. Through the parting trees, around a sharp curve, down the roughly hewn dirt road, was a house.
The first thing Dipper noticed was the set of bright red wooden letters on one side of the roof, proudly proclaiming, MYSTERY HACK. He then proceeded to notice everything else, and it was all downhill from there.
Mabel was stifling gasps of wonder beside him, so at least somebody was happy.
The house gave the impression of having been slapped together from the most run-down parts of assorted other, inferior houses. Its shape was indistinguishable but parts of it were decidedly triangular. It seemed to teeter and sag in certain crucial places. And there was a goat on the roof.
"Home sweet home," Soos said cheerfully, turning the engine off.
Dipper took a good, hard, long look at the ramshackle house, and as he did, his stomach took a good, hard, long sink to the soles of his feet.
"I like it!" Mabel declared at length. "It has real character!"
"That's certainly one way of putting it," Dipper muttered through gritted teeth as Soos slammed the driver's side door shut behind him and trudged over to the open bed.
"It may not be a dazzling architectural gem," he said proudly (sounding, for a second, on the brink of tears), "But it's home. You two wait here with your suitcases; I'll go get Mr. Pines!"
He was gone before either Dipper or Mabel could say anything, but maybe that was for the best, as they were both deeply engrossed in the process of gaping speechlessly up at the house. (And Dipper truly, deeply hesitated to use the word "house" so liberally here.)
"Sweet Sally," Mabel whispered after a time. "So this is home now, huh?"
"That's being a little overly kind, don't you think?" Dipper deadpanned. Mabel elbowed him in the ribs. It hurt, but he didn't move to strike her back. He let his feet dangle off the edge of the truck and daydreamed about a big, blue ocean underneath them.
At that moment, Soos came traipsing back from the other side of the house with another figure in tow. Dipper squinted. He was grizzly and old-looking, with a red fez on his head that sported a strange gold symbol, and an eyepatch over his left eye under his thick glasses. His suit was almost too tailored. His feet were long and large. On his left hand, every one of his fingers except the ring finger and thumb had a gold ring on them, and in those fingers was a cane with an eight ball on the tip of it. The closer he got, the more aware Dipper became of the smell of mothballs and moonshine.
He was smiling at them, all teeth (one of them gold). The expression was made of falsities and ulterior motives.
"Well, well!" he exclaimed. His voice was gravelly, but strangely compelling, almost theatrical. "I wasn't expecting custo—er, guests at such a late hour! Please, please, step right up! Welcome to the House of Mystery! I am Mr. Mystery, your guide into this world of intrigue and—"
"Um, actually, Mr. Pines," Soos interjected after clearing his throat, "These aren't customers. It's your great niece and nephew, you know, the Pines twins! All the way from down south!"
The slick grin only lasted for—Dipper counted—two seconds after that. Then, promptly, it was gone, replaced by a scowl that put ogres to shame.
"Eh?" Mr. Mystery grunted. "The who?"
"The—the Pines twins," Soos repeated, poking his index fingers together nervously. "The—"
"I'm Mabel!" Mabel announced brightly.
She waved enthusiastically at Mr. Mystery while swinging her legs back and forth. One of her socks had slipped down to bunch at her ankle. She was beaming, bright-eyed and tin-toothed (Dipper still wasn't used to the braces, the last thing their parents had been able to afford before the Crash).
Dipper only just then realized that they must have looked like a couple of ragamuffins, dirt on their knees and knots in their hair and busted shoes and hand-me-down clothes, too big for them, patched twice over at the joints. Certainly not the kind of customers this fellow was used to.
With conscious effort, he managed to unsurely lift one corner of his mouth, giving Mr. Mystery a hopeful, cautious half-smile. He hoped Great Uncle Stanford wouldn't be anything like this piker, but knowing his luck…
"Hm… Mabel, huh?" Mr. Mystery grumbled, squinting pettishly at Mabel, who did not lose the cheery expression even for a second. He pointed to her sweater with the tip of his cane. "What's with the feline there?"
Mabel braced her hands on her hips. "It's because I'm the cat's meow!"
Dipper tried not to cringe. Mabel's quirky sense of humor had charmed every grown-up in sight back home, but there was no telling if it would get her anywhere all the way out here.
"I made it myself with my magical crafty hands," Mabel added, waggling her fingers. Then, eagerly, "What's with the funny symbol on your hat?"
Mr. Mystery barked, "Mind your own potatoes. Didn't your parents ever teach you not to ask questions?"
"They sure didn't!" Mabel replied merrily.
Mr. Mystery scratched very obviously at his tomato nose before letting out a snort, though whether it was derisive or amused was hard to tell. He cleared his throat, bracing the cane against the ground, and sniffed.
"Well, uh… go on and get your bags inside, then," he finally said gruffly. "Soos'll help."
He provided no further conversation, pivoting around and storming back to the house, mounting the porch steps and slamming the front door shut behind him.
Dipper rubbed puzzledly at his hairline, nudging his cap back. "Holy Moses, what a pill."
"I think he's nice," Mabel declared, hopping off the truck, kicking up a cloud of dust when she landed. Of course she did. Dipper grasped his duffel bag and slung it over his shoulder, then followed her.
"Heck, if that old coot's what you consider nice, I don't think Great Uncle Stanford'll have a problem at all," he laughed. Mabel giggled right along with him.
"Oh," Soos interjected, suddenly holding their suitcases in each hand and frowning worriedly down at them. "Didn't you know? That is your great uncle. Mr. Mystery is just what he calls himself around the tourist-folk."
Dipper froze mid-step, bristling. His grip had tightened unconsciously on the strings of his bag. And all at once, he watched all of his bright, feeble hopes of an enjoyable summer trickle away from him, along with all of the colors from his face.
"Oh," Mabel said weakly. "Well, how about that."
"You'll both be sleeping in the attic," Grunkle Stan said in passing after Soos had given them the grand tour of the house (a gift shop, a flea-bitten room for the sideshow filled to the brim with clearly fake creatures; the kitchen with a real, live refrigerator; more rooms they weren't allowed to go into than rooms they were). "Gets a little drafty up there some nights, but the blankets are good."
"That means that he cares," Soos told them in a whisper after Grunkle Stan had slouched into the kitchen. "He even used some of his hoarding money to buy them."
Dipper couldn't picture Grunkle Stan caring about something if his life depended on it.
The attic looked to have been almost completely cleared out, but Dipper could tell by the patches of dust on the floor that this was a recent development. His and Mabel's beds were against opposite walls. Mabel dashed for the first one, leaping onto it with a cry of, "Dibs!" Dipper, however, was more preoccupied by the shape of the enormous, pyramid-shaped window, its black grilles bleeding together into overly complicated and asymmetrical patterns.
The hairs at the nape of his neck prickled unpleasantly, and he couldn't put his finger on why.
"Uh, Soos…" he said, "Call me nuts, but… does that window have an eye?"
Soos squinted at the window with painstaking attention, tilting his head. "Hm. Could be. Kinda gives me the heebie-jeebies." He shuddered as if in proof, arms tightening. "Just don't sleep facing it."
He left them then, apparently going home for the night. ("You don't live here?" Mabel gasped, clearly disappointed; Soos chuckled and replied, "I sure don't! I live with my abuelita!") Dipper and Mabel made noble efforts to negotiate some semblance of home with the splinters and the vague smell of old mustard, with varying degrees of success—by the time Stan barked at them to come down for dinner, Mabel had already laden the wall beside her bed with all of her old maps and postcards and empty seed packets, and Dipper had shooed the spiders from his corner and arranged his books on the makeshift shelf that had probably been recently hammered in by Soos, and the place didn't look half-bad. It looked about two-thirds bad.
Mabel chattered with sunny enthusiasm about the marvelous quirky charm of the old attic, how exciting this all was, and Dipper, probably because he was hungry, noncommittally agreed with her three times in a row. When they reached the kitchen doorway, they both ran right into Grunkle Stan's legs.
"Ow!" Mabel shouted, rubbing her forehead. "Who put these here?!"
"Oh, um," squeaked Dipper when he realized what had happened, darting his eyes up to meet Stan's and regretting it immediately. "E-Excuse us. Me. Excuse me."
"Peh!" Stan scoffed, scowling down at him. "Quit that waffling! Now, before you go marching on in there to eat me out of house and home, we've got to establish some rules and regulations."
"Rule number one!" Mabel interjected with a raised finger. "Mabel is permitted to put glitter on everything."
"Rule number two," Dipper added, with like gesture. "Glitter will not, under any circumstances, be placed on Dipper."
"You can't make that a rule, dummy; it's in direct conflict with the first rule!"
"You can't decide when a fella can and can't get glitter put on him without consulting him first!"
"If I wanted consulting, Dipper, I'd go to a firm!"
"First rule!" Stan bellowed over them both, shocking them both into clamping their mouths shut. His eyes were wrenched closed with annoyance. "No yapping, bickering, blithering, or chattering of any kind! Save that hooey for your own time, not mine; I've got a business to run here, and I don't need any kids beating their gums and disrupting the fragile balance I've established!"
"You mean the balance where you swindle people out of their money and bury it under the house?" Dipper asked him cynically, crossing his arms at his chest.
When Mabel gave him a look of shock and Stan gave him one of what may well have been impending murderous rage, he ducked his head and scratched at the back of it, stammering out something about family rumors and the like. Brazen courage was terrible. He never wanted to deal with it again.
"Don't pretend you know your onions when you haven't got any to sell, kid," Stan snapped, wagging his cane at Dipper.
Dipper made a face. "Wait, what does that even—"
"Ooh! Do you know any songs, Grunkle Stan?" Mabel asked abruptly, hands clasped at her chest. If Dipper didn't know any better, he'd say that her eyes were sparkling.
That sure threw Stan for a loop.
"Grunkle? What in the—whose idea—" He seemed to puff up in indignation with each escalating word, a flabbergasted scowl on his face, and Dipper had to stifle a laugh. "What's this 'Grunkle' flummery, eh? Of all the… the…"
As he went on glowering down at Mabel, whose bright, adoring expression did not falter, whatever ornery mood had possessed him seemed to stutter and wane. Dipper would lay even money that this crotchety crackpot had never been looked at that way in his whole life.
Stan blinked rapidly for a moment before clearing his throat and straightening his fez. "Well, I, uh, do know a ditty or two…"
Mabel applauded him, bouncing up and down. Dipper swore that he saw Stan's cheeks grow red.
"Sing!" she urged him, leaning forward until she started to teeter on her tiptoes. "I'm a great musical aficionado myself, Grunkle Stan. Songs are to me what stamps are to my brother here."
Dipper wrinkled his nose at the same time that Stan darted his eyes back and forth briefly and asked, "A frail method of escaping the void of loneliness and disappointment?"
Mabel stamped her foot exasperatedly. "No! Tiny, beautiful things meant to be collected and shared with the world! Yeesh!"
At that, Grunkle Stan set his hands on his hips, raising an eyebrow in befuddlement down at the twins.
"You, ah…" He rubbed his chin, perplexed. "You're an optimistic little gremlin, aren't ya?"
Mabel beamed at him, braces and all. "I sure am! And for as long as I'm living under this roof with my brother here—" She hooked an arm around Dipper's shoulders, yanking him close until their cheeks were squashed together, "This house is officially a happy house."
Stan seemed more stumped by Mabel than anyone Dipper had ever seen. He tilted his fez back to properly scratch his head, mouth tilting upwards in one corner.
"Hate to burst your bubble there, kiddo, but this ain't called the Happy Shack," he said after a time. "What we deal in is the bizarre, the mystifying—"
"With varying degrees of legitimacy," Soos piped in.
"Nobody asked you, Soos."
"I know, and I'm comfortable with that."
"Say, Junior," Stan grunted, tapping Dipper on the head with the eight ball on his cane ("Ow!" Dipper yelped). "You've been awful quiet. You sell your tongue to get a ride with Soos?" He slapped his knee. "Bahah!"
Rubbing the sore spot on his head, Dipper glared up at him, compelled by the urge to prove something, although he didn't know what.
"No," he said as angrily as he could manage with a cracking voice. Yeah. That'll show him.
"Hah. Or maybe you just sold your sense of humor." Stan coughed into one fist and pounded his chest—apparently laughing was hard work for everyone in this economy. "Didn't catch your name there, slick."
Dipper opened his mouth, but the way the name his parents gave him rose onto it felt rattled and stale and not at all like something that was his. He became acutely aware of the birthmark on his forehead, the one he'd learned to hide well with overgrown hair that everyone said made him look like a blind-jumping hobo; it dotted him in tingling lines, suddenly. So he breathed briefly in through his nose and answered, "My name's Dipper."
Stan rubbed his chin, narrowed eyes shifting unreadably from Mabel to Dipper and back again. Dipper fidgeted slightly, tugging his slipping pants up.
"Great Uncle Stan," Mabel said, and then, in a move that made Dipper jerk a fist to his mouth to hold back a chortle, she curtsied. "Thank you so very much for your charity and goodwill in letting us live under your esteemed roof. We will do everything in our power to repay you for this invaluable favor." She lifted her chin slightly, winking. "We'll even work! At no cost to you, of course; strictly free!"
Dipper didn't have to hold in laughter anymore.
"Now there's a word I can get behind!" Stan exclaimed, slapping his knee, and there was that conniving smile again, but his eyes gleamed with just the slightest bit of happiness and vitality that they had been lacking out by the truck. "And here I was starting to doubt we were related. We'll talk business later, missy. Okay, into the kitchen you go, ya little gremlins; the nosh is bound to be getting cold."
"What is the nosh, Grunkle Stan?" Mabel asked excitedly, falling into step beside Stan where Dipper had to jog forward a bit to catch up.
"Canned spaghetti and canned green beans!" Stan replied. "Get used to 'em!"
Dipper's stomach gave a furious, insatiable growl, and he clapped a hand down on it to try to quell it. He already knew who'd be taking Mabel's share of the beans.
"Can I stick the yucky green beans up my nose?"
"Only if you want me to stick your yucky tush outside for the night."
They mostly ate dinner in silence—Grunkle Stan, for all his cantankerous airs, seemed sensitive enough not to ask after their parents or their lives prior to the bumpy journey to Gravity Falls—before going into the living room to listen in to the radio.
Dipper fell asleep almost instantly. When he woke up the next morning to the sound of Grunkle Stan shouting obscenities at the shower and Mabel slamming the dresser drawers containing her many sweaters closed, the bed was so comfortable, and so clean, that he didn't even want to get out of it.
(They wouldn't discover it for a while, but the ditty or two that Stan had begrudgingly admitted to knowing turned out to be "You Are My Sunshine," and Dipper wasn't going to go and say anything about how much more sincere it sounded when he sang it to Mabel, but he most assuredly noticed, and thought that maybe Stan wasn't as much of a miser as he tried to be.)
June crawled comfortably around the last balmy remnants of May, washing the Mystery Shack's outer walls with inexorable sunlight that bounced off of every bough and leaf with playful indolence. Grunkle Stan put Dipper and Mabel to work straightaway, mostly manning the store, occasionally being promoted to such key tasks as dusting and sweeping and chopping wood and whatever other hodge-podge of things Soos could not attend to due to the fact that the toilet was clogged, again. Dipper used his spare time to read, stare at the ceiling contemplating the transience of life, and read some more. Mabel's ambitious dreams of pancakes came to fruition in the form of a local diner by the name of Greasy's, or so it seemed that they did—the owner, one proud eccentric known as Lazy Susan, seemed to have trouble distinguishing cooking from, well, not cooking at all.
Mabel loved it, though. Most of all, she loved that everyone in the small population of Gravity Falls could be described as a proud eccentric—the two-bit reporter, Toby Determined, who had watched his dreams of Broadway stardom recede into daily issues of the Gravity Falls Gossiper; the portly Sheriff Blubbs and his treasured, bell-ringing deputy; local kook Old Man McGucket, who crowed tale after tale of a legendary monster called the Gobblewonker; Jimmy the grocery boy, whose favorite pastime seemed to be throwing eggs at Grunkle Stan to see if he could catch them (which he could)—and that Grunkle Stan had grouchy stories to tell about every last one of them.
"This town has such a colorful history!" she squealed when Grunkle Stan dropped them at the single-room museum in town for the day, gazing starry-eyed at the statue of town founder Nathaniel Northwest.
The Northwests were purportedly the richest family in town, but had not shown their faces in the months following the stock market crash. Their sole daughter, Pacifica, was Dipper and Mabel's age, and encountering her in the street was supposedly an omen that your eyes would soon be pecked out by a swarm of crows.
On the fifth of June, Dipper and Mabel returned from accompanying Soos on his errands (during which he bought more Hostess Twinkies than Dipper thought any human could ever require) with arms full of paper grocery bags. Dipper staggered a little, and not just from the weight; the bulging presence of so much to eat, so much to use, dizzied him. That Grunkle Stan was using his greedy ways to buy them the candy bars they wanted didn't seem at all possible.
Soos went in first, and Mabel nudged the door open with her shoulder so that she and Dipper could follow. Dipper heard him call out amicably: "Oh, hi there, Wendy! Starting the job today?"
Dipper and Mabel rounded the corner, traipsing down the hallway that passed the employee entrance to the gift shop, and when Dipper spared a cursory glance inside, he forgot how to walk.
He hadn't thought that he would get a crush for at least another year. It seemed like such a dangerous game to be playing when he was so unprepared. But the girl leaning easily against the counter by the cash register, crowned in carefree and easy red, peppered in freckles, slouching in her plaid green shirt and cinched pants, did exactly what he had heard crushes do: halted the beat of his heart for an instant, before teaching it to march to a different beat altogether.
"Oh," Stan grunted when he saw Dipper standing bug-eyed, still holding grocery bags, in the doorway. "Kids, this is Wendy Corduroy. She's picked up a job here to help out at home."
Wendy blinked as though sleepy and glanced to where Stan's attentions were focused, and Dipper felt as though something sharp and sure had just gone straight through him when she looked him in the eye... but even more so when her face brightened up around a loose, friendly smile.
"Hey there," she greeted them, waving. "What's shakin'?"
Dipper brayed out a laugh before he could stop himself. It went on for far too long. He considered leaping into the hole in the back that Grunkle Stan had labeled the bottomless pit.
"Shakin'!" he repeated when he managed to get some laughable imitation of a grip. "You're—You're funny!"
Sadly, Dipper had not managed to provide a foil to Mabel's innate tendency to wear her heart on her sleeve. In fact, he wore his heart smack on his forehead, outlined in flashing neon arrows, and it had gotten him into trouble time and again his whole life.
But Wendy didn't make fun of him. She furrowed her orange eyebrows a bit, but didn't lose her genuinely pleasant expression.
"You're funny, too, short stuff," she said.
Apparently she came from a family of lumberjacks and had won many prizes statewide in competitions of such a sort; a small hatchet was always stuck through one of her belt loops, and her scuffed old boots were always caked in dried mud. Sometimes she had dirt on her face, and her hair was rarely combed. Dipper had never seen anything look so wonderful in his whole life, and Mabel spotted it right away.
She was one to talk, for all her teasing and her cooing in his direction about his big fat crush on Wendy Corduroy, the gangly tree-climber. Her love life grew to be a whirlwind in just that short month of June.
Mabel was taken with and tickled by an entire cavalcade of local boys, flitting from one to another from week to week and flirting expertly with each. Dipper would watch her sometimes and marvel at how she did it—not just the talking to people activity, but the making them find her charming bit, too. It was a talent that he all at once envied and felt a little unsettled by. Seeing such tangible proof that Mabel was growing up faster than he was was less than encouraging, to say the least.
Still, he and Wendy threw pine cones at a target she had pinned to the totem pole out front, and swapped impersonations of the amusing so-and-so's who wandered into the gift shop every day, and she told him that he had moxie, and it was the nicest thing anybody had ever said to him in his whole life. He wished that he could take that sentiment and stick it in one of Mabel's scrapbooks.
And then—then.
Then he found the journal.
"Step on it, Dipper!" Mabel was screaming in his ear, knocking gnomes away left and right with a baseball bat. "It's getting closer!"
"You think I don't know that?!" Dipper screamed back, sweaty palms slipping as he clumsily steered the golf cart around the bend of the forest road. "Make sure none of them get the you-know-what!"
Mabel grunted her understanding and took another hard swing at a particularly snarling gnome. Dipper would be the first to admit that he had severely underestimated the creatures, but the mysterious journal's charming little drawings of them hadn't helped. And he thought Mabel's new beau had been a zombie! It just shows you.
Startling him out of his introspection, a wailing gnome suddenly launched itself at his face, scratching and biting at him. He couldn't see a thing and the golf cart was veering about and everything hurt—
Mabel punched the thing several times in the side until it broke off, but it went sailing away into the trees with Dipper's cap clenched between its teeth.
"No!" he shouted, feeling something in his chest snap, and he craned his neck around, but the gnome and his father's hat were gone. "We have to go back—"
"Are you nuts?!" Mabel shrieked. She gave his shoulder a good, hard throttle for emphasis. "If we don't get this shipment delivered, Grunkle Stan'll toss us in the lake! I am not about to be Gobblewonker chow, Dipper!"
"Ah, yes, the shipment, and also the massive giant made out of angry gnomes that's currently chasing us down!" Dipper hollered back. "I'd say that's a slightly more immediate problem!"
"No need to shout at me!" Mabel shouted.
That was another sudden and intriguing development in Dipper Pines's precious, messy, magnificent, baffling summer, besides finding a mysterious handwritten encyclopedia of the bizarre in a false tree on a cloudy day: he and Mabel were now bona fide criminals specializing in the illegal moonshine trade.
That was, of course, if the coffin varnish Grunkle Stan coughed out in his secret basement brewery could be called legitimate moonshine in any sense, which it couldn't. Not that Dipper would know, being a well-mannered and respectable young lad of twelve, but he had a feeling. Grunkle Stan and high, honest quality were not two things that had ever gone hand-in-hand.
Mabel had dived headfirst into their new vocation with aplomb. A worrisome amount, as a matter of fact. "Just the thing to spice up our summer hijinks!" she had exclaimed with glee when Grunkle Stan had first mentioned it.
Dipper had not been as quick to accept this new career path. In fact, spurred into shock, he had taken to spluttering out law after law about the Prohibition of liquor in the United States and the many dangers of entrusting a vehicle to someone whose feet couldn't reach the pedals, and Stan had resorted to his usual empty retort: "You're fired."
"Pedals won't be a problem, though; you'd be riding around in the golf cart," he'd added, tightening his bowtie.
"You want us to run hooch?" Mabel had squealed, bouncing a little. "Like real live mobsters? That sounds like a wingding!"
Dipper, ever the pragmatist, had folded his arms and added, "That sounds like a jail sentence."
Grunkle Stan had brayed out his trademark laugh. "What, stick-in-the-mud, never heard of a little excitement before?"
"He hasn't," Mabel had said cheerfully.
Dipper had known more excitement in the measly month since he'd first arrived in this whacky town than he would ever need to know in his life, if you wanted the truth, but he wasn't about to say anything—not to Grunkle Stan, of all people.
"Y'see, kids, it's like this," Stan had explained, sounding remarkably respectful and knowledgeable despite the fact that he was wrangling children into becoming mobsters, "Hands are short around here, and running booze is just about the only thing keeping this drafty old barn on its legs. The Mr. Mystery hootenanny's a gas and all, but it doesn't pay the bills. Times are hard and there's money in booze, and I sure do love the do-re-mi!"
"More than you love, oh, heck, I don't know, not being in prison?" Dipper had snapped, throwing his arms wide for emphasis. "Grunkle Stan, are you completely off your nut?! We're not going to deliver a drop of your two-bit booze to anybody! Aren't you supposed to be looking out for our best interests?!"
"Well, pardon me, Palooka Pines! Just hear me out," Stan had said with a conniving smirk, hunkering down to Dipper's level and waggling his eyebrows. Dipper had stiffened at the nickname, glaring. "It'll give you somethin' to do, won't it?" Without losing the jolly tone, he had clapped Dipper on the shoulder so hard that his knees had just about buckled and added, "Plus, if ya don't, you'll be swimming with the Gobblewonker before you can say 'Grunkle!'"
Mabel had squished her cheeks between her hands, biting her lip, dazzled. "Real, live mobster threats! Ooh! I'm getting chills!"
"Me, too," Dipper had whimpered, nauseously.
And here they were.
How was Mabel supposed to know that the terse, mysterious teenager she'd been stuck on all week would turn out to not be a viable client for the "family business" and would instead turn out to be a stack of ill-tempered gnomes in need of a new queen? Dipper couldn't exactly blame her, but boy, did he try.
Did he ever try.
Dipper would theorize, later, that maybe Gravity Falls had always been strange and frightening and full to every leaf and clump of moss with boundless adventure, and the journal had just fatefully happened to tell him about it. At the time, though, turning the musty pages with care and concentration, staying up until the darkest part of nighttime reading it and feeling his breath catch in his throat, it had felt as though the journal itself had drawn all of the creatures and oddities out from some secret place in the woods' deepest parts. Perhaps the strangest of all of it—the most persistently unsettling—was a boy by the name of Gideon Gleeful.
He'd been awfully stuck on Mabel from the second he'd met her, and the second he'd met her hadn't even been on purpose. With their curiosity piqued after hearing story after censuring story from Grunkle Stan about his greatest rival, a phantom known solely as Gideon, Dipper and Mabel had both decided (at precisely the same time) that the best course of action was to attend one of his sermons and see what all the fuss was about. They hadn't been expecting him to be nine ("so widdle," as Mabel had cooed), nor had they expected the uncanny coif of snow-white hair, or the pale face and the piggy nose and the immaculately tailored baby blue suit.
Nor the psychic powers.
"Brothers, sisters, friends and strangers!" he had crowed to the open tent with his tiny arms raised, in a voice so large and riveting as to seem other than his own. "America does not need repeal; she needs repent! I have gone my whole life as a sworn enemy of demon drink, and of the low and scurvy beasts it makes of man! If there is one weapon, one sole, slinking weapon that the Devil can use to ensnare us poor sinners, it's that double-crossing temptress alcohol! We are better than the Devil, ain't we? Ain't we, folks? Rise up, rise up, swear to li'l ole me that you won't give a dime, not a wheat penny, not a wooden nickel, by gum, to those foul and yellow-bellied gangsters and blockers who think they can run this town by running our mortal veins with bathtub gin!"
Dipper's body had stood with all the others, despite every certainty in his mind that he would not stand for this child if his life depended on it. That was when he knew, more or less, that Li'l Gideon was more than just a precocious little preacher, which, while insightful, hadn't much come in handy when he'd nearly gotten his tongue cut out by a pair of telekinetically-lifted lamb shears. But that's a story for another time.
"What are you knuckleheads doing, sneaking out to go support that bluenose Li'l Gideon?" Stan barked, in what was to be the preface to the biggest scolding of Dipper and Mabel's lives. "He's my biggest competitor, and you're out fraternizing with him! What, did he bribe you with pomade?"
"Blech, he couldn't bribe a rock with the stink of that pomade," Mabel groaned, sticking her tongue out as if to rid herself of a bad taste.
"How can he be your biggest competitor, Grunkle Stan?" Dipper inquired with turned-out hands. "All he talks about is God and Hell and a bunch of other baloney; how does that interfere with the Mystery Shack?"
"Hang the Shack, kid; I'm talking about bootlegging!" Stan snapped, waving his cane furiously at the sky. "That snot-nosed little pip's been a boil on my neck for years! He was swindling this town with all that hooey about moderation when he was still in diapers!"
Dipper and Mabel's jaws dropped in unison.
"He's a bootlegger?!" they shouted.
"You'd bet your sweet bippy he is!" Stan retorted. "His dunce of a father, that dirty Bud Gleeful, makes most of the shrewd business moves, but Gideon'll be surpassing him soon enough." He ground his dentures together, fists clenched. "Ooh, that little goblin burns me up—"
"Well," Mabel said after a moment, "We could always try to sabotage him! He is pretty sweet on me, so I could always use that to our advantage! Let me con him, Grunkle Stan! Please, pleeeease?"
At that, Stan had abandoned his stewing to straighten up and wipe a single tear from his suddenly glistening eyes.
"I'm touched by your crooked ways, sweetie," he told her, genuinely, "But you're too good of a catch to be used for nonsense like that. That punk doesn't deserve you, even in the context of a false courtship meant to bleed him dry of resources and leave him penniless!" He paused, tapping his chin pensively. "Hold the trolley, I'm reconsidering…"
Dipper told Wendy about all of it later, as the two snickered over a candy bar on the roof during one of her many self-elected breaks. (Wendy was the muscle; she also packed the bottles Soos filled into crates. She was a lady legger, for sure. Dipper had written "Dipper Corduroy" in the journal on at least one occasion.)
Her only response had been, after nudging him affably in the side, "And you thought this town was gonna be a snorefest."
Gravity Falls was not a snorefest. As Dipper said at the very beginning of this, he and Mabel did all sorts of wild and wondrous things. They were adventurous, and they were brave, and they were stupid, and they were afraid, and they were mischievous, and everyone in town took to calling them the Mystery Twins. Dipper warmed to it.
He stuck up to manotaurs, fought a wax figure of Sherlock Holmes, broke Li'l Gideon's nose, nearly got into a fistfight with Wendy's steady, Robbie Valentino, who stunk of cologne and never combed his hair. Mabel ran the Shack for a day, kissed a daydreaming mer-boy, won a pig and named it Waddles and fended off Stan for weeks and weeks, screaming that he was not free bacon and would not be eaten under any circumstances. Dipperand Mabel met the eighth and a half President of the United States, chased the Gobblewonker, ran from dinosaurs, danced around to "My Gal Sal" and "When You're Smiling" and a host of other tunes when they drifted into the living room on Stan's radio (they even convinced him to do the Charleston with them, and they didn't even have to take him to the hospital).
They made an awful lot of mistakes, and sometimes they fought with each other, but never for longer than an afternoon. They narrowly escaped arrest on a dozen or so occasions when they had to convince Blubs and Durland that the crates in their golf cart did not contain anything remotely illegal, spent a whole day trying to figure out a way into Stan's secret basement (which they weren't even sure existed, but he had to whip up all that moonshine somewhere), and even met some ghosts thanks to Wendy's friends and their lack of respect toward their elders and the dead and… well, everything else. Stan's booze became known all over town for its quirky personalized touch of sweater-like bottle cozies (Mabel's doing), and though Stan griped to Dipper here and there to please tell his sister to stop swaddling the hooch, he came to accept it.
And Dipper started to think, despite his best efforts, that it wasn't so bad at all. That maybe, just maybe, it was a step or two short of what he was meant for in this loud, lousy, crazy, big old world.
That was what scared him the most.
Dipper had only seen the journal's most frightening page in cursory instances, flipping past it to reach the parts regarding height-altering crystals and fairies and truth-telling teeth and what looked remarkably similar to the amulet of Gideon's that Mabel had broken, but it came back to him, it and the unsettling red spatter on its surfaces, and the jagged, unsteady scrawl of the letters: DO NOT SUMMON AT ALL COSTS!
In Dipper's defense, he hadn't summoned it. Gideon had.
Dipper couldn't breathe. Or, well, more accurately, he didn't want to, didn't even think to—not staring down the single malevolent force responsible for every dark and insidious thing writhing in Gravity Falls's darkest parts. Not standing before it on shaking twelve-year-old knees, wondering if he was going to die tonight, silently willing Mabel not to touch his stamp collection even when he was pushing daisies.
"You're afraid, kid; I get that!" the demon who had introduced himself as Bill Cipher exclaimed, hovering overhead. "I love it, actually! But chin up, all right, I'm just here to do a little business."
His voice was bizarrely charismatic in its cadence, but it seemed to be made of ten different noises Dipper had never heard, and it echoed eerily. All of the scenery around him had been bled of color and its suddenly high contrast was dark and disorienting. Dipper wasn't even sure that there wasscenery around them; maybe this was just the void, a place where real things came to dissolve.
"B-Business?" Dipper stuttered. The journal felt heavier, and his arms less equipped to hold it, but he refused to let it go, clutching it to his chest, right over the spot where his heart was jackhammering away.
"What, you having trouble picturing that in this economy?" Bill asked, tugging at both ends of his bowtie. "I'll lay it down real simple-like for you, Junior. You give me something I want, I give you something in return. Mutually beneficial. Positive results for both parties. So what is it you want?"
Answers flitted, wistful, through Dipper's cluttered head, answers like for things to go back to the way they were and for Wendy to like me and for Mom and Dad to want us again and to be useful for once in my lousy life. The mounting presence of them made his chest start to hurt, as though there was something inside of it that shouldn't be there.
"I—" He caught it, then; the journal's words rushed urgently back to him, no longer murky and faded: Do not let him trick you. He swallowed, though his dry throat burned, and furrowed his eyebrows resolutely, though he couldn't spur himself into looking anywhere but at the ground. "What do you want?"
Bill let out a cackle at that, so hearty that his top hat almost flew off.
"Say, you're a smart little scrub, aren'tcha?" He seemed more pleased than Dipper would have thought. "Okay, I'll play ball." He pointed straight down at Dipper's chest, slit-pupil never straying. "I want that there journal."
Dipper frowned. "Wh-What for?"
Bill crossed one leg over the other, spinning his cane in one hand. "Oh, you know, secrets, power, the like. Things beyond your puny mortal comprehension."
He said them so boredly that Dipper wondered if all the knowledge he could ever acquire could measure up to what this creature knew.
"But don't you already know everything?" Dipper demanded. "I mean, the journal says you're all-knowing and all-seeing, so what do you need it for?"
"The journal's giving me more credit than it should," Bill replied, "Because its writer was a lowly coward. He thought I was big and scary, so he made me sound big and scary. But I'm not! I'm just a humble little triangle trying to have it all."
Dipper took a step back, arms sore in the joints from where the edges of the journal were pressing into them. "I… but I need this. I need to know."
"What for? Because you're bored?" Bill snickered. "What's a twelve-year-old flatfoot wannabe like you need with a bunch of musty old pages full of fairy tales? Trust me, genius, what that book has is nothing compared to the things you'll get in return if you hand it over."
Dipper narrowed his eyes, but his foolish curiosity got the better of him.
"What kind of things?" he asked slowly, but as soon as he got the words out, he knew that this was exactly what the demon wanted of him. He felt stupid, disgusting, like a fink. How could he be playing ball with this thing?
"Like I said, kid; I'll cut you a deal," the demon said, throwing his licorice arms wide until his cane floated straight out of his hand. "You gimme that there journal, and I can make it so you and your sister will be living the high life from now on! Lots of modern comforts like heating, clothes you haven't been washing threadless for weeks… even getting a roof over your head for much less than risking your neck running booze for a great uncle who doesn't even like you, let alone want you at the dinner table! You can get her out of this dump, make her start looking on the sunny side again! Doesn't sound half bad, right?"
He snapped his fingers, and a writhing blue flame overtook his hand, illuminating his single eye in eerie light. Dipper's heart was jumping, but he tried hard not to show it.
"They don't call it a Depression because it's a ring-a-ding, Dipper Pines. Tell me something—strictly off the record. Who've you got left in this pathetic excuse for a world, anyway? Little Mabel, right? But who's gonna protect her now that your folks have tossed you out on your ears? Not you, that's for sure! You're too busy with your nose in a book that'll never reveal its secrets to you, no matter how hard you look, because that's just not how the world works. Nothing's fair and everything's terrible, unless you've got some otherworldly help. When it comes to what's in those pages, though… Trust me, you're out of your depth." He twiddled his fingers in beckoning. "Pass over the journal, pine tree. We can work this out. You can skedaddle right on out of Gravity Falls once and for all, just like you always wanted. How's that sound?"
Dipper's sweaty fingers bore down on the worn cover, gripping it so tightly that it made his knuckles hurt. His eyes were burning with something prickly that made his vision blur, and it was only when he saw a wet splatter on the cover that he knew what it meant.
He bit his lip until it hurt and heard himself whisper, "No."
Bill leaned in slightly, body curving with the motion, and his eye flashed dangerously, red around the edges.
"Sorry, chum. Gonna have to speak up there," he said. His voice had taken on a sinister edge, now. It seemed to echo from six different far-off, twisted places.
Dipper ran his thumb along the spine of the journal and thought of gnomes, their tiny red hats vanishing into the underbrush as he and Mabel doubled over laughing. He thought of crystals that shrank and grew things, the odd and unintelligible dolphin chatter of Mermando, the wind blowing through the needles of the pines that he would sometimes imagine was the work of a dragon. He thought of feeling smart, and brave, andgood for something, for once in his sorry life; he thought of sitting up on the roof until he was sure the map of wheeling stars overhead would burn a hole in his tiny and unlearned soul; he thought of Mabel, and that tune she loved, the one about keeping on the sunny side, and then he thought of the tune that he loved, about flying away some bright morning and never thinking to look back.
He thought of all the myths and mysteries that he had touched with his own two hands, he and Mabel, the peculiar Pines twins from Piedmont, holes in their socks and summer sweat on their brows, matching grins, the same triangle window, always letting their food get cold because of how badly they wanted to share with each other.
"I said no," he repeated, louder and stronger this time. A mighty wind was beginning to grow in the air around him, below him, and he knew the demon was enraged now, and he wondered if he would die. "We got this far. I'm not just going to throw it all away!"
"Yeah, because you two've really got a lot to live for!" Bill laughed, chilling the trees into shriveling a little. "A broken-down shack full of shmucks! That really warms the heart I don't have."
"You're wrong!" Dipper yelled, finally rearing his head up even as the wind carried away his cap, knotted his hair, stung his eyes. He clutched the journal close to his chest. "We've got each other! And Grunkle Stan, and Soos, and—" The word caught in his throat, choking. "And Wendy! And yeah, maybe… maybe we don't have a clue what's going on in this crazy old town. Heck, maybe we never will. And maybe we'll even wind up zombie bait! Or maybe Grunkle Stan's cooking'll finally blow us down! It'd be pathetic, but doggone it, it'd be worth it!" He dared to take a step closer, never breaking his stare from Cipher's lone, glowing eye, and everything where his heart should be began to clamor together, jumbling, overflowing into something like courage.
Cipher's body began to sharpen at the edges, clearer, darker. "Hey, listen, pipsqueak—"
"You wanna know who'll protect Mabel?" Dipper shouted over him, over the hurling wind. "Me! And she'll protect me, too—we protect each other! That's how it's always been, and that's how it'll stay, no matter what comes our way—mysteries or monsters or running booze or, or Lazy Susan's omelettes. So keep your lousy deal! I wouldn't—" He swallowed, feeling, bizarrely, a smile starting to rise from right in the middle of his suddenly roaring chest. "I wouldn't trade any of that for the whole world!"
He hoped that it was as touching as it felt. It was getting harder to see with the gusts drying his eyes out until he wrenched them shut, fingertips curling around the journal. He wished Mabel was here.
The demon's laugh started out slow, but it grew. The sky seemed deeper, the ground more bottomless, and still Bill Cipher cackled, mad and hysterical, kicking his tiny feet.
"Oh, what a funny joke!" He spat out the last word in a deep and inhuman bellow that made Dipper's ribs clatter together. "You think you can win with all that yammering about love and hope? Tell that to this whole pathetic century!" The burning crimson in his eye faded, then, into something more calm and conniving. He twiddled his fingers together, critical gaze bearing down on Dipper. "I'll give credit where it's due, though, Pines—you're going to be a tougher mark than I thought. Let's call it even for now, but don't get too comfortable. I'll be watching you. I'll be watching yoooouuu!"
Dipper only had an instant to register the circle of peculiar symbols forming around the demon's body before everything went white, whiter than he had ever thought possible, harsh and clean and bright enough to scrub every shadow out of him. He felt his body hit something hard and rough, and his nostrils filled up with the scent of dirt, along with something wet and warm.
He fumbled a hand up to his nose and touched something slick. A little of it dripped into his gasping mouth. Swell. A nosebleed.
The world began to come back into focus after a minute: tall pines, a blue sky fragmented by the boughs, wide strips of sunlight streaming down. Dipper's breaths heaved in and out of him, and he swore that his heart had shot up to pound dully in his skull.
When his mind caught up to him, he groped frantically at his chest and stilled when his fingers clamped down on warm, battered leather and the worn edges of pages. He still had the journal. Bill hadn't taken it.
But he would, someday. The conviction gripped Dipper with such force that he wondered how he had ever been stupid enough to think anything else.
Perhaps the Dipper of a few months ago would have been consumed by fear, by a certain selfish brashness, the certainty that he would have to face the demon alone, that he was the only one who could, because that's what heroes do: accept the inevitability of their own solitude. But this Dipper, this shivering, frightened Dipper, with his bloody nose and his scraped knees and his oversized pants and his askew cap and his dirty face—he shut his eyes tightly and loosened his grip on the journal just slightly and felt like things would turn out all right, because he had Mabel.
He had Grunkle Stan, who cut even sneakier deals than a trickster demon a dozen times a day. He had Soos, whose bravery came by accident from his wild imagination. He had Wendy, with her freckles and her battle-axe and her reassurances that life was whatever you made of it; you just had to make it something good. He had an awful lot of things, for a poor kid.
Dipper laid there, spread-eagled, blinking up at the sky, and learned something. He'd never lost his family after all.
Huh. What do you know.
After a long, long time—when it started to get dark, and the blood on Dipper's face had dried—he teetered to his feet, exhausted legs shaking, and turned around to traipse back home.
He couldn't wait to tell Mabel what had happened, even though he knew she would feel temporary spite for the fact that he hadn't invited her.
Predictably, the letter came—please take care of them just a little longer, we will come to visit at Chanukkah—and unpredictably, Dipper couldn't stop smiling for hours after Grunkle Stan read it aloud at supper.
"You, ah…" Grunkle Stan cleared his throat and fidgeted, eyes darting hither and yon and everywhere but to the twins' faces. "You kids don't mind having to stick around here a little longer, do ya?"
"Oh, Grunkle Stan, it's a travesty," Mabel moaned, tossing an arm across her eyes and slumping back in her chair. "We're through, I tell you,through!" She gripped Dipper's shoulder with her other hand. "Whatever shall we do, Dipper?"
"I—I can't fathom, Mabel," Dipper whimpered, mirroring her pose (and taking on the tone of a Southern belle, simply because it seemed appropriate). "What a tremendous tragedy. Trapped in this horrible place with our rotten, good-for-nothing great uncle! Oh, Lord, say this ghastly sentence won't last forever!"
"It's enough to make a girl cry!" Mabel wailed. The crocodile tears came in full force: "Wa-ha-haaah!"
"All right, all right, you two chowderheads," Grunkle Stan cut in grumpily, but when Dipper peeked through one open eye, he saw that he was smiling. "You're breakin' my heart here. Looks like I'll have to eat that beautiful cranberry pie in the refrigerator all by myself… ah, well, what can ya do…"
That certainly shut both of them up. They jolted forward in their seats with identical bug-eyed looks, slamming their palms on the table to push themselves up higher.
"No, no, no, we're sorry!" they protested in unison, shaking their heads wildly, but Grunkle Stan had already stood primly and stridden over to the refrigerator.
He gave the twins a goading smile when he pulled out a beautiful plate (Lazy Susan's best, no doubt) with an entire pie on it, and it was made still worse when he dug his fork into it, raising a chunk of golden crust and bright red fruit filling to his wide open mouth.
Dipper and Mabel launched themselves away from the table and tackled him together with all their might. This was a maneuver that nearly lost them the pie itself, but Mabel managed to catch it with one outstretched arm, which Dipper applauded wildly until Grunkle Stan grew annoyed and told him to knock it off.
"Grunkle Stan, how did you even afford this?" Dipper asked later on through a mouthful of the tart, rich pie. "You only ever get eggs and milk and bacon in town."
"It wasn't a question of affording it, kid," Grunkle Stan grunted, prodding at the remnants of his slice. "It's not like I'm penniless."
"Well, you make such a big show of acting like you are because you want to hoard all your cash that you might as well be," Mabel interjected, wolfing down her third slice (and sneaking pieces to Waddles every now and then).
"So what was it a question of?" Dipper pressed him, narrowing his eyes. "Is this…" He gasped. "Poison?"
Mabel made a series of exaggerated gagging noises, clutching her throat.
"Bah! Too traceable," Grunkle Stan said, waving his hand. "Give me a break, kid; if I gotta have a sit-down with the interrogation squad every time I feel like doing somethin' nice, I'm gonna quit doing it real quick, so watch it."
Dipper felt an unexplainable rush of affection for Grunkle Stan, then, watching him stab his fork grouchily into his pie as though it would undo the horrendous exposure of kindness he had just bungled out. He forgot about his plans to show him the journal and see how much he knew about the weird and wild happenings of Gravity Falls. He forgot about the endless stream of chores, the curmudgeonly belittlement, the snoring that kept him up all night. All he could think of, really, were the simple words that had drifted to him from a memory that wasn't his, the spick-and-span royal blue cap that had been waiting for him on his bed after a gnome had stolen his old one.
His eyes started to feel damp and everything. It was awful.
"Thanks, Grunkle Stan," he said, hoping it could carry a dozen, a hundred of the thank-yous he had skimped on since arriving on that rickety doorstep outside all those months ago.
"Hold it, don't go getting sappy on me," Grunkle Stan barked, waving his fork warningly at Dipper. "I'll throw you right out. No room for that hooey in this house."
When Dipper glanced over at Mabel, she winked at him, nudging her knee briefly against his under the table.
"Wouldn't dream of it, old man," Dipper retorted slyly. "You smell like a pig's bum and you look like one, too."
"Ha-hah! That's more like it," Grunkle Stan shouted, grinning, and then, the words that Dipper would turn over in his head for years and years to come: "That's my boy."
That night, he and Mabel both jumped on their beds until Grunkle Stan shouted at them to cease that infernal racket. Then, they blew their lantern out early, using their sheets and pillows to build a fort and hide away in it, stifling their laughter at nothing in particular.
"Gosh, so we're sticking in Gravity Falls til winter, huh?" Mabel mused, propping her elbows on her knees and clasping her cheeks with them.
There was a peculiar, almost sad uncertainty in her voice. Dipper leaned in conspiratorially and, in an effort to erase it, said, "You know, I've heard winter is a good season for vampires."
Mabel did not brighten as he had expected. Instead, she blinked at him for a second, unreadable for one of the few times in his immediate memory, before wrapping her arms around her knees and bowing her head so that her mouth was obscured.
He could still see the smile in her eyes, though, and he felt pretty all right.
"Thanks, Dip," she said, before reaching forward to lightly punch him in the shoulder.
Dipper rubbed the spot, raising one corner of his mouth bashfully. "I should probably be thanking you."
"Whoa, don't go getting sappy on me now," Mabel exclaimed with a dramatic wave of her hands. "How about we just thank each other and call it a done deal?"
Dipper made a big show of shrugging his shoulders and waffling around, squinting pensively at the ceiling, so much so that Mabel let out a scoff and shoved at him until he snickered.
"You're a great brother," she murmured sincerely and warmly after a while. "And a big dope."
"Aw, shucks," Dipper said dryly, but he was smiling despite his resistances.
"And I'm a great everything!" she proclaimed, flinging her arms wide. "Mabel Pines, Twentieth Century Doll! Nothing can beat my sunny disposition and aggressive charm! Why, nobody could even think to feel low when I'm around! I oughta be the next President!"
Dipper could have argued with her, but he didn't, and he never would, because all of that, every single boisterous, unbearable, wonderful word, was true.
They'd be all right. They had the journal and each other and their daring dispositions and their matching magnetism for danger. And there would so much more, oh so much more, out there, scuttling between the trees in the slivers of light the branches allowed.
And still the summer roved on, and on, and on, every lazy breeze and golden sunrise another effortless note in what Dipper was sure would be his favorite song for years and years to come.
Call him a lousy sap, but doggone it, it was true.