"Welcome, Pines." The familiar voice echoed across the cavernous space between time. "Mason. Mabel. Stanley. Stanford…And a Northwest."
Pacifica furrowed her brow as the thrawl of eternal flight ended. By now, being called a Northwest instead of a Pines seemed like an outright insult. They floated lamely in the seemingly all-encompassing, low-gravity swirl of cosmic clouds and dust, the infinity belts tethering them like helium balloons.
The silence was deafening. A sort of soundless, eternal space where only your own breathing seemed to perforate the eardrums, where you could hear your own pulse and not a single piece of atmospheric sound from the outside. It was a tranquil, yet foreign sort of silence. It sent every one of them simultaneously on edge, and drowned them in peace and quiet. For the first time in a very chaotic couple of days, they all found themselves free to think. Free to breathe and calm themselves.
And yet, it seemed an almost impossible task, even surrounded as they were by beautiful, gentle swirling colours and lights and deprived of sensory intervention - floating in soft air that felt embracing and cool.
Pacifica blinked as - at a far end of the space - she spotted her guardian. Lazy Susan was innocently sipping a cup of tea on an interdimensional beanbag, holding onto her lap with a certain level of tension - and a particularly perturbed glance into nowhere in particular. Which, considering the current environment, was also everywhere.
"S-Susan!" Pacifica gasped, swimming to the woman with limited success. "A-are you okay?!"
"Heeeeyyy, Pacifica!" Susan smiled. "Ain't the swirling clouds pretty?"
The Northwest heir continued fussing frantically. "Are you hurt? Are you woozy? Dizzy? Sick?"
"Gassy?" Stan threw in. Pacifica wrinkled her nose.
"I'm fiiine." Susan replied, holding Pacifica in her arm warmly. "Just got a headache. This glittery time-tea is helping!"
Ford wrinkled his nose. "That stuff contains a galaxy. You're drinking a galaxy."
Susan blinked, shrugged, and continued drinking.
"Am I being ignored?"
"We can't see you, bud."
"...Right, right."
With an arctic-white glare, the slippery keeper of all time and dimensions appeared, slickly unfolding itself from omnipresence into its tangible form. A thick, glistening pink body decked with blue fins and bright red frills - followed by a gigantic, wide head punctuated by ink-dot eyes and a large red tongue.
The room filled with a scent of water purifier, as if the world that enveloped them was nothing more than his existential aquarium. Bean bags appeared for every member of the family, each one colour-coded, and he swept forward, sweeping a glittery wake behind him as he oriented himself before them. By nature, his expression was blank and almost vacuous in appearance - an empty, staring, continuous look to the heavens that saw all, yet focused on nothing. A fitting presence for an omnipotent amphibian of time and space.
Dipper and Pacifica - both better acquainted with the creature than they cared to admit - still found themselves gazing up in awe at its glistening, smooth presence - a soft, plump body that seemed free of fold or scar. It was a strange, gelatinous vision of interdimensional perfection, mixed with the pure ugliness and otherworldly nature of its species - a silky smooth, almost foetal-looking salamander picked out with ghostly, expressionless features, devoid of obvious thought, of feeling, of hatred and compassion.
Pacifica hadn't even seen an axolotl before. She knew Stan had a pet one, but that one was a jerk and mostly hid under a rock eating gravel.
"You know of me. I know of you.
And I see what you've been going through.
The town you love is now in tatters,
But throughout it all is scattered,
Thoughts of guilt, of time and pain,
Knowledge of a family name."
The creature's plump hands took hold of Pacifica and Dipper's shoulders.
"Oil and water - alas, I see,
You've ruined Northwest destiny.
The world is falling quite apart,
From the love you both did start.
Such power, such strength, all in two.
Will it see a fate anew?"
The two glanced at eachother, unsure whether to be flustered or fearful. The creature nodded its head, its large red tongue moving to the other side of its mouth before it swept back into its comfortable, floating recline.
"You have things to ask me, that I know.
Well, Pines. Let it be so."
Ford stared at the beast blankly. "You're the-"
"The big frilly. I am time and space unbridled. I am the beast that sits in the land, water and air of the eternal plains. I am the freshwater beast of all that exists, all that generates, all that dines upon fine aquarium gravel-"
"The Axolotl." Ford finished for him, prematurely.
"Yeesh, kid," Stan whispered to Dipper, "You were right, the guy's self-obsessed."
The Axolotl floated round to Stanley, its lipless mouth seemingly curving into the gentlest hint of a smile.
"A self obsessive? You might be right,
There's many now, within my sight.
A scientist seeking recognition,
A teen trying to prove cognition.
A lovestruck sweater wearer, too…
And a Northwest. Whose life fell through.
And yet your kids, Dipper and Mabel,
Had once fixed you with that label.
The brother who sacrificed it all,
To stop his sibling's eternal fall.
Could it be, the same applies,
To me, without a word of lies?
A creature with the power to,
Put right all things that you rue?
It swept back to Dipper and Pacifica.
"I'm curious now, it must be said,
In what strikes within the Northwest's head.
What sacrifice she's willing to make,
For the innocent townsfolk's sake."
Silence ruled over the realm. Susan almost instinctively put a protective arm around Pacifica. The two Grunkles exchanged a perturbed glance as the creature's inky black eyes stared, free of emotion and movement, straight into the wide, confused pupils of the Northwest heir. The clouds and lights swirled around them silently.
"W-what are you asking me?" Pacifica murmured to the towering, wide-nosed, lipless beast of the cosmos.
"It's a simple question."The great frilled one replied.
"Oy. Nothin' you seem to say is simple, bud." Stan snarked, holding the bridge of his nose. "Speak right. Just spit it out."
If the expressionless beast was capable of making a look of offence, it no doubt would have as it glanced towards Stanley Pines - the only mortal perhaps stubborn - or foolish - enough to talk back to the central amphibious fate-bringer in the flesh.
"You are a brave man, Stan Pines. Or really stupid. Or arrogant. Or all three."
"It's all three," Ford interjected, momentarily forgetting he was talking to a creature of indeterminate power. "But for what it's worth, he's quite right."
"Just…look, please," Pacifica said, her eyes rapidly filling with emotion. "Keep it simple. After the week we've had, surely you can do that?"
Silence ruled the realm, as the creature ruminated on the matter. Finally, licking its lipless mouth, it spoke once again.
"I could put this all right." The creature spoke, firmly. "I could set the Northwests back into line, silence those nagging doubts, destroy the three-sided one, once and for all, and remove the interdimensional tar that pervades your world."
It continued reverently as if impressed by its own power.
"No more terrifying train ghosts. No more possessed video games, or businessmen, or cankerblight, or geese. No more terrible family discoveries, no more rivers of gold, no aliens, no beavers, no sentient coal. All gone. Removed. Drained from your reality. Imagine the heartbreaks you could save, the injuries prevented, the trauma removed. It could all be gone, Northwest. All removed from your reality.
"A- a time wish?" Mabel whispered.
"Not a time wish." The creature responded. "A time removal. A correction. A reversal. A closure."
"Now hang on a moment. You're insinuating you'll …remove this entire summer? Just take it out of the timeline?" Ford said, furrowing his brow. "Entirely?"
"That's crazy!" Stan said. "...Right? Is that crazy?"
"It's outright unethical!" Ford replied, stamping his prosthetic foot down upon the empty space beneath his boots. "You can't just - just remove two months! Think of other people's lives! Their experiences! Their closure, their-"
He faltered and gestured towards Dipper and Pacifica, in a rare sign of fragility.
"Th-their love. Our love for them. Our family. You can't give us that choice. It's wrong."
"Ford Pines. I know of love - but I know what this love has wrought. I believed this pair may be fate, a pre-visioned scene destined to take shape before my eyes. Sadly, we are not known for our grand sense of vision." The creature said, floating momentarily onto its back and wiggling its stumpy little legs like a puppy. "I see the future only in shadows and shapes, young Pines. But every shadow and shape I foresee is aflame, should this summer be allowed to become part of history. I committed a folly when permitting Bill Cipher a purgatory. I now see that I must put things right. Permanently."
"A damned fine choice of creature to handle time." Ford murmured to his crooked brother. "They have a terrible sense of sight. It makes sense our slippery friend here would struggle with decision-making."
"Ya really think he can just…reverse it all?"
"Easily, Stanley. It's as to whether it's the right solution."
"Gotta admit, poindexter, things are looking crummy out there."
"Crummy? An understatement. Your world is in chaos. Dimensions open, extraterrestrial foliage. A train wreck. The dead being brought back to life by their crazed creed. Explosions, fire, flame, destruction and floods. Your town is being rocked by forces that, for better or worse, you are the catalyst for."The creature shot back. He gestured to Dipper and Pacifica, pointedly. "That these young lovebirds are the catalyst for. Change comes with risk! And I fear the natural order has been risked simply too much for us to return without dire action."
Silence once again ruled over the group as the creature twinkled in the light of a thousand endless worlds. Tears came to the eyes of the Northwest heir as she glared at the amphibious beast. She was not only upset - she was furious. It simply didn't seem fair.
After everything.
After how much she had worked to change, after how much she had learnt, how much she could feel she had bettered herself. How dare he? How dare anyone tell her that the world needed a reset? She was Pacifica N-... Pacifica Pines. She was Pacifica Pines, and that, in her mind, was fate. That was the future. She couldn't bear to think…
"You must know, it all means very little to me…" The space-salamander added, briefly getting sidetracked by staring into space and repeatedly opening and closing its mouth. "But I don't take pleasure in this. I loved, once. Until it turned out to be a reflection from the dimension of crystal."
The silence was positively painful. The sort of silence that could be heard in all corners. An eternal, emptiness - void of hope, loaded with emotion, yet empty of sound.
Tears ran down Lazy Susan's cheeks as she took in just what all of this could mean: Pacifica Northwest ending up back at the Northwest Maisonette. No prospect of freedom for her - and no prospect for her to have her adoptive daughter. After all, she might have been a caring guardian - but she wasn't built for uncovering mysteries and scandals. She wasn't a fighter.
She could never guarantee having Pacifica back. She could never guarantee working her way back into the Northwest's life with her parents still fettling and controlling her.
She could never guarantee protecting her, or lending a friendly ear.
It felt final.
Like the worst possible kind of closure.
"I'm sorry, Pines. I'm sorry, Susan Wentworth. I'm sorry, Pacifica Northwest. But it's time. To restore oil to oil and water to water - and sever this misdirection of reality. To return you to your rightful place and never allow it to return to this…chaos. Sometimes, even the most innocent must suffer."
Grunkle Stan and Ford, too, found themselves speechless. The idea of losing a member of the Pines - even one who had only been part of their lives for a couple of months - brought back horrendous memories.
And that was nothing to speak of Mabel, faced with the potential loss of her precious, gappy-toothed, big-coifed lumberjack - who she had only spoken to for the first time due to the mysteries of Northwest Manor.
Tears streamed down chubby, rosy cheeks as she took in the idea of losing the one romance - the true romance - she had spent all of her admittedly short years searching for.
"I'll let you ruminate." The Axolotl said - with perhaps a modicum of gentleness. He was, after all, not a heartless creature. Simply a very jaded, macro-managing steward, who occasionally needed his filter replaced.
Without another word or thought, the great sky-salamander disappeared - content to return to his off-dimensional cave to dine on intergalactic molluscs - leaving only a trail of glittering primordial dust and the softest scent of moisture in his wake.
The family exchanged unreadable glances - each member of the party wrestling with their own thoughts, doubts and fears of the Axolotl's ultimatum. The option had been laid ahead - the option to reset the universe to how it had been intended. A truly rare moment - a moment for wrongs to be rightened, born out of a creature's desperation to maintain balance - christened by thousands of gallons of Oregon spring water.