Not much had moved in the kitchen since the adventurous trio had left, apart maybe for Stan's plate and the curtains cutting off the advancing night. Greg had stayed where he was, eyes dry but not drooping from fatigue as they should have been doing at this time in the evening. No, he remained forever patient in the return of his lucky frog, the one which, as them, had travelled into the Unknown and back.

Wirt was on a similar level of activity, but not in the same way. He was yet again stuck in his thoughts, sitting in a chair facing his brother, but not really watching him. He may have seemed blank on the outside, but inside his brain was a boiling, thrashing sea that would not be appeased no matter how hard he tried. It swung wildly between desperate, heart-wrenching guilt at having put Greg in danger earlier on, relief that he had in the end not received any of the pain he had been forced through, and finally the memories of the actual torture he had undergone.

He did not blame anybody apart from himself for that last part though; he should have remembered Lorna, the bell that still resided in Jason Funderburker's belly, the spirit he had banished from one place and that he had not thought to completely destroy. He probably wouldn't have had the heart to, he added as an afterthought. He was good at destroying things, like troublesome lamps and people's lives, but it didn't mean he made a good job of it. The Beast was probably roaming around the Unknown again at this very instant, he thought bitterly. He made up a little poem for himself in that moment:

A new grave, now dug in the garden near the lake,

Covered in flowers and tears from close and afar.

Yet see how the coloured paint of houses near flake,

And the families within them miserable are.

Trees wilt and illness strikes all those who dare approach,

The town once bright and jolly now chill and lonely,

His body dead, yet his presence like a cockroach,

Wirt the failure now lies six feet under, coldly. [1]

Then came the engulfing terror of that other moment he had nearly lost Greg, which bled into more and more memories incorporating mental and the leftovers of the physical pain he had received earlier. He shivered, coming back to himself after a while. He looked at Greg, still unmoving, and then quickly took in his surroundings, as if he was rediscovering the place. He needed something to distract him, now, before it came back and dragged him down again.

His gaze stopped on the book still sitting next to him at the table, and he quickly snatched it up. A small voice shouted at him from a corner of his head to keep some dignity, which was ignored in favour of the creamy paper and black ink.

He skipped the title page, table of contents and chunk of acknowledgements to get to the actual story. It wasn't something he would usually do, but this was an emergency. He needed a story to immerse himself into as quickly as possible, before the horrible thoughts came back again.

"I'd never given much thought to how I would fall in love…"[2]

And he was hooked.

It was magic. It was interesting, yet the read was light enough so that he could break away from it at any moment to look up and check on Greg. Every time his own traitorous mind crept up on him like some great predator on the hunt, he would be able to take up the story again, which would effectively shoo it away.

When he glanced back up at the time during one of these reprieves, he was surprised to see that it was well past midnight. His brother, as was to be expected, had not moved, yet it didn't stop Wirt from worrying for him. His brother was literally the only person he was left to protect, the only reason for his existence. How he regretted now not taking Dipper to one side before he left, getting him to tell him what he knew of his family, what had happened to his friends meanwhile, in these twenty-odd years his brother and him had been missing. What had happened to Mom? How would she react when he saw a son who should have been in his mid-forties not having aged even a bit since that fateful day? He paled.

Was she even still alive? [3]

He did a quick calculation. Forty-eight... She had been forty-eight in 1983. So she would be in her late seventies by now. His chest hitched at the thought of the smiling, caring woman he had called his mother, but now with fair hair turned grey and wrinkles deeply driven like furrows from the corners of her eyes. Or maybe not. A lot of things could happen in thirty years, and seventy-eight was getting very close to the average life expectancy.

It hurt to admit, but maybe that the last time he had seen her, he had grunted a goodbye as she had set off for her evening of TV watching with her friends, bowl of potato salad in hand and tired smile upon her face after the long week of work. At the time, he had been too busy worrying over Sara, fiddling with the hem of his costume and the tape that he kept pulling out of his pocket and picking up again. His mother was a caring person, who would sometimes nag even more than Greg's father (who really liked the place clean) about such things as cups of tea strewn around the room, and would always offer a word of comfort to her eldest son when he saw him on edge. But that day, they hadn't exchanged more than a handful of them.

The more he thought about it in the relative silence of the kitchen, the more it seemed overwhelming. It was nearly worse than his mind-drowning earlier on, the selfish thoughts (that weren't as selfish as that; they included Greg, after all) that he had held the sappy romance novel up against. His meagre umbrella of a windbreak had been pulled out of his grasp, and he could now no longer force himself to open the cover to where his thumb bookmarked the page he had been reading.

He needed to know. The regret of that last interaction he had had with his mother was too difficult to bear, the uncertainty even more so. Was he simply condemned to regret things he had not managed to do throughout his life? He strengthened his resolve. No, even if such a curse had been laid upon him, it made no difference to the meaning of his existence in his life. He hadn't realised it for so long, adding yet another thing to his ever-growing list of regrets, but he had to protect Greg. Make sure that he didn't turn into an individual as worthless and as generally selfish as himself. And above all, keep him safe from danger as best as he could.

Wirt completely forgot about the passage he had previously so carefully bookmarked, and lost both line and page as he set the cringe-worthy cover of the book face down on the table, letting it assume the position it had originally sat in. He walked over to Greg, trying to keep the worry down as he saw that he didn't react even as he approached him. Slowly, he pulled the blanket that Stan had draped over the kid's shoulders before setting off to bed himself, with a huff managed to lift his brother onto his lap, before pulling the blanket back around both of them. He hugged the still wide-eyed boy against his chest as he too lost himself in the contemplation of the immobile frog. After a while (did time really have any importance in situations like this?), he felt the soles of Greg's shoes digging into his lap as the boy pulled his feet up, trapping Wirt's arms between his legs and torso, then slowly lowering his head onto the cushion thus formed by his knees. The boy's breathing slowed as the clock ticked the seconds away, and finally he fell asleep.

Wirt's eyes had not left the still form of the frog on his improvised hospital bed, feeling sorrow for the poor creature that had unwillingly been dragged along with them into this catastrophe of an adventure. He had difficulty understanding his brother's attachment to the animal most of the time, but right now, he could see where it came from. In his childish fervour, he saw the animal as more than just what it was. Through all the games of make-believe, it had acquired a personality to him that could only come from a kid that hadn't had enough attention paid to him in the first place. Maybe that during all that time, he had been trying to fill in a gap that he had failed to fill. It was saddening, but the more he thought about it, the more his self-hate geared mind deformed it, until he was absolutely certain that nothing other than that could be true.

His energy was starting to wear out on him though, and even though his blood was cut out in his limbs and his mind was still uncomfortably active, he managed to drop off in a sleep haunted by a number of light nightmares.

The shrill ring that in that moment could only be the haunted bell broke him out of his slumber, his body filling with aches and cricks and his skin drenched in cold sweat. Greg had also been startled awake, clambering off his brothers legs to rush as close as he could to his pet amphibian. Seconds later through his hazy mind, Wirt managed to gather that the threatening ring had only come from a telephone sitting somewhere deeper in the Shack. One of the rings was interrupted in the middle, followed by Stan's voice bleeding through the many cracks in the Shack's wooden walls. As he listened, the tone changed from annoyed to worried, to finally finish off in a panicked squawk. Pounding footsteps approached the kitchen, and in stepped the man, one of his arms in the sleeve of his jacket over a dirty tank top and stripped pyjama bottoms. This would have been striking and mildly amusing were it not for the look on his face which was as far from the usual scowl Wirt had become used to in the last few hours.

"Kids, you're coming with me. They found it," then added with a muffled sigh, "and Dipper's in trouble."

[1]Told you I'm really bad at this. I'm open to all suggestions for a better angsty poem to be inserted in place of this one, if this is your thing.

[2]An obvious Twilight parody, as the novel in Gravity Falls was supposed to be. I just slightly altered the first sentence. Is that copyright infringement? Please, don't sue me Stephenie Meyer! And don't flame me, fangirlish readers!

[3]At first I wanted the father to be Greg and Wirt's connecting family member, but after having rewatched "Tales of the Dark Lantern", I had confirmation that it was in fact a mother that they have in common. It doesn't really matter, I just had to edit this chapter so that it fell so, but I find it so unnerving to write down the word "Mom" (you probably understand by now through the way I write and the numerous hints I dropped that I use British English rather than American. There isn't really much of a difference, but some things still differ enough so that the text gives off a slightly different feel).

Well, this was actually completed before chapter 11 (which I had major writer's block on. I'm not good at writing those kinds of scenes). Major angsting, seeing as it's Wirt, and at last, major plot points! This is a pretty sad story actually. A frog in a coma, a pair of traumatised brothers, an unpleasant spirit kidnapping our favourite nerdy teenager, a broken family… Whoops! Getting ahead of myself. Let's see how this unravels first; I'm just as excited as you, don't worry ;)

And yet again sorry for the late updates. I've got a whole lot of things going on in the real world, as well as a bunch of unfinished ideas for other fics that will probably never see the day. Hope you enjoy what I actually do give to you here, anyway. And thank you so much favouriters/followers/kudo-leavers… You may think that it's not worth supporting such a useless writer as I, but it is! Even if it isn't this fic that I'm working on, it still encourages me to write in general, so do!