The Y2K Problem

by HerenorThereNearnorFar, orphan_account

Summary:

On December 31, 1999, in the small town of Gravity Falls, the world ended.

Mabel and Dipper Pines have grown up mostly okay despite all that.

Chapter 1

Mabel Pines is the luckiest girl in the world. Everyone says so. Her brother reminds her of it when he’s in one of his anxious, pacing moods—“Don’t you know how lucky we are, Mabel?!” Her parents whisper it to each other in strained voices when they think she and Dipper have gone to sleep—“Do you have any idea what might have happened to the children, how lucky we are that we got to see them grow up?” Dad will hiss. “And you just want to throw that away?” Then Mom will reply “Without your family we wouldn’t be in this mess!” The President of Somewhere or Something called her lucky once before he got turned inside out, poor guy. And, of course, her great-uncles call her fortunate all the time.

She likes to spread her luck around. Nothing special’s any good unless you share it! She knits sweaters for basilisks and invents toothbrushes for giant death worms and tailored a lot of child leashes so the Father of Ten Thousand Dark Spawn would stop losing his babies. Her Make Things Better Juice has nothing but five star reviews from friends and neighbors. Her makeovers always succeed and her matchmaking always makes sparks (as her great-uncle says, nothing last forever! what matters is that everyone has fun).

She’s a doll. She’s a sweetheart. Everyone agrees. Mabel Pines must have been born lucky because the alternative is that everyone else was born unlucky; and that makes her sad to think about.

Deep in the bowels of the only home she can remember are cages full of slavering beasts and adorable abominations. Mabel skips between the grabby tentacles, making her way towards her darling, a great pink oozing mass. His name is Wobbles, because that’s his method of locomotion, and though Mom and Dad have banned him from the apartment, he’s still Mabel’s pet. She traded a wisdom tooth on futures to keep him forever.

“Wobbles,” Mabel says, pulling out her knitting and a stack of torn, scavenged magazines. “You have to stop changing form like this. It’s making tailoring for you a conundrum.”

He just adheres to her side, schlorping slimy appendages down her face until she dissolves into giggles. “Okay, okay. Not a sweater-vest man, are you? Controversial but I can love you in spite of your bad fashion sense. Let’s consult Apostroteen on accessories. I’m feeling… hats.”

In the end he tolerates a little bow. Mabel stows her supplies and they set out on their daily constitutional. They wend through halls of pearlescent black, shot with threads of glittering light in a million ever shifting shades. Scattered throughout are half destroyed monuments and records of a world destroyed years ago. The “Seven Wonders of the World” shrunk down and set on a plinth. A star in a jar, shining blinding light on anyone who pulls back the curtain. Several lonely looking, abandoned heads on spikes.

Mabel greets all the familiar faces as she passes.

“Hi Mona Lisa Who’s Always Screaming! Hello Mr. Cruise, nice dancing—you know, I saw an article about you in my magazines? Have a nice day, Your Holiness! You’ll escape that cursed snow globe someday, ma’am, keep going!”

Further through the hallways she can hear the hum of The Party. It’s in one of its downswings, low jazzy strings music instead of ear-shattering bass beats, most of the guests passed out on the floor trying to work up the energy to party more. The fun never stops but it does occasionally need to take a break to barf.

People are so tuckered out that no one even tries to eat her as she passes through the outer rings of the party. Further in, with the VIPs, everyone knows her on sight. She lets her grip on Wobbles slacken so he can root through the upturned snack table and goes to find her brother.

He’s sitting with Great-Uncle Ford and a purple-edged, bleary Pyronica at the foot of the great stone dais that supports the throne, playing a board game with too many pieces. Great-Uncle Ford is making some nerd argument about the distinction between how a termite piece and a carpenter ant piece can move in the lignin phase when Mabel crashes into his side.

“You’re a fraud or a liar if you’re telling me they play Stigmergy Style in the Third Ring Casinos. I didn’t get banned for card counting there just to have someone try to—oh, hello sweetheart.”

He kisses her on the head. His breath smells of melted time and sour fruit.

“Hey Princess,” Pyronica slurs, taking a deep puff from her cigar. “Want to join in?” It's unclear at first if she means the game or her smoke but Great-Uncle Ford glares over Mabel’s head tellingly.

“We have discussed drugs and the children—“

“Yeah, yeah, Sixer, ‘Not good for their development’ ‘Not until they’re older.’ Well time’s dead and they’re looking pretty sturdy to me.”

She gestures to Dipper, who, in Mabel’s unprejudiced opinion, looks like a strong breeze might blow him over. He’s drowning in his bear pelt cape and the band t-shirt he found on their last adventure is two sizes too big. Still, he puffs out his chest at Pyronica’s comment. Mabel tries to swipe one of his enzyme cards off the field of play, just on principle, but Great-Uncle Ford catches her hand before she can pocket it.

“Even more reason to trust me about their development. They are children.”

Eye soft with the exhaustion of a weeks-long rager, Pyronica leans back. She can’t be bothered to argue, which is saying something. Pyronica loves a good snit-fest with Great-Uncle Ford. Mabel slips out from under his arm and circles round the board to bury her fingers in strands of slippery fire. What should be white-hot just tickles and she digs down until she finds the solid iron-tinged plasma of her scalp, the tough plutonium of horn and nail.

“Your move, Sixer,” she sighs. “Break it down hierarchal style, I guess. Game’s gonna take forever but it’s not like we don’t have time.”

While Great-Uncle Ford plots out his move, Mabel scoots past Pyronica, towards her bro.

“How long have you guys been playing?” she whispers into his ear.

“Since I came down here after breakfast,” he mutters back. “Party seems like it’s going to be dead for a while still. I’m hoping we can get Great-Uncle Ford a little sleep.”

“He doesn’t need sleep,” Mabel dismisses. Wobbles, having gorged on abandoned meat and time paradoxes, is bounding back towards them. Or…. oozing towards them. It’s a dignified, affectionate ooze.

“He doesn’t not need sleep either,” Dipper insists, which doesn’t even make any sense.

Besides, Great-Uncle Ford looks great! A bit ragged under the eyes, a suspicious tremor in his left hand, but that all runs in the family. The confetti in his hair matches the multi-colored blood on his boots and his sweater today is very fetching. It’s one of the ones Mom made him ages go, when Dipper and Mabel were small. The pale blue color of it reminds Mabel of the sky in her dreams and demon flames.

Speaking of demons! She checks her satchel quickly and is delighted to see her latest project in there. Right where she left it—but that’s not always a guarantee with dimensional hyperfolds.

“Dipper, watch Wobbles for a little!”

“What, no! Mabel! He’s going to mess up the game!” Her brother’s voice cracks on ‘game’, startling the nearby Pacifire out of his nap and making 8-Ball look away from his round of poker with either himself or several invisible entities. Even Great-Uncle Ford, who has been locked in, moving tiny parasites and peptides under Pyronica’s drowsy glare, glances up to see Mabel yoinks their portal gun from Dipper’s waist and point it up. Past the stairless dais, towards the throne.

“Mabel, maybe not today—“ Great-Uncle Ford starts. He’s too late. Mabel aims, fires twice with perfect precision, and hops through the portal onto a twisted plateau of human suffering. She plops down on the arm of the throne delicately, taking care not to snap off any fingers or noses, then, once settled, starts to kick her feet.

“Hi Great-Uncle Bill!”

Great-Uncle Bill uncurls from his ruminations, blinking a haze of shapes and strange memories out of his eye. He can get so broody when the party’s at its nadir. He moves a giant hand to hover over Mabel, a smaller hand emerging from a fingertip like a steel girder to tweak her nose.

“Hiya Baby Star! Having fun? Keeping your brother in line? You won’t believe how long they’ve been playing that nerd game now!”

Mabel squints down at Dipper, desperately tugging Wobbles back from the game board by the collar as he stretches out hungry tendrils for the pieces. “I think they’re playing Keep Away right now,” she observes.

“Bet you a tube of super-glue that the pig wins,” Great-Uncle Bill offers.

Wobbles may be her angel, her joy, but Dipper is her brother. She has to root for him even when he’s outmatched. “Make it a tube of super-glue and two pounds of body glitter,” Mabel says fiercely.

They watch for a little while and, after Wobbles successfully eats a few of the cards, Mabel digs into her bag to hand over the goods. Great-Uncle Bill just waves her off, indulgent. “Keep it, kid. Just remind me, who’s your favorite great-uncle in the world?”

She screws up her face, pensive. “Ussssssually it’s a tie. But right now I’m thinking… you! Boop!” Great-Uncle Bill’s pupil swells with gratification. He looks—not happy, but sated. Like a cosmic chimera gnawing on the bones of a galaxy.

Contentment is not enough; Mabel strives to make people joyous. Her hand, still deep in her satchel, starts to emerge. “And as my favorite great-uncle I thought you should have a crown for your victory. Ta-da!”

The ring of chain and antlers takes a second to yank out fully. It’s made for Great-Uncle Bill, the host with the most, a towering figure of many hands and mouths, not the squeezable great-uncle Mabel prefers. That Bill only shows up for special occasions.

She and Dipper had to raid eight abandoned hunting lodges and bargain with The Too Many Bones Man to get enough deer corpses for this project. It’s worth it when Great-Uncle Bill whistles appreciatively. “Wowie! Look at that spread. The carving on those vertebrae—woof. And you painted it all gold? Baby Star, I’ve got to say, this is even more impressive than the possum tooth cloak.”

His eye curves up in a smile and Mabel smiles back.

“Can I put it on right now?” Great-Uncle Bill asks.

“No,” Mabel replies, and on some level she does know that she’s one of nine people in the universe, tops, who can say this to Bill Cipher. Her father’s breath catches in his chest when he shows up for dinner, pulling Great-Uncle Ford like a balloon. Her mother shakes with terror every time her children leave, which is so silly. Don’t they know how lucky Mabel and Dipper are? When they were just four months old someone traded the world for them. “Let me put it on for you!”

Great-Uncle Bill scoops her up between two fingers broad and unyielding as tree trunks and lifts her up and up and up. She swings for a minute, a thousand feet off the floor, kicking her legs idly. Then he places her at the top of his top hat, a velvety smooth disk of blackness that stretches out five feet on either side of her.

Spreading the antler chain in the middle of the field she unloops the twists and orients every spar and branch correctly. Then she begins to pull the circle out, towards the cliff edge of the crown. Then, in one sprint, she races round the circumference, kicking the chain down. It clatters as it falls until it settles like a coronet around the rim of the hat, gleaming and speared and gold. Dipper was right for once, obsidian knives would have broken up the eyeline too much. Satisfied with her work, Mabel leaps back down into Great-Uncle Bill’s hand.

“You deserve something nice for this,” he exclaims, admiring himself in a briefly apparated mirror. “Take somebody from the throne for your tea parties. Heck, take two, I’m feeling generous!”

With that, he deposits her on the ground.

A throne gift is always a special treat, though one Mabel enjoyed more when she was younger. All those games of play pretend, trying to make friends, they’re all a little babyish. Even the most obliging new friends eventually start to look at her funny and their parents always makes her let them go after a while—it’s not safe for any human but a Pines to live in the Fearamid.

She takes her time making her choice this time, looking over the frightened, twisted faces for someone who looks nice. Or, if she can’t find anyone nice (it’s hard to judge these things based on expressions of haunted agony) at least someone who looks fun.

When she was little, Mabel would pick other kids—but that didn’t last long. They always cried, asking for their families, for their homes. Sometimes Mom or Dad or Great-Uncle Ford could pull an entire family free and that was exciting; like a frantic party, everyone pressed close in the five rooms of their apartment, making forts under the table, telling Dipper and Mabel stories of the last millennium to ever exist.

Since she grew into a preteen (probably, Great-Uncle Ford estimates these things for them with growth charts and x-rays), Mabel has picked her prizes for glamour; mature women with lovely eyes and frozen features. They leave faster and say much more interesting things before they go. And they give much better eyeliner tips!

She’s walking around the base of the chair looking for the tell-tale folds of a dress or the curl of long hair in the endless press of stone limbs and torsos when her eyes catch on something new.

He’s beautiful. Even in granite there’s something about his face that she’s only seen before in magazines. It’s sharp and smooth at the same time. She can only see one half of his face, a profile folded up against many other bodies and the mystery is almost as good as the promise of more of him. Does he have a secret second mouth? A rugged scar? Gently she slides her hand under his chin, feeling stone soften into flesh. Her murmurs as he stirs back to awareness—and just as soon as he turns his head Mabel stills him.

There’s nothing particularly exciting about the other side of his face. Her heart won’t stop pounding anyways.

It’s normal to feel this way as you grow up, their parents have stressed. Growing bodies, hormones, unfortunate circumstances, safe outlets, blarg bah blah. The ample supply of teen romances and celebrity posters available to them is no mistake; it’s like they think Dipper and Mabel will start crushing on Pyronica if they don’t get enough human romance material. Which is really gross—she’s known them since they were babies.

Still… most of Mabel’s real life crushes before this ended with them being crushed. Or eaten, or turned inside out, or trapped for all eternity in a cursed portrait made of ants. There have been a few teenage hotties, met on outings with Great-Uncle Ford to the world below. Their encounters never lasted longer than a few hours and then they were gone. Great-Uncle Ford never takes them the same place twice; it’s safer for them that way, he says.

This boy is here, in her home. He’s cute. He’s not sentenced to death for the crime of failing Bill Cipher. He could be Mabel’s, if she asked for him.

Of course she’ll have to give him up eventually. Eventually can be a long time away. (And maybe, a hopeful little voice in her head adds, he’ll fall in love and want to marry you, and then he’ll be family and no one will hurt him and you can live forever and ever with someone other than your brother.)

She yanks the boy from the throne, which shudders, readjusting to the loss. A few thousand moans fill the air as the people blink back to life, going pliant just long enough to be reshuffled. Then they’re petrified again.

“Whoa-kay!” Great-Uncle Bill says, “I see someone knows what she wants.”

By Mabel’s feet her prince awakes.

He’s lanky, two hands on the end of one arm, dressed in a leather jacket and leather pants. A Bad Boy, she classifies mentally, thrilled to finally be putting her hard earned knowledge to the test. He groans, clutching his head.

“Joe? Kevin? Where are my boys at? Was there a little girl here?”

Mabel extends a hand to help him up. “Hi! I’m Mabel and you don’t have to worry about anything anymore!”

The boy stumbles up, flicking his ragged hair out of his face. The fleeting relief that crosses his face when he sees Mabel is quickly replaced with horror when he sees the throne, and on it, legs crossed, checking his nails, Great-Uncle Bill.

“Don’t worry, he can kill me first,” he declares, shoving himself between Mabel and her looming great-uncle even though his legs are shaking with fear. It’s so sweet she almost feels bad about correcting him.

“It’s okay,” she says, patting his arm and ooh, he’s muscular too. “That’s just my uncle.”

He stares at her, too confused for a moment to be afraid. The arms that were flung out to protect her wrap around his own waist. “Bill the Brutal is your uncle? Cipher the Slaughterer? That’s your uncle? You’re wearing a neon tutu.”

The last part is a bit out of left field; Mabel decides to interpret it as a query about their very different looks. “He’s our great-uncle by marriage. Which I think is very beautiful, personally. I’d love to get married some day.”

The beautiful boy looks up at Great-Uncle Bill—who is now staring off into space, sunken back into one of his distant moods—then looks back at Mabel. Then he tries to stab her.

It all happens fast. The knife flashes out of his jacket, towards her. She scrambles for her own knife, instincts honed by Great-Uncle Ford over years of lessons, but it’s too slow, she knows it’s too slow. It’s been so long since someone’s really tried to kill her in her home.

Three inches from her rib cage the knife stops, embedded in a pitch-black, noodley limb.

“Alley-oop!” says Great-Uncle Bill as his other arm spears the boy through from the back, emerging out his sternum with a pulsating heart clutched between his fingers. He offers it up to Mabel first then, at her refusal, tosses it up and catches it with one of his side-mouths.

Distantly she can hear Dipper and Great-Uncle Ford calling her name, the scramble of movement as they start to scale the dais. It will take them a while though; she took the portal gun. There’s blood on her face and on her cardigan. It’s one of her favorites too; it has real nebulae woven through the yarn, ancient hydrogen and twisted threads of compressed cosmic dust that glitter in daylight.

“Love’s rough, starlet,” her great-uncle says, helping her wipe the gore from her face. She was only really getting it smeared around on her own. “Everyone needs a few bad breakups, it builds character!”

Mabel likes him best like this, shrunken down and trying to be a person for them. It’s not be fair to Great-Uncle Bill—he might have decided to be an omnipotent chaos demon and to take over the universe but he didn’t decide to be an ocean where most people are just puddles. Still, it’s easier to love him when he’s a little guy, not a god.

“I don’t know if I can do worse than that,” she says, hopeful.

Great-Uncle Bill laughs raucously and coils an arm around her. “Oh, Baby Star, I know you can! But don’t you worry about these pathetic fleshbags,” with a wave he incinerates the boy, flames jumping as high as Mabel’s waist and then dying out in an instant.

“I think… I think he hated me.” Mabel bites her lip. It is an unfamiliar feeling, hatred. She’s the luckiest girl in the world. At worst she has been feared, resented—those are all natural reactions to good fortune, unevenly distributed.

She does her best to be good, to save people, to dole out her luck like water from a neverending well, and even if they aren’t grateful (“You can’t expect thanks, Koala Bear,” her dad said when she was tiny—was that the first time Great-Uncle Bill let her pull someone from his throne? the second? “It’s an ugly situation and you have been very… very gifted to escape the worst of it,”) they were always nice. They looked at Mabel and Dipper, the bridled fury in their eyes mixed with sympathy.

“I don’t want anyone to hate me,” she says.

Great-Uncle Bill squeezes her a little tighter. “It should be flattering—hate and fear and love are all part of the same mixed up neurochemical bomb and it’s way easier to hit two of them than the third.” Double-checking her face, he frowns, flickers through a few images on his eye. “Okay, okay. Look at it this way—once I track down the last of your obnoxious family, we can blow this planet wide open; you and Sprout won’t have to worry about humans anymore. Why does it matter what a doomed species on a partied out planet thinks of you?”

“Great-Uncle Bill,” she reminds him, “I’m human.”

He ruffles her hair, arm twisting around her neck like a boa constrictor. “Sure are, kid! Don’t worry, I don’t hold it against you.”

Notes:

there is a whole background AU for this, involving timelines and drama and a teen mom willingly taking two four month old children across state lines to get involved in some sort of secret brother/faked death/estranged twin/surprise family reunion situation her baby daddy’s family threw up out of nowhere as soon as they announced their pregnancy. the shapeshifter and tate mcgucket are there. there’s intrigue. there’s double crossing. there are fraternal screaming matches. there’s aging punk anarchist shermie pines. there’s a whole alternate zodiac involving wendy’s mom.

the really important part is that there were far too many pines in gravity falls when the rift broke and, with a surplus of leverage, bill found it really easy (read: only, like, one brutal murder involved) to get the equation out of ford. what ford did manage to extract from him in addition to sparing the actual infants in the room was a pretty durable promise not to hurt any of ford’s family.

unfortunately for bill, several members of ford’s family got the hell out. turns out it’s hard to destroy an anthill and spare a few of the ants inside. so he’s been stewing and partying and making tiny deals, tearing up small bits of the planet while trying to find the last few members of ford’s family so he can swallow the entire earth, possibly freeze all the pines in permanent stasis, and then maybe kill ford at the moment of his greatest misery? he wavers on that last part. he’s definitely gotten fond of the kids though, so maybe they can stay on as his style team.

(what’s Stan doing you might ask? don’t worry about it. bill definitely doesn’t.)

Chapter 2

Notes:

happy late bookaversary! warnings for killing a guy and involving children in killing a guy and keeping your husband paralyzed while you try to get his niece and nephew to help you kill a guy. and an implied dub-con wedding and unreality bubbles and overhearing arguments between family members and one (1) swear word. mabel's mostly concerned about the swear word.

Deep inside the pyramid is a bubble of weirdness. Here the surfaces aren’t strobing marble but solid, honey wood and something called linoleum. The plain green house plants never move and the undying orange flowers on the table don’t even have faces. The light that comes from the windows shifts from pink to gold to purple, always soft and hazy, without a hint of any landscape outside. There’s a television that plays silly cartoons. There are stacks of CDs in bright jewel cases by the stereo. There are glow-in-the-dark stars made out of plastic and not plasma. There’s a bunk bed that literally has her and Dipper’s names on it. Everything is static here—there are stains on the wall from where Mabel spilled spaghetti as a little girl, carvings in the door frame to mark how she and her brother have grown. Outside the party thrums with chaos but here it’s always the same.

It’s a good home. Of course, most of it isn’t real.

They’ve brought in more real things as the years have gone by. Most of the books are actual books. The stationery too now. There’s a selection of toys scavenged in their earlier childhood and then carefully vetted for curses; Beanie Babies, action figures, slinkies, dolls with bellybutton gems and fluffy hair. Even before they started picking their own wardrobes their clothing has always been real. The craft supplies are real. There are a few chipped plates and novelty cups—real, real, real. When you cross your eyes and peer past the soap scum layer of fantasy that Heathcliff mug on the counter stands out stark against the slick black glass and bone which hold up their home.

Personally, Mabel prefers the lie. What’s the point in knowing that the curtains are spiderwebs or that the throw pillows on the couch are really made of stone? No one should ruin their own naptential like that.

But she understands Dipper can’t help his nosiness; it’s baked into who he is. Not knowing things hurts him as much as knowing things does and knowing things hurts him a lot.

Even just sitting at the dining room table he’s jumpy, glancing over at their father as he cooks with a look of polite horror which suggests that the eggs today are more than they seem. Poor Dipper. Mabel kicks him under the table until he starts kicking back, culinary dread briefly forgotten.

“Let’s do these last two questions and then we’ll wrap for brunch,” Mom says, pointing into their calculus textbook. Mabel is ready to start tearing out pages and eating them. Even her brother, who’s good at homeschool, is starting to lose patience.

He squints at the page, tapping his pen (real) against the table. “Why do we need to know how to calculate the collision of two accelerating trains? They could pass right through each other or they could both turn into hummingbirds. You know that the laws of physics don’t even apply anymore, right?”

Mom folds her lips thin. “The stranger this whole situation gets, the more important it is to be grounded in the basics. You’ll never regret knowing how to derive.”

“I’m kind of regretting it right now,” Mabel says, glumly scribbling a pufferfish with luscious, flowing hair. Her pencil catches on a groove in their dining room table, a relic of a scissor centric arts and craft project.

Dad’s tuneless humming has stopped, leaving only the scrape of spatula on pan, the sizzle of cooking hashbrowns. He's just poured out the first of the pancakes. Their mother pushes her chair back. “Okay, fine. Go out, entirely unprepared to deal with reality—“

“Outside is reality!” Dipper argues, “All of this,” he waves at the cluttered table, textbooks stacked high. “Is—it’s ridiculous. It’s learning rules to a game no one plays.”

“If math doesn’t work then nothing works.” For a moment, Mom, despite the solid foot she has on her children, despite her sweeping sweater and the kicky loafers that Mabel still trips in, looks small enough to hold in the palm of a hand. “Look, we’ve made concessions on the social sciences and biology. You still need to—”

Whatever she was going to say cuts off as Mabel disappears.

The oak underneath her falls away, replaced by empty air. The fall is short and familiar; the landing is soft. She knows this wide leather couch, the warm crackling fire, the mammoth-head ottoman, the sloping shape beside her.

“Great-Uncle Bill!” she cries, half outraged and half delighted.

“You know we’re way too big now for you to just nab,” Dipper complains from his other side. He’s always been more wary of their great-uncle’s ability to yank them from a few miles away—but that’s what happens when you’re related to a demon. Underneath the usual fuss Dipper sounds relieved. “Is a little privacy too much to ask for?”

Great-Uncle Bill presses a finger to both their mouths as he yanks them even closer. “Hush up for a sec, kids. Uncle Billy needs to use you as a rhetorical device.”

Obediently they fold up their legs (the couch will slobber on them otherwise) and turn their attention to the people cowering on the floor.

There’s three of them. All wearing suits or regalia of some sort, a snazzy trio. On the left, a guy made of glass full of some sloshing purple fluid. On the right, a doll-guy with a coin for a head. In the middle, really putting their back into that bow, is someone with six arms and hands like a racoon’s hands, tiny and adorable.

Great-Uncle Ford is there too, sitting in his chair near the fire, frozen in place with a strip of duct tape across his mouth. He’s glaring, not cowering. Mabel waves at him.

“See these?” Great-Uncle Bill asks, squishing Dipper and Mabel’s faces against his sides. From this direction it’s a bit like hugging a ruler. The edge of him, that half inch where he intersects reality, cuts into her cheek like the back of a knife. “Real cute, aren’t they? Smart too. And they’re twins! Adorable! Don’t you just want to burn down a city for ‘em?”

Praise feels glowy, like the deep red stained glass lamps scattered around the room and the light reflecting off of golden statues, like that quiet evening when the Great-Uncle Bill and Great-Uncle Ford showed them the stars.

The middle figure glances up quickly and takes them in then goes back to hugging the rug. “Yes, Lord Cipher, definitely, Lord Cipher.”

“You want these kids to be happy, right?” Great-Uncle Bill demands. “Don’t they deserve it?”

“Yeeees.” Raccoon-Hands says cautiously. Now that Mabel looks closer they’re really more like possum hands.

The rubbery-rope arms curled around Dipper and Mabel whip away to slam down on the carpet in front of Possum-Hands and his crew. Great-Uncle Bill crawls forward, growing redder, bigger, his eye bulging. Back on the couch with Mabel, Dipper taps his pen fast against his knee.

“Well unless you nitwits can pull it together and find the rest of their family, they won’t be!” Shrinking down to a more reasonable size, he hovers over trembling heads. “Every day you stall is another day you’re keeping these kids from seeing their great-grandma. What if they never get to meet her? I think they’d be sad. Baby Star, Sprout! How do you feel about being cruelly deprived of your genetic associates by a bunch of incompetent buffoons?”

“I mean, not…great?” Dipper says, still drumming the pen on his leg. Bah-bah-bamp. Bah-bah-bamp.

“I’d like to meet our great-grandma,” Mabel agrees. “Ooh, and Great-Uncle Ford’s twin! Then we can be twin buddies!”

They’ve never actually met another set of twins before—not human ones, at least. Lots of monsters come in litters or pairs. There’s Yug and Neb, the twin blasphemies, who are fun to look at but not great talkers. There’s the Three Headed Snake That Eats Daydreams—triplets aren’t the same. There's the Planigons, all eleven of them strange siblings, and of course most of the eyebats are related. Even La Llorona and her sister Bloody Mary (who used to date Great-Uncle Bill, talk about drama) may or may not be twins depending on which one you ask. None of those are quite like knowing there are people out there like you. If his brother was here maybe Great-Uncle Ford would talk with them about it.

“Neat.” Great-Uncle Bill snaps his fingers. “So how do you think I should kill these guys?”

There’s a muffled noise from Great-Uncle Ford, still frozen in his armchair but making big motions with his eyebrows. Mabel frowns and folds her arms across her chest. “Great-Uncle Bill, you know we aren’t allowed to help you kill people. Besides, if you kill them, who will find Greatma Caryn?”

Great-Uncle Bill drifts back and settles on the couch between them, letting Mabel snuggle back in. Even Dipper, moody though he is, leans a bit closer. It’s cozy, the always-warm flesh of the sofa and the airy heat of the fire and the yellow pumice rasp of their uncle. “Puh-lease. This is just the latest failure delegation. They came here to die, isn’t that right, fellas?”

The guys on the ground politely don’t answer. Mabel thinks that’s for the best.

Mabel sighs. Compromise is important but she can also see Great-Uncle Ford turning a deeper and deeper shade of purple as things go on. Whatever he’s trying to psychically convey to Great-Uncle Bill clearly isn’t getting through; that’s fine though. Mabel can fix this.

“Okay, what if we just killed one of them, as an example?”

“And make the others watch? Baby Star, you’re a hoot! What’s the method then?” Idly, Great-Uncle Bill lifts Possum-Hands up in the air, spinning them. Their arms pinwheel wildly, tiny hands catching on nothing.

It’s best not to think about these things too hard. Mabel just says the first thing that pops into her head.

“Death by a thousand robokittens!”

Dipper, at the same time, offers, “Rip him limb from limb.”

Behind Great-Uncle Bill’s back, Mabel mouths What? to which her brother replies I’d kind of like to meet our great grandma.

They stare at each other for a moment. They never did have enough baby teeth to trade in for twin telepathy (maybe if their parents didn’t barter the early ones away for who knew what, or maybe if they hadn’t been so easily wowed by infinite cupcakes and fifty foot bouncy towers—there’s no point regretting bargains their younger selves made). At times they can get close.

“Turn his arms and legs into wild animals?”

“Griffinhippos, I think,” Mabel says.

Dipper nods. “Good call, they’re pack animals and won’t attack each other.” They’re also adorable, which should offset the yuckiness of dying a bit. If you have to get eaten you should get eaten by something with sharp claws and a squishy, fat face.

Great-Uncle Bill’s eye crumples in a smile. “It’s so nice to see siblings get along, don’t you think, Fordsy?”

After that it’s just a lot of screaming. And roaring. The room expands to fit the scene, giving the two survivors room to scramble back and giving Great-Uncle Ford, freed from whatever was holding him, space to stalk around the carpet towards Great-Uncle Bill.

“I cannot believe that,” he spits. His cheeks and lips are still pink from the tape that was over his mouth. “That contravenes so many agreements it’s almost impressive.”

Leaning back—as much as a triangle can lean—Great-Uncle Bill smiles up at his husband. “I think you’ll find it doesn’t. I let the kids take the initiative the whole way through.”

“You brought them here in the first place, you involved them—“ Great-Uncle Ford is furious, looming over the couch like an oncoming hurticane. Even when it’s not directed at her, will never be directed at her, the intensity of the anger is enough to make Mabel cringe back. She doesn’t like people to be unhappy.

Seeing her, Great-Uncle Ford melts. He leans down, whispering something in Great-Uncle Bill’s ear (or at the side of his head, at least).

“Hmm. Yep. Yeah. Okay, Six-shooter, that is a minor infraction, I’ll fix it.” With a showy eyeroll, Great-Uncle Bill banishes the two remaining delegates. “They’re fine,” he promises, catching Mabel’s frown. “Home all fuzzy headed and terrified.”

“Good,” she says, and doesn’t look at the man on the rug or his eight new friends. Instead she runs her hands across the spotted fur slung across the sofa-back, rumpling it then smoothing it back down. “Reduce, reuse, recycle, like I’m always saying. Can’t save the planet without putting back a few eggs.”

Great-Uncle Bill kicks his feet and laughs. It layers over top of the muted shouts and cries, then folds over itself again, an audible omelette of delight.

“I should return the children to their parents, they’ll be worried.” Great-Uncle Ford is still crouching low. Up close Mabel can see the fraying of his jacket and the smudges of ash on his chin from shaving. He still smells like vanilla and Mabel dropped that bottle of perfume on him twelve whole sleeps ago.

“Let them stay, the show hasn’t even gotten good! We haven’t seen the organs yet.” With a snap, there’s a bucket of popcorn in her lap, big golden puffs and visible flakes of salt. Gently, Mabel pushes it to the side and slides off the couch.

“Sorry, Great-Uncle Bill, but we did leave the apartment fast. I don’t want Mom and Dad to freak out. Besides, it's blueberry pancake day.”

He sighs. “Fine, be boring. Sprout, do you want to see an accessory spleen?”

Dipper has crept out of his seat and is messing with the knick-knacks on the nearest side table. There’s Brett in his timeout pyramid—he must be giving Great-Uncle Bill tinnitus again—and a fighting pit for miniature black holes. Dipper nearly fumbles Saturn at the sound of his own nickname, knocking one of its cute little moons out of orbit.

“Uhhh-uh,” he stammers. “I pretty much know what all the organs look like. But if you have some time I’d kind of like to see the Pharaoh’s Cease and Desist Letter again. I’ve been practicing my hieroglyphics, I think I can figure out the code this time.”

Great-Uncle Bill blinks a few times. “I hate sparing anything, but for you, kid, I’ll do it. C’mon, let's study with a show.” He pats the seat the Mabel left, replacing the popcorn with a coiled old scroll. The nearest lamp flickers a little brighter, bathing everything in rosy light. On the carpet the screams have fluttered down to whimpers—but there are still whimpers. You need permission to die in the penthouse suite.

“Are you sure, Dipper?” Great-Uncle Ford asks, lingering. He’s forcing himself to smile, Mabel can tell. Not a good sign, he’s being overprotective again. “I don’t want you to miss out on pancakes.”

Dipper is already engrossed in his nerd pursuits, head bowed over the ancient pages. Tapping his pen against his mouth and scribbling on his bare arms like he can’t just ask for notepaper; it makes Mabel want to bop him over the head with a pillow. “Yeah, I’m fine.”

“Hrmmm.” He gives Great-Uncle Bill a brisk kiss on the eyelid that makes him fizzle then takes Mabel’s hand and swings it. His hands are big and solid, six whole fingers of security. How could she ever be unsafe here? This is her uncle’s home.

Once they’re outside of the penthouse Mabel gives his hand a reassuring squeeze. “It’s okay! Even if things are all rawr today, Dipper and I are fine. We can handle it.”

It’s a ten minute walk back to the apartment, through triangular hollow halls full of strange staircases that spiral into nothing and beautiful mosaics of endlessly tiling shapes. From time to time a specter flits across the tessellated walls, periodically the walls and floor shine with saliva or heat that isn’t there. Mabel realizes that she’s still in her nightshirt. At least she put on a headband. No one should be seen without a trademark accessory; three or more is better but one is the bare minimum. 

“You and your brother are the safest children in the world.” Great-Uncle Ford sighs he shepherds her past a babbling fountain of syrupy, lemonade colored molten metal.

“Because you and Great-Uncle Bill love us soooo much!” Mabel reminds him. She spins in place, a pirouette that gets their arms all tangled together. Instead of letting go of her hand Great-Uncle Ford grimly spins her in the other direction.

“Love is… it’s a complicated word, my dear. I know we’ve discussed this in the past—“

“We have!” Mabel keeps twirling, making him keep up with her. “And I think you’re being silly. Great-Uncle Bill loves you, he married you!”

And if Bill Cipher loves her uncle then surely he came to love her and Dipper over time, the way that Mom and Dad love Wobbles. Even if they didn’t want him at first, even if they still refuse to let him in the house, even if they tried to kill him. Love must be the most powerful thing in the universe because love is what ended it.

Great-Uncle Ford easily matches her two-step, skipping through the halls at her beat. “He also married every reigning monarch he could get his hands on. And the Dalai Lama.”

“He gave you a wedding though,” Mabel argues.

She has copies of the pictures. There are two she really likes from the tish; Great-Uncle Ford in a black suit with floppy tails, shirt already half unbuttoned and silk tie loose. He’s holding her in one arm and Dipper in the other while they cry the big useless tears of babies who wouldn’t recognize a shindig if it spit up on them. He’s laughing at someone just past the camera—his nose red and his eyes shining—and that laughter must have calmed them because by the next shot they’re dozing against his shoulder while he signs the ketubah.

Great-Uncle Ford yanks her back before a ghost can walk through her. With his free hand he makes a wavery gesture. “Myyyeh… it’s…. It’s an intricate matter.”

Outside the immediate zone of untouchability that surrounds the penthouse suite they start seeing people. Specters drift through walls and partiers lie collapsed in alcoves and on disjointed stairs. The Sphinx of Black Quartz and the Quick Brown Fox hastily peel off each other as they pass, lipstick stains on their fur. They’re a long way from the booming dance hall but wayward guests have always filtered through the Fearamid, stumbling into rooms and peeing places they shouldn’t. Mabel lowers her voice, mindful of her family’s privacy.

“Great-Uncle Bill says he loves you,” she tells him, feeling a little unkind. It’s not fair to Great-Uncle Ford, who can’t help getting tangled up in his own head. He’s got so many thoughts up there that they obscure the obvious.

They stop. A giant, napping troll has wedged himself into an intersection of hallways, leaving only a sliver of open space near the ceiling. It looks clamberable. Before Mabel can scarper up the dimly glowing green chest, Great-Uncle Ford says, so soft she might have missed it.

“He killed my baby brother in front of me.”

Mabel knows this, of course. There are relatives that she and Dipper still get to meet and Grandpa Shermie isn’t among them. He died when they were only little.

She plants one foot in a roll of fat and starts to scramble up the snoring body, using fistfuls of chest hair to yank herself up. The giant jolts, his snork-mi-mi briefly interrupted by a meep of pain, but he doesn’t awaken. Great-Uncle Ford leaps up to join her, levering himself off of the elbow in a smooth arcing bound and then folding over to fit in the small gap between belly and roof.

“He loves you though,” Mabel repeats as they slide down the other side of the giant. “He tells me all the time.”

Not loudly, not in front of everyone. He is a pan-galactic tyrant, after all, and there are appearances to keep up (this is, in Mabel’s opinion, ridiculous—but she doesn’t rule the cosmos.) Amid family, though, he’s generous in his affections. And he always answers Mabel’s questions with grinning delight.

“Fordsy? I love him to pieces. Wouldn’t be here without him! My favorite human to date. And to date—haha!”

Great-Uncle Ford pushes up his glasses. “I spent seventeen years chasing Bill Cipher. He consumed me. He is the yardstick that measured my days, the center of my solar system, a gravity well I couldn’t escape from. I suppose I love him exactly as much as he loves me.”

That’s enough to settle the weird fluttering in Mabel’s chest. She takes her great-uncle’s hand again and matches his long strides through the halls, her socked feet gliding on the endless marble floor.

The apartment is behind two layers of doors which only a Pines can unlock. They open the first one and step into the entryway; a dense little room with pitcherplants and a cluttered shoerack. The interior door is thrown open by Mabel’s father, his hand distorted through the oil slick membrane of magic that separates the apartment from reality. The bubble pulls taut around him, every detail of his face painted in shimmering pastels. Then, like a blob spitting up, it relinquishes him, stumbling, onto the doormat.

“Dipper, Mabel?” He throws himself around her. He’s still wearing his apron, the one she sewed, all swirly purple cotton with FEARAMID’S BEST DAD across the chest in the finest of fabric paints. She rubs her face on the puffy letters and breathes his familiar Dad-smell. “Hey there, Koala Bear. You gave us a scare!”

His voice when he speaks over her head is completely different—no shaky softness. “Uncle Stanford.”

“Andy. Dipper has chosen to stay a little longer with Bill. I can run back right now, if you’d prefer—“

“Sharon already left to check the throne room.” Dad interrupts. “I don’t know if you’ll be able to catch up with her.”

“Goodness. I should go then. Who knows what she'll get up to.” Great-Uncle Stanford is mild as yogurt but Dad’s arms still tighten boa-constrictor solid around Mabel’s middle.

“Sweetheart, brunch is getting cold. Why don’t you go eat and then you can help me make seconds for your brother when he gets back?”

“Brunch is only fun with family! Great-Uncle Ford, you should stay. There’s eggs and hash browns!”

He opens his mouth. He closes it. “Maybe not today, Mabel, dear. Go enjoy your pancakes; I’m sure your father will be with you soon.”

She might be young but she’s not stupid. Mabel knows when she’s being sent away on purpose. She wriggles out of her father’s grasp. “Okay, but don’t blame me when you get a rumbly-tummy later.”

“I’m sure your Uncle Stanford can feed himself,” Dad says, kissing her hair and then gently shoving her through the doorway.

The stretchy elastic of the bubble between the real world and the apartment feels like a pressure washer full of pop rocks. Or like crashing through bubble-wrap, first the stretch and then the snap as you stumble in. It ripples behind her and already her father and Great-Uncle Ford’s voices are muted, almost inaudible. She could lay her head against the doorframe and try to listen in but there are better ways of eavesdropping.

There are a few scrumptious smelling covered plates sitting alongside their abandoned schoolwork. Mabel shoves Calculus for Silly-Billies and Permerfuoffenly-Humpenshire’s English Grammar onto the linoleum, revealing the bare, pitted surface of the table. There’s a tiny sharpied out triangle on the end closest to the kitchen, carved by her or Dipper long ago—which one of them it was she couldn’t say—and then definitively blotted out by a parent. Sometimes the faint outline under the ink still sizzles or blinks. Mabel lays her head down on it, pressing her ear against the tear in unreality.

Their apartment is static, like the fuzz of a turned off TV. Static like pressing your tongue to a downed power line.

Mabel always finds the stuffed animal she secretly wanted to sleep with that night at the head of her bed and Dipper always guesses the killer in the mystery shows they watch. The tap water is the perfect temperature and there are just enough forks in the utensil drawer for the number of people eating dinner. She knows the story of every scratch and stain because if they get forgotten they tend to disappear. Everything is frozen just how you remember it and everything behaves just how you expect it too.

It’s really hard to redecorate when things stay where you put them. She has no clue how people did it back in the old, boring days. Luckily there are ways to hack even normalcy.

Cheek squished against the sun drenched wood she gives the world—or at least this corner of it—a silent pep talk.

Hey there, it’s me, Mabel! You’ve known me forever and I’ve known you and you know what you’re really good at? Transmitting sounds! You’ve got vibrations for days, girl. Dipper and I used to play a game where one of us would sit at this table and the other one would go all the way out the front door and we could still hear each other. You’re great at finding noises and moving noises and—

The new truth sinks in, wriggling through the illusion, stretching and shifting and reordering. You can make anything happen if you believe in it hard enough; at least that’s what she’s always told herself.

Tinny voices shudder up through the table, echo-y but audible.

“–exactly who’s responsible for the end of the world. More people who have every reason to want to hurt my children. How many people did your blushing bride end up killing? Ten? Twenty?” Dad sounds upset, his voice tight and threatening to crack. Hmm. Maybe not a secret discussion of how mature and responsible Dipper and Mabel have been, and how they should be allowed to get a swimming pool full of talking dolphins. Maybe this is Grumpy Time. That’s fine!

“Please, don’t get hysterical…. only one. And I had Bill smudge the survivors’ memories; they shouldn’t recall the children.”

“So you tidied up and left Dipper alone with the corpse and the killer to, what, come have pancakes? Cheese on crackers, Ford. He’s just a kid.”

Speaking of pancakes, Mabel snakes out a blind hand and fishes under the plate cover for a snack. The crispy breaded edges have gone soft from steam and the heat is rapidly fading, leaving a limp, sad, floppy flapjack. Dad's expectations, he's never optimistic when he's worrying. She nibbles around the edges. Bite, turn. Bite, turn. If she folds it right she can chomp out two open eyes and a smile.

“I’ll go back as soon as you let me! Dipper wanted to stay, he was interested in reading an old text Bill keeps. What would you have had me do—drag him out kicking and screaming? He may be a child but he’s growing up fast. They both are. We gain nothing but mistrust by taking away the childrens’ choices.”

The pancakes would have been better if she got them fresh off the griddle but there are only three on the plate—it looks like Dad stopped cooking when they disappeared. The next batch will be better.

“They get plenty of choices. Age appropriate choices—to stay up late on weekends and choose their own clothes and read bad literature. They don’t get to choose to socialize with a murderer.”

“They have been doing just that for years. Andy, I understand your fears—“

A quick interruption. “As if you understand a thing, Uncle Ford.”

“But you’ve never been able to keep the children confined to this bubble. They’ve been escaping since they were what, six? Seven? Goodness, it’s hard to tell—the fact remains that these days you and Sharon are lucky if you know where they are one day out of three, and there are more monsters than Bill around.”

The pancake isn’t sitting well in her stomach, no matter how tiny she makes her nibbles. Mabel slows down even further, chewing over and over. Her jawbone jostles against the table with every motion. She mashes the food in her mouth to a fine puree then sticks out her tongue, wishing her brother were here.

“We—we know where they are. They have to write their itineraries down before they leave now.” That is true, Mabel nods. Mom printed out the expedition form in triplicate, on special paper. They sit right next to the front door. If she and Dipper have been lax about filling them out, they’re tacked onto the door with a push pin.

“And half the time they still end up at the base of Bill’s throne, looking for their great-uncle. They grew up with him, they adore him.”

“And whose fault is that? We never should have let them get attached.”

“I’m not sure how much control over that we had. Besides, Bill is fond of them. That itself is a shield.”

“Go fuck yourself. After what—”

That’s enough of that, Mabel decides, sitting up and shaking the noise out of her ears. She knows enough bad words from 8-Ball. Dad and Great-Uncle Ford will need a session in the Get Along Lasso but probably not until they’ve cooled down a little. Everything seems better with brunch in your belly and your family around you at the table. The Pines are gummy, like sap. They’ll always stick back together. And if they move too slowly, well, that’s what Mabel has a hot glue gun for.

There are two more pancakes left, one chocolate chip and one blueberry. She munches them down, one after another, admiring the sounds she can make with her mouth. Mnam, mlahh. Meow, meow, meow, meow. Even with her mouth full her kitty-cat cover of the Sidestreet Boys is really good.

She’s still working on the blueberry pancake when her father comes back, his hands shaking a little, and stations himself at the stove.

“Dipper and Mom should come home shortly. How’s about you eat a little protein and then… do you think more pancakes now or more pancakes later?”

Rolling the wet glob of a berry over her tongue and then crunching it between her teeth (it’s a blueberry, if it tastes like a blueberry then that’s what it should be called; it doesn’t matter what it turns into if you take it outside of the apartment), Mabel takes only a second to consider her answer.

“Pancakes! Pancakes! Pancakes!” she demands, slamming on the table until it shakes. Dad laughs and jiggles the burner on the stove until, with a fwoosh, it ignites. A pat of butter in the pan, a whisk taken to the abandoned pancake batter. Everything is smooth in her father’s hands where Mabel or her brother would be fumbling; they still haven’t recovered from the Great Peanut Brittle Fiasco (in their defense, the oven didn’t ignite until the grownups started saying it would).

“Eat an egg,” Dad warns but he’s already ladling batter. There will be plenty of food for everyone. Leftovers too. Maybe she can box some up (in non-see-through container, that's very important) and take it down to Wobbles. The peachy mid-morning light from the windows is fading into that dandelion color of afternoon. The radio on the kitchen counter hums to life, spitting out nonsense words and snippets of strange music. We’re coming to you indefatigable from the gala of lost toys it mumbles, before Dad reaches out and kills it.

As she finishes off her portion of scrambled egg, Dad turns from the griddle, one hand on his hip.

“Sooo,” he says, casually. “I heard you spent some time with Bill. Anything interesting happen?”

Mabel swallows a cheesy, slimy bite. “Not really. He just wanted to hang out with us!”

“Great.” Dad says. “Coolio.” His hand is shaking again as he tests a pancake. It’s not quite ready to flip yet but he keeps chipping at it, worrying the edge with his spatula.

“It’s because we’re his favorites!” Mabel reminds him. “And he’s lonely, really. It must be really hard to be in charge of everything. He needs to take more breaks.”

“As long as you’re safe I really don’t care how Bill Cipher feels.” It’s mean, the sort of unpleasantness that sets Mabel on edge. But Dad’s just nervous. Nervous and scared. He didn’t grow up here, he doesn’t get things like Mabel does. He’s never gone cloudhopping or loxhunting; he doesn’t like tagging along on the outings with Great-Uncle Ford even when they’re just supply runs. He never learned that the eyebats are ticklish at their wing joints or that if you dance yourself to exhaustion, Great-Uncle Bill will let you nap behind his throne, out of sight but still able to hear the pounding music and the laughter. (He lets Mabel do it, at least.) The Fearamid isn’t his place, just this tiny, not-real bubble inside it. 

“We’re sooooo safe,” Mabel assures him, echoing Great-Uncle Ford’s earlier words. “Super-duper mega safe. Probably the safest in the universe.” Even though he's not looking at her, she smiles wide, showing off all her teeth. Bigger smiles are more reassuring. 

Dad finally flips the pan, flicking his wrist to send the contents arcing up into the air. It lands perfectly—the real secret to the laws of physics is confidence. He’s shaking still. It’s moved up from his hands to his shoulders. Grownups get like this; even her Great-Uncles. Even Hectorgon. She thinks it might be home-sickness. “Sometimes that worries me most of all,” he mutters.

He’s probably talking to the pancakes.

Chapter 3

Notes:

thank you for all the response! someone even put this on a lovely fic recommendation. i definitely would not have written all the way out to chapter three without it. going to try to push this as far as it can go, while keeping the chapters mostly self contained. as a reward, please enjoy 7000 words of priscilla northwest being the worst. feat: messy motherhood, so much internalized misogyny and classism she might explode, lost time, and some light suicidal ideation.

The word apocalypse comes from the Greek apokalúptō, which means to uncover or reveal. That’s really all the end of the world is. No one’s making any new horrors, just shaking out the old ones. Turning over the rock and seeing what’s under it, as it were. Well, it turns out it’s the same thing that lives under every single rock. A lot of bugs. Bugs and dirt.

Priscilla Northwest doesn’t like either. 

She’s not sure how long she’s been wandering this miserable forest in this miserable apocalypse. Sometimes she goes to sleep, knife clutched in her hand, and it’s still dark when she wakes up. Sometimes it stays dark for what seems like days. Sometimes the sun doesn’t set and eventually she has to rest under its burning red eye. 

One hillside will be dusted with snow, like the day everything ended. Cross over to the other side and it will be flush with wildflowers—lupine and saxifrage and anemone and wild ginger, each of them wrong. The adder’s tongue hisses and try to curl around your ankles. The spring gold jingles metallically. The fawn lilies kick little deer legs in the air. Things bleed that should bleed. Things bite that shouldn’t bite. 

She’s filthy and unkempt, surviving on spite and distant memories of who she used to be. The longer she stays in this nightmare the closer that naive little hick seems to loom—but even Cilly Pryce never let her hair go unbrushed for this long. Dirt and blood streak through everything. She’s thankful now for the blocky hiking boots and windbreaker they insisted she change into before they sent her down. Thankful to the people who might have killed her. 

The mountains should be familiar. Sometimes they look familiar. Once in a while she can almost orient herself off recollections of a childhood in the forests north of here, of hunting in Gravity Falls’ strange woods. Preston liked that she could handle a shotgun. He’d bait guests into challenging her to a shooting competition and then crow when she won. He liked her ambivalence about it; her skill could never threaten him because she was never eager to show it off. 

She has to show off now. Every buried 4-H skill, every Fireside Girl badge, every fire started and knot tied and deer butchered yanked out of the depths of her memory. She fends off a beetle the size of a cow. She trades ration bars with a pack of slobbering fairies in return for bandages. She stabs a tree that tries to wrap her up, spider-like, as she dozes beneath it. She screams—actually she screams a lot. By the time the stranger finds her she’s eaten two talking rabbits, a rat with eyeballs instead of organs, and a sprinting dining room chair that was surprisingly meaty beneath the wooden exoskeleton. 

“Whoa,” comes a voice from under a roughly woven poncho. When he throws the hood back with oddly frozen hands his face is still and plastic . Literally plastic, shiny round cheeks, a nylon tangle of hair. His paint is scuffed or scraped in places, revealing the flat color underneath. His mouth doesn’t move as he speaks, instead the noise resounds from his barrel chest. “You’re pretty far from the road. Do you know where you’re going?” 

Priscilla considers her options. First on her mind is stabbing him. It’s unclear if that would actually work—she’s never stabbed a giant hunk of polyvinyl before. She could reject him—she thinks he’d take it and just… trot off, wherever strange men go in this strange world. He has the timid air about him of a mountain lion or some other beast that will scarper if you make a ruckus. She would like to get out of these woods though. And he has a full backpack, clean clothes; the signs of (basic) civilization about him. 

A Northwest never asks for help. But they might give orders. 

“I’m headed towards Gravity Falls. I’ll allow you to escort me, I suppose.” 

“Wow, what a coincidence! That’s where I’m going, ha-ha. Going back to, I guess. I mean, it’s not really that much of a coincidence, on account of the geography.”

“How far is it?” 

He stoops, catches a handful of leaf litter in one curled fist, watches it tumble to the ground. Picks a pale mushroom from a nearby tree and mashes it against his orificeless ear as if he’s listening. “Hmmm. It’s looking like three.”

Well, that clarifies nothing. There’s a nasty scrape down her leg courtesy of a rabid Dodge Dakota (she wouldn’t have escaped if not for her short career as an auto show model—amazing the things you pick up about turn radius) but it’s not going to get any less infected out here in the forest. Priscilla stands and gathers her meager, cheap hand-me-downs. The only thing more degrading than holding a hunting knife again is a hunting knife given as charity . 

“Fine. Let’s go.” 

The… plastic man… squirrel thing keeps trying to make conversation as they trudge through the forest. She’s willing to listen to his babbling but she won’t respond. Awkwardness descends like a shroud. They walk in silence, or what would be silence if not for the many strange noises all around. Whistle and shouts and warbling calls, a jet engine roar and distant laughter. The walking toy navigates them around all of it, leaving Priscilla to stew in her thoughts.

Before shoving her towards the portal the Pines woman had whispered something in her ear. There’s a safe house at the Mystery Shack in Gravity Falls, head there first. Maybe it was earnest advice—everything about that wannabe yuppie was transparent as fishnet—but Priscilla would rather die than take advice from a mousy, self-effacing, nerd incapable of leveraging a literal god as an in-law. She’s going home. 

(They crest a hill and she recognizes the caldera of Gravity Falls spread out beneath them. Strange how something can be the same and yet so different. Red moss grows over toppled buildings while others glow with unearthly light. The water tower has vanished and there’s a strange pillar of stones teetering on the railway tracks that stretch between the twin cliffs. The high-school gymnasium has a massive apple tree growing through the roof, each apple big enough to feed a family of six. The bowling alley has been ripped up and set back down on its side. A localized fog wreaths the entire mall. From this vantage point they can see all the monsters that flit or amble across the landscape: the usual vampire bats grown five times their previous size, a forty foot cow grazing on treetops, something that was all arms and hair.

At sixteen she would have given anything to see Gravity Falls, miserable excuse for a county seat, a town that barely qualified as a town, destroyed. At sixteen she thought she was getting out in a way that mattered.)

“It’ll be all good, dude,” her guide assures her. “I’ve been making this trip for years now. At first because they couldn’t eat me but now I can do it without anyone getting eaten.”

Priscilla just nods. 

Even if looters have been through Northwest mansion they can’t have found all the caches. There are secret rooms in that old building even she doesn’t know about. There will be resources—her resources, things she earned by being better than everyone else. She can put on clothes that don’t squeak when she walks. She can change into soft slippers and carve the calluses from her feet and the jagged edges from her fingernails. She can lay in her own bed and put a pillow over her head and scream. She can—

They’re in front of the Northwest Mansion gates. The once rich russet wood is stained and graffitoed, layers on top of layers of spray paint and regular paint and something dark and flaking that might be blood. The ornamental ironwork is bent and rusting. One of the stags which top the posts is missing and the other one wears a necklace of garlic flowers, a pair of sunglasses, and a straw hat. 

“Yeah, so, you never said where you wanted to go and you seemed a little out of it.” The plastic man is already stepping up and beginning to knock a coded rhythm right in the center of the x-ed out eye painted mantralike on the wood. “So I figured I’d just take you back to home base. Don’t worry, everyone here is really cool.”

The gates—her gates, to her home—swing open and Priscilla Northwest doesn’t like what she sees. 

These ingrates have ruined the topiary. She expected the yew to be overgrown; she didn’t expect it to be torn out completely. In place of the elegant lawn there is mud and overflowing planter boxes. The fountain is still and full of cattails; true plants interspersed with fuzzy, tabby striped strangers. Wild grapes trail along hand built trellises. It takes her a moment to realize what’s wrong with them—every fruit bears the likeness of a different human face. 

“Soos!” cries the ungainly tattooed girl behind the gate. She’s grappling with the plastic man, wrestling him into a hug. Priscilla pays them no mind as she walks forward, towards the front door. 

Inside is somehow even worse. The grand hall is packed with camping tents and even more packed with people; if people is even the right word for them anymore. Tiny men in hats and eight foot tall stinking bovine monstrosities and a floating disembodied brain and ambulatory beards and a scrambling pink thing like a wad of chewed up gum and someone with two faces and someone with no face at all and a pint sized apple-cheeked faun and something lanky just visible around the edge of a pillar. Several of the taxidermied animals mounted on the walls are moving, bowing their stiff heads to speak with those below them. Carved wooden thunderbirds once bolted to the wall flit freely around the room, nesting in the whale skeleton that hangs from the ceiling. There’s a monstrous amalgamated bear in an alcove with children sitting on his many knees. Scattered between the creatures are mostly-human beings, whose features she recognizes dimly. A few townie classmates, one or two shopkeepers. They’ve aged or shifted—that police officer didn’t have any grey in his mustache last time she saw him. He didn’t have a thicket of limp forget-me-nots growing out of his collarbone either. 

Heads turn towards the open door. There are calls of “Soos!” and “J-man, who’d you find?” and then one clarion clear, “Mrs. Northwest!”

Priscilla finally sees some sense amid the chaos. Edgar, their butler, is pushing through the crowd. He’s gotten old too. Only a few strands of his hair are left clinging to his scalp. His jowls are even more pronounced, like the sagging face of a basset hound. Loyal as a dog he zips to her side. 

“What has happened here?” Priscilla demands. “How could you have allowed this?”

(Around her she hears other conversations happening at breakneck speed. “I think that’s Preston’s wife,” an elderly woman mutters. “Jesus she was up there —where did you find her?”

“If she came from the sky thingy she was way far away from the drop site,” the plastic man is protesting. “Dr. Pines must have screwed up his coordinates.”) 

Edgar clasps his hands behind his back and bows his head. “My deepest apologies, ma’am. We allowed the townsfolk to shelter here on the condition that they help protect the premises. And—“ he hesitates. “The young miss was fully in favor of it.”

“The young miss? Who are you…” 

Oh. That’s what Priscilla has been forgetting. 

She grabs Edgar by the jaw, squeezing his cheeks until something pops. “Where’s Pacifica? Take me to her this instant. If this collection of misfits you’ve allowed to besmirch our manor have harmed even a hair on her head—“

That day she and Preston had driven down to his awful little podunk town. He always insisted on spending the holidays and at least half the summer in the sticks when they had perfectly good townhomes in Portland and Seattle. Noblesse oblige, he said. Show up for the ridiculous holidays and buy trash from what passed as boutiques on Main Street. Visit with the decrepit mayor on Foxing Day. Admire the sad fireworks display on the Fourth of July and the sadder carved watermelons. Walk the snowy streets around New Years until the sky split open and disgorged every imaginable nightmare. 

They didn’t need to bring the baby, Priscilla had argued. She might catch poor people germs—better to wait until she was fully vaccinated. They’d left her and they hadn’t come back. 

Maybe when she first woke up after an eternity of iced over torment to a little girl’s cheerful reassurances she’d assumed her own little girl was dead. Yes, that must be it. She’d been grieving. 

Edgar gurgles something and Priscilla relinquishes her grasp on his face. He straightens, adjusting his starched collar, still blinding white despite the grime that seems to cover everyone else. 

“Miss Pacifica is upstairs at the moment. We should go to her post-haste.” 

(“Edgar, dawg, she hasn’t been detriangulated—“ someone says but neither of them pay the surrounding crowd much mind.)

“Has her nanny been treating her well?” Priscilla frets, pushing through the press of bodies. Hands try to catch her, pull her back, she elbows them until they let her pass. She steps over the detritus of habitation—empty tin cans and children’s toys cluttering the once grand ballroom. Her focus is on the stairs. 

“Oh, her nanny left as soon as she caught a glimpse of the, ah, developing events.” 

That French little—

“She said she had to get back to her own family, though given the circumstances I fear she may have been waylaid. It’s of little concern; an alternate caretaker emerged quickly. He may seem unorthodox but I assure you he has been devoted to the task. The young lady is in very safe hands.” 

A massive shadow crosses the far wall. 

“Not born to sin; to sin you tressed. By contract and bond, I smell a Northwest!” 

Priscilla stops, just as a smaller shape darts in from the left and bounds down the stairs to collide with her. 

Her hair is a dull brown, cut with what must have been garden shears—there’s no other way they could have done such an atrociously choppy job. Her cheeks are pink, sun kissed even though the sun is a sick thing in the sky. She has lovely, long eyelashes, Priscilla used to get compliments from strangers on the street about her lashes, but her nose is too much like her father’s. They should have had a chance to fix that. They should have—

“Mom?” asks the almost grown girl clinging to Priscilla’s plastic jacket. “Are you really my Mom?” 

She left an eleven month old baby behind but time moves strangely when you’re part of a frozen throne of human agony. This child is solid—twelve, maybe thirteen, a smidgen taller than the ghastly Pines children. There’s athletic muscle on her arms and tears in her eyes. She clearly tried to put on eyeshadow but the palette must have expired; pale blue glitter dusts the tops of her full cheeks, smearing as she starts to cry. 

“Pacifica?” Priscilla asks hoarsely. Her daughter nods. 

“I can’t believe you’re here! I always hoped you’d be one of the ones to come back. Edgar tells me not to get my hopes up—it’s unbecoming or something—but I just knew you’d figure out a way. That girl has been on a bit of a makeup kick and I just thought “there’s no one more glamorous than my mom.” Did you see Dad? Is he at least on one of the outer layers? Lazy Susan says they get shuffled around pretty regularly but it never hurts to be visible.” She stops to catch her breath and buries her face in Priscilla’s side. “I can’t believe I really get to meet you,” she mumbles. 

Priscilla pulls her daughter close. Holding her brings no comfort, her sharp chin digs into Priscilla’s rib cage, her hair gets in her face. Letting her go feels more intolerable than continuing to cling. “Oh, darling. Pacifica. I missed so much. I should have been here to protect you.” 

“It’s okay. Archibald and Edgar have taken care of me.” 

“Clearly they haven’t! Look at this place, look at who they’ve allowed to invade our home. I’m not sure what sort of salary Edgar has been collecting, probably skimming off the gold stash, but it stops now. I’m firing him.”

Pacifica glances up at her, startled, her nose running and her eyes red. That slapdash attempt at makeup is smearing. “Mom, no, you can’t.” 

“I can and I will. This is my house—at least until your father gets back. You’re my daughter. I mean, what have they done to you, what are you wearing?” 

It looks like one of Priscilla’s cocktail dresses has been butchered and reconstituted into a romper. Over top of it she’s wearing one of Preston’s dress shirts, cuff links lined up and down the arms like cheap charms on a child’s bracelet. It’s abominably déclassé, no sense of history or dignity to it. She might as well be a teenybopper on MTV. 

Pacifica draws back. “I’m wearing my clothes. Archibald says—“ 

“And who is this Archibald!?” Priscilla throws her hands up in the air. “On what grounds did he break into my house and start raising my daughter?”

The banked fireplace sputters to life. The shadows, which have been lengthening as crimson dusk closes in around them, suddenly jump to attention, stark as ink blotches. Priscilla has been ignoring the crowd of looky-loos, the monstrosities and the invaders. She’s been ignoring Edgar by her shoulder as he discreetly coughed for attention, trying to break through their reunion. She cannot ignore the way all her hair now stands on end, a jolt of terror running down her spine. 

“I am Archibald,” says a booming voice. “And I have dwelt in this house for a century and more, waiting for a chance to take my revenge.” 

Behind her is a ghost of flames and pale light, a burly man more than six feet tall, bearded, clad in tattered, incorporeal flannel. There’s a painting of him in the Walnut Parlor. She’d asked Preston once, in the early days of their marriage, if he was an ancestor. “Goodness no, dear. That’s a representation of the ancient, familial curse.” She hadn’t asked further questions—he never liked a woman with too much on her mind. 

“Stirred from my slumber under uncertain skies I awakened to the cries of a child,” the ghost declaims. “I saw your daughter to this age—“ (a cough) “with help from the butler. She has grown beyond the Northwest name. You ought to be proud of what she’s become.” 

“Archibald ,” Pacifica whines, “You’re embarrassing me again.” 

A very large axe is slung across the specter’s shoulders. At this moment Priscilla doesn’t care. “How could I be proud when you’ve turned her into a common ragamuffin. She’s barely a Northwest.” 

With a gasp, Pacifica wrenches out of her arms. Priscilla lunges forward, but her baby steps back even further, putting more parquet between them. 

“You know, I hoped you would be different. Even having seen all the terrible things this family has done I thought…. and everyone let me lie to myself. They’d tell me stories of you in the best light and I’d pretend I couldn’t hear the truth underneath because I wanted my parents so badly. Now here you are and you’re terrible. If being a Northwest means acting like you then it would be better to live in the forest and wear trash.” Like one, last curse, Pacifica adds even softer, “I wish you’d never woken up.” Guilt blooms across her face as she says it. Then she turns and runs, back up the staircase, past the subsiding flames, into the dark. 

The ghost is instantly after her, wringing his hands. “Pacifica, child—“

“Miss Pacifica—“ Edgar fusses in tandem, striding forward with  purpose in his step. He’s never had such a hurried gait before, nor such clarity in his sleepy old eyes. 

Before Priscilla can follow them, a hand descends on her shoulder. Or, ascends to her shoulder—he’s not a tall man. “That was awful to witness,” says the once sheriff. “I think we can all agree we wish that went better, for our Paz’s sake if nothing else. But we’ve gotta get you to the Mystery Shack before it gets dark. You have people to meet.”

The study of the end of the world is called eschatology—Greek again, those morbid European perverts. She learned all sorts of end-of-the-world-word-facts from an elder statesman at one of Preston’s parties. It’s important for a hostess to know how to handle every guest. Set a bunch of rich men talking about armageddon and they’ll entertain themselves for hours. The Day of Reckoning, they always called it, and they knew exactly who would be reckoned with. Recalcitrant employees, unsightly vagrants. Whether by fire, flood, aliens, or meteor, they all agreed that the end times would come for Them long before it came for Us. 

Preston, who kept his own collection of apocalyptic artifacts inherited from his grandfather’s second wife— bizarre old pieces with motifs that, in hindsight, were rather uncannily triangular in nature— would laugh at his more doomsday-minded peers, their bunkers and their social clubs. “It’s ten pounds of prevention for a five pound problem, darling,” he’d say. “Money will always talk. But it doesn’t hurt to indulge them.” 

Priscilla used to take comfort in that as she smiled through long, dull rituals presided over by retirees in polo shirts. The bronze chalices and the deer blood and the collected memorabilia from a dozen cults the world over was all a bit tacky but it was community building and on the off-chance that Robert from the yacht club was on to something, well, no one ever regretted having insurance. 

Even when she imagined the world ending, she never quite grasped that her world could end too.

She’s traipsing through the ruins of Gravity Falls again, with a different set of escorts. One of them she even recognizes—a perpetually anxious woman who Preston would invite to dinner every business quarter because she owned a small but relevant share of the mudflap factory. A few years back she married some local auto-dealer. As far as Priscilla was concerned it was the best a dull twig like her could hope for. 

So what is she doing here, now, laughing? Imogen Gleeful née Beaufort looks terrible; strands of grey flecking her acorn hair, cheeks even hollower than they used to be, a tattered patchwork coat over a dress that would have been out of fashion a century ago. Yet she keeps sneaking glances at the old man walking on Priscilla’s other side and giggling to herself, a little girl in love. 

The world has, objectively, ended, and still people have the audacity to keep living. 

“Now we haven’t had many weirdness waves since the Day of the Badger,” he drawls. “But from time to time the tide of madness will rise and sweep over us all.”

“Don’t scare her, dear,” Imogen smiles and lays a damp palm on Priscilla’s arm. “Now it’s safe as houses if you’re careful. Run and duck if there’s a change in the air, stick to known paths, avoid concerning doors, go with a group. They’ll help debrief you. And oh, here’s the Mystery Shack.”

An A-frame house is emerging from the firs. It was something of a tourist attraction, once, wasn’t it? Though she’s never been inside, the silhouette recalls dingy billboards and flyers ground underfoot. The sign proclaiming its name has disappeared, the exterior is broken down, windows shattered and wooden siding tagged. Advertising works. Priscilla can still picture in her mind’s eye what the building once looked like. 

“We’re friends of Miss Butternubbins,” Imogen declares gravely, as they approach the porch. They stop before a tattered old couch, the stuffing falling out of it. Rats—normal, unaltered rats—peek out from under it. 

They’re all carrying old-fashioned oil lamps stuffed with some sort of luminous stone creature and the light of their chirping pulses is rapidly the only light they have to see by. Dusk has taken a long time to fade, longer than it should under any normal circumstances. Now it’s replaced by that awful Weirdmageddon night, with warping pink borealis, shifting stars, and the unchanging crimson rift across the sky. 

With a great heave someone removes the board across the door. A young woman, her red hair glinting almost purple in the unearthly rocklight, wrenches open the busted old screendoor. 

“Man, it’s late. We were about to go to bed—whoa, another one?” She stares at Priscilla until, like a fuse catching, recognition alights on her face. “Oh my god, is this Paz’s mom? Tambry, you’ve got to see this!”

Another girl, this one younger, barely a teenager and iridescent all over like favrile glass, stomps over. Tries to stomp, really more chimes over. “Yeah, yeah. Let’s get them inside first, okay?” 

They’re all pulled into the dilapidated hut, through several hallways, into what might be the remains of a gift-shop. It looks like several tornados have been through. Floorboards ripped up, objects strewn about. Every room is a new disaster. The two girls are obviously living out of a small corner of which stands pristine against the wreckage; buckets of water, a camp stove, folded sleeping bags, a small pyramid of canned food and a matching empty glass bottles. 

Their sleeping quarter is not the most remarkable part of this room. An old vending machine, torn from the wall, covers a yawning, dark hole. 

“She came to us first, likely dropped off in the wrong place and wandered in the woods for a while,” Imogen’s man is explaining.

“She does look like Pacifica,” Tambry frowns, getting up close to Priscilla’s face. Even the girl’s eyes are frosted with luster and her hair is a single fluted block painted in chunks of pink and black. Though it’s unsettling to see her move there is something undeniably beautiful about the light shining through her semi-transparent hand as she snatches Priscilla’s lamp. Here are there, scattered throughout this nightmare, are terrible, wonderful things. “Kind of like if Paz got stretched out. I guess I should feel happy for her.”

“Yeah, I know,” her older colleague, rummaging around in a duffle bag. “Think about it this way: it’s proof that Mabel is still on her older women kick. Let’s just hope she stays on it forever. Aha! Got it.” She holds a flashlight over her head. “Right, since you came to us sideways we’ll keep the security measures brief. Hold still and don’t struggle.” 

With that she flicks the flashlight on. 

Compared to the measly light of the lamps, this blaze comes like a kick in the teeth. Priscilla squints against the light, blinking back tears, until it’s extinguished. 

“Eyes look fine. Tambry, check her stuff.” The red head stows the flashlight and approaches Priscilla. “Right, now, this is going to be a little invasive but I need to check—“

She feels like a criminal as the young woman, barely more than a child, cheeks still round with adolescence, frisks her, rolls up her cuffs and sleeves, and then, inexplicably, smacks her several times. Across each shoulder blade and between them, on her upper arms, at the small of her back. 

“All clear.” 

“Clear,” Tambry echoes, handing Priscilla back her backpack. 

She should feel violated, seeing her possessions hastily rifled through by a grimy, shiny tchotchke. But she lost her clutch purse somewhere in the press of stone bodies. The fur jacket she was wearing went to her warden; Priscilla knew better than to deny the coy oh my gosh, I love your coat! of a child with the apocalypse on her side. Who knows what’s been done with her belongings back at the manor. All she has left is the cashmere on her back and her wedding ring. Which was very expensive before the world ended but who knows what diamonds are worth now. 

Red is talking to the other two now. “I assume you guys are here so we can go right away?”

He hooks his thumbs through his tattered suspenders. “I believe that was the plan, yes.”

“And we can leave you alone without you falling into a panic and ginning some sort of elaborate conspiracy?”

Despite her vim, the old man seems nonplussed, dull hick eyes fixed somewhere in the distance. “I’ll do my best.” 

With an eye roll, Red looks to Imogen. “Keep an eye on him, Mrs. B. Right, let’s get going.”

Agilely, she bounds across the room and slides over the toppled vending machine, then gestures, as if she expects Priscilla to follow her. Priscilla is done trailing after strangers for the day. Like a Trakehner balking before the first jump, she leans back, whole body rebelling against the hands on her reins

“Where? Why on earth should I trust you people? I’m not taking another step until you explain what’s going on.” She shifts her stance, sets her feet as solidly as she can amid the wreckage of the house. It’s four to one, they could drag her down, if they wanted. 

They do nothing of the sort. The girl props one leg up casually and sighs. “Listen. I know that this is all confusing and scary. We get that—”

“Do you know what I’ve been through?” She’d scream, she thinks, if she was someone else. Someone low class, someone weak. Privilege reshapes rage into aggrievement. “I was turned into stone. You’ve been living in this nightmare, you’re used to it. I was thrown back here, tossed aside, like, like garbage! Do you know what it’s like to lose years?”

“I mean, kind of, yeah.” Red leans back against the doorway, framed by the dark. “Not as many as you, so I get why you’re tee’d off, but we came out of that throne too.”

That stays her ire for a moment. “You did?”

Her footsteps padded by her surfer’s boots, Tambry creeps up behind Priscilla. Her clothing is clearly made to cushion—dense dark layers, thick sheepskin—but there’s still that faint ringing susurration, like the collision of champagne flutes or the crackling of a frozen over river on a still winter day. “Like, if you think that place is bad, imagine dealing with it as a baby .”

“Ahh, it wasn’t that terrible,” her friend protests. “We were three. We got Mom, after a while. Mabel was…. Mabel.”

Tambry fixes her glittering eyes on Priscilla, face tilted up to properly look at her. Another thing that no one warned her of—that armageddon would be chock-a-block full of little girls. “Wendy’s playing it cool, as usual. We screamed for days, I’m pretty sure. And they only managed to pull her mom out of it, before the pointy guy lost patience. My parents, her dad, her little brother—they’re still up there, we think. Mrs. B. thinks she might have seen Mr. Corduroy when she left.”

“You all…?” Priscilla glances back at Imogen, who flashes her a nervous smile. If she’s been in the unchanging grip of hellish torment until recently her greys are even less forgivable; she doesn’t even have age as an excuse. Some people really do use any situation as an excuse to let themselves go. 

“I mean, not Sprott,” the girl called Wendy says, and jerks a thumb at the last of their number. “We’re not totally sure what he was up to.”

“I witnessed the horrors until they began to witness me,” he says serenely. 

“Yeah, whatever, man. The point is that you’re not alone. And you’re not the first person to go through this. We can’t understand as well, cause we were, you know, kids, but other people will. Some are where we’re going, some are back in town. Once you’re debriefed we can catch you up to speed. It’s…. I get that the whole situation blows. End of the world, you know? But if you panic or give up you’re just letting that geometric jackass win. So don’t.”

“What she means by that is you should calm down and get in the hole,” Tambry chimes in. “Like, now.”

Still, Priscilla wavers. Outside, a swirling mauve night has descended. There is insect song, of a sort. They’re singing Chopin. Something screams, too throaty to be a fox. It’s possible she could survive out there again. Now that she’s in the dish of Gravity Falls, she more or less knows where things are—this is not her town but she went to school here. She lived here with Preston, at least according to their tax records.

If she tried to go see Pacifica again would they send her back here? 

“Give me a reason to cooperate,” she bluffs, her mouth dry. 

Wendy groans. “You are a Northwest. Jeez.” She reaches to her own throat and fishes around under the collar of her bomber jacket, pulling out a necklace. She lifts it over her head and holds it out. “Here. This is a special protective amulet—me and Tambry both have one, in case we’ve got to leave the Shack real quick. You can wear mine until we get where we’re going. The path’s not super dangerous but just in case. Does that prove we’re on your side?”

The plain leather is stitched with a rainbow thread, the glitter sharper and the colors more saturated than Tambry’s adularescence. It sparks like an opal, like holographic plastic. A tiny glass vial full of something sloppy and silvery and oddly full of chunks is latched to the cord. 

“Wendy.” Little Tambry’s tone is flat, stern, reprimanding. “Mom’s going to freak if she knows you gave that up.”

“We won’t tell her then,” Wendy shrugs. “As long as we all make it back safe she doesn’t have to know.”

Neither of them seem like they’d be good liars. Priscilla takes the necklace. It settles against her breast, oddly heavy for its size, as if gravity wants to drag it to the center of the earth but can’t work up the will. “I suppose I have the time to indulge your whims.” 

“Finally.”

The dark doorway does, in fact, contain a staircase. It winds down several levels, each as wrecked as the upstairs of the house. Doors caved in with inhuman force, a flurry of mildewing paper and shattered wood spilling onto the steps from one of the levels they pass. They’re headed down . 

They finally stop in a cavernous room of broken metal. Large panels lie on the ground, entire mechanisms carved apart, smashed, rent by massive claws. Wendy and Tambry pass the ruins like they’ve seen them a thousand times, heading for the back of the chamber. Priscilla trails them until they reach a toppled metal sheet, seemingly like every other. Moving in sync, despite the difference in their heights, the two girls heave it up, revealing another waiting passageway. 

This one is more of a slide than a staircase. She’s not a fan. But it terminates in a single, gently sloping stone tunnel. It’s wide enough for five people to walk side by side inside it and when Wendy flicks the flashlight back on the darkness isn’t that bad. 

“We’ve got to save the batteries on these things,” she explains. “But no one is going to blame us for keeping it on this far underground.”

“And videogames?” The high beeping song of Tambry’s Gamebrat accompanies them down the hall. She’s not even looking at the ground in front of them, wholly focused on her tiny pixelated blocks. 

(Underneath the harsher, brighter light the tiny cracks and chips in her surface are visible. She’s missing part of an earlobe. Several fingers are glued back on, thick paste like adhesive visible on and through her, filling spiderweb-like fractures.

“Oh, it’s super cursed,” Wendy says and explains no further. 

They walk for a while, the walls striating around them. Vertical bands of yellow, sandy stone and deep glassy black appear for a few inches at a time. Priscilla has toured Gravity Falls’ one, still functioning cinnabar mine and the earth there looked nothing like this—then again, they are very far down.

“You mentioned you were both children when you woke up,” Priscilla begins, barreling through any awkwardness with a host’s bright smile.

“Yeah, we were tiny—I was three when, you know,” a mimed explosion, a bwoom noise, “Tambry was almost four. There are a decent number of us from Mabel’s friends phase, and even if we weren’t the same age originally we’re all around the same age now, which is nice.”

Wendy Corduroy (she must be Dorothy Corduroy’s niece; it would explain the garish hair) is visibly a foot taller and five years older than her associate. Priscilla knows all sorts of ways of discreetly commenting on someone’s appearance but this one, admittedly, has her a bit flummoxed. 

“You’re aware of your….”  

“Fell into a time sink a little while back,” Wendy says, “They’re not common but man, are they nasty. Egregious T and I experienced a hellish high school alternate universe before they managed to pull us out.”

“Which is why Mom will kill you if you die out here,” Tambry adds, not looking up from her game. “She’s freaked out enough as it is.” 

Wendy waves her off, “It’s fine, it’s fine.” The tension around her eyes suggests that it’s decidedly not fine. But Priscilla never interferes with another woman’s badly managed nervous breakdown. If you can’t handle the heat, don’t try to be a star.

She looks down at her shoes, the splash of purple peeking out from under the tongue. The tunnel is now mustard-brown, streaked through here and there with rusty red or cream, pitted with large, dark inclusions. 

“Then you’re all around my daughter Pacifica’s age.” It takes a wrenching effort to picture that feral, ungrateful child instead of her angelic infant. 

“More or less. Lee’s a bit younger than us but he was a big toddler. Irma G’s a bit older but she came right at the end of Mabel’s whole friends thing. We’re tight though.” 

It must have been smothering to grow up in the middle of all these other screaming children. Like siblings but foisted on you by some whimsical child-demon. Priscilla’s poor little girl—she wasn’t meant to grow up with sticky hands grasping at what was hers.  

“My, how interesting!” she chirps, keeping her smile pasted on. “I suppose everything is very different these days.” 

Wendy flashes her the awkward grin of a child talking to some hopelessly out-of-touch elder, bored and baffled all at once. “Yeah. I suppose it is,” 

They hike on through the unending, striped hallway. They must be out of Gravity Falls proper by now, somewhere under the high mountains but not quite to the next habitable valley Direction is impossible to judge underground. The stone around them doesn’t look like Gravity Falls—pale sorbet golden, sandy, broken up here and there with undulating ribbons of ancient shell and foamy limestone and crackling slate. When she comments on this, as casually as she can, Wendy laughs. 

“That’s because we’re most of the way through Arizona now.” 

Even geography is broken. The problem with the death of reality is that dead things don’t work. There is no heartbeat of coherency in a corpse. Something is growing here but its as akin to the laws of physics as rot is to flesh. 

“We’re almost there,” Tambry warns, at some identical twist in the trail. She stows her device in a pocket, the last trills of the song muffled by fabric “We should blindfold her.” 

She spent two weeks beholden to the whims of a preteen—why shy away now? She lets them blind her and holds their skinny, scarred hands as they march down the path. 

“Be careful, there’s a little step,” and “Okay, now we’re going to be walking on boards,” and “Don’t trip, it’s uneven here,” fill the darkness. The underground silence of the tunnel slowly fills until its a cacophony. Water running, the matching babble of voices, many footsteps. A horse beating, though that might be her mind playing tricks on her. 

Everything echoes. People greet them—greet Wendy and Tambry, at least. The girls shout greetings back to various people; no names stir her memories.  

At one point they stop. Someone sprinkles water in her face, puts some sort of very light hat over her head. Voices chant. Then one voice, clearer, asks, “Are in contact with, wearing, or otherwise contractually obligated to the entity known as Bill Cipher?”

“No,” Priscilla scoffs and they proceed on. 

Finally they pull the filthy bandana from her eyes. They’re in a little chamber, walls of pale rock with that gloopy sheen found on stalactites and half melted candles. It’s illuminated by a single, flickering bulb roughly wired to the low ceiling. The narrow entrance is blocked by a sheet of plywood on hinges driven into the rock. There’s a table. There are a few folding  chairs. Priscilla sits in one of the stained, white plastic seats and tries to look better than this place, which isn’t hard. Wendy exits and Tambry goes back to her game. 

After several levels of Tetris, two new figures enter. The first is a woman in perhaps her forties, irritatingly beautiful. The second is a face she’s seen before. 

“You left me stuck in the woods,” she tells Dr. Stanford Pines, barely suppressing the tremble in her voice. 

He guffaws, a sound too gravelly, as if his vocal cords have just been put through the ringer. Something’s wrong with him—his spine slouches, his hair is stark white where it was last grey. His face is right but the textures of it are all wrong. Too much stubble on his cheeks, pores too open, dry and scaly flakes trying to escape his hairline. 

“Yeah, I know the resemblance is a lot. But that wasn’t me. I’m the other Pines twin,” he slides into a seat across the card table. “We’re trying to kill that angular bastard.”

“And we think you can help. Moira,” the older woman says, offering Priscilla a businesslike handshake. Her auburn hair is cut short around her ears. Dark, almost black eyes glitter in an oval shaped face. She wears a sort of self assurance that makes Priscilla want to lash out at her; like she’s shown up at a party to find someone else pulling off her outfit better than she ever could. “You met my daughters. We have a few questions for you about your experience in the Fearamid and then we’ll answer any questions you might have.” 

“Then you are working with them. The Pines, the ones up there.” 

Pines and Moira trade a look. “I mean, define working with,” he says. “It’s not like we can walk up to their house and ask to have a chat.” 

“We don’t have any direct lines of communication,” Moira says. “Never have. Stanley’s brother sends people to the Mystery Shack because he knows it’s safe—which it is, unicorn hair is the best anti-weirdness shield we’ve got. People who come to us from the Fearamid just happen to sometimes have information. Not messages, little things. Tidbits mentioned in conversation, information about which governments are collaborating right now and which ones are pushing back. Facts about the layout of the place, about what demons are in residence.” 

“I’m 80% sure Sharon’s doing it on purpose.” Stanley Pines grunts. “Not sure where she thinks the intel is going but she’s been sending it.”

The entire time Priscilla spent there she was certain they were too incompetent, too pathetic, too delusional to wield power in any real way. The children, barely human, mimicking their awful benefactor but never questioning him, never thinking to stretch their influence for more than a story or a horrifying trinket. She’s met the offspring of mere millionaires more capable of enforcing their will upon the masses. Mabel Pines never demanded, she just asked, and that felt far less honest than spoiled child’s tantrums. Her brother occasionally made ultimatums—he’d cornered her that first day and warned her not to upset his sister—but he was also incapable of dressing himself in clean clothes from day-to-day. It’s hard to respect a ferrety child in a BABBA shirt too big for him, no matter how evocative his threats. 

Then there were the parents, both cringing specters  who’d rather stay trapped in a microcosm of suburban mediocrity than engage at all with the (admittedly horrifying) typhoon of power on their doorstep. They resented each other, they resented the man who’d saved them, they very much resented Priscilla after the shock wore off and they had a chance to speak to each other. They stayed, fretting, in the same five rooms as their children ran off on them and when she’d suggested they do something about it they’d turned on her with all the icy ire they otherwise saved for each other. 

Even ‘Great-Uncle Ford’, the most active and willing of the bunch—certainly the most charming, in an off putting way—reminded her too much of the worst type of trophy wife: one who can’t fully commit. Oh, she’s seen it all before; the oil baron’s third wife who dabbles in drippy environmentalism, the wealthy widow too mistrusting to donate to charity but too guilt-ridden to die rich, who lavishes funds on young relations because her own life didn’t turn out as they planned. 

Underneath all the competence, the devices, the gun on his hip, the enthusiastic rope burn just under his collar (the kind that a person only gets from struggling for the thrill of it), there was something broken about him. How pathetic, to marry a world-ender and then fret about the ending of the world. When you make a deal with the devil you lose the prerogative of regret. Priscilla knows half-a-dozen society wives who could have managed the whole shebang much more cleanly. 

The idea that their whinging rejection of influence and incredibly audible fights and bad interior design might be intentional, part of some longer game strikes her briefly mute. 

“We can start from the beginning,” Moira says, so kindly that Priscilla briefly fantasizes about clawing out her eyes. “It’s hard for a lay person to know what might be useful to us; we’d rather hear everything.” 

Priscilla lays her hands on the table. Her nails, at least, are painted despite their uneven edges, cherry red without a chip or gap. Mabel slipped a bottle of nail polish into her bag before she left, more charity that she couldn’t help but take.

“If I cooperate I want a change of clothes. I want a full, hot meal. And I want a bed to sleep in—an actual bed. To myself. Not a couch or a cot, something with a mattress.”

“Last one might be tricky,” Stan says, “But I think we can swing it.” 

Priscilla nods. “Fine. Fine. From the beginning, you said.” 

“From the beginning,” Moira confirms. Past the flimsy door someone is cheering. There are people out there, another crush of sweaty, hopeless fools. Whatever these people are doing here it’s most likely doomed. She ought to pity them. 

Money always talks, darling. What Preston never quite realized was that money is just a stand in for power. Resources. She won both once, she can do it again. 

“The first thing I saw when I woke up was a girl covered in blood. Just drenched in it, head-to-toe. The triangle, Cipher, was behind her, sticking close. I believe the first thing she said was, ‘now don’t do anything crazy, it would be so sad if we had to kill you.’” Priscilla shrugs, “Something of that tenor.” 

Stanley Pines stands up so fast he knocks his chair over. 

“I think they need me out there,” he explains, gesturing to the door. “Mo, you got the rest of this?”

“Mhmm,” Moira agrees, not looking away from Priscilla. “We’ll manage.”

It’s a long story. Priscilla drags every useless bit of marginalia from her memory. She tells her everything, except the things she doesn’t particularly want anyone to know, and those can’t possibly have any strategic value. If Andrew Pines smuggled some vital intelligence into his stammering rejection of her, she’ll eat her non-existent hat.

As promised, at the end of it, Moira gives her the abbreviated tour of the sprawling caverns, and an elevator pitch of their operations. There’s something about journals and quite a lot about unicorns and a deeply unsatisfying explanation of how they got here that involves harnessing massive worms to dig literal worm-holes. She brings her a set of clean, though clearly second hand clothes, trading them for the amulet ("We do need those, they're tricky to make.") When she shows Priscilla to her air mattress, tucked in one of the many alcoves off the big chamber, she lingers for a few minutes by the fabric privacy curtain. 

“If you’d like I can arrange a guide to bring you back to Gravity Falls as early as the morning,” she offers. “I know we took you away from your kid.” A pause. “Or you could stay. Sometimes it’s easier to adjust among strangers.”

“What was it like for you when your daughter grew up behind your back?” Priscilla asks. She wants to wipe that smug look off Moira’s face. She really, truly wants to know . 

Guilt creases up Moira’s features, but she answers easily enough. “It hurts every time I look at her.” 

“And it never gets better.” She doesn’t even need to ask this time; the truth seems self-evident. Time heals all wounds and the injuries it leaves are irreversible. 

Somewhere lost amid the contorted, screaming stone bodies is her tasteful jeweled clutch; in it is a picture of a baby with corn-silk hair, a tiny green ruffled dress. Her first birthday was coming up and they had a shindig planned, extravagant but private. Reality might have curled up and died but surely little girls still get birthdays. 

Moira shakes her head apologetically. “No. None of it gets better.”

“I’ll stay,” Priscilla says, feigning disregard. “I never liked that town anyways.”

Stan Pines stumbles out of the interrogation room (“we’re not calling it that,” everyone had agreed when they put in the constantly fritzing lightbulb and the bare plastic accoutrements, but hell if the name didn’t stick). 

He makes his meandering way through the crowded halls of the hideout, smiling and nodding to people as he passes. The old guard of rebels get even more attention—it never hurts to butter up your base. He comments approvingly on the brace of kingsnakes Trigger and the Valentino kid are bringing down from the surface (their little gold crowns are useful for the engineers—apparently precious metals are good for more than just hoarding), gives Wendy a firm nod and ignores Tambry as she prefers, slaps a miner on the back, trades veiled insults with Hector from his fraud days (setting up in New Mexico meant he had contacts—a shame most of it wanted to make contact. With his face. With their fists), admires Testoteraur’s lifting power, compliments the smell of the slop in the communal stewpot. He listens to a bevy of complaints from C-beth, who’s always unhappy with the accommodations, but knows as well as Stan that there’s not much she and her herd can do about it—unicorns are on Cipher’s naughty list for obvious reasons. The five obnoxious horses and Stan are the only people here who haven’t seen the sun since they set up operations; Celestabellebethabelle, in her aggrieved way, sees him as a fellow prisoner. 

He finally gets to his room. It’s decently larger than some of the other makeshift accommodations down here, a terminal chamber far enough from the main hubbub that you can almost ignore the noise unless someone starts screaming or shooting (both of which have happened). He’s even got a door! 

He falls back on his lumpy mattress, stares at the ceiling. 

Six hours ago (according to the time cops, whose knack for keeping up with the flow of time almost makes up for the crime of being cops) a messenger from the Disjointed Nations swung by, a squirrelly little guy riding in on a pigeon. 

“Honestly. I didn’t even know we were hiding you. They sent me up to die about it and I didn’t even know.” 

“Probably why they sent you,” Stan shrugged and offered him another finger of tequila. 

He came to terms with the cost of his freedom some time ago. Sure, he questions sometimes why he’s still holding out, if it would be better to surrender himself and let the triangle do his worst. But spite’s a powerful motivator. Various governments must agree because they haven’t given him up yet. Oh, they make some formal effort—they put up the wanted posters, half heartedly raid the Shack every now and then. But if all Earth can do about the polygon who has everything is deny him the last thing he wants—they’ll do that. They’re a catty old planet when it comes to revenge. 

“Yeah,” the little guy; Groat, he said his name was. He dipped his flat, silver face completely in the shot glass. What a guy with a dime for a head was getting out of this, Stan had no idea, but when he surfaced his tinny voice was a little smoother, the trembling in his extremities was beginning to subside. “Wanna know why I’m not dead?”

“Give it to me,” Stan agreed. 

“These kids saved me.” Groat says. “Trembley help us, I can’t remember what they looked like, but one moment they were just there. And he, Bill, that…. He went on and on about them. Offered to let ‘em pick how we were gonna die. And they said, “kill one of them but not the rest.” So they killed Kevin. I think it must have hurt. They killed him and then they sent us away.” He stares up at Stan, somehow managing to convey with the unchanging profile of FDR a wet-lashed, limp terror. “They called him uncle.”

And Stan’s stomach had clenched then but he worked past it. He gently wrung dry the sopping dime, siphoning up every worked-over detail about Cipher’s nightmare castle. About his brother. About the kids. 

“He looked like you,” Groat confided. “Enough that when we first came in Kevin thought he was you. Tried to argue, very briefly, that Bill clearly didn’t need us, he’d found you on his own. But they made the difference real clear.”

“It’s basically his face on the wanted poster,” Stan said. He’s done such a good job hiding. 

They sent Groat back still tipsy, had to tie him to his ride. Luckily the pigeons are tolerant, this one only tries to peck at his shiny head a little before he was strapped in place. He includes a letter to Ma as well, nothing much but the facts, which she’s probably already getting from her own sources. One, paltry “Love Stanley,” at the end. 

“I’m going to quit my job,” Groat declared, before takeoff. “Fuck government benefits. I’m leaving. I have a family! They can’t kill me twice.” 

Stan was pretty sure they could put him in some sort of unending time loop and kill him over and over again if it caught their fancy—he knows the DN has some of the displaced time pigs on their payroll. He just nodded and started to hand over the pigeon to a surface runner who could bring it up top. 

“Just remember to forget about us, capìche?” Stan said. 

“Buddy, I don’t even know where we are.”

The wanted posters have his brother’s face on them. He knows how Ford is doing—knows too much about how Ford is doing. Information on the kids is harder to come by. Andy and Sharon are basically invisible outside reports from prisoners, however, their children pop up from time to time. There are rare reports of the twins planetside, trawling through flea markets with a masked Ford as their guide. They appear by Bill Cipher’s side, a pair of human faces laughing along with his jokes, a single child dancing amid monsters, trying to put pop music on at the cosmic rave, helping a demon select torments, picking screaming statues from a throne like a kid picking out a hamster at the pet store. He knows the names they go by, their favorite food, how they dress (loud and sloppy, respectively—you’d think Bill Cipher could at least peer pressure them into a nice suit).

Stan knows his great-niece and nephew from a distance and every fact about them only seems to put them further away.

He probably would have driven off a pier if they weren’t born. Kicked out of his house, rejected by the brother he worked so hard to bring back—he’d let Shifty stay, for pete’s sake. Those kids saved his life and he likes to think he saved them in turn; if he hadn’t shown up their grandma definitely would have butted in and taken over babysitting duties. Four months he changed their diapers and warmed up their bottles, tried to keep them entertained and awake so they’d sleep easily when their parents came home. And they did, for the most part. They were good kids—a little colicky, sometimes, a little clingy. Mabel had a grip like a baby orangutan and an eye for finding hair to pull. Dipper wanted nothing more than to nap on his stomach despite the safe sleep guidelines. 

He tries to imagine Mabel covered in blood. Covered in blood. Covered in it. Not spattered, not splashed, soaking with the stuff. He has a picture in his head of what she looks like, though admittedly that picture is “glittery, girl Ford circa 1962”. He can’t, despite his best efforts, make the two line up. 

Covered in blood. Covered in it. 

He leans over the side of his bed and dry heaves. Then he stands up, brushes himself off, and goes off to fix the next problem. The Sleepers need to be checked on, just in case they’ve awoken. There’s a fight likely to be brewing between a few of the newer recruits—people always get antsy about the night meal. The work never rests. 

Damn Ford for having the audacity to thank him before telling him to take Ma and run. In fact, damn Ford for trying to schtup an interdimensional chaos demon in the first place. Damn himself for trying to hold out instead of surrendering like someone with brains. Damn Moira Angel for convincing him to make this a full time gig. Damn Greg Valentino for positing, in his cheerful voice, that anything alive can be killed. Damn the people in general for thinking such an inane idea was brilliant. 

And fuck Bill Cipher—if Ford hasn't beaten them to it.

 

Notes:

i actually do have an timeline for a lot of the side characters--at least all the ones i could sketch out. gideon, unfortunately, does not exist. i'm sorry, my sweet prince, the timeline is not in your favor. but grenda is five (her older sister got throne-yanked and the family came with her). lee and robbie are out and 10-12ish. thompson is a fully grown teenager (his family was on vacation that winter). the mayor was briefly freed during mabel's Very Old People phase and runs a second safehouse in his manor, but it's honestly not as impressive as the northwest safehouse, and also everyone is a little worried about him croaking one of these days. soos was turned into an action figure years ago and just lives like this now, the inedible protector of hundreds.

a lot of other details that didn't end up in this chapter. for example, tambry and wendy ended up on mystery shack duty because tambry eats broken glass and is ideal for long watches. abigale blackwing is also haunting northwest manor but she doesn't consider herself the maternal type and mostly just suggests steampunk inventions. mr and ms valentino are stan's most lethal enforcers. quentin trembley was briefly president early in bill's reign but fell in the great mecha-rushmore incident. blubs and the multibear run a waldorf inspired school to teach reading and writing.

edit: there is fanart for this! here are some exceptional priscillas and a and a (nsfw) ford which is stunning.

Chapter 4

Chapter by HerenorThereNearnorFar

Notes:

I promised (mostly myself) I'd make this public if it hit four chapters and it has! Very exciting. Had to move some things around, which is why there's an orphan-account but it's been me this whole time.

This chapter does include more divorce, children being exposed to drugs and violence that they probably shouldn't be, the implication of some messy relationship dynamics, etc.

Mom and Dad are arguing again. 

Raised voices bubble through the walls and drill through the pillow that Mabel has folded over her head. They shouldn’t be able to hear it, the fact that they can hear it means that one of them wants to know more than their parents are able to hide it. 

Stupid. Dum-dum. What’s the point of knowing stuff anyway? But try as she does she can’t wish the voices away. 

Below her the bed creaks, sheets slither. Dipper is creeping out of his bunk, over towards his desk. He scribbles something on a piece of paper and flicks on the blue light. The words, written in invisible ink, flash to life. 

I’m going on a walk, want to come?

Mabel nods so fast she thinks her head might fall off

They get dressed quietly and quickly, pulling on overalls or pants over their nightshirts, shoving on shoes. Knives too, it’s important to have a weapon. Mabel’s knife makes people bleed pink lemonade. While Dipper grabs the transdimensional totebag, Mabel finds the portal gun. Once sufficiently equipped, they push open their bedroom door. The living room and kitchen are empty, odd shadows coiling under the couch and mirror reflections pooling in the places you don’t look. With a wish for smooth hinges and silent floors, they skitter through the ghost-lit purple room, towards the front door. It’s unlocked because they tell it to be—even Dipper knows how to stop second-guessing himself long enough to push an easy lie like that. Just as Mabel starts to turn the handle she hears Dad’s voice, not loud but clear, as if he’s in the room with them. 

“You could have just left.” He sounds tired, like he’s said it before. He has said it before, they’ve heard it. They’ve heard lots of things. Mabel stands, frozen, unable to listen but unable to not listen. Her brother pokes her in the small of the back but his heart isn’t in it. 

“I’m not abandoning them with your family—“

“Not…. before that. You didn’t have to marry me if you never loved me in the first place.” 

Mom should say something like “Of course I loved you, stupid!” Then they’ll kiss and the fighting will stop for a while, doubt conquered by love. This is how the arguments have gone in the past (more or less). Instead she makes a crumpled noise, like a used tissue, and whispers “You know why we got married.” 

Mabel throws open the door and stumbles headfirst through the bubblegum barrier of their home, out into reality. 

The escape is successful; no panicked footfalls follow them, no parents appear in the entry at their heels. Two hallways down, with their freedom certain, they turn their attention to the question of where to go. Most of the Fearamid is off limits, as it has been for the past few sleeps. Big, red, impermeable barriers with the words NO WAY, NO HOW, YA LITTLE RASCALS flash whenever Dipper and Mabel get too close. Not that they’d want to try to sneak through—just knowing that there might be sex stuff going on is bad enough. No one wants to think about their great-uncles like that. 

“We could go visit Wobbles,” Mabel suggests as they slump against the latest dead end. Beyond the wall are noises, screams remixed in real time at the DJ’s whim. “I bet he’d love to see us.” 

“Mabel, I love your ooze thing as much as the next guy but last time it saw me it tried to digest me.” 

“It’s not his fault he doesn’t have eyes. You should try smelling less like food.” 

“Maybe you should stop feeding him garbage.” 

“Hah! So you admit it—“

They make meandering turns around the outer hallways of the upper levels, stopping to snatch handfuls of ectoplasmic candy from Mr. Groany The Semi-Sentient Saltwater Taffy Machine, chasing each other around triangular statues in various heroic poses. There’s a display of cursed screensavers which always makes Dad a bit teary—he’s not allowed to have a computer anymore after the Incident. 

For the sake of safety they mark their path with a piece of chalk but they hardly ever get lost these days. Even when the pathways change the locations stay the same. Taking the temperature of the stone, listening to the thump of music, assessing the hue of the grout, checking the pull of gravity and the turn of the compass tells you where you are—in or out, up or down. It can even tell you how Great-Uncle Bill is feeling, like a giant mood ring. Right now, the magpie-blue suggests…

Well, he’s not angry. But Mabel doesn’t think he’s very happy either. The squeak of her jelly shoes halts as she pats one of the walls. It’s briskly cold, like ice cream against your teeth. 

“Come on!” Dipper calls from the next bend. “There’s a window here.”

She draws a smiley face with her chalk and moves along. 

They admire the view out the little, eye-shaped window for a while, the dark sprawl of space and the sun with his sunglasses and a tiny little sliver of Earth visible in the corner. Underneath the mold-fuzz of clouds,cities glitter like rhinestones. Thousands of people, sometimes tens of thousands can crush into the pyramid but billions live on the planet below. It always fascinates her to watch them. This isn’t the best angle for it, though. If they want to see everything properly they’ll have to go to Great-Uncle Ford’s observatory.

“I could use the fresh air,” Dipper says. They both know what the other is thinking. Not in a weird way or a magic way, just the rations of a pooled childhood, a life spent living in the same place with the same people. 

“I want to see if anyone crashes into the side of the Fearamid,” Mabel agrees. Eldritch horrors from universes beyond the bounds of reality are terrible at picking designated drivers.

There aren’t many other people out and about tonight. It’s not for lack of bodies. The party is alive, electric under their feet, the entire pyramid shaking with the stomp of feet and the clap of hands. It feels a little like being in a piñata, if piñatas were full of bees—which maybe they are. Mabel has only ever seen the traditional bone ones but she knows most humans don’t like that sort of thing. 

Only one party guest stops them on their journey, an eight-foot tall beetlelike creature with a mouth full of glistening blades. 

“Oh, it’s Bill’s brood,” she clucks, in the voice of an old lady stuck at the bottom of a garbage disposal. “What are you doing out of your larval cups alone?” 

“Just going for a walk,” Dipper assures her. He has to crane his head to make eye contact with her bulging, corrugated eyes. 

“Be careful,” she says. “It’s not always safe for little grubs.” Then she tries to chuck them under their chins. The bristle-hairs on her sharp, stabby legs tickle.

“It’s like you’re made of pipe-cleaners” Mabel tells her, through giggles. 

“And you are made of egg sac stuff. Too soft to be wandering on your own.” Her mandibles click-clack. A little bit of foam is building behind them. 

With that, she leaves them, clattering down the hallway and up the walls and belly up on the ceiling.

“She seemed nice.” 

“She seemed like she wanted to eat us,” Dipper is now consulting the handheld gravimeter Great-Uncle Ford made him, a fiddly thing with lots of springs. 

“Lots of people want to eat us. It’s what they do that counts.” A reliable landmark appears around the corner, a spit-shiny black shellac spiral staircase, with white tusks of some ginormous creature (the nebula walrus; Great Uncle Bill says he helped hunt them to extinction for “having bad energy”) jutting out from the sides. It corkscrews wildly, turning in on itself like a ribbon given too much curl with the scissors, twisting generally upward into the foggy void. She shakes her brother’s arm so hard he almost drops his doo-hickey. “There! C’mon.”

The staircase is made silly, each step as tall as one of them, the railing completely out of reach. They stay in the middle of the stairs and work as a team, shoving and pulling each other up. Once they get in the rhythm though the distance goes fast. 

“Alley-oop!” Mabel cries as she heaves Dipper up. Soon enough they find the wavering break in reality that separates the capstone from the rest of the pyramid. From the outside there’s a big space between the upper section and the lower; inside, space is funky. Her stomach lurches just a little as they hop across the boundary. Inside the pyramidion the bwub-bwub-bwub of the music is inaudible. All the lead turns to gold and the air gets a little warmer, pleasant heat that tickles the skin. Dipper is humming something under his breath, one of Dad’s old records, she thinks. Something peppy, a fast beat that keeps them moving, clambering further and further. Mabel accompanies the tune with her own song.

From the stairs it’s not hard to find Great-Uncle Ford’s observatory. It’s a big, cluttered room with a big, triangle shaped hole in one wall. Unlike the landing bays below, where people can drive their cars or clouds or skin-kites right into the Fearamid, this entrance isn’t very wide. Dipper and Mabel can sit in it and dangle their feet over the side and just touch the wall on one side and the hulking Global Portaling System (GPS for short) on the other, a contraption of lenses and metal that peers down at the world below. This is where Great-Uncle Ford takes his science-y observations, where they set out on their adventures. It’s where he sends back her unpetrified peeps when it’s time for them to go home. 

They can see so much more of the Earth from here. Below their kicking feet is the greater mass of the Fearamid, walls unfolding around them, the busy mouth of the main entrance just a couple hundred feet away. Then, past that, is the turning planet. 

Right now they’re stalking the dawn. Great-Uncle Bill has set the Fearamid to hover right over the unsteady line of brightness first curling over the globe. The smiling sun is to their backs, only a few bright tendrils creeping around to smart their eyes. Like this it’s easy to see the stumbling of the light, how it catches on mountain ranges, advances and then retreats, second guesses itself, getting snared in the eddies of unsteady time. Globally, it all evens out. Time passes, people get old—Great-Uncle Ford was very insistent on that when he got married. (Apparently Mabel and Dipper weren’t growing for a while there, and neither were their parents.) But everywhere still has local quirks. 

It’s fun to watch the creeping sunrise and the constant flow of party animals. Dipper and Mabel dig snacks out of their bag and alternate between shoving handfuls in their mouths and throwing them. 

“Get the guy with the fire hair,” Mabel instructs, squinting through her opera glasses. 

“There are, like, three guys with fire hair,” Dipper says, but he tosses a gummy ring anyway. It makes it a few dozen feet and then drifts aimless in the void. This is not turning out to be a very good game. 

Mabel unloops her arm from Dipper’s (if they fall they’re going to fall together) so she can reach over and grab a fistful of crackers. “You’ve got to put more spin in it. Like… this!”

Her attempt makes it a little further, stalling above the entryway. A long serpent with brightly colored feathers snakes out to grab it. It looks around for the origin of the mystery morsel but doesn’t spot Dipper and Mabel—no one ever seems to see into this room. 

“Hey, are those vampires?” Dipper asks, distracting her from their total failure. “Let me see the glasses.”

“Get your own opera glasses,” Mabel shoves him away, taking her time assessing the approaching vehicle before handing them over. “They do look like vampires. Their car has fangs.” It’s a nice car, venous red with tailfins and an open top. The vampires are less nice, more wrinkles and capes than badboy flair but no one gets to choose these things. Besides, she can appreciate a ruffled cravat on a man, even if he does have a silly mustache. 

“They’re going to run right into the flying purple people eater if they don’t decelerate.” Dipper observes. “And we all know who’s coming out of that—”

There’s a sound behind them, something crashing onto the ground. A bucket of screws spills across the floor, a metal plate spins frantically, the clattering sound of it increasing into an endless ringing that just as suddenly stops. Dipper and Mabel both turn to see a stumbling shape emerge into the perpetual dawn. 

It’s Great-Uncle Ford but he’s standing wrong, tilted to one side and lurched forward, his arms hanging loose like he’s not even aware they’re there. There’s blood matting his hair and staining his dress shirt and for once it is his—Mabel can see the head wound. One pants leg is shredded up to the thigh and he’s lost a shoe. Really, it’s impressive his pants are hanging on at all, with his suspenders hanging down and the fabric sliced to ribbons. His forehead is glossy with sweat. He closes one eye to look at them and Mabel gasps. 

“Great-Uncle Bill?”

“Got it in one, kiddo!” he laughs and jolts his way over to them, collapsing on the floor at their backs. “What are you doing awake? It’s your developmentally mandated weakness-time, isn’t it?”

“What are you doing in our uncle’s body?” Dipper asks. 

Great-Uncle Bill laughs again, the sound frail. Maybe because Great-Uncle Ford’s necktie is wrapped three times around his neck, digging in deep enough to raise bright angry arguments in his skin. Mabel reaches out to unwind it and he bats her hand away. “That’s. Huh. Look, sometimes when I want a break from being me and your Great-Uncle Fordsy wants a break from being in his big, loud head, we do a little switch. I get to attend my own party without the paparazzi coming after me and he gets to stop beating himself up and let someone else do the beating.” His bloodshot eyes flicker around the room, from Dipper, to Mabel, then away into the distance. They’re different from Great-Uncle Ford’s eyes; shining like a cat’s, the pupils ovals instead of circles. Of course, it’s hard to tell because his pupils are also the size of golfballs. “Ford insists I tell you that it’s all consensual and you’ll understand when you’re older.”

“Will we?” Mabel asks, excited. “Are we going to be able to do this when we grow up?”

“Only if you marry a dream demon!”

“Do you know any other dream demons?” Being able to swap bodies with someone sounds sort of cool. Mabel’s not locking herself into anything yet but she likes to have options. Of course she would want to be one in charge. Having a bonus body sounds really fun, like a costume for your brain to go in. And if she could do it to anyone—ooh, the things she could do. She could fix the hodag’s dental hygiene problem. She could finally get Lava Lamp to confess his crush on Hectorgon. So many beautiful possibilities. 

Great-Uncle Bill laughs again, a little meaner this time. His wide smile somehow gets wider. “None who are going to be allowed near you, pumpkin.” 

“Are you okay, though?” Dipper says, a bit anxiously. “You—Great-Uncle Ford looks kind of—”

Mabel completes his thought. “Like you got run over by a bus full of giraffes and then the giraffes all came out and stomped on you.”

“And then they made you run a marathon,” Dipper adds, placing a hand on the smooth metal shell of the GPS as if to steady himself. “You look awful.”

He’s holding his hands up to the light, lacing his—Great-Uncle Ford’s—fingers together and smiling at the shadows cast across his face. The blood is still oozing from his temple, fresh wells of red rising whenever he presses the sticky side of his head against the floor and then lifts it up again. “Oh, I feel fine. Better than fine. Like a billion dollars, haha!” He relents at their pleading expressions. “Do whatever you’re going to do. But I’m not moving!” 

They have a few tins of bandaids in their bag, a bottle of iodine, a roll of gauze. Dipper pats away the blood on his forehead while Mabel dots his sliced-up leg with bandages. Below the knee his leg is covered in spit, which is gross. She uses a nearby wrench to roll down his saliva soaked fancy sock and douse his gnawed ankle in antiseptic before stamping on the bandaids. They have cartoon dinosaurs on them, one of her own special finds. 

Luckily Great-Uncle Bill hates an awkward silence as much as she does. He doesn’t talk to them but he does cackle to himself as he drags the back of his hand up and down Great-Uncle Ford’s stubbly cheek, stick out his tongue (purple, like he’s been drinking Chernokov specials, which are not good for Great-Uncle Ford’s digestion), make popping sounds with his mouth, and sing softly—one of his old man songs which make no sense but reminds Mabel somehow of being small. “Oh, let us all be happy, let us not feel blue. Let us smile once in a while and make others happy too. Dadadadadada-dah, dadadadada-dah. Dadadadadadadada-dah, dadadadada-dah. Now I used to be somebody…”

Dipper watches, frowning, as the song trails off and he switches to once more bending Great-Uncle Ford’s fingers as far back as he can. “Is it weird? Not being in your own body?” 

A few feet away, Mabel has finished with the bandaids and starts looking for a marker to scribble with. The combination of iodine and pressure might sting a little bit but Great-Uncle Bill has only giggled at the pain so far and Great-Uncle Ford will probably appreciate supportive messages on his leg when he wakes up. She’ll put some taffy in his remaining pocket too, as a present. 

Great-Uncle Bill’s one eye flickers open, wet like macaroni noodles in the pale sunlight. “Of course it is, Sprout! Weird’s the entire point!”

“But isn’t it—I don’t know, doesn’t it make you feel wrong? I mean, you’re a triangle, Great-Uncle Ford’s a person…” He’s laid out the gauze and with both hands he tries to lift up Great-Uncle Bill’s head to slide the wrapping under it. Great-Uncle Bill fights him for a second before going limp, letting Dipper awkwardly manuever the bandage around his skull, once, twice, four times. 

“Our bodies are all beautiful, Dipper,” Mabel reminds him. “And we can change who we want to be whenever we want. Maybe Great-Uncle Bill doesn’t feel like a triangle anymore.”

That earns them a befuddled grimace. “I don’t change for anybody. This is just a stretch. A walk around the block in a tailored suit. Everyone deserves to shake things up once in a while. Get silly with it. You know what I mean?” His words are gooey like the great Sahara Oobleck, an instability that’s not noticeable until you stop looking for it.

“No,” Dipper ties off the messy gauze wrap.

“Yes,” Mabel says just as quickly, without looking up from her art. She’s a girl, of course, she’s been a girl as long as she could be one. But sometimes a girl also needs to be a tiger, or a witch. A Girgitch. A human must be a little like a tiger, if you’re a shape to start with. 

Great-Uncle Bill sits up abruptly, shaking off their hands. (Mabel didn’t even get to finish her drawing.) Half upright he sways a little, like he can still hear the music of the far off dance hall. Below them the party is still rumbling, life and unlife passing in and out. The vampire car crash has turned into a whole four vehicle pile-up and drivers are duking it out midair, a snarling whirlwind of claw and slime. “It’s just a grown-up game. Hot tip if you kids ever get a chance to make your own corporeal forms—five livers is plenty. You think you’re doing yourself a favor but you’re not.”

“What kind of–” Dipper starts to ask but Great-Uncle Bill steam-rolls past him. 

“Now your great-uncle, he’s got the perfect tolerance for everything. It's like he was made for me. Receptors smooth as jazz. He….” the words drift into nothingness. Great-Uncle Bill winces. “Oh, come on, Brainiac. They’re biiiiiiig kids now, they can handle it!” 

“Bwaaa?” Mabel grabs a nearby rolling lightbulb, one of the bits knocked onto the floor by Great-Uncle Bill’s less than elegant entrance. She holds it over her head, then tosses it into the thermosphere. “Great-Uncle Ford is here! Where is he?” Despite knowing better she looks around, as if his invisible presence will be unmasked now that she knows the secret.

“Yeah, yeah, you’re very clever.” Great-Uncle Bill grabs them by the collar, shoves them off their ledge then reels them in before they can fall, right back into his arms. When he kisses Mabel’s head it’s unsettling—Great-Uncle Bill doesn’t usually have a face like this, with soft lips and flat teeth. He even smells like a mix of them, Great-Uncle Ford’s leather and wool and oil overlaid with the burnt rubber scent that accompanies Great-Uncle Bill. Also faint, sour undertones of throw-up and weed but the iodine almost drowns those out. “Should start calling you Brainiacs Two and Three.”

“But Great-Uncle Ford is here,” Mabel insists. Dipper is looking around now too, swiveling so fast he knocks his head against their uncle’s chin. 

“He’s floating right behind you,” Great-Uncle Bill says, and nearly topples out of the pyramid laughing as Mabel cranes to look. If he goes down he’s taking them with him. Of course, they could probably catch themselves somewhere on the walls, and if it comes down to it they know how to whistle for the eyebats, but Mom and Dad don’t like them being outside the Fearamid at this height. “No, he’s…around. Talking and talking and talking. Can’t get enough of the sound of his own voice, the drama queen.” 

Mabel tugs at his sticky shirt-sleeve. “Does he have anything to say to us? Does he want to tell any jokes?”

“He says you should be in bed right now,” Great-Uncle Bill reports smugly. “Eighteen hours a night, tick-tock! Your squishy mortal brains are atrophying in your skulls at this very moment.” A pause, dragged out longer than it would if Great-Uncle Bill was just yucking it up. “He thinks you’re handling this like champs. If it was up to him you’d have never seen us like this. But we all know he’s a coward where you’re concerned.”

He says it so matter of factly that Mabel feels compelled to defend her great-uncle’s honor. “He loves us a lot and he loves you and he loves the earth. It’s hard to love so many people, it gets you twisted up.” 

“Love?” The gentle swaying stops, Great-Uncle Bill’s already loose grip on them falling away. “Love has nothing to do with it. You were just tiny reflections of his own egomania, little mirrors that he could see himself in. No one loves their family, they just—-”

Moving like a rat snake, quick as the light that folds over them, Dipper curls around and socks Great-Uncle Bill in the jaw. 

There’s a moment of uncertainty before the fire springs back in Great-Uncle Bill’s eyes, ten times as bright, a rage that they’ve only ever seen second hand. He’s turning on Dipper but that means his back is to Mabel. She grabs him by the hair—he’s never had hair before—and, before she can second guess herself, slams him into the steel side of the GPS. It’s easier than it should be; he’s all loosey-goosey from the substances. He flops over, nearly toppling out of the doorway, but Dipper and Mabel steady him and when his eyes flicker open they’re different, dark and soft. 

“Great-Uncle Ford!” Mabel sobs, relief and absolute fear flooding her in equal measure. 

“Ch-children,” he stammers. 

Then he leans forward and throws up down the side of the pyramidion. It’s tar black and sort of sandy, dotted with weird chunks. There’s definitely some glass marbles in there, clinking down the stone to collide with unsuspecting party guests’ heads; she knows from experience that those are less fun to eat than they look like they’d be.

Scrubbing his mouth with his already stained cuff, Great-Uncle Ford tries to sit up. He ends up mostly propped against Dipper, eyes fluttering. “Told him not to, not to have that last drink,” he mutters, almost to himself. He scrabbles to the tie twisted around his neck and loosens it a little. “Oh, he thinks he’s so funny, just because he’s hilarious.”

Mabel grabs him, wanting to curl up in his arms, wanting to cry. “Does Great-Uncle Bill hate us now?” He might still be here, she realizes, the same way Great-Uncle Ford was. She glances around, looking for some sign of ghostly presence, unable to summon up an apology. She’s not really sorry, she just wishes she hadn’t done it. 

If Great-Uncle Bill was moving like he was underwater, Great-Uncle Ford is moving like he’s undersoup. Some sort of chowder, something with density. Even his rush to comfort her is slow and clumsy. “No. No. You did, ugh. You did excellent. Ly. Very well. Under the circumstances. Bill will be fine. He’ll recomver. Recover. Great Scott.”

“We hit him though,” Dipper fusses. His panic is quieter than hers, more self-contained, but she can feel him trembling. “We hit him and we ruined his night and he hates people who ruin his night. What if he’s mad at us? What if he’s mad at you?”

It takes Great-Uncle Ford a second to formulate his reply, as if the words are dominoes that have to be lined up before they can be knocked down. “The night is–was– over, on account of my organs trying to shut down. He’ll be fine. Nothing will change. He’ll be crowing about your propensity for violence by the time you wake up.” He glances up at something in the air. Maybe he’s seeing things or maybe Great-Uncle Bill is there, saying something. Whatever it is he doesn’t repeat it. 

“We’re cool?“ Dipper stresses, biting his lip. Mabel can feel her own wobbling. 

“Everything is going to be fine,” Great-Uncle Ford insists. She believes him. Why wouldn’t she believe him? He knows Great-Uncle Bill better than anybody. They live in each others’ skin. 

“Speaking of–” this time when he tries to sit upright he succeeds. “Bed.”

“We’ll help you back to your room,” Dipper offers but Great-Uncle Ford shakes his head.

“No, I can make it back to the penthouse suite. On my own,” he insists. That seems incorrect, based on his general floppiness of limbs, though he does manage to stand, unsteadily, and drag himself over to the (more disorganized, after Great-Uncle Bill swiped an arm across it) work-table. He glowers at it, as if just now realizing how much of a mess the observatory is, then refocuses on them. “You two, to bed.” 

“We’re going to stay up and see who wins this knife fight,” Mabel says, gesturing to the brawl unfolding below. Because she’s his favorite great-niece ever and because she’s just so goshdarn cute and also because he’s sloshed, Great-Uncle Ford accepts this without more argument. And he loves to argue. They really should make sure he gets home safely. 

That might mean seeing Great-Uncle Bill though. So they sit, frozen, as he stumbles back out of the same door that his body stumbled in through, less graceful despite being more in control of himself. 

When he’s gone Dipper looks at her. They’re still sitting at the edge, more space between them now because no one wants to sit on top of the throw-up. 

“Do you ever feel like everyone in our family is lying to us?”

“No,” Mabel says, and she’s 87% sure that’s not a lie. 

Dipper’s face screws up, the way it does when he’s trying to figure out a difficult crossword. “Okay, maybe not lying. It’s just…it’s like there’s this puzzle and everyone has pieces to it that we don’t have. There are things missing that we don’t know we’re missing, information that would explain mysteries that we don’t even realize are mysteries. Mabel, there is something wrong with our family.

”Nuh-uh,” she says, automatically. Ooh, they’ve got An Assortment Of Spectral Lights in a neon vest trying to direct traffic. Coplike activities only happen when Hectorgon is subbing in. 

“Yeah, there is. I’ve been doing research and most people’s families aren’t marshaling armies to go after their great-grandmothers. Most people’s families don’t have to negotiate how far out of the solar system they can be taken.”

“We’re special,” Mabel responds, fists curling. “We know that and we know why. Great-Uncle Ford—”

“Great-Uncle Ford supposedly made a deal to keep our family safe but for some reason part of our family still doesn’t want to be here. Why is that? What don’t we know and why don’t we know it?” Frustration clouds Dipper’s face, turning the shadows under his eyes into trenches. He looks like their uncle when he’s upset, like his little brother sent through time. 

“We could go find him and ask him.”

“Great-Uncle Ford’s not gonna—”

“Not Great-Uncle Ford, doofus, Great-Uncle Stanley. We can go find him and ask him. He’s been hiding from Great-Uncle Bill but he wouldn’t hide from us, we’re his family.” Excitement pulses along her limbs, chasing out any trace of sleepiness that still remained.

Her brother blinks at her. “Mabel, there are so many people on Earth. I don’t know how we’d even start to look for him.”

“How would you do it, huh, Brainiac Two?”

Now the gears start to turn in his head. “I mean, I’d probably start by looking in all the places Great-Uncle Bill hasn’t looked. We were from, uh, North America, right? So they’ve probably been focusing pretty heavily on that continent. If he was there, they would have found him. So we should look on the opposite side of the planet.” He glances down at the spinning globe, the big dark seas, the wobbly advance of sunrise. “Just past there, actually.”

Mabel nods, mind made up. “Let’s go, bro-bro.”

They’ve cobbled together a working understanding of the GPS over the years. Great-Uncle Ford never lets them use it alone but they’ve caught the gist. If they aim inland, somewhere flat and mostly uninhabited, they'll land safely and probably not harm anyone else in the process. 

“What, now? We haven’t made any plans or gotten any supplies—what if we get eaten down there? Great-Uncle Ford will kill us. Our parents will kill us.”

“We have most of our stuff already,” she reminds him, heaving their bag into her lap. “And if someone messes with us we just….” she mimes stabbing a knife into her chest several times and expires dramatically. “Blaaah.”

“We kill them,” Dipper repeats, with some relief. His smile is growing, matching hers. “You know we’re going to get in so much trouble for this.”

“If it works everyone will be too busy crying and hugging to be mad at us,” Mabel argues. Great-Uncle Bill has promised that if anyone finds even one member of their family he’ll throw the greatest party this world has ever seen—and no one can be barred from their own party. It’s against the laws of the universe. 

“And if it doesn’t…”

“Grounded.”

“Grounded forever, yeah.”

Notes:

there is a whole background AU for this, involving timelines and drama and a teen mom willingly taking two four month old children across state lines to get involved in some sort of secret brother/faked death/estranged twin/surprise family reunion situation her baby daddy’s family threw up out of nowhere as soon as they announced their pregnancy. the shapeshifter and tate mcgucket are there. there’s intrigue. there’s double crossing. there are fraternal screaming matches. there’s aging punk anarchist shermie pines. there’s a whole alternate zodiac involving wendy’s mom.

the really important part is that there were far too many pines in gravity falls when the rift broke and, with a surplus of leverage, bill found it really easy (read: only, like, one brutal murder involved) to get the equation out of ford. what ford did manage to extract from him in addition to sparing the actual infants in the room was a pretty durable promise not to hurt any of ford’s family.

unfortunately for bill, several members of ford’s family got the hell out. turns out it’s hard to destroy an anthill and spare a few of the ants inside. so he’s been stewing and partying and making tiny deals, tearing up small bits of the planet while trying to find the last few members of ford’s family so he can swallow the entire earth, possibly freeze all the pines in permanent stasis, and then maybe kill ford at the moment of his greatest misery? he wavers on that last part. he’s definitely gotten fond of the kids though, so maybe they can stay on as his style team.

(what’s Stan doing you might ask? don’t worry about it. bill definitely doesn’t.)