GravitySkittles

Agate! They/Them Sideblog for Gravity Falls fanfiction! also art, posts, and other stuff. I have brain worms about this show and they won't! leave! me! alone! current fic: "Wherever We Go We Go Together" Link to Ao3 version is pinned!! Ask me anything! please! I love talking about my writing!

[gravityskittles]

An Archive of Our Own, a project of the Organization for Transformative Works

[gravityskittles]

Chapter 20: Into the Mindscape

Falling into Grunkle Stan’s mind had felt like nothing. As far as Mabel remembered it, one moment she had been standing in the living room next to Stan’s armchair, and the next minute the world had fuzzed out of focus and she had been standing in front of the washed-out Mystery Shack.

Falling into Dipper’s mind was completely different.

She was compressed on all sides. The air was thick and sticky like craft glue – for a moment she wasn’t even able to breathe. It was dark and when she opened her mouth to call out, the darkness flowed in across her tongue. It tasted like mildew and she tried to spit it back out into the void, but it stuck. The fuzzy damp feeling of it spread throughout her body like ice water. She looked down at herself and realized with mounting horror that she was disappearing into the darkness. The only light she could see was emanating from the unicorn hair bracelet still tightly affixed to her wrist. For one horrible, disorienting moment she couldn’t remember why she was there.

             She focused on the bracelet, she knew she was here for a reason. She tried to press forward, tried to break through whatever she was stuck in, but every direction she tried she was met with resistance. Her chest felt tight, and her vision began to blur again.

             Frustrated and afraid, she opened her mouth again, pulling a name from the recesses of her mind.

“Dipper!”

The word sounded muffled, like it was being shouted through several layers of thick blanket, but the moment it left her mouth, the darkness around her shattered. She gasped in surprise, breathing in cold night air, and fell backward onto wet asphalt.

She scrambled up, brushing water and grit off her pants and looked around in confusion. She remembered why she was here now; she just hadn’t expected it to look like this.

She wasn’t entirely sure what she had expected, but she had sort of secretly hoped it might be their attic bedroom in the Mystery Shack. A few years ago, Grunkle Ford had taught both of them how to meditate in the mindscape and after that, she and Dipper had spent a few lazy summer afternoons trying to construct a shared one. It had only worked a handful of times over the years, mostly they remained stuck in their own separate mindscapes, but every now and then they would tumble into an imaginary version of the attic. She had fond memories of laser battles, inventions and giant forts, but those felt like an entire lifetime ago now.  

Really, it was silly to think it could have been the attic he was trapped in though. If the purpose was to get away from everyone then there was no reason he would have wanted to be in their shared space. Still, she had been expecting at least something familiar — the Mystery Shack, their house in Piedmont perhaps, or even Grandpa Shermie’s house from when they were little. Instead, it was nighttime and she was in a random alleyway in what was, as far as she could tell, a completely unfamiliar city. Worse, she didn’t see any evidence of Dipper anywhere.

A police car zoomed by at the end of the alley, lights painting the wet brick on the buildings around her with smears of red and blue, and she darted into the shadows of the nearby wall, hands over her ears.

Okay, okay. She had to think. If she were Dipper, where would she be? A bitter little voice at the back of her head spat out ‘not in this situation’ but she pushed back against it. That wasn’t true. She had done exactly this before. Bill had slipped into her head, offered her the chance at whatever she wanted, and she had awoken in a nightmarish pink bubble of endless summer and permanent joy.

Whatever had done this to Dipper had offered him something. Something he had wanted more than anything else in the world. Something that had made him overlook all precautions; made him see past his paranoia around deals and supernatural beings. If it had been Mabel in that situation, faced with a boy who felt like he belonged nowhere in the world, faced with someone too angry and sad to see a way forward, what would she offer him?

All at once she knew. Because now that she thought about it, she had been in this situation before. What felt like weeks ago now, she had sat in a dingy little hotel room and tricked her twin into going on a monster hunt with her, hoping that it would buy them time to figure things out before heading to Gravity Falls.

She tilted her head back, letting the imaginary rain of the mindscape patter down onto her face. She didn’t know what Dipper was hunting out here, but she figured chances were good he didn’t know precisely what it was either – after all, a monster hunt became a lot less fun once you actually found the monster.

Mabel closed her eyes and concentrated. Claws, fur, too many eyes, enough teeth to be unsettling, a strange whistling cry that sounded similar to the pipe organ from the Luray Caverns, footprints that left glowing shadows on the pavement. She pictured it, holding the echoes of it in her mind, trying to plant a trail of evidence, a trail of clues. It was difficult. That strange cold fuzzy feeling from earlier danced along her skin as she tried to envision it, and the more energy she put behind it, the tighter her chest began to feel. She gritted her teeth and focused so hard she felt like her brain would melt. Then suddenly the resistance vanished and she heard a cry ring out at the end of the alleyway, echoing the one in her mind.

She opened her eyes just in time to see a blur of dark purple fur streak by, claws skittering along the pavement as the monster of her imagination vanished into the wall at the end of the alley, leaving faintly glowing footprints behind it.

She held her breath, staring at the street beyond the alley. He had to have heard it, surely his mindscape couldn’t be that large, he had to be on his way—journal in hand. She just had to be patient.

The footprints had just started to fade away when he appeared. In one hand he held a small metal net. He was wearing a backpack and had his old blue pine tree hat pulled low over his eyes, but as he crept forward into the alleyway, Mabel leapt up in excitement.

“Dipper!! You came!”

Her brother froze and then surged forward and shoved her back against the wall.

“How do you know my name?”

“Dipper—what—”

“My name.” He hissed. “How do you know who I am? I’ve never been to this city before.”

Mabel struggled to push him off of her. “Dipper, what are you talking about? It’s me, Mabel, your twin??”

He let go of her arm and stepped back looking confused.

“I don’t have a twin.”

Angry now, Mabel closed the distance between them and gave him a shove in return. “Just because you’re still mad at me doesn’t mean you get to say that! I’m sorry, alright, I know I shouldn’t have said what I said. I know I messed up, okay? I know. Look, you don’t have to forgive me, but saying I’m not your twin isn’t going to make me go away. You have to wake up, and you’re not getting rid of me until you do.”

“Hey, hey” Dipper dropped the net at his feet and held up his hands placatingly. “Look I’m sorry. But I really have no idea what you’re talking about or what you mean by waking up. I don’t know you, and I definitely don’t have a twin. I’m sorry, but you must have mistaken me for someone else.”

Mabel felt unmoored, like she was missing a limb she hadn’t even known she could lose. Dipper bent down to pick up his net and then turned to look for the footprints which had faded away while they talked.

“Wait, please? How could I have mistaken you for someone else, what are the chances that my twin looks exactly like you and has the nickname Dipper? What are the chances that both you and my twin have a birthmark shaped like the Big Dipper on their forehead? I know you, I know pretty much everything there is to know about you. For instance, I know that right now you’re hunting a monster, something that most people think doesn’t even exist. It's purple and furry and has too many eyes and teeth and it leaves glowing footprints behind it in the rain.”

Dipper turned back to face her, net clenched so tightly in his hand that his knuckles had turned white. “Who are you?”

“Can you at least let me try to explain? I promise, I’m not trying to hurt you. But I think I have an idea of why you don’t remember me.”

He stared at her and Mabel held her breath. Her heart was racing so fast she thought he must be able to hear it. She didn’t know what was going on, not really. In Mabeland she had always been aware of herself and of who she was. Bill had managed to warp how she felt about things, but he had never tried to erase her memories. This was entirely new territory, and she desperately wished Stan or Ford were here to help her. But it was just her and she had to try to fix it.

“There's a diner about a block from here. We can at least get out of the rain. Trail’s gone cold anyway.” He gestured limply towards where the creature had vanished and started walking towards the entrance to the alley.

-

Mabel stared at the menu with a frown. What kind of diner didn’t have pancakes? Not that she had really been planning to eat mindscape food anyway, but she had been hoping to catch pieces of the Dipper she knew in the diner. Maybe it would have been reminiscent of Greasy’s, or even the ghost roads diner they had stayed at. Instead, it was flat and modern, no touch of Gravity Falls charm or 50’s neon and checker. The menu was equally boring and unfamiliar, breakfast sandwiches, eggs, and variations of coffee. There were no pancakes, no waffles, and definitely no sprinkles. She sighed and closed the menu, looking up at Dipper.

He was staring at his own menu, but she could tell from the way he was frenetically tapping one hand on the table that he wasn’t actually reading it. She cleared her throat slightly and he jumped.

“Look, clearly neither of us is planning to order any food. Can we talk please?”

Dipper set the menu down carefully, lining it up with the edge of the table, and began fiddling with one frayed corner where the edge was peeling away from the plastic. “I don’t have anything to say to you. You asked for a chance to explain. This is it.”

“O-kay.” Mabel had been trying to think of a way to get through to him since the moment he hadn’t recognized her, but honestly, she didn’t know what to do. She’d never had to prove who she was to Dipper before—back when they were dealing with the shapeshifter the person Dipper had needed to identify had been Wendy.

“Um. I don’t really know how to do that. See you have no memories of growing up with a sister and I have no memories of growing up alone. One of us is wrong. I don’t really know how to prove which one of us is wrong. So, I’m not going to try to do that – It’s not really what I’m here for anyways. My name is Mabel Pines, and despite the fact that you have been my twin since birth, it’s nice to meet you.”

She stuck her hand out in front of her, across the table, and was proud of the fact that it wasn’t shaking.

Dipper stared at it suspiciously for a long time. Then carefully reached out and shook it.

“So why are you here then, and what did you mean about needing me to wake up?”

Mabel shrugged ignoring the second half of his question, “You’re trying to solve a mystery right? Can I help?”

Dipper’s eyes lit up and for a moment he was her brother again, before that guarded look slammed back across his face. “Look. I appreciate that you’ve realized I’m not who you think I am, but that still doesn’t mean I trust you. This thing I’m doing right now is really important and I don’t need someone like you messing it up.”

That stung, but Mabel kept her smile on her face, reminding herself that at the moment he didn’t know who she was. Besides, she had said worse things to him. That was why they were in this whole mess to begin with.

“Can you tell me why it’s really important? I definitely don’t want to mess things up, but I do have some experience with monster hunting.”

Dipper chewed on his bottom lip for a moment. “You have experience with monster hunting?”

“Sure!” Mabel grinned. “You—I mean, my twin—was always better at it than I was. But together we found all sorts of things growing up. Ghosts, unicorns, plaidypus, even a hide-behind!”

“What is a plaidypus?”

Her heart sunk slightly as she realized how much he had forgotten. “Um. It’s like a platypus but it has a little plaid jacket as its fur? They’re really strange but super cute. They live in a remote part of rural Oregon!”

“Huh.” He frowned at her and she could see him trying to work something out. “You really have encountered things like this before, haven’t you?”

“What, ghosts, unicorns and a hide-behind didn’t convince you but the plaidypus did?” Sometimes she did not understand her brother.

“Well sure. I mean. Pretty much everyone knows about those things. The hide-behind is a bit obscure but you absolutely could have read about it somewhere. Listing those things doesn’t make you seem credible, it makes it seem like you’re humoring me or lying to me. The plaidypus though. That’s weird, like properly weird. It just doesn’t feel much like something someone trying to con me would bring up.”

“I mean if you want weird I’ve got it. My great uncle found something called a hawktopus once and—”

“Stop.” Dipper’s face twisted up in annoyance. “I don’t even want to know what that is, it sounds like a mistake.”

Mabel grinned, remembering how furious Grunkle Ford had been to discover that the hawktopus was still alive and well in Gravity Falls, after his return from the portal. At least some of her brother was still in there.

“He thought so too.”

Dipper laughed then looked surprised at himself.  “Alright. Fine. You’ve convinced me Mabel. What do you want to know specifically?”

“What are you actually hunting for and why?”

“You know what I’m hunting for, you described it to me yourself in the alley.”

“No, not the thing I conjured up for you to find. Before me, what were you hunting? There must have been something.”

“What do you mean, conjured up?”

Mabel rolled her eyes. “This is going to make you not trust me again. But to reiterate, I’m here because in the real world, you're asleep and I need you to wake up. As far as I know, we are currently in your own mindscape. Some, warped version of it anyway. In here both of us should be able to materialize anything we want. When I got here, I was looking for you and I figured you’d be tracking some kind of anomaly, so I came up with something weird enough to be intriguing. No matter what you were actually looking for, I thought my fluffy purple guy could probably derail you.”

She sighed, watching him start to drum his fingers on the table again. “Look here, y’know how there’s no pancakes on the menu?”  She pointed at the empty space in front of her on the table, “boom, pancakes!”

As the heaping plate of pancakes topped with a cavity inducing amount of whipped cream, maple syrup, and industrial sprinkles, popped into existence, Mabel noticed something. Similar to the creature she had conjured up, the pancakes took slightly longer to appear than she was used to. That cold feeling didn’t return but it definitely took more energy to conjure them up than normal, and in the space between her imagining them and them appearing, the unicorn hair bracelet around her wrist glowed slightly. She had been too busy panicking while trying to conceptualize the monster earlier to see it, but thinking back she remembered feeling a heat around her wrist in that moment. Almost as the more complicated her creation, the harder the bracelet had to work to dispel whatever was affecting Dipper’s mindscape.

She opened her mouth, the muscle memory of years spent working out theories together making her want to tell Dipper what was going on. But before she could say anything he was pointing at the space in front of him.

“Coffee!”

Nothing happened.

He frowned and pointed at the table with both hands.

“Coffee!!”

Nothing happened again.

“How did you do that?”

Mabel remembered that Dipper wasn’t wearing his own bracelet anymore and felt a flash of annoyance.

“Okay, I don’t know why you can’t do it, but clearly I can. So, what were you chasing before my monster?”

Dipper slumped back against the booth. “I don’t know.”

“You mean you don’t remember?”

“No. I mean. I don’t know. There’s this magical travelling circus I ran away to. I know it’s cliché and whatever, but I graduated early from high school, and my parents were starting to have some marital problems. We didn’t have the money for me to go to college yet and I needed to get out. I heard about this circus in the paper, and I hitchhiked out to it and asked for a job, figured I could work there until I had the money for college. I’d done some monster hunting in and around Piedmont with friends growing up and so the guy in charge of the circus hired me to find oddities for them. This is my first contract and all I was told was that there was something weird in Boston and I needed to go find it and bring it back to the circus.”

“We’re in Boston?”

“That’s the part of this that’s weird to you?”

“I’ve just. I’ve never been to Boston before. That’s all.”

Dipper sighed. “So, that’s my version of the story. What’s your version?”

“Um. Well. My twin and I grew up in Piedmont. A little two-story house on Acre Street, we had a nice yard and a trampoline and things were great. But then, some stuff changed and our parents divorced and for a few years that was okay, but then Mom decided to try and get back together with Dad. She moved us all to DC and their relationship was just as bad as before the divorce, and Dad’s relationship with me and my twin was worse. We got kicked out, and were in the process of driving to Oregon to meet up with family. You and I—my twin and I—got into a really bad argument, and he left. He hitchhiked to the Green Fairy Circus and asked the ringmaster, Lucian, for a job. By the time I got to the circus, my twin was in some sort of magical sleep. He’d signed some contract that wasn’t one Lucian had written, and I’m here to try and get him back.”

“Right.” Dipper’s face was completely blank. “You think that I’m your twin, and I’ve just had my memory augmented or something, by some deal I made?”

“Yes, exactly!” For a moment Mabel was hopeful she’d gotten through to him, and then everything fell apart.

“Well. I don’t know about your twin, Mabel. I’m not stupid enough to do something like that. I signed a contract with Lucian sure, but I read it before I signed it.”

“It’s not about you being stupid. You’re not stupid! But you’re angry and upset and sometimes that makes us do things we wouldn’t normally do, trust people we wouldn’t normally trust!”

“Sure, and what would you know about that exactly?”

Mabel had been trying so hard to be calm and to hear him out, she had been trying so hard to not to argue with him or yell. But that hurt in a way nothing else had. “At the moment, you remember nothing about me or what I’ve done. So, I’d be really careful about what you say next.”

Dipper slammed his hands on the table and pushed himself up out of his chair. “You’re right! I don’t remember you, because I don’t have a sister. I don’t need this. I finally got something good and now you’re here telling me it’s all a lie? I don’t want to hear that! Maybe you’re right and I am your twin, but who cares?! As far as I can tell, his life is shit. If I were him, I’d want to forget everything too. Maybe you should just let him sleep. Clearly, it’s what he wanted.”

He slung his backpack over his shoulder and walked out of the diner. Mabel sat at the table stunned and hurt. She couldn’t remember ever being this angry before. Maybe it was because the Dipper who had just left didn’t feel like her brother, maybe it was just the culmination of everything that had ever happened to them. She didn’t know. But she was shaking so badly she could feel it in her bones. Growing up, all their fights had been sharp and short. They never stayed mad at each other for very long, and they always made up within a day or two. But the last few weeks had felt like one drawn out fight, their last moment of solidarity had been driving away from their parent’s house together, and everything after that had just been pieces of a fight neither of them wanted to admit they were having. Mabel was done.

She stood up from the table and followed Dipper out into the rain.

He was walking away from her, down the street, whistling softly to himself.

“Goddamn it. Dipper you don’t get to do this!”

He kept walking without looking back, picking up his pace and pulling his hat down more securely onto his head.

“Come back! You don’t get to walk away from me! You don’t get to refuse to see what’s happening here! You wouldn’t let me do that, why the hell do you think I would let you do it!?”

The burn on her palm began to sting as she clenched her fingers so tightly into a fist, she could feel the bandage shift and tear. Dipper continued to walk. He was almost back at the entrance to the alleyway now, and she knew that the second he vanished he would be lost to her forever. She screamed, part anger, part fear, part grief and threw her arm out in front of her.

The bandages shredded away into ash as a bright ball of fire flew out of her palm and burst across the ground at Dipper’s feet with a hiss. She threw another and another, ignoring her exhaustion and the way the unicorn hair bracelet around her wrist was beginning to burn her as its glow intensified.

“I! Hate! You! So! Much!” It was childish and she knew it but she couldn’t help it. She ran, chasing him down the street, feet pounding through puddles as rain and tears streaked her face. “You’re supposed to be my brother!” She threw another fireball, breathless and angry.

Dipper ducked, and threw himself behind a trashcan on the street.

“You’re allowed to hate me!” She threw another, and it grazed the top of the trashcan with a crash. Dipper fled into the alcove of a nearby building.

“You’re allowed to never speak to me again!”

Her arm ached with old burns and her wrist stung with new ones. This time her fireball went wide and burst against the side of the building in a spatter of cinders.

“But you’re not! Allowed! To! Give! Up!”

Each word was punctuated by another fireball, which grew progressively smaller and smaller as her energy finally ran out. She sank to her knees by the steps of the alcove, cradling her arm against her chest and sobbing.

She knew what would happen next. Dipper would walk away, just like last time, and there was nothing she could do to stop it. Grunkle Ford had been right, she wasn’t ready to do this, she should have let him do it, or Stan do it. Both of them understood Dipper, both of them understood magic, both of them could have gotten through to him. She had never been able to do anything more than make everything worse. She had no clue why she had expected this to go any differently.

She heard footsteps splash softly towards her, and then an arm settled hesitantly across her shoulders.

“That bad of a brother huh?”

Mabel stared over at Dipper in disbelief and made a weak attempt to push him away. “No! No, its me that’s the problem. It always has been.”

Dipper shrugged and scooted closer to her. “Not that I remember or anything, but in my experience, it takes two people to make a problem. Besides. You can’t be that bad. You came looking for me, didn’t you?”

“Yeah,” Mabel mumbled into her sweater. “But all I did when I found you was yell at you and tell you I hated you. And throw fire at you.”

“You did do that.” He  pulled away and rubbed his hands down his face in a way that was so quintessentially Dipper it made her heart hurt. “But you tried to explain first.”

He sighed and pushed his hat up out of his eyes. “Look, I’m still not sure I understand everything you were trying to tell me. But. I don’t want to give up. I also don’t really want you to try and kill me again—”

“I wasn’t trying to kill you I just—”

“Wanted me to listen?”

Mabel nodded, wiping uselessly at her face to try and dry it despite the continued rain. “I’m sorry. Really Dipper, I’m sorry. I know you don’t remember, but these last few weeks it’s like all we’ve done is fight with each other. But it never really turns into a fight we just yell and then pretend like it didn’t happen. I’ve just been so, angry, I guess. I don’t really know how to fix it, I don’t know if it even is fixable I mean, I just threw fireballs at you—”

“Totally mature and calm of you.”

She glanced up to see that he was giving her a half smile. Then he sighed and stood, offering her his hand.

“Well, we won’t know if it's fixable until we try right?”

“Right. I don’t really know how we do that though, especially if you don’t remember anything. Before all of this, I thought we were trying but then it seemed like everything we did just made it worse. The last fight we had was so awful, Dipper. I…” She trailed off, staring at the blistered burn on her hand.

“Seems like I need to wake up then.” He sounded determined. “Any idea how we go about that?”

“I know how.”

Dipper and Mabel spun around. There was a man standing on the corner under a streetlamp. He was tall and thin, wearing a nice suit and gripping a silver topped cane in one hand. “But you’ll have to do something for me first.”

Mabel frowned and concentrated, feeling the bracelet around her wrist begin to heat up again. For a second she saw the man’s outward form fall away. Beneath was a hulking shadow. A spine of pure white bone jutted from its back, and a long thin hand was held out towards them, a silver pocket watch dangling from one clawed finger. She saw the shadow grow taller and twitch it’s fingers before the shape collapsed back into the man from before.

She watched in horror as the bracelet around her wrist disintegrated into ash. The man clicked his tongue in disapproval.

“None of that now. My world, my rules.” He smiled at her and she shivered at the sharpness of his teeth.

“You want your brother back? First, you have to find him.” His hand flicked towards Dipper and Mabel watched in horror as shadowed hands sprung up from the pavement and fastened tightly around Dippers legs. He screamed and tried to pull away. Mabel reached out for him but with another flick of his hand the man rendered her frozen, forced to watch as her brother was dragged through the sidewalk into the ground. Right before he vanished the man snapped his fingers and Mabel saw recognition finally spark in Dipper’s eyes.

“Mabel, don’t believe anything he says! You have to get out of here! Please—”

He was gone.

The man smiled at her again and tipped his hat. “Happy hunting.”

He walked away down the street, cane tapping next to him as rhythmically as a clock. She was forced to watch him, unable to move or speak, until he finally vanished around the corner, and the world around her twisted into something new.

[gravityskittles]

I'm not doing NaNoWriMo this year because I simply have way too many design projects ongoing for school. BUT I am making myself write at LEAST 500 words a day because we Are Getting This Fic Done by Xmas. So. New chapter this weekend probably!! Then only three more to go!

[gravityskittles]

Chapter 19: Negotiations

Ford was up just after dawn, scrolling through emails from Fiddleford and pointedly ignoring the silver flask he could see poking out of the pocket of Stan's jacket. Technically he had been awake before dawn. He had been awake for most of night following his conversation with Mabel.

It was infuriating to him that he had had such a productive conversation and then still failed to sleep because every time he closed his eyes he could feel blood pooling in his eyelids. To be able to know that someone was dead and gone, to be able to name both the pain and relief of losing that being, and yet to still fear it, confused him to no end.

He knew the blood hadn't been real, he had checked several times in the night. He had told himself over and over again that there was no threat and that in order to be useful today and to protect his family he needed sleep. But minutes turned into hours, and hours turned into slivers of early morning sunlight dancing on the opposite wall as the heater gently rustled the slats of the blinds.

So here he was, reading emails and pretending that he didn't want a drink.

The emails were surprisingly straightforward. Fiddleford, Pacifica and Candy had tracked Dipper as long as they could. For some reason the anomaly affecting Dipper and Mabel appeared to have separated in time them when it ended. Mabel had ended up in the current moment, when she would have been if time had been passing normally. Dipper on the other hand, had continued through time from December 31st. Ford had to assume that time had continued on from there for Dipper. It didn't seem like it had kept looping anyway. Dipper had continued on from Deadwood and hitchiked his way back to the circus Mabel had told them about yesterday.

Then, there was no sign of him.

Ford wasn't exactly concerned about that. Mabel had told them a lot about the circus and despite being fae in nature, it seemed safe enough. Also, the circus was still in the same place so as long as time was moving normally for Dipper, all they had to do was drive and get him. It was simple.

Simple enough to send alarm bells ringing through Ford's head. Nothing in life was this easy. Especially not when dealing with magic of any kind. It was simple enough to be a trap. But, he reasoned with himself closing the laptop with a soft click, he also had a habit of being 'overly anxious' sometimes, as his niece liked to say, and there was no reason to upset Mabel any further. He'd definitely tell Stan his misgivings, but in the meantime they would plan for the best and be prepared for the worst.

A rustling noise behind him and a series of popping joints told him Stan was awake. He turned around to squint at the clock on the bedside table and watched in mild amusement as his twin fumbled around for his glasses.

"Jeez, poindexter, did you get any sleep at all?"

Ford sighed, amusement fading. This was going to be a very long day.

…

The car trip only confirmed Ford's hypothesis. Stan had insisted on driving, citing something about Ford's lack of sleep as evidence. Ford thought this was highly unfair, but didn't want to start an argument in front of Mabel, so he had clambered into the passenger seat without a word.

The fortunate part of Stan driving was that they always got wherever they needed to much faster. Ford had learned back when they were teenagers that speed limits were barely even suggestions to Stanley and absolutely nothing about that conviction had changed in their time apart. The unfortunate part of Stan driving was that Stan got to pick the music.

Normally that was at least somewhat bearable as Stan routinely had on oldies hit radio stations, or beat up tapes and CD's from decades past which reminded Ford of their childhood. Ford even enjoyed more modern stuff on the occasion when Stan had some particular ear-worm from Soos or the kids and wanted to put on the current chart toppers.

Today, however, Stan had given Mabel free reign over the music, letting her plug her phone directly into the audio jack on the car. Ford was fairly certain this car wasn't supposed to even have an audio jack but given that Stan now took the Stanleymobile to Fiddleford for maintenance, he couldn't claim to be surprised.

Mabel had been playing what seemed to be the same boy band for the past four hours and it was really beginning to grate on him.

At this point he was becoming convinced that all the songs were actually just the same ten songs being shuffled randomly on repeat. He knew that there were only a finite number of chord progressions on the musical scale but surely, there were more than this.

He wasn't going to tell Mabel to stop though, how could he when every time he glanced back at her she was either crying or asleep, hands curled protectively around her grappling hook, like it could protect her from the world. Instead, he tried to occupy himself with journaling but he was holding the pen so tightly that it had torn through the page he was trying to work on in several places.

He gave up with a loud sigh right as Stan chose to pull off on an exit for a gas station. Stan rummaged around in his wallet for a moment while Ford enjoyed the blessed absence of pop music, then turned around to Mabel holding out some money.

"Pumpkin, can you go into the gas station for me and grab some grub? You can get whatever ya want as long as you bring back some coffee for me an' Ford."

Mabel stared at him expectantly, not raising her hand to take the money.

Ford watched as his brother let out a deep, full bodied sigh and shook the money at Mabel. "Please?"

Her face broke into a grin and she snatched the money, pushing open the car door as she did so. "Anything for the magic word!" She called back, slamming the door shut and hurrying towards the store.

"Little brat." Stan grumbled, beginning the process of extricating himself from the car to get gas.

"You love her." Ford said simply, tucking his journal back into the glove-box and getting out to stretch his legs.

"I love you too, doesn't stop you being an insufferable know-it-all."

Ford ignored the barb and leaned on the top of the car, watching Stan unscrew the gas cap. "What do you think about this circus?"

Stan looked up, "Circuses have been good to us in the past. 'Sides, I see no reason to assume anything has happened here other than Dipper being a bit of an idiot."

Circuses had been good to them in the past. Ford remembered their ill-advised childhood hunt for the Jersey Devil quite as clearly as Stan. But he still couldn't shake the feeling that something was wrong with this situation, something he couldn't quite see yet.

"What if there's something we don't know about?"

Stan stared at him blankly for a moment. "Then we don't know about it."

"But how are we supposed to protect Mabel or rescue Dipper if we don't know what's coming?"

Stan sighed, turning to watch the numbers tick up on the gas meter. "Ford, I don't think Dipper needs rescuin' from much else than himself, and as for protecting them." He shrugged, and patted the pocket of his coat where Ford knew his brass knuckles rested.

"What if it's not a normal threat Stan," Ford snapped, becoming annoyed at the easy way Stan was throwing answers at him like he'd already thought through all of this before.

"Then you've got an alien tech blaster and I haven't met many things in my life that don't respond poorly to bein' shot." Stan replied, infuriatingly calm.

"What if it's Bill?"

Ford snapped his mouth shut around the words, trying to will them back out of existence. He wasn't worried about that. Was he? He couldn't be. He knew Bill was gone. Dead. He knew that to be a fact of the universe, even if the past few days were doing their damnedest to convince him that he was wrong. Bill was dead.

He'd slipped out the night before they left and taken a walk out to the clearing to kick at the statue for good measure. It had been right where it always was, covered in snow and spraypaint, frozen and immutable proof of Bill Cipher's death.

Stan replaced the nozzle in the gas pump and carefully screwed his gas cap shut. He popped the little metal door shut with a click and walked around the side of the Stanleymobile.

Ford looked down at his feet, not wanting to meet his brother's eyes. Heavy hands landed on either side of his shoulders.

"He's dead, Ford." The words were simple. They weren't pleading or frightened, they just were. Matter of fact and reassuring. "I punched the bastard myself and you of all people should know how well I can throw a punch."

Ford finally looked up, Stan's face was open and warm. There was no hint of deceit or fear there. He looked sure.

Ford reached out a hand and gently brushed it over the small starburst shaped scar on Stan's forehead. It was faded now, less and less stark with each passing year. At this point, unless he knew what to look for, he would almost assume it was nothing more than a birthmark. It used to make him feel intense guilt when he looked at it. The physical living reminder of the fact that he had once been forced to kill his brother. But right now, it only reinforced what Stan said.

Bill was dead. And whatever else might come, they would deal with it together.

He nodded and Stan grinned, pulling him in for a brief hug, at which point the sound of excited squealing started across the parking lot. The sound continued, growing progressively louder, until a solid weight slammed both of them against the car.

"Family hug!!!!"

"Mabel," Stan wheezed, gently trying to pry her off of them. "Kiddo, for the rest of the drive I get to pick the music alright?"

Ford sighed in relief.

…

They reached the circus in the evening. Ford stepped out onto the grass after Stan parked, and frowned at the warmth. It was basically springtime here, which he supposed made sense. The barfing fairies in Gravity Falls hadn't resembled much of what he considered true fae to be, but even they had seemed to have some control over their own local weather. It had never seemed to rain in the fairy glades.

Stan stepped out too and frowned at his car. "I'm surprised she handled this well off-road in the snow," he muttered. "Wonder if McGucket fiddled with the tires last time I was in."

"What snow?"

Stan looked up at him, "Uh. The snow, Poindexter?" He gestured around them. "Somethin' wrong with your brain there?"

Ford opened his mouth to reply but Mabel beat him to it.

"Oh! One second!" She spun back to the car and started digging through her backpack. "Here!" She pulled out a small Ziploc baggie of rainbow covered fibers and shoved it into Stan's hands.

Ford watched Stan peer at the bag in confusion and then look around them with surprise.

"What? Where did the snow go?"

"Mabel?" Ford looked over at her with a newfound sense of pride. "Is that unicorn hair?"

"Yes!" She grinned, "You know how I got some extra from you before the end of our first summer?"

Ford nodded. In truth he didn't quite remember, aside from the kids birthday the days following Weirdmageddon had been entirely consumed by Stan's condition. He had a vague recollection of letting Mabel dig through his spell cabinet for some ingredients but he certainly hadn't asked enough questions about it at the time.

"Well, I braided two bracelets from them for me and Dipper and kept the extra in case we needed to make another one. I figured if we ever encountered anything like Bill again that we should have at least some defenses. The circus and a lot of its performers have glamours set up on them for safety reasons, but Dipper and I didn't know that at first so we used the bracelets for protection." Her face fell slightly "Dipper left his bracelet in the car after we left the circus though."

"Well, that was very smart of you my dear. I'm impressed."

"Alright alright. So you have a bracelet and I have the hair, what makes you immune to this 'glamour nonsense' Ford?"

Ford reached up and knocked on the side of his head, wincing slightly as the muffled clang reverberated in his head. "The plate seems effective against the fae in a similar way to Bill and those sirens we encountered," He muttered absently, as he noticed someone heading towards them from around the back of the large central tent.

"You met sirens?? You didn't tell me that!" Mabel grumbled accusingly.

Ford ignored her and pulled his blaster out from its holster. He kept the barrel pointed at the ground for now, but switched off the safety. He took a step towards the figure, a man wearing a button down shirt and walking with a slight limp.

Before he could do more than that however, Mabel had pushed past him, calling out "Lucian! Lucian its Mabel! These are my grunkles and we're here to talk to Dipper." She paused for a second and the man abruptly stopped walking with the same bemused expression Ford recognized from people who hadn't spent much time around Mabel. Even depressed his niece still talked faster than Fidds after ten cups of coffee.

"Look," Mabel continued, "I know Dipper probably told you that he doesn't want to see me but you've at least gotta let Stan and Ford talk to him, please? I just want him to understand more people care about him than just me and I—"

Stan walked up behind her and placed a hand on her shoulder. "Hang on a sec kiddo, I think we might be missing somethin'."

Ford noticed what Stan had. While Mabel had been talking the expression on the man's face had morphed from amusement to genuine concern. He had also begun to twist his cane around nervously in his hands the exact same way Stan did when he had something to say that he really didn't want to say.

Stan glanced back at him and Ford gave a slight nod. Whenever they went new places, Stan was always the one who took the lead on getting to know the locals. Ford was more than happy to play backup with his blaster if necessary but even before the portal he had been abysmal at talking to people.

"Right. Lucian is it? I'm Stan, this is my brother, Ford. I take it you've met Mabel before. We're lookin' for our great-nephew Dipper, and as far as we can tell he's been stayin' here at your circus."

He stuck out his hand and Lucian took it hesitantly. "Good to meet you. I'm Lucian Ozwin, owner of the Green Fairy circus. I have indeed met both Mabel and Dipper before, and Dipper has been here for the last week or so but, you can't speak with him."

Ford watched Stan's knuckles whiten as he tightened his hand around Lucian's.

"Why exactly would that be?"

"If you would please unhand my friend that would be fantastic!" Came a bright, cheerful voice from behind Ford. He spun around, blaster raising automatically, to see a short girl standing behind him. She had bright blue hair and ice blue eyes, and was wearing a thin silver tiara that seemed inlaid with sapphires. She was barefoot, and dressed in a loose white t-shirt and pants. Around her feet a small circle of frost was beginning to spread across the grass.

"Ah good, you're here Nalia!" Lucian sounded extremely relieved, and Ford turned back around to see him carefully twist his hand out of Stan's grip.

"I can and will explain. To the best of my ability, anyway. But, you'd all better come with me. Including you, Nalia."

The girl drifted past them, feet crunching softly across the grass, and even with the metal plate in his head Ford could feel the magic emanating off of her. Whatever she was she was powerful, powerful enough that attempting to attack her now was probably not in their best interests. He tucked his blaster back inside his coat and looked at Stan.

Lucian started walking back towards the big tent. Stan hesitated for a moment and then shrugged, "We might as well see what's goin' on at least."

Ford nodded, and started to follow the others. A moment later, he felt a hand slip into his, and turned to look at Mabel. She looked determined, but he could feel her hand shaking slightly in his.

"We'll figure it out my dear, I promise."

…

Ford stared at Dipper's sleeping form trying to figure out a way to fix this.

"Explain it one more time, Lucian?" Nalia was sitting on the end of the bed, pensively spinning a large snowflake around in the air. The snowflakes had started appearing while Lucian went through everything the first time, and based on Nalia's fidgeting, Ford assumed they probably appeared when she was stressed.

"Dipper came to me a week ago, he was upset and wanted a place to stay. I gave him a standard contract and told him I didn't need it signed until the morning. It was the middle of the night so I sent him to sleep here and he never woke up. I got some of the more medically inclined members to take a look at him but none of them are sure what exactly is going on." He sighed then turned to look at Stan and Ford. "I didn't exactly know how to contact his family so I reached out to Nalia. She's the most powerful thing I know, so if she can't fix it I'm not sure what to do."

Nalia waved her hand through the halo of snowflakes around her head, sending them spinning off around the room. "Right, so clearly it's a magical sleep of some kind. The question is why."

Ford bristled. Magical or not, how dare this girl jump to conclusions. "You don't know that. It could be a coma of some kind, either magical or physical. It could be some sort of magical illness or curse. For all we know his soul could have been removed!"

"His soul is gone?!" Mabel yelped, scrambling up from the floor to look at her brother again.

"No." Said Nalia calmly at the same time Stan said "Ford, watch it."

Ford glared at both of them. "I don't want it to be, but it could be! We have no idea what happened to him since we last saw him. He was suffering from a literal time curse! Who knows how that could have affected him."

"You're right," said Nalia raising her hands placatingly. "I have no idea what has happened to him, but I can tell you with certainty that he is in a magical sleep. If he was in a physical coma he would have died by now from dehydration, and a magical coma tends to not include breathing. His soul is intact or he wouldn't be dreaming." She pointed to the faint twitching of Dipper's hands on the blanket, and when Ford looked closer he could see Dipper's eyes clearly moving under his eyelids.

Nalia continued, "It definitely could be due to a curse or a spell of some kind, but that doesn't change what is functionally wrong with him. It doesn't even change the method of waking him up."

Ford felt silly all of a sudden, now that she had said all of that it was obvious that she was right, but that just frustrated him even more. "How do I even know I can trust you" he hissed at her.

"She is the Queen of the Winter Court, magical sleep is kind of a specialty of theirs." Said Lucian quietly, bending over to pick up the contract from the ground next to Dipper's bed.

Ford slammed Lucian against the wall, pulse thundering in his ears. He knew Lucian had mentioned the contract earlier during his explanation but somehow at the time it hadn't concerned him. The contract had seemed secondary to the reality of the situation initially but now Ford wasn't so sure.

"What did you make him do for you?"

Lucian dropped his cane and scrabbled at Ford's arm with his hands.

"What are you talking about?" He coughed.

"Hey Ford, dontcha think maybe—"

"Shut up, Stan. Can't you see what's going on here?"

The temperature in the room plummeted but Ford ignored it. "You did something, I know you did. You forced him to agree to something, you manipulated him into this state. Tell me the truth!"

"Grunkle Ford, Stop!"

He ignored Mabel. He could feel frost beginning to climb his fingers, but he could still pull the trigger on his blaster if he had to.

"Bold accusations for a man with a demon's contract written on him body, mind, and soul."

Ford froze. His blood felt like ice but he could feel the tattoo on the small of his back burn like fire.

"Hey, listen lady I don't know who you think you are but you have no right to say that to my brother!"

"Stop it!! All of you stop it right now! This isn't helping!"

Ford didn't move.

"Dammit, would you listen to me? Dipper needs us and all you guys can do is fight!"

The sound of Mabel stamping her foot yanked Ford back into reality. He let go of Lucian and stepped back, looking around. Lucian slid down the wall rubbing at his neck and Ford saw Stan lowering his fists somewhat sheepishly.

Nalia's skin was coated in frost and in one hand she was clutching a wicked looking ice dagger.

"Nalia, play nice," Lucian warned softly, as she showed no signs of backing down.

She glared at Ford, but lowered the ice dagger and folded her arms as the ice began to melt off of her skin.

Mabel was standing in the middle of all of them looking angrier than Ford had ever seen her.

"Right. Lucian, would you hand my uncle the contract please so he can read it for himself? Nalia, before this all started you mentioned that you know how to wake Dipper up? Grunkle Ford, Grunkle Stan, I'm very disappointed in both of you."

"In me? What did I do!?" Stan complained, as Ford snatched the contract out of Lucian's outstretched hand.

"You failed to act like an adult." Mabel hissed.

"Oh don't be too hard on them Mabel," Said Nalia tiredly, moving over to examine Dipper again. "I always forget how young you all are."

"Young!" Said Stan, now sounding even more indignant than before. "Kid, you don't look any older than Mabel!"

Nalia laughed and the room got a little warmer. "Looks can be deceiving."

Ford ignored them and scanned the contract. It was shockingly normal. Well, as normal as any contract for a magical circus could be he supposed. It just seemed like one large protective charm for both the signer and for the circus itself. There wasn't even a length of employment listed, just a simple clause stating Lucian or the signer could terminate the employment at any time. Only one thing concerned him.

"Lucian, why does this contract require his name?"

Lucian sighed. "It requires a name. He gets to choose which one he wants to use. Most people around here pick a stage name for the duration of their time here. Some people like Nalia just use a nickname. You probably know how cagey the fae are about True Names and all that, this is a way to circumvent that. All names carry some sort of power but they only carry the power that user attributes to them."

"Ah. Well." Ford paused, still not quite able to bring himself to apologize. Instead he settled for grabbing Lucian's cane and holding out his hand to help the man up off the floor.

"Right!" Nalia stepped away from Dipper. "If everyone is done trying to kill each other," she stopped as though waiting for objections. "Mabel asked how to fix Dipper and the answer is, we have to make him want to wake up."

"How?" Mabel asked eagerly.

"Well. A lot of times magical sleep traps people in their own minds. In order to break the spell or curse or whatever the origin is, generally you have to give those people something that they really want. True love's kiss is always a good bet, he doesn't have some kind of long lost lover does he?"

Mabel made a face. "Not one we could get here fast enough."

"Seemed too easy. Hmmm." Nalia frowned. "The only other way I know of is getting the person to tell you what they need themselves. That's a much trickier venture obviously—"

"Oh that's all? Well that's easy! I've been in Grunkle Stan's mind before and it wasn't so hard. Getting into Dipper's should be a piece of cake!"

"Mabel sweetie—" Stan started at the same time Ford said, "You are absolutely not going Mabel, that's far too dangerous."

"Why not!" She spun to look at them. "It's my fault he's here in the first place. Whatever happened wouldn't have happened if I'd been with him. You have to let me fix it!"

"This is not up for discussion."

"You're not my parents!" She shouted back, tears beginning to stream down her face. "I've done plenty of dangerous stuff without your help and I don't need you to suddenly start caring because you feel guilty!"

"Mabel—"

"NO! You don't understand, it has to be me!"

"Pumpkin, why does it have to be you?"

"Because, Dipper got me out of Mabeland. Besides. He's my brother, I promised him we'd be okay."

"She's got ya there, Ford." Stan said softly.

"Stan, no we can't let her do this. You know that." Ford stared at his brother in horror.

"You gave her a crossbow at the age of twelve and sent her into the woods to fight unicorns." Stan said flatly.

"I was, perhaps, misguided at the time. Anyway, she had Wendy with her!"

"Ah yes a person you'd never met, who was one year younger than Mabel is right now." Stan looked at Nalia. "If something goes wrong, she can just come back right?"

"Look. It's not my place to get involved with your family. But, Lucian once walked into the literal afterlife to bring me home, and I have since returned the favor. If there is one thing the fae understand, it is debt and promises."

Ford wanted to argue. Mabel could owe Dipper the sun for all he cared, it didn't stop her from being a child. But if he was being honest with himself he wasn't even sure Dipper would want to come back for him or Stan. If anyone could convince him to wake up it would be Mabel.

He turned to Mabel. "If you get yourself stuck in there, you're grounded until you go to college."

She threw herself at him, and Ford felt his bones creak with the force of her hug.

[gravityskittles]

Hahaha I’m not horrendously behind on these! Don’t worry about it!

Anyway, new chapter up sometime this weekend.

[gravityskittles]

I love your stories so much and it makes me so sad to see them only getting like 5 likes.

Please, if you love this, don't stop.

LOVE YOUUUU!!!!!!!!!❤️❤️❤️

Aww thank you!! I really appreciate that! I'm mostly just really exceptionally bad at promoting my own work haha, but I get a fair amount of interaction with it on AO3. I just like cross-posting to Tumblr in case people are interested in it over here as well.

But don't worry! I'm definitely going to keep writing the current AU (working on the new chapter rn actually) and keep cross-posting here and on AO3.

I also have a few one shot ideas, (pre-portal time loop AU and Living Mystery Shack) that I will absolutely be posting here once they are done.

Thank you for the love though, it's been genuinely so awesome to see that people like my writing. It's my first time really posting a story publicly and it's been a good experience so far.

❤️❤️❤️

[gravityskittles]

Chapter 18: Sink Into Oblivion

The circus was dark and silent by the time Dipper reached the grounds. It had taken him half an hour to clamber his way there across various ditches and railroad tracks after leaving the crossroads. As he stepped out into the clearing, shaking snow off the hood of his jacket, his hand tingled again. He tucked it roughly into his pocket, trying to ignore the sensation. Ever since the handshake at the crossroads his hand had been buzzing with pins and needles. They seemed to be fading now, at least he hoped that they were.

He hadn’t been expecting any side effects, which, reflecting on it, was a bit short-sighted of him. His hand had tingled for a while after his deal with Bill as well, he’d just had more pressing issues to deal with at the time so it hadn’t really stuck out in his mind.

He didn’t like the similarity there. He knew that this deal had been different. He had thought over the wording hundreds of times in the last half hour and it still seemed watertight to him. All he had to do was find Lucian, ask to stay at the circus for a while, and then all of this would be over with. Tomorrow he’d wake up and it would be a brand-new year. But every time his hand buzzed with a fresh wave of numbness he heard the echoing laughter of a summer long past.

Dipper waited in the long grass on the edge of the parking lot for a long time. He wondered—fleetingly—what Mabel was doing right now and, despite the lingering pit of anger in his chest, he hoped she was okay. She hadn’t texted him at all today. He hadn’t necessarily expected her to, their fight had been pretty bad after all, but the silence from his twin felt oddly deafening. He pulled out his phone and squinted in the sudden wash of light from the screen. There were no new notifications but, as he went to tuck it back into his pocket, he glanced up at the time and his heart skipped into his throat. He had been standing out here for longer than he thought. It was just past midnight.

January 1st, 2016.

It had worked. Whatever he had done, whatever the consequences of the deal he had made, at least this tiny part of it had worked. The time loop was over, broken. It was the first day of a brand-new year and, as the cold slush began to soak steadily into his shoes, he took a deep breath and squared his shoulders. He was ready to start a new chapter.

…

The wood of Lucian’s wagon door was smooth and faintly warm despite the chill. As Dipper raised his fist to knock a second time, the door swung open. Warm gold light spilled across the steps and onto the ground around Dipper’s feet, and he blinked up into the imposing shape of the ringmaster, silhouetted in the doorway.

“Sage, I know you are primarily nocturnal but now is really not the time for us to discuss your new act proposals. I—”

Lucian broke off, and bent down towards Dipper, who took an involuntary step back.

“Oh, I apologize um—Dipper, wasn’t it? It is quite late; is there something the matter?”

Dipper took a deep breath and spoke, trying to sound as authoritative as he could. “I’ve come to work for the circus.”  He winced as his voice cracked sharply on the last word.

After a silence just long enough for Dipper to begin to panic, Lucian spoke again.

“I see.” He paused again. “I suppose you’d better come in then.”

He stepped back from the door and Dipper, after a moment’s hesitation, followed.

It looked very different from the last time he had been here. Gone were both the desk and chair, replaced instead with a comfortable looking bed that seemed to have folded out of the wall previously housing maps of the Earth and Faerie. The bookshelves too were hidden, covered by elaborate wall hangings of ice blue silk depicting swirling snowflakes woven from a thin silver thread. As Dipper watched, the snowflakes seemed to shift and sparkled faintly in the lantern light.

“I thought you said you didn’t serve a court?” Dipper said, before he could stop himself.

Lucian turned to look at him. In the warm light of the wagon, he appeared much less imposing than he had moments before. His hair was slightly tousled, and he was wearing what Dipper had assumed to be a long cloak, but which now revealed itself to be a fluffy pale green bathrobe, decorated with embroidered golden vines. Lucian laughed at Dipper’s question and leaned back against the wall, stifling a yawn.

“I don’t. But, from time to time my friends within the courts bestow me with gifts. Each tries to outdo the other of course, and I end up with all sorts of odd things.” He tugged ruefully at his bathrobe then gestured to the wall hangings with a smile. “These I like, so I use them to muffle sound at night.” He paused, then continued, “Even if I hadn’t liked them, it does not do to refuse a gift from the fae, no matter how close a friend you are with them.”

“Now,” He ran a hand through his hair and squinted thoughtfully at Dipper. “Explain to me what exactly you’re doing here.”

So, Dipper told Lucian the whole story. He started haltingly, stumbling over the beginning, worried that at any second Lucian would cut him off or throw him out. But when the man just nodded quietly along, Dipper continued with more confidence. He talked about the ghost roads and the time loop, he explained what he was running from and what Mabel had been running to, and then finally he explained the last argument. He edited it a little, not wanting Lucian to think less of Mabel because of what had happened, but still explaining enough to make it clear he had needed to leave. He almost talked about the crossroads, but something gave him pause.

He remembered his first conversation with Lucian. The intensity with which the man had spoken about outside entities sending humans to harm the circus burned in Dipper’s memory. He was certain that the crossroads ghost meant the circus no harm, but still, the fear that Lucian would throw him out if he knew about the deal Dipper had made was enough to keep him silent. Instead he finished off his story after the argument, explaining that he had hitchhiked back here, hoping for a place to stay.

Lucian frowned. “So, the time loop ended? How?”

“I’m not really sure,” Dipper said, truthfully. “I don’t actually know what started it in the first place, but I think something about Mabel and I separating caused it to end.”

“I see.”

He stared up at the ceiling for a while and then looked back down at Dipper. “I am truly sorry for the position that you have found yourself in, Dipper. I hope that you are wrong and that you have more family than you think on your side. Your sister seemed like she cared about you very much, and I think you should at least try to get back in touch with her when you are ready, if only to let her know you are safe.” He fixed Dipper with a look that, while not quite a glare, held the same amount of weight as one.

Dipper flushed slightly. He didn’t like being told what to do but thinking about Mabel was starting to make him feel more and more guilty. Lucian was right. Regardless of what happened between them he didn’t want her to worry about him. He nodded, “I will try to call her tomorrow.”

Lucian smiled slightly and Dipper wondered how many arguments Lucian had been forced to mediate in his time at the circus. The way the man had just spoken to him felt genuine but also practiced, as though he had said similar words to others many times before. Before he could ask however, Lucian sighed and walked over to rummage through some drawers next to his bed.

“As I am sure you noticed during our show, there are several humans in my troupe. All of them have come to me out of need, and I would never dream of turning them away. You are no different.” He turned around holding a piece of paper in his hand and Dipper felt a weight vanish from his shoulders. Lucian was going to let him stay.

Lucian yawned again and turned toward his bed then paused and sighed. “I really wanted my desk to be there.” He frowned down at the piece of paper in his hand, then held it out to Dipper. “This is a circus contract. Normally I would make you read it and sign it right here, but circumstances being what they are, this is probably better dealt with in the morning. Read over it and be back here first thing in the morning to sign it.”

Something in Dipper’s expression must have given away his trepidation because Lucian quickly continued. “I promise it’s a totally reasonable contact. It’s more out of habit than anything else, but the fae like their rules, so I find it best to be consistent. Really the only thing in it, other than protection clauses for the circus, the troupe, and the patrons, is a directive to choose your name.”

Dipper froze, “I’m not giving you my name.”

Lucian held up a hand placatingly, “I’m not asking you to give me your name. I don’t even make people sign contracts with any sort of name anymore. A fingerprint does just as nicely and makes the fae less jumpy. Names are important around here, and certainly powerful, but in the last hundred years or so I’ve figured out a solution to help things run smoothly around here.” He leaned over and pointed towards a paragraph at the bottom of the contract.

“It’s explained better here but the gist of it is, while signed with the Green Fairy you will choose a name to use. As it will be a stage name, whether it is a real name or not doesn’t matter. It doesn’t let me, or anything else in this circus own you, control you, or compel you. All that it does is let you feel comfortable existing here and forming bonds with other members of the troupe. When eventually, you leave the circus, your contract will be burned, and your chosen name will no longer be tied to the Green Fairy at all.”

Dipper nodded slowly, “I think I understand. So, since the contract prevents any sort of harm or ill intent towards members of the circus or patrons coming to the circus, names lose their power?”

“Sort of. Names never really lose their power, but sometimes their power isn’t fully realized when it’s constrained within a set of rules.”

Dipper began to rock back and forth on his heels excitedly. “Wait, that’s so cool, the implications of that are insane! The kind of protections you could put on people using that loophole are—”

Lucian raised his hand again and smiled kindly as Dipper fell silent. “Much as I would love to discuss the intricacies of name magic with you, it is late, and being human, both of us need to sleep.”

“Sorry.” Dipper winced; he hadn’t felt this out of his depth talking with somebody since he first met Ford.

“No need to be sorry, it’s a really interesting subject, just not one for right now. There are extra cots in the back of the main tent if you feel comfortable heading over there by yourself. There might be a few of the more nocturnal troupe members practicing in the ring, but they won’t ask you any questions. People arrive at all sorts of odd hours around here.”

Dipper nodded and folded the contract, tucking it into his pants pocket. “I can find my way. Thank you so much, I’m glad you gave me that business card, I’m not sure I would have thought to come back here without it.”

Something flashed across Lucian’s face, but his expression shifted back into that same relaxed smile before Dipper could understand what it had been.

“I’m glad I could help. I promise that whatever else happens, you will be safe at the Green Fairy.”

Dipper turned to go, as he pulled the door open, Lucian spoke one more time.

“Could I have that business card back by chance? My friend who makes them for me has been off-continent for a while and I’ve been running out of them.”

This struck Dipper as odd, but he was too tired to question it at this point. Instead, he fished the card out of his pocket and passed it over. As his fingers brushed Lucian’s hand, a burst of the pins and needles from earlier rushed through his fingers and he almost let the card fall to the ground. He yanked his hand back, flexing his fingers to try and work some feeling back into them. That odd expression was back on Lucian’s face, but before he could say anything Dipper mumbled “G’night” and hurried down the steps towards the tent. Lucian didn’t call after him, and as Dipper reached the entrance to the tent and looked back, he saw the lights in Lucian’s wagon go out.

…

 When Dipper woke up the next morning it felt like he’d never actually gone to sleep at all. He remembered leaving Lucian’s and heading for the main tent. He remembered walking around the ring, past the rows and rows of empty seating, watching two acrobats up high above the floor, swinging back and forth along a series of practice trapezes. Lucian had been right, neither of them had spared Dipper a passing glance as he had made his way to the backstage area. He remembered finding the cots and kicking his shoes off. He remembered setting down his backpack and reaching into his back pocket for the contract which he had wanted to read over before he went to sleep. He distinctly remembered folding the contract back up after reading it, he hadn’t had any questions about it, it had been fairly straightforward—exactly as Lucian had said. But after that he remembered nothing.  

Since his shoes and backpack were exactly where he had left them and the contract was tucked awkwardly under his body, he supposed he must have fallen asleep as soon as he had lain down last night.

He hadn’t slept that well since—well probably since last summer to be honest. He always slept well at the shack, even with Stan downstairs watching TV or Ford coming in at god knows what hour of the morning with some creature hot on his tail. Those sounds were comforting and familiar. The sounds of his crazy family being exactly who they were.

The room in DC had been too loud and too quiet at the same time for him to sleep properly. The lack of forest sounds combined with the distant sound of arguments kept him up until early in the morning, even after Mabel had long since fallen asleep. Once they had moved to DC his nightmares had started again as well, so even when he did get some sleep, he never felt rested when he woke up. But right now, he felt amazing. It had been months since he had woken up without a headache of some description, he couldn’t even remember dreaming at all. Grinning, he scooped up the contract and pulled his shoes back on. Clearly this was exactly where he was supposed to be.

…

The morning was bright and crisp as he walked out of the tent. He could still see that the grassy area around the circus was clear of snow, but the air had a bite to it that felt more like fall than the summer warmth he remembered. Around him groups of performers were working together to load supplies and set pieces up into the wagons, which had all been pulled around to the front of the tent. While most of the wagons were attached to nothing at all, a couple of them were being pulled by what looked like horses. They differed from traditional horses in that their skin appeared to be made of shifting shadows and their eyes burned with a flickering cold fire. They were horse-shaped enough aside from that though and, as Dipper watched, one of them leaned down and lazily began to crop the grass below it. 

The remaining wagons seemed to be attached to a slew of antique cars, each one painted in bright colors matching the wagon it was towing. As Dipper walked by these, heading for the knot of people by Lucian’s wagon, the wagon closest to him flickered slightly, for a moment becoming a bulky kind of metal trailer. He frowned at it, concentrating, and the metal façade blurred back into wood.

Now that he thought about it, Dipper could feel that familiar buzzing sensation dancing over his body. He wished momentarily that he had brought the unicorn hair bracelet Mabel had made for him, but he had almost certainly left it in her car back in Deadwood. Try as he might, he couldn’t completely banish the glamour from around him, but he did feel the buzzing sensation fade slightly as he tried to focus more on his surroundings. It made him slightly uneasy to realize that he couldn’t actually see the reality of his situation, but he told himself that there was more glamour in the air than normal because they were packing up and didn’t want any unwanted passerbys. And anyway, he was certain that with enough practice he’d be able to see through glamours as simply as if he had been born with true sight.

The knot of people broke apart as Dipper drew closer, and he saw that they had been gathered around Lucian. The man was holding a clipboard in his hand, and shouted out a couple of directions to the people now hurrying towards the big tent, before turning back to Dipper with a sigh.

“You’d think after a few hundred times they wouldn’t need me telling them how to tear down. But that’s fae for you. Forgetful bunch.”

The buzz across Dipper’s skin spiked again as the last of Lucian’s helpers brushed by him on their way to the tent, and he shifted uncomfortably.

“Now. What was it you wanted? Didn’t I already give you something to do this morning?”

Something about Lucian’s energy seemed off to Dipper but he couldn’t put his finger on what it was. He’d never heard the man sound so dismissive of his friends before, nor had he known Lucian to be forgetful, but he had only really spoken with him twice. Also, teardown was obviously stressful for everyone so Lucian seeming a bit more harried than usual didn’t feel necessarily out of place.

“No, you told me last night to come back to you this morning to sign my contract, remember?” Dipper pulled the folded up contract out of his pocket and handed it over to Lucian.

“Oh yes!” Lucian’s face lit up. “Totally forgot. Let’s get that taken care of, shall we?” He pulled a small ink pad out of his coat and held it out to Dipper. “Press your thumb onto that and sign away!”

Dipper opened up the small silver box. It didn’t seem to have any ink actually on it, but he assumed it was just invisible or magical in some way. As he pressed his thumb down though, there was a sharp prick. He yelped and pulled his hand back, staring at the bright red bead of blood that was blossoming slowly on the top of his thumb. He looked up at Lucian. The man was smiling.

“Ah, sorry about that. I thought I mentioned it last night, but I must have forgotten. I don’t require a name for signatures but for a thumbprint to carry weight it does have to be signed in blood.”

Dipper was annoyed but he couldn’t remember why. He knew something about using blood here felt dangerous. However, what Lucian was saying made sense, and anyway, Dipper wasn’t nearly well versed enough in magic to tell the ringleader of a magical circus that he was wrong.

Lucian held out the contract to him. “Just press down right here, and you’ll officially have joined the circus!”

Dipper reached out then paused. “Didn’t you need a name from me?”

“Oh yes, but not right now. Take your time to pick the name you want, I wouldn’t want you to use the wrong one.”

“How long do I have to pick one?”

Lucian laughed, and the laughter sounded wrong, but Dipper couldn’t seem to remember why that mattered. “Let’s just say I’ll need it before your contract ends.”

The paper hung from Lucian’s outstretched hand. It looked old and weathered, moreso than it had looked last night when Dipper had read it. The ink upon it was faded with age and at the bottom, where he was supposed to sign, there was a faint red mark. A smudge, almost a recognizable shape, but not quite. Like there had been ink there a long long time ago.

Dipper was an anxious person by nature. He knew this. His heart rate skyrocketed when the pretty cashier at the corner store in DC asked if he wanted to pay with cash or card. He had once become so convinced that his and Mabel’s teacher back in Piedmont was a vampire, Ford had to take a week off from sailing to come and confirm that the guy was just an extremely pale and skinny history nerd. He could feel that familiar anxiety thrumming though his body but above it there was a strange calm, accompanying the rising buzz on his skin. He felt as though he was supposed to be figuring something out right now, but the pieces of the puzzle that he knew was there, were drifting further away from him with each passing moment. His brain felt like it was full of a dull fog, and everything around him dulled as his anxiety slowly faded away.

Fingers snapped in front of his face, and he blinked as the world rushed back.

“You with me?”

Dipper looked up at Lucian with a smile. “Yeah sorry, don’t know where my head was at there.”

“Well, we don’t have all day kid. We need to be on the road in an hour, so what’ll it be? You in, or you out?”

Dipper reached forward, pressing his thumb onto the worn paper of the contract. The drop of blood spread across his fingerprint and soaked definitively into the paper, whorls and ridges captured in indelible bright red.

“I’m in!”

[clinical-space-podcast]

Reblog if your art project has not, does not, and never will make use of generative ai at any point in your creative process.

[arrhythmiapod]

Are you ready, residents? Welcome to Ribbon Ridge.

Arrhythmia is a ten-episode limited-series queer horror audio drama, releasing in the summer of 2025. Follow us on Instagram, Tumblr, and Bluesky @arrhythmiapod for updates. We'll see you soon🫀

[gravityskittles]

Not gravity falls related: (once again the next chapter will be here before the end of June.) I'm moving cross country on the 22nd and then I'm literally free until mid August so the rest of the chapters will be posted by the end of the summer. I'm so sorry for the hiatus the authors curse got me bad. But! One of my other creative projects is finally completed and I wanted to share it here cause I'm really excited about it!

For anyone who likes queer horror podcasts this is a project I've been working on for five years now that is finally getting released this summer!!! I'm so so excited for people to get to listen to it so please if you are interested give it a try!

[gravityskittles]

In lieu of another chapter (which will come soon I promise, I just lost a lot of motivation due to family stuff and increased workload etc. Y'know. The traditional authors curse) have a playlist!!!

Song order/choices are explained below:

Title theme (obvious)

Secret Worlds - (Beginning of summer, the mysteries of gravity falls etc.)

Second Child Restless Child - (The younger twins relationship, the growth they will have to go through to continue on)

Two Birds - (again the younger twins, the foreshadowing of the pulling apart and growing up that is happening to them)

Shooting Star -- Dreamer (Mabels songs, some are just songs she would listen to ie 5SOS and Taylor Swift, Shooting Star is for her emblem, and the last few songs are her main conflict about not wanting to grow up too fast and not wanting to experience change.)

Constellations -- Price (Dippers songs, constellations is for his name, some are things he would listen to or just general vibes, boys will be bugs is because I fundamentally see Dipper as trans and couldn't resist adding that song, and Devil Town and Price are sort of his main conflict with needing Mabel but not wanting to need her/wanting to grow up too fast and not seeing her as a fully realized person)

As It Was - (I don't exactly know how to explain it but I really like this song as the closing to the younger twins arc, like learning that they need each other, that things will change and they will change but change doesn't necessitate growing up or growing apart)

Are You Satisfied - (the beginning of the Stans arc, the pressure from themselves and from their father, the constant need to prove themselves)

Dear Wormwood - Babylon (Ford's songs, I think dear Wormwood is a good summation of his character, meet me in the woods is him finding Bill, the next few songs are his relationship Arc with Bill, Babylon is the portal incident)

Brother -- Family (Stans Songs. Brother and The Boxer are a summation of his character, the rest of the songs are mostly just vibes and character analysis, pretty pimpin is specifically his arc of pretending to be Ford and then losing his memories. I have a lot of feelings about that song and ideas for an animatic which I will probably never make.)

I have made mistakes (The Stans reconciliation and the end of their arc together.)

Insane -- All eyes on me (Bills songs, pretty self explanatory, this is love and rule 34 are about Ford specifically I don't know that I think they were in a romantic relationship exactly....but something was happening there.)

Life is Good -- Amnesia (weirdmageddon and feelings about the memory gun)

Trouble -- Wave After Wave (Stan O War vibes and post canon Stans vibes)

The rest of the songs -- (Bill isn't dead and I don't trust Alex Hirsch)

[gravityskittles]

Chapter 17: Of Choices and Deals

Dipper honestly couldn’t remember ever being this angry before. Sure, he’d been angry at Bill and angry at his dad, but those flavors of anger had been driven entirely by fear. This anger was driven by nothing except a deep sense of betrayal.

It felt like the confirmation he had been waiting for the whole time. No one really wanted him. People just tolerated him, until the moment that they could finally cast him away. First his dad, then his old friends, then his mom, and now, finally, Mabel. The one person he was supposed to have been able to count on for his entire life.

He didn’t see the point of continuing on to Gravity Falls. After all, if Mabel had betrayed him, that just confirmed that eventually everyone else was going to, so what was the point in putting himself through that vicious cycle of hope and loss again.

He dug blindly through the car, collecting his scattered belongings and shoving them into his bag haphazardly. He couldn’t breathe properly, and his own pulse was thundering in his ears so loudly that he didn’t even hear the sound of the clock when it shattered. He felt his arm knock against it and turned just in time to watch it hit the ground, breaking cleanly in two and scattering glass and gears across the pavement.

It felt oddly symbolic to him. The final confirmation he needed to make this decision. He bent down and grabbed a piece of the clock, then pulled his bag up onto his shoulder and walked away from the car, towards the highway. He didn’t look back at the tree line. He didn’t need to look back to know Mabel wouldn’t be there, she hadn’t even called after him when he had left her in the snow. She hadn’t even tried to apologize, so there was no use waiting for someone he knew wasn’t going to come.

As he walked out onto the verge of the highway, watching the setting sun bleed its way along the snow mounded up around him, he convinced himself Mabel would be fine. She had always been better with people than he could ever hope to be. Anyway, people didn’t stop caring about Mabel, not really. She still talked to her friends from Piedmont every couple of weeks, and she was even still friends with an old ex from middle school. She would get to Gravity Falls and talk to Mcgucket about the time loop, and he would figure it out for her. She would be fine. She would be happy. She would be better off now that he wasn’t in the picture anymore.

He watched a car approaching in the distance, took a deep breath, and stuck out his thumb.

…

Okay, so hitch-hiking was probably not the way to do—whatever it was he was doing. On the plus side, he hadn’t gotten himself killed, or robbed. The first three cars had passed him without slowing down, but the fourth car had pulled over for him. The driver, an older man, with a round, kind face and a warm smile had offered him a ride to a motel in town.

Dipper had trusted the man immediately, and climbed in. He had successfully avoided questions about what exactly a “kid like him” was doing hitch-hiking away from a national forest by himself, and the man had eventually relented and pulled off at the motel. As Dipper got out of the car the man shook his hand, slipping him two twenties and giving him directions to the local bus station so he could ‘get a nice hot meal and a safer way to travel’. It had been a surprisingly wholesome interaction despite neither of them learning the other’s name.

Dipper, with no other immediate plans, had checked into the motel before heading across the street to a local chain restaurant for dinner. He was now staring vaguely at the lemonade machine, lost in thought, doing his best to ignore the pit of anger, guilt, and loss which rattled around inside his head. His journal lay open on the table in front of him, and his pen was slowly bleeding an ink splotch into one of the pages.

The paddle in the lemonade churned steadily with a soft buzzing hum that reminded him distantly of the noise the mothlings had made back in West Virginia. Eager for a distraction, he flipped back through the journal, looking at the photo of the creatures that Mabel had taken and carefully affixed to the page with tape during one of their nights on the ghost roads. He smiled slightly remembering her flopping back on the seat dramatically, bemoaning how she had had to leave most of her scrapbooking supplies in DC. “Putting tape on a picture in this day and age is a crime Dipper! A crime!! Civilized people use scrapbook corners!” He had responded with something along the lines of “Well it’s a good thing you aren’t a civilized person then, isn’t it.” Mabel had pulled his hat over his face in retaliation.

The smile slid off his face. That kind of interaction was never going to happen again. He knew it was for the better, but that didn’t mean it didn’t hurt. Frustrated with himself, he scanned the rest of the journal page, doing his best to ignore the occasional notes from Mable written in pink gel pen in the margins of his blue ballpoint scrawl.

As he read over the page, the final warning Mothman had issued them, floated to the surface of his brain. “Remember that lost things cannot be found unless they truly want to be”. Dipper frowned and picked up his pen, flipping back to a clean page in his journal and scrawling the words absently in the corner. He stared at them for a moment and then also copied down the prophecy from the Green Fairy.

“You stand before a Crossroads, A deal waits, the decision is yours to make, your life is yours to take, or yours to leave behind, choose your name carefully.”

He circled the word crossroads and underlined the word deal. He stared down at the page for a long moment, playing idly with a loose straw wrapper in his free hand and chewing on the end of his pen.

Beneath both of the previous sentences he wrote the words time loop in large block letters and underlined them. He resumed chewing on his pen and tapped his fingers on the table, tracing out a repetitive circle as he continued to stare fixedly at the words on the page. He felt as though he was missing something here.

Initially all three of these things had felt entirely separate; the time loop had been an accident after all. Simply a combination of the supernatural and magic. The warning from Mothman had just been a cryptic jab at the two of them because they had seemed unsure of what exactly their goal was or where they were going. The prophecy from Lucian’s staff had definitely felt ominous, but he had assumed it was one of those prophecies that happens on its own, with or without the recipient’s input. The type of thing that could only really be understood when its looked back on after the events had happened.

It's not that he didn’t think the prophecy was worth paying attention to, Dipper was just well aware that attempting to escape a prophecy often only resulted in setting yourself even more firmly on the path to fulfilling it.

Now, however, as he looked at the words written across the page in front of him, he began to consider them in a slightly different light. Great-Uncle Ford was always adamant that it was best to process data by starting out with a central assumption. Even if that assumption later turned out to be false, in the beginning it gave you a lens through which to analyze the data you had. Looking at data as a whole with no guiding factor isn’t something human brains were designed to do, after all. 

If he assumed that both of these prophetic warnings were directly related to the time loop problem, that meant that the time loop was seemingly directly tied to his own indecision in what he wanted to do next. Mothman had told them that lost things can’t be found unless they want to be. It felt fair to say that he and Mabel were ‘lost’ in the time stream, stuck in a day that wouldn’t let them be found by their family no matter how far they travelled. So perhaps the fact that he hadn’t been certain that he wanted to go home, back when they first entered the ghost roads, had created a kind of spell, hiding them until they were sure of what they wanted.

This didn’t entirely make sense, because Mabel clearly hadn’t had any reservations about going back to Gravity Falls from the start, so her also being stuck in the loop seemed odd. He wrote that down, then drew an arrow off to the side and wrote the word proximity. Perhaps him being near her, or them being twins, had caused the magic to extend to both of them, even though he was the main cause of it beginning at all.

The prophecy from the Green Fairy was a little more difficult to parse, but the mention of a crossroads once again reinforced the idea that the magic affecting him had to do with the indecision he felt about his own future. He wasn’t sure what to make of the rest of the lines, however. They seemed to imply that he could escape the time loop by making a deal with something or making up his mind about the direction he wanted his life to take.

Dipper frowned, studying the lines and swirls in the cheap Formica tabletop beneath his journal. The word ‘crossroads’ was bothering him. It didn’t feel like it was being used metaphorically. It felt like instead, it was referring to a specific place, or creature.

As he continued to turn the prophecy over in his mind, the tinny speakers above him crackled with music. He found himself humming along absently with the familiar tune that was coming out of them. He hadn’t heard The Devil Went Down to Georgia in a long time. He and Mabel had once had a long argument about whether or not a fiddle made of gold was in any way practical as a musical instrument and…he paused, his thoughts grinding to a halt as he re-read the journal page again. It couldn’t be that easy. But maybe…

Dipper hurried back to the motel and dug frantically through his bag for his cryptids book. He found what he was looking for under the ‘ghosts’ section and began to read.

“Perhaps one of the most well-known ghost stories in North America is that of the Crossroads Ghost, also known as the Crossroads Devil. Variations of this legend exist but they all tend to have the same central aspects. In each story the main character is a person who seeks out the Crossroads Ghost in an effort to have a wish or desire fulfilled, much like the stories of the Middle Eastern Djinn. Once the being has been summoned it will either offer a wish in exchange for something of the askers (In more religious retellings of the story the wish is often traded for the human’s soul), or it will offer a contest or game for the asker to win their wish. Losing the contest or the game will result in the being refusing to fulfill the wish and requiring payment from the human involved.

Habitat: Sightings and stories of these beings are centered throughout the Appalachian region and the Southern United States, with scattered accounts from across the remaining United States and a handful of accounts from various Canadian provinces.

Powers: Other than wish granting abilities, no specific powers have been attributed to this being. Accounts of fulfilled wishes vary, implying that there is no limit to what the Crossroads ghost can accomplish. However, they are known for purposefully misinterpreting wishes when the wording is vague – again similar to the Middle Eastern Djinn. Some reports note that no time seemed to pass while the Crossroads Ghost was present, leaving the asker standing alone at the crossroads at the exact time they had arrived there, after the terms of the deal had been completed.

Dipper read the entry three times. Then he opened his journal and re-read his notes from earlier. It felt too easy, but it was all right there in the book. He still wasn’t sure what had caused the time loop in the first place – perhaps they had somehow unknowingly summoned a crossroads ghost when they fell into the ghost roads back in Virginia. It seemed unlikely, but it wasn’t impossible. If that was the case, he’d just need to summon the Crossroads Ghost and sort out whatever had happened, so that time would run normally again. If that wasn’t the case and some other thing had caused the loop, then he could still summon a Crossroads Ghost and figure out a simple deal that would break the loop.

He had realized on his walk back to the hotel earlier that he knew what his next move was. He still had that business card which Lucian had left with him when he and Mabel had left the Green Fairy, and he thought that it seemed like a good next step. So, tomorrow he would start heading back to the circus, and whenever he got there, he would ask Lucian if he could stay for a bit. He didn’t exactly have a circus act ready to go and he hated performing, but he was sure he could find ways to make himself useful. The circus seemed like a good place to lose himself for a while, while he figured out whatever it was he actually wanted.

He nodded to himself and shut his journal, gently placing it on the bedside table with his phone and Lucian’s business card. He had made a decision. Tonight, he would avoid the ghost roads. When he woke up the time loop would have reset him significantly closer to the Green Fairy and he would be able to go back and talk to Lucian. Best case scenario he’d find an appropriate crossroads along the way and try his hand at some ghost hunting. It would certainly make everything a lot easier if he could sort out the time loop before having to go back to a place he and Mabel had already been in a previous loop.

He sighed and curled up in bed. He wasn’t sure what would happen if only one of them missed the deadline, but he was fairly sure that if Mabel was in the ghost roads when the loop happened, he wouldn’t drag her with him. If he did, well, that would be a problem for tomorrow. For now, all he wanted was sleep, and hopefully when he woke up, he’d be a lot closer to the circus.

…

When Dipper woke up, he was confused by how well rested he felt. Over the past week he’d gotten used to sleeping in the blanket nest across Mabel’s backseat, and while entirely manageable it had been leaving him stiff and sore every morning. He didn’t remember them deciding to stay in a hotel last night, but his brain was always foggy when he woke up.

“Mabel, where are we?”

He didn’t have to open his eyes to know she would already be awake. Mabel always woke up before him, it was the main reason their parents had ended up splitting them into separate bedrooms when they were little. She not only woke up before he did, but she had always been the louder of the two. Dipper had lost a lot of sleep on the weekends due to Mabel bouncing around their room at ungodly hours of the morning, singing, dancing, and dramatically attempting to reenact scenes from her favorite movies. That was part of the reason he had resented the shift back to a shared bedroom in DC, although he had been surprised to learn that she was much quieter now and tended to slip out of their room in the mornings long before he woke up. Of course, they had both grown up a lot since age 10, but given how loud, bright, and bubbly his sister still was on a daily basis, he hadn’t expected her morning habits to have changed that much. It had been especially surprising given how loud she still insisted on being in the summers when they stayed in the attic of the Mystery Shack together.

He frowned and shoved himself up against the headboard of the bed, trying to shake off the heavy pull of sleep that had been creeping up on him again. He blinked his eyes open blearily, wondering why Mabel hadn’t answered him yet, then he noticed the distinct lack of a second bed in the dingy little room, and the events of yesterday flooded back to him all at once.

He was overwhelmed for a moment by the sheer absence of Mabel as he realized how instinctively he had spoken to her upon waking up, but he pushed all of that away. It was something he would just have to get used to, disruption in a routine of any kind always had an adjustment period, and this was for the better. He knew that, even as a small, treacherous voice in the back of his mind questioned him.

Now that he had slept on it, Dipper felt guilty about everything that had happened yesterday. If he’d been thinking straight, he would have seen Mabel’s comment for what it really was. After all, he’d had years to miss his dad. He’d been grieving the loss of that relationship since they were twelve. But Mabel had always been the optimistic one. She had believed even then that Dad would come around, that he would take the space he needed, figure out that he did love them, and come back. Conversely, Dipper had known that was an impossibility by age 13, the moment their mom picked them up alone at the bus stop when they had arrived back in Piedmont.

However, he hadn’t been thinking straight. Days of being in the car together, trapped in a time loop neither of them really understood, punctuated by daily arguments and pointless fights, had worn him raw. So, instead of realizing that Mabel was only just coming to terms with the fact that they had lost their parents forever, Dipper had been burned by it. Horribly. But he didn’t have time to dwell on that now. He had made his decision yesterday and he had to keep believing it had been the right one.

The far more interesting part of his morning was that he had woken up in the same motel he had gone to sleep in. Delighted, he reached for the phone on the bedside table and looked at the date. It still, stubbornly, read December 31st, 2015, and his heart sunk. Some part of him had been convinced that when he had decided to walk away from Mabel, he was making the choice necessary to free them from the time loop. At worst, he had assumed that the time loop would continue to function as it had, causing him to wake up on the side of the road somewhere a couple of hours away, alone but still closer to his goal than he had been. This outcome, where the rules of the time loop seemed to have changed completely, wasn’t something he had anticipated at all.

After sitting in bed for a while, staring angrily at the date on his phone like he could somehow will it to fix itself, Dipper decided that nothing about his plans had changed. He still wanted to go to the circus, and he still needed to try and summon a crossroads ghost to sort out the time problem. So, after a quick shower that made him feel marginally more like a person, he packed up his stuff and slipped out the side door of the motel. He felt a little bad for not paying, but he wasn’t entirely sure that the motel even realized he was here given that technically he hadn’t even checked in until tonight in the first place.

As he waited at the bus stop next to the hotel, he kept having to stop himself from watching every car that passed. He knew that some foolish part of him was looking for Mabel’s car, but not only would seeing another version of himself be a terrible idea, but also he knew that they hadn’t even arrived in Deadwood until much later in the day. As he rode the bus to the train station, he deliberately looked away from the parking lot for the national forest when they passed it. Even if Mabel’s car was still there (he had realized that the time loop change could have affected her as well, leaving her somewhere still in or around Deadwood), he didn’t want to know.

…

In the end it took him almost all day to get back to the small town the circus was near. There hadn’t been any trains leaving the Deadwood train station that afternoon, so he had hopped on a bus that was at least going in the right direction. After getting off at a stop about an hour away from where he had wanted to end up, he had started walking down the highway. Around lunchtime he had ducked into a service station for some snacks and a map of the area. While he ate, he studied the map, circling some road junctions nearby the circus that seemed promising for his crossroads ghost.

He was fairly certain that just any old crossroads wasn’t going to work. A lot of the stories he had managed to look up during the bus ride, had mentioned crossroads where criminals had been executed or blood had been spilled, but all of the stories seemed to make a point of mentioning that the crossroads were old and barely used. His theory was that the crossroads needed to be replicated within the ghost roads themselves, someone dying on the specific spot seemed like a good way to link the two, but age would also do it, as with time and use, the imprint of the roads bled over between worlds.

He had then continued to walk down the highway for another half hour or so before eventually giving in and hitch-hiking again. The woman who had picked him up had been nice, she hadn’t asked him any personal questions other than where he was going and if he needed any help. She had even specifically gone out of her way to drop him off at the outskirts of the town of Blunt instead of just leaving him at the highway exit like he had suggested. The circus was only a twenty minute walk from where she had dropped him off, but he had decided to go ghost hunting first, before he lost the light completely.

The first three locations had proven useless. The first two hadn’t shown up in the ghost roads at all, and while the third one did exist in the ghost roads, the street in the real world had only recently been repaved, and so any kind of digging or ritual seemed out of the question. He currently stood at the last location. This one consisted of a dirt road which crossed a set of railway tracks. Shifting briefly into the ghost roads confirmed that this specific crossroads existed there as well. The dirt road was solid under his feet, and off to either side of him faintly glowing tracks snaked off into the hazy undergrowth.

In order to perform the ritual, Dipper shifted back into the real world. He wasn’t an idiot and knew that approaching a ghost in its home territory was likely to end incredibly badly for him. The ritual he was planning on was a combination of spells and items he’d cobbled together from what he remembered of Great-Uncle Ford’s sorcery entries from Journal 2. In all honesty, none of the Crossroad’s stories had mentioned much other than a trinket of some kind for initial payment, but doing this without any magical elements at all felt wrong to him. At least with the spell components he felt marginally more protected against whatever it was he was summoning.

He stood in the center of the train tracks, balanced on one of the wooden railroad ties, and dug a shallow pit into the cold ground in front of him. Around him he had scratched out a few runes in the dirt and attempted to make a circle out of sticks. He reached out and placed the hour hand from the clock, which he had picked up yesterday before leaving Mabel’s car behind, into the hole he had made. It seemed fitting for the request he was going to make. Then, he closed his eyes and focused on his wish.

He just wanted the timeloop to end. He wanted to be able to exist in the real world again, to make his own way through the world unaffected by magic or laws he did not understand. He wanted Mabel to be free of it as well, to be safe and home again – wherever that was for her. He wanted it to be January, he wanted the new year to turn over and allow him to keep moving forward with it, into whatever it was he was moving towards.

There was a crack in the air, and the temperature around him dropped significantly. Dipper opened his eyes. A man was standing on the train tracks. He was tall with long dark hair and dark clothes. One hand clutched the top of a smooth silver cane, and in his other hand the hour hand Dipper had left as an offering spun mesmerizingly between his fingers.

Dipper narrowed his eyes and focused on the being in front of him, he tried to pull apart the image in order to force away the glamour he was sure existed there. The man looked up at him, brown eyes shifting to jet black, and Dipper took a step back. He blinked a few times but nothing else about the figure seemed to change. Satisfied that he was seeing the true form of the crossroads ghost, he welcomed it.

“Hello, I have called you here to ask a favor.”

The being tilted its head at him and laughed. The laugh was rich and full and oddly familiar to Dipper’s ears.

“I know, mortal, that is the only reason I am ever called anywhere.”

Unable to figure out why the ghost’s voice felt so familiar to him, Dipper continued slowly, thinking about each word before he said it, afraid of accidentally entering into an agreement before he was ready.

“There is a spell I am trapped under, a time spell that keeps me stuck in the same day. It also affected my twin sister. I wish for the spell to be removed from both of us, and for us to be placed back into the right time.”

The being took a step closer to him, eyes boring into his soul. Dipper struggled not to flinch away from it, desperate not to show fear.

“The time which you originally were trapped in, or the time after that which would have passed if you were living it linearly?”

Dipper thought for a moment. “Either is fine, so long as, after the loop ends, time progresses normally from whichever moment you pick.”

“Those are your terms?”

“Yes.”

“Then here are mine. I will break this time loop for you and your twin. I will make it so that time flows normally for both of you from the moment the loop is broken. In return, you will go to the circus that lies east of here. You will speak with the man who says he runs the circus, and you will sign the contract he presents you, and stay with the circus for a time.”

Dipper stared at the ghost, confused, he had been planning to do all of that regardless. He trusted Lucian, he understood from the short time he had spent with him that the contracts were a necessary part of keeping the peace between the fae courts. He thought over the words, looking for loopholes.

“How long of a time would I need to stay for?”

The figure shrugged, an odd rolling motion that seemed to blur his shape for a moment. “However long you wished to.”

“What do you get out of this?”

The being stared into him again, silently.

“It’s just, this feels very one sided to me. I expected the payment to be…different.”

“I happen to have an interest in this circus, that is all. There is a quirk of my nature that allows me to keep watch over those with whom I have traded favors. Your position at the circus would allow me to know more about it. It would be mutually beneficial. However, if it is not satisfactory, I can certainly present you with a different form of payment. Would you prefer it to be different?”

“No. No, that makes sense, I guess.”

“In that case. Those are the terms.” The being tucked the hour hand away inside its jacket and held out its hand to him.

Dipper stared at the hand offered to him and thought about deals. His family was certainly no stranger to them. After everything with Bill, Dipper had avoided handshakes whenever possible and became almost obsessive about the wording of any kind of contract. He had always been the kind of person who actually read the terms and conditions (frankly people who didn’t scared him), but this had been a whole new level of paranoia. Just another quirk of his that no one but Mabel had really seemed to understand.

Something about all of this still felt off to him. The deal seemed too good, too easy. He could hear Stan in the back of his mind telling him that if a deal seemed too good that’s because it was. But at the same time. He wanted it to be real. He needed the time loop broken, and he wanted to go to the circus. He might regret this but he couldn’t really see how he would regret this. Worst case scenario Lucian was secretly evil, and Dipper ran away from the circus too, it wouldn’t break the terms of this contract to do so.

He shook off the uncertainty. He had been tricked by deals before, but he knew better now. He’d grown and learned. He wouldn’t make the same mistake twice, he couldn’t. He took a deep breath and met the man’s eyes.

“Deal.”

[gravityskittles]

Hello little update: I just realized it's been almost a month since I posted a chapter and I'm so sorry lmao. I'm lighting designing a production of Into the Woods and it has been absolutely kicking my ass. A three hour long musical is no joke to work on. Tonight is officially my last night of tech notes though so after 10:30pm I am freeeeeeee!!!!!

And I have the next chapter fully outlined so it will be up sometime in the next 5-7 days I promise!

Anyway you all are my favorite thank you for sticking with me! Stay tuned for a nice long chapter of sad angst Dipper POV

[gravityskittles]

Okay not a gravity falls related post (the next chapter is coming soon I promise, I have tech for a show I'm designing this week and it's killing me right now but I will have time to write soon!)

I reread the Murderbot Diaries (excellent series by Martha Wells highly highly recommend if you haven't read it. Tons of queerness and neurodivergent themes also just fun sci-fi shenanigans) and I'm looking for fanfic to read now that I've run out of actual content and I'm Struggling to find anything.

If anyone who follows me on here has any suggestions of fanfics for me that they have enjoyed I'd Love Some. (No real tag preferences although I don't love Murderbot in explicit romantic relationships cause in my mind it is ace.)

I'll probably repost for my main as well but yeah. Please give me fic suggestions I crave more silly robot time.

[gravityskittles]

Wherever We Go AU

Chapter 16: Foundering

Ford had wanted there to be a way to scientifically figure this out. He wanted there to be a way to figure everything out scientifically, but even he understood that was unrealistic. Well. Not necessarily unrealistic. Just that there were certain lines you shouldn’t cross with science, or at least lines other people thought he shouldn’t cross with science. But this specific thing should be easy and wasn’t even something other people would find morally questionable.

There should be a way for him to figure out exactly what Stan’s premonition had meant. Because if he could figure out what it meant, then he could figure out exactly where the kids were going to pop up and grab them before anything bad actually happened.

There were pages of calculations scattered across the dashboard. Ford had been working on this solution since they had parked at a motel in Deadwood earlier this morning. Stan had just sighed when Ford had asked if he wanted to help and told him that “he was pretty sure they would know what was gonna happen when it happened.” Which, in Ford’s opinion, was an absolutely ridiculous way to go through life.

Stan was currently snoring gently in the passenger’s seat. They had both agreed not to leave the car – wanting to be able to head out the second they heard from Fiddleford, or saw anything strange happening around town. The second they had decided this, Stan had pulled his beanie down over his eyes and propped his feet up on the dash to take a nap. Ford was uninterested in sleep. After last night, well—he twitched his head to the side involuntarily as though trying to forcefully eject that thought from his skull. He wasn’t thinking about last night.

Besides, it didn’t matter. He was fairly certain his calculations were finally getting somewhere. Envisioning time as a form of movement was certainly helping anyway. He moved a few numbers around and stared at the formula he was trying out, frowning slightly. Then, several things happened at once.

His phone dinged, Stan shot bolt upright in his seat, and Ford suddenly had a headache with pain so fierce it felt like his skull was going to split. He gasped, hands flying up to his head, but the pain was gone as fast as it had come, leaving the equations swimming fuzzily on the page in front of him.

“We need to go.” Stan’s voice was quiet but certain.

Ford pulled his phone out, fumbling with the buttons as he tried to unlock it. There was a notification from Fiddleford but he couldn’t get his fingers to put in the password properly. Stan reached out and snatched the phone out of his hand, sweeping a bunch of Ford’s equation sheets off the dash and onto his lap.

“Now, Ford!”

“We don’t know where we’re going!” Ford protested, scrambling to pick up his papers before they got completely out of order.

A firetruck screamed by on the road behind them, sirens blaring loudly.

“Yes, we do!” He pointed at the truck, mouth set in a grim line.

“How do you know?” Ford shot back as he started up the engine, throwing Stan’s car into reverse.

There was smoke rising above the trees from the forest to the north of them. Stan didn’t look away from it as he answered. “I dreamed it.”

For a moment Ford wanted to argue. Dreams weren’t real, there was no reason for the time loop to have broken yet, and driving towards a forest fire was insane. But he had never heard Stan sound so utterly convinced of something before, and if he was right and Ford wasted precious time arguing with him about it while Dipper and Mabel were in danger, he would never forgive himself.

By the time they got to the visitor’s parking lot for the local trailhead a good chunk of the forest was on fire and the lot was choked with fire trucks and police cars. For a second, Ford thought they had gotten it wrong, that this was just an unconnected fire, and then he saw Mabel’s car parked a little ways off. He didn’t even bother parking properly, just ripped the key out of the ignition and shot out of the door at the same time as Stan.

They both crossed quickly to the purple car, ignoring the shouts of a policeman behind them. Ford approached the car carefully, he already could tell that the kids weren’t there. The backdoor on the passengers side was hanging open, and something lay shattered on the ground beside it. Stan caught up with him as he bent to examine it. His breath caught in his chest as he realized it was the clock they had given the twins for their birthday last year. Now it lay broken almost perfectly in half, Dipper and Mabel’s sides connected only by a scatter of broken gears and shattered glass. His fingers brushed lightly over the clock hands which lay a few feet away, slightly bent.

“Stan, do you think—” Ford broke off as he heard a strange noise amidst the roar of flames behind them. He turned his head towards the sound and waited. After a moment he heard it again. It was quiet, nearly drowned out by the cacophony of shouts and sirens and the crackling flames. But it was unmistakably there. Someone in the woods was screaming. He felt himself jump up on instinct, but before he could get more than a few steps away a hand on his jacket pulled him up short.

He stumbled and rounded on Stan, who stared back at him, clearly terrified. The angry outburst died in Ford’s throat, and he floundered for something to say but, before he could figure it out, Stan let him go.

“Just. You better come back, Six.”

Ford gave a sharp nod, and reached out, taking the time to briefly lace his fingers with Stan’s, despite the urgency thrumming through him. He tightened his grip for a moment, then let go, and launched himself toward the fire.

The world blurred into nothing but heat and noise. As Ford ran, he felt his stride lengthen, and he began to filter out the sounds around him, focusing in on the voice he could still hear, pleading for him somewhere within the burning trees. He didn’t often miss his time as an interdimensional fugitive, but sometimes he missed how simple things had been. When your only objective is to survive, running becomes second nature, words become tools wielded efficiently and infrequently, instinct becomes your only ally. He hadn’t run like this in a long time, but his feet still knew the pattern of fallen trees and snowbanks, his lungs still remembered how to keep his breathing deep and even, despite the smoke in the air.

He tugged up the neck of his sweater over his face to filter out as much of the haze and the embers as he could and made a mental note to thank Fiddleford next time he saw him for the damage resistant coats he had given both Ford and Stan last Hanukkah.

The sound was getting closer now, and as he rounded a snarl of bushes he saw her.

Mabel was collapsed in the slush, he could see blood on her face and arms. Her sweater was burned and charred in multiple places, and he could see that her hands were blistered and red. There was no sign of Dipper anywhere. He glanced around carefully, scanning for any sign of his nephew. He could see broken branches and mud where Mabel had clearly scrambled through the fire to where she now lay, but he saw nothing else to indicate someone else had been here at all.

He shoved his growing anxiety down, burying it where the rest of his panic was locked away, and gently scooped Mabel out of the snow. His first objective was to get her to safety, then he would return and find Dipper.

Her eyes fluttered and she struggled for a moment, but he didn’t drop her, instead tucking her close to his chest, shielding her face inside his coat. He could see that her hair had also been burned, and gently threaded his fingers through it, trying to find the source of the blood still dripping down her face.

“Dad?”

His heart broke. He forced himself to take a deep breath separating his emotions from himself, cutting them out of his chest to examine and feel later, once they were safe, once there was time. He pulled her shoulder bag off of her arm, slinging it securely across his chest. His fingers finally found the gash on her forehead, and he murmured, “Oh sweetheart, what did you do?”.

Mabel began to cry, and he hugged her closer to him.

“Mabel, honey, where is Dipper? Was he with you?”

She began to sob harder at his words and he frowned.

“Mabel, I know it hurts but I need you to focus,” He tried to move her head so she could see him, “Did Dipper get out safely?”

She blinked, eyes unfocused, and in the back of his head Ford added concussion to his growing list of Mabel’s injuries. Then she nodded, and Ford felt relief crash over him for a moment before Mabel’s eyes fluttered closed and her sobs faded. He felt the weight in his arms shift and realized that Mabel had passed out. He once again pushed the anxiety down and took a deep breath before beginning the run back towards the parking lot.

…

He reached the car right as Mabel was waking up again. Her eyes were still unfocused, but she managed to hold her head up as he walked over to Stan.

Ford watched Stan’s face smooth over, carefully masking his fear behind a relieved smile.

“Hey there Pumpkin,” he said softly, opening the car door and moving to take her out of Ford’s arms. “We’ve been looking for you.”

Stan lifted her up and tucked her into the backseat. She was clinging to Stan’s jacket so tightly that he was unable to straighten back up fully to look at Ford.

“She has a deep contusion on her forehead, second degree burns along her forearms and hands, a possible concussion, a twisted ankle, and likely other injuries as yet undetermined.” His voice didn’t feel like his own. It was clinical and detached, all emotion still locked away. If he let himself actually think about what he was saying for even a moment he knew he would crumble, and right now they couldn’t afford for him to do that. Not while Dipper was still missing.

“Where are you going?” Stan had finished detangling Mabel’s hands from his coat and was facing Ford, one hand resting comfortingly on Mabel’s shoulder.

“Dipper.” Ford replied shortly, turning back towards the forest, prepared to run again.

“He’s not there, Six.”

Ford froze, the animal inside of him howling to ignore Stan. He knew the longer he delayed the less chance there was of getting Dipper back safely. Statistics about smoke inhalation whirred by in the back of his mind, but he forced himself to stop, forced himself to listen.

“McGucket called, he picked Dipper up on a gas station security camera right before we headed over here. There’s some time complications but he said Dipper was definitely alone and seemed to be heading back east. Said it looked like he was hitchhiking.”

Ford didn’t move. This was complicated, too complicated for the way his brain was currently processing things. Dipper and Mabel were a unit. Inseparable. They were supposed to be together. He and Stan hadn’t planned for the outcome where Mabel and Dipper were separated, that hadn’t even come up as a possibility.

“Look, I know it’s not what we planned for, but I don’t wanna hafta go talk to the police again. It was hard enough to keep ‘em distracted while you were in the woods, they aren’t gonna listen to me if they see how injured she is.”

He placed his hand on Ford’s shoulder again and this time Ford let himself be led back to the car.

…

They had agreed before heading out to get the twins that unless someone was fatally injured, they were going to avoid a hospital trip. Both of them hated hospitals for various reasons and Stan was worried that taking injured children with at least one outstanding warrant (that they knew of) to the hospital would result in a bunch of legal issues they would both prefer to avoid. Even without the potential criminal charges, the fact that neither of them was Dipper and Mabel’s legal guardian was sure to come with its own set of issues. So, with the help of Wendy and her dad they had come up with a fairly extensive first aid kit to keep in the car.

When they got to the hotel, Stan scooped Mabel up easily out of the backseat and carried her into the bathroom to get a better idea of her injuries. Ford pulled the first aid kit out of the trunk and, after glancing around for any witnesses, unshrunk Mabel’s car. That particular idea had been Stan’s. Apparently at some point during that first summer, the twins had found the size changing crystals out in the woods and built a rudimentary shrink ray with one of them. Before they had left on the Stan O’ War II, Stan had suggested that they rig up another one to store extra provisions and after using it on several occasions to shrink various pieces of large lab equipment, Ford had decided it was essential for all of their adventures. It had definitely come in handy earlier when neither of them could find Mabel’s car keys.

Ford followed the others inside and laid Mabel’s shoulder bag down next to one of the beds. He set the first aid kit on the table and, out of habit, checked the locks on the windows and the door.

Then, finally, he allowed himself a small moment to fall apart. He sunk down onto the floor between the bed and the wall, pressing his back against the floral wallpaper as hard as he could, letting the pressure ground him back into reality.

Bit by bit he felt himself come back, felt the animal leech out of his bones and teeth. His mind slowly caught back up and all the anxiety and worry flooded back into him. He raised his shaking hands to his face and bit down hard on his palm, letting out a muffled scream of anger and fear.

The bathroom door clicked open, and he jerked his head up. Stan was staring at him warily.

“You alright, Ford?”

Slowly, painfully, Ford shook his head. He’d promised Stan to be more honest and even though every single part of him was screaming that right now was not about him, he felt the need to at least try.

“Right, stupid question. Are you gonna be okay by yourself for a mo? I’m grabbing a change of clothes for Mabel, I need to wash her hair to figure out which parts of it are unsalvageable. But I’ll come back out here for the proper medical stuff.”

Ford forced himself to nod, trying to get his breathing back under control.

Stan hovered in the doorway for a second, frowning at him, before ducking out to the cars. Ford felt a belated flash of annoyance. Why on earth was Stan worried about him right now? Mabel was the priority, the kids would always be their priority no matter what. The kids and Stan. He was allowed to be an afterthought, he deserved to be— that’s not helping anyone either really.

He frowned, mental spiral stopping abruptly. That voice was new and sounded suspiciously like Stan. Huh. Maybe he was getting better at least a little bit. The voice was right anyway, he wasn’t helping anyone by sitting here and self-destructing. In order to help people he had to be functional and in order to be functional (actually functional not the thin mask he pulled on most of the time) he had to accept help.

He closed his eyes and focused on his breathing, counting breaths in and out, while one hand rested loosely on his wrist, feeling the pulse under his skin steady and eventually begin to slow. He may not think he deserved help but that wasn’t important right now, Mabel did deserve his help and that meant he needed to allow himself the space to be okay again.

When he opened his eyes the bathroom door was shut again and the shower had been running for quite a while. He uncurled from the floor and carefully stretched, feeling the tension bleed out of him bit by bit. The smell of acrid smoke still hung around him, having seeped deep into his sweater and jacket, so he changed. He pulled a fresh sweater out of his bag, and hung his coat up by the door. As he pulled the sweater on he ran his hands over the cabled fish pattern on it and smiled, Mabel really was exceptional.

The shower abruptly shut off in the bathroom and Ford started, pulling the first aid kit towards him and beginning to sort through it for the things he knew they needed; burn cream, gauze, bandages, butterfly closures, and some extra strength Tylenol. By the time he had everything lined up neatly on the table, Mabel had opened the bathroom door.

He was immediately struck by how small she looked. It wasn’t just the missing sweater, leaving her in only a thin black t-shirt, there was something else about her, something diminished , that made his heart skip uncomfortably. Normally, Mabel was the gravitational point of any room she walked into. Everything about her, from her bright sweaters to her laugh, was larger than life. Now it was like all of that had been stripped away, leaving behind a fragile imitation that scared him more than he had expected it to.

She sat down quietly on the bed and stayed silent as Ford carefully checked her over. The cut on her forehead needed a couple of butterfly closures and her ankle was swollen enough that he ended up wrapping it. Twisting it around he didn’t feel any of the clicking or grinding he would expect from a fracture so it was likely just a sprain that would heal in a few days. A close look at her eyes confirmed that she had a mild concussion but as long as they kept an eye on it, she should be fine. As he worked, he quietly explained everything he was doing, and paused to give her space to ask questions if she wanted to. She stayed quiet though, aside from a small hiss of pain as he dabbed antiseptic on her forehead. As he pulled out his own concoction of extra strength burn cream (developed in a particularly nasty dimension plagued by bouts of boiling rain) he reflected on how similar this situation was to his childhood.

Their father had never been interested in helping either of them after an injury, and once they got to a certain age Filbrick had forbidden their mother from helping either, taking the stance that ‘men needed to learn how to take care of themselves’ and ‘injuries built character’. So, in the safety of their bedroom, Ford had taken over from their mother in cleaning Stan up after fights with Crampelter, mishaps on the beach, and eventually even boxing matches. He had explained everything back then too, teaching Stan how to take care of himself if, for some reason, Ford wasn’t around to help him. Stan had scoffed at that at the time, telling Ford proudly that he ‘wasn’t going to get rid of him that easily’, and Ford had laughed, and Stan had tackled him, undoing all of Ford’s hard work. He had never minded.

He finished smoothing burn cream onto Mabel’s hands and began to carefully wrap them in clean bandage strips. He was relieved to see that none of the burns were third degree. The worst burn was a bright shiny circle of blisters seared into the center of her left palm like a brand. He hoped it would fade with time but knew enough about burns to realize it was likely to be permanent.

“Alright, all done. Is there anything else that still hurts which I missed?”

Mabel shrugged and stood up unsteadily, clambering into the bed on the other side of the room and facing the wall with the covers pulled up firmly over her head.

Ford immediately went after her, brain once again swirling with anxiety, clearly, he had missed something. What was it? Internal damage perhaps? Or some kind of illness he hadn’t thought of?

Stan grabbed his arm.

“Ford, leave it.”

“Stanley, what are you talking about? Clearly I missed something, I have to make sure she’s okay—”

“You didn’t miss anythin’. She’s in sweater town, that’s all, and we’re gonna give her space. C’mon.”

He tugged Ford out of the room, saying loudly. “Alright pumpkin, we’re gonna go grab some grub alright? We’ll be back soon.”

As they walked down the street to a nearby pizza place, Ford kept worrying. He could feel Stan glancing at him every few seconds, which wasn’t helping.

“Alright fine poindexter, I’ll bite. Whatcha got goin’ on in that big brain of yours?”

Ford’s anxiety and annoyance finally boiled over.

“How are you fine right now? How are you totally fine while Mabel is basically catatonic, and Dipper is missing? How is this not affecting you Stanley? What is wrong with you ?!” He froze. He hadn’t meant to say that last part, but there he went again, blundering into everything with exactly the wrong words. All of this would be easier with a drink, but Stan hadn’t returned his flask after last night.

“Y’know. After you fell through the portal, I didn’t speak to anyone for almost a month. Words were just too much. Like, the last thing I had done was beg the portal to turn back on, and it was like that took all the words I was ever going to have away from me. Pretty pointless being a salesman who can’t fuckin’ speak but hey. I didn’t have to be a salesman anymore, I just had to get you back. Then a month went by, and the food ran out, and they were gonna’ turn off the power and I had to find words again or I was never going to get you back.”

He paused for a while, walking in silence. Then he reached out and grabbed Ford’s hand tightly.

“I’m not gonna lie Ford. Seeing the shadows of the worst days of my life in those kids will haunt me for a long fuckin’ time. But at the end of the day, they’re gonna’ be okay because they have us, and we’re gonna’ be okay because we have them. So right now, the goal is to get food, and to get Mabel to speak enough to tell us what happened. Then, we find Dipper.”

Ford tightened his grip on his twin’s hand. “I can work with that. Just remember to give yourself some space too, okay? I worry about you.”

Stan shrugged and waved his other hand dismissively. “I’ll be fine, Sixer. Besides, what you should be worrying about right now is that I’m paying which means I get to pick the toppings, and you hate olives.”

“You’re paying?”

Stan grinned and dropped Ford’s hand. “Sure, with your wallet!”

…

Ford sat up. It was disorienting for a moment and he instinctively flattened himself against the wall and reached for his blaster. He fumbled in the dark for it, panic welling up in his chest, before his fingers found an alarm clock, and two pairs of glasses, and the comic book Stan had been reading before bed. Right. His heartbeat slowed incrementally as he forced his breathing into a regular pattern.

He was safe. He was in a hotel room with Mabel and Stan and his blaster was in the drawer of the bedside table; close enough to grab in a real emergency, far enough away so he wouldn't shoot any of his family in a half-asleep panic. There was still a burn mark on the ceiling of the Stan-O-War’s cabin from the night Stan had made that rule, right after him getting up to get a glass of water had nearly ended very differently. Fortunately, Ford wasn’t a very good shot when half asleep. 

He pinched the bridge of his nose trying to figure out what had woken him up. He was fairly certain it wasn’t nightmares, he didn’t remember any and his panic upon waking up had been due solely to not knowing where he was. His phone was on silent and a quick glance at it told him he didn’t have any new notifications anyway. Stan was still fast asleep, snoring away gently. Mabel however, was gone. Her shoulderbag was still leaning against the foot of the bed, alongside her jacket, but her bed was empty and her shoes were missing. 

Ford slipped out of bed, careful not to wake Stan, and pulled his blaster out of the side table just in case. He grabbed his own coat, and Mabel’s, and headed outside.

He didn’t have to go very far. Mabel was sitting on the railing a few doors down, feet kicking idly. Even from this distance he could see she was shivering in her thin shirt.

Ford genuinely didn’t mean to startle her, however years of dimension hopping had left him habitually silent, and as he settled her jacket gently around her shoulders, she yelped and slipped backwards.

He caught her, and pushed her back up onto the railing. 

“Easy there, didn’t mean to startle you.”

She blinked at him in shock, and then shifted slightly further away, turning to look out at the snow again. She didn’t shrug the coat off though.

“You woke me when you left the room, I just wanted to make sure you were okay.”

She shrugged. “M’fine.”

After dinner and Stan explaining to Mabel what they knew so far about Dipper’s whereabouts, Mabel had become slightly more like her old self, although they still had been unable to get her to say more than a few words.

Ford knew she was lying, but he wasn’t going to press for more information. If she wanted to tell him she would. Instead, he leaned forward against the railing and stared out into the snow. 

It was beautiful. Thick mounds of it covered the cars in the parking lot and turned the bushes and trees into hunched lumps of white. Flakes swirled in gentle eddies past the soft warm glow of the streetlights, and the sky was a perpetual dusky purple. Everything was muffled. The world seemed closed off, pulled and compacted down into this single parking lot, like all of this was for the two of them alone. 

After a while the muted silence was broken by a sniffle. He glanced over at Mabel and saw that her face was shining with tears. She was staring down at her hands, still covered in bandages from earlier. 

“Do they hurt?” A small, selfish part of him wanted that to be it. Physical wounds he could heal, he understood those. Emotions however, he never really seemed to have gotten the hang of. 

She shook her head minutely. “Not so much.”

“Would you like to talk about whatever is bothering you?”

“Not really.”

“Should you?”

“Probably.”

Ford waited patiently, watching the snow. 

“It’s all my fault.”

Moses, those words were familiar. In an instant, Ford was back in the woods, years ago, kneeling in front of a sobbing Mabel. His hands were firmly on her shoulders. “It’s all my fault Grunkle Ford, I gave Bill the rift, I ruined everything.”

He blinked and was once again staring out at the dark parking lot. He’d nearly forgotten about that conversation; he wondered if she remembered it. She continued before he could ask though, words tumbling out like if she didn’t say them now, she never would. 

“We found these weird little bugs in the woods. Dipper said that they were called firebugs, I think he found them in that cryptid book you gave him for Christmas. Dipper had left his journal in the car, so he went to go grab it so he could do some sketches, and I was holding the firebug and staring at it and it just. It reminded me so much of childhood campfires and our family. And it reminded me of summers with you guys, but it also reminded me of summers at home…before everything got bad. And it hurt so much because I missed those summers. I missed them so much it even though I know I shouldn’t but I know we’re never going to be able to get them back. And I missed playing tag with Dipper, and I missed dad teaching us about the constellations, and mom and dad carrying us up to bed afterwards. And Dipper asked me what I was thinking about and I. I. I didn’t think , I was so stupid . I answered him automatically like it wasn’t going to ruin absolutely everything . I--”

She broke off, hands reaching up to tangle in her hair, pulling at it. Ford reached out automatically, pulling her hands down and trapping them gently in his own, as Stanley had done for him countless times. “What did you tell him, sweetie?”

“I told him I missed Dad.”

Her words were so quiet he almost missed them. 

“I see. What happened after that?”

“Dipper told me I should go home, and then he walked away. I wanted him to yell at me, I wanted him to push me or scream or do anything at all. But he just walked away, Grunkle Ford! And in that moment, I was so angry with him for leaving, for not waiting to hear me out, and so angry with myself for having said that in the first place, for having betrayed him like that. And I forgot I was holding the firebug. I lit a whole forest on fire because I’m a selfish terrible sister and I--”

“Hey. Okay Mabel, listen to me.” He tightened his grip slightly on her hands and met her eyes as she turned to look at him, tears streaking her face.

He thought about the forest clearing again. He remembered sitting on the grass and hugging her to him like he could shield her from the world.  Slowly, he had told her about being tricked by Bill himself. He told her about their friendship and the portal and the eventual betrayal. He had promised her that there was no shame in being tricked by a god, and that none of them blamed her, and they never would. He had realized then how similar he and Mabel were, and it had hurt him to see the weight of his mistakes re-invented in a child, especially when he knew that the blame should always have been his, and his alone. Now, he saw himself in her again, and he wondered how much to tell her.

“You are not selfish for missing him.”

“But I—”

“Let me finish. Sometimes, people come into your life. They love you, they show you sides of yourself you never knew were there. They teach you about the stars, they tell you stories, maybe they teach you how to cook, or take you on trips. Maybe, they are simply there for you at a time no one else is. They understand you in a way that no one else ever has. They don’t call you strange or weird, and they praise you for the things that set you apart from everyone else. Those people become your safe place, your rock. They become the person that you turn to when everything has gone wrong.”

He took a deep breath and looked out at the snow, forcing himself to keep talking before the words got stuck in his throat. “Sometimes, later, you come to realize that those people changed, they changed how they felt about you when you weren’t looking, or maybe they never loved you the way you thought they did at all. The moment you realize that, your world crumbles. Every memory of that person becomes tainted with the knowledge of what they became, or what they always were.”

He looked back at Mabel. “But despite everything, even after you leave, even after you distance yourself, even after you are safe again, sometimes you still miss them. You miss them because once upon a time, they were good to you.”

She stared at him, a fresh wave of tears trickling down her cheeks. Ford wondered what her father had done that had resulted in her learning to cry so quietly. Just because she had a complicated relationship with her father didn’t mean he had to have one. Someday he would punch that man and maybe atomize him for good measure.

“How can you know that?” Her voice was so quiet he almost missed it in the hiss of the falling snow.

“Because. I still miss Bill.” The confession left him in a rush. He hadn’t even told Stan about this before. He felt his heart rate spike and waited for her to rip her hands away from him and take off into the snow. He’d just admitted to missing the being that had tried to kill her and Dipper more times than he could count; the being that had trapped her in the prison of her own mind while attempting to hunt down, torture and kill everyone she loved. She didn’t move.

Instead, Mabel blinked at him and then slowly tugged him towards her, pulling him into a hug. It was awkward, her, twisted backward on the railing, still partially covered by his own coat, him with one arm slightly trapped between them. Her injuries also meant it was less bone crushing than normal, but it was still a Mabel hug, and he melted into it, hugging her back as tightly as he could.

“You’re not a bad person, Grunkle Ford.”

The words were mostly mumbles against his sweater, but he could still make them out. Moses, what had he done to deserve Mabel. To deserve any of his family, really. He detangled himself from the hug carefully.

“Then that means you aren’t a bad person for missing your dad either.” He wasn’t quite able to make himself admit she was right. He wasn’t sure he would ever really believe he wasn’t a bad person. But right now, he had to try and make Mabel understand that she wasn’t, so he wasn’t going to argue with her about it.

She shrugged. “You missing Bill didn’t destroy your relationship with your brother though. You missing Bill didn’t burn down an entire forest. Me missing my dad ruined everything . You didn’t see the way Dipper looked at me, Grunkle Ford. It was like I burned him too.”

Ford sighed. He had been expecting this. He knew there were things he could say to try and help. He certainly had his own parallels to work with: letting Stan get kicked out, branding Stan during the portal fight, shooting Stan to save the world. But none of them quite fit what Mabel was talking about. He had never hurt Stan in a way that had driven him away. In the end it had been their father who had kicked Stan out after their fight, the portal had wrenched him away from the next fight, and shooting Stan had been Stan’s plan to begin with. He had…an idea of how to approach this, but he was worried it would work better with Dipper than Mabel. If Stan were here, he would be better at this, he was always better with Mabel. Or he’d just tell Ford to stop overthinking and get on with it.

Ford realized he had been quiet for too long when Mabel leaned away from him again and turned back to the snow. He stepped up behind her and draped one arm loosely over her shoulders.

“There is a type of pine tree that grows in the western mountains of North America. Its scientific name is Pinus contorta latifolia but colloquially it is known as Lodgepole pine. This is because it grows straight and tall and tends to be very uniform across individual specimens, so the trees were often used by native populations and later Europeans, to build permanent structures.”

He paused. He was rambling, and he could feel his anxiety buzzing under his skin as he talked. He knew this wasn’t the last time they would talk about this, and he understood that this conversation wasn’t necessarily going to shape the rest of Mabel’s life, but he could also feel the importance of this moment. He knew Mabel was hanging over a precipice in her own mind and in order to find Dipper and get the twins back to Gravity Falls safely he had to find a way to pull her back from that precipice. He took a deep breath, grounding himself as the cold bit at his lungs.

“That’s not what makes the Lodgepole pine so interesting to scientists, however. This specific species of pine tree has a pinecone that is covered in a hard resinous shell. Now. When I was growing up the United States did a lot of work surrounding forest fire prevention. We didn’t learn about it much in New Jersey for obvious reasons, but when I moved out to California and Oregon it was talked about a lot. The theory at the time was that any forest fire was bad, so any time small fires started either through natural or human causes, they were immediately put out to protect the forests. The local native populations advised against this, but the state governments ignored them.”  

Mabel groaned softly. “Grunkle Ford, I appreciate the science lesson, but I don’t really think distracting me right now is going to help.”

He gave her shoulder a squeeze. “I’m not trying to distract you, honey. I promise there is a reason I’m telling you this, just give me a second.”

She flopped back against him, and he smiled at the gesture. At least some part of her was still the teenage Mabel he remembered.

“A few years after I fell through the portal, Yellowstone National Park in Wyoming caught on fire. For decades, firefighters dutifully put out every single tiny fire that sparked in the park. Dead wood and timber piled up throughout the forest, and a series of lightning strikes during a thunderstorm caused a fire that raged through the park and ended up burning down over 36% of the total forest. After the fire, the government believed that those sections of forest were damaged permanently, and prepared for a years-long restoration project. Except, when they came back a few months later to start the replanting work, they found a small crop of saplings already growing.”

Mabel turned to look at him and he wondered if she had figured out what he was trying to do yet. He cleared his throat and looked down at his hands, picking out the circle of puckered white scar tissue on the back of his left, remembering his own personal forest-fires.

“You see. The lodgepole pine has this amazing survival tactic. The resinous shell that covers its pinecones, traps the seeds inside. They can stay viable for decades like this, buried in the soil, but the resin means that the seed can never reach water, and thus never germinate. Back before the government controlled the park, Yellowstone experienced multiple small fires a year, natural controlled burns that would clear out the dead wood and the excess underbrush. The heat from those fires would melt the sap from the Lodgepole pinecones. The seeds would be freed and germinate in soil rich with nitrogen and nutrients from the ash. In the wake of the fire, new Lodgepole pines would spring up, growing quickly with no undergrowth to impede their need for sunlight or water.”

“Am I supposed to be the pine tree in this metaphor, Grunkle Ford?”

She sounded skeptical and vaguely amused.

“Not exactly. I’m not the best at emotions. I understand things about myself through logic, facts, empirical evidence, and statistics. You and Stanley understand things through emotions, relationships, characters and stories and I’m just. Not as good at that. This isn’t a metaphor, it’s a real phenomenon that’s very interesting and completely changed the way the United States government thought about forest preservation and natural stewardship, but it’s also a story for you. You said Dipper looked at you like you had burned him, and I think sometimes relationships are like forests. Every now and then you have to have conversations that are going to hurt so that you can be stronger and healthier in the future.”

He thought about arguing with Stan on the porch of the Shack earlier this week, and arguing with him again on the floor of the hotel last night following the Night Mares.

“When you don’t have those conversations, sometimes it just takes a tiny flame to burn down everything, but you have to remember that in the end, new growth does come from fires. It will take time, and it will always be different than it was, but it will come back again.”

He thought about yelling at Stan in the portal room ‘— the first worthwhile thing in your life’ . He remembered punching him after stumbling back out of the portal thirty years later, fire still smoldering inside of him.

“Are you talking about you and Grunkle Stan or me and Dipper?”

Ford laughed. “Both, I think.”

“What if I apologize and it doesn’t work? What do I do if he doesn’t want to fix it with me?”

He could hear the naked panic in her voice and his chest tightened painfully.

“Honestly, I don’t know. All you can do is try, and hope that he is in a place to hear you. If he isn’t, you give him space, and when he’s ready, you fix it together.”

“Pumpkin, listen.” Ford jumped slightly at the gruff voice behind him, and spun around. Stan was leaning in the open doorway of their room, watching.

“I know your brother. He’s a good kid, and he loves ya even if you both can be knuckleheads sometimes. If me an Ford can make it work after all the ah “forest fires” in our life? You kids are gonna be just fine. ‘Sides, you got me an’ Sixer here to take care of you both, alright? We love you too and nothin’ you do could ever change our minds about that. Now!” He clapped his hands together. “Enough of this sappy shit. You’re both gonna freeze your butts off out here. C’mon inside, I made hot chocolate.”

“With glitter?” Said Mabel hopefully, sliding down off the railing and wiping at her eyes.

“Course! What do you take me for.”

Mabel gave Ford a hug. “Thanks, Grunkle Ford, I needed that I think.” Then she hurried back into the room.

“Hey Poindexter. You comin’?”

Ford leaned on the railing, watching the snow spiral through the air, and rubbing absently at the scars on his hands. He wanted to give Mabel some time with Stan, plus he wanted to think a bit. He’d never actually admitted some of that to anyone before, and he wasn’t entirely sure how he felt about it right now. He wanted the space to breathe.

“In a moment, just want to watch the snow for a few minutes.”

“Right, well if she puts glitter in your hot chocolate that’s not my fault.” Stan was silent for a few seconds and Ford almost thought he had left, when he spoke again.

“Ya did good, Ford. I’m proud of you.” The door clicked shut quietly and Ford smiled to himself, feeling warm despite the chill.

[gravityskittles]

Wherever We Go AU

Chapter 15: Just One Spark

Mabel blinked slowly. She felt strange, caught somehow in a place between being awake and asleep. She yawned and rubbed at her eyes, wondering what time it was. As the pale pink ceiling swam into focus above her, she sat bolt upright.

Around her was her bedroom from back in Piedmont. Exactly as she remembered it. The rational part of her realized this was probably a dream, but another part of her, the part that knew magic was real, quietly hoped that it wasn’t. 

The sunlight streamed in through her sheer purple curtains. It painted strokes across the floor, filling the room with the hazy orange light of late summer afternoons. She could hear the buzzing click of cicadas outside the window, their calls rising and falling alongside the gentle rustle of leaves. Everything in the room was how she remembered it. Everything was exactly how it was the summer before things got bad.

There was a basket of yarn in one corner, and a couple of her first attempts at sweaters lying crumpled on the floor next to it. She hadn’t really started knitting until later that fall, when she had still believed that there was a way to make everything all right again if she used enough yarn and glitter and smiles.

Crowded on the wall around her mirror were photos of her with friends from school. Framed on her desk was a photo of her and Dipper from just a few weeks before, his hair newly cut, her braces newly attached. For the first time in a photo together as un-identical twins.  She remembered her mom telling her it was silly for them to take a photo right then. Mabel had been in so much pain from the braces and Dipper’s hair had still been messy and wet from the shower, but she had insisted, and so, with a sigh, their mom had made them stand against the wall in the kitchen and taken the picture.

A slight breeze sent the suncatcher hanging in her window spinning, causing tiny rainbows to scatter and bounce across the room.

She wanted this moment back so badly it made her chest burn with something she couldn’t find the words for.

She wanted this room and this house and the way that this summer had stretched on forever in a pleasant hum of sunlight and trampolines and family trips to the beach. She wanted the freedom of bike rides and skinned knees. She wanted the constant smell of sunscreen and the ever-present stickiness of a recent popsicle.

She knew how the story went from here. She remembered the screaming matches and the slamming doors and the way their dad stopped speaking to Dipper sometime after Christmas. She remembered finding the business card for a divorce lawyer on the kitchen counter and how her parents began to trade off having dinner with them to avoid each other. She remembered empty beer cans overflowing the recycling bin and the way that she and Dipper had become so invisible in their own home that their mom forgot to pick them up on the last day of school.

She knew that this perfect moment was only a memory. But sitting here in the dusty sunlight, seeing her own childhood piled up around her, she missed it so much that it felt like she couldn’t breathe.

She picked up the photo of her and Dipper and stared at it, sinking down onto her desk chair, letting herself melt into the warmth of sunlight and memories. It wasn’t that she wanted to stay here forever exactly, she just. Didn’t want to let go yet.

Then the sunlight was too hot. Becoming hotter by the second until it was burning her and she scrambled up with a shout of pain, spinning to look at the window. Flames erupted along the walls, hungrily devouring the purple butterfly curtains and the photographs, filling the room with the acrid smell of smoke. She stumbled backward, still clutching the photo, and jolted awake in the backseat of her car.

She shoved the door open on reflex and tumbled out onto the ground, gasping in breaths of air that still tasted faintly of smoke.

The words from the vision she had seen in Lucian’s staff echoed in her ears alongside the roaring crackle of flames. 

One half of a whole

Trapped within a Crossroads

Flames will rise

Blood will separate

Follow the stars

Remember the World you Want

From behind her, Dipper popped his head up out of the blankets, squinting at her sleepily.

“You okay Mabel?”

She forced her breathing to slow, trying to ignore the smoke that she could still feel gathered thickly in the back of her throat.

“Yeah, yeah sorry. Just a bad dream.”

She stood shakily and forced herself to climb back into the car. Trying not to let herself miss the warm sunlight of her middle-school bedroom. Dipper reached out and patted her awkwardly on the arm.

“Sorry,” he mumbled through a yawn, “It’s okay now though, I can fight the monsters.”

She stifled a laugh, letting the guilt slowly begin to bleed out of her. Sleepy Dipper was always fun. “What monsters Dip-dop?”

He didn’t respond, and after a moment his breath evened out and she shook her head with a small smile, crawling back into her nest of blankets. She wasn’t able to get back to sleep though, instead lying and staring at the tan roof of the car, waiting for the sun to rise.

…

The snow rolled by in an endless blanket of plain white, dotted here and there with small houses and the occasional tree. Dipper was quietly leafing through his cryptids book next to her, making the occasional note in the margin and chewing on his pen cap. They hadn’t spoken a word to each other that morning. Mabel had clambered to the front seat, not bothering to change out of her pajamas, and had started driving the second Dipper was ready to go.

She had decided last night, staring up at the roof of the car, that she was ready to go home. She knew the time thing was complicated, she understood that home in this case wouldn’t be the home of her childhood bedroom that she still guiltily craved. But being back in Gravity Falls meant they could talk to Fiddleford, and maybe even summon the Time Police or whatever else they needed to do. Being in Gravity Falls meant being safe, and having options, and that’s what she really needed right now. Besides, it might not be quite the home she wanted but it was home nonetheless and that was more than she could say about DC.

It was hours before Dipper broke the silence. Mabel had been driving basically on autopilot since the morning, glancing down occasionally to check the gas gauge, but otherwise speeding along the mostly empty highway, eyes fixed on the horizon.

“Hey uh. Any ideas about where you want to stop today?”

“Not really. Mostly just want to get home.”

Dipper looked away and she felt her chest twinge with guilt. “I’m sorry, I’m still down to stop wherever you want to! We’re just so close and I really want to get home.”

Dipper shifted uncomfortably and pulled the roadmap off of the dashboard. “Look Mabel, I don’t wanna burst your bubble or anything—”

She winced and tried to cover it up with a cough, but Dipper continued on as though he hadn’t noticed.

“But we definitely have at least another full day of driving after this. Probably a little longer, just because I hate cutting it too close to midnight on the highway, so it’s unlikely we’ll actually make it to the Shack tomorrow night anyway.”

She blinked rapidly as her vision blurred with tears that she was absolutely not going to let fall. She knew that; she wasn’t stupid, she was just exhausted. They’d been at this for over a week now and the closer they got, the more it seemed like Dipper didn’t want to get there. He’d spent almost the whole of yesterday hunting Jackalopes through the snow and they’d really only gotten two hours of driving time in, most of which had been an argument.

Arguing was all they could seem to manage these days anyway. Planning and arguments. They hadn’t had a real conversation in days aside from debriefing about the circus performance, which was what had led to the argument yesterday anyway, so it didn’t really count as a conversation, just a prelude to the inevitable fight. She could still see the business card poking out of the top of Dipper’s journal. The card he had spent all day yesterday twisting around in his hands like some kind of talisman before he had finally asked her if they really needed to go to Gravity Falls.

Her fingers tightened on the steering wheel. “Look Dipper, just because you don’t actually want to go home doesn’t mean I don’t, okay? So, let’s just try and get to Oregon and then once we’ve solved the time issue you can go do whatever it is you want to.”

“Mabel! That’s not what I meant yesterday. You know that I just—”

“Oh, it’s not? I’m so sorry. What exactly did you mean then?” She could feel the sarcastic bite in her voice, but she was too exhausted to try and play nice anymore. It wasn’t like it would work anyway.

“I hate talking to you when you’re like this! Can’t we just—Can’t you just accept that maybe we want different things sometimes?”

“Yes! Obviously, I can! But wanting to run away and join the circus rather than accept the fact that you got disowned isn’t us wanting different things! It’s you refusing to acknowledge that you need help!”

Ah shit. She hadn’t really meant to say that. She’d been thinking it of course. She hadn’t wanted to go home at first either. She still was hesitant about it, still mostly believed that Stan and Ford would be disappointed in her. But. Obviously, they wouldn’t be mad at Dipper. He should have realized that by now.

She just couldn’t accept that he really thought running away to the circus was a better option than accepting help from people who knew him and loved him.

She waited for him to yell, but instead he just sighed and flipped through the map again.

“Well, if you don’t have a place in mind to stop today, let’s just drive until we get to Deadwood. It has a weird forest fire history, and I have a few ideas about what might link to that. We should get there late in the afternoon, so I’ll have time to take a walk before it gets dark. You don’t have to come.”

His voice was steady and if there was an underlying current of resentment in it, she couldn’t hear it.

“I’d like to come. If that’s okay?”

Dipper nodded quietly, and they drove the rest of the way to Deadwood in silence.

…

Dipper’s excitement was infectious as he walked through the trees. They hadn’t resolved their fight in the last few hours and Mabel knew that they really should make an attempt to communicate about it before too long, but for now she was happy to watch her brother dart off, cryptid book in hand.

“Remind me what we’re looking for again?”

“Basically anything glowing that looks like it shouldn’t be there!”

“Are there glowing things that are supposed to be here?”

“Well, that depends, how close are we to the nearest nuclear weapons silo?”

“Dipper!”

He grinned at her and lobbed a badly packed snowball in her direction. “I’m mostly joking!”

The snowball spattered against a tree trunk next to her head, sending a fine powder of snowflakes drifting into her hair. She bent down and scooped up a snowball of her own, readjusting her shoulder bag so that her camera wouldn’t slip out.

“Your jokes are terrible!” She chucked the snowball back in his direction and he dodged behind a tree.

“That’s what I have you around for!” He called cheerfully, vanishing into a thick snarl of branches.

“To critique your jokes?” She looked around warily, trying to figure out where he had gone.

“Nope!” A snowball hit the side of her head with a thud and her glasses flew off into the snow. “I keep you around to tell the jokes!”

She laughed despite the annoyed expression she was trying to maintain, and dropped to her knees, feeling around in the powder for her glasses. She felt her fingers brush against something warm and paused in her digging, still thinking about Dipper’s nuclear waste comment, before continuing to search. Eventually she felt the thin arm of her glasses and lifted them back up to her face, wiping snow off the lenses.

As she put them back on, she noticed a faint glow coming from under the snow. Right about where she had felt the warm spot a moment ago. She carefully reached out and began to dig gently at the top layer of snow.

Hidden beneath it sat what, on first glance, looked like a glowing coal. It shimmered all over with a gently pulsing orange light that sparked every so often, causing the snow around it to hiss and steam. Then, Mabel saw it move. Six long legs stretched out from the sides, and it raised itself up off the ground, briefly shaking open wings of flickering flame before closing them again with a click. It was a beetle. Large enough to fill the palm of her hand if she was to pick it up.

“Dipper! I found the thing you’re after! I think.”

He skidded through the snow, plopping down next to her with a lopsided grin. “I was right! It’s a firebug!”

“That’s a very unoriginal name,” Mabel remarked, poking gently at it with one finger. It was pleasantly warm to the touch, like a stone that had been sitting in the sun all day, but it didn’t seem hot enough to burn.

She scooped it off the ground, holding it up to get a closer look.

“Mabel!” Dipper hissed, “You could get hurt!”

“You worry too much, Dipper. I’m fine! Besides, it’s cute!”

He flipped through his book a bit. “The book says their flame reacts to the emotions of things around it. So, when it’s surrounded by happiness or contentment it glows like a warm coal, when surrounded by anger or grief it can build into a ball of spitting fire.”

“Probably where all the forest fires come from huh? People come out here to camp, get too close to one of these little guys while having an argument and whoosh!”

“Yeah—good thing we aren’t arguing anymore.”

Mabel rolled her eyes and tugged Dipper into a one-armed hug. “We never really were arguing silly, not enough to start a forest fire anyway. I’m sure sibling bickering would only light a campfire at best.”

He laughed. “You’re probably right. It’s awesome that you found it though! It seems to like you.”

Mabel looked down to where the scarab had nestled firmly into her palm, vibrating slightly against her fingers. It was like a little hand warmer. She stroked the top of its shell with one finger, and it clicked at her, wiggling its legs slightly. Dipper pulled out her camera and took a photo, before sliding it back into her bag.

“Hey, are you okay here for a minute? I want to run back to the car and get my journal.”

“Yeah, sure Dip!”

He stood and brushed himself off before heading back into the trees. Mabel cupped the beetle in both hands, letting it crawl around her fingers, as she watched the sparks ride along its back.

When they had been kids, their dad had always hosted an end of summer campfire. It had always been in their backyard, grass sprayed down with the hose to ensure there was no chance of starting a real fire. He had built the fire pit himself back when Dipper and Mabel had been about three.

She remembered, in that vague way you remember things from early childhood more from story retellings than from an actual memory, toddling along behind him dragging rocks from the truck to the hole in the backyard. For a few summers they had even temporarily installed a tarp into the firepit to act as a kiddie pool.

But on the final day of summer, they would pull the ancient lawn chairs off the porch and into the wet grass and their mom would put together a small tote bag of marshmallows and chocolate and graham crackers. Their dad would cut a few sticks off the aspen trees or the bushes around the house to use as marshmallow roasters, and they would sit around the fire for hours getting progressively sleepier and stickier as the flames slowly died down.

This bug reminded her of those nights. She stared at it shimmering in her palm, and felt something warm and sharp settle into her chest. She didn’t want to think about how things had been, but the dream last night was still at the forefront of her mind, and she couldn’t shake off the nostalgia. She remembered curling up on her father’s lap next to the glowing coals of the fire, and asking him about the stars.

She wasn’t sure Dipper remembered where her love of constellations had come from. After all, it had been years since their last backyard campfire. But every campfire ended with their father telling them about the stars. He would pick out constellation after constellation, and tell stories until they both fell asleep, each curled up on their respective parent. Those nights always ended with them both being carried up to bed, still sticky with chocolate and marshmallow, and having to wake up all the earlier the next morning to shower and take family photos before heading to their first day of school.

Tears pricked at her eyes as she stared into the tiny ball of flames cradled in her hands. She missed those days so much. She missed the gentle rumble of her father’s voice beneath her as he retold all of her favorite myths. She missed the way he carried her up to bed, beard tickling the top of her head as he gently pushed the screen door open. She missed how he would tuck her in and pile all of her stuffed animals around her, laughing quietly when she would startle awake in confusion before understanding where she was. She remembered how he would tell her he loved her and hum softly until she fell back asleep, flipping on the nightlight before he left the room to go check on her mom and Dipper who were going through the same exact ritual in the room next door.

She missed feeling safe. She missed the way that her childhood had been an endless blur of laughter and warmth and love, her best friend always at her side, their parents always there ready to catch them when they fell.

She didn’t understand what had changed. She didn’t get how you could have a child and not be prepared to love them no matter what happened. How on earth you could love someone so much and then just stop loving them the moment that they didn’t meet your expectations anymore. She didn’t understand. How had the man who had loved them both more than every star in the sky, kicked them out of their house just because they were no longer the people they had been when they were born.

She could feel the heat growing in her hands, but she didn’t let go of the beetle. She clutched onto it tighter, knowing in the back of her head that letting it get away before Dipper came back would lead to another argument. Flames flickered between her fingers, and she wasn’t sure if it hurt.

“Hey Mabel? What’s wrong, did something happen?”

Mabel felt a hand on her shoulder. She turned to look up at Dipper. Through blurred tears he looked almost exactly like their father, the same concern causing wrinkles along his forehead. The same unhappy little twist was at the corner of his mouth as chewed nervously on the edge of his lip. She blinked and felt the tears begin to run down her face.

“Mabel, talk to me, what’s going on?”

“I miss dad.”

She felt the world break around them as the words left her mouth. She knew it was a mistake; she hadn’t even meant to say it out loud. She wished more than anything in that moment, that she could take them back.

Dipper’s expression closed off. Concern smoothed away into blank indifference in a single second. He jerked his hand back from her shoulder like she had burned him, and stared off into the distance refusing to meet her eyes.

“You should go home, Mabel.”

She wanted to scream. She wanted to scream and cry and apologize until her voice was gone. But, as Dipper straightened up and walked back into the trees towards the town, all she could do was stare after him silently, choked by all the words tangled in her throat.

By the time the blank numbness inside of her had begun to give way to grief, Dipper had long since disappeared into the trees, without a backward glance.

“I’m sorry.” The words were barely more than a broken whisper. Something inside her chest cracked into pieces and she began to sob, hands tightening around the beetle which she was still clutching at, despite the heat.

“I’m sorry! Please, Dipper, I didn’t mean it, I’m so sorry!”

The snow swallowed up her sobs.

She screamed, numbness cracking into grief, then shattering from grief into anger. Fury at her carelessness, at the callous way she could never seem to stop hurting her brother. Four years had gone by and she was still the same selfish, heartless little girl she had always been. Her scream echoed into silence and the world around her glitched. She felt a swooping sensation in her stomach almost as though she was falling. Her tattoo burned sharply with the cold fire of the ghost roads, and then the pain was gone, the world settled, and the fire in her hands flared into an inferno.

Pain lanced through her, sinking deep into her fingers and palms, burning with the same intensity as her anger. She dropped the beetle into the snow in panic, but it was too late. The flames rose, climbing around her in a swirling cyclone of smoke and fire.

She tried to run, slipping through the slush and mud back towards where she had watched Dipper disappear.

“Dipper! Help me!”

There was no response except the roar of flames.

She paused for a second, gasping for breath between ragged coughs. She pulled her sweater up over her mouth to try and block out the smoke, and looked around desperately for an opening in the trees. Above her there was a sharp crack, and a branch crashed into the ground, scattering flaming embers onto her head and sweater.

She stumbled back with a cry, feeling her clothes and hair catch, as the heat climbed along her arms. She screamed again, a mix of grief and terror, and ran blindly away from the inferno. Her head connected with a tree trunk and stars burst across her vision. She lost her balance and tumbled backwards into the snow. The only clear thought ringing through her head was that Dipper would never know how sorry she was.

The world spun around her as she watched the trees burn and fought to keep her eyes from slipping shut. She knew that if she didn’t move now, she was going to die here, but she couldn’t seem to get her limbs to cooperate. Smoke began to fill her lungs and blood seeped down her face from where she had hit her head against the tree.

Then, suddenly, there were voices around her. People were shouting and sirens were wailing, and she couldn’t understand any of it through the pounding in her head. She tried to scream for help again, but instead began to cough, struggling to catch her breath.

Strong arms lifted her up out of the snow, and a mask was slipped over her nose and mouth. For a moment she tried to struggle, but the person only held her tighter, pulling her gently into their chest like she was a small child again.

“Dad?” Her voice was garbled by the mask. She knew it wasn’t her father. Even through her confused fractured memories of summertime and bonfires, she felt the dull burning pain from her hands and the ache in her head grounding her to the snow, the cold, and the now.

A rough hand carded gently through her hair, and she leaned into it as much as she could, despite the pain in her skull.

“Oh sweetheart, what did you do?”

Mabel felt herself begin to cry again, as the darkness finally claimed her.

[gravityskittles]

Chapter 13: Family Matters

Stan watched Ford’s fingers tap across the tabletop. He could feel the fresh start to a migraine begin to dig in behind his eyes. Half blurred images kept surfacing and then disappearing before he had the chance to really focus on them. At this point he was almost certain he had ended up in that diner at least two more times during the years before Gravity Falls. He groaned slightly as another half remembered moment, this one involving a figure he couldn’t make out with the glint of a switchblade held in their hand, flickered into his consciousness for a moment before fading away again.

Ford looked up sharply from his journal.

“Stanley, we don’t have to finish going over this if it’s hurting you.”

Stan shook his head, “I’m fine Poindexter. Jus’ worried about the kids.”

He could feel that Ford wanted to argue. He could see it in the way his posture straightened, in the way his fingers stilled their blurred movement on the tabletop and the way his other hand tightened on the pen it was holding. He took a breath and Stan sighed.

Then both of them snapped around towards the doorway of the kitchen. Stan’s hands were moving towards his pockets for his knuckle dusters before he had even registered what the problem was, and a movement in the corner of his eye told him Ford’s blaster was primed and ready. Then Fiddleford zoomed into the kitchen, Pacifica right behind him, and screeched to a halt.

“Where’s the fire boys?” He looked cautious but not upset with them. Stan paused in the act of pulling out his brass knuckles and instead just shoved his hands further into his jacket pockets, trying to look nonchalant as he settled himself back into his chair. He watched as Ford sheepishly lowered his blaster and sank back into his own seat, fingers beginning to card through his hair anxiously.

Pacifica, who had ducked down behind Fiddleford’s chair as soon as she had registered what was happening, cautiously peered over his shoulder at them.

“Sorry kid,” Stan said gruffly, kicking Ford under the table, “just been a bit jumpy lately.”

Ford grimaced and mumbled out his own apology before tucking his blaster away again.

Fiddleford stared at them both for a minute then shook his head, mumbling something that sounded an awful lot like “what am I going to do with you two” before pulling further into the room and holding out his hand for a stack of papers that Pacifica was shuffling nervously.

After Stan had left Cassie’s diner, he had practically run all the way back home. He had given Ford the shorthand of events over the phone as he ran. Ford had then sent Pacifica and Fiddleford away to figure out where Deadwood was and what danger it might present to the younger twins. When Stan had arrived home Ford had made him go over the entire story twice, including the memory, in as much detail as he could remember. Stan had been surprised that Ford had believed him so quickly. Not about the diner or Cassie obviously, there was very little that surprised either of them anymore when it came to weirdness or anomalies. No, Stan had been surprised with how readily Ford had accepted that Stan trusted Cassie so implicitly. He had been prepared for an argument, prepared for Ford to tell him they couldn’t trust someone like that. Instead, Ford had just nodded and written down her warning in his journal. He had even asked Stan to repeat it several times to ensure he had gotten the wording right. It really said a lot about how much the two of them had grown over the past few years. 

He knew that Ford probably only trusted her because she had saved Stan’s life in the past, but it really meant a lot that Ford had trusted him—hell that Ford had trusted his memory—enough to gamble the kids’ lives on. To be honest, it scared him a little. But he knew he was right on this one, and the expression on Fiddleford’s face cemented that for him.

“Well, I’d say Deadwood is certainly a good bet. Accordin’ to the twin’s current travels Pacifica here worked out a trajectory for where they’d be headin’ next. Seems like they should be passin’ through Deadwood sometime in the next few days.” He carefully spread out the paper he had taken from Pacifica onto the table.

It was a map of the US with a series of hand drawn lines on it that seemed to depict the twin’s cross-country journey. It had various photos from traffic cams taped to it along with small sketches of items presumably purchased via Mabel’s credit card.

“Pacifica, did you make this?”

She started fidgeting with the end of her braid and stared down at the floor. “Um well, Candy helped Mr. Mcgucket print out all the traffic cam photos, and Grenda has been keeping track of the credit card purchases but um...”

“Yep! She made it! She’s spent the last few days working on it and she spent this morning comparing different routes to Gravity Falls figurin’ out what their fastest route would be.”

Fiddleford gave her a soft pat on the shoulder, shoving her forward towards the map.

“She did a right good job of it too.”

Pacifica’s face flushed. “I’ve been scrapbooking stuff of Waddles for Mabel. I had some extra material laying around that’s all.”

Stan leaned forward over the map, hiding his smile. “Well, it looks fantastic kiddo. Seems like your path has them heading right through Deadwood.” He glanced up at Fiddleford. “Find anything interestin’ on the anomaly front, Fidds?”

The man grinned back at him, setting down the rest of the papers he was holding. “As a matter of fact, I did. Not too sure what’s causin’ it or nothin’. It may not be overly helpful, but Deadwood, South Dakota seems to have a suspicious number of wildfires. An’ at times of the year that don’t make a lick of sense.”

Stan winced, remembering the crackling of the flames rising around him as Cassie’s diner had faded away.

“That seems about right then. Ford, any idea of what might be causing that?”

Ford was staring at the map, with a slightly unfocused look in his eyes.

“Ford, you okay?”

He didn’t respond. Stan realized with a jolt that Ford hadn’t responded to anything since Fiddleford came into the room. He glanced up at Fidds. “Well, sounds like we should get packing then if we want to catch them in Deadwood.” He said, carefully pulling on his Mr. Mystery Smile. “We’ll probably wanna leave first thing in the morning.” Fidds caught his eye and nodded subtly, turning and ushering Pacifica back out of the kitchen.

Stan waited, listening to the sound of the wheelchair zooming away back into the depths of the house, before turning to face Ford again.

“Alright, earth to Sixer. What’s going on?”

Ford blinked and then shook his head roughly like he had water in his ears.

“I’m fine Stanley.” He said quietly, and began to busy himself folding up the map and neatening the stack of papers Fiddleford had printed out of the town’s fire history.

“Ford.” Stan ran back through the interaction trying to figure out what had happened. Then Ford stood up from the table, revealing the blaster strapped to his belt, and everything clicked. “You weren’t going to shoot them, Stanford.”

He said it casually, looking carefully at his brother out of the corner of his eye. He watched him stiffen in shock, and then collapse loosely back down onto the chair.

“I could have.” He said flatly.

“Nah. You’re an ask questions first kind of guy. Helps you determine exactly how painful someone’s death should be.” He said it lightly, part of it was a joke after all. But he also knew he wasn't wrong.

Thirty years of being basically hunted for sport through various dimensions had turned Ford into a carefully honed weapon. Stan hadn’t seen it often; Ford did an excellent job of hiding it under nerd glasses and anxiety, but he had seen it. In the last few years there had only been a handful of times, whenever they were backed into a corner with no way out, when something inside the familiar shape of his brother would sharpen and detach into something precise, deadly, and more than a little terrifying to witness. However, Stan would never tell him that. Aside from very specific circumstances, he knew it tore Ford up inside to hurt people, even people who really truly deserved it. The specific circumstances in question were the list of people from Stan’s past which Ford kept in his journal. Stan didn’t know exactly why he kept that list, and he had decided a long time ago that he was never going to ask.

Ford’s expression didn’t change. “I’m dangerous Stanley.”

“Sure you are. ‘Bout as dangerous as me when I haven’t had my coffee in the morning.”

“Stanley, this is serious!”

“I am being serious! C’mon Stanford, be reasonable. I reached for my weapon, same as you did. We’re both a bit jumpy these days. Fiddleford understood. There was no harm done.”

Ford glared at Stan, who was caught off guard by the intensity of his gaze. A clear mix of anger and beneath that a genuine, naked fear.

“Your weapon can’t disintegrate someone’s atomic structure, Stanley.” He took a deep shaky breath. “It doesn’t matter that Fiddleford understood, he shouldn’t have to understand. I scared Pacifica, I pointed a gun at a child Stanley! I could have killed her! I shouldn’t be around children, I’m not safe anymore!”

Stan’s heart lurched. “Ford, I’m not tryna’ downplay what happened. I recognize you coulda’ killed them, but you didn’t, and I know ya weren’t going to.” He sighed as he watched Ford open his mouth to argue. “Ford, we should talk about this later. It’s been a long day, neither of us have actually eaten anything other than coffee since about eight this morning. You go pack, I’ll make dinner.”

Ford stood up and began to walk unsteadily towards the living room, pausing as he went to squeeze Stan’s shoulder firmly. Stan took that to mean that things were as okay as they were going to get right now.

“Ford,” He didn’t turn around, feeling his brother pause, hovering in the doorway, “You’re always going to be safer for Dipper and Mabel than their parents ever were. Just remember that.”

Ford hesitated, as though about to say something, but then there was the sound of the front door slamming and when Stan turned to look, Ford was gone.

He sighed and closed his eyes, wincing slightly at the headache that was still steadily growing.

“Why didn’t you tell me, Stan?!” Hissed a familiar voice from the doorway.

He ignored this and instead turned towards the cabinets, rifling through them for various ingredients.

For a moment there was silence and then an explosive yell from behind him and the thunk of something heavy against the kitchen table.

“Don’t ignore me old man!”  

Stan sighed again, it had been a long day, and he really was getting too old for this.

“Wendy,” He replied calmly, turning to face the girl whose hand was still gripping the handle of the axe she had just embedded into his kitchen table. “I’m gonna tell Soos to deduct that from your next paycheck.”

She took a step back, surprised at his nonchalance, and he took the opportunity to shove a bowl, whisk, and eggs into her hands.

“Here, whisk this.”

“What are you doing?!” She yelled at him. Stan winced and feigned tapping irritably on his hearing aid to cover up the actual stab of pain in his head.

“Making pancakes.” He turned away from her to dig around in the spice cabinet for glitter.

“Why?!”

“Because I’m hungry, Ford hasn’t eaten anything all day, and because I know I’ve taught you better ways to manage your anger than attacking my furniture with an axe.” He turned to face her again, this time allowing some annoyance to slip into his voice and leveling her with a stern glare. “Now, whisk.”

She slammed the bowl down and attempted to crack an egg into it. The first one missed the bowl entirely, smashing onto the counter instead in a spray of yolk and shell. The second one split on the edge of the bowl, dribbling in streaks down the side. The last one made it in in one piece, and Stan wordlessly passed her two replacement eggs. He watched as she began to whisk, at first splashing egg over the sides and at several points nearly toppling the entire bowl into the sink. But over time her movement became more controlled, and after a while he handed her the milk and began passing along dry ingredients to mix in as well.

By the time the pan was hot, and the mixture was ready, her breathing was under control again. As Stan was adding in a dash of glitter, she finally spoke, no longer yelling, although he could tell she was still angry. He didn’t blame her for that. He was angry too, he just didn’t have the freedom to show it right now.

“Why didn’t you guys tell me what happened?”

He ladled two pancakes into the pan and turned to face her. She looked good, he realized proudly. He hadn’t seen her since the end of last summer when she had been heading off to her year-long apprenticeship with the National Parks Service. He could see that in her time away she had clearly gained some muscle, and her face was flushed with freckles from how much time she was spending outside. His heart twinged painfully as his eyes rested on Dipper’s beat-up old hat which sat firmly on her head and he looked away again.

“Because we didn’t want to worry you.” He answered truthfully. “Ford and I were hoping to get them back before anyone else had to know what had happened. That way they could tell people what happened in their own time. How did you find out anyway?”

“I ran into Soos at the store earlier today. I’m home for a few weeks before I head back to the Cascades. He asked if I’d seen you and Ford yet, and I asked him what the hell the two of you were doing back here.”

“Damnit.” Stan flipped a pancake angrily, “I told the kid not to tell anyone anything.”

Wendy winced. “He uh-I really didn’t give him much of a choice. Don’t be too hard on him man.”

“Well. Ford and I are heading out tomorrow.” He ladled some more pancakes into the pan and slid the finished ones onto a plate. “We should have the kids back here safely in a few days. Assuming everything goes well.”

“Okay well I’m coming then.”

Ah. He’d been afraid of that.

“No, you aren’t.”

“Why, Stan?!” She threw up her hands in the air, defiant anger on her face once again.

“Because—”

“Because It’s a family thing? Well, I have news for you, man! I’m just as much their family as you are!”

“Because, I’m not having you jeopardize your apprenticeship on the off chance this takes longer than we think it will.” He glanced at her again. “This is something Ford and I have to do. Together. If it was just about it being a family thing, you and Soos would both be coming with us. Besides, even though I know you can handle yourself, I refuse to put more of you kids in danger when I don’t have to. You’ve been through enough.”

She gasped, and Stan grinned at her slyly. “And before you get all excited, if you ever repeat any of that to anyone, I’ll kill ya.” He paused, then laughed quietly. “No one would ever believe you anyway.”

“You’re an old bastard you know that?”

Stan smiled, flipping the pancakes idly. “I should hope so, I’ve worked hard to be one.”

…

Stan rolled over, looking across the room at the form of Ford on his bed. Dinner had been good., Fiddleford, Pacifica and Wendy had stayed for pancakes, and he had ended up making a second batch when Melody and Soos came over to check in on how everything was going. It had made him proud watching everyone at the table, Fiddleford doing a terrible job of explaining some math homework to Pacifica while Melody and Wendy watched on in amusement, occasionally throwing out helpful suggestions. Soos had been helping him flip pancakes while Stan pretended not to notice him miss on purpose every once in a while, letting the pancake fall to the floor where an eager Waddles sat waiting.

It should have been perfect. Except for the fact that he could feel the hole the twin’s’ absence left in the scene like a burning wound. And of course, the fact that Ford hadn’t appeared at all, instead slipping downstairs after everyone had left to grab a plate of cold pancakes and then vanish into their room again.

Stan had decided to give him space. He had learned over the last few years that Ford wouldn’t talk about things until he was ready. Stan just had to wait for him to be ready. But he didn’t come down while Stan was washing the dishes, or afterwards while he sat alone in the living room watching TV and waiting for the migraine medication he should have taken hours ago, to kick in. When Stan finally had gone up to bed their bags had been neatly packed in the center of the room, and Ford was pretending to be asleep.

He knew Ford wasn’t actually asleep. Spending years sleeping in the same room as each other had made him very good at recognizing Ford’s breathing patterns. It helped to know when his twin was having a nightmare, and when that nightmare was serious enough to warrant shaking Ford awake. It also helped to know when Ford couldn’t actually get back to sleep after a nightmare. He’d always tell Stan he could and pretend to roll over and go back to sleep, but his breathing never evened out quite right, and Stan would lie awake with him, hoping eventually Ford would decide to talk to him about it. Most nights though, Stan would fall asleep before that happened, and wake in the morning to Ford already up and several cups of coffee deep.

Stan had been lying here for an hour now and the itch under his skin was growing worse every passing second. He wanted a cigarette. To be honest what he actually wanted was a good strong drink, but he wasn’t that much of a hypocrite. A cigarette would have to do. He knew if he got up right now Ford would hear him, but he was quickly coming to the conclusion he didn’t actually care. If Ford wanted to stop him, he’d have to talk to him first.

Still, Stan made every effort to get out of bed silently. He knew the creaks in this house by heart and had made his way out of the room and most of the way down the stairs before he heard Ford stir. He ignored the sound, slipping into the kitchen and digging around behind the serving dishes for the pack of cigarettes he knew was still stashed back there. He pulled it out and headed for the porch.

His lighter clicked on at the same moment that the door opened. Ford stepped out carefully, scanning the empty yard, before joining Stan against the railing. Stan continued to light his cigarette and took a long drag off of it, breathing out slowly and watching the smoke swirl up into the cold night air.

The buzzing beneath his skin faded slowly as he took another drag. The smoke settled into his lungs with a warm familiarity and a sharp stab of guilt. He’d promised the kids he had quit. But then again, he had also promised the kids he would keep them safe, and look how well that had gone.

Stan hummed to himself bitterly. Still a fucking failure, even now. Even during what was supposed to be his happy ending.

“Do you want to talk about it, Stan?”

Stan smiled grimly; there it was.

“Nope.” He said gruffly.

“I think maybe we should talk about it.”

“I think we should talk ‘bout a lot of things Poindexter but—” he paused to take a drag, breathing out the smoke as he spoke, “a’ this point I’m not really sure how much good it’s gonna do us.”

“Look, Stanley.” Ford fumbled for a minute searching for what he wanted to say. “If this is about earlier, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to imply I wasn’t going to help you get Dipper and Mabel. I just. The things I had to do out there Stanley. It changed me in ways I’m still surprised by, and I’m just terrified of hurting you. Any of you.”

Stan just nodded along blankly. They had had this conversation before. The time Ford had blindly attacked him when he had woken him up after a nightmare that had his brother screaming in his sleep, he had had to fight for a week to get Ford to agree to sleep in the cabin again instead of at his desk with a locked door between him and Stan. The trouble was Ford never seemed interested in elaborating on exactly what had set him off, never seemed interested in letting Stan try to fix things.

“The things you had to do?” He said as calmly as he could. He kept staring out at the snow, tamping down the annoyance and anger he could feel starting to bubble up. They couldn’t afford to do this right now.

“I don’t want to talk about it right now, Stanley.”

“Mmmm.” He couldn’t keep the bite out of his words this time.  “You never want to talk about it, Ford. That’s the problem.”

“Well at least I’m not the one blatantly lying to the kids.” Ford growled at him, reaching out and knocking the unfinished cigarette out of his hand into the snow.

The anger flared and Stan spun to face him, a voice in the back of his head chanted frantically that he was going too far, that he was going to push too much, that he was going to break something like he always broke something. But he had ignored the voice and pushed on anyway.

“Goddamit, Ford. You’re not the only one who had to ‘do things’ to get by. You’re not the only one who’s fuckin’ afraid here. An’ I’m not the only one who’s lying.” He shoved the rest of the cigarette carton roughly against Ford’s chest and slipped his hand into his brother’s coat pocket, ripping out the flask he knew was hiding inside. He slammed it down roughly on the railing and hissed “’m goin’ to bed, Ford.”

He knew he had pushed too far, he waited, shoulders tense as he shoved the door open, for the shout that he had been sure would follow. For the inevitable fight. But there was nothing, and when he glanced back, he saw Ford staring blankly out at the sky, flask clutched tightly in one hand.

He slammed the door shut behind him, ignoring the guilt that was slowly filling the space the anger had left behind, and went up to bed.

Sleep was a long time coming that night, and it wasn’t until hours later when he was finally drifting off that he realized Ford had never come back upstairs.

…

The day had been. Awkward.

Stan had driven for most of it. Glancing over at Ford every so often, who alternated between sleeping and scribbling idly in his journal. He played the most obnoxious music he could find, hoping to goad Ford into talking to him but nothing ever came of it. He eventually stopped for gas just shy of Montana and when he came back to the car, holding a perfectly legally obtained bag of jellybeans and a coffee, Ford was sitting patiently in the driver’s seat.

Stan saw this for what it was and handed over his own peace offering in return. Ford had nodded a silent thanks before pulling out of the parking lot. The next few hours had still been silent, but Stan found that the tension he felt had much more to do with Ford’s driving skills, rather than the fight they had had the night before. He knew they would still need to talk about it at some point. He just hoped that for once in his life he could manage it without breaking anything.

It was pitch dark out when Ford finally pulled into a motel parking lot. It certainly wasn’t the seediest place he had stayed—he’s not even sure they made places that seedy anymore—but it did make him feel vaguely uneasy for reasons he couldn’t identify. The motel was one of those travel lodges. With a u-shape of dusty, ground floor rooms, and rusted metal gutters. The half-lit neon sign read The Sobbing Stag Motel, and the vacancy light was flickering on and off in the weak light of the surrounding streetlamps.

Ford came back a few minutes later with a room key and they had started busying themselves with pulling out stuff from the car they would need. Stan pulled the half-eaten bag of jelly beans out of the center console and was just turning to lock the doors of the car when he saw something standing at the edge of the parking lot.

It was almost a horse. The legs were too thin, and as far as he could tell it didn’t appear to have a mane or tail of any kind. It was a pale, almost silvery white, and as it moved it made no sound. Stan watched in horrified fascination as it drew closer to him. Its eyes were blown wide like a jackrabbit’s, flickering with a panicked, hungry sort of fear that he recognized from decades old bathroom mirrors. He could see what looked like every bone in its body. Ribs and spine stark against the taut skin, and he realized with a jolt that it wasn’t breathing.

Stan looked around, wondering distantly if Ford had noticed the creature as well, when he realized that there were more of them. Pale shapes crowding at the edge of the parking lot, each pair of their wide, bloodshot eyes, fixed unblinkingly on him. He looked back at the one in front of him. It was much closer now.

“Hey, uh. Sixer?” He called weakly.

There was no reply. He didn’t dare look away from it again.Stan felt the cool metal of his car against his back and realized he had been unconsciously backing away from the advancing thing. Now, he had nowhere to go. It took another silent step towards him, and he closed his eyes, hoping wildly that when he opened them again the not-horse would be gone. He felt something cold brush across his face, felt the bag of jellybeans slip from his hand—and then, Stan Pines felt nothing at all.

[gravityskittles]

Hehehehe. People yelling in my ask box is genuinely my favorite. I love this fandom lol, and I'm so happy people have been enjoying my writing!

[gravityskittles]

Chapter 14: Shadows of the Things That Were

There was a recurring dream that Stan had had since the day he  broke the perpetual motion machine. In it, he would watch the events of that night play out over again. He would curse and hit the table. Popping off the grate on the machine. Ruining two futures in one reckless action.

Except here, the dream would twist away from the reality of that night. Stan would watch as Ford appeared at the back of the auditorium. He would run towards Stan, shoving him to the ground and reaching for the project, cursing at him the whole time.

Then Ford would touch the machine, and the dream would fracture and bend. The perpetual motion machine would grow gigantic, trapping Ford within it, caught in a maze of grates and levers.

No matter how close Stan got to saving him in these dreams, he always broke something along the way, and after the machine was broken, Ford would vanish before Stan had the chance to apologize.

After those dreams, he would always scrounge around for quarters and drive to the nearest payphone. He’d dig out the scrap of paper he kept in the inside pocket of his jacket and painstakingly put in the same number every time. He never actually mustered up the courage to talk to Ford, but just hearing his voice at the other end of the phone was enough to remind him his brother was safe. Enough to prove that Ford was happy and better off without him.

After the portal incident, these dreams had become a lot more straightforward, swapping out one broken science experiment for another. When he had woken from those dreams however, startling awake in Ford’s drafty, empty house, there had been no one left to call.

Stan hung in darkness. He felt panic, knew he should be fighting back against whatever had just happened to him, but he couldn’t seem to move. He realized faintly, as light started to glow around him, that he didn’t even seem to have a body anymore. His body stood beneath him, drowning in the long shadow of the machine that was slowly being revealed as the world settled. He stared in horror at it. It was a monster of twisted metal and cable. The perpetual motion machine from his nightmares melded into the portal of his reality.

For a horrifying second, he wondered if he was being possessed somehow. He remembered Dipper describing floating outside of his body while Bill puppeted him around. But, as he watched two versions of Ford walk out from around the sides of the machine, and watched his body stumble back in poorly hidden fear, he realized while it was him down there, it wasn’t him. The body below him was still young, still seventeen, still on the precipice of what the next 40 years were going to bring. The small amount of relief he felt at the understanding that he wasn’t being possessed, was immediately overshadowed by the renewed panic that he didn’t know what was happening, and no matter how hard he tried, he still couldn’t move. Then he felt his awareness split, and the nightmare started up around him.

He stumbled backwards, staring up in horror at the machine above him as two separate versions of Ford screamed at him for help. He launched himself forward, but their fingers didn’t quite reach his in time as they were pulled away into a maze of steel and wire.

For a while he ran, panicked, through the machines, screaming Ford’s name as he went. Eventually, despite his best efforts, he tripped, slamming his shoulder into a panel. The glass around it shattered and wires inside sparked briefly before the entire machine flickered into darkness. He stared at it in horror. He had broken it again. Both Fords were gone.

Stan stumbled, defeated, through the machinery’s wreckage. As he walked, the edges of his vision began to fuzz out slowly, like a TV with bad reception. His awareness blurred steadily, and piece by piece, he slipped away into the darkness of his own mind, as though being pulled by invisible hands.

Stan didn’t remember.

And there was something about that which felt familiar.

He couldn’t exactly put his finger on it. But lying there, in the dark, shivering uncontrollably, he couldn’t remember anything.

He rolled onto his side, and then everything came back in a rush, as he opened his eyes to the scuffed leather seats of his car. His home.

No, that isn’t right. Something itched in the back of his skull. Alongside a voice he almost thought he recognized. Something about this whole situation is wrong.

But it wasn’t wrong. He’d screwed up. Again. He should have known better than to try stealing from such a small store, but he was so cold. He hadn’t realized they would send the cops after him for a blanket and a can of soup. Stupid. He was always so stupid. He couldn’t even go back to New Jersey now, and of course the very next state he had tried he was already screwing up.

He watched the snow pile up outside. He was pulled up on the side of a highway, miles away from anywhere he could have stayed the night. If he’d even had money to stay the night. No one would find him in this. No one would want to anyway. Less than a year after getting kicked out and he was going to freeze to death in his car and Ford wouldn’t even—

Ford.

The itch in the back of his mind intensified. He shook his head, blowing carefully on his hands to try to warm them up. He didn’t want to think about Ford. It hurt too much.

‘This isn’t how it happened.’ The small, insistent voice at the back of his brain piped up as the stinging cold began to worm its way into his bones. He blinked, confused. This had never happened before. ‘But this isn’t how it happened. You remember this—You have to remember—'

 He remembered driving through the blizzard, remembered sliding across the roads, remembered the semi that had almost flattened him as it fishtailed across the highway. He remembered helping the man in the cab out of the truck, offering him a ride to the nearest gas station. He remembered cash being pressed into his hands. A hotel, a hot shower. Hope.

‘You survived this.’ He remembered surviving this. He remembered Ford, he—the itching suddenly became painful. A blinding ache that sent spots swimming across his vision. He felt himself lose consciousness. Again.

Stan didn’t remember.

He didn’t have time to reflect on why that felt familiar before he was slammed up against a wall outside of a pool hall.

Two men, both taller than him, each one built like a slab of muscle, had him pinned up against the rough bricks.

He knew what he had done. He’d hustled the wrong guy. ‘Like always.’ He’d been hustling the tables at this establishment for over a week. Had almost enough money to send some of it home.

Always in envelopes with no return address. As much as he could spare. Often more than he could spare. He remembered that it was never enough, never enough to go home.

‘You didn’t stop until Pa died—'

Pa wasn’t dead. He knew that. It had only been a few years; he talked to Ma when he could. She would have told him, she would have—

A punch to the gut knocked the wind out of him and he curled in on himself as much as he was able. He tried futilely to protect himself as the men beside him held him firm. A third man had appeared, the man who had punched him. He wore a crisp white suit and a disappointed smile. ‘Rico.’ The voice in the back of his head supplied, although he knew he had never met this man before.

‘You’ll wish you had never met this man at all.’

The man smoothed his suit jacket carefully. He shook out his hands like he was flicking water off of them and delicately began to slide off each of his heavy gold rings, before reaching for Stan.

The voice in the back of his head was screaming now. Stan may not know this man, but the voice knew that motion. He knew that motion. The little ritual Rico had. Rings were always left on for a beating, acting as his own twisted form of brass knuckles. But he always took his rings off before he killed someone. Before he killed someone—

Rico’s hand grabbed Stan’s hair, roughly yanking his head up so he was forced to meet his gaze. Out of the corner of his eye he saw Rico’s other hand pull out a shining, wickedly sharp knife from his jacket pocket.

‘Rico always did like things personal.’

He knew with certainty he was going to die. He’d seen Rico kill before. He knew just how efficient this man was, knew that he would walk away leaving Stan gutted like a fish, bleeding out in the filthy alleyway, without a single drop of blood on his suit.

His brain screeched to a halt as he watched the blade come nearer.

The itch at the back of his head had started up again. ‘This is wrong.’

 If Rico had killed him now, he’d never know all of this. If Rico had killed him now, he never would have ended up in the car trunk, never would have ended up in prison in Columbia, never would have ended up in Tijuana, never would have ended up in Gravity Falls.

Gravity Falls.

The knife swung towards him and pain erupted in his skull as the voice in the back of his head desperately tried to hang on to the ghost of a memory. There was a blue, glowing light at the corners of his vision. And then everything went black. Again.

Stan didn’t remember.

He was getting tired of this.

‘You’ve been tired of it since the first time it happened.’ But—this hadn’t happened before. He would remember if he had been in this situation before.

He could feel rough rope digging into his wrists and ankles. Blood trickled slowly into his eye from a stinging cut on his scalp and the pounding pain in his skull told him he probably had a concussion. ‘Definitely have a concussion.’

Wherever he was it was dark and small.

He’d always hated small spaces after this, even the cabin on the boat was difficult sometimes. He hadn’t been able to open his car trunk for months afterwards.

Car—

Fuck. He felt the rough carpet under him now, and the steady thrum of the engine and the wheels beneath him. For a while, he struggled, trying to get his foot around to kick out the tail-light, but they had him tied in a way where he could barely move. After an eternity, an eternity that felt horribly familiar, the car stopped.

He held his breath, listened as doors slammed and footsteps crunched on the ground outside. He heard muffled voices speaking rapid fire Spanish above him and allowed himself to hope that they were going to let him out. That this was just one of Rico’s ‘lessons’. The voice in the back of his head told him that ‘They aren’t. And it isn’t.’

It sounded resigned in a way he hadn’t heard the voice sound before.

He’d never heard this voice before. Right? His head swam with the heat and pain as he listened to the footsteps grow fainter and the sound of another car speeding off, away from him.

Tears pricked his eyes. He was going to die in here.

‘Fuck.’

It was getting hotter and hotter in the trunk. He remembered this as well. Remembered burning his arms on the hot metal at the end but first—

First—

His jaw ached and he realized with horror he could taste blood in his mouth. ‘You haven’t even started chewing on the ropes yet.’ He hadn’t even thought he was going to do that. Surely there was another way out. Surely there was—

‘No.’

He remembered this. He remembered the blood, the feeling of breaking his teeth.

He hated this, hated the resigned way the voice was speaking. Hated that somewhere deep inside of himself he knew it was right. He didn’t want to remember this. The other times he had remembered. The other times with the blizzard and with Rico. They hadn’t happened like he had thought they would. They had been different. They had been. Better.

‘Not this one.’ The voice shook slightly. ‘Not this one.’

It took him another eternity. He felt every excruciating part of it. He wished he hadn’t.

Three times of living through this felt like too many.

Eventually, after the thick bloodied rope, and the shattered glass of the tail-light, and the twisted broken lock of the trunk. He lay on the sand, blood dripping slowly from his ruined mouth and raw fingers. He knew he needed to get up, needed to hotwire the car and get away before the adrenaline wore off and the muted pain became sharp and real and overwhelming. But he couldn’t seem to focus on anything but his teeth. Or where his teeth had been. Fuck. He was going to need dentures. Dentures at the age of 24. He glanced blearily down at his wrist where his cheap blood-spattered watch was still glowing faintly. It was past midnight.

He began to laugh wildly. A high, broken, wheeze that went on until they turned into shuddering sobs which he tried desperately to stifle against his hands. Dentures at the age of 25. Happy birthday Ford.

‘Happy Birthday.’ Images flashed through his head of two small children and a bright pink cake with far too much glitter on top of it. Huh he hadn’t been able to remember them before.

He tried to focus on the images, tried to pull names out from the fuzzy blankness of his memory but the pain in his mouth and hands steadily grew unbearable, and he felt himself fade away. Again.

Stan didn’t remember.

At least. He didn’t think he did. The voice in the back of his head felt closer somehow. The familiarity of it was on the tip of his tongue he just couldn’t quite—

He shivered violently and opened his eyes. Above him, the light of a naked bulb flickered weakly. He could tell it had originally had some sort of light fixture surrounding it but now it just dangled loosely from the pale, yellowed ceiling. He stared up at it, watching the walls swim gently around him. He was cold, but his mind was pleasantly detached. It felt like floating. It felt like—'No.’

 No, he was clean now, had been since the last stint in prison. He knew he hadn’t—so why? He blinked trying to clear the fog away and peered around him. There was a cracked sink, rusted faucet dripping water in irregular brown colored drops, a closed door made of cheap wood veneer which was peeling and cracking in dusty strips.

He was in a bathroom. ‘Oh.’

More specifically he was in a bathtub. ‘Oh no.’

He struggled to sit up, feeling cold water slosh around him. What was happening, why didn’t he remember? He did remember. Oh Moses, he remembered too well.

He turned to look at himself, at the pink tinged bathwater, and the ice cubes scattered around. His vision swam again, sending the room spinning. He gripped the sides of the bathtub for support, a motion that pulled at his skin.

There was a pain in his side.

He looked down.

‘NO! No, not again, no I don’t want to live this again I don’t I—'

The voice in his head was drowned out by his own screams which echoed off the walls, bouncing back around him in a hideous cacophony of fear.

There was a wound on his side. A curved cut like a smile that stretched up from his left hip to just below his ribcage. It was stitched up. Something that would be a small mercy if the bastards had bothered to do it correctly. Instead, the thread was loose in some places, leaving the wound lethargically seeping blood into the dirty bath water, and far too tight in others, cutting into the skin around the incision.

Someone had taken his fucking kidney.

He remembered walking back to the hotel he was staying at in New Mexico. A seedy long-term place he’d finally been able to actually afford for a month or two. He’d been working as a mechanic downtown; he’d finally been good at something. Finally, been able to save money for the first time in ages. He almost had enough to start looking for an apartment nearby. He almost had enough to finally put down roots somewhere for the first time in almost ten years.

Then he had noticed the men following him. He’d tried to ignore it, tried to tell himself he was just being paranoid. He hadn’t done anything to warrant being chased out of New Mexico yet, he hadn’t even stolen anything other than some shoplifted gas-station sandwiches a few weeks back. Then he heard a small snippet of Spanish, and his blood froze as he flashed back to Columbia, to Rico. To the man he had still crawled back to after the goddamn trunk because where else was he supposed to go. To the man who had finally asked him to cross a line he wouldn’t. To the man who he owed more money than he owed his own fucking father.

He had tried to run. But they had grabbed him before he got very far, and the prick of a needle against his arm had stopped any chance he’d ever had of fighting his way out.

Stan sat shivering on the bathroom floor, hunched around himself like a wounded animal. In one hand he clutched the note Rico’s men had left for him. It was simple. What had been paid and what was still owed. The former amount seemed laughably small for what had been done to him, and the latter far too large to ever dream of paying back. The note told him he had 72 hours.

In his other hand he was holding a needle and thread, which he had dug out of his bag after crawling out of the tub and into the hotel room. They had taken all his money from his job, and anything else he owned that they had deemed valuable enough to steal. He had thanked whatever gods existed that they had left him his car, and his poor excuse for a first aid kit.

He leaned his head back against the cold tile. This was it. There was nothing he could do. Sure, he could stitch himself up properly, but he couldn’t get Rico’s money in 72 hours. He had finally reached the end of the road. After everything he had done, every failed business idea, every failed scheme, every deal gone bad, it was finally catching up with him. He realized now he was never going to get to go home. Never going to make that million dollars to earn his way back.

‘You never should have had to earn a family.’

He was going to die here in this hotel and not a single person would care.

‘That’s not true.’

The voice was getting angrier. He ignored it. He deserved this, he always had.

‘No. You didn’t. I didn’t. We never deserved any of this.’

The itch in the back of his mind burned. And then something snapped inside of him, and he felt someone grab his hands. You survived this.

The blackness crashed over him. Again.

Stan Didn’t Remember

And he was tired of this.

His shoulder was consumed with a sick heat. Every time he shifted it stung and burned, the skin cracking open over what he knew was an infected wound.

He stood up unsteadily from the couch he had been lying on, immediately overwhelmed by the sharp tug of the stitches in his side as he stretched slightly too far. He gasped and doubled over, prodding softly at the space around the stitches. He couldn’t afford two infected wounds. Hell, he couldn’t even afford one but. He had to get Ford back. He had to. He couldn’t wait for his shoulder to heal. He couldn’t wait for the stitches to heal. The stitches he had ripped out a second time in his fight with Ford. The fight where he had killed his brother.

‘You didn’t kill him.’  

Stan jumped. The familiar voice sounded like it had come from directly behind him. He spun around, still doubled over in pain. For a half second, he could have sworn he saw Pa standing next to him but then he was gone, and Stan saw nothing except an empty couch and a worn red journal lying mockingly on the floor beside it.

He cursed in every language he knew as he slowly straightened up. It couldn’t have been Pa. Hell, he hadn’t seen Pa since the night he was kicked out, and he knew Ford hadn’t been home since college. That thought made bitterness bubble up in the back of his throat. Ford had literally had the one thing Stan had always wanted and had thrown it away the second he could.

‘Eh. He had his reasons.’

Stan flinched again, ignoring the pain in his shoulder as he grabbed for Ford’s crossbow. He brandished it wildly around the room, catching sight of himself in the window’s reflection. He looked terrible. It had been a week since Ford had fallen through the portal and in that time, he had barely slept or eaten. Even in the wavy glass of the reflection he could see the bags under his eyes and the unhealthy paleness of his face. He had refused to change into Ford’s clothes, so he was still wearing the ratty burned jacket which was now covered in patches of dried blood.

Then the window shimmered slightly and there was a figure standing next to him. He yelped and brandished the weapon again but there was nothing there. He glanced back to the window. The old man standing beside him was almost Pa but not quite. He looked softer than Pa ever had. His rough edges smoothed over underneath a dark blue sweater and a red beanie. He had a sad smile on his face and kind eyes that had the barest ghost of the same hunted look in them as his own did. Realization stole over him.

“You’re Ford. Oh god I’m so sorry I—”

‘Nah. Five fingers see?’

The figure raised his hand and waved at him slowly.

“You’re—”

‘Stanley Pines, at your service.’

“I get old?”

The man’s smile grew slightly sadder.

You are old. He said softly. This already happened, a long time ago. And you need to remember now. Because we need to wake up.

Remember.

Stan ignored the faint itch at the back of his skull. He stared at the reflection in the window. He looked at the sweater and the knit hat and the glasses he knew he needed but always refused. He looked at this man who was claiming to be him and he tried to slot his present and his, apparent, future together.

He remembered the portal; he remembered night after night of calculus and physics and math he had no business learning. He remembered taking his car apart over and over again before he worked up the nerve to try taking apart the portal’s engine. He remembered the townsfolk and the Murder Hut—no—the Mystery Shack. He remembered years and years of time slipping by him in this sleepy little town. Winters and summers and decades of time.

He watched himself in the reflection, watched himself heal and grow and change. Watched himself age.

He remembered Soos and Wendy and then the twins and then the portal and then Ford and the end of the world. He remembered remembering nothing at all and the years that came after it.

He remembered a phone call and a rage he hadn’t felt since he punched that triangle out of existence. He remembered a parking lot and a horse that wasn’t a horse and the worst memories he had playing out in a sick nightmarish loop.

He blinked and the identical men in the reflection became one man.

“I remember” He said softly.

…

Stan startled awake on the asphalt next to his car. The word ‘Ford’ was echoing in his ears and he wasn’t sure if he had actually yelled it or not. His head spun as he tried to force himself up off the ground and so he allowed himself a moment to breathe.

He gently ran his hand over his shoulder, even though the pain was nothing more than a dream now, fading as he tried to focus on it. The scar was there, deep and gnarled and exactly as it had been. The scar on his stomach was the same, and gently prodding with fingers that were absolutely only shaking from the cold revealed his dentures firmly in place over long healed gums. He took a deep breath and screamed out every curse he could think of into the frigid air.

Then he laughed.

He laughed for a long time, until his chest hurt, and his face was wet with quickly freezing tears. He was here, he was okay. He had survived everything up until this moment and he would survive everything after it. He didn’t know what those things were, but they’d need to try a lot harder than that if they wanted to break him. His laughter subsided slowly into ragged breathing, and he glanced up at the sky.

The moon certainly hadn’t been that high when they had pulled into this motel. It was odd that Ford hadn’t come looking for him yet.

That thought jolted him to his feet before he had even processed that he was moving.

“FORD!?”

He looked around wildly, before catching sight of the door to what was supposed to have been their room. It stood slightly ajar and, for a moment, he could have sworn he saw one of the Not-Horses standing just inside the doorway before it vanished.

He stumbled over to the door, tripping slightly on his numb legs, and threw the door open. Inside one of the Not-Horses was standing over the crumpled form of his brother. Ford was moaning softly in his sleep the way he did when he was having a particularly nasty nightmare.

“Get off of him!” Stan roared, throwing himself at the thing, fists raised to meet it.

It vanished and he toppled onto the carpet next to Ford.

He swore and glanced around but it was gone. That was fine, he could deal with it later. He just had to wake Ford up and then they could deal with it together. He fumbled for his brother, intending to shake him gently out of whatever magical nonsense he was trapped in, but the second his hand brushed Ford’s shoulder he knew he had made a mistake.

He pitched forward into darkness, the last coherent thought ringing through his head was “Not again.”

…

As his eyes opened to a sea of white, Stan thought he was back in his car at the beginning of his own nightmare loop again. Then he realized that this time he was outside, and this time there was only one version of him. Also, he had all his memories, which he figured meant whatever was happening right now wasn’t targeting him. Probably he had somehow gotten himself caught in Ford’s nightmare prison. Figures. Although, he was surprised Ford hadn’t broken out of it yet. Surely, he would have figured it out faster than Stan had. After all, Ford had decades more experience with things like this than he did.

He looked around at the snow, wondering idly where Ford was, when he heard a familiar scream echoing through the trees. Shit.

He ran, slipping in the deep snow, until he came to the edge of a clearing. He stopped short, staring at the Mystery Shack. Well. What would become the Mystery Shack. Currently with all the barbed wire and keep out signs, it was clear this version of the shack still belonged to Ford.

Stan walked towards the house cautiously. He wasn’t sure exactly what Ford was currently re-living. He knew very little about what had happened to Ford after Bill’s betrayal. He had picked up on some things from what he found in the house after the portal incident, and some more things from the puckered scars on Ford’s hands. But it was something Ford had never wanted to talk about with him. Just like he had never wanted to talk about the portal with him. Deep down, Stan resented this. He wanted to know about Ford’s past—the good and the horrible. He wanted to know what his brother had been through so that he could help, so that he could get it on at least some level. But, as his eyes found a crumpled body on the ground in front of the house, he realized that he wanted to know these things because Ford was ready to tell him, not because he had snooped on them by breaking into his mind.

He had to try and wake Ford up as soon as possible.

He walked cautiously towards the body, doing his best to ignore the sick feeling rising in his throat as he watched the bright red stain on the snow around it spreading. He knelt next to Ford. He could tell by the odd angles of his limbs that most of Ford’s bones were broken. He opened his mouth but the words died on his lips. He knew without asking that Ford was gone, there was too much blood for him not to be. Then, the body shimmered and vanished, and above him there was a scuffling noise.

He shot to his feet and looked up at the roof. He could see Ford dragging himself across it, limbs jerky and stiff, and, when he squinted he could see the yellow glint in his brother’s eyes. Bill. The breath caught in his chest. He knew it was only a memory—not even a true one at that. He knew Ford obviously hadn’t died and, given the lack of broken bones during their fight, he probably hadn’t even ended up falling off the roof. But the idea that at least some of this was true, that that fucking corn chip had dragged his brother up here to threaten him, filled him with rage.

He watched Bill walk Ford’s body right up to the edge. He saw the moment when Bill let him go, watched as Ford’s shoulders slumped. Ford hung in the air, arms wheeling as he tried to catch himself, tried to grab the edge of the icy roof. Stan watched in silence as Ford fell backwards with a scream. He looked away before Ford hit the ground, wondering how many times Ford had been forced to live this twisted memory.

When he looked back, he saw that Ford was lying in the same position he had found him in before but the twitching of his fingers and the shallow rise and fall of his chest meant that this time he was still alive. Stan dropped back down next to his brother and carefully placed a hand on his shoulder, hoping that he wasn’t adding to the pain Ford had to be feeling right now. To his shock, his hand phased through Ford as though he himself was made of air. Okay, so he couldn’t touch him but he could talk to him, that would have to do.

“Hey Six, listen to me. This didn’t happen, okay? You’re dreamin’, you have to wake up now.”

Ford’s eyes remained unfocused and glassy, blood dripping lethargically out of one of them. But he opened his mouth weakly, slurring out, “Stan ‘m srry.” 

“You don’t have to be sorry for anything, you just need to wake up.”

Ford’s eyes glazed over and Stan watched in horror as his limbs fell slack. Around them the scene twisted into darkness.

Ford Was Gone

Okay, that hadn’t gone nearly as well as Stan had hoped. He wasn’t even convinced that Ford had really known it was him. He was fairly certain that he hadn’t heard most of what Stan had been trying to tell him. But he still wasn’t sure why Ford seemed so much more stuck in here than Stan had been. Even from the first memory he had known that something was wrong, and his younger self hadn’t really listened to him, but he’d at least seemed able to hear him.

The darkness began to fade and Stan readied himself.

When he opened his eyes, he was once again standing in front of Ford’s house. Snow was still covering the ground, but this time there was no sign of Ford on the roof. Hopefully that meant this was going to be a different memory, maybe one where Ford would be able to listen to him.

As he watched, a familiar car pulled into the driveway next to the house and a younger version of himself clambered out, duffle bag in hand. He winced watching the careful way that this version of Stan held himself, and the way he kept checking over his shoulder to see if anyone had followed him. Stan’s hand strayed down to his own stomach, reminding himself again as he brushed his fingers over his scar that this was in the past and he and Ford were both fine now.

He watched Stan knock on the door and watched as Ford threw the door open, crossbow in hand. Stan was just thinking that he probably could try and grab Ford if he followed them down to the portal room, when he heard a harsh ka-chunk noise followed by both twins giving startled yells. 

Stan had assumed this memory was going to end with Ford getting sucked into the portal. Surely that, and whatever had happened immediately afterwards, had to be the stuff of nightmares for his brother. Instead, he was staring at his own body, crumpled in the snow, a crossbow bolt sticking out of his neck. Ford threw himself down the stairs, hands fluttering above the bolt as though he could somehow undo it, as though he could somehow fix this.

Stan watched with a grimace as he bled out into the snow. Part of him had always assumed the crossbow was just for show. No rational person would keep a real loaded crossbow by their front door. He didn’t love knowing how close he had come to dying that day.

Ford was pressing his hands against the bolt, begging Stan to stay with him as blood bubbled between his fingers, spilling over into the snow.

Stan could tell that his counterpart was already gone. He silently willed Ford to figure it out, to see the nightmare for what it really was. Instead, he watched as Ford tugged the other Stan’s body up into his arms. He was sobbing now, alternating between broken apologies and begging Stan to wake up.

“Ford. Ford, listen to me, this didn’t happen.” He walked over, kneeling in the snow next to his brother, trying very hard not to look at his own slack, blood spattered face. “Ford please you have to wake up now, this isn’t how it happened.”

Ford stared through him, unseeing. “Stanley, I’m sorry. Stanley, please please, wake up, I promise I’m sorry, I promise I didn’t mean to. Please, I can’t do this without you, I can’t I. Please I can’t I’m sorry.”

Stan grabbed at his shoulders, trying to gently force Ford to look at him, but, just like last time, his fingers sank insubstantially through Ford’s body. “Ford this isn’t real, ya didn’t hurt me, I promise, you just need to wake up.”

Ford let his head drop against dream Stan’s body, words now a stream of broken muttering that Stan couldn’t quite hear. He tried again to grab Ford’s shoulder, focusing all of his energy on making himself solid and real, but just as he felt his fingers make contact, the darkness pressed in again.

Ford Was Gone

“I’m getting tired of this!” He shouted. Ford’s consciousness had to be around here somewhere, suspended in the dark the way Stan’s had been. He just had to get through to him somehow. “Ford none of this is real, c’mon you know your own memories, I know you do, you weren’t the one who got shot by the memory gun!”

Okay, maybe he shouldn’t have said that.

The scene had changed again. He had been anticipating something from the portal this time, assuming that the nightmares were taking place in order. Instead, he was in a high vaulted room, staring at two men in a glowing blue cage. They were having an argument. He knew how this went. He remembered the defeat in Ford’s eyes when he had realized he couldn’t talk Stan out of this. Stan hadn’t understood why back then. He’d still believed Ford hated him at that point, still genuinely believed that his life just wasn’t worth as much as the rest of theirs. He still believed that, but now he accepted that it didn’t matter what his life was worth to him, because it was worth a whole lot to his family.

He watched them switch clothes, watched Ford’s eyes widen at the scars on Stan’s torso. He remembered hissing at Ford that there wasn’t time to explain, as Ford had pointed wordlessly at the surgical scar on his side. He watched himself place the fez on Ford’s head, straightening it out as Bill stalked back into the room.

When the dream twisted, Stan was ready for it at least. That didn’t make it any more pleasant to see Bill’s eye flash towards Ford’s six fingers wrapped around the bars of the cage. Stan forced himself to keep watching as Bill pulled his hand back from the deal and disintegrated Dipper and Mabel on the spot. The screams from this memory’s version of himself were cut off with a choking noise as Bill grabbed him and threw his body roughly against the wall. Bill was saying something to his soon-to-be corpse, but Stan ignored him, running up to the edge of the cage where his brother was staring vacantly at the scorch marks where the twins had been standing moments before.

“Ford, listen to me. You have to wake up, this isn’t real Poindexter!”

The cage disappeared and glowing blue chains appeared around Ford’s neck, wrists, and ankles. Bill hoisted Ford up off the ground and Stan could only stare at him in horror as Bill coursed electricity through the chains. He watched Ford's body seize and contort but there was nothing Stan could do to free him now. The electricity paused and Bill began to laugh, pulling down one of the tapestries and slowly setting it alight in front of Ford’s eyes. Stan tried not to look, he didn’t want to know who Bill was burning to death. He told himself that it didn’t matter, he knew that none of this was real, he just wished Ford knew that too.

He squared his shoulders. If this wasn’t real then Bill couldn’t hurt him anyway, so it didn’t matter if he was noticed or not. “FORD! Please you gotta listen to me!” His shout echoed through the fearamid. 

Finally, Ford looked down at him, and Stan sighed with relief. Ford could finally see him. Now he just had to wake up and all of this could stop.

“It’s all my fault Stanley. I did this. All of this, I failed you and the kids. I deserve this.”

The darkness swept over them before Stan could reply.

Ford Was Gone

As he waited for whatever was about to come, Stan thought about Ford’s words. He knew that Ford had genuinely seen him. But he hadn’t wanted to wake up. Or he still didn’t realize that he could.

Something about what Ford had said was bothering him. It sounded just like what the dream version of himself had said during the memory of his uh, impromptu surgery. Which. Hadn’t that been the nightmare where he had finally been able to take control again? He hummed to himself trying to fit all the pieces together. As the darkness faded, he figured it out. He knew what he had to do.

He was surprised to find himself on the Stan O’ War II. Whatever memory this was pulling from had to be fairly recent because he recognized their anomaly chart on the wall which placed them firmly around Alaska instead of the Arctic. For a second, he was worried it was going to be another nightmare involving the kids, but the calendar on the wall above the stove told him it was sometime in November. Just a few months ago.

He tried to think back to what it might be, he didn’t remember anything specific happening in November, at least nothing he had been aware of. There was a muttering noise coming from the office. Something about the whole scene was sending his anxiety into overdrive, but he couldn’t figure out what it was. Then, the door to the office opened, and Ford walked out. Except it wasn’t Ford. Stan didn’t even have to look at the eyes this time to recognize the jerky movements and overwide smile as Bill inside his brother’s body.

He stumbled back against the counter, panic coursing through him in a way that froze him to the spot. Bill stumbled into the sleeping cabin and Stan heard himself begin to scream from beyond the door. He tried to get his breathing under control. This hadn’t happened. Obviously it hadn’t happened. He had killed Bill himself, it was the most satisfying memory he had. He squeezed his eyes shut against the screaming. He’d heard himself scream enough for a lifetime today. He was really getting tired of this.

After what felt like hours, Bill stumbled back out of the room and into the office. Stan tried not to stare at the blood on the floor. He didn’t need to know what lay beyond the door. He watched blankly as Ford startled back to himself at his desk. His brother brought a shaking hand up to his right eye, which had begun to weep a moderately alarming amount of blood. He drew his hand away and stared at the blood for a long time.

“No. No that can’t. STAN!” Ford shot to his feet, and Stan decided he was done.

He was done with whatever sick, twisted games this creature was trying to play with them. It was one thing to have to relive his own memories, but at least he had known when this thing was trying to mess with him. His own memories were gruesome, but at least he’d never killed Ford, at least he’d never had to feel himself die. Ford didn’t know that this wasn’t real, he believed he had killed Stan multiple times, he had felt himself die at least twice that Stan had seen, probably many more times before he had been able to get into Ford’s head. Worst of all, in the hazy moments of lucidity that Ford had, he seemed to genuinely believe that he deserved all of this for some reason.

That didn’t sit right with Stan. Only one person was allowed to guilt trip Ford and that was him. Besides, Ford didn’t deserve this, none of these things had actually happened. Things were supposed to be okay now. It didn’t matter how long it took, Stan was going to make Ford believe that.

He stepped forward, blocking the door to the cabin, seething with anger. “Ford stop. This isn’t your fault.”

Ford paused, then shook his head and tried to walk through Stan.

“You don’t deserve this Ford. You never did.”

He felt Ford bump into him and freeze. Slowly, Stan reached up a hand to wipe the blood away from Ford’s eye. To his satisfaction, his hand made contact.

“You deserve a happy ending. You always have.”

He took Ford by the shoulders and stared into his eyes.

“Wake up.”

…

The motel floor was not any more comfortable the second time that Stan became aware he was lying on it. He rolled over and sat up, rubbing at his head with one hand. He was definitely going to have bruises in the morning. He was too old to be falling onto the floor.

Ford blinked and pushed himself up against the wall, staring silently into space. That wasn’t good. Stan got up shakily and pushed the motel door shut, noticing as he did so that the sign outside now read Motel 9 instead of The Sobbing Stag. He sighed.

“Hey Sixer, next time you pick the Motel, can we make sure it exists first?”

There was a sharp intake of breath behind him and he cursed silently. Using that nickname had definitely been a mistake. “Sorry Ford, that was my bad. I shouldn’t have said that.”

He turned around. Ford had one hand tangled tightly in his hair and was breathing far too quickly to be healthy. Stan sat down next to him, being careful not to touch him yet. They had a routine for nightmares.

He glanced over, Ford was wiping repeatedly at his right eye, pressing harder and harder against his face with each pass. Stan gently reached out, trying to tug his hand down. Ford flinched away with a shout. 

“No! Stanley, no get away, I’m not safe get away from me please--”

“Ford, Stanford.” Stan raised his hands slowly away from his brother, angling his body so that Ford could see he had no weapons on him, while also keeping the closed door in Ford’s line of sight. “Listen to me. It’s okay. We’re awake now. You’re safe.”

Ford shook his head frantically, jamming himself into the corner between the wall and side of the motel dresser. One hand was still tugging sharply at his own hair, the other hand was resting on the handle of his blaster. 

Stan took a deep breath, at least Ford knew who he was this time. There had been nightmares in the past where that had not been true. “Okay, I understand. I’m going to sit right here okay? I want you to try and match your breathing to mine. Do you think you can do that Ford?” He took another deep breath. Ford’s eyes flicked frantically around the room, searching for whatever danger he seemed sure was coming for them. Stan kept his eyes fixed on Ford, watching as his breathing grew more and more erratic. This approach wasn’t working. 

“So uh. I thought that metal plate in your head was supposed to stop things from gettin’ in there. Seems like you should demand a refund. The fucked up horses got in just fine. Hmmm. That name is too long.” He grinned. Sometimes silence worked best with Ford, but most of the time the best way to jar him out of a panic spiral was plain old annoyance. “Whaddya think about Night Mares? Get it? Like horses? Night Mares? Admit it. I’m hilarious!”

“Stanley…”

Ford’s voice was hoarse, and Stan noticed his eyes brow bright with tears. He stared up at the ceiling, pretending he hadn’t seen anything.

“I wish you hadn’t been there.”

“Well. I mean I can’t say it was a pleasant experience, but I think ya’d probably still be stuck there if I hadn’t seen it.”

Ford thunked his head back against the wall and scrubbed roughly at his face with both hands.

 Stan thought about his next words. He knew he could leave it alone. Pretend it hadn’t happened and move on with his life. But he didn’t want to. He was tired of Ford constantly hiding his past from him, he wanted to understand and painful as it might end up being, this was going to be one of the only chances he got to talk about it. “Ford, why couldn’t you get out? You had to have figured out that stuff wasn’t real.”

Ford laughed in a strangled, painful way that made Stan’s chest tighten. “How exactly was I supposed to do that, Stan?”

“Well, I mean I did.”

“Yes well seeing as you haven’t had a dream demon in your head editing your memories and brain functions before, I think that—”

“He did what.” Stan’s voice was low and dangerous.

“Um. It doesn’t matter, Stanley its—”

“What did he do to you, Ford? Don’t fucking lie to me. Not right now. Not after what I just watched you go through.”

Ford flinched again, but didn’t answer.

“Stanford, please.”

Ford yanked his flask out of his coat and unscrewed it roughly, taking a swig and glaring at Stan as though daring him to say something. Stan didn’t comment, tonight Ford could drink as much as he wanted for all he cared. So long as he got answers, he could make peace with that.

Ford opened his mouth to speak, then closed it again. This happened a few more times before he finally seemed to find the words. “There was a point where I was. Foolish enough to try and force Bill out of my head.” He shuddered, taking another drink before continuing. “At the time, I thought he was bound by more rules, I didn’t realize how much power over me our deal had truly given him.”

He met Stan’s eyes tiredly and raised one hand, showing off the scarred mess across his knuckles. “You know that he started hurting me physically when he took over, but he also derived a sick pleasure in toying with my mind.”

Ford took a deep breath, and his next words were so quiet Stan had to strain to hear them. “He made me forget my own name once, just to prove that he could. While I was disoriented, trying to force myself to remember what it was, he made it so all the nerves in my body signaled at once. The pain was…” He trailed off. 

Stan hesitantly reached out for him but Ford shook his head, forcing himself to continue. “Another time he deleted my memories of him torturing me so when I woke up I thought we were still…friends. By the time you came to see me I no longer knew what memories were real and what memories Cipher had twisted. Sometimes, I’m still not sure.”

Stan allowed himself to fantasize briefly about tracking down a Time Agent so he could go back in time and kill the evil little corn chip a second time. Ford took another swig from his flask.

“I didn’t know.” He said quietly.

“Of course you didn’t, how could you? I’ve never told you anything about it.” He murmured bitterly. 

“Why, Ford?”

“I’m supposed to help you first. That’s the system.”

“What system?”

“The system where you protected me when we were young so I protect you now, because I wasn’t there when I should have been, and so I have to be there now, I have to make up for it all.”

“That’s a stupid system.”

Ford stared at him.

“It’s a stupid system, and if I’d realized that’s what you were up to this whole time I would have put a stop to it years ago. Ford look. I appreciate the sentiment, but I’m okay.”

Ford snorted, “Of course, Stan. I’m sure your experience with the Night Mares was completely fine.”

Stan shrugged. “Honestly. Yeah. I'm okay. Cause look, Ford. I have bad days, bad shit happened to me and sometimes it ‘haunts me’ or whatever. In my opinion it makes me more interestin’. But for the most part, hot chocolate and you and the twins makes it better. Sure, I needed help immediately after the apocalypse, and I appreciate all you did for me, Stanford. I genuinely don’t think I would have my memories back without you.”

“You wouldn’t have lost them without me either.” Ford muttered bitterly. 

Stan fixed him with an ‘I’m still talking’ glare. “You gave me the happy ending I always dreamed of. But what you can’t seem to get through your stupid metal skull is that the happy ending isn’t worth anythin’ if you’re miserable. Tonight, I relived some terrible shit. But you’re right, I’ve never had a dream demon mess with my memories. I’ve never had to question what’s real in my own head. The second those horses started trying to twist things I was able to start pullin’ myself out of it.”

“You died.” Ford said quietly. “You watched yourself go through the worst moments from your past and then you came to rescue me and you had to watch yourself die. I killed you.”

“Nope.” He reached out and carefully pulled Ford’s hand out of his hair to place it lightly on his chest. “I’m doin’ jus’ fine see? You never killed me Stanford.”

“I could have.”

“You didn’t, and the cops can’t getcha’ for crimes you didn’t commit.”

For a moment, he saw the ghost of a smile on Ford’s face, but then it slipped away again. 

 “I thought things were supposed to be better by now.”

“I mean, it’s been like ten minutes since we got out of that shit. It takes you longer than this to recover from a normal nightmare, much less whatever that was.”

Ford looked away, staring up at the ceiling, but Stan held onto his hand tighter, refusing to let him pull away again. “I mean in general Stanley. I thought things were supposed to be better in general. I shouldn’t be flinching when you call me my childhood nickname, I shouldn’t have flashbacks to freezing on my roof when I see snow, I shouldn’t be pulling out a weapon when someone startles me. Logically, I am supposed to be okay now, I’ve run every test I can think of and I know Cipher is gone from our dimension for good. So, why am I not fixed?”

Stan couldn’t remember the last time Ford had been this vulnerable with him. He shifted closer until they were leaning on each other.

“You’re doin’ better.”

“It doesn’t feel like it.”

“Yeah well, tough shit. You are doin’ better. You don’t constantly carry your blaster around with you anymore. You hadn’t had a severe nightmare for months leading up to all this. An’ I know I yelled at you about it las’ night, but before all this you weren’t actually drinking all that much either.”

“Right but now I’m right back where I started. I’m not fixable.”

“Nope.”

“You can’t just say nope as a response Stanley.”

“I can and I did. You aren’t back where you started, you’re just having a bad time right now. And stop tellin’ me you need to be fixed. You aren’t one of your machines, Stanford, you’re a person.”

“But why are things so much worse than they were?”

“Let’s see,” He held up his free hand and sardonically started checking things off on his fingers. “Because for the first time in four years your family is in danger, your routine has been disrupted, you went back to the house you haven’t been in in the winter since you were being physically and psychologically tortured by a sadistic little shape, and you just had to live through all your greatest fears on repeat.”

“Oh.” Ford said quietly, and for the first time Stan heard genuine realization in his voice.

“Yeah, oh.”

Ford slowly leaned into him, letting his head rest on Stan’s shoulder. “I’m sorry, Stanley.”

“For what?”

“I realize now that it might have been not the wisest course of action for me to decide that I no longer needed anyone's help.”

“Yeah well. Once we get the kids back we all should think about going back to therapy.”

Ford groaned into his shoulder, sounding achingly like he had when they were kids. “Do we have to?”

“You know Mabel is going to make us the second she finds out we stopped going last year.”

Ford groaned again, louder. And Stan laughed.

“Stan, I’m sorry I killed you.”

“You didn’t knucklehead. I’m right here.”

“I’m still sorry.”

“Hey, listen Ford, I meant what I said in your head. You didn’t deserve any of that. You never deserved anything he did to you.”

“I appreciate the sentiment Stanley but,” He sighed and gently screwed the cap back onto his flask. “I’m not sure that’s something I will ever be able to truly believe.”

“I know,” Stan said, pulling himself up off the floor and holding out a hand to Ford. “I’ll keep believing it for you ‘til ya figure it out though.”

Ford let out a wet laugh and let himself be pulled upright.

“We should probably get to bed.”

Stan shrugged, the phantom pains starting up in his side and his shoulder meant he definitely wasn’t getting anymore sleep tonight. But he could spend the rest of the night making sure Ford woke up if he started having any more nightmares. “Yeah, we probably should.”

Ford paused awkwardly, staring at him for a moment. “Thank you Stanley. For everything.” 

Stan pulled him carefully into a hug, waiting a moment until he felt Ford melt into it, hugging him back fiercely.

“Anytime Poindexter.”

As Ford pulled away and headed for the bathroom, Stan felt something drop into his jacket pocket. He slipped his fingers in, surprised and pleased to feel the smooth metal of Ford’s flask. There was still a lot of work they both needed to do, but this, at least, felt like progress.