A/N: For geronimo-alonzi on tumblr who wanted an update as their prize for winning my tumblr follower fic giveaway.

Danny didn't know if he had to stick around to see the portal finished and personally face whatever came out of it, but Mabel was right. Clockwork's warning hadn't been so they'd stop what they were doing. It had been so they'd be prepared. And Danny was part of those preparations.

Clockwork, who acted like something of a mentor to Danny, now expected Danny to act like a mentor himself.

A little warning would have been nice. Or actually being asked.

Danny pulled the thermos out of his pocket, which earned him identical pairs of raised eyebrows. Clearly, neither of them had thought it would fit there. Maybe they were newer to this whole magic thing than they'd let on, since he doubted magic was terribly different from some of the things ghosts could do. At least the thermos was serving as a sufficient distraction from his slip about the portal. "Okay, before I hand this over, you need to promise you're not going to turn it on and suck me in there."

"We promise. Right, Dip-Dip?"

Dipper scowled. "If you don't give us a reason to use it, we won't."

Okay, yeah, he wasn't going to get anything better than that out of Dipper right now. Danny just wouldn't tell him that the thermos was useless while he was Fenton and not Phantom. He passed it to Mabel, who started turning it over in her hands, and Dipper leaned over for a closer look.

"Right now, that will only work on ghosts, but I think we can modify it for other stuff. It should be able to contain anything noncorporeal."

"Like?"

"You're the one with a book full of weird things. You tell me."

Dipper and Mabel exchanged glances but didn't enlighten him. Fine. If he needed to know, there was plenty of time to find out later.

"It's pretty simple. You just take the cap off, aim, and press the button on the side to activate it. I've primed that again, so it'll work; it was nearly out of power before." He didn't need to get into the details, like how it was powered by ectoplasm and that's why a single charge lasted as long as it did. Though, if they were going up against something that wasn't a ghost, that charge wouldn't self-renew for nearly as long as a typical charge in Amity Park. "The circuitry's still intact, so if I just tweak the code a little, you should be good. Hopefully. At least for a little while. I've never seen a ghost break out of the thermos—" the Box Ghost might be an exception, but Danny wasn't going to think about that right now, much less tell them that "—but that doesn't mean it can't happen."

Tweaking the code would be a lot easier with Tucker around to do it for him, but just because this would be the first time Danny was modifying something without Tucker looking over his shoulder, didn't mean it was doomed to failure.

It couldn't be, if this really were Clockwork's grand plan, and he hadn't stepped in to interfere yet or otherwise nudge Danny towards the correct path. Danny was pretty sure he'd do that, at least if the current path was going to make things way worse.

"How are we supposed to tweak this?" Dipper asked, not taking his eyes off the thermos.

We. Not you. More likely a sign of mistrust than solidarity, but Danny just explained as best he could anyway. At least if he was talking about this, he wasn't talking about the portal, and if he could just get the twins far enough off that topic, then he could pretend he'd never mentioned it at all—

The sound of a vehicle pulling up distracted them all. Dipper shoved the journal out of sight under his vest again and Mabel hid the thermos in her lap, but the twins relaxed when they saw the car. "Grunkle Stan's back," Mabel said, ignoring the way Dipper immediately hissed her name.

Grunkle Stan. Stan. So that was Secret Lab Guy's name. Danny could see him clearly enough as he got out of the car, and he was wearing the same clothes, so it (probably) wasn't just a lookalike. (From the little Danny had seen of this place, not to mention his general experience with shapeshifters and clones, he was not keen on assuming anything.)

Stan waved at them and started to walk over. "Hey, kids, who's your friend?"

Danny blinked, about to reassess his judgement that this guy didn't have a twin, too, but then he noticed how intently Stan was looking at him and realized that not telling the twins about the portal involved pretending they hadn't already met, too. "Danny Fenton," he said, holding out a hand.

Stan shook it and then said, "You here for a tour?"

"He had it already," Mabel said. "Can he stay for supper, Grunkle Stan? Wendy said we can do a wiener roast. She bought more marshmallows and everything!"

Dipper glowered. Danny plastered a smile on his face. Stan pretended to dither for a moment before melting and giving in.

Stan didn't mention the journal, so Danny didn't, either. Maybe Stan just thought it was a weird thing to bring up out of the blue? Or, more likely, he assumed Dipper hadn't yet told Danny, a kid he supposedly knew nothing about—?

The implications made Danny's head hurt. That was more Jazz's or Sam's territory than his.

Whatever. If Dipper could give him an idea of what he might need to tweak the thermos for, he should've picked up enough knowledge from Tucker to know what to change when it came to reprogramming it. (He did know how to do more than just program stuff to ignore Phantom—or at least not hit him with the full force of whatever-it-was, depending on the weapon and how obvious the tampering would be.) He could probably get it done before supper, too. It wouldn't be the first time he'd had to do a rush job before his parents came home and caught him at it—or just straight up noticed that their new prototype was missing, which was frankly more likely, since he didn't do his fiddling in the lab unless there was a serious chance of it resulting in an explosion.

Stan shuffled off, Danny scooted closer to the twins as Dipper pulled out the journal again and Mabel produced the thermos, and they got to work.

Mabel didn't really understand what Danny and Dipper were doing with the thermos, but she trusted Dipper to keep his word, so she didn't feel too bad about leaving them to it about ten minutes into a discussion she couldn't follow anyway. Danny had tried to explain some of it to her when Dipper had sneaked into the toolshed for a screwdriver, but he might as well have been speaking another language for all she'd understood.

Instead, she skipped past Grunkle Stan and Soos—all she caught of that conversation as she passed by was something about hauntings and advertising, so tourist stuff—and found Wendy at the fire pit. Wendy had already found the campfire forks—they were leaning up against the tree near where Grunkle Stan usually sat—and the ashes from the previous fire had been replaced with fresh wood. Two bags of marshmallows poked out of a grocery bag nearby, and—

Mabel frowned.

A box of salt?

"Hey, Mabel!" Wendy said, smiling easily at her. Mabel almost missed the fact that she moved to stand in front of the box of salt and gently nudged it behind one of the logs with her foot. "You and Dipper finish gathering some deadwood for tinder? We'll need it to get this started. I've still got some cattail fluff from last fall, but we'll need something between that and these larger logs. Stan likes to cheat and toss some gasoline on there, but you two should know how to build a fire before the summer's out."

Mabel nodded. "We stacked it by the wood pile, the kindling's in a box, and Dipper split some more wood for later, too." She hesitated for only a beat before adding, "Grunkle Stan said our friend Danny could stay for supper. Do we have enough hot dogs?"

"Danny?" Since she was looking for it after that box of salt, Mabel didn't miss the way Wendy's expression froze, though she'd schooled her face into its usual relaxed expression a second later. Huh. Mabel hadn't realized Wendy knew anything was off about Danny. "The kid who was in earlier?"

"Yeah, he came back to visit."

Already? But Wendy didn't vocalize the question Mabel could see written on her face, instead shrugging and saying, "Cool. Yeah, there's plenty of food." She paused. "His parents know he's here?"

"He phoned earlier." It was a lie wrapped in a truth, and she felt a bit bad about that, but she was pretty sure Danny would rather explain everything to Wendy himself. Assuming he would explain it to her. Mabel hoped he would. If there really was something coming, something bad enough to merit forewarning, they should all know about it.

The journal entry had her stumped, though. If the bit in green ink wasn't for Danny, who had it been written for? And in a different code than everything else, no less? Maybe the message was actually for that Clockwork Danny had mentioned? Or from him, just not meant for any of them? If he really knew what was coming—

Wendy hummed. "We can get some pretty weird folks coming through here. Mystery Shack 'n' all."

Mabel blinked.

Was that a warning? From Wendy? Sure, Danny hadn't made the best first impression on Dipper—or her, come to that, but she was a lot more willing to trust him than Dipper—but Wendy wouldn't have met Phantom. And Danny had said himself that he was as much human as ghost, more or less, so it's not like he was that bad at faking it when you hadn't seen both sides. So what had Danny done to put Wendy so on edge?

And then Mabel remembered that Wendy had thrown a box of baking soda or something into the air after Danny had not so subtly taken up knocking on walls. She hadn't seen any evidence of Danny then, but what if Wendy had? She'd clearly connected it to Danny, not Phantom. Granted, Mabel was pretty sure that Wendy wouldn't be fooled by Phantom any more than she and Dipper had been by Danny, but….

"He's a friend," Mabel repeated firmly. Dipper might not believe it, but she did. "And everyone's a little weird sometimes, so he just fits right in."

Wendy didn't manage to pull her frown into a smile before Mabel noticed. "Sounds about right," she said. She dropped to a crouch in front of the campfire and looked up at Mabel, saying, "Here, wanna try building this yourself? I'll tell you about the different styles."

Wendy's stack of wood looked perfect already, but Mabel was curious, so she accepted the subject change for what it was and dropped to her knees opposite Wendy. "Sure!"

Dipper still didn't trust Phantom—Danny—whatever he wanted to be called, not by a long shot, and he wasn't sure he could trust everything Danny was doing with the thermos that had once contained him, but it didn't blow up in their faces, so that was a plus. Dipper wasn't entirely sure it wouldn't backfire if he was forced to use it, though. He was half tempted to bury the thing behind the Mystery Shack again after finding an excuse to send Danny away to find Mabel, even if it was empty.

"Who's Tucker?" Dipper finally asked after Danny muttered the name yet again.

"One of my best friends," was the absent answer as Danny squinted at circuitry they definitely wouldn't be able to alter without a soldering iron or something similar. "He's good at this kind of thing. Way better than me."

"So why should I trust that you know what you're doing?"

Danny frowned at him. "Is there any way I can answer that question and not have it come back on me?"

Probably not. Dipper shrugged. Danny huffed and started to screw the panel back into place. Since he hadn't done anything to it beyond pressing a hidden button, Dipper hoped that meant everything was in order, that the hack would work. Danny claimed he had managed to return the thing to what he said were the equivalent of its factory settings, but Dipper wasn't entirely comfortable with having to take his word for everything.

It barely seemed better that Danny was doing all the work on it. Sure, if it exploded, it would be in his hands. Then again, if he decided to turn it into a weapon that he could use against the rest of them, rather than one that worked on him, Dipper didn't have the knowledge to stop him.

He suspected Danny knew that, even if Dipper was doing his best to pretend that he knew what was going on.

"How can we be sure that what you're doing is going to work?" It wasn't much of a different question than before, but it was certainly a valid one in Dipper's opinion.

"Remember when I said my parents built this? I'm really familiar with this design. With all their designs. I know how they think, and I can figure this out, even without Tucker looking over my shoulder. It would just be faster with Tucker."

He'd managed to pull up a menu on the display, so he might not be making things up completely. Dipper decided that if he had to trust Danny, then trusting him not to do something that would harm them would be the first step—and trusting him to try to do this could be the second, even if that would be a work in progress and very much contingent on Danny not going berserk on them. "Fine. I don't suppose you'd be willing to test it?"

Danny scowled. "You could at least pretend to trust me."

"Well, if it doesn't work on you, then it either means you broke it or did what you're trying to do, doesn't it?"

"No. I'm going to expand what can be captured, not exclude ghosts from that. You guys might wind up facing down a ghost, and a thermos is a good thing to have in your back pocket. So if it doesn't work on me, then it's broken, but it's not broken, because if it were, Clockwork would've talked to me by now."

"You seem pretty confident about that considering you said he doesn't like to interfere."

"He pretends he doesn't like to interfere. I think he tries not to be too blatant about it." Danny looked up at him. "I know how this sounds, but I'm not working against you. I really just want to get home, and this is the only way I know how to do it."

He sounded sincere. At least, he sounded a lot more sincere than he had when he'd first talked to them. He might not be saying everything, but Dipper could believe that Danny was telling the truth now.

Dipper still wasn't sure where the truth got them. None of them knew what was coming—except apparently this Clockwork guy. All they knew was that, whatever it was, it was supposed to be bad, which wasn't exactly a whole lot of help. How were they supposed to prepare for something bad without knowing what that something was?

For all that Danny claimed he didn't know what was coming, Dipper would've bet that Danny had a pretty good guess—or at least a better guess than Dipper himself did. He could think of entirely too many possibilities; the journal talked about everything from gnomes to interdimensional beings.

Speaking of which— "What were you saying about a portal earlier?"

Danny froze, and Dipper would've had to have been blind not to read the guilt on his face. "What?"

"You said something about a portal. What was it?"

Danny purposely returned to screwing on the panel—or rather, unscrewing it, loosening it just enough to give himself something to do. As if Dipper couldn't recognize a stall tactic that obvious. Without meeting Dipper's eyes, Danny said, "That's not important."

He didn't try to claim he hadn't mentioned it, which seemed like an improvement over earlier, but that didn't mean Dipper was happy. "I'm pretty sure it is. You talked about interdimensional safety before, and then you mentioned a portal."

Danny grunted.

"Not telling me what you know isn't going to make this any easier. And it might take you even longer to get back home." However that was supposed to work.

Danny tightened the last screw (again), dropped his hands still holding the thermos and screwdriver into his lap, and looked up. "Fine. Interdimensional travel? Risky. Trying to straight up drill a hole between dimensions? Risky. Trying to even communicate with beings from other dimensions? That can be risky, too. It isn't always, but it can be. What we're doing with this?" He lifted the thermos. "It's barely more than a precaution. Just because you have a thermos, doesn't mean you're going to have an easy time getting anything into it. If anything is too strong, the thermos won't be able to pull it in until you weaken it so they can't fight back, or at least not fight back as much."

Dipper was not about to let him get away with not mentioning the portal. "So the portal—?"

"When I said I was in a lab accident? It was a portal accident. I know a thing or two about portal safety, not that it helps me now. Pro tip: don't put the 'on' button on the inside. If you have to do that, at least make it a switch so you can keep it in the on position and just plug it in and unplug it when you need to turn it on and off."

Dipper frowned. "You think repeatedly pulling the plug is better than having things safely shut down whenever you want to turn it off?"

"No, I think you should have a design where safe shut downs and not just emergency shut downs are actually a thing. Not having a kill switch is just as dangerous, though. There isn't necessarily going to be time to shut everything down safely when something is coming through to kill you and everyone you care about."

Dipper blinked.

"That one's not from personal experience," Danny said as he let the thermos drop into his lap beside the screwdriver. "A kill switch wouldn't have helped in that case."

"What—?" Dipper broke off. "Never mind." Danny was trying to distract him, and it was working. He couldn't let Danny get away with changing the subject like that. "Why did you mention a portal in the first place?"

"I dunno, because interdimensional safety kinda implies portal?"

Dipper growled. Danny wanted to feign ignorance and play innocent? Fine. Dipper could spell it out for him. "Not in relation to you, to us."

Danny lifted one hand to rub at the back of his neck. "Look, this place is weird. A portal to somewhere else being involved somehow is a distinct possibility. If that's not why it's weird, it might be appealing to people who are interested in why things are the way they are around here. That's why my parents chose to set up shop where they did."

Dipper was well aware that he'd only scratched the surface of the mysteries within Gravity Falls, but he hadn't exactly gotten the impression that Danny had been talking hypothetically earlier.

"Is it really that hard to believe that I just want to protect people?" Danny asked. "How many times do I have to tell you I just want to help?"

"You just want to go home," Dipper countered, "and helping us is apparently the only way you can do it. Forgive me if it's hard to believe that some of your help isn't as helpful as it could be."

Danny groaned. He got to his feet, handed Dipper the thermos and the screwdriver, and said, "Fine. Try the thermos on me. Be satisfied with the fact that it works and that I didn't sabotage it. Then you can let me out again so I can keep helping you."

Dipper glared but took the thermos in one hand and pocketed the screwdriver with the other. He thought about asking what was stopping him from just keeping Danny in the thermos after he tried it out—assuming it worked—but decided Danny might come out with some drawled 'your conscience' response, even though 'your sister' would have been more accurate.

"It's really easy," Danny was saying. "All you do is unscrew the cap and turn it on or turn it on and unscrew the cap, depending on whether it's off or on standby. I've got it on standby right now, so you only need to take off the cap, but you'll want to turn it off to save power once we're done because this thing runs on ecto-energy. If you have anything inside, it'll stay contained until the power is completely drained. Clear as mud?"

Dipper didn't bother returning Danny's smile.

Danny sighed, turned the thermos in Dipper's hand, and pointed at a button. "The release button is clearly labelled. Take the cap off and press it. That's it." He hesitated. "Well, don't drop it when the cap is off unless you have the release button locked." He thumbed a slide next to the button, pulling it down to the little icon of the open lock, and the display on the side briefly flashed UNLOCKED in green letters before returning to EMPTY.

It hadn't exploded yet, so Dipper figured it might be safe to use.

"Let's just go farther away from the shop," Danny muttered, glancing over and the Mystery Shack. "I don't want to do this where the others can see. Scaring your cashier once today was enough."

Dipper glanced sideways at him but let Danny pull him into the trees. "Wendy?"

"Yeah, I think that was her name."

"Wendy doesn't scare easily."

"Okay, then being threatened by your cashier once today was enough," Danny amended.

"She knows ghosts are real."

"Clearly."

"No, I mean— You aren't the first ghost she's met, either."

"Tell her to visit Amity Park, and I won't be the last. Well. She might run into me again, but I won't be the only ghost there." He paused. "I think."

Dipper waited.

Danny did not explain.

Naturally.

Dipper let Danny walk in silence for another ten seconds or so until the shack was masked by a familiar mix of deciduous and evergreen trees. Somewhere overhead, a bird trilled, and there was a nearby rustle as a chipmunk made a mad dash for a tree. Dipper took some comfort in the fact that the local wildlife hadn't immediately made itself scarce in Danny's presence, but he still asked, "Are we far enough away that you're comfortable telling me what else you've been hiding? Because if you're hoping none of them would hear me scream in pain from here, we need to go farther."

Danny rolled his eyes. "I'm not going to hurt you."

"And you're not going to talk, either?"

"I'm not hiding anything else."

Dipper raised an eyebrow. "You're a terrible liar."

"Which means you should believe me when I say I'm only trying to help you!"

Dipper bit his lip and then made his decision, handing Danny back the thermos. "I'll trust you that this will work," he said as Danny hesitantly reached out for it, "and I'll trust that your warning wasn't intended to dig us into deeper trouble. But I don't believe that you've told me everything we need to know."

"I've told you everything I can right now," Danny said, gripping the thermos as if he expected Dipper to try to yank it back out of his hands at those words. "Everything important, anyway."

Maybe it was a passing cloud that obscured the leaf-filtered sunlight that had speckled Danny's black hair as he said that. Maybe it was the wind blowing the trees and shifting the leaves overhead. Somehow, Dipper doubted the cause was truly so innocuous. The sudden shift to shadow caused his skin to crawl—especially when the light didn't return within a few heartbeats.

Danny didn't give any indication that he noticed, or at least not that he felt that something was wrong, so Dipper didn't know if this was Danny's doing or something else within the forest itself.

Even if the author had managed the great feat of discovering all the secrets of Gravity Falls, Dipper hadn't found and read the other journals. He didn't know what he was missing.

There was too much he still didn't know, and Danny was making it abundantly clear that he wouldn't say anything else.

For all Dipper knew, he'd recognized the strange code in the journal after all.

"Dipper!"

That was Mabel. The call wasn't urgent, just pitched so that her voice projected far, most likely because she didn't know where he was or if he'd gone inside. Her mind wouldn't have jumped to all the things Danny could have done to him when they were alone, though given that none of the things Dipper had come up with had happened, perhaps he shouldn't have been so quick to think it, either.

Still.

A little wariness never hurt anyone, right? Especially in Gravity Falls.

"Grunkle Stan said we could roast some marshmallows before our hot dogs, and I'm going to eat yours if you don't get your butt over here!"

Danny offered Dipper a weak smile. "Guess it's supper time, huh?"

"Can you even eat?" Dipper asked, not realizing how rude that must sound until after the words had left his mouth. "I mean, uh—"

"I can eat," Danny said, and this time his smile looked genuine, a spark of laughter reaching his eyes. "Food I don't have to make myself that I also don't need to hunt down when it comes alive and goes feral? Count me in."

It was a distraction from their earlier conversation. Dipper knew that.

Knowing that, however, was not enough to stop him from repeating, "Comes alive and goes feral?"

Danny's smile twisted into a definite smirk. "Let's just say that holidays at my house involve more famine than feast, at least until we get everything cleaned up and can order take out."

"Dipper! Danny? Where did you guys go?"

"Coming!" Dipper called back. He glanced at Danny, wondering if he had anything else he wanted to share before they went back.

"Truce?" Danny asked, holding out his hand. "I mean, we kinda had one before, but officially now? Where we help each other?"

One deal with a phantom (not-phantom) kid shouldn't backfire on him, so Dipper nodded and shook Danny's hand. "Truce."

He'd shaken on sketchier deals in the past, and if something came back and bit him over the course of this summer, Dipper didn't think it would be this.