sun you've got to hurry
It's Thursday evening and Mabel is wringing every last possible second out of her conversation with Grunkle Stan.
"Then what happened?" she presses.
Grunkle Stan's stories are almost always deliberately vague and at least partially fabricated (no doubt the legacy of a life spent in questionably legal pursuits). She had begun her summer in Gravity Falls pretending to be interested in them, humoring her strange old relative. Now she's milking him for every anecdote he's got just to earn one more minute of his voice coming across the miles of separation.
"Well, brainiac over here was telling me that we had to get up on the iceberg, but it's a freakin' iceberg!"
"Come on, Grunkle Stan, you're a great climber!"
"Maybe when you kids don't give me a choice," he grunts, but she can tell he's amused. "Climbing a scaffold is a little different than climbing a chunk of floating ice."
"Sounds like a job for a grappling hook!" she says, imagining herself being there to save the day with her grappling skills.
"Yeah, if only some little gremlin hadn't taken mine."
"I'm an adorable gremlin, and you weren't even using it! You said I could take whatever I wanted. It's not my fault I'm great at picking out gifts." She rolls over on her bed and props her feet up on the headboard. "Where did you get it from?" she asks, having found another avenue of conversation.
"That old thing? It was, uh… huh." Grunkle Stan goes silent.
The smile is instantly wiped from Mabel's face. Even before Grunkle Ford had discreetly made mention of it she had started to suspect that Grunkle Stan's recovered memory isn't as complete as they had all assumed. He's never misremembered anything from the previous summer: From the moment the twins arrived to the moment they left, he's recalled every major event and plenty of little things. The years just prior to their arrival also seem mostly filled in. But the decade-plus between leaving New Jersey and arriving in Gravity Falls is patchy, at best.
Stan has spent the majority of his life alone, without any close family or confidantes, which makes it difficult, if not impossible, to know exactly what he's missing. The summer can be easily corroborated, an extremely memorable three months for all involved. The thirty years managing the Shack is probably full of forgettable repetition and gaps anyway; Soos can help with roughly a third of that time, and some of the locals with major town events (and the Shack itself is crammed with a million bits of memorabilia). For his childhood, he has Ford. But the years Stan spent on the road, alone and on the run? Some of it is lost, and they'll never be able to know just how much.
Mabel immediately regrets steering him towards that hole in his past. At the same time, there's a hopeful part of her that wonders if it might make him remember something. "Doesn't matter—it's mine now!" she says with forced cheer.
"If there's one thing you two are good at it's helping yourselves to my stuff," Grunkle Stan says, shaking off his momentary lapse easily enough.
"But you have all the best stuff!" she counters. "You have a dinosaur skull for a cup holder. That is so cool and ominous!"
"Heh. Yeah, I'm pretty hip for an old man."
Somewhere in the background, Mabel can hear Grunkle Ford. "The kids don't say 'hip' anymore, Stanley. Even I know that."
"Can it, Ford!" Grunkle Stan pauses for a moment. "Alright, looks like we're ready to move again."
"Wait! Let's talk some more about your stuff! Don't you want to tell me all about how your back hurts? How do you feel about the current political climate? What's your opinions on today's youth fashions?!" she says desperately.
"You know me too well, Mabel, but I gotta go. I'll call you later, pumpkin."
"Byyeeeeeeeeeeee—" she says, holding the note until the phone goes dead.
She goes limp and lies there. It's always hard to hang up (which is why she lets her grunkles do it). She's not despondent or anything; they'll call again soon. But she planned her entire afterschool day around that call and now that it's over she has to think of something else to do. And it's not going to be homework because it's Thursday and she doesn't have anything due until the middle of next week.
She lifts her phone up and scrolls through her messages, just in case she's missed something. She's been extra diligent with her texts lately; she doesn't want anything from Pacifica to go unseen and she makes sure to reply quickly. Pacifica hasn't been very forthcoming about her situation recently. Her texts are either brief and lacking in detail or only interested in what Mabel and Dipper have been doing. Mabel knows Pacifica must be lonely, but she hopes that the worst problem Pacifica faces besides that is boredom.
Which is definitely what Mabel is facing, at the moment.
She groans loudly and slowly slides off her bed, approaching the floor a centimeter at a time until her legs finally succumb to gravity and crash to the carpet with a thud.
"Mabel? Was that you?" Dipper calls out from his bedroom.
She groans even louder by way of response.
Her door swings open as Dipper peeks in. "Are you actually hurt, or are you just being dumb?"
"So bored," she says piteously. "Will to live… leaving."
Dipper sighs and slouches into her desk chair. "Grunkle Stan had to go, huh." He takes off his hat and runs a hand through his hair. "I actually have something we need to talk about."
His tone indicates that the topic, whatever it may be, will not bring the fun. Still, it's better than nothing. "Go on," Mabel says into the carpet.
"Great-Uncle Ford was asking about Mom and Dad. He said he'd like to come see them with Grunkle Stan, especially since he's never met Mom." Dipper pauses. "Hey, do you remember Grandpa?"
Mabel thinks about it for a second. "No, not really," she says.
"Yeah, me neither. Great-Uncle Ford didn't say much when I told him that, but I thought he sounded disappointed."
With a jolt, Mabel realizes that she's never thought about Grandpa and Grunkle Ford. Grandpa had passed away when she'd been too young to even remember what he looked like beyond the pictures of him she's seen. Grunkle Ford has been gone for so long that he's come back to find himself a brother short. Had they been close? Mabel doesn't think so from what she knows; then again, what she knows mostly relates to Grunkle Stan. Stan had been estranged from pretty much everyone in his family save for Mabel's father—although, by the time Dipper and Mabel were in elementary school their father was just about the only family Stan had left. Even then the twins hadn't gotten to know Stan well until they were twelve.
Vacations and holidays have always been nuclear family affairs. Mom is the only child of a single mother and Grandma lives in Florida, so the twins don't see her very often. Grandpa Shermie had been divorced twice and neither of his wives had been the mother of Mabel's father, which is information that Mabel has mostly pieced together from overhearing things, as neither Mom or Dad seem willing to explain just how Grandpa had come to have Dad (Shoot! Mabel should have remembered to ask Grunkle Stan—he would have told her even if it was sketchy adult stuff!). The Pines don't have much in the way of extended family. Mabel doesn't have a single cousin, at least not any that she knows about. It's never bothered her, though, because she's always had Dipper.
"Dad has another uncle and we haven't told him," Mabel laments, pillowing her face on her arms. "We're the worst."
"We kind of are," Dipper unhelpfully agrees.
Mabel doesn't want to be the worst. "How do we tell them, Dipper? Use your smartness!"
Dipper's brain fails to rise to the occasion. "I don't know. There's no good way to do this; if we make something up, we'd have to talk to Great-Uncle Ford about it first. Our stories have to match."
"I thought we could stop lying," Mabel says.
"Well, even if we don't lie, maybe Ford won't want us to talk about the portal. Maybe it's better that nobody knows about it but us. It's just too much, Mabel. Remember when I first found Journal 3? Even you thought I was nuts until Jeff tried to grab you! Gravity Falls just…" Dipper shakes his head helplessly. "It just doesn't make sense. Not anywhere else. Only there."
Mabel turns her head until her cheek is on her elbow. From her position on the floor, her eyes are close enough to the carpet that it stretches away like a great beige plain, half out of focus, the door looming in the distance as a dark-grained horizon. Each little individual carpet piece is detailed, unique; fuzzy, frayed cylindrical grass. Dipper's socks are knitted white hills. She is a giant looking through the vision of someone smaller, a microscope reversed. Up close, the familiar is suddenly alien and new. It makes her think about perspective.
Dipper is right about the portal. They have to talk to Grunkle Ford before they even think about mentioning that to anyone. As for other, more miscellaneous aspects of weirdness, they aren't entirely without evidence.
"We could prove some of it," Mabel says, rolling over until she can see her closet, where her scrapbook is safely stored away. "I've got pictures of Octavia and the Shack robot and we still have the tapes from your guides, right?"
Dipper's face gets very apprehensive. "Do you really want Mom and Dad to watch us almost get eaten by the tooth-island?"
"Okay, so not that tape," Mabel allows. "Although that will be denying them some hiii-larious Bear-O hijinks!"
"So it's a win-win."
Dipper just isn't capable of appreciating Bear-O's sophisticated appeal. "We could show them the little naked man," Mabel says, ignoring him. "He wasn't dangerous. Unless you were made of candy."
Dipper makes a face. "No, but he was naked. I don't know if that's what we want to lead with."
"Then what do we want to lead with?" Mabel says, raising her arms and letting them drop with a thud. She suggested it and she isn't even sure it's a good idea.
"Well… Ford already said he wants to see Mom and Dad…" Dipper says hesitantly. "Maybe we should just let him do it?"
Mabel knows that would be dodging any responsibility, but she is still relieved at the thought of leaving it all up to the grownups. "It was his portal…" she muses.
"And he knows what he wants to say and what he doesn't. We just have to follow his lead," Dipper rationalizes.
"Yeah! Good ol' Grunkle Ford, being a hero." Mabel relaxes for a moment. Then she sits upright and turns to Dipper. "We aren't still being the worst, are we?"
"Not the worst," Dipper says immediately, though he proceeds to slump in his seat a little. "…But definitely not the best."
Mabel collapses again. "We're dumb jerk-faces with butts for hearts."
"I never thought about any of this when we were there. I was so caught up in everything…"
Mabel thinks of her unsent letter, lost in the tumult that destroyed the Shack. She's always thought it was a good thing she never had the chance to mail it, but maybe it would have at least forced a conversation. She doubts the results would have been positive, though. She's just not sure if it's better to maintain a lie and live with the guilt or reveal the truth and suffer the consequences.
The consequences, however, could easily involve not being allowed to return to Gravity Falls. And she can't have that, the weight of her guilt be darned.
"We'll wait and see," Dipper says into the silence, sounding like he's trying to convince himself as much as her.
"Okay," Mabel sighs.
It's not like they aren't already used to waiting.