A/N: Hey! Welcome to Part Two: Our Getting Better, which inadvertently sounds like the title of a Scrubs episode. I just did a quick Google search to make sure it isn't actually the title of a Scrubs episode.

So you're all aware, there are 8 chapters left, including this one. Thank you, as always, for reading and reviewing.

PART TWO: OUR GETTING BETTER

I've never been one to longingly gaze at the clock while I'm at work. Most days, I'm content to slave away until Lindsay reminds me that my shift is over, and the diner's usually too busy for me to keep track of time anyway.

I know why today is different, though it's a little embarrassing to admit. It's different because Mabel is at my apartment, and while we've only been apart for a grand total of eight hours, I'm looking forward to seeing her. Now, how did that happen?

Things have been different since our candid chat after dinner, two nights ago. After I had overcome the devastating imagery of Mabel being shoved around, and then cried a little when she lifted her shirt and showed me the bruises on her back, all of the resentment that had hung over us during our pursuit of Ford's final words just sort of disintegrated. I can breathe easily around her now. Last night, we ate ice cream on the couch and teamed up on one of those giant crossword puzzles. That's it. That's all we did. And I had more fun than I usually would at any party.

We haven't talked at all about her returning to the Mystery Shack. As far as I'm concerned, I have an available room, she's recovering from a traumatic experience, and neither of us enjoy being alone. Seems like a no-brainer to me.

My apartment has never been squalid, by any means, but I certainly wouldn't say it has been clean since... well, since I viewed the place, when it was full of somebody else's furniture. I like to leave clothes on the floor so that I'm always a few steps away from switching up my outfit. You could call it living on the edge. Nina was persistent about keeping the place in order for the first six months that she lived there, then she gave up.

When I walk into my living room this afternoon, I nearly drop my keys on the carpet in shock. I feel like I've stepped into a montage at the end of one of those home makeover shows. The carpet is freshly vacuumed, the end table by the door that I usually dump my keys on now actually has room for my keys, the barricade of shoes between the door and the couch has been rearranged in the corner. Several pairs that I thought I'd lost one half of have been reunited; my bunny slippers that I'd lost entirely have magically reappeared.

"Holy shit," I blurt out, my eyes hovering over the rest of the room and the equally monumental changes.

The supposed culprit spins around in the kitchen and yanks out her earbuds, a spray bottle in her rubber-gloved hands. "Hey hey hey," Mabel says, chipper as ever. "What do you think?"

"What did you do?"

She raises one shoulder. "I cleaned it."

I take off my heels and set them beside the others, fighting the habit to fling them at the back of the couch. The carpet feels nice between my toes as I venture further into the unfamiliar space. "Mabel, it's incredible. The TV is all shiny."

"You like it," she says, exhaling loudly. "For a moment there I thought I'd overstepped."

"No, it's great." I look over at her leaning on the breakfast counter, and frown. "But why?"

"Cabin fever. I told you I should be back at work. Did you speak to Lindsay today?"

I walk up to the other side of the counter and sigh. "She still thinks you need time. I tried to tell her you were ready to come back but she doesn't agree. And frankly, neither do I. Whenever I'm going through something... difficult, it usually takes me at least a week before I can function like a human again."

"But it doesn't make any sense. Why would I want to sit around by myself all day and let my brain implode? Working keeps me distracted. Hence-" she gestures to the sparkling kitchen appliances- "shininess."

I think about it for a moment. She really does seem like my polar opposite, sometimes. "I'll call Lindsay tonight. Let her know about the shininess." I smile at her. "That bruise is healing fast."

"I know! When I looked in the mirror this morning I almost didn't recognize myself. I think I was starting to get used to it."

I peer over her shoulder at the stove and frown even harder than before, if that was possible. "What's bubbling?"

"I started dinner," she says, turning back to a cooking pot and stirring. "Only I don't know a lot of recipes, so you're getting my famous spaghetti bolognese. And I used to say that in an Italian accent, but Dipper told me it was so far from accurate that it was offensive, so I stopped doing that."

"It's not even four o'clock," I point out, moving around the counter and peering into the pillar of steam above the pot.

"I know, but yesterday when you got home we busted open that giant bag of chips, and then the ice cream. And while I have no regrets, we can't make a habit out of that or we'll both be signing up for fat camp."

"What is this?" I ask, holding up some kind of vegetable. "Did I have this?"

"No, I went to the store. That's also where I got these," she says, waving her gigantic yellow gloves. "I know what you're thinking, but it was fine. It made the checkout girl a little uncomfortable, but that was all. Plus I had my shades on when I was outside."

I relax against the counter as she continues to clean it. "You're a lot braver than I am."

"No I'm not." She points the spray bottle at me. "You were not supposed to be home yet. I was going to have dinner all laid out for you."

"A clean apartment and my dinner on the table? I've always wanted a housewife."

"Then that is what I shall be," she says, but her grin eventually gives way to something more serious. "Honestly, this is the least I could do. You've been so good to me. I really want to thank you."

My insides knot up, caught off guard by the warmth. "It isn't totally selfless. Believe it or not, I like having you around."

By the time I've finished my shower, Mabel's serving bolognese onto two plates at the counter. I whip my wet hair a few times and sigh in contentment. "It's like a hotel in there," I tell her. "And not a trashy one, either. I've never felt cleaner in my life."

My stomach sinks a little when I spot the bottle of wine and the two glasses beside our plates. Mabel picks it up and tips it in my direction.

"None for me," I say, taking my glass to the refrigerator. "But I'll drink water out of the glass so you can pretend you're not drinking alone."

"I stopped at the Shack earlier to pick up some more of my stuff, and I found this in the kitchen. Figured I'd gone too long without a drink. Are you sure you don't want any?"

"I'm sure." I take my place in the stool opposite her. "You, um, went back to the Shack?"

"Yeah," she sighs. "It was a little weird walking up the driveway. My heart was pounding, like I expected him to still be inside. And then when I was inside it just felt... empty."

"Do you know when Stan's supposed to come back?"

"Nope. Last I heard, he was in Mexico. No idea why Ford sent him there. He calls my parents from time to time."

"Hmm." I pick up my fork and dig into the spaghetti, and my taste buds explode. "Oh my god, Mabel. This is amazing."

"You like it? It's been my go-to meal all throughout college. You get pretty good when you cook the same recipe five-hundred times."

Mabel shovels a substantial forkful of spaghetti in her mouth without a second thought, and I have to fight to hold in laughter. It's funny to watch her eat like a slob after spending her whole day being a clean freak.

"So I'm going out tonight," she says, taking a swig of wine.

"Oh yeah? Where?"

"To the theater. I should clarify, I'm breaking in to the theater. Not watching a play. And you're welcome to come, I just didn't want to ask you because you've done so much for me already."

I try to push down the ridiculous ounce of hurt that she would willingly go without me. "I'll come. Don't want you to fall off the roof or anything trying to get inside."

"Cool. Wendy's going to help us too. I spoke to her earlier."

I nod. Makes sense - Wendy often tells the story of how she managed to break into a museum in London once. And while I drunkenly laughed along to it the first three times, after the tenth recital it became a little unsettling. A small-town theater will be a piece of cake for her.

She pulls up in her van outside the theater as recklessly as she usually drives, almost crushing my foot under her front tire.

"You're late," I tell her, and she is. Mabel and I have been shivering in our hoodies for half an hour, the climate having clearly forgotten that it's July.

"Sorry guys," Wendy says, coming around the front of the van in a t-shirt and shorts. "My dad wouldn't let me borrow his gun."

"His- Jesus, Wendy, we didn't need a gun."

"What if there's a security guard?"

I gape at her but she squeezes my cheek and grins.

"I'm kidding. Lighten up." She turns to Mabel. "Hey, little dude," she says warmly, and wraps her up in a hug. "How are you doing?"

"I'm okay," Mabel says into her shoulder. "Just trying to stay distracted. Even if it means becoming a criminal in the process."

"I'm pretty sure nobody uses this place anyway," Wendy says, leaning back on her van and pulling out her cigarettes. "And by the way - still mad at you guys for not taking me to your old house, P. What the heck? Breaking into an abandoned building, and you didn't think to call me."

I shrug. "Sorry. It wasn't much of a challenge. We just hopped a gate and the doors to the house were open."

Wendy exhales a cloud of smoke and eyes the building fifty feet behind us. "Yeah. This'll be a lot tougher," she says, pacing to the gravel path leading up to the theater.

It's an old building - two stories tall, made up of weathered brick, black-out windows at the front. To its right, down the street, sits an equally worn down warehouse. Like a lot of places in this town, the theater is surrounded by overgrown plots of grass, and backs onto an infinite expanse of forestry. The sun is setting somewhere behind the trees, but it's totally obstructed by thick clouds, washing the theater and its courtyard in a dull gray color.

Wendy stops halfway up the path and places a hand on her chin, like she's appraising a house.

"This could take a while," I murmur to Mabel.

She nudges my shoulder. "Let her do her thing."

"Her thing? Watch her walk right up to the front door and try to open it."

We follow Wendy further up the path and come to the glass double doors. She lifts her hand to her forehead to peer inside, and then pushes the door, but it doesn't budge. Mabel smirks and swats my shoulder before I can say anything.

"Let's walk around the back," Wendy says. "They might have left a door unlocked."

I glance behind us, back at the street, suddenly feeling way out of my depth. This has always been a problem of mine - blindly following along on other people's adventures and then waking up halfway through, wondering how on earth I got there. I'm banking on a door being unlocked, because I'm not actually about to break into a building, am I?

The side of the theater is one long stretch of brick, no windows. Near the end, we come across the back of a fire exit, one of those gray, metallic doors. Wendy, in her infinite wisdom, steps back and charges at it with her shoulder, but bounces off with a clang that echoes around the woods.

"For god's sake, Wendy," I say. "Are you trying to get us arrested?"

She swivels her head around pointedly. "Do you see anyone out here that's gonna arrest us?"

Before I can respond to that, Wendy rams the door a second time and accomplishes nothing but creating more noise.

"Stop! You're gonna break your shoulder."

"Unlikely," she says, which is true. Growing up as a lumberjack's daughter - swinging axes the size of her head - has left her with a lot of bulk in her upper arms. I have no doubt that with a little persistence she could break this door off its hinges, but with Mabel standing idly by, I'm clearly the brains of this operation - or at least the most lawful person here.

"Let's just wrap around back to the front. If we don't find any easy way in, we'll have to leave and come up with a better idea. Remember that Ford's already been here, and he definitely wouldn't be doing... this," I say, gesturing to the dent in the door.

The back wall of the building is lined with what I can only assume are old props and backdrops, most of which look like they've been disintegrating for years in the sun and the rain. Halfway along this wall, there's a small wooden door that looks older than the building itself, chipped at the corner, almost inviting us to break in. There's no handle on this side - just a keyhole.

"This looks more promising," Wendy says, stepping up to it, but I grab her arm.

"Do not break the door down."

"I'm not gonna break anything." She pulls a thin metal rod out of her pocket - like a straightened paperclip, but sturdier. "I'm gonna pick the lock."

"You don't know how to pick locks."

"Sure I do."

"Since when?"

"Since forever," she says, kneeling on the concrete and peeking into the keyhole.

"Then how come I'm only just hearing about it?"

She turns to me and frowns like I'm the dumbest person on Earth. "Because we've never needed to pick a lock until now."

Mabel looks at me and shrugs. "Can't argue with that."

We don't hear a peep from Wendy for a good five minutes. She calls us back over to the door, and pushes it open with smugness oozing from her face. A smell that I can only describe as church-like emanates from inside. I scrunch up my nose - I only really associate churches with funerals. Mabel high-fives Wendy and saunters into the dark without a care in the world, and Wendy follows her. By the time I've surveyed the area to make sure we're not being watched, they've already found the light switch and begun looking around inside. I leave the door wide open behind us, in case I get terrified enough to bolt.

I count two dressing rooms, a kitchen, a back office, and two storage rooms full of props and musical instruments. Zero rats, zero spiders, zero ghosts. The place isn't as decrepit as I thought it would be; I find a playbill for a local theater group's rendition of Hamlet that debuted only three months ago.

The three of us walk around silently on our own curious investigations of the backstage area, and then Mabel finds the rope to pull apart the giant red curtains, opening up to a hundred empty seats, but she stops halfway through and walks out to the gap in the curtains.

I eye her curiously. "You alright?"

"Oh my god," she says, to the nonexistent audience. "Holy crap, I've been here before. I mean I put on a play here before."

"You did?"

"Yeah," Wendy says, coming up behind us. "The puppet opera."

"My sock opera," Mabel adds, turning to me and beaming.

"Sock... what?"

"We knitted ourselves as sock puppets," Wendy tells me. "It was creepy as hell. Then Mabel wrote this ridiculously long script and performed an entire rock opera with sock puppets. A sock opera."

I frown at Mabel. "Were you high? How come I've never heard about this?"

"I'd honestly forgotten all about it. The whole thing was to impress some guy who turned out to be a fruitcake." She shrugs and points at her eye. "I have poor taste in men."

Wendy widens her eyes at me when Mabel turns back to the auditorium. I'm glad I'm not the only one mildly shocked that she dropped that joke so casually.

"Mabel," I say, "Ford's clue said something about socks."

"That's right, it did." She pulls the slip of paper from the pockets of her hoodie. "You'll find me in the theater, right beneath your socks."

Wendy glances around. "Did you leave any of the puppets here?"

"I don't think so... no, they all got destroyed, remember? We had to throw them in the trash. Poor Sock Mabel. She was so innocent."

I tap my foot on the stage a couple of times, letting the sound flutter around the theater. "Your sock puppets were up here. So right beneath your socks..." I point to the hatch in the center of the stage.

Mabel clicks her fingers and points at me. "You're smart, I knew there was a reason we brought you along."

I hunch my shoulders. "I'm the brains."

"Ooh! That's fun. What am I?"

"You're the looks."

She kneels down beside the hatch and squeezes her face. "Yay!"

"What am I?" Wendy says.

"You're the one that nobody really wants to be around."

She punches my shoulder, hard.

"Ow! Okay, you're the muscle. Geez."

"Sweet. Can I be the charm, too?"

"What? No, you only get one role."

"Says who?"

"Says every trio ever."

"Um, hello? Hermione was the looks and the brains."

"That's true, but you're definitely not a Hermione."

"I can be a Hermione."

"No, you're more of a Ron Weasley."

"Why am I a Ron Weasley?!"

"You're the dumb redhead that nobody really respects."

"Okay, you are getting on my friggin' nerves tonight, P." Wendy wrestles me into a headlock while I choke out my laughter.

"Guys," Mabel says, poking her head up through the hatch and placing a toolbox on the stage. A cloud of dust attacks her face and she coughs it away. "Check it out, there's a note on top. Only to be opened by Mabel Pines. If you need to move this box, please return to its original position at your earliest convenience. Thank you."

"Oh shit," Wendy says, releasing me. "That sounds like Ford, alright."

"Yeah," Mabel says, and then she just stands there, half-underground, staring at the unopened toolbox. After a moment Wendy and I sit down either side of her. "I get so nervous every time I'm about to open these. Like, this could be it. Right here."

Wendy's face softens and she picks up Mabel's hand. "We're right here for you, dude."

I take her other hand, and she smiles gratefully up at both of us. "I, um, I can't open it now."

"Why not?"

"No, I mean, you're holding my hands. I literally can't open it."

"Oh," I say. "Right." We each let go of her hands.

Mabel places her palm on the lid of the toolbox, and then swiftly flips it open. Her face lights up; she reaches into the box and slips a crude sock puppet onto her hand, a relatively giant pair of glasses taped to its front, and gray hair drawn on with a marker pen.

"Aww," Wendy says. "That's so sweet."

I resist the temptation to say something negative about the handiwork. Mabel sets the puppet down at her side and pulls out a sheet of paper, straightens it out on the stage, and shuts the toolbox.

"Here's my attempt. What do you think? You can be honest. I'll try not to be too offended."

Mabel frowns at the page. "That's all it says." She turns it over, and on the back we're confronted by a maze, drawn in the same gray marker with edges so neat that it looks printed. Without a word we help Mabel out from underneath the stage and follow her to the small office we found on our way in. The maze itself isn't at all difficult to solve - within a minute of finding a pen Mabel finds the way through.

She holds it up to the light on the ceiling. There isn't a whole lot of sense to it - we now have a line zig-zagging through gaps in other lines seemingly at random.

Wendy's the first to vocalize her confusion. "What if that isn't part of the clue? What if he was just eating at Chuck E. Cheese's and that was the only paper they had for him to write on?"

Mabel rotates the page around so that we see it from every angle, then drops it on a desk and exhales. "My head hurts."

"Hey, we've figured everything out so far," I tell her. "We'll figure this out too. It's only a matter of time."

"How long do you have left in Gravity Falls?" Wendy asks.

Mabel shrugs. "The semester starts some time in September. So... six weeks?"

"That's plenty of time. You said Dipper finished this in two weeks, right?"

"Yeah, but Dipper is a lot smarter than I am."

"That's not true," Wendy says, putting an arm around her and guiding her back towards the stage. "Besides, you have Pacifica. She's a wizard at puzzles."

Their voices drown out as I stare down at the page. I study the maze at every possible angle, mentally explore some of the unvisited routes leading off the main path, but nothing stands out at all. A sense of dread washes over me, not unlike how I felt when we found that jumbled up map under the water tower. What if this is it? What if nobody ever finds the solution, and Mabel never finds her uncle's last words? That would eat me up inside.

When I rejoin my friends, they've closed the hatch in the stage, and Mabel is delivering some kind of Shakespearean monologue to Wendy, her audience of one. When Mabel hears me coming, she pivots and stops talking immediately, like she'd forgotten I was even here. "Hey, you like acting, right?"

"Not... really?"

"Yeah you do. Remember that character you used to play, Miss Chievous?"

My skin flushes and Wendy yells out a laugh from the front row of seats. "What?" she shouts.

I did have a character called Ms. Chievous. She was a stereotypical rich bimbo who slept around a lot and liked to brag about it. But I only liked playing her because whenever I launched into the character, Mabel would act as my timid husband who had trouble keeping his wife in check. And as pathetic as it sounds, I got a thrill out of talking to Mabel like we were in a relationship, no matter how dysfunctional it was, and how real it wasn't. That's all there was to it - it was a silly little game to entertain a crush. I didn't expect her to remember it.

"You weren't supposed to tell anyone about that," I say.

"She was so good," Mabel tells Wendy. "She used to do a voice straight out of Real Housewives."

"You mean her regular voice?"

"Har-har," I say. "Fuck you."

Wendy claps her hands together. "You guys should do a scene from that play."

"What play?"

"Mabel was just talking about a play she was in."

"Yeah," Mabel says, turning to me. "Welcome Back to Your Life. It was an original production we put on in college. I played a girl whose boyfriend - the main character - he comes back from the war, but he's changed so much that the girl doesn't love him anymore. It was so good. I saved part of the script on my phone, actually, I loved it so much." She pulls her phone out of her pocket and starts tapping. "I cried the first time we performed this part on stage, real tears."

"Show me," Wendy says, clapping her hands again. "Show me show me show me."

I plant my hands on my hips and glare at her. "Since when are you so interested in theater?"

"I'm not," she says. "But I love war stories and I love romance stories."

"It isn't really a romance story," Mabel says, looking up from her phone. "My character splits up with the protagonist and he doesn't find anybody new by the end of the script."

"Wow, spoiler alert," Wendy calls out.

"Here," Mabel says, handing me the phone. "You can be Robert. I'm Katrina."

"Oh, so this is happening? I have no say in this?"

"It'll be fun! Take a moment, breathe some air, close your eyes. Try and get into the mind of Robert. You've been home for four weeks. Five of your closest friends - including your best friend, your best friend from birth - they all died by your side, on the battlefield. Every time you close your eyes you hear the gunfire, and the explosions, and the screaming. You've had three hours of sleep over two days and you're just finding out that your high school sweetheart has been spending a lot of time with an older man who lives down the street, both while you were away, and since you have come home. Now open your eyes, and read the first line."

My eyes flutter open to the back of Mabel's head. I look down at the phone. "Did you sleep with him?" Jesus, what a place to start.

She paces further along the stage, her arms folded, her back to me. "Does it matter?"

"What do you mean does it matter? Of course it fucking matters!"

"Why?" she yells, turning back to me. "I've already told you how much time I've spent with him, isn't that enough? Why do I have to spell it out for you, Rob?"

I'm so entranced by the emotion on her face that I forget to look at the phone. "Whoa. Shit."

The girl switches straight back to Mabel, and tilts her head. "That isn't in the script."

"She's improvising," Wendy says.

"Yeah," I laugh. "I'm improvising."

"Shall we take it from the top?" Mabel says, ignoring us.

"Okay. Okay, I got this."

We repeat the four lines I was able to get through, and I don't stumble backwards at her reaction this time.

"Just answer the fucking question, Katrina," I say.

"Yes," Mabel says, pinching her forehead, feigning exasperation. "Yes, I slept with him."

"So you cheated on me?"

Her expression softens as she looks up at me. "You were thousands of miles away."

"And that makes it okay?"

"No," she says. "No, but... you just don't get it, Rob, you don't know how hard it was for me, how lonely I felt."

"How hard it was for you?" I'm surprised at how much anger I've just plucked out of nowhere. "You wanna talk about loneliness? Try walking back to your camp in the black of night, through mud, and rain, and blood, and corpses, try witnessing your friend's body explode into pieces, and then having to shut your eyes and sleep that night, so you have enough energy to wake up at the crack of dawn the next day, just so you can do it all over again!"

"And I never asked you to do any of that!" Mabel shrieks. "You knew what you were signing up for when you enlisted, you knew that despite all of the horrible things, that was the life that you wanted, and I had to bite down on my tongue so fucking hard, so that I wouldn't get in your way. I never asked for you to leave, did I? I never asked you to leave me here."

"You told me you'd love me forever. You said you'd be here for me when I got home."

"I was eighteen, Rob. You were nineteen. What did either of us know back then?"

"We knew that we were in love. Isn't that enough? We still are in love, we can make this work, Katrina."

"No, we can't. We're two completely different people, now."

"That doesn't matter if we still love each other." I freeze up reading the next part of the script - there's a little snippet of scene direction. I look up at Mabel. "Is that the end?"

"No," Mabel says, as if trying to keep her patience. "There's a little more. You were doing so good!"

I glance down at the phone again, look over at Wendy, who is literally on the edge of her seat, and back to Mabel. "It says here I'm supposed to kiss you."

Wendy laughs. "You hesitated at a lesbian kiss?"

I glower down at her. "It wouldn't be a lesbian kiss, I'm playing a dude."

"Oh yeah."

"It's only acting," Mabel says. "This is the emotional climax of the scene, this is the tearjerker."

I look back at the screen, totally at a loss for words. I can't decide if kissing her would be heavenly or torturous.

"Can I try?" Wendy says, and it's hard to tell whether she's bailing me out or if she does actually want a turn.

"Be my guest," I tell her, practically leaping off the stage and handing her the script.

I relax into the chair that Wendy warmed up for me and let my heartbeat simmer back to a regular pace. I made the right choice, I think. Kissing Mabel has never resulted in anything good in the past.

Wendy offers a lot more conviction to the role than I did, which surprises me. They repeat the scene from the top and when it comes to the kiss, Wendy doesn't wait around. She cups Mabel's face in her hands and darts right in, and I assume it's part of the script that Mabel gives in to the kiss for a few seconds, her eyes fluttering closed before she wakes up and pushes Wendy away.

"Well I don't love you," Mabel says, convincingly teary-eyed. She turns around and hurries behind the curtain, and after a couple of seconds she calls out, "and scene." I applaud them both as Mabel walks back into view and bows.

"And you call yourself straight," I say to Wendy. "That was the gayest thing I've ever seen!"

"It's called acting, P. Don't be jell."

She's kind of right. Out of all the emotions settling in my stomach, jealousy prevails, which is very inappropriate. The worst part is I can't decide which one of them I'm jealous of most. I know firsthand that while kissing Mabel is playing with fire, she's up there among the best kissers I've ever laid my hands on. And then there's a part of me that has always been curious about kissing Wendy. Can't help that - the girl exudes passion. And I've always been like that anyway - if I'm friends with a girl, I'm eventually going to wonder what it would be like to smother them with my mouth, and occasionally I'll lack the self-control to stop myself from actually doing so. It's just because I have so much love to give. That's my excuse and I'm sticking with it.

We leave the theater exactly how we found it, to our best memory, aside from the toolbox that Mabel carries out in her arms, Ford's sock puppet and maze tucked inside. Unless we were caught by hidden cameras, there's no trace of us ever being there. Night has fallen, and we follow the path back to the road through the moonlight.

"That was fun," Wendy says, when we're back at her van. "Let me know when you figure out what building we're breaking into next."

"He really was a bit of a hooligan in his dying days," Mabel says. "I hope it doesn't escalate. What if he tells me to rob a bank or something?"

"Then we rob a bank."

I lower my brows at Wendy. "I don't think we do."

"We should do something fun though, Mabel, while you're here," Wendy says. "Maybe a night out in Portland."

Mabel gasps. "I would love to. It's been so long since I've gone out with just my friends."

Wendy hugs her from the side and both of their eyes turn on me. "We can catch up with Nina as well, can't we?" Wendy says.

"Yeah," I say, much quieter than intended.

Mabel's eyes soften. "What's wrong? You don't wanna go?"

"No, I will. But I'll probably skip the, um- the night out part."

Wendy frowns. "What? Don't be dumb, you'll be fine. We'll keep an eye out for you."

"Why would we have to keep an eye out for her?" Mabel asks, all innocence.

"God dammit, Wendy."

Wendy lets go of Mabel and looks between the two of us, confused. "Wait, P, you haven't told her? Oh, I'm sorry, I assumed-"

"It's fine. I, um, I have a little bit of an alcohol problem."

Mabel's reaction is pure sympathy, which for some reason doesn't feel patronizing coming from her.

"But it's under control. I don't drink anywhere near as much as I used to. And I'm trying to get sober completely. It can be a little difficult if everybody's drinking right under my nose, but it's fine. I'll deal with it."

"Well we won't go out drinking then," Mabel says. "We can do other stuff. We could see a movie. Or go bowling."

"It's fine, really. I can control myself. I'll survive on Coca-Cola."

"Are you sure?"

"Positive. It'll be fun, anyway. I haven't had a night out in a while either. Unless you count... this."

"We definitely don't count this," Wendy says, hugging me from the side now. I'd ask her if she's drunk right this instant, but I think she's just happy to be around friends. Being a prolific partygoer, she has a lot of acquaintances in the area, and not a lot of people she's close with.

Wendy gives Mabel and I a ride back to my apartment. I'm tired enough to go to bed right away, so I brush my teeth and drink a glass of water over the sink. Mabel asks me if she needs to hide the bottle of wine she was guzzling at dinner, but I tell her no, I'm not that impulsive, even though that isn't true whatsoever.

At about 2 A.M. I wake up with my bladder complaining, and notice the strip of light under my bedroom door. I throw on a shirt and open the door. Once my eyes have adjusted to the overhead light in the kitchen, I find Mabel's body flopped over the counter, sleeping peacefully, her cheek pressed into the sheet of paper out of Ford's toolbox. There's a notebook just beside it, where she has scribbled zigzagging lines and other doodles that appear to be unrelated to the puzzle. I might just be hazy from sleep, but a strong feeling of admiration washes over me. I tuck a few long strands of hair behind her ear and give in to the temptation to stroke it. Impossibly silky. Talk about winning the genetic lottery.

She doesn't wake up until I shake her shoulder - gently, because I'm terrified she'll mistake me for Jason. Her eyes open and she sits up, stretches her arms, and looks at me like she can't quite remember why I'm here but she's happy that I am.

"You're welcome to sleep here," I say softly. "But you might have some trouble with your back in the morning."

"Sorry. I must have passed out."

"Made any progress?"

She groans. "No. I've traced the route to every dead-end, and they're all just... squiggly shapes. One of them looks kind of like an 'L', but I don't see what that would have to do with anything."

"Maybe it'll become clearer in the morning."

"Maybe."

Mabel's still at the kitchen counter when I finish up in the bathroom, so instead of going back to bed I stand beside her, poring over the maze again. It doesn't feel right ending the day on such an unsatisfying note.

After five minutes or so she speaks up. "Hey, can I ask you something?"

"Sure."

"When did you start drinking? I mean, when did it start becoming a problem?"

"About three years ago."

She hesitates, drawing something in her notebook. "Because of your dad?"

I glance up at her and she looks back, clears her throat.

"You don't have to answer that if you don't want to."

"No, it's fine. It was... yeah, it was because of that, but it was also because of school. And because I didn't know who I was. And partly because of you, too."

She looks down at her lap, wringing out her hands.

"I'm not blaming you. I just missed you a lot. More than I think you know."

"I missed you, too," she says, her eyes shifting back to me. "I tried to call you when I found out about your dad. But it only rang once and I got your voicemail."

"You could have tried from a different phone," I say, hating myself for saying it. Are you really bringing this up again? At least let her recover from her four years of trauma first. "Sorry. That sounded stupid out loud."

"No, it's... I should have. I was scared of what you would say to me. I knew it had been a year but it still felt so fresh."

"Like if we talked we'd just continue arguing from where we left off."

"Yeah."

And it's true - in the first year that we had no contact I regularly fantasized about what I'dsay to her if she reappeared in Gravity Falls, and it was never very pleasant.

"Pacifica... you can tell me if I'm overstepping, but it sounds like I missed a pretty big chunk of your life while I wasn't here. If you're willing to talk about it, I'd like to listen. You listened to my story, and it helped me a lot."

I nod slowly. Funny how a few weeks ago I wouldn't have trusted her with anything. A smirk tugs at my lips. "Have you got all night?"