(AN: Thank you so much for your amazing reviews! Sorry the update is a day late, but I was at a Government Camp for the week. It was quite fun, but now I'm back! And if a certain group of people in the chapter seems "out of character", I have two notes.

1. It's an AU.

2. I never specifically stated which group they are, nor whether or not they're in the original show.

I only realized that this might be a problem while re-reading this, but it's a little late to fix it. So, here you go!

And also, next chapter will be another MABEL POV! I do love those.)

CHAPTER THREE

WENDY

CENTURIES

Pacifica goes to sleep quickly. I can hear we steady breathing in the tent below me. Dipper takes a while to get comfortable; his shadow moves rapidly against the tent walls as he tosses and turns. He's probably worried about his sister; I can relate to that. I wonder almost every day how my brothers are doing without me. Whether they're still…

I shake my head. "Stop, Wendy, stop." I whisper to myself. "Don't think about it. It's in the past, over, doesn't matter."

Besides, Pas would hate me if she knew. And so would everybody else. I sigh and tie myself to the tree with a tight rope; don't want to fall down. I scan the trunk, looking. I put a hand on the acorn around my neck, feeling the frayed ribbon holding it in place with my fingers.

No use dwelling on the past, but I can remember the good parts on occasion.

I wake up early the next day, and untie myself. Clapping my hands as I jump from the tree, I yell, "Okay, time to pack it up! We've gotta move out!"

Pas wakes up with a start and immediately begins rolling up her tent. Dipper groans as he sits up. "What time is it?" he asks.

"No use telling the time." I shrug. "But the sun's up, so you should be too."

"Wow, it's like Mabel's right here with us." Dipper mocks, yawning. "She used to say almost the exact same thing."

"Get moving." I order. "Our job offer won't wait for us forever."

"What even is your job offer?" Dipper asks, trying and failing to collapse his tent.

I come over to show him how to do it properly. As I work, I explain, "Some village on the edge of Gleeful has been ransacked by bandits recently, and they keep coming back. We're heading over to teach them a lesson."

"Yeah, it'll be sweet!" Pas grins, shouldering her bag and grasping her rolled up tent in her opposite arm. "We haven't been to Gleeful yet."

"So you guys are, like, sheriffs for hire or something?" he summarizes last night's discussion.

"Pretty much sums it up." I shrug. "You carry the tent. I'll get our weapons and food."

"Ever heard of traveling light?" Dipper asks as he tries to shoulder his bag and the rolled-up tent.

"Nope." I grin. "Come on! Are we gonna save your sister before or after next year?"

Dipper sighs. "I'm starting to rethink traveling with you."

"Good." I nod. "You'd be insane if you weren't."

"To your left! Your left, Pacifica!"

Pas holds the sword out, thrusting it in the direction I'm yelling. She struggles to move with a blindfold, and trips on a root. "Wendy, there aren't very good odds of me going blind anytime soon."

"Anything can happen." I say, sharpening a dagger against a rock. "Keep using your other senses."

We've taken a mid-day break. While Dipper ate lunch, Pas and I snuck off to practice fighting techniques. She's currently fighting blind, which I learned when I was about her age. Come to think of it, I didn't like it so much either.

I hear a rustle behind me, and look around. Dipper is shyly peering through the bushes. "Want to join?" I ask, and he slowly comes out.

"Um, I dunno..." he shuffles his feet. "I was never very good at it at the castle."

"Fine, we'll start with the basics." I shrug. "Pas, c'mere."

Pacifica gladly takes her blindfold off and throws it to the ground. She comes over to Dipper as I'm giving him one of my smaller swords. "It's pretty light." I explain. "You'll do fine, just fight Pas."

Dipper looks even more worried than before. "I'm not so sure that's a good ide-"

Pas charges at him with her sword. Dipper barely manages to block it, swiveling on his feet. She jabs her sword at his stomach. He jumps and swings his sword as he's about to come down. Pas blocks it by putting hers over her head, and Dipper lands behind her. She turns to attack while he's still dazed, and kicks his feet out from under him. He holds his sword up to block attacks, but she kicks his weapon out of his hands, and it soars away.

"Not bad." she says. "Most boys would've been down by my second move."

"You can do better." I say, now hanging upside-down from a tree.

He nods and stands up. "So what now?"

I jump down. "Well, now I sta-" I stop speaking as a scream is heard behind us.

"What is that?" Dipper yells.

"I dunno, but let's go find out." I say. I lead the way, following the source of the noise behind me. I push through bushes and duck under trees, and thankfully the person keeps yelling so I know where to go.

"Ow!" I can hear Dipper yell behind us. "Ow! Ow! Ow!"

"Keep it down!" Pacifica orders.

I stop just short of a clearing, and look ahead. A young boy is cornered by a Gremoblin against a tree. "Pas?" I ask.

"Gremoblin. We just need him to look at his reflection and we can get through this without killing." she reviews. "Dipper, can you be a distraction?"

"Oh yeah, cause that's the job of all future Kings of the biggest kingdom in the Alliance." he mutters back. "We only exist to be human sacrifices."

"Wait!" I hold up my hand.

Someone approaches the monster from behind. Thier cloak obscures their face, and they shout something at the creature. The Gremoblin turns, and catches sight of a mirror the person holds up. They flee howling into the wilderness.

"Well, that was simple." Pas says.

Dipper makes a move to leave the safety of the bushes, but I block him with my hand. "Hold up."

The boy turns to thank the cloaked stranger, but the man instead grabs the boy by the arm and drags him away.

"Where are they going?" Pas asks.

"Let's see." I say, and slowly follow the figures' path through the woods.

"Inside the cave." I point out the trampled grass around the entrance to the gaping cavern. "Be careful, we don't know who this could be."

"Looks like some crazy guy who saves the lives of random people and then drags them into a cave." Dipper shrugs. "So what're we gonna do about it?"

"We're gonna rescue the boy." Pas explains, rolling her eyes. "Are we going in or what?"

We head in silently, each with a hand on some sort of weapon. To my surprise, Dipper manages to keep up pretty well. "I figured you'd be tripping over everything in the dark." I finally admit, but quietly.

"Mabel and I used to wander around secret passages in the castle." he shrugs. "We… We got kinda good at it."

Pacifica shushes us. "I hear voices." she explains.

I mentally slap myself for not hearing the voices first. I push the kids behind me and keep walking, one arm out to block them if somebody should jump out at us. I draw my sword as we get closer to a bend, and lantern-light casts shadows across the wall.

Dipper prods me in the back, and I turn around. He points at a gap in the passage wall, which is also streaming light. I nod and duck over there, peering through, while the kids crowd around and try to hear what's going on.

I can't see much, only a few puffs of smoke against darkness, and the odd bobbing lantern light. But I can hear what they're saying. At first, it sounds like gibberish. "Retinentia deleo. Retinentia deleo." But Pas's face goes pale.

"What is it?" I ask, worried.

"Sorcery." she whispers. "We... we used to have sorcerers in the Northwest Kingdom... I'd recognize it anywhere."

I decide not to ask; Pas is very shy about her years in her old kingdom. I give a glare to the Prince next to her to keep him silent. "What spell is it? Do you know?" I ask.

Pas nods quietly. "Memory-erasing. If I'm not mistaken, they're erasing the boy's memory, probably of the monster, but mostly of them. The way the words are inflicted- how it starts out deep but manages to get very high-pitched by the end- the spell is probably self-referencing."

"Great." Dipper rolls his eyes and whispers, "I guess I've gotta be the moving target now, too."

"It doesn't seem like they're hurting him." I respond, shrugging. "So long as their magic doesn't turn against him, it shouldn't be-"

"Magic is evil." Dipper interrupts, visibly upset. "It's destructive and does no good."

"Says the unsocialised child." I retort, then try to see through the smoke again.

"I'm not a child!" Dipper responds, but Pacifica elbows him to shut him up.

I strain to hear if they're saying anything new. After a few moments, the chanting stops and someone does say something different. "That's the fifth mind we've had to wipe this week. Our experiments keep escaping. We need to keep them in their prison."

"Their dungeon doesn't seem to hold them." another answers. "Some have finally integrated, but the others keep trying to escape back here. We're going to have to speed up our plan."

"But there's no reason for the Kingdoms to turn against each other now!" one person with a faintly recognizable voice sputters. "We need a good excuse to start a war!"

We glance at each other as the men keep talking. "Good excuse? Oh, we'll make one alright."

"How?"

"Easy enough." the man who seems to be the leader responds. "We're all well acquainted with Princess Mabel's disappearance, aren't we?"

Dipper gasps and Pacifica stuffs a fist in his mouth to shut him up.

As the others finish muttering affirmations, the leader continues. "Some say she's been taken by a dragon. So, if we control the dragon, we control the Princess. You-" he must be making a gesture here- "get our army and capture the dragon. Start rumors that other Kingdoms have her, and the civil war begins. You, you and you, stir up more trouble between the kingdoms if you can. And you, get the boy somewhere."

"But, what do we do with the Princess once we have her?" someone finally asks. "She's a feisty one, and I should know."

"She can't be allowed to speak of us. And you know our powers are no match for hers." the leader responds. "Dump her body on one of the Kingdom borders after a week or so."

Dipper struggles against Pas, beating against her with his weak arms. He looks furious, and downright dangerous. He reaches for his sword, and I tackle him to the ground. "Shut up!" I whisper to him. "Shut up! We've gotta get out! They're gonna find us! You can't protect Mabel if you're dead!"

Dipper settles, but his eyes burn with a fire I've never seen before. "Move." I whisper. "Before they come to see what all that noise was about."

We race out of the cave and towards the forest. Once out in the open, Dipper keeps tripping over stuff, but he no longer notices. He looks anxious, nervous, furious and hostile at the same time, which I wouldn't have thought possible.

We stop at our temporary campsite, and sit down. I glance between the two of them. "Well… did not expect that."

"Mabel…" Dipper mutters. "They're gonna kill Mabel…"

"So we've gotta get to her first." Pas shrugs. "We'll camp somewhere farther away. We've gotta keep moving if we wanna reach Gleeful in time. If we push it, we might be able to make it in a week."

Dipper looks up, a hardened gaze in his eyes. "We've gotta find her." he says. "I… I don't know what I'd do without her."

I put an arm around him; Pas has told me before that this is a sign of affection. "Hey, it's alright, man. We'll get her. The question is-" I stand up, "Why are they trying to start a war?"

"And what did they mean by 'experiments'?" Pas asks.

"We can find out after we get Mabel out of there." Dipper suggests. "Our number one priority right now is saving my sister."

Song Title: Centuries

Artist: Fall Out Boy

Album Title: American Beauty / American Psycho

Lyric that best fits this chapter: "We've been here forever / And here's the frozen proof / I could scream forever / We are the poisoned youth"

Lyric that best fits this fic: "And you're a cherry blossom / You're about to bloom / You look so pretty, but you're gone so soon… And just one mistake / Is all it will take / We'll go down in history"