the lack long after

Dipper is suddenly torn from sleep by a vibration rattling his chest.

His first instinct is to flail at it, and he ends up knocking his phone to the floor. It takes him a moment to remember what happened: Pacifica texted him, and he'd fallen asleep awaiting her reply.

Rubbing at his eyes, he reaches down and grabs his phone. It's still dark outside; the clock tells him it's nearly five in the morning. He's slept just enough to be more tired than ever. He blinks away his blurry vision and squints at his phone. The screen is too bright to look at directly. He flops onto his stomach; for some reason, it's easier to look down at it.

Pacifica: Come outside

What? He rubs his eyes again, looks away, and then rereads the message. Does she mean come outside to somewhere? Is she texting him on accident? He tries to complete the text in a variety of ways but can't figure it out. He's about to grab his journal and start applying some code ciphers when he realizes that maybe he should just apply Occam's Razor instead.

He clambers upward onto his knees and looks out the window.

Someone small is standing out in the dark, on the sidewalk. They're wearing a heavy coat with the hood up and are bent forward slightly, arms wrapped around their middle.

Dipper stares, his breath slowly fogging the glass. He pushes himself backwards until his feet hit the floor. Pulling on a pair of baggy gray sweatpants, he grabs his hoodie and slips his sneakers on without any socks, snagging Wendy's hat from a wall peg on the way out of the room. He knows which parts of the stairs creak and which are safe; he sticks to the side of the stairwell, making sure his feet rest on the sturdy edges of each step. Quietly, he turns the deadbolt and hits the latch on the screen door, catching it as it closes so the hiss of the pneumatic won't be as loud.

The night air is cold, prickling across his face and sticking in his nose. It's probably in the mid to high thirties, the sun yet to rise. His breath steams out in front of him as he crosses the walk with the frosted lawn to his left and the faint blue siding of the garage to his right. The distant sound of traffic rolls in over the nearby houses, heralding the inchoate morning rush. His bare ankles are a strip of ice compared to the downy fabric that swathes the rest of him.

When he gets close enough to the street, he can see strands of platinum hair hanging out of the lowered hood of the coat. It's the kind of large-buttoned coat that people wear on TV in the big cities, all expensive dark fabric and luxurious lining. But even when his footsteps are obvious, the hood doesn't raise.

He stops at the edge of the sidewalk where it bisects the driveway, a study in off-white and pitted black. "Pacifica?" he says, the words made manifest by the cold, written in vapor.

"I didn't think you'd come out," she says, still looking at the ground. Her voice sounds off. It lacks its customary edge, its volatile pride.

"Pacifica, are you okay?" he asks, even though he's pretty sure she can't be.

She raises her head. The dark circles under her eyes have become more like bruises. Her face, always sharp and slender, a perfect diagram of well-bred slopes and points, is something close to gaunt. She's lost weight. She looks like she hasn't slept since he last saw her.

She takes a step backward. "I shouldn't be here," she says.

Dipper looks up and down the street but doesn't see a car. "How did you even get here?"

"In a taxi," she says listlessly.

He assumes she flew into San Francisco again because he just can't see her sitting in a taxi for that many hours. Of course, prior to this moment he also couldn't see her arriving at his house unannounced at five in the morning looking worse than she had after surviving the first days of a localized apocalypse. He has no idea what's wrong and he has no idea what she wants from him. What he does know is that she's shivering.

He puts a hand on her shoulder and leads her towards the house. "Follow me and be really quiet."

She complies, excepting a moment when they're about to reach the front walk. "Can you not even afford socks?" she says, observing his bare ankles.

Her tone is too lacking in inflection to have much bite, but, perversely, Dipper's worry is slightly eased by hearing her make any kind of jab at all.

When they enter the house, he briefly considers waking his parents. This seems like the sort of situation that they might need to know about, depending. But he doesn't know how to explain his friendship with Pacifica, never mind what she's doing at his house at five AM (not that he even knows). And it's not like he'd made it a habit to tell adults what was happening in Gravity Falls all those times he was in very real danger, so why start now?

Besides, he doesn't really want to try explaining. He just wonders if doing so might lessen the amount of trouble he will be in if they wake up. Like, say, right now, as Pacifica puts her feet in all the wrong places on the stairs.

Somehow, they manage to get to his room without waking the entire house, despite her unfamiliarity with stealth. He closes his door and watches as she takes in his room. There's a fair amount of dirty laundry scattered across the floor and he's amassed an impressive collection of soda cans on his desk (he's been burning through the Pitt that Soos brought at an alarming rate). It's slightly embarrassing, but he jams his hands into the front pocket of his hoodie obstinately and refuses to feel awkward about it. She's the one who showed up in the dark hours of the morning. She can put up with it or hire him a butler.

She sits on the edge of his unmade bed without saying anything, and that's when Dipper knows that something is definitely, seriously wrong.

He sits on his desk chair and waits.

She's sitting oddly with her shoulders slumped and her head hanging low. Fatigue, would be Dipper's guess, given the time and the trip. That and whatever brought her here. It's not the way he remembers her: private school posture, ballerina poise.

She reaches up and lowers her hood. Her blonde tresses are still perfectly coiffed, one thing that hasn't changed. "I think my parents are getting divorced," she says.

Dipper's heart sinks in his chest. It couldn't happen to two nicer people, sure, he's got some schadenfreude going on, but then there's Pacifica. "Oh… geez. Man. I'm sorry, Pac—"

"I know they're bad people," she interrupts him. "I don't even like them. I don't even like my own parents." She pauses, her mouth in an ugly twist. "They don't like me. You don't either."

Dipper needs Mabel. He needs her to come in and say what Pacifica needs to hear in the way that only Mabel can, so genuine and believable. He doesn't think he can be what Pacifica needs. "That's not true," he objects.

She just looks at him.

He knows she needs more convincing. She's clearly in a bad place, but she needs the truth, too, because she won't believe anything else from him. "I like you just fine when you're not being what your parents want you to be," he tells her honestly. "No, I didn't like you when you were being a jerk to Mabel or stuck up about mini golf or money or whatever, but you saved both of us from the ghost and you could have died with us at the end. If I didn't like you, why would I let you in?"

She looks away. "So you like me when I'm not myself."

"I only like you when you are yourself. Or at least that's what I think. Am I wrong?"

She wraps her arms tightly around herself. "I hope you're right."

"You really seemed like you were trying. Is that what this is about?" Dipper pulls open one of the drawers on his desk. He takes out a folded letter, creased and worn from use. He points to her pink signature, the first 'I' in her name dotted with a heart. "I thought you really meant this."

"I did!" she declares, her voice snapping with something approaching her usual acid spark for the first time. "And that's the problem!"

He glances worriedly towards the door, hoping her voice didn't carry. "What happened?"

"You wouldn't understand."

He sets the letter on his desk and crosses his arms. "Try me."

She falls silent. Dipper waits, afraid to break eye contact in case it breaks the moment.

"After we lost the Manor, I thought things would be better," Pacifica finally says, her expression distant. "Like, without that history, or, because of what happened and we saved them… it should've meant something. I don't know. How could it not mean anything? How can they just…" She huffs in frustration. "It was stupid. I was stupid. Dad didn't learn anything; he was just even worse. Mom started drinking again. They didn't want to talk about it, and I wanted to, I wanted us to be… different! …I wanted to be different." Her voice lowers further, hopeless.

Dipper shifts uncomfortably in his seat. He's not sure he's cut out to be anyone's confidante for stuff like this, but he's trying. "For what it's worth, I think you are different."

She looks up, eyes plaintive. "You really think so?"

"Come on, Pacifica. Would the you I met at the beginning of summer even be here like this?"

A corner of her mouth lifts in a small smile. "Ugh, no."

He smirks. "That's what I thought."

Her smile fades as she looks away again. "They didn't want to talk about any of it, not even the party. They pretended it never happened. They tried to make me think it never happened. I—…" She suddenly stops and fixes him with a laser glare. "You aren't going to tell anyone about this, are you?"

"What? No!" Dipper says, affronted. "Who would I even tell?"

"Mabel."

"Isn't she the one person you wouldn't mind me telling?"

"…Maybe," Pacifica says grudgingly.

"Hey, if you don't want to talk about this, you don't have to. You showed up on my sidewalk at five in the morning," he points out.

"I know this is weird, so like just shut up about it!"

"Shhh!" He hushes her and looks at his door again. Grimacing, he turns back.

She looks apologetic. "This isn't easy for me, okay?" she explains tightly.

"I'm not going to tell anybody," he sighs.

Her mouth is thin in her pale face. "Good."

He's still not sure she really believes him, and he tries not to take it personally. He doesn't doubt that in the kinds of circles she runs in it's pretty commonplace to have anything personal used against you. It makes him appreciate how difficult it must be for her to hand him so much ammunition.

Though if the tension in her shoulders is any indication, she's not done yet.