My first Gravity Falls fic! Many apologies for any misuse of the characters... I don't know if I'll continue, but let me know what you think?

Grunkle Stan leaned on the counter and watched Dipper count out the cash in the drawer. Dipper was always surprised about how much money could be in here after a mildly busy day. Why someone would buy a bobble-head figure of his great-uncle was anybody's guess, but apparently the little things moved were like hotcakes.

Dipper wasn't sure who was buying so many hotcakes, either, but he didn't study the economy.

Stan gave an exaggerated sigh of contentment and a sip of his soda. "You want to know my favorite part of summer, Ford?"

"Sunburn?" Grunkle Ford didn't look up from the little table in the corner where he was engrossed in "the books." The budget. He took pride in the fact that all the columns were aligned and things added up. Stan's creative accounting apparently gave Ford hives.

"No."

"Sweating."

"No."

"Mosquitos."

"You done?"

"No."

"Child labor!"

Rolling his eyes but unable to help his smile, Dipper cast a glance at Mabel. She stuffed a laugh into her sweater while she arranged t-shirts on the racks. Dipper pulled a pair of twenties from the stack in his hand and waved them in his great-uncle's direction. "By the way, Grunkle Stan?"

"What do you think you're doing?" Stan grasped for the money, ineffectively.

"Child labor isn't free," Dipper said, stuffing the rest of the money back into the correct slot in the drawer.

"Cheap!" Mabel plucked one of the twenties from Dipper's fingers and grinned. "But not free."

"I pay you guys in room and board. You don't have to pay rent for the entire summer and food is on the house."

"Yeah." Mabel elbowed Dipper in the ribs and snickered underneath discreet air quotes. "'Food.'"

"We're thirteen, Grunkle Stan," Dipper said. "We couldn't pay rent even if we wanted to."

"Yeah. It wouldn't be child labor if you were much older, either." Stan gave Dipper a gentle shove out of the way and closed the cash drawer. "What's the damage?"

"Two-hundred and twenty-five dollars," Dipper said.

"And are you counting this highway robbery?" Stan asked, pointing at the two of them without making eye contact. If Dipper had to guess, that was because they'd just arrived last night and today he couldn't look at them without grinning apparently.

"Nope. Didn't count the robbery." Dipper slipped his twenty into his pocket and looked around the store. It was largely the same, though the furry fish had been replaced with a different animal.

There was a new cap in red and white instead of blue. Dipper went to try it on. The Dipper staring back from the mirror looked like a different person. He didn't have any leftover blue ones from last year, so it would just have to do. He turned to Stan. "Can I have this?"

Stan glanced up, taking in the sight, and then back down. "Yeah, sure."

"Stan, can I talk to you?" Ford spoke up sternly, reminding everyone else that he was, in fact, in the room.

"Shoot."

Dipper noticed before Stan did that Ford hadn't responded. Stan looked up from the cash register, counting the money again because apparently that was just what he did.

"Well?"

"Uh." Dipper looked around, his eyes landing on the outside edge of the rock that looked like a face. Dipper had noticed a new display outside on their way in late last night but didn't get a good look at it. "Mabel, I have to go sweep the porch."

"Sucks to be you," Mabel said.

"Want to come with?" Dipper glared, hoping the weight of his stare would catch her attention.

Mabel did notice he was staring at her, and took the hint. "Sure. Can I finish this later, Grunkle Stan?"

"Make sure you do."

Dipper pulled Mabel out the door with him. He closed the door behind them probably a bit too aggressively, to make sure Ford bought that he actually was outside doing whatever it was Dipper said he was going to do, and turned to see Mabel staring at him.

"You left the broom behind the counter."

"Oh." Dipper looked at the closed door, barely able to hear the hushed tones of his more-demure uncle as it was. "I guess I did."

He heard Stan's explosive "What?" carry through the window before he could grab Mabel's wrist and drag her around the side of the building to the window. It wasn't open, but in Dipper's experience eavesdropping here, it didn't matter.

"What's going on?" Mabel whispered.

Dipper hushed her and ducked beneath the window. The shack was old for a neglected structure in the wild woods around Gravity Falls, and from certain angles daylight could be seen shining into the gift shop where there were no windows. The attic had a similar problem, though it was more a blessing up there given the poor air circulation. The windows were always open, but having a drafty room was a good thing out in the summer heat.

"What do you mean? The overhead for this place is, like, zero dollars," Stan was saying. "Also I don't recall a thank you for paying off your mortgage while you were gone, by the way."

"You stole my identity," Ford said.

"Who the hell steals an identity and pays off its mortgage? I'm a better criminal than that."

"You're deflecting from the point. Again."

Dipper heard the flutter of a pad of paper, he assumed the ledger that Ford had been working with all morning. Since Dipper thought about it, he'd been muttering almost non-stop and prodding at that poor calculator like it'd offended him…

"Calling your bank account last summer a 'savings' is a bit generous," Ford went on, "but the financial situation hasn't recovered from having the kids last year. Our expedition over the winter didn't help matters…"

"What's your point?"

"One of us has to get a real job."

"I have a real job!" Stan said. "We make over two-thousand dollars a week during the summer. But how are you supposed to know? You're the basement dweller with no prospects."

"You haven't paid taxes since 1989 and you're in debt up to your eyeballs from these—what are these?" Dipper heard something rattle inside, and he had to admit he had no idea what knick-knack Ford had picked up. "Look, it doesn't matter. The point is that the Mystery Shack has never really been… solvent. You barely break even."

"It's still early, and summer profit always been more than enough to cover the merchandise for the year. Spring has always been like this."

"But summer hasn't."

"Excuse me, but having the kids here is the exact opposite of the problem."

They went on from there; Dipper stopped paying attention long enough to exchange a long look with Mabel. Her newly-braceless teeth dug into her lip. "I knew Grunkle Stan didn't manage money very well, but…"

"I didn't realize visiting again was going to make the Mystery Shack go bankrupt…" Dipper mumbled, turning his back against the wall and looking up at the new display. It was a bunch of birch tree trunks glued together, the knots conveniently located to look like a half-dozen faces. Its plaque read, Mangrove Head.

Dipper sighed and pulled the bill of his new hat down over his eyes.

Mabel scoffed, knocking on Dipper's drawn up knee. "Come on. Grunkle Stan would never let something happen to this place."

Dipper cast a quick glance around: the dilapidated signage, the ratty roof tiles, the furniture and appliances that looked like they hadn't been upgraded since before his parents' wedding. "At least, nothing more than what's already happened to it," Dipper allowed.

"We can save Grunkle Ford the money on hiring summer help, at least. Maybe that would make him happy?" Before Dipper could respond that was a great point, Mabel slammed her forehead against the wall next to them with a groan. "I don't know how money works."

With a chuckle, Dipper pulled her away from the wall. "What do you mean?"

"We eat lots of food, Dipper! We went out to the diner all the time last year, and do you know how many band-aids you need over the course of three months? Because I don't! That's not even counting sunscreen, and poison oak treatment..."

"What are you two kids doing?"

With a start, Dipper looked up to see Grunkle Stan hanging over them out the window above. "Uh. Nothing?" Dipper said, even though he couldn't have come up with something more stupid to say if he tried.

"Uh-huh. Eavesdropping." Stan rubbed the back of his neck. "We've gotta work on that."

"Are you in money-trouble, Grunkle Stan?" Mabel asked.

Leave it to Mabel to get straight to the point. Dipper looked from her, up to Stan. He didn't look at all concerned. Not even upset. It was possible Ford was worried for nothing, but… well, Dipper wasn't so stupid as to notice that Stan was just as interested in singles as in larger denominations. He had to imagine that wouldn't be true if he had hundreds or fifties at the ready.

"No. Not at all." Stan paused. "Not really. Ford likes to worry."

"Stanley…" Ford scolded from further in the shop. "Tell them to come in. I assume they heard everything."

"What do you think, knucklehead?" Stan turned back into the store. "Of course, they heard everything." He leaned back out the window to talk to them. "Ford definitely overstated the negative economic impact of your visit last summer."

"Is there anything we can do to help?" Dipper asked anyway, leaning the top of his head against the wall behind him. "We know kids are kind of expensive, and…"

"Please, tell them to come inside!" Ford interrupted from the distance. "This is ridiculous."

Stan winked out the window at them, pulled back inside, and closed the window.

With a sigh, Dipper looked at Mabel. She shrugged. They got up together and went inside silently, and the scene in the gift shop was pretty much exactly what Dipper imagined it would be. Stan was behind the counter, sorting coins into piles. Ford was back in his chair with the ledger opened in front of him. Neither of them looked very happy, sort of like he and Mabel tended to look when they were purposefully not talking each other even if they had to share the same room.

"I'd be happy to show you the budget, if you want to see," Ford said. "But I don't want you two to feel as if this is somehow your fault. Managing time and money has never been a particular skill of Stanley's."

"Hold on." Stan made to move from behind the counter, knocking over a small stack of quarters as he did. He sounded offended, but Dipper didn't have any real indication he had a right to be.

Dipper went to Ford's folding table. "I'd like to see."

"It's nothing you should concern yourself with, Dipper," Stan said.

"Though it might be a good idea for you to know what a budget looks like…" Ford said with a meaningful glare at his brother. "Might keep you from making similar mistakes in the future."

Dipper looked at the sheet of paper open before Ford, the numbers assigned to categories, and the rather large negative number at the bottom. Stan was paying hundreds every week to pay off debt, and electricity out in this part of Oregon was apparently not cheap. The food budget was the only thing they could afford according to Ford's calculation. But, if Mabel was right in her assessment that they ate a lot of food, that was about to change.

Dipper sighed. "What can we do?"

"Ford…" Stan growled and snatched the ledger from between them.

"You don't have to do anything, kids. But Stan and I do have to make some changes. Retirement is definitely out of the question for both of us…"

"Retirement was never in question!" Stan said, pausing his flipping in the ledger. "I assumed when I was thirty this was going to be the rest of my life; I was going to keel over right there behind the counter. I guess at this point, I'd have Soos stuff me and I could continue to add to the mystique of the place."

"Ew, Grunkle Stan." Mabel giggled and waved him off, but Dipper couldn't quite tell if she was enjoying the hyperbole or actually disgusted.

"Look." Stan put the ledger down on the table. "Here's the net profit from the last five summers, including last year. The Mystery Shack and Stanford Pines has been in the black every year for a decade. Not by much, but he's actually been surprisingly successful with the whole tourist-trap thing."

"You're not accounting for—"

"We'll be fine, Ford."

Dipper wasn't convinced. He looked at Mabel, though, and could see without her speaking a word that she absolutely was. Just from his brief flashes of numbers flying by while Stan flipped, Dipper could see a lot of red. And Stan wasn't kidding when he said "not by much." Last year the Mystery Shack made a whole $107.60. That wasn't a lot to live on, and Dipper had a feeling that was exactly what Stan wasn't accounting for.

"But…"

"No buts," Stan interrupted Dipper's unspoken objection. "We can split a ketchup packet for lunch."

Dipper laughed, and so did Mabel.

A second later, even Ford joined in. "I guess it's worth it," he admitted.