To say that Dipper Pines did not expect to be picked up by the gigantic creature would be an understatement. He was a perfect mixture of surprised and terrified, but his emotions quickly started to lean further towards the latter as the dragon began to move. He was completely unfamiliar with the way it felt to dangle from the teeth of a twenty foot tall quadruped while it ran.

As the huge animal picked up speed, the young detective shut his eyes as though the loss of sight could take away the entire experience. But the wind still blew loudly in his ears, and he could feel every small bob of the creature's neck. As a matter of fact, the loss of sight made the experience positively horrifying. He opened his eyes again.

Soon, Dipper started to notice they were passing familiar places in the woods. There was that stump he had sat on after twisting his ankle last summer. Twenty meters from that was the tree he had spotted a unicorn scratching itself on. Another thirty meters and he could make out a hole he had tripped over because he'd been busy looking over his map of possible Wendy locations. He realized that they were growing closer to the Mystery Shack.

No, he told himself. Sure, the vest could have just been the dragon assuming it belonged to me because I'm a human. But it has no idea where I live, right?

Wrong.

They reached a small area where the trees thinned, thickened again, thinned and then eventually disappeared altogether. It was within eyesight of the Mystery Shack. This is where the colossal creature stopped, peering through the woods and lashing its tail. Dipper shivered, because it was clear it was looking directly at his great uncle's permanent house.

The animal stayed there, simply staring, for quite some time. It seemed to be thinking over something, perhaps planning. Dipper was growing restless. He was fifteen feet above the ground, and he could be accidently or purposely dropped at any moment. Every muscle in him burned to run, fight, punch, anything to get out of the terrifying situation currently at hand.

Suddenly, he swayed back and bumped gently against the dragon's neck as it started to move again. It was much slower this time, though, and almost seemed to be tiptoeing. The young detective reached up and shielded his eyes from the abrupt exposure to moonlight as the creature stepped into his backyard.

It looked about almost timidly, drawing itself back until it looked as though it were only half its full size. He felt the wind rushing by him softly as it lowered him to the ground. The great jaws unclenched from around the back of his vest, and the dragon turned around as though it were about to tear back into the woods. Dipper looked at the retreating form, completely confused. The animal seemed greatly reluctant to leave.

It turned back around and drew closer to Dipper once again. He winced in pain as it lowered its head and smacked its muzzle against his back. Despite the slight discomfort, he didn't make any noise. The dragon gave him what could only be described as a fearful look and bashed itself against him again.

Dipper gave it a questioning look. What the heck was it doing?

The dragon seemed to be growing slightly frantic. It nipped him, pushed him roughly, whipped its tail against his back, but still he didn't complain. Finally, the huge animal abandoned whatever it had been trying to do and rose its head to full height, letting out a shattering roar.

Dipper winced and slammed his hands over his ears. Even with his most affected sense muffled, he could still feel the tremendous vibration through the ground. The call lasted only a few seconds, before the dragon closed its mouth and dashed back into the woods at full speed.

As he heard the footfalls of the creature growing quieter, Dipper heard the loud sounds of someone running down stairs before Grunkle Stan appeared outlined in the hole of the Mystery Shack wall. "I can take you going through my garbage, I can take you scaring my niece and nephew, but this is the final straw! I can't believe you have the nerve-"

His eyes, furiously scanning the yard, spotted Dipper. The conman fell silent before a small, relieved smile spread across his wrinkled features. "Kid! You're back!"

Dipper blinked and nodded, holding his head. His great uncle walked over and pulled him onto his feet, letting him stand on one leg while the other was supported. The two hobbled together into the Shack.

"Where were you? I sent Mabel and Soos out to search the woods, and they're still out there." Stan scratched his head. "Might want to call them back now…"

"It's a long story," Dipper gasped, collapsing onto the large armchair in the living room. His great uncle pushed him over and sat beside him.

"Well, we have all night," Stan replied. He pulled out a phone and dialed a number. The first thing he said was, "He's here."

Dipper heard the person on the other end excitedly exclaim something, followed by low muttering. Stan shook his head and answered, "No, he just showed up in the yard. I was about to make him tell me how, but I guess he can wait for you."

The person said something rather loudly, and the second smile of the night appeared on his great uncle's face. "Yeah, I'll see you soon," he replied, pushing the end button. Stuffing the phone back into his pocket, Stan stood up and started out of the room. "Kid, I'm going to go get you some bandages. Your sister is probably going to burst through the door in about a minute, so prepare yourself." He then left.

Dipper sat in silence. His leg throbbed suddenly, making him hiss in pain. He slowly lowered himself to the floor, where he could stretch out his injured shin and examine the damage. As soon as he caught sight of the torn, bloody mess, though, he felt his stomach grow unsettled and decided it could wait.

"Dipper!" someone shouted from the hole that had once been a door. The young detective looked up, spotting the overjoyed face of his sister rapidly approaching before capturing his body in a hug. Soos appeared behind her, grinning and flopping onto the floor.

"Hi, Mabel," he smiled weakly. He reached out a hand and gently high-fived Soos, who fistpumped happily. He could hear his sister panting, as though she had been running the entire way there. As a matter of fact, she probably had.

"Glad to see you all reuniting," Stan joked, once again entering the room. His hands were full of bandages and a bottle of hydrogen peroxide. "Now you can tell us why you showed up in our yard around," he checked his watch, "Nine o' clock."

Mabel released him, only then noticing the injured state of his leg. She covered her mouth and winced at the very sight, pushing Soos a bit further away from the wounded boy.

"Well, I went out with the trap like Grunkle Stan asked this morning," Dipper began as said grunkle pulled out a cotton swab and opened the peroxide. "I knew about this awesome place a mile from here where I could set it up, but I had to cross a waterfall to get to it." He hissed loudly as Stan liberally applied the chemical. "Ouch, that stings."

"Continue," his great uncle requested, ignoring the boy's pain.

The young detective gave him a slight glare before starting the story again. "I started to cross, but I ended up slipping and hurting my leg on the way down. I passed out on the bank, and when I woke up, it was dark out. I started to drag myself home, but…" He found himself trailing off, suddenly uncertain of how to continue the tale. The part that came after was almost too astonishing for words.

"But what?" Mabel asked, leaning against one hand and sprawling on the carpet. She looked up at him eagerly. Soos lifted his head in anticipation as well.

"But I heard something on the other bank," the boy resumed after an uneasy moment.

"And it was…" Grunkle Stan asked, trailing off. "Jeez, kid, just spit it out already."

Dipper gave his friend and family a quick glance before focusing on his wounded shin. "It was a dragon," he finally answered.

Grunkle Stan's head shot up in shock, spilling more peroxide and making his great nephew grit his teeth. "A dragon?" he questioned. "Are you sure? I mean, sure, they exist, but they're extremely rare. I don't think anyone in this town has seen one since at least fourteen years ago."

"It was definitely a dragon," the young detective insisted. "It had wings, four legs, scales and horns. It ate all the steaks," he added, looking at Soos. The man-child sighed sadly.

"Did it try to hurt you?" Mabel asked after a moment. "I mean, dragons are super mean, right?"

"That's the weird thing. It didn't," Dipper murmured. "It almost seemed worried about me. That's how I got home. It carried me."

Everyone was silent for a moment. Finally, Grunkle Stan decided to continue the unusual conversation. "Well, I doubt you could have roared like that, so I'm not going to argue about it carrying you," he started slowly, referencing the earlier alarm he had received. "But everyone I know who's ever had experience with a dragon has told me that they hate humans. They're nothing more than angry wolves stuck as giant lizards."

"Then why did it care enough to carry me home? How did it even know where I lived?" the young detective pondered. "And if it did care, then why did it nearly destroy the Shack?"

"Wait, this was the thing that ripped part of the roof off?" Soos asked. Stan's eyes widened and Mabel gasped.

"I'm pretty sure. The claws were the exact same length apart," the boy explained. He rubbed a small bruise forming on his arm and looked out the door, into the darkening woods.

"Welp, we're clearly not going to catch this with a normal trap," Grunkle Stan concluded. "We need something bigger. Soos, do you think that you could find a dead deer and fill it with rat poison?"

"Wait, we can't just kill it!" Dipper exclaimed. "It saved me!"

"Dipper, it tore apart our house and scared Grunkle Stan," Mabel tried to reason. "Besides, aren't you just the tiniest bit scared that it knows where we live?" She gave a slightly disapproving look to her great uncle and continued. "I don't want to kill it, but we need to find a way to get it away from us before it does something worse."

The young detective fell silent. The only noise he made was another slight squeak as his great uncle began wrapping bandages around his calf.

"We could just trap it and set it free like, a hundred miles from here," Soos suggested.

"It's got wings. One hundred miles is nothing for an animal with wings," Stan replied, shooting down the idea. Mabel sighed and scooted beside her downtrodden brother as he gazed blankly at the floor. The slight movement made her great uncle suddenly seem to notice that the two children were still there. He taped Dipper's bandage in place before standing up.

"You kids should be going up to bed now," he remarked. "Dipper, you especially. I don't know what kind of dragon worries about people, but we should be cautious about it anyways. If you have any ideas for trapping it, tell us, but you need sleep to heal that injury."

Dipper sighed and got to his feet, using Mabel as a crutch to get upstairs. He put on his pajamas almost lifelessly and flopped onto his bed. His sister sat next to him, staring at his bandaged shin almost sadly.

"Mabel, that dragon doesn't want to hurt us," he said suddenly, startling her. She quickly recovered from her shock, but her brother didn't speak again.

"Look, I know it saved you, and I'm not going to argue that something isn't different about it because there clearly is," she began. "But it knew where you lived, and it almost destroyed our home. It might care about you, but we have no idea about whether or not it cares about the rest of us at all."

Dipper muttered something under his breath. Mabel leaned closer to him. "Sorry, didn't quite catch that, broseph."

"It returned my vest," the young detective murmured, touching the damp fabric. "I lost it when I fell down the waterfall, and it brought it back to me, like it was worried about me staying warm."

Mabel's eyes widened slightly. "Really?"

Dipper nodded, clenching his vest tightly. "Mabel, it's really hard to say, but I feel like I've seen that dragon before." When his sister gave him a slight look of confusion, he elaborated. "The way it looked at me was so familiar. It almost scared me."

"Maybe we saw it sometime last summer," she mused. "We ran into a lot of crazy monsters. I'm sure we could have seen the eyes in a cave or something."

Her brother did not reply this time. She looked down at him in confusion, before jumping a bit when she saw there were tears in his eyes. "Dip, what's the matter?" she asked, placing a small hand on his shoulder.

"I just remembered why I know that look," he whispered, covering his eyes and sniffling.

Mabel was almost afraid to ask, but didn't have to. Her brother took a shaky breath before whimpering, "It was the look Wendy gave me whenever she left work."

The young artist stared at the floor. As incredibly sorry she felt for her brother, she couldn't help but admit to herself that this Wendy business was getting almost tiring. She'd thought he would give up when the girl's father himself stopped looking, but no. He just had to keep making more maps, spending more time in the woods completely alone, and locking himself away to study where everyone who ever knew her saw her last. It had finally gone so far that he was comparing her to a dragon. His obsession wasn't going away, it was only increasing the sadder and more desperate he got.

She slowly got off his bed and retreated to her own cot, pulling off her sweater and falling asleep within minutes. However, her brother stayed awake hours after that, silently sobbing into his pillow.

The next morning was almost completely clear. The sun rose in the morning, as though the great storm had never happened, and Mabel got to watch the stars fade away as she ate breakfast. Dipper, on the other hand, was lying half asleep upstairs in his bed, completely miserable.

Grunkle Stan had visited the two in the attic around seven in the morning, unofficially diagnosing the young detective with a pulled muscle and sending his sister off to eat. When Dipper had started to prepare for a fresh search for Wendy, his great uncle had pushed him back into bed with the command he would not go on any more dangerous solo missions until his leg was better. To only add to his frustration, he was pretty sure the old man had told Mabel to make sure he stayed inside and didn't try to sneak out.

He finally stumbled downstairs to eat breakfast around eight thirty, half-heartedly consuming an apple before retreating to the living room to read the newspaper. There really weren't any interesting stories, just like the last 26 issues he had read. Discouraged from taking on the day in the lower levels of the Shack, he walked back upstairs, regretting ever straying from his room.

The several news articles about Wendy's strange disappearance were still pinned up on Dipper's wall. As he flopped back into his bed and began reaching for a book, one suddenly stood out. He sat back up slowly and pulled away the thumbtack that held it in place, beginning to read.

Lumberjack's Daughter Still Not Found - New Evidence?

In a tragic event that shook nearly the entire town of Gravity Falls-

Dipper skipped over the part about the nature of the disappearance. He didn't want to read that again. He settled a few paragraphs down, an elated expression spreading across his face as he found what he was looking for.

"She came home like she always does on Friday," says Wendy's brother. "She didn't look sad about anything, really. Then she said she was going to go for a walk around the old creek about a half mile from here, and she didn't come back."

Local authorities have searched the area and not found any evidence of the teen, though one reported unusual marks in the mud around the creek area. Wendy's other brothers and father were not available for comment.

Unusual marks. The first time he had read the article, he had just assumed the cops were fishing for anything and everything to report, but now that he knew more, he realized the true weight of the fact. Maybe she hadn't run away! Maybe she had gotten into a scuffle with some sort of animal, or even another human, and was dragged away! Maybe… Maybe…

Maybe she's still alive.

Dipper fistpumped and cracked a smile for the first time in days. He had a new lead.

Mabel came upstairs around lunch, carrying a peanut butter sandwich in one hand and Waddles in the other. As she neared the entrance to the attic, she could hear a frantic scribbling noise even through the door. She put her pig down, turned the doorknob, and prepared for the worst.

Her brother was sitting on his bed, rapidly examining maps and taking notes on a pad of paper. The young artist's mouth opened in shock as she saw the small smile on his face, taking hold of his every feature and brightening it. She hadn't seen him so happy in months.

"Bro, what'd you find?" she asked, dropping the sandwich on their bedside table and sitting on her own bed. She would have plopped down on his, but there were many papers and articles blocking her way that she didn't want to mess up. He looked up at her only for a moment before resuming his frenzied writing.

"I think I found out where Wendy went missing," he answered excitedly, drawing a circle on his current map and showing her. The area on the paper he had marked out seemed to be a tiny body of water surrounded endlessly by pine trees.

"Dip, that's great!" Mabel encouraged, though she privately added, and not just for Wendy. She reached up and patted her brother on the back before picking the sandwich back up. "Hey, do you want to take a break and eat lunch?"

The young detective looked up regretfully. "Uh, I kind of have to finish this first," he started slowly. As his sister's face fell, he immediately added, "But I'll be with you in just a few minutes! Don't worry!"

Mabel gave him her trademark grin and nodded, leaving the sandwich on his sheets. "Gotcha. See you downstairs, broseph!"

She skipped out of the room and shut the door behind her. He could hear her jumping down the stairs in only a way Mabel would do. He saluted to the shut door and refocused himself on his work.

After his promised few minutes, he pulled himself away from the research at last. Sandwich in hand, he folded up the countless papers, pinning a few up while leaving the rest for when he would return after his meal. With his work somewhat organized, he left the room in high spirits as he went to meet his sister in the kitchen.

As he reached the foot of the stairs, Dipper couldn't help but attempt to skip as his sister had done. Things were finally looking up. Sure, he couldn't go out on his rebounded search for Wendy just yet, but he would be able to in just a matter of a few days, when his stupid leg finally healed. He would be able to find her for real this time. He had new evidence!

He was barely able to register his sister's cheerful greeting as he realized that he was finally feeling hopeful once again.


A/N: GOOD LARD THIS FANFICTION HAS SEVENTY TWO PAGES

I GOTTA POST MORE

Anyways, not much happens in this chapter, but I can guarantee that plenty happens in the next. So, there's not really much to say here except please review, and peace out!