Author's note: Thanks to fereality for your generous review of the last chapter! I will keep writing this story so long as someone out there wants to read it!
Dipper, Mabel and Wendy stared in shock as the Man led Charlie into the room. Subconsciously, Wendy started to fumble for her hatchet, while Dipper cursed himself for not borrowing Ford's magnet gun or something with which to defend himself. Mabel moved off to one side, eyes fixed not on Charlie but on his tormentor's shiny dome.
"Now, I'll keep it brief," he said. "I don't like to hurt or kill anyone unless I have to, least of all kids like you. I'm a businessman, and blood is a big expense. All the same, that doesn't mean I'll hesitate to fry your friend and all of you if you get in my way."
It took a lot more than that to intimidate three people who'd stared down Armageddon.
"Dude, seriously?" Dipper scoffed. "That's like, the opposite of brief. And you didn't tell us anything except that maybe you'd hurt us if you had to, which, like, we already knew from your holding a cattle prod to our friend's chest."
"Let me guess," Wendy rolled her eyes. "You're one of those stock movie villains who'd rather talk to a captive audience than actually go through with killing them. Been there, dude. It doesn't work in real life."
"Yeah, and...you're bald!" Mabel added, distracted by the shine off his scalp.
He tightened his grip on Charlie's collar and sparked his prod. "Guys, maybe this isn't the best time to provoke the professional killer," he sputtered.
Indeed, the Man wasn't amused. "I was trying to be reasonable with your smartasses," he growled. "Hand me the microfilm and no one gets hurt."
"See, you could have saved time by saying that in the first place," Dipper muttered.
"Fair enough. How about I electrocute all four of you and take the microfilm anyway?"
"Well then," Wendy said, "what do we have to lose?"
They remained at an impasse for a minute, staring hatefully at each other, awaiting the first move. The Man sparked his prod again, and Charlie yelped at the sight of the blue electricity buzzing at the end.
Finally, Dipper gave in. "All right, dude, you win," he said, throwing his noodle arms in the air. "I'll hand it over."
Wendy's mouth dropped in shock. "Dude, seriously?"
"Sorry, Wendy," Dipper said. "Some things aren't worth getting electrocuted over. Especially one hundred year old microfilm. Besides, Charlie is Mabel's friend," he said, "and we wouldn't want to hurt Mabel."
As he said her name, Dipper shot Mabel a meaningful glance. Mabel still hadn't moved, still seemed fixated on the villain's chrome dome, but in fact took the cue silently, stealthily...
"That's the spirit," the Man said, loosening his grip ever so slightly on Charlie's collar. "Hand it over."
Dipper started making his way across the room, eyes on the cattle prod. Wendy stood back, her arms crossed. She still wasn't sure what Dipper had planned.
"If you think about it," the Man said with the casualness of a certain victor, "you're right, kid. This is a stupid thing to fight over. I mean, like you said, who cares about century-old newspapers?"
"Obviously someone would, or you wouldn't be here," Dipper replied. The Man could only nod.
The Man lowered the prod to his side, pushed Charlie forward into Wendy's arms. Dipper handed him the microfilm...
And the man fell backwards with a grunt and a thud.
Wendy and Charlie looked over and saw Mabel reeling in her grappling hook. She beamed before tucking it away, then rushed over to Charlie's side and hugged him tightly.
"Oh my God, are you okay?" she asked him. "That meanie was going to fry you!"
Charlie looked no more comfortable in Mabel's arms than the Man's. "Thanks, Mabel," he said. "I'm alive, but it would be nice to breathe again."
Mabel didn't get the hint, and hugged him harder. He wheezed in shock and discomfort.
"That was pretty clever, dudes," Wendy said as she gave a golf clap. "Did you plan that or something?"
Dipper shrugged. "Wasn't that hard," he said. "I remember Mabel had the projectile weapon and you had an ax, and it's very easy to get our minds in sync in a panic situation..."
"Twin intuition," Mabel said, finally releasing her grip on the librarian. "Twintuition!"
The two Pines twins did their weird secret handshake and shouted "TWINS!" then laughed. Wendy laughed along with them, though Charlie still seemed too shaken to react.
"At least we know we're on to something big," Dipper said, holding out the microfilm. "Hopefully we can find..."
If Wendy and Dipper had been as genre savvy as they thought they were, they would have expected the Man to wrap his arm around Dipper's torso and pull him to the floor alongside him. Or the microfilm to go flying from Dipper's hand as he fell, rolling across the floor. But they weren't, and it came as an unpleasant surprise.
What happened next was a violent blur. The Man raised himself off the floor and began chasing after the microfilm. Mabel reached for her grappling hook, but the Man punched her in the face, knocking her to the ground with a moan, a trickle of blood coming from her nose. Infuriated watching someone hurt his sister, Dipper wrapped himself around the Man's leg and received a kick to his throat for his trouble.
As he fell back gasping, the Man straightened himself up and turned to Wendy. Then Charlie ran forward and headbutted the villain in his stomach, momentarily winding him.
"You son of a bitch!" Charlie shouted, pounding his chest and stomach and shoulders with feeble nerd fists. Once he regained his breath, the Man easily pushed him off; Charlie stumbled back against the microfilm machine. Wendy moved forward, unsheathing her ax; the Man blocked her blow with his prod, then hit her in the nose with his elbow. Then Charlie tackled him again, his chest running straight into the prod.
The three friends watched in horror as Charlie screamed, 80 volts of electricity shooting through his body. He let up like a giant bug in a polo shirt, drawn to a zapper. Then he fell into a smoking heap onto the ground, twitching uncontrollably. Dipper gasped in shock, Mabel yelped in horror before collapsing back to the floor. The Man shook his head and made towards Dipper next, prod at the ready.
"YOU BASTARD!" Wendy shouted, cracking him over the head with the shaft of her ax. He yelped and cringed as Wendy struck another blow, drawing blood. The Man took a moment to regain control over himself, then kicked Wendy hard in the midsection with his knee.
Wendy doubled over in pain, gasping for breath, dropping her hatchet to the ground. He kicked it out of the way, then reached for his prod and moved towards the redhead...
Dipper sat nearby, watching in horror. His sister was barely moving, Charlie was unconscious or worse, and Wendy was next. He looked around for something, anything he could use as a weapon.
At the last possible moment, he saw it - a half-empty water bottle conveniently sitting on the desk. Figuring he had nothing to lose, Dipper scrambled to his feet, trying to ignore the pain that surged through his throat with each breath, grabbed the bottle and threw it towards the Man.
The Man, looming over Wendy, sparked his prod...And the water splashed on his arm.
The Man screamed in shock and agony as his own weapon turned against him, volts surging up and down his body. Wendy managed to crawl out of the way, into Dipper's arms, as they watched him writhe amidst an eerie blue flame. Finally, his finger released on the trigger and he fell backwards onto the floor next to Charlie.
Wendy and Dipper looked at him, then each other, then started crying hysterically in each other's arms. Ordinarily Dipper and Wendy would have joked or brazened their way through it, like a million other frightening situations, but this seemed so much more intense, immediate, personal than most of the other threats they'd faced in the past. What else could they do?
Meanwhile, Mabel managed to crawl over to Charlie, whose clothes still crackled with lingering electricity. Mabel didn't say anything either, just crawled on the young man's chest, the man who'd risked his life for hers, and screamed. Screamed harder and longer than she'd ever screamed since the darkest moments of Weirdmageddon and the worst nightmares she'd had afterwards.
After a few minutes, Dipper and Wendy managed to regain their composure and led Mabel into Wendy's car. Mabel, however, refused to leave Charlie, and they had to carry him back to the car. He was still alive, thankfully, but his heartbeat remained wild and erratic; every few minutes he twitched or cried out, each strangled yelp stabbing daggers into Mabel's heart.
"Let's get to the shack," Wendy said as she and Dipper climbed into the cab of her car.
"I thought we didn't want to get Stan involved," Dipper said.
"What the FUCK else can we do?" Wendy shouted, louder than she ever admitted. "We can't go to the cops or the hospital with this!" And there was no more discussion as they backed out of the parking lot.
Or the way home, either. Wendy felt embarrassed that she had cried like that in front of Dipper; there's no way he'd still think she was the coolest person he'd ever met after that. Her only consolation is that they'd both bawled their eyes out. And who could blame either of them?
And she still struggled to breathe and sit up straight after her manhandling. That guy was a pro; Wendy wondered if he'd just been playing. He probably could have killed them all if he'd really wanted to. And that, frankly, is what scared her; that mess was him going easy on them.
Mabel rocked back and forth in the backseat, mourning over Charlie who slumped beside her. "Charlie, what did I do, what did I do, what did I do?" she asked, knowing that this wouldn't have happened if she hadn't asked him for help, and that he might not have rushed directly into harm's way if not for her attention and their kiss.
"Mabel, you didn't do anything," Dipper tried assuring her. "It was him." That's all he could muster, and at that moment it didn't do much. Mabel might ordinarily have retreated into Sweatertown, but she couldn't take her eyes off Charlie...
...who finally, as they turned past the cutoff near the Shack, opened his eyes and sputtered a few uneven breaths. Mabel looked over, cried out and clutched his hand as hard she could.
They were all silent for the rest of the ride home. What was there to say?
Stan's first instinct was to yell at the kids for coming back so late and making a ruckus. But they barely needed to climb out of the truck before he could see something was seriously wrong; he saw frazzled hair and torn shirts and blood, and a half-conscious young man in Dipper and Mabel's arms. He made sure to grab his crossbow from the closet before going out; no telling what trouble was waiting.
"Kids, what's going on?" Stan asked from the doorway. "My God, what happened to you?"
"No time to explain, Stan," Dipper said. He nodded and propped open the door for them to bring their friend inside. They sat Charlie down on a couch, with Mabel fixed to his side, hugging his arm and closing her eyes. Dipper ran over and poured him a glass of water.
"What's wrong with him?" Stan asked, trying to remember where he'd put the first aid kit. "Looks like a shock."
Wendy lifted up his shirt and saw a deep burn across his chest and belly. But he was awake and breathing okay; his heart seemed to be coming back down to normal.
"We had a run-in with a real creep," Wendy said with what understatement she could still muster.
"What creep?" Stan could think of a lot of creeps, none of them good.
Dipper unwound enough to explain. "We've been investigating that break-in at the Historical Center and this guy - Charlie - was helping us do research. Then this older dude with a bald head and a mustache showed up with a cattle prod and attacked us, trying to steal microfilm that we were using."
Ordinarily Stan would have made a crack about this, but the situation was far too serious for that.
"Whoa, a cattle prod?" he asked. "Obviously he wasn't kidding around."
"I'm better off than anyone else here, I think," Dipper muttered. "Mabel and Wendy got blows to the head, and Charlie..."
"Wait, someone hit you girls?" Stan's old-timey chivalry, usually submerged beneath sarcasm, surfaced. "What kind of low-down bastard..."
"He didn't do anything we didn't give back to him," Wendy assured Stan.
"Yeah, I'll bet," Stan said, forcing himself to laugh. "If there's anyone who could kick his ass, it would be you, Corduroy."
"You know, Stan, that's the nicest thing you've ever said to me." Wendy couldn't help letting a grin slip over her face.
The Man parked his car outside the Shack, trying his best to be inconspicuous. His ears still rung, his head still buzzed and his muscles and heart throbbed from the experience at the Museum. All that effort to get outsmarted by some lousy teenagers, two of them girls at that.
Well, from now on he wouldn't be playing nice. He didn't have a firearm on him at the moment, but there were other ways to kill someone...
Then he heard a crash, and saw an arrow jutting through his window. He bolted upright and instinctively exited the car, spotting an older man in a fez and an ill-fitting suit aiming a crossbow at him.
"Next one goes in your balls, putznasher," Stan Pines said in the raspy, profane Yiddish of his youth.
"You're all making a big mistake," the Man warned, raising his arms.
"Tell me something I haven't heard a million times before," Stan said, somehow sounding both bored and angry. "You messed with my family and their friends, and assholes far more powerful and dangerous than a little prick like you'll ever be learned to regret that." He calmly aimed his crossbow.
"Fine," he said with an air of mock acceptance. "Could you pass a message along to your kids?"
"Unless the message is that you're going to make amends by drinking acid, shove it up your ass!" Stan replied.
"Just tell them that there's no reason to keep looking," the Man said. "My client cares about this stuff, but it's not enough that anyone should get hurt over."
"Well, just a little while ago you thought it was," Stan said. "Now get out of here before I turn you into a pin cushion."
The Man just nodded and slowly got into his car. Stan trained his weapon on him until he drove out of sight, then sighed with relief and worry. Then he sat down on the porch and yawned, hunkering down for a long night's vigil.