Author's notes

The cover art has been created by i-am-a-swat on Tumblr. Check it out!

"Why?" Mabel whimpered, burying her head deeper into the cushion. The sun was torturing her for her drinking; it stabbed at her eyes and cooked her brain without mercy. Her head felt like it was being slammed against the wall repeatedly and her stomach clenched uncomfortably. Mabel rolled over so her back was facing the dreadful sun.

Eventually, the realization that she wasn't in her motel prompted Mabel to take a scan of her surroundings. She narrowed her eyes and shared a lewd hand gesture with the ball of fire in the sky. There was a flat screen television sitting proudly on a simple wooden table on the opposite wall to the couch. Books were displayed in the open cabinets of the table but the woman didn't dare try to read the words. The blue curtains were pulled away from the two windows, one on each side of the television. There was a modest fireplace on the left side of the room and a hallway leading to the rest of the house on the other. Mabel was in a living room, she concluded. But whose?

Her nose twitched at the smell of bacon cooking and her stomach grumbled loudly. Mabel rubbed at it to soothe its cries for food and attempted to get up off the couch. She flopped down the first time but the second she managed to stand. Mabel whimpered at the pounding of her head and she followed her nose to the food. Lucky for her, the living room seamlessly became the kitchen and Wendy was at the stove with her back turned on Mabel, whistling softly as she flipped the pancakes.

Mabel gulped at the sight of the older woman. She was adorning a green flannel, much like the one from her youth but Mabel's eyes were glued lower down the woman's body. She could see Wendy's naked legs all the way up until they disappeared into the shirt. Just what the hell did they do last night!?

Wendy must have sensed that her companion was awake because she turned around with a smile. "Breakfast is almost ready." She nodded to the pile of bacon and pancakes on a large plate in the middle of the table. "Help yourself." When Mabel didn't move from her spot, Wendy sighed and jerked her thumb at the food. "You'll want something greasy and fattening, trust me."

"Uh, Wendy?"

The woman in question turned to look at Mabel, an eyebrow raised in concern. Mabel sounded so conflicted that Wendy worried she went a little overboard on the food. "What's up?"

Mabel chewed her bottom lip and played with the ends of her jacket's sleeves. "You're not wearing any pants," she said.

"So?" Wendy didn't see a big deal so there must have been something else that was bothering Mabel.

"I don't really remember last night," Mabel tried to clarify but the confusion was still clear on Wendy's face. She took a deep breath and asked the question that has been on her tongue since she first saw pantsless Wendy. "Did we have sex?"

Wendy stared at Mabel for a few seconds before a smile cracked on her face. Soon, she was gripping her side with one arm and slapping the counter with her other hand. Wendy tried to apologize for her reaction but seeing the blush darken on Mabel's face only made things so much funnier. When her laughter was back under control, Wendy dared talk again. "You wish, or maybe it's Dipper that wishes he could get into these pants. But no, we didn't fuck." Wendy lifted the hem of her shirt to reveal blue boxers. She let the shirt fall and turned her attention back on the last pancakes. "I just don't like sleeping with pants on." She scooped the pancakes onto a spare plate and carried them to the table. "You should try it man, it's really freeing." Wendy sat down and promptly grabbed some strips of bacon and drowned her pancakes in syrup. She noticed that Mabel still hadn't moved and waved impatiently to the empty chair. "Now come on, I'll feel like a loser if I have to eat all these pancakes by myself."

Mabel was baffled at Wendy's reaction but felt relief bloom in her stomach. She took a seat at the round table and helped herself to a generous stack of pancakes and bacon. Mabel glanced up at Wendy as she ate. It wouldn't have been an awful thing for Mabel and her to hook up. Wendy was truly a beautiful woman if not a little more masculine than most females but that just made her even more attractive in Mabel's eyes. She looked at her arms and noticed that Wendy filled out the green flannel in all the right places. Wendy wasn't a bodybuilder but Mabel could tell that the Corduroy could handle herself in a fight with bigger and more brutish humans and magical creatures. No, it wouldn't have been awful at all. Her train of thought brought Mabel to Wendy's earlier words. "When you said my brother wished, did you mean that you two never did the do? Like at all?"

The older woman laughed through a mouthful of pancake and had to swallow before she could answer. "No, I never slept with your brother." She washed down the food she ate with a gulp of orange juice. "Honestly, after he more or less got over me, I started to see him as a brother. Funny, right? Like I needed another little Corduroy running about." Wendy's face sobered and she brushed back an errant lock of her hair. "Besides, it would have been majorly fucked up if I gave him false hope like that."

Nibbling on her piece of bacon, Mabel mulled over Wendy's words. She nodded her head and reached out for her own glass of orange juice. "I see your point. It was a little creepy how obsessed he was with you."

"Can you blame him?" Wendy asked with a cocky smile. She made a show of flexing her arms and winking at Mabel. "Strength, beauty, and brains! I got the whole package."

Mabel rolled her eyes at her friend's antics. Seeing how happy Wendy was and all the others made the older Pines twin start to wish she came back to Gravity Falls sooner. "How much do you remember about last night?" she blurted out. The way her stomach clenched meant that she might have said something she shouldn't have.

For her credit, a light flush spread across Wendy's cheeks and she stalled for a bit by chewing her pancakes thoughtfully. "You said," she sighed and glanced away, "you said you were a hunter." Wendy sat up straighter in her chair and didn't like how Mabel's eyes widened with fear. So she wouldn't have told me if she was sober, Wendy concluded. The thought made her sad but also angry. How could she have kept this from all of them!? "You said that the ones you hunt are like Bill. Mabel, what you're doing is stupid and most of them are pretty okay if you don't mess with them."

"Most of them," Mabel repeated. She wondered what exactly she should tell Wendy to prove her point. "Some of them are like Bill." She saw how utterly unconvinced Wendy still was, even if she had that abomination to compare to what Mabel had been dealing with for the past five years. Mabel shook her head and pulled back the sleeve of her jacket to reveal her scar. It looked as if something literally taken a chunk out of the older Pines twin's arm, which was the case. "A skinwalker did that to me three and a half years ago. It was terrorizing a village in Ethiopia, Africa. The bastard would turn into a villager's deceased loved one to get close enough for the kill." Mabel watched Wendy's face become horrorstruck but she continued her tale. "I managed to kill it with a shot to its head with a silver bullet but it took a bite out of me before I could put it down. I don't know how it knew but it turned into my mother. I almost couldn't pull the trigger. If I hadn't, I wouldn't be here right now."

Wendy didn't know what to say. She looked down at her plate half filled with food, her appetite dead like the skinwalker. She had no idea that something so evil existed in this dimension and she had seen a lot of evil shit. Wendy took a peek at Mabel's face and saw how the twin's eyes were clear of any emotion like the whole experience didn't phase her. What else had the woman been doing that made her like this? "D-d," Wendy had to take a moment to find her voice, "does Dipper know about any of this?" She gestured wildly to the scar.

Mabel shook her head as she watched Wendy's expression intensely. "Of course not." She looked down at her food, also experiencing a lack of an appetite. She took a deep breath and asked, "Do you remember the first summer that I didn't come back?" Wendy nodded, the memories bringing a sour look to her face. "How did Dipper look?"

"Fucking terrible," Wendy answered with a shudder. "He looked like all the Manotaurs ganged up on him. Both elderly Pines were all up and arms about it but Dipper wouldn't say who did it to him." Realization drained the color from Wendy's face. She stared hard at Mabel and the older Pines twin grimaced at the tiny bit of accusation in her eyes, like she was the cause of Dipper's injuries. "You know who did it, don't you?"

"Yeah, and it's a what, not a who," Mabel answered. "There was a lake near our college campus, way out in the woods so most students didn't really know where it was. A group of seniors went there one night to celebrate their final year or something but they never came back. The police scanned every inch of that lake and found their remains. The autopsy report said they most likely died of drowning, but five people all drowning? One of them was on the swimming team even! Dip" Mabel hated how the use of her brother's nickname brought a small, hopeful smile on Wendy's lips, "and I found it. There was a water nymph residing in the lake and she wasn't too happy with us being there." Mabel reached under the table to brush a patch of skin on her inner right thigh. The damn monster slashed her there when it attacked the twins. "We barely made it out alive. I almost had to watch Dipper drown," she whispered. Mabel jumped when she felt one of Wendy's hands rest on the one still on the table. She looked at the older woman and saw understanding in those eyes, but that just pissed her off. Mabel snatched her hand away. "I realized that night that there are a lot more fuckers like Bill in our own dimension but Dipper reached another conclusion. He talked about that night like it was a simple misunderstanding. He almost died!" Mabel gritted her teeth as she practically growled out. "I researched that damn lake and there were unexplainable drownings as far back as the 1800's. Dipper knew that!" she shouted, slamming a closed fist on the table. "There was no way he didn't."

Wendy watched as Mabel worked herself into a near rage. She sat back in her chair and waited for the younger woman to calm somewhat before asking the question she already knew the answer to. "What did you do afterwards?"

Mabel glanced up, apparently forgetting that she wasn't alone. She forced herself to take even breaths to bring her heart rate back to normal levels. She didn't see a reason to lie now so she finished her tale truthfully. "I went back and killed the nymph and then I skipped town. I kept an eye on that lake for the past five years and no more students drowned. There's even talk to make it a public nature park," she laughed sarcastically. Mabel had almost broken her phone from clenching at it so hard when she read the proposal.

"Are you here to kill the magical creatures?" The question was out of Wendy's mouth before she even thought of it.

"No!" the answer was instant and Wendy knew Mabel was telling the truth. The younger woman even looked offended at such a question and then saddened at how Wendy's eyes must have betrayed her relief. Mabel chalked up the relief to Wendy being friends with a couple of them, she seemed chummy enough with Chutzpar. "I came to Gravity Falls to talk to Grunkle Stan and Ford." She fumbled in one of her jacket's pockets and brought out a journal, much like the one Grunkle Ford had. Mabel handed it to Wendy without hesitation. "I've been making my own journal, but the creatures in there are less friendly than gnomes and unicorns."

Wendy opened the journal and read some random pages. They were written almost like a diary, each entry talking about where and what Mabel was doing. Sometimes bits of notes were blackened out and Mabel explained how previous information was now irrelevant, either the witness had died or the creature moved on to a new victim or even at times the creature Mabel thought she was hunting turned out to be something else entirely. Wendy's worry for the older Pines twin grew more and more as she flipped through the pages. It was like with each monster Mabel hunted, a piece of the old Mabel died along with the creature. The woman sitting in front of her, patiently waiting for Wendy to finish reading what she wanted from her journal, may act like the old Mabel but that girl was long gone. Finally, Wendy had to shut the journal at one of the newer entries describing how a malicious spirit was hunting a painting of a family and if a viewer looked at the painted girl's face, she would possess the viewer and have him or her gut their entire family.

Mabel took back the journal and stored it in her jacket. She waited until most of the green had left Wendy's cheeks before she spoke up again. "I want to see Bill's statue too." Wendy's eyes snapped to the younger woman's at the mention of that demon. "I have a theory that because Grunkle Stan got back his memories, a part of Bill might still be alive but trapped in his statue." She smiled sadly at her friend who might not be a friend anymore as she got up from her seat. "I should go, I probably overstayed my welcome." Mabel tightened her jacket around her. "I have a nice bedbug ridden bed to crash at that motel outside of town. See ya around, I hope." She turned to leave but the sound of chair legs scraping against the tiled floor halted her steps.

"Don't go," Wendy said, hating how she sounded like she was pleading, which she may very well be doing. "You can stay here. That motel is known for drug deals gone bad and it would really suck if you died from a crossfire and I have to see your body." In truth, the only criminal things that go on at the motel was the occasional prostitute being caught but Mabel probably already knew that.

The younger woman turned to study the sheriff of Gravity Falls. There was not a single doubt in her mind that Wendy was hiding something from her, some ulterior reason she wanted Mabel to stay here where she could watch her instead of going to the motel, outside of the town's jurisdiction. Still, after some debate in her mind Mabel nodded. She was curious what Wendy's reasoning was and she couldn't figure it out if she left. "Okay, but don't complain when your wall space gets covered in my findings and notes."