Ahh, remember all the self-flagellation I used to launch into for being a week late on an update? I was so cute back then. I won't bore you with the hows and whys, but suffice it to say that this delay is almost entirely self-inflicted and I just promise not to do it again.
7
You knew things were bleak when even Mabel had trouble forcing a smile.
The rain was picking up tempo, a rich liquid soundscape in the echoing woods, but no member of the group made any attempt to find cover. Dipper looked around shakily from one face to another, all equally wet and scared; his sister was slowly feeding a lock of hair into her mouth, Sara clenched and unclenched her hands over and over as if to reassure herself that they were still attached, and Wirt was huddled on the mulchy ground with his eyes locked on the dead wolf and his arms wrapped so tightly around his little brother that it was surprising the kid could still breathe. Dipper carried a sick feeling in his throat that he fought desperately to banish. Everyone was fine. Nobody had died. They had gotten through it together; this was supposed to be a happy moment. If they'd eaten the others, you and your sister could have taken the food and scarpered, intoned a lazy, nasty voice at the back of his head, and he swallowed the unwanted thought with his nausea.
The drizzling silence was finally broken when a small hiss sounded, and most everybody but Wirt looked up. Beatrice stood with her head bowed, and when she raised it again, her hand was pressed tightly against the left side of her jaw. Rusty brown blood was smeared across her neck and knuckles. Dipper's stomach dropped.
"Oh, shi –" He bit his tongue with a half-glance at Wirt and Greg, though neither of them were paying much attention to him. "Shi… shirt. Um, shirt! Beatrice, here –" He shrugged out of his overshirt, a ratty flannel thing splattered with black wolf-oil, and pulled off his green shamrock tee without a second thought. He bit into the hem and began to tear out a large strip of fabric.
Beatrice seemed startled by this action, and looked away from him with uncharacteristic shyness. "Oh, put your shirt back on, I'm fine," she muttered as she sat down on a wet mossy boulder, but Dipper would not be so easily dissuaded now that his clothing was already ruined. He put the flannel shirt back on over his bare back and approached her.
"Here," he said again, and she tried to shrug him off, but he insisted. "No, seriously, you're bleeding. You're bleeding a lot. Take this." She hesitated once more, but finally took it and pressed the scrap of green cotton against her jaw, where it bloomed immediately blackish. Her dress had torn inappropriately high up the seam during her scuffle with the wolf, and she had a large laceration across the top of her right thigh as well, a more dangerous injury by far. "Mabel," he called as the rain spattered down and he worked to make an even bigger bandage of his once-shirt, "we don't have any antiseptic, do we?"
"Sorry, Dip," she said, and slowly perched on the edge of the boulder close by Beatrice's shoulder. When the taller girl turned her neck, she winced, and Mabel put a bracing hand on her arm.
"Great," Dipper muttered. "This'll have to do, then." He made sure he had enough shirt left over to change the bandages later, and knelt down before pausing briefly. "Can I…?" Beatrice gave him a steely nod, not making eye contact. Her freckles were dark enough to be visible even through the smears of blood. He brushed her skirt out of the way, wrapped the bandage around her thigh, and reached to his side where sat a broken wet tree branch the size of a billy club. He slipped it inside the bandage, took a deep breath, and twisted hard.
"Oww!" she cried roughly, and tried to jerk away. "Motherf– That hurts!"
"Sorry." He sat back on his heels with an ill feeling that he tried not to let show. The tourniquet was going to be soaked through in just a few minutes. "You've lost enough blood. If it had nicked an artery, you'd already be dead." She glanced uncertainly at him, sour expression wavering.
"Listen to him, Beatrice." Wirt's voice drifted over dully from his spot still just a few feet from the dead wolf. His eyes hadn't left its visage. "He knows what he's doing." It was a strangely affirming statement, for how lifeless it sounded, and against all expectations, Beatrice listened. She folded up the rag in her hand to reapply it to her face and ceased protest.
With a grunt, Dipper stood back up and shook the lingering crouch out of his legs. Mabel was still sitting next to Beatrice, asking if she was doing okay, and Greg was starting to wriggle in his brother's grip. "Did anyone else get hurt?" Dipper asked shakily. No one said anything, but Mabel shook her head. "Good, because our bandages are limited to the, uh, square footage of a medium men's t-shirt." As with most of the jokes he ever told, no one laughed. Sara stood conspicuously apart from the rest of them, with her head turned and her arms crossed. She wasn't looking at anything or anyone, but seemed absorbed in worrying thought. "Hey," Dipper said as he approached, and she jumped slightly.
"…Hey," she returned, taking a small, ashamed step back, like she didn't want him too close.
"Are, uh –" His gaze skipped up and down from her face to her feet to her hands, all positioned defensively. "Are you alright?"
"Yeah. I didn't get hurt," she said. "Hit my head, though, so I guess I'm in the club now."
"I didn't –" That wasn't the question he'd been asking, exactly, but he decided not to push it. He rubbed the back of his neck. "I just wanted to say, um – you were really – you were good, with the wolves. You were great." Her eyes were a little watery, but he pushed on: "You were just – calm and cool and… I think I might owe my life to you right now, and if I don't, Mabel definitely does. She – she could have been killed. She's the only sister I've got, you know? And if she ever got hurt I don't know if I could –" He stopped and swallowed, because he wasn't sure what the most direct route to his point was anymore. "Just. Thank you. Really. I'm, uh… I'm glad you guys started stalking us, that night."
Once again, it was supposed to be a joke. Her face seemed to crumple a little, and she smiled, but only perfunctorily. "Me too," she said, but the words rang hollow. Once again, she clenched her hands tightly, and he noticed that she was no longer holding the pistol. He wasn't sure where it had gone. "You did pretty good yourself, you know," she said. She wasn't making eye contact. "With that camping knife. You looked like you… really knew what you were doing."
Dipper thought back on tackling the first wolf inside the door, of shoving the knife down into the base of its skull as oil seeped between his fingers, until metal cleaved bone and movement ceased. It was like he was twelve again, and terrified, finger on the crossbow's trigger as a gold-eyed jaculus bared down on him and Wendy from out of the bloody, red-split sky.
His mouth felt poisonously arid. "Sure," he croaked. "So did you." It was transparently untrue; Dipper was terribly conscious of the tension held in her shoulders, the weakness in her jaw. Hers was not the body language of a woman at peace with killing, and he didn't know what to say to ease that pain. Should he offer her a hug? Was that too much? Bumblebee's cute when she's upset, said the mean little liar in Dipper's head, and he ignored it as stolidly as ever. He didn't know where that nickname had come from. For a minute she just chewed her lip, and then she asked him, voice quiet, "Does it get easier to do?"
The rain washed her cheeks, and the black-and-white skull makeup was running in gray stripes down her throat. He considered lying, just for a moment, but she deserved better than that. "Yeah," he muttered, and it was his turn to avoid eye contact. "It does."
They stood still, several yards removed from everyone else. After a minute, Sara sniffed bravely and wiped underneath her eye with her wrist, and she seemed surprised when it came away covered in paint. "Here," Dipper said, and he wriggled out of one of his shirtsleeves and presented the damp cloth to her. She accepted it with a grateful look and took a moment to scrub at her face. When she pulled it away, some powdery white still lingered at her hairline and around her jaw, but for the first time, he could see her face clearly, dark and doe-eyed and snub-nosed.
She squinted at him. "Did I miss any?"
"A little here…" He gestured with his hand. She went in again and then gave him back his sleeve with an apology that it was now covered in paint. "Don't worry about it," he said. "If it dries hard enough I can probably use it as a gauntlet when that last wolf comes back." That one did get a chuckle. If he couldn't kill the fear in his own gut, he could least coax a laugh out of someone else. He gave her a half-smile and held out a hand to shake: "Hey, nice to meet you, by the way. I've never seen you around here before. I'm Dipper."
Sara smiled wryly. "You're going to have to tell me the story behind that name someday," she said, and accepted his gesture. He was half-ready to lift his bangs from his forehead and share the story there and then, but in the instant that her hand wrapped around his, painful high-voltage shock ran from Dipper's palm to behind his left eye, flashing white. He cried out and staggered backward like he'd been struck as the voice in his head barked, so loudly that it might have come from next to his ear:
TAKE WHAT YOU WANT.
He dropped heavily to his knees, one hand on his ear and the other on his eye, and gritted his teeth at the wet, mossy ground between his thighs while his vision sparked and popped. "Dipper?" Sara said, startled, but her voice seemed to be coming from very far away. "Are you okay?!" He gave no response. What the hell, he thought blearily as a small commotion took up from where the rest of the group was standing. "Dipper?" he heard again, Mabel's voice this time. Squelchy footsteps jogged up to his side and he felt her wet hair brush his ear. She took up a handful of his collar. "Dipper, what's wrong?"
"Is he okay?" Sara repeated.
"Dipper?!"
"I'm fine," he grunted, and removed his hand from his eye, blinking experimentally. He felt like he'd been stabbed in the socket with a knitting needle, but the pain was fading fast; it was the phantom words in his ears that wouldn't fully fade. They had been loud and sudden enough to send his heart thundering, and his hands still shook as he stood back up, leaning on Mabel more than he would have liked. Everyone was looking at him, even Wirt having finally torn his gaze from the dead animal beneath the tree. Dipper avoided their eyes.
"I'm fine," he muttered again. "I got a thing. A pine needle. In my eye."
Sara looked to Mabel, seeking insight, but Mabel was looking at Dipper. If any of the others had fallen for it, she certainly hadn't, but thankfully she said nothing. She let her gaze linger on his for a second longer with we'll-talk-later askanceness, but finally looked away and let out an immediate, audible gasp of delight. "Sara!" she cried, and clapped her hands over her mouth. "Oh my gosh, you're so pretty!"
"Huh?"
"Look at this girl!" Mabel said, taking her around the shoulder and pointing her at the others. "She had a beautiful face under her skull all along!"
Beatrice looked strangely perturbed as Mabel marched Sara back toward the others, but Wirt smiled, small, but noticeable. "Sara is pretty," Greg piped up, having finally extricated himself from his brother's arms effectively enough to stand. "Wirt always said that all the time while they were kissing." The grin on Wirt's face was wiped immediately away.
"Greg –"
"Don't embarrass your brother, Greg," murmured Beatrice, and Dipper actually had to do a double take to confirm that it came from her, because it was the most surprisingly tender-sounding thing that had ever come out of her mouth.
At very least, nobody was paying attention to him anymore, and for that Dipper was grateful. His pulse was steadying, and if he tried hard enough, he could almost fool himself that the pine needle story was true. He meandered back into the thick of the group as if nothing had happened, while the rain picked up harder, only for a few seconds, before lessening again. Greg walked over to Beatrice to offer her a hug around the calf of her uninjured leg, and Wirt finally stood up, wiping mud from his pants and cape. Dipper watched somewhat awkwardly for a moment before asking, "You okay, man?"
Wirt glanced to him and away again. "Yeah," he said, rubbing his right arm slightly, like it hurt. "I'm fine." His moppish hair was limp with rain. His eyes fell on the wolf, wrapped in woody brown vines, and he swallowed visibly. Dipper stepped up next to him, wanting to say something heartening, but nothing came to mind.
Instead, he said, "That thing almost killed you, huh?" and regretted it immediately.
Wirt grimaced. "Yeah, thanks. I remember. I was there."
"Tree had your back, though." Dipper laid a hand on the rough elm trunk, reflecting again on what an impressively stupid thing that was to say. He didn't know if it was his own social dysfunction or the lingering memory of their very knifey introduction that made Wirt such a hard person to talk to, but the end result was the same. "Maybe you, uh, could ask it to carve itself into a lean-to, while you're at it. To, you know. To keep us out of the rain."
"The implication of a world which bends itself to our whims," Wirt said, hollow-voiced, "is either the most comforting or most terrifying thing imaginable." Dipper wondered what must feel like to be so unselfconsciously melodramatic. Nice, probably. The taller boy looked at him, and added, "Your shirt's open."
"Huh?" It was. "Oh." He'd spent the whole conversation with Sara with his chest hairs hanging out. Great. He started fastening the buttons and, purely to make conversation, decided to ask, "So, you and Sara are…?" He meshed his fingers together and wiggled them vaguely. "I didn't know that."
"What? Oh, no." Wirt turned his head to look over at the girls and his brother, clustered closely together. Mabel held the hem of her sweater out over Greg's head to keep him dry. "I-I mean, we did. We used to, in high school. Not anymore." He had a very strange expression on his face.
"Oh. That's cool." But Dipper was chilled by the reverberation of the words in his mind again: Take what you want. He blinked rapidly, and his eyes fell on the wolf, being slowly subsumed by vegetation. "You, uh… do you have any idea what that thing was talking about, the promises and all? Was it talking to you?"
Wirt just croaked, "Not a clue," and his long face looked even more skeletal than Sara's had before the paint came off.
They stood there in the rain for a few seconds longer until Dipper sidled awkwardly away, and Wirt made no objection. "Hey," Dipper said to Beatrice again where she still sat on her wet rock. "How's it going?" She lifted the blood-soaked rag from her face and said nothing. The split flesh in the wound on her jaw was shiny and orange. "Jesus. Okay." He perched on the rock next to her, suddenly much more tired than he had been only a second ago. "I guess the good news is that it doesn't look like you're still bleeding anymore. Well… not there." Without thinking, he reached for her thigh, and she jumped away from his touch.
He assumed for a second that he'd hurt her: "What's wrong?!"
"You are very forward," she said, twisting her lower body from him.
"…What? Are you being serious right now? I'm going to change your bandage."
"Just warn me before you go grabbing my legs next time."
"Forgive my brother," Mabel said, popping up over Beatrice's shoulder from out of nowhere with a cheeky grin. "He has very limited experience with how to handle a woman's thighs."
"Oh my God, Mabel!" Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Sara bow low with laughter, while Wirt looked sympathetically flustered. Dipper flushed red – and surprisingly, Beatrice did too. "Okay, that's enough," he said, and put a hand over his sister's stupid face and pushed her away from them. "I'm the doctor here and you are clearing out, right now." Mabel was too busy cackling to protest.
He muttered under his breath and started to untie the once-green bandage, already heavy with liquid. Thin silence fell between them as he tore out and tied up a fresh wrapping. "Thanks for doing this," Beatrice said finally. She screwed up her face when he redid the tourniquet, but didn't complain this time.
He sat back with a small breath. He had blood on his hands. "No problem," he said wearily.
"Sorry for trying to kill you with my bat." That got his attention. He turned his gaze up, but her eyes were stubbornly on the ground. "I guess I never really apologized for that, so – sorry."
He stayed quiet for a moment, then said, "I appreciate that." He rubbed the back of his head. "If it makes you feel any better, it doesn't hurt much anymore." She grunted. "Can you walk?"
"'Course I can walk." Beatrice stood up to prove it. She visibly bit her lip when she put weight on her bad leg, but bore it well. "See?"
"Great. I'm glad." He stood as well, coming in a spare inch shorter than she was. "You know, you're actually pretty tough. For, uh, a girl." She dug an elbow into his sternum and he stepped back with a chuckle.
"Yeah, next time I'll let you wrestle with the wolf. Alright, losers, and Greg," she announced, and crossed her arms over her sopping wet nightdress. Faces turned. "Let's get the hell out of here. I'm sick of that dead animal staring at me." There was no arguing that they needed to move, and for the first time in eighteen hours, their group as a whole looked forward in preparation to leave. Sara was the only one with eyes cast back. Dipper watched her skulk around the far side of the elm, toward the collapsed shack, apparently looking for something.
"What's up?" he asked, vaulting up on top of the trunk.
"Had to get this," Sara said, and picked up the pistol from the forest floor, twigs and mulch stuck to its wet grip and barrel. She turned on the safety and tucked it back into her belt. "I'm not feeling on great terms with this gun right now, but I guess we still kind of need it."
"How many rounds are left?"
"One."
"One wolf left, too."
"If it comes back." But she looked perturbed. "If there isn't anything else in these woods that we need to worry about more."
You have no idea, kid. It was all Dipper could do to keep from slapping himself in the forehead to get his brain on straight. Sara gave him a wan smile and she, too, crawled atop the trunk and slid back down the other side, and in a few seconds they caught up with the rest of the group on the trackless northward road.
–
Going was slow, due in equal part to the bad weather and Beatrice's bad leg. Everyone had long ago given up hopes of staying dry, and acceptance of the rain made it easier to bear, somewhat. Mabel tried for a while to turn the experience of her cold damp sweater sticking to her collarbone into a positive ("It's a fantastic new tactile sensation! Today only, experience the thrills of – wet cotton!") but as Pacifica always said, you could only listen to the cheerleader in your own head for so long before you started wanting to strangle her. Beatrice said not a word of complaint all morning, but her struggle was clear and her bandage wept red, rusting the front of her ruined blue dress; at some point, Sara slipped in under the other girl's arm and took the burden of her weight upon herself without comment, and they walked that way until she grew tired and Wirt took over, and then Dipper. Sometimes, it seemed like the trees were spreading out as they walked, extending the distance between them and their destination a little further with each step. Rarely did anyone speak, and every once in a while, a heavy drop would fall from the evergreen branches above and ploink tinnily off of the top of Greg's saucepan hat, setting off a startled croak from the frog in his shirt. These infrequent interludes, and the gradual changes of light and indistinct shadow, were the only measures of time in the endless gray woodland.
If it had been nine in the morning when they began walking, then it was scarcely three before they were forced to stop. Their frequent rests grew longer and longer, and developed eventually into an unremarked-upon close to their travels for the day, after Wirt pointed out a heavy cluster of trees that the rain had mostly not managed to penetrate. Sara helped Beatrice limp the last few yards to escape the weather and they eased down to the ground in tandem while the rest of the group trudged along behind, slopping drenched and miserable under the tree cover. Mabel knelt at Beatrice's side as she agonizingly extended her knee along the ground.
"Wet enough for ya?" she asked, as brightly as possible. Sara smiled for the attempt at levity, but Beatrice paid her no mind. Her face was very pale and she was trying not to look at her leg, which was understandable. It wasn't a pretty sight. While the boys sat down a few feet away at the base of a weeping fir, Sara pulled apart the torn hems of Beatrice's skirt with gentle fingers.
"Jesus," she muttered as she uncovered the crusting bandage. "I'm so sorry this happened."
Beatrice seemed to flush a little, but she didn't let herself look away. "I'd be a lot worse right now if not for you," she said. "Don't apologize." Mabel shifted her gaze between the other two women and then took both of them around the shoulders in a squeeze, as she had earlier that morning. Despite all the rain and all the blood, she decided that this hug was the better of the two. It was, after all, given with much more certainty that they were all going to live to see the sun go down that night.
"How are you doing?" Dipper asked, ducking over to where they sat and crouching by Beatrice's knee.
"Just peachy," she said through gritted teeth. Her hands hovered over the wrapping for a moment but she seemed to lose nerve, and pulled away again.
"Okay," Dipper said. "I'm gonna – I'm gonna change it, okay?" Beatrice nodded. "This might hurt. It might have… Well. It might hurt." He untied the tourniquet and pulled away the stiffened fabric with large scabs of blood. Beatrice blanched and curled her fists, but made not a sound until he was done, and even then only let a small exhaled "Shit."
"You know, you're pretty much a superwoman," Mabel said. "I'd have made Dipper start carrying me hours ago." Sara nodded vigorously. Beatrice gave a strained smile as Dipper tied on a new bandage, and this one didn't stain nearly as quickly. She hunched up her shoulders and shuddered, and Wirt joined them as she did.
"She's cold," he said quietly, "but we can't make a fire, can we?"
"Oh, don't talk about me like I'm not here, Wirt."
Dipper said, "Not a chance," and then did the exact opposite of what she'd asked by continuing, "but you're right, we've got to get her warmed up. Her core temperature could drop now that we're not moving anymore." Beatrice fumed, but Mabel was struck with an idea, and she stood up so suddenly that she thwacked her head against a low branch and splattered them all with water.
"Hold the phone!" she said, and slung her soaking backpack off of her shoulder. She wondered fervently if it was one of Dipper's waterproof bags, and miracle of miracles, it was. Both their blankets were still dry inside, and beneath them lay the item she'd been searching for: a worn pair of denim jeans with paint on the butt. "Tadaa!" she cried as she brandished them. "Dry clothing!"
"Trousers?" Beatrice asked, eyebrows almost at her hairline, at the same time as Sara's eyes widened and she, too began digging through the pack she carried. "For me?" Behind her, Sara sat back up. In her hands she held a t-shirt, bright yellow with a cutoff collar and the words BATTLE BEES emblazoned across the chest.
"I think it'll clash with your hair," she said, and laid the shirt across Beatrice's lap. "But getting you dry is the most important thing right now."
Beatrice blinked at the garment and picked it up with a wondrous expression. "Holy wow," she murmured as she ran the material between her fingers. "Look at that weave. And the color." She looked at Sara in disbelief. "Where did you get this?"
"Uh, maybe The Gap?"
"Good Lord, that sounds terrifying." And Beatrice had never looked so enamored with a piece of clothing before.
The boys were shooed away across the copse, and in their absence, Mabel and Sara helped Beatrice to undress. They carefully peeled off the soaking blue nightgown, and both able-bodied girls worked in tandem to help her stand and put on the pants, a process which seemed to baffle and delight her. Mabel was thicker and shorter than Beatrice and the jeans hung low on her hips, but the extra-roomy fit let her bandage breathe. Sara, likewise, had a compact torso, and the hem of the t-shirt grazed the taller girl's bellybutton. "You've got to be kidding me," she mumbled as she looked down at herself, red-faced. "Does this even count as being dressed?"
"You know what, I like it," Mabel announced as Wirt and Dipper returned from their exile on the far side of a Douglas fir. "You've got this kind of sexy, no-effort slacker-grunge thing going on. You look like Wendy, actually. Hey Dipper!"
"What?"
"Doesn't Beatrice look like Wendy right now?"
His eyes skipped up and down her body and he flushed imperceptibly. "…No."
"You damn dirty liar."
He changed the subject with transparent determination to ignore his sister: "What the hell is a battle bee?"
Wirt stepped up next to him. "Our high school mascot."
"Aw," Mabel said, putting her hands on her cheeks. "A little angry bee! That's adorable."
"Yeah, well, you should have seen Sara in the bumblebee costume."
"Bumblebee costume?" Dipper had a curious tone to his voice. "What?"
"I was the school mascot for three years," Sara said, sitting back against her hands on the ground. "Beowulf the Bumblebee, that was me."
Dipper seemed perturbed. Mabel saw this, and made a snap decision to dilute it; "You know, I tried to make Dipper try out for school mascot once." He looked up, and she casually laid an arm across his shoulder. "I think he would have fit right into the costume."
"Oh? What was your mascot?"
"A great North American nerd," she said, and pounced on her brother to give him a noogie. The element of surprise balanced out their weight difference and they wrestled for a minute before she found herself clinging tightly to his back with the announcement, "I won!", just in time for him to fall backwards with her as his turtle shell.
"By the way, Wirt," Sara said while Mabel flailed, "this is a perfect example of why you never give your opponent a gravitational advantage during groundwork." Dipper finally relented, and Mabel stayed in a pile of damp pine needles for a moment longer, gasping for air. "You get smooshed."
"Thanks," Wirt said as he sat down next to Beatrice. "I'll remember that for next time I have a full-bodied wrestling match with someone." Sara shrugged with an 'as you like it' expression, and Mabel sat up as the rest of the group settled close by. She scanned their faces casually, but realized that they were one body short. Greg was not with the rest of them. When she turned around, she saw a small sliver of ugly orange sweater peeking out from behind a tree.
He was sitting back in the spot where the boys had been previously banished, with his back to a fir trunk and Jason Funderburker in his lap. "Hey there, buddy," Mabel said as she crouched down next to him around the tree's slight curve. He looked up. "You doin' alright?"
"Yeah, I'm okay." The poor kid had bags the size of Ziplocs under his eyes. He didn't sound like he was lying, exactly, but she'd never heard him so dull in the voice before. "I'm tired."
"Yeah, no kidding. Me too." She wiggled her toes in her shoes so that they squelched, and then glanced over at him. "You shouldn't hang out here by yourself, though. There's still a wolf out there." She nudged his shoulder gently.
"Nah." Greg pulled his mouth to the side and shrugged, and his saucepan hat rotated slightly and slipped down over the side of his face closer to her. "It isn't gonna bother us anymore."
"No?"
"No."
"How do you know that?"
"It's scared."
"Well, you know what, it should be!" Mabel lifted her arms and flexed her biceps invisibly under her wet sweater, grinning. "It's seen what happens when you mess with the Pines Twins and, uh… all you guys. What's your last name, anyway?"
Greg didn't answer, though. She couldn't see his face past the saucepan, but it seemed like he was looking at Jason Funderburker. The frog tilted his head sympathetically. "Hey, Maple?" he asked after a minute, and the thinness in his voice was frightening: "Do you ever want bad things to happen to people?"
"Huh?"
"When there are bad people, and they do bad things. Do you want bad things to happen to them, too?"
"Ah, jeez." She drew her knees up to her chest. "Yeah. I guess so. I think that happens to everyone." He sniffed a little, and she reached over to tip the pan up. He wasn't crying, but he looked a little red in the eye. "It's really normal, Greg," she said, and reached underneath to ruffle his hair. "And it doesn't make you a bad person. Having mean thoughts and doing mean things aren't the same. You know what I mean?"
"But what if the mean thoughts make mean things happen?" he mumbled, wiping his nose on his sweater sleeve.
"What do you mean?"
"I dunno."
"Okay."
"I just –" He started to straighten, but sat back again with a frustrated expression. "When the wolf was going to hurt Wirt. This morning, you know? I was really, really scared, but – I was scared, but I was mad, too. I was mad that it hurt Beatrice and I was mad it wanted to hurt you and I was really, really mad because – I'd thought Wirt was finally gonna be safe in the tree with me but then he had to run back out to fight it –" He scrubbed at his eyes angrily and a little crack opened in Mabel's heart. She reached an arm around his shoulder and squeezed.
"It's alright, Greg."
"I wanted the wolf to get hurt," he sniffed, and Jason Funderburker nuzzled his chin, "and then it happened."
Mabel laid her cheek against the cold bottom of the pan and wrapped her other arm around Greg's front to complete the hug. The vista in front of them opened up into gray-green woods, and silvery raindrops dashed infrequently between the tree trunks. "It's alright," she murmured, while Greg hunched up his shoulders to become as small as possible. "You love Wirt, and you didn't want him to get hurt. That's what happens when you have a brother. You love them so much that…" She swallowed. She could still remember Dipper's silhouette, outlined against the whirring luminescence of a doorway made to connect worlds, and the golden glow in his eyes as he turned to look at her with a smile that intended to end them. "We'd do anything for 'em, wouldn't we?"
"But it happened, Maple," he whimpered into her elbow, and she decided this was no time to correct him about her name. "I wanted the wolf to die, and it did. The tree told me it would help and it did. And the strawberries –"
"Rorpp," said Jason Funderburker.
"Jason Funderburker's right," Mabel said firmly. "Nothing that happened today was your fault, Greg, okay?" She put a finger under his chin and directed his eyes to hers. They were big and gray and tearful. "I mean that. You love your brother. You'd do anything to protect him and I think he'd do the same."
Greg buried his face in her wet sleeve and murmured, "He already did."
They sat there for a few minutes longer, cold and damp, watching the rain. Greg's breathing gradually slowed, and became quieter. "Let's get you back to your brother," Mabel said finally, and nudged the child so that he looked up again. "I think you'll feel better once you talk to him."
But Greg said, "No," and shook his head vigorously, stuffing his frog back into his sweater with a surprised ribbit. "I don't want him to know I was sad, Maple. Don't tell him. Please?"
"Alright, kiddo. If that's what you need." She stood up, and as she did, her phone tipped gently out of her skirt pocket and landed in a pile of moss. She picked it up with the initial thought that she and Dipper hadn't done a time check in almost two days now, but dismissed it; "No point saving this battery anymore," she muttered, and with a smile, handed the device to Greg. "You deserve a little destressing, you know? And I've got a ton of games for you to play. Come on, little guy –" She held a hand out to him. "Let's bring you back into the fold."
When they returned, it was to the conclusion of a story, courtesy of an unusually-charismatic Beatrice: "…and lo and behold, where do I find the cat? Pissed as hell and locked in the ice box. Exactly like my brother said." They chuckled, and Wirt had an unusually carefree smile on as Greg and then Mabel sat down next to him.
"There you are," he said, and spun Greg's hat around so the handle stuck out the back. "Where have you been?"
"Peein'" Greg said nonchalantly.
"I had to check on him, to make sure he hadn't fallen in," Mabel said with a grin, and Greg nudged her, smiling shyly. "How's your leg, Bea? Can I call you that? 'Beatrice' is just kinda long, syllables-wise. What about 'Trixie'?"
Beatrice ignored her. "My leg feels – better, thanks." She was leaned up against a tree trunk with the leg in question extended carefully along the ground. Some color had returned to her face. She ran her fingers up the denim and frowned. "Trousers are weird. I've never worn men's clothing before." Dipper and Wirt exchanged looks, while Greg pulled on Mabel's sweater sleeve with a small inquiring sound.
"You can just call them pants," Sara said.
"I thought it was weird you were wearing them." Beatrice frowned at the other girl. "I thought it was just you. Is this normal where you come from?"
"Yeah, it's pretty normal."
"Maple?" Greg whispered from Mabel's side, and tugged on her shirt again.
"What's up?" she said without looking down.
"You said you had games, right?"
"Yeah. They're on the phone."
"What?"
"The games are on the phone, Greg."
"Like… phone tag?"
"Well, you know, that's not a game, but…" She picked up her cellphone from his lap and switched it on. Greg's eyes grew wide as saucers as the screen lit up blinding white in the dim shaded light. "There."
"Holy moly," he gasped, and held it reverently. "I thought this was a candy bar!"
Mabel laughed as the home screen booted up, and Wirt glanced over with mild interest. "Yeah, as if we haven't had enough candy lately." Greg wasn't laughing, though. The eight-year-old blinked at the background, depicting a princess punching a unicorn in the face, and poked the screen with a weak finger. He stiffened when it responded to his touch.
"Wirt," he said under his breath, and started elbowing his brother madly. "Wirt, look! Maple's got a Star Trek toy!"
"What?"
"It's a Star Trek thing!" He stood up with every sign of his previous melancholy gone, replaced by wholehearted thrill. "Can it scan the planet's surface for life?!"
"Seriously?" Dipper's attention had been caught, and he sat forward with an amused expression. "You've never let your little brother use a phone before?"
"Of course he uses the phone," Wirt said, agitated. "What are you talking about?"
Mabel watched the little boy wonder over her Christmas present from last year, and a curious feeling wormed in her stomach. Sara was paying attention to their commotion now, but looked no savvier than Wirt. "You guys aren't, like, Amish or anything, right?" she asked nervously as Greg displayed the screen with aplomb ("It moves when you touch it!"), and Beatrice just looked at all of them like they were speaking Greek. "Oh my God, have we been blaspheming in front of you this whole time?!" But even as she asked the question, she was starting to reobserve some small quirks of their persons that she'd thought inconsequential before – the quality of denim and the cut of Sara's jeans, how fastidious both Wirt and Greg were about keeping their shirts tucked in, the marshmallowy plainness of all their sneakers. It was just strange enough to notice. She'd thought at first that maybe they just came from a small town, but the only time she'd ever seen kids her own age dressing by such stark fashion cues was on Retro Night back when she was a sophomore in high schoo–
Oh, there was no way.
Wirt looked utterly nonplussed as Greg shoved the smartphone into his hands, babbling happily. Out of the corner of her eye, she thought she saw Dipper's expression change, and maybe he was following her same train of thought, but she was a lot less intent on him than on Greg; her mouth suddenly felt dry. As the little boy proudly shared with his big brother the phone's incredible capability to turn its screen on and off, Mabel asked, as offhanded as she could, "Hey, Greg?" He looked up. "What, uh… what year were you born?"
He tilted his head and said, as casually as if sharing the time: "1974."
Dipper froze, and then actually clapped a hand to his eyes, an expression of exasperation made to conceal fear. Mabel sat for just a second with a burning thrill in her stomach; "Oh, no way."
"No way," Dipper agreed, eyes still covered. "Not a chance, he's just wrong. Little kids get dates wrong all the time."
Wirt was quick to jump to his brother's defense. "Sorry? I think Greg knows when his own birthday is."
"This can't be happening," Dipper continued, and removed his hand from his face by way of dragging it up through his hair. "It can't. The Time Anomaly Removal Crew promised we would never run into any more issues like this again –"
"Hoooly crap, guys," Mabel said, and started rocking back and forward on the ground with her sweater pulled over her knees. "Just – wow, crap, oh my God. Oh my God. You guys. We're from –"
"Don't tell them, Mabel." Her brother's voice cut in over hers like a joy-killing knife. "Don't say anything, the less they know the less we run the risk of paradox –"
She had already steamrolled on, though, and the weight of her words held too much momentum to be stopped. Mabel sat forward on her knees and cried, "We're from the future!" with outflung arms and sparkling eyes. Her voice was harsh in their small shelter, but the line had a less dramatic impact than she would have liked. Greg frowned with a puzzled look, Wirt and Sara glanced at one another skeptically, and Beatrice just threw up her hands as if to indicate that she had completely given up on understanding even a single word of this conversation.
For a second no one spoke; and then Jason Funderburker asked with rising inflection, "Rorpp?"
"Yeah," Greg said, and tilted his head to the side. "What do you mean by future?"
"Nothing," Dipper insisted. Mabel ignored him.
"I mean that we both got stuck here on Halloween," she put her hands on the ground before her and bore down, almost in a crouch, "but not the same Halloween. And I think yours happened a long time before ours." She glanced between faces; there were finally starting to manifest the expressions of wonder and worry she'd anticipated before, and she had everyone's attention captured neatly.
"…How long are we talking, here?" Sara asked, audibly walking the wire between skeptical and credulous.
Mabel was about to answer, but Dipper beat her to it, apparently having decided that his denial-ship had sailed. "Long enough," he said, and his voice sounded so very tired that it almost felt like a sock under the eye just to hear it. "Our dad was born in 1974."
No words for a minute. Wirt said, "You're kidding me. Right?"
"Nuh-uh," Greg said, surprisingly hotly. "She has the Star Trek toys, Wirt!"
"Yeah, seriously though, we have to put that away," Dipper said, and reached for the phone in Greg's hand. "You shouldn't know any more about the future than you already do, the fabric of space-time could be even thinner right now than –" But suddenly he stopped, his hand frozen in the air as his brows furrowed. The group stared. "Oh, crap," Dipper choked after a second, and sat back down with a thump. "Greg, how old are you?"
The little boy seemed more than happy that everyone had so many questions to ask him lately. "Eight and almost-a-half," he said, chest puffed.
"Eight," Dipper said faintly. "That's what I thought. And that means you all had this happen to you on Halloween of –"
"It's 1982." Wirt sat back on the heels of his hands, still looking unconvinced. "So?"
But Mabel recognized the look in her brother's eyes. The mechanisms in his brain were turning, the gears with so many more teeth than her own whirring fast enough that she could practically hear them. "Jesus," he said, and pinched the bridge of his nose between his fingers. "Are you hearing this, Mabel?"
She said, "I don't –" But it seemed like he hadn't really been waiting for her answer anyway.
"1982," he said, and laid his hands together with angry emphasis, "was the year of the first portal activation. Stan never told us the exact date, you know? But he never said it didn't happen on Halloween, either." She blinked at him dumbly. "We knew this had to have something to do with Gravity Falls, we knew that, but we didn't know what. But here are a bunch of people tossed in from the past, and their time aligns almost perfectly with the portal's first activation –" He stood up halfway, bonked his head on a limb, and sat back down again distractedly. "I bet you anything, Mabel. I bet you the portal was opened again three nights ago, and that's how all this started."
"I'm sorry, portals?" Sara asked, voice clearly only just staying on this side of nervous giggles.
"Our uncle," Dipper shot bitterly, "built a portal that punches holes through worlds and lets things crawl through if you're not careful." He picked a leaf from the toe of his shoe and shoved an angry thumb through its center. "It opened up for the first time in 1982, and again in 2012 –" ("Two thousand twelve?" Wirt asked incredulously) "– and I almost guarantee you it's been opened for a third time now."
"That doesn't –" Sara's mouth was buried in the palm of her hand, her brows furrowed deeply. Her expression looked so much like Dipper's that Mabel almost did a double-take. "I don't understand why a door just opening a few times over the years would do what you say. Mess up time. If that's really what happened."
"Because it cuts holes through dimensions," said Dipper, "and time is a dimension, too. The portal actually shares most of its same basic technology with the time machines that they use in 207̃012 –"
"Alright," said Wirt, "now I know you're messing with us," but Greg bade him "Shh!"
"– And look where we've ended up!" Dipper raised a hand, spread his fingers at the dripping trees and slivered gray sky. "Piedmont was run over by trees until it disappeared, trees from a – from someplace else, and a place you say you've visited before. Maybe three portal activations was too many, I don't know, maybe it knocked too many bars out of the scaffolding that was holding the multiverse together, but now –" He dropped his arm again. "Our world got all mixed up with another one. And we're the only ones left to tell about it."
He stopped, looking like he was waiting for someone to respond to what he was saying, but nobody did. All of them sat in silence, staring off in different directions, while the rain pattered the foliage high above them. Then a question to occurred to Mabel, and she asked, "Why?"
"Why what?"
"Why are we the only ones left to tell about it?" Dipper frowned at her. "Why us?" They must have been the six kids on Earth best suited to deal with broken worlds and broken time. That seemed an awful coincidence.
But her brother shook his head. "I don't know."
"You're really being serious right now?" Wirt asked one more time. "Time travel? I can't -"
Unexpectedly, though, it was Greg who had an answer for him. "Unknown Time is weird," he said wisely. "Last time it was always Halloween even when it wasn't, remember, Wirt? Maybe it's all the Halloweens, and we just didn't know before."
Mabel spared a glance toward Beatrice. The taller girl was looking not at Dipper, but at Wirt, and her frown was deep and pained. "Bea?" Mabel said. She started.
"What?" she asked defensively.
"Are you okay?"
"I'm fine," she said with great emphasis, and turned her head and said nothing of it for the rest of the night.
The remainder of the afternoon was spent resting under the cover of the trees. It was almost cozy, even if they couldn't make a fire; Mabel found comfort in their closeness, as they huddled together carefully in the bare dry spots left to the world. A few times Beatrice tried to stand to see if she could walk again, and each time she did Wirt and Sara persuaded her back to the ground so that she didn't make things worse, their voices full of matched concern. When Dipper wasn't looking, Mabel showed Greg how to play the games on her phone, and pressed a conspiratorial finger to her lips. Paradoxes schmaradoxes; she wasn't so sure this was a world where the normal time-rules even applied, and anyway, the poor kid deserved something fun to distract him from everything right now. As he bent happily over the glowing screen, she puzzled over the idea of him as he must have been before the world ended, a man the same age as their father, maybe with kids of his own – but she couldn't do it. He leaned against her lap, small and sturdy, and she was quietly gratified to have him there exactly as he was.
"Hey," she murmured to Sara out of the corner of her mouth, while Dipper and Wirt once again tried to convince Beatrice to stop walking around, "I wanna ask you a question."
"Okay."
"What's the Cold War like?"
"Oh. Not great, I guess."
"Yeah, that's what all the movies said. Were they still doing duck-and-cover drills in the 80s?"
Sara murmured back, "It actually makes me really uncomfortable that you keep referring to my entire life up to this point as a relic of the past," and Mabel supposed she could understand that.
"Oh, okay. Sorry." She fidgeted for a minute and then blurted, "Dipper wouldn't want me to tell you this, but it's gonna get better, you know?" The other girl looked up at her. "We're friends with Russia again in like twenty years. The world doesn't end in nuclear Armageddon. For what it's worth."
"I guess that's nice to know." Sara smiled wryly. "Even if it does end in encroaching wilderness instead, huh?" Mabel grinned, but then stopped. Her tone didn't sound like she was really joking.
That evening, when the shadows charcoaled and swallowed the understory, the noises in the woods were as bad as they'd ever been. Rolling, guttural moans seemed to come from behind every tree, sometimes only feet away from them, but there was never anything there when they looked. Still, as Mabel settled on the ground under the blanket between Beatrice and Sara, blind in the shrieking darkness, she couldn't help feeling sort of thrilled. They were still hungry, and cold, and confused, and they had a long way to go to reach Gravity Falls – but there was something directing their movements now. They didn't know why they had found each other, but it wasn't for no reason. They were in this together, and always had been, and she had two warm bodies on either side of her. Nothing was going to be easy, but everything was going to be okay. She could feel it.
Rain fell persistent on their small encampment at the base of eternity, and all of them slept surprisingly well that night.
As you can probably guess, it is at this point that I have to officially abandon my oft-broken promise to Sunday updates. I am a little stymied by events unfolding during Gravity Falls' Weirdmageddon arc, and am further slowed by wanting to see exactly where things end up so that I know how close I can stick to canon before having to branch off in order to satisfy my pre-ATOTS setup. I certainly don't anticipate taking any more three-month breaks, but expect from here on out to see updates happening closer to twice a month (I hope!).
Now maybe my tastes are on the strange side, but I personally think this chapter pairs well with a certain writing prompt I filled back during the summer, and recommend you check out: tinyurl [dot com] / qa4jgt9
For fun and profit, visit my blog at whiggitymacabee. tumblr. com!
