Dipper stared at his reflection in the kitchen window. Things were getting better – he was sleeping more, and the purple bags that had hung from his eyes since his release had faded away. He scratched his beard and made a mental note to buy a razor; he liked his beard, but Bianca reached up and plucked hairs out of it often enough that it was becoming detrimental to his health. She didn't like his nose much, either, judging by how violently she squeezed it, but there wasn't a lot he could do about that.

Mabel drew the curtains, blocking his view. She scurried over to the cabinets and Dipper traced the pattern in the granite countertop with his finger, only distantly aware that she was talking to him.

"Dip?"

"Hmm?"

She held up a bottle of wine, two glasses dangling from her fingers. "Do you want some?"

"Oh, no. Thank you."

She popped off the cork and frowned. "When's the last time you had a drink?"

The night he punched Doug Tanner. "Before prison," he said. "Can't remember when."

"Well." She pulled out a stool opposite him and set her glass on the counter. "If we're going to talk about this, I need a drink."

Dipper nodded, his mind elsewhere. "Hey, you know what I just realized? I never asked you how old your kids are. Is that bad? I've been so preoccupied with myself, I–"

"Dipper," she said, and swatted his hand. "Chill, dude. You're fine." She took a sip of her wine. "Zoey's four. She'll be five in March. And Bianca is two and a half."

"March," Dipper murmured. "So the last time you came to see me, you were pregnant."

She nodded and smiled. "I know what you're thinking. I was so young, I wasn't old enough to raise a baby. Mr. Practical."

"I'm not thinking that," he said. "I have no doubt in my mind that you're the best mom on the planet."

Her eyes snapped up, as if sensing he was joking. But he wouldn't joke about that, and she realized it. "Something's happened to you," she said, her eyes narrowed. "I married a boy and you didn't even get to vet him. But you seem okay with that. You've lost your protectiveness."

He shrugged. "It's hard to be protective when we're so far apart."

She hummed in agreement, pulled a thin black case out of her pocket, opened it up on the counter, and rubbed a small sheet of something on her face.

"What are you doing?"

"Wiping off my makeup," she said.

"Oh. I'll try not to say anything to make you cry."

Mabel laughed. "Good luck with that. You already came pretty close, with that comment about me being the best mom on the planet."

She threw the makeup wipe away and closed the case, slipped it back into her pocket, and then she gazed across at him, waiting. He picked his thumbnail, recalling his last night in Gravity Falls. Strangely, more vivid than the event that led to his arrest was the memory of riding in the back of the cop car, and looking out the window, up at the same galaxy of stars that he used to watch with Wendy from Lookout Point.

"After it happened," he said, "I felt like I wasn't worth anybody's time. Do you remember when I was first diagnosed as bipolar? And I hid up in my room and you spent hours trying to convince me to take my meds."

"I remember you kept calling yourself a 'lost cause.' And I remember shouting at you a lot. Mostly telling you to grow some balls."

"Yeah. Well, being in prison felt like that – like I was a lost cause – but it was ten times worse. Every time one of the wardens came up to me and said I had a visitor, I was angry. I couldn't imagine why anybody would want to see me. I couldn't even comprehend it. Especially Wendy, I mean, Jesus Christ. The first time she came to see me, she sat down and she– she started talking like we were just getting coffee. She was complaining about her boss at the bowling alley."

"I can understand that," Mabel said. "She wanted you to know that she forgave you."

"Forgave me? She wouldn't forgive me, Mabel. She can't forgive me. I killed her dad. If you kill your girlfriend's dad, that's the absolute end of a relationship. There's no forgiveness after that. How could there be?"

"Dipper." She lowered her head. "It wasn't that simple."

"Yeah, it was. How could it not be that simple?"

"Because people still loved you. Wendy did, I did, Stan did. Love is unconditional."

"But that isn't true. It can't be unconditional, there have to be conditions. Becoming a murderer is a pretty big condition."

Mabel bit down on her lip and glanced off to the side. "Okay, I didn't realize we were going to talk about this specifically, but... Dip, there's a reason that you're here and not in prison for the rest of your life. You are not a murderer."

"I was convicted for murder."

"No, you were convicted for manslaughter. You saw something deeply disturbing and you needed to stop it. It wasn't– I'm not saying it was the best thing to do, but other people, in your position, might have done the same thing."

"That doesn't change anything, though. He was fucked up in the head." Dipper glanced around, expecting to find a child in the doorway, but he concluded that if one of them was eavesdropping, an f-bomb wouldn't have been anywhere near the most shocking part of the conversation. "Sorry. He was sick. Wendy said so. He could have been sent to prison, or a mental institution, or something. He could have gotten better."

"And maybe he never would have gotten better, and he would have lived on to make Wendy's life miserable. You can't go back and wonder what might have been different, Dipper. It'll eat you up inside."

"But you can't– you can't defend it like that. You can't defend what I did. I took a man's life, there's no defense for that."

"But there is," she said. "That's why you only served eight years."

Dipper gazed into her steady eyes. The reason he had chosen to come to San Francisco was that out of the few people in his memory, his sister was the most likely to overlook his crimes and accept him. He could almost count on it. But this was two steps beyond that – not only did she seem to forgive him for the felony, she was trying to justify it. "So you're not scared of me?" Dipper said, disbelieving. "You don't feel a little bit sick when you look at me?"

She shook her head. "You were trying to do the right thing. You just didn't do it in the right way."

Dipper opened his mouth but didn't respond. It was true, to an extent, and it was also an opinion he had held for a part of his sentence, at least subconsciously; in his untitled fantasy trilogy, Willow murdered the king and didn't once regret it. When Dipper came to reread the stories several years later, he was conflicted. If he were to take the stories to the outside world, have them published, what would he be trying to push on people? The idea that murder could be a moral solution? The books almost felt dangerous, after that. The night before he left, he stashed the notebooks under Mitch's bed. Mitch had always liked them, although – and Dipper was only now realizing this – Mitch was a killer who did not often express regret for his past.

"I don't think we're going to see eye to eye on this," Mabel said.

"I guess not."

"This whole time, did you think that I– that I didn't love you anymore? Is that why you didn't want to see me?"

"No, I knew that you loved me. But I wanted you not to." His voice broke. "You're, like, the best person in the world, Mabel. You're too good for anybody."

In the blink of an eye, her face contorted and she began to weep. She bit down on her lip and shook her head.

"You are," Dipper said. "My whole life, I've fought tooth and nail, to even be half of who you are. And when I was at my rock bottom, for you to still be taking time out of your day to travel to Oregon and see me, I thought you were wasting your time. And I told you that, remember?"

She nodded, wiping her eye on her sleeve, but the tears kept coming, and Dipper's own eyes started to well up.

"But you kept coming back," he said, "week after week, so I did the only thing I could think of to keep you away."

"You told me you didn't want to see me anymore," Mabel whimpered.

He told her that, contrary to what she thought, he had started a new life in prison, and he didn't want her to be a part of it. She had trembled, staring at the table, but she kept a straight face, and told him that he didn't mean that, but he insisted that he did. "And then I started refusing to see you. But it wasn't true, Mabel. None of it was true. You were the only thing getting me through the week. I just didn't want to be the only thing ruining yours."

Mabel hopped down from the stool, came around the counter, and hugged him. Suddenly he felt weak, and he dipped his head and rested his chin on her shoulder.

"I'm so sorry," he said.

"Why would you think you were ruining my week?" she said, her voice wet. "Didn't I make it pretty clear that I wanted to see you?"

"I wanted you to have a normal life. That wasn't possible if you had to visit your criminal brother once a week."

She pulled away and wiped her eyes again. "I don't get it, Dipper. You get these skewed ideas in your head. Why would an estranged brother be any more normal for me than an imprisoned one?" He couldn't answer, and she sighed and leaned on the counter. "I guess that doesn't matter. I guess I'll never know what would run through my head if I was in prison." She put her hand on top of his. "What matters is that you came here. After the last time I drove up there, I got it in my head that I'd never see you again. I always said to Andy, 'if he comes back, we'll put him up in the guest room, right?' But I don't think I ever expected it to happen. I was just saying it to comfort myself." She chuckled, dabbing the last tears from the corners of her eyes. "And then one day you were there, on our doorstep."

Dipper swallowed the lump in his throat. Mabel had built a life here, visible in the photos and the mementos all around them, but Dipper's absence had been an underlying source of suffering for her, and to think that he had caused that filled him with guilt. That guilt swelled when he thought about Stan and Wendy; his parting words with Stan were akin to what he had later said to Mabel, except his uncle, a bitter and hardened man, had bitten back. I feel sorry for you, kid. If you keep acting like this you'll have nobody left. Stan was gone, now – he died in his sleep two years into Dipper's sentence.

As for Wendy, Dipper wondered if she still thought about him. He doubted it. Even when they were together, Wendy had been an independent woman. If nothing else, her move to Denver would have helped her forget Dipper, and Gravity Falls, and the darkness that loomed over her old cabin in the woods.

"The only people I didn't tell to leave me alone were Mom and Dad," he said. A bitter laugh slipped out. "They did that on their own."

"Yeah, well," Mabel said. "They're assholes."

"They're what?"

"Assholes. Screw them."

Dipper couldn't find anything to say.

"Last time I spoke to them must have been... four years ago? Right after Zoey was born, I think."

"Wait, I don't get it. What happened?"

"They neglected you, that's what happened."

"I mean, yeah... but they had a pretty good reason to."

"I don't just mean because they stopped visiting you. I mean because they started acting like you don't exist." She bit her lip and laced her fingers together. "Sorry, I didn't want to tell you about that, but... it was horrible, Dipper. Any time I mentioned your name they went stiff, like if I said it again you'd go poof and appear in the room and ruin dinner."

Dipper thought he had emotionally detached himself from his parents a long time ago, but it still hurt to know that to them, he may as well have been dead.

"And it wasn't just that," Mabel said. "They never took it seriously that you were bipolar. They paid for your therapy, but that was about it. I bet they were thrilled when you told them you wanted to go back to Gravity Falls."

"You can't shun them just because of me, Mabel."

"I can. I have. If anything, it's a precaution. Why would I want my family around people that disowned their son?"

Dipper felt that her logic was somewhat flawed – how could his parents have been a worse role model for Mabel's kids than he was? He didn't say anything, as much as he thought Zoey and Bianca deserved some grandparents, if only for the extra presents at Christmas and on their birthdays. But maybe they had that relationship on Andrew's side. "I'm sorry, Mabel. If I could go back ten years... I wouldn't have gone back to Gravity Falls, I guess I wouldn't have even reconnected with Wendy if I'd known how it would turn out. Things could have been so much more simple for all of us."

Mabel shrugged. "You were in love. I've done plenty of crazy things in love as well."

Dipper almost laughed at how facile that sounded. His sister was beginning to trivialize the severity of what he had done, and he wasn't sure if that was healthy or not. And at the same time, the mention of Wendy had opened up a hole in front him that he couldn't resist digging further into. "Have you heard from her at all?"

Her expression softened and she shook her head. "I haven't spoken to her in a few years, either. Last I did, she was in her final year of college, on track to graduate. She was living in Denver. But, again, this was around the time that I had Zoey, so life was kind of hectic. She never posts anything on Facebook, either. I'm sorry."

"No, don't apologize." He smiled. "I don't know what I wanted to hear, really. I guess it would be nice to know that she's doing well, settled down somewhere."

"She seemed really happy when I did speak to her. And she was gushing over Zoey's baby pictures. Which, um–" she elbowed Dipper playfully – "you have yet to look at, by the way."

Dipper grinned and rolled his eyes. "Go get the baby pictures, then."

"What? No, I didn't mean right now. We're having a serious discussion."

"Yeah, and we're done with it. My head hurts. Go on, go get the baby photos."

Mabel stood up straight, her eyes wide, beyond excitement. "Are you sure?"

"Yes!"

She scurried out of the kitchen, paused in the doorway. "Wait, just Zoey's? Or Bianca's too?"

"All of them. All the family vacation photos, too."

Mabel beamed, and clapped her hands together loud enough to wake up her whole family, and then they all spent a couple of hours in the living room, photo albums spread out over the carpet, the girls elated to be up past ten o'clock, competing for Dipper's attention, Andrew watching them with a sleepy smile on his face, even though he'd be up at four in the morning to go to work.

And in the weeks that followed, life continued in the same vein. Andrew only worked for six months a year, and when he was working, he spent his weekdays and weeknights in L.A. This was a constant strain on their marriage, though having witnessed how mushy they could be around each other on weekends, Dipper wasn't the least bit concerned that that strain would have any real effect. Mabel talked a lot about their plan to move further south along the coast, once she could tear herself away from San Francisco. She worked from home full-time, and she mentioned to Dipper at least a hundred times a day how glad she was to have him around – she got twice the amount of work done when the kids were too busy playing games with him to distract their mom.

Zoey and Bianca had become his best friends, essentially. He made them their lunch, he took them to the park, and he was invited to all of their tea parties (except the all-girl tea parties, although every all-girl tea party thus far had undergone a reconsideration midway through, in which the majority of the stuffed animals present had voted in favor of allowing boys in again).

He spent many a Saturday evening up late around the dining table with Mabel and Andrew, trading banter with Mabel like they hadn't missed a day and with Andrew like they'd been friends for years. On sunny afternoons, he walked down to the beach, and gradually became re-acclimated to the general public, learned to ignore his self-involved paranoia that everybody everywhere was watching him. He stood on the shore, the autumn winds cold but not unpleasant, and watched the water until it reminded him of the lake in Gravity Falls, at which point he would turn around, trek back up the hill, and find a chore to do in the house to keep his mind away from such things.

And while on the surface his adjustment to life as a free man was going well, there was something keeping him awake at night that he couldn't quite put his finger on. Though he paid little attention to the exact date, he knew it was December. He had been released on October 14. That meant he had been a part of the Hollis household for at least six weeks, which must have been well beyond what the average person would consider overstaying their welcome. He replayed in his head every conversation he had had that day, trying to pick up on subtle hints he hadn't noticed the first time round, but – save for the curious stares from the kids on the first couple of days – Mabel's family had not made him feel anything other than welcome. They never asked him where he was planning on going next, what he was planning to do. And when he had convinced himself he was only entertaining the paranoia that Mabel kept scolding him for, he fell asleep.

That Friday morning, he slipped on yesterday's clothes and stumbled down the stairs to breakfast, pausing before the kitchen doorway to rub the sleep from his eyes and put on a smile that might match the bizarre early-bird energy of his sister and his nieces. Mabel was in her bright pink robe chopping up an apple and Zoey was at the counter eating cereal. They chirped 'good morning' in unison. He could hear Bianca in the living room, shouting at cartoon characters on the TV.

He sat down opposite Zoey and took the box of Lucky Charms. As he poured them into a bowl, he noticed Zoey had stopped chewing, and she stared at him, a drop of milk running down her chin.

Dipper grinned. "Uh oh," he said. "Did I pour too much?"

Zoey did not look amused.

"I'll buy some more when I'm at the store later, 'kay?"

"They're supposed to only have that once a month," Mabel said. "As a treat."

Dipper waited until Mabel's back was turned, then winked at Zoey. "I'll buy more later," he whispered.

But Zoey folded her arms and said, "well, you ate all the Pop-Tarts and you didn't put them back."

Mabel spun around, one hand on her hip. "What did you just say? Don't speak to your uncle like that."

Zoey, apparently caught off guard by her mother's sternness, burst into tears, jumped down from her stool, and ran out of the kitchen. Mabel rolled her head back and shut her eyes, flinched slightly at the muffled sound of a door slamming upstairs. Dipper watched the whole fiasco in mild shock. "She didn't– like, it's okay, she didn't offend me or anything."

"I know, but I don't want her speaking to you like that. I don't want her speaking to anyone like that. She's getting a little too sassy." Mabel came over to the counter, scratched her head, and sighed. "Maybe I was being too hard on her. I'm gonna go talk to her."

Suddenly, it was obvious. Sure, nobody had outright told Dipper that his extended visit was disrupting their lives, but there had been other small moments like this that he had caused, unintentionally. A couple of weeks ago Andrew had called the landline and told the girls they would have to postpone their trip to the zoo that Saturday, because he had to stay in Los Angeles and work, and Zoey said it was fine, Dipper could take them; Dipper took them lots of places, now. Sometimes when Bianca came into the living room in the evening Mabel would fuss over her and pat her lap, but Bianca would wander right past her and climb up on Dipper instead.

This home, and these children, were not his life. He didn't necessarily have a life right now, but as a free man, as an adult of twenty-seven, it was his responsibility to go out and find one, instead of becoming a permanent add-on to someone else's. He glanced down at the colorful cereal that had caused this epiphany, and finding that the appetite he had built up overnight had vanished, he poured every morsel back into the box, and washed the bowl in the sink. He traipsed into the living room and sat on the floor next to Bianca. Some kind of Dora the Explorer knockoff was on the TV, a kid wandering through the Arctic, and Dipper's mind drifted back to Alaska, the lonely cabin on a snow-covered plain. He didn't think he wanted something that solitary anymore, and perhaps it would do him good to leave behind the busyness of the city. He needed somewhere in-between, then.

Of course, he knew exactly the place.

Dipper woke that Sunday morning before sunrise, and quietly packed his clothes in a trash bag. He tiptoed down the stairs in his socks and didn't switch any lights on until he reached the kitchen. He sat down at the counter and drummed a pen on a notebook, scolding himself for not outlining sooner all of the things he wanted to say. He spent fifteen minutes, then signed his name, and left it at that – he didn't have all morning. He stashed the box of Lucky Charms he had bought the night before in the pantry, and a box of Pop-Tarts in the breadbox.

He opened the curtains in the living room and paced in circles in the dim glow from the streetlight outside, pausing to gaze at photographs or to pick up a toy the girls had left on the floor. His heartbeat was irregular – every time he heard the softest noise, he spun around to look at the doorway, expecting one of the kids to be standing there and to scream at the sight of a man wandering around in the dark. The most recent photo of them was on top of the mantelpiece, and Dipper lingered there the longest. Simply the sight of his nieces, frozen in time, birthday cake in their hands, it was enough for him to consider turning around, tearing up the note in the kitchen, going back up to bed and emptying the trash bag out into the chest of drawers. It was unbelievable, he thought, just how fond you could become of children in a matter of weeks.

But the light in the room grew brighter, and Dipper watched out the window as a pair of headlights stopped outside the house. He blinked away the tears forming in his eyes, grabbed the bag off the floor, and opened and closed the front door as softly as he could. The taxi took him back to the bus station, and at 6:30 A.M. he boarded the Greyhound to Medford, Oregon.

The bus was at a rest stop on the side of the Interstate when he got the call from his sister. He was sitting on a metal picnic bench beside a block of toilets. The sun was low in the sky, but warm on his face already. He answered his phone, said "hey," but for a moment all he could hear on the other end of the line were shallow breaths.

"Where are you?" Mabel said quietly.

Dipper glanced around – squinting in the sun – at a sprawling landscape of hills, dotted with dry shrubbery and trees. "I'm not sure," he said. "About three hours out of San Francisco."

There was another delay before she spoke. Dipper knew that there were a lot of things she wanted to say, none of them very friendly, but she was taking the time to be diplomatic. "You're on the bus?"

"It's at a stop right now. But yeah."

"How could you not say goodbye?"

"Because I knew you would have convinced me to stay."

"You're damn right I would. Dipper, why go back there, of all places?"

He had written in the note on her kitchen counter that he was headed to the Mystery Shack. "I'm not planning on sticking around," he said, truthfully. "My old stuff is still in the attic, right?"

She sighed. "Yeah, unless Ford has cleared it out. He stays at the Shack when he's in Gravity Falls, you know. He might even be there right now. And what about your parole? Surely your parole officer isn't going to like that you're leaving your family to go hang around in the town that you... you know. Where it happened."

"It's like I said, I won't stay there for long. I just need some time to pick up where I left off, I guess. Figure out what to do next. It would be hard to do that while I'm in your house because I'd just be thinking about staying there forever, lazing around, eating your food."

She tutted. "For god's sake, Dipper, it's not like you were freeloading. You've been worth your weight in gold, looking after the girls."

"That's part of the problem, though. I'm their uncle. I'm not supposed to be, like, a daily thing for them. It makes me feel like I'm stealing their attention away from Andrew. Look, you know that I love those two to death, and I'm forever in debt to you and Andrew for letting me stay, but the longer I do stay, the more I'm going to disrupt your lives. They're not my lives to disrupt. It's your family."

"That doesn't make any sense, Dipper."

"It–" he pinched his temples – "it does, in my head. I think it will make sense if you really think about it, too."

She was quiet again. "The girls are going to be downstairs any minute now. What am I supposed to tell them?"

"Tell them that I'll be back to visit very soon."

"And will you?"

The fact that she doubted him made his heart sink. "Of course I will."

"Well how am I supposed to trust that when I can't even trust you to say goodbye properly?" she said, her voice wavering.

Dipper rubbed his forehead. Here he was again, the weight of rash decisions catching up to him. "Mabel, I promise you I will come back soon. I'll even tell you when – the weekend before Christmas. I'll bring presents for everyone. I'll even dress up in that fucking Santa suit Stan had in his closet. You remember that? He used to drive around the neighborhood throwing boxes onto people's lawns, but when they opened the boxes there was just a coupon for the Mystery Shack inside?"

Mabel laughed, and sniffled. "Yeah, I remember. Please don't wear that, you'll only freak the girls out. Bianca was terrified when Andy dressed up as Santa."

"I mean... she's a smart kid. Santa's creepy. An old man watching your every move for a year and then breaking into your house at the end of it? No thank you." He looked up, and noticed the short stream of elderly backpackers boarding the bus. "Hey, Mabel, I think the bus is about to move again. I'd better go."

"Okay. Call me when you get there, okay? Please."

"I will."

"I love you, Dipper."

"I love you too. Tell the kids I love them. And... Andrew, too. Not in a gay way, though."

She snorted. "Goodbye, Dipper."