Chapter Text
It had been an unseasonably cold night, close to the end of May but feeling more like early March, an icy wind blowing off the ocean and carrying the smell of salt inland with the roiling purple clouds, until the whole world seemed to be at the bottom of a vast, dark sea. The moon peeked through cracks in the cloud cover only in slivers, lighting the tips and edges of the clouds in a fine silver filigree. Most of the illumination had come from the streetlights, casting yellow circles in the blue dark visible outside of Ford's window.
She could still remember the chill that had radiated from that window, the salt smell and hint of petrichor from the impending storm, permeating the air for feet from the slightly warped glass. The window had been as old as all of Pines Pawns, and in about as good repair, leaking cold air into the room in winter and making Stanley complain that he might as well sleep outside.
Ford had never been sure if the leaking window seal was responsible for the cold filling her chest as she'd watched her brother's duffel bag land on the sidewalk in front of him. She'd wanted to believe that. That it was only the night air, and the warp in the thick, old glass making Stanley look twisted and nearly unrecognisable, and the smell of the sea and the storm that hadn't yet broken.
Everything was different, now. But the cold feeling was exactly the same, turning each limb to immobile ice as Ford stood on the porch of the ramshackle house in Oregon, transfixed by the sight of Stanley's fez lying discarded on the lawn.
"Wh-why would he leave the protective barrier?" Dipper's voice rose from somewhere to Ford's right, increasing in both speed and pitch with alarm. "He did know about it, right? Why would he go out where it wasn't safe? Does this mean Bill's already figured out how to get in? But if he has, then why take Grunkle Stan and not us? Is he just playing with us now?"
There was a tug on Ford’s sleeve, and she looked down to see Mabel, her brown eyes shimmering threateningly but her mouth set in determination. “We’re gonna go rescue Grunkle Stan, right?”
Ford tried to shake off the layer of crackling ice that seemed to have settled over her, shove the sharp-edged crystals of freezer-burned fury to the back of her mind. This was just like Stanley, to go charging in headfirst without a single moment’s thought, totally overconfident, totally unprepared - how dare he scare the children like this -
She tried, but failed, to quash the chilly little thought that Stanley might already be beyond rescue.
Mabel tugged at Ford’s sleeve again, this time with greater insistence. “Grunkle Stan punched a pterodactyl in the face to save my pig. I’m not leaving him alone out there with that triangle monster!”
"He fought off a horde of zombies when they tried to eat us," Dipper agreed. "If he thought something was going to hurt us, he would've tried to fight it. That's gotta be how Bill got him out here! Great-aunt Ford, we've gotta go save him!"
The ice worked its way a little deeper in.
Ford took a deep breath, feeling frozen parts grind against each other somewhere deep within her, trying not to look down at the two hopeful faces turned towards her. "Mabel, Dipper," she started, and then faltered, the words tumbling out of their neat, ordered sentences at the way both of the children perked up. She took another breath, and tried to start again. "Stanley may not be - your Grunkle Stan wouldn't want -"
The look Dipper gave Ford was hard and too old for his twelve-year-old face. "You're saying it's impossible."
Mabel raised a hand to her chest, curling her fingers tight in the fabric of her sweater.
Ford took another deep breath, closing her eyes as she collected her thoughts. When she opened them again, it was with a smile that, thankfully, felt genuine. "From where we stand, yes, it does seem impossible. But that doesn't mean we won't try." She made sure to meet the children's eyes, trying to let the naked hope in their expressions inspire her rather than terrify her, hearing the words she'd told herself so many times over the long years between dimensions somehow strange when spoken aloud. "That's what it means to be a hero."
Mabel nodded a little, her fingers uncurling from her sweater. "Just like Grunkle Stan."
Ford stopped herself before she could speak. Everything the man had in life, he'd stolen - much of it from her. He ran a backwoods tourist trap, for the love of Tesla! He barely ever even wore pants!
But even if Ford disbelieved what the children had said, or thought they were exaggerating or leaving out important context - and they probably were, they both seemed to see Stanley's every word and action through rosy, admiring lenses - she herself had seen firsthand how Stanley had come running, guns blazing, through the beginnings of an apocalypse, to shoot a god of chaos point-blank in its single eye to keep his family safe.
"Just like your Grunkle Stan," she agreed. The words tasted bitter on her tongue, and Ford couldn't help the way her eyes dragged back to the fez forlornly lying in the burnt grass.
Dipper nodded, his blue and white cap bobbing. "Right. Then we're gonna need a plan."
...
"Okay. First things first, we need to know where Bill's keeping him."
"Do we have to do this with the graph paper?" Mabel complained. "I feel like I'm playing your nerd math game. And there aren't even any hot elves."
"Mabel, please try to focus," Dipper said shortly. Mabel pouted, and started to toy with her pen. "Okay. The first place I'd look is in that creepy floating pyramid. That definitely looks like an evil lair for a megalomaniacal triangle."
"We should observe it for a while, before we try to make a move," Ford suggested. "Bill is a master of misdirection. If he does something big and obvious, it's likely that his true intentions lie elsewhere."
"So you're saying he might not actually be using the giant floating pyramid as an evil lair?" Dipper asked, and Ford nodded.
"We should see if he enters and leaves it before we make a move against it. Thankfully, it's very visible from here. If Stanley hasn't thrown it away, I should have a telescope in the attic somewhere."
"Why do we have to do any of this?" Mabel complained, slamming both hands down on the expanse of graph paper and pushing herself to her feet. "Why can't we just...I don't know, do something?"
"Mabel, we are doing something," Dipper protested. "It won't do Grunkle Stan any good if we get caught by Bill too."
"I knooooowww, I just..." Mabel flopped back down flat on the floor with an enormous sigh that seemed to suck all the air out of her, ruffling the graph paper. "I can't believe I'm just sitting here while Grunkle Stan is out there somewhere all alone, and Bill's probably doing something terrible to him right now while we're sitting around messing with graph paper and telescopes!"
"We're not just sitting here. A careful balance of action and consideration -" Ford stopped mid-sentence at the way Mabel pressed her face into the paper covering the floor. "If you'd rather be up and moving, why don't you run upstairs and find the telescope? You can start keeping a lookout, and see if you can identify the pyramid's defences and any weaknesses in them."
Mabel raised her head enough to shoot Ford a watery smile, and pushed herself to her feet. "You bet! I'm the best at getting into stuff Grunkle Stan wanted to keep us out of. I'll find that telescope in no time flat!"
Ford couldn't help but smile as Mabel took off for the stairs, a bright blur of colour. She turned back to the graph paper she and Dipper had laid out, eyeing the flat white expanse of the unknown between the novelty snowglobe of the Mystery Shack that she'd taken from the gift shop and the triangular prism from her room which was standing in for Bill's floating pyramid. "I hope Mabel can figure out how to operate the telescope. We could use a good idea of what Bill's done to the world out there, what the terrain looks like, so we know what we're facing."
"Mabel'll figure it out in no time," Dipper said, in between gnawing on his pen. “Did you know she taught herself how to make gold leaf for a scrapbooking project? Of course, she tried to make it out of Mom’s jewellery, so...”
“Hey, guys?” Mabel’s voice echoed down the stairs. “We might have just a tiiiny little problem.”
Ford was about to ask what she meant, when the sound of roaring away down the lane reached her ears. It was mingled with engine noise.
She locked eyes with Dipper, and pushed herself to her feet, reaching into her coat for her molecular disruptor. Without a word, she got up and made her way as quietly as she could to the nearest window, the one she’d kept watch from while Mabel was still trapped in sleep.
There was an enormous cloud of dust rattling up the lane. Ford caught sight of something long and spiked whipping out of it at odd intervals. She couldn’t see anything else through the cloud, but she could definitely tell that the roaring was emanating from somewhere within it.
“Get your sister and go to the basement,” she said, shortly, over her shoulder to Dipper. “I'll deal with this.”
“No way,” Dipper said, straightening up and pushing out his chest. “I’m not scared! And I’m not losing any more of my family!”
There was something fierce and determined in his eyes, in the set of his shoulders, and Ford felt something catch in her chest. There could be no doubt that she and Dipper shared so much more than Dipper and Stanley did, but - just for a moment, looking at Dipper was like looking through a time warp at her own brother, twelve and tiny but ready to take on any bully who dared to cross the Kings of New Jersey.
Ford swallowed hard around the lump that had materialised in her throat.
“I know,” she said. “Do you still have the magnet gun I gave you?”
Dipper shook his head. “I think Mabel had it, she got my backpack by accident.”
Ford rummaged around in her assorted pockets and holsters until she found what she was looking for. “Take this, head upstairs, and get your sister to help you cover the windows. Keep your heads down.”
Dipper took the weapon Ford handed him with a solemn nod. He paused a moment, taking a deep breath in, like there was something more he wanted to say, but no words came out.
Ford squared her shoulders, gathering herself up to her full height, steeling herself against her own fear. The roaring was growing closer, and she let it wash over her, memories and strategies flashing shining tails as they darted through her mind. Whatever it was, she’d almost certainly faced worse.
She shot a smile down at Dipper, and was relieved to see he seemed to find it as reassuring as she’d meant it to be. “Let’s go show whatever that is just what kind of mistake it's making messing with us.”
Dipper shot a bright grin back to Ford, standing a little taller himself as he turned and ran out of the living room.
Ford took another steadying breath just as the roaring stopped. The engine noise abruptly cut out as well, and in the sudden silence, Ford could all too clearly hear her own heart hammering within the cage of her ribs.
She snuck out of the living room and down the short hallway leading to the foyer, keeping close to the wall, and pressed herself flat against the wall beside the front door, adjusting her grip on her molecular disruptor as she inched towards the door. She stopped within arm’s reach of the doorknob, waiting and listening for any other sound from outside. Was that the grinding of gears? Were those footsteps against the gravel?
Dimly, Ford heard Dipper and Mabel’s voices echoing down from upstairs, but she was so focused on whatever was outside that she barely noticed. The hollow sounds of footsteps on the wooden steps up to the porch had consumed her attention. They came to a stop just outside the door, and Ford had the sudden, dizzying thought that only a thin wall with a little insulation stood between her and what could be certain death.
She’d faced worse, she reminded herself, as three loud knocks shook the door.
Ford nudged the door open with her toe. Sunlight and dust filtered through the crack that opened up, and she pulled her foot back and drew away from the door as far as she dared, anticipating a shot or an explosion or some kind of curse - which didn’t come.
She raised the molecular disruptor again, and slid closer to the door, reaching out one hand to carefully pull it all the way open. Before she could get it more than halfway, though, something grabbed the door from the other side and shoved it the rest of the way open.
Ford spun on one heel, stepping around the door, planting both feet squarely in the threshold, and raising the molecular disruptor, ready to fire on whatever horrific nightmare being lay in wait. She was expecting teeth and eyes, too many of each, an assortment of limbs and pulsating organs. She was expecting the ordinary, but twisted, a horror too close to sanity to bear. She was expecting something out of the darkest pits of Bill Cipher's warped imagination, come at long last to destroy her.
She wasn’t expecting to come eye-to-eye with...a hat.
Ford looked down. The hat’s wide brown brim tilted up, revealing the face of an old man, hunched forward like an animal, peering up with surprisingly sharp, if meandering eyes from behind spectacles missing one round green lens and several feet of thick white beard.
Those eyes locked onto Ford’s face, and she felt all the blood drain from it. There had been an unmistakable flicker of recognition there.
The old man straightened up, taking off his hat, and Ford took an involuntary step backwards. She suddenly felt as thought she were the misshapen tangle of limbs she’d expected to find on the doorstep. She’d thought she’d known what “wrongfooted” meant, but, Ford thought, she’d never really known what it felt like until just now.
The voice that spoke out from under the beard was shaken and faint, perhaps with shock, perhaps only with age. It didn’t matter. It was still far, far too undeniably familiar.
“Stanford?”
Ford drew in a deep, shuddering breath, trying to find her balance. “Fiddleford, my god, what - what did I do to -”
She was interrupted by a thunder of footsteps from the stairs as both Mabel and Dipper came racing down. “Great-aunt Ford, it’s okay!” Dipper shouted, as he skidded to a breathless halt beside Ford. “It’s okay, we've faced the Gobblewonker before, it's just one of Mr. McGucket's robots, and if it was Bill he couldn’t’ve got past the barrier anyway, right?”
Fiddleford looked up to meet Ford’s eyes, and she forced herself to meet his gaze, not to turn away. “ ‘Great-aunt’?”
“It has been thirty years,” Ford managed. “We have...a lot to catch up on.”
“You c’n say that again,” Fiddleford said, reflectively, before stepping past Ford into the house to talk to Dipper and Mabel, leaving Ford feeling simultaneously frozen into a statue and as though her legs might buckle under her. “Glad t’see you two safe ‘n’ sound! Is that great-uncle of yours around? It ain’t safe out here, you oughtta skee-daddle on down to the bunker.”
“Mr. McGucket!” Mabel chirped, eyes widening, reaching out to clasp one of Fiddleford’s hands in her own. “You came back out here just to look for us?”
Fiddleford’s eyes darted around the room like a cornered animal’s for a few seconds, but he didn’t pull away from Mabel’s death grip, and eventually his eyes came to rest on her face with a shy smile. “Well, I figgered I been a-runnin' and a-hidin' enough fer two lifetimes already. I got a boy out here what needs his father ta protect 'im. And it didn’t feel right ta leave you-’ns out here with the ghoulies after what-all you did for me.”
Mabel held his gaze for a moment, looking almost as though she were on the edge of tears, and then flung both her arms around Fiddleford’s neck in a crushing hug. Dipper hesitated, but he was smiling like his heart was fit to burst, and after a moment joined in on the hug anyway. Ford considered stepping back, giving them some space, but it felt like any movement, any sound, no matter how small, would only draw their attention back to her, ruin the moment. Then again, though, Fiddleford might have more information about the state of the town than they could gather on their own. And Stanley's life could be on the line...
"Um, like, weird old hillbilly guy?" a voice said from the open doorway behind Ford, and Ford was spinning, raising the molecular disruptor and cursing herself for letting herself get so distracted by sentiment, before she could process why its sarcastic tone sounded so familiar.
For the second time in only a handful of minutes, Ford found herself aiming a deadly, high-powered extradimensional weapon, not at the monster she'd been expecting, but at an unsuspecting human. Pacifica Northwest regarded the business end of Ford's molecular disruptor with an expression somewhere between shock and exhaustion, the two girls behind her reaching for weapons of their own amongst what looked like a small makeshift arsenal. It took Ford a moment to recognise Mabel's friends Candy and Grenda under the face paint.
"Okayyyy," Pacifica said, gently pushing the nose of Ford's blaster aside and looking around her at Fiddleford. "Are we, like, just parking this giant robot right out here in plain view of anybody? Like, not like I care, but -"
"We would prefer to not be eaten," Candy finished for her, and Grenda nodded enthusiastic agreement.
Mabel's gasp of delight was a welcome sound. "Candy! Grenda!" She hesitated a little before calling, "Pacifica!", but her voice was no less enthusiastic when she did. She let go of Fiddleford with one arm and waved her friends over; they ran over to join the hug, nearly crushing Mabel in a cocoon of affection. "I was worried about you guys!"
"We were worried about you!" Grenda's voice boomed, out of the middle of the group hug. "Mr. McGucket and his robot saved us from one of those madness bubbles, but we didn't know what had happened to you guys! Candy and Mr. McGucket were planning a Dipper-and-Mabel-rescue-bot nearly the whole way here!"
Pacifica cleared her throat. "Yeah, I'm...glad you're safe. Also."
Ford glanced down at the sound. She hadn't realised Pacifica was hanging back as well, watching the hugging group with an unreadable expression. When she noticed Ford's attention was turned towards her, Pacifica shot her a defiant glare, as though daring Ford to say anything.
"Aw, Pacifica," Mabel said, and then, apparently coming to some decision. "Get over here!"
Pacifica coughed delicately into one hand. "Um, I think I'm all right back here, thanks. I'm not supposed to touch wild animals or hillbillies. My mother says rabies is bad for the complexion."
"Pfff, Pacifica," Mabel snorted, but she didn't push it. "Grauntie Ford? Come on, this is a limited-time-only hug-pportunity!"
"Actually, we should probably be getting back to the bunker," Pacifica said, with a nervous glance back over her shoulder towards the door, and it was only then that Ford realised how tightly Pacifica was hugging herself, how much she'd been scanning her surroundings. Pacifica had almost certainly seen something, something that gave her at least an inkling of the true extent of Bill's powers and the true depths of his depravity, and Ford's heart went out to the girl all at once. No wonder Fiddleford was trying to help her. "It's really not safe out here. I don't know where you all have been or what you know about what's going on, but -"
"It's a post-apocalyptic nightmare world out there!" Grenda interrupted, and Candy nodded agreement.
"The world resembles the cover of a death metal album," she said, and then froze. "Which...I do not listen to, as I am busy practising violin. Yeeeessss." Her eyes darted from side to side.
"Haha, well, don't worry, girls," Mabel said, clapping each of them on the shoulder. "You're in the safest place in Gravity Falls! Remember that unicorn hair we definitely obtained through legal, moral and ethical means?"
Grenda raised a hand. "Hey, didn't we -"
Mabel took a step back out of the slowly-disintegrating hug, waving her arms broadly to encompass the entire Shack. "It all went into a cool magic barrier around this place! Nothing can get us while we're in here!"
The slow sinking in the pit of Ford's stomach became a sudden, precipitous drop.
In an attempt to clear her head and quash the feeling, Ford said, "Girls...Fiddleford... You've been out there, you've seen the kinds of horrors Bill has visited on this dimension - tell me, what are we up against?"
Mabel's friends and Fiddleford shared a look.
"It's bad, Dr. Pines," Grenda boomed, finally. "Like...real bad."
"I'm aware," Ford said shortly. "I'm more interested in specifics. Specifically, what kind of obstacles one might expect to encounter between here and the black pyramid."
"Stanford..." Fiddleford's gaze was reproachful, and Ford steeled herself for the recriminations she felt certain were soon to follow, already mentally preparing a stockpile of arguments against the seeming certainty that Fiddleford would try to talk her out of it. "Yer plannin' exactically what I think yer plannin', ain'tcha?"
"Bill has to be stopped," Ford said, the words spilling out of her in a rush. "The future of this dimension - and Stanley's life - depends upon it. And I am the only one who knows how, the only one -"
Thankfully, it was there that Candy interrupted her. "Mr. Pines' life?"
"Grunkle Stan is missing," Dipper spoke up, also pulling away as the group hug slowly disintegrated. "And - Bill, or somebody working for him, left us a message."
"It seems a certainty that Bill has taken Stanley - for what nefarious purpose, we do not yet know." Ford took a deep breath, focusing her gaze on the stair banister rather than meeting Fiddleford's eyes. "It may be that he is simply trying to draw us out."
"Draw you out, ya mean," Fiddleford said, the words pointed and piercing, their tone disappointed. Ford shifted uncomfortably, curling six fingers in the sleeve covering the opposite arm and trying not to meet his eyes.
"Bill also has...reason to hold a grudge against Stanley. There could be any number of explanations as to why he's taken this course of action. Regardless, we can't in good conscience leave Stanley in Bill's clutches. Not to mention that we have no idea what part Stanley may yet play in Bill's plans for world conquest." She cleared her throat, turning her attention back to Candy and Grenda. "Which is why any information you might have that would help us gain access to Bill's lair would be greatly valuable."
"Of course!" Grenda thundered, her usual booming bass increasing in volume until it nearly rattled the windows. "No way we're letting that stupid triangle get Mr. Pines!"
"It would not be Gravity Falls without him," Candy agreed, more quietly but no less vehemently, reaching up to adjust her glasses and accidentally setting off a laser blast from something attached to her wrist. She looked up at the smoking hole scorched in the ceiling, and pursed her lips. "Hm. That firing mechanism may need recalibration."
"Wait, back up." Pacifica's voice, as ever, was like a razor cutting through the conversation. "Did you just say you know how to stop this...Bill guy?"
"Of course she does," Dipper said, glancing up at Ford with pride welling in his eyes. It was almost as bad as the disappointed lack of surprise in Fiddleford's. "Remember the Journal I used to help catch your ghost? Great-aunt Ford wrote that."
Pacifica quirked an eyebrow. "Okay, so you know about busting ghosts. What's - Bill - supposed to be, like, a category ten thousand?"
"A demon," Ford said, and Pacifica's other eyebrow shot up to join its twin.
"Oh, great," she snapped, her voice sharp but brittle. "Just awesome. A demon. And we're going to go up there with five kids, a couple of geezers, and a pig, and - what? Karaoke it to death? Stab it with a knitting needle? Just ask it nicely to please stop destroying everything?"
"Hold hands, actually," Ford corrected her.
Pacifica stared. "You're kidding me."
"No, I'm quite serious. Once assembled, the components of the prophecy wheel can -"
"This is ridiculous," Pacifica snarled, swiping a hand viciously along under one eye and shaking her head. "Pines, please tell me you at least have a jacuzzi somewhere in this scrap heap of a building. I need a good long soak."
"We...have a tub!" Mabel chirped.
"I don't know about water, though," Dipper interrupted. "When I tried to turn the tap on to wash my hands, blood came out." He thought for a moment. "At least I think it was blood. Looked like blood, smelled like blood, tasted like blood..."
"Ew, you tasted it?!"
"Damn, the well must be outside the barrier," Ford muttered in realisation.
Pacifica tossed her hair, shutting her eyes. "I guess aromatherapy beads are out of the question, then." She gave a long-suffering sigh, and turned to Mabel. "Lead the way."
...
With Pacifica and Mabel upstairs trying to negotiate a hot bath, and Dipper, Candy, Grenda, and Fiddleford forming a war council of sorts in the living room to discuss how best to get into the pyramid and whether it would be better to bring as many people as possible into the Shack's protections first, Ford decided that she could be spared, for a little while at least.
She wasn't hiding. She was...making a strategic retreat to the basement to see if any parts of the portal or her thought-encryption device could be scavenged to rebuild her quantum destabiliser. There would be very little point in rescuing Stanley only to leave Bill loose in their dimension, and Pacifica's lack of faith in the prophecy wheel did somewhat highlight the possible flaws in relying on it. It would be better to have a backup plan, if at all possible -
"Stanford?"
Ford froze at the sound of the heavily-accented voice in the doorway behind her, slowly turning to face Fiddleford. He looked - dwarfed, somehow, by even the small entrance to her underground study, hunched forwards and looking around him with obvious apprehension, and it took Ford a moment to realise why. It really shouldn't have. The reasons for Fiddleford's discomfort were obvious, staring down as they did from every available surface.
Ford silently cursed herself for keeping all the idols of Bill in the first place, as she hurried to tack up the sheets Dipper had unfortunately pulled down after their ill-fated session with the brainwave encryptor. "Fiddleford - I beg your pardon, I haven't had a chance to clean this place up. I was only looking to cannibalise this machine for parts -"
"We oughtta talk," Fiddleford said, uncurling a little as the various Bills vanished behind the dropcloths, and Ford's words dried up in her throat.
"You must understand," she managed, finally, turning her back and reaching to pin a particularly unwieldy corner into place. "Bill's being here is entirely my responsibility, so naturally I should be the one to -"
"I'm rememberin' lots o' things these days," Fiddleford said, soft, and Ford wrestled with the pin, trying not to listen to the quiet pad of Fiddleford's bare feet against the floor. "You never told me about this."
"What - Bill?" Ford drew in a deep breath, long and sustained.
"Well, that too." Fiddleford's footsteps drew to a halt directly behind Ford. Ford jabbed the pin with more vehemence than it really deserved, and it slipped, stabbing deep into her thumb instead. She exclaimed, stuffing the injured appendage into her mouth with a mumbled curse.
Worry tinged Fiddleford's voice as he asked, "Are you all right?"
"Fine, fine, just - slight stab wound -" Ford motioned for Fiddleford to go on with the hand she didn't currently have in her mouth, which meant dropping the sheet she'd been trying to pin. She muttered another curse around her thumb, crouching down to retrieve it.
She didn't expect to come face to face with Fiddleford, who gave her a sad smile as he picked up the cloth and held it in place for her to pin.
"I was yer closest friend - heck, yer only real friend - for years an' years, and I never noticed," he said, just when Ford was starting to think he was finished speaking. "Never said a word, no matter what I thought. What kinda friend does that make me?"
"A better one than me, certainly," Ford said, under her breath, forcing herself to really look at her old friend. This close, she could see the scabs dotting his bare scalp, from animal or insect bites or from pulling out his own hair, she couldn't tell, the slow, unthinking meander of his gaze, as though his once-legendary precision focus had simply worn away, the dirt ground into his threadbare overall and the cast that covered his left arm, the leathery, hard-worn texture of his skin...
"I done this-all to myself, so don'tcha start," Fiddleford said shortly, taking a half-step forward. Ford almost wanted to pull back, but she found herself once more rooted, unable to move, even to look away. The slouched, dirty, prematurely ancient man before her bore nearly no resemblance to the intelligent, cheerful, vibrant young man she'd once been proud to call a friend, but she could see - especially after the vision in Mabel's mindscape - that same brilliant spark of personality, even under the years of hardship that had all but smothered the man she'd known.
"If it hadn't been for me, you wouldn't have done anything to yourself," Ford said hollowly, looking past Fiddleford's left ear to avoid meeting his eyes. The voice at the back of her mind, the unpleasantly familiar one she did her best to ignore, went on. If you'd been smarter. If you hadn't been so self-absorbed. If you hadn't thought your own feelings were so important. If you hadn't fallen for Bill's lies. "You have every right to blame me."
"Fer what?" Fiddleford snorted. "You never held that mem'ry gun t'my head and pulled th' trigger." He brought an arm up to scratch at the back of his neck. "True, I mightn'ta inventorated it in th' first place outside o' gettin' my head stuck through that there portal, but...I coulda stopped at that. Shoulda stopped at that. This warn't yer fault, Ford." He paused. "You - you are still goin' by Ford? I ain't been callin' you by an old name you hate or nothin'?"
"Yes, yes, I've dropped the 'Stan', but otherwise - Fiddleford, you can't honestly think - if I hadn't been so stubborn, if I'd listened to you from the start -"
"There ya go again, not listening to me," Fiddleford said, and even though his tone was light and his smile teasing, Ford still felt something inside her crumple.
"I'm - I'm so sorry," she managed, and Fiddleford's face creased in a frown.
"Ford." Fiddleford took a deep breath, and looked down at his bare toes, scratching the back of his neck. "Truth is...I don't rightly recollect a lot o' the time we worked together, but I know ya hurt me, an' hurt me bad." His accent seemed to thicken as he talked, the more emotional he became, and Ford found her mouth dry, her throat sticking closed when she tried to swallow. "But I didn't do myself any favours, neither. We still got lots to talk about, but - but I've had just about enough a-hurtin' an' a-losin' people. So just stop kickin' yerself an' stop beggin' me ta do it for ya. I'm just glad ta see ya safe an' whole."
Ford wasn't sure if Fiddleford held out his arms first, or if she stepped forward, but somehow she found herself embraced by a pair of skinny, wiry arms, Fiddleford's slight frame pressed against her like a memory made flesh. Ford threw her own arms around him, torn between the impulse to squeeze as tightly as she could to be certain that this was real, he was really here, and the impulse to hold back for fear of snapping her old friend in half.
"Not anywhere near as glad as I am to see you again," she muttered, and was rewarded by a laugh from Fiddleford.
"Ahh, Ford, you always did have ta one-up everybody else." He gave her two solid thumps on her back with his good right hand, and another squeeze around the waist before pulling back. "So! What's a-brewin' in that big ol' brain o' yours? How're we plannin' on takin' Bill out?"
" 'We' -" Ford stumbled over her own words. "Fiddleford, you've done enough. You've done far more than enough, just helping the children, and after what you've been through - I wouldn't put you through more. Not for my sake. Not for the world's."
Fiddleford's gaze bored into Ford like twin lasers. "How 'bout fer Tate's?"
"I - I didn't mean -"
Fiddleford's gaze softened, and he cracked a gap-toothed grin at Ford. "Like I said to the young 'uns - enough a-runnin' an' a-hidin'. Long past time I did a little fightin' back." He grinned up at Ford, then shuffled his feet a little sheepishly, like a child admitting a crush. "Sides, that brother o' yours been good ta me, these past thirty years, when there weren't nobody else watching. I mighta froze a few winters gone if'n it weren't for Stan Pines. But don't - don't tell 'im I told ya that. Man's got his pride." For an instant, Fiddleford curled in on himself, his gaze turning inwards, and Ford felt a sudden, unswayable certainty that Fiddleford was revisiting an unpleasant memory.
"Wait - you and Stanley know each other? You -"
"Well, I reckon that's just about enough yakkin' for right now," Fiddleford interrupted, speaking just a little too loudly for the confines of the basement. "Ain't we got a triangular menace to kick in the right angle?"
...
Fiddleford and the girls, as it turned out, weren't the only refugees to turn up at the Shack. Despite her best efforts to sit down and lay out a plan, Ford found herself interrupted every few moments by a knock at the door and the arrival of another friend, acquaintance, or vaguely familiar face. It wasn't only the townsfolk who show up looking for sanctuary, either - Dipper greeted a many-headed creature he called a 'Multibear' with an excited shout and a hug, and Ford ended up having to negotiate between Dipper and Mabel and a troupe of gnomes seeking a place to hide after their burrows all filled up with an inexplicable root beer flood. Before long, what seemed like half the population of Gravity Falls, both supernatural and otherwise, was crammed into the living room, crowded around the graph-paper map Ford had laid out and was filling in from their various reports.
"- an' somefing wif tentacles fick as yer waist," one of the gnomes chattered excitedly, jabbing a finger at the area of swampland that had once been occupied by something called "Mighty Mike's Ammo Emporium and Fine Lingerie Boutique", apparently. Ford dutifully noted it on the map.
"This information is invaluable," she said, again, to the ring of faces crowded around the map. "Now we have a much better idea of the least dangerous route to the pyramid -"
"Oh no," Mabel groaned, from the window, and Ford looked up.
"What's -" Dipper started, hurrying over to the window as well, and letting out a groan of his own. "Oh, no."
"Excuse me," Ford said to the gathered crowd, dropping her marker and jumping up to join the twins at the window. "What's - oh. Oh."
Out in the scrubby gravel of the parking lot, something that looked like a pair of dentures about the size of a human child, with little stubby arms and legs, and something vaguely humanoid, but long and gangly and covered in green fur, were chasing what was either a small child or a pig in a remarkably well-maintained silver bouffant wig around in circles. The - child? Pig? - could be heard wailing and screaming all the way inside the Shack.
“I guess we should probably let him in,” Mabel said, in a tone of voice Ford would have expected more from someone anticipating their own execution than from Mabel, under any circumstances.
“Says who?” Dipper asked. “Nobody has to know we even knew he was out there.”
Ford looked from one twin to the other, unable to conceal her disbelief. “Who, exactly, is that?”
“Gideon,” Mabel complained, slumping against the windowsill with her chin in one hand, scowling.
Outside, in the parking lot, the green figure - 8-Ball, one of Bill’s right-hand...men, for lack of a better word, if Ford recognised him correctly - reached out with one overlong arm and pinned the child - Gideon - against the gravel. Gideon’s squeals and cries rose into a register that was almost painful to the ears.
“Mabel, he’s the one who summoned Bill in the first place!” Dipper said, to Mabel’s scowl, which was quickly dissolving into pity. “He started all of this! Honestly, this kind of serves him right.”
“Yeeaaahhhhhh,” Mabel said, long and dragged-out, but she didn’t straighten up from her pathetic slump, and she didn’t sound even slightly convinced.
From outside, Gideon’s pathetic cries turned into words. “Oh, I’m about to be devoured! If only there were someone who could help me!” Ford wasn’t sure, but she thought he’d pressed the back of one hand to his forehead.
“I dunno, Mabel, something about this is fishy,” Dipper pointed out, and Ford nodded.
“You’re right. This doesn’t make sense,” she muttered. “Those are Bill’s minions. There’s no reason for them to waste so much time killing the child, unless they’re toying with him for their own amusement.”
Both Dipper and Mabel looked up at her with identical expressions, somewhere halfway between discomfort and disbelief.
“We gotta let him in,” Mabel said, finally, decisively. Dipper turned that dumbfounded expression in her direction instead.
"Okay, but you do know this is obviously a trap, right?"
"I knooooooowwwwwww," Mabel whined, slumping over to bonk her forehead against the window. "But what if it's not? What if we just leave him out there and they eat him?”
“Then we never have to see one of his obnoxious commercials ever again,” Dipper said, with a shrug. “Seriously, Mabel, there is no downside here.”
“You said that this child was the one who summoned Bill back into this dimension?” Ford asked, and Dipper scowled out the window.
“Yeah. He and Bill were all...buddy-buddy.” He said it like the words tasted bad.
“Bill doesn’t have ‘buddies’,” Ford said, watching as the child tripped, the thing like a giant set of dentures - Teeth, if she was remembering correctly - bearing down on him. “He has pawns. And playthings.”
The look of terror on the child’s small, round face was far too real.
Ford was moving before she really realised she meant to, unholstering her blaster as she ran for the door.
Teeth’s mouth - ...torso? - was wide open in clear anticipation when Ford flung the door open and fired. The shot went right down the creature’s throat, a bolt of pale blue light illuminating an oversized uvula and glowing through the top of Teeth’s palate when he snapped his mouth closed.
For a split second, Teeth looked (somehow, despite the fact that he had no face to speak of) surprised that his mouth hadn’t closed on a tasty morsel. His - expression, for lack of a better word - was just starting to turn to rage when he suddenly seemed to blur, to go fuzzy around the edges.
A stiff wind, sweeping through the clearing, dispersed the vaguely Teeth-shaped cloud of disparate molecules where Teeth had been standing moments before.
Ford carefully aimed her molecular disruptor at 8-Ball, who was standing frozen and staring (as best he could with his two wildly-rotating eyes) at the spot where Teeth had been. “Let the child go, or you’re next.”
8-Ball’s eyes turned, on average, towards Ford. Then he turned and started to lope towards the trees surrounding the clearing.
Ford was still breathing hard, trying to calm her racing heart, when the small voice piped up from the ground in front of the porch.
“S-Stanford?”
Ford’s gaze snapped down to the child sprawled in the grass, her heart seizing sharply in her chest. The boy - he couldn’t have been more than ten years old - was staring up at her, eyes wide and - confused.
Of course. Stanley had taken her name.
Ford breathed out a long sigh, extending a hand in the boy’s direction even as she scanned the trees for more hostiles. “It’s not safe out here. Inside, now.”
“Wait, you’re not -” the boy started, confirming Ford’s suspicion that this was a case of mistaken identity.
“The man you knew as Stanford Pines is my twin brother, Stanley. You can call me Ford,” she said, as the boy scrambled to his feet, dusting off his impressive white pompadour hairdo. “This building is protected by a Bill-proof barrier. Behind these doors, none of his weirdness can touch us.”
She realised, slowly, that the boy hadn’t heard a word she’d said. Instead, his eyes were fixed on her outstretched hand.
“Well, wrap me in pastry and call me a pig in a blanket,” Gideon said, hushed, almost reverent. Ford took a step back, curling her fingers into a fist and tucking it behind her back, but the boy’s awestruck gaze turned, instead, to her face. “You’re the Author.”
...
Gideon trailed after Ford all the way into the living room with enormous, starry eyes. He also wouldn't stop peppering her with questions, which grew tiresome far more quickly than she'd imagined. She found herself with a new appreciation for how genuinely respectful Dipper had been of her personal boundaries when she'd first...'arrived' was wrong, considering that she was returning to a long-lost home, but it felt the least wrong out of the options her vocabulary supplied.
"Where've you been all this time, anyway? What made ya abandon all your work? Why'd ya hide your journals? Were you challengin' any who would dare to learn the secrets of ultimate power an' follow in your footsteps to prove that they were worthy?" Gideon sounded purely self-satisfied as he went on, "That was it, wasn't it."
Ford had to stop, mid-step, to stare incredulously down at the small boy. "Does this look like ultimate power to you?"
"I -" Gideon's voice faltered, as he hastily backtracked. "Well, now, I just thought, given as how your journal said -"
"My journals were hidden so that they wouldn't fall into the hands of any who would be tempted by Bill's false promises and attempt to recreate my work," Ford said, aghast. Dipper and Mabel had, of course, mentioned that the child had summoned Cipher, but - Ford had thought that Gideon might at least have had enough common sense to realise, when the entire world started to shatter, that Bill Cipher worked for his own gain and his own gain only - ! "They were never meant to see the light of day again. How did one find its way into your possession?"
"It came to me!" Gideon exclaimed, and Ford actually took a step back, surprised and a little alarmed by his vehemence. Gideon appeared to realise his mistake, because his next words were more subdued, his voice honeyed and an enormous, insincere smile spreading across his round face. “Of course, if I’da known that all of this trouble would come from that one little book, why, I never woulda cracked its cover in the first place!” He gave his head one solemn shake, his expression turning downwards in practiced sorrow.
“Of course,” Ford echoed, warily. “If you’ll excuse me...”
She hurried away before Gideon could follow, ducking into the gift shop and back behind the vending machine.
...
Gideon didn’t give up. When Ford finally re-emerged from the basement, no longer able to pretend even to herself that she might be able to rebuild the quantum destabiliser which she had spent two decades gathering materials for from across the multiverse out of scrap from her lab, he was waiting, sulking in a corner of the living room watching Pituitaur and Pacifica arguing over hair gel. He jumped when Ford appeared in the doorway, patting his hair nervously.
“Oh, there y’are!” he twinkled, his entire demeanour shifting as he visibly turned on the charm. Somehow, even despite the smudges of dirt on his pudgy cheeks and the snags and tears in his powder-blue suit, Gideon managed to give the impression of gloss, like a photograph, or perhaps a candle left to stand too long in the hot sun. Combined with his wide, too-white smile and thick, down-homey accent, the whole effect was strangely off-putting, though Ford couldn’t quite put her finger on why.
If Gideon noticed her discomfort, though, he didn’t seem to care, plunging forward as though their conversation had never been interrupted. “I must say, I was quite surprised to find that you were related to Stanf- Stan Pines. I must admit that Stan and I have not seen eye to eye for quite some years now.”
“How old are you?” Ford asked, incredulous, but Gideon barreled on as though he hadn’t heard her.
“As a matter of fact, we’ve even had a li’l ol’ good-natured blood feud goin’ for a while now!” He chuckled, and Ford glanced back over her shoulder, wondering if Gideon was absorbed enough in his monologue that he wouldn’t notice if she left again. “But I daresay it was all a big ol’ misunderstanding, if you and he are twins. Why, I even thought he was jealously guardin’ those journals of yours out of plain ol’ selfishness!”
“Stan - what?”
Apparently misinterpreting Ford’s expression, Gideon nodded solemnly, his bouffant bobbing. “Whatever the secret of ultimate power was, that man guarded it like it was his last expired coupon for canned meat. Same with this house and the first journal! Why, at the time I thought he was just a selfish old codger who didn’t know what he’d got - but now I know he must’ve been hangin’ onto that secret like his livelihood depended on it.” His smile was sly and sidelong, but he batted his big eyes in a parody of innocence. “And who’m I to say it didn’t? Something sure kept the tourists floodin’ into this old shack, and if it was Stan Pines’ showmanship, why, I’ll set myself straight on down in a patch of poison ivy.”
Ford had to give herself a short shake. "Are you implying that Stan used my journals for his own personal gain?" It sounded like something she'd expect Stanley to do, and yet...despite what he'd done to her house and her good name, despite his rash, idiotic, selfish decision to reopen the portal, Ford couldn't quite reconcile it with the brother she knew. After all, Stan hadn’t stood to gain anything from reopening the portal except, perhaps, and the chance would have been slim to nonexistent, seeing his twin again.
For the first time since she’d arrived, the look Stan had given her when she’d stepped out of the portal flashed back before Ford’s eyes. For just a moment, Stan had looked like he had everything he could ever have wanted in the world.
For just a moment, before Ford’s fist had met his face, Stan had been perfectly, completely...happy.
“Well, and why not?” Gideon batted his lids in Ford’s direction, the picture of guileless sincerity. “Without your second journal, I woulda had to do a lot more work to keep these fine townsfolk and tourists interested in my li’l ol’ Tent of Telepathy! Why, I simply couldn’t compete with the Mystery Shack without it. I just can’t imagine how else Stanf- Stan might’ve managed it.”
Ford snapped abruptly out of her guilty reverie. “You used my research for parlour tricks?”
The wide, smug smile slid slowly off of Gideon’s face, replaced by a confusion which quickly turned to defensive anger. “Wh- I’m tellin’ ya, your own twin sibling did it first!”
“No, you’re telling me that you speculate that Stanley must have made frivolous use of the very serious information contained within my journals, because that’s what you did, and you assume that he would never have achieved as much as he has without resorting to cheating and riding on my coattails,” Ford growled.
Gideon took a step back, and Ford realised she’d shifted her weight forward, changed her stance, preparing for a fight.
“Which - I admit, he has, in the past, done,” she said, straightening up and squaring her shoulders so that she no longer loomed menacingly over the child, and clasping both hands behind her back. “But you severely underestimate Stanley if you believe that the only way he could possibly have been successful is through someone else’s effort.”
“We - are talkin’ about the same Stan Pines here?” Gideon said, narrowing his eyes in a way that made him look astonishingly like Mabel’s pig. “The same Stan Pines I once saw gettin’ that handyman o’ his to pick his nose for him because he was too lazy to raise his arms?”
“I - wait, what?” Ford shut her eyes, huffing out a breath. “No, no, that’s definitely the same Stanley Pines.” She couldn’t quite disguise the shudder of disgust. “Regardless. The information contained within my journals is dangerous beyond - beyond anything you could possibly imagine, and it should never have been used for personal gain.”
“You were the one who stuck it in a hole in the ground and left it there for anyone to find!” Gideon protested, and Ford had to wonder, again, how any of her journals had made their way into his small, unusually sweaty hands. Most likely through Bill Cipher’s machinations. “And you know, I’m startin’ to think you don’t even know the value of what you’ve got! Do you have any idea what kind of power you could wield even without leanin’ on Bill Cipher?”
For a few moments, Ford found herself speechless. The child seemed to have no idea of the true gravity of the situation, and an unending thirst for the kind of power Bill promised easily and falsely. He would have been, in Bill’s eyes - eye, a perfect pawn.
“Would you come with me a moment?” she said, turning back towards the gift shop. “There’s something I’d like to show you.”
...
“Do you know what started the apocalypse outside?” Ford asked, as the elevator came to a shuddering halt at the bottom floor of the basement. They were now two full storeys underground, and Gideon’s eyes were as big as dinner plates. He hadn’t spoken a word since the elevator doors had closed behind them, too apparently awed by the sights around him, but the grin he wore stretched from ear to ear.
It all but vanished at Ford’s question, though. Gideon sounded exasperated, like a child being asked a question he knows is rhetorical but who can’t quite see what conclusion he’s being led towards. “Yes, yes, Bill Cipher brought about the end of the world. What is this place?”
“What I wanted to show you,” Ford said, as she stepped out of the elevator, Gideon following on her heels.
She’d made some progress on dismantling the portal, but since she’d devoted so much time to containing the rift (and to spending time with the children, a little voice in the back of her mind pointed out), there was still more than enough left to stand, grim and imposing, dominating the massive, echoing emptiness of the space beyond the control room. Gideon’s eyes nearly bugged out of his head as Ford led him out of the control room, into the open cavern of the basement proper, into the shadow of the ruined portal.
“Do you know what this is?” she asked, looking up at the crumpled metal that loomed precariously over their heads.
“This is the secret!” Gideon whispered, his voice excited but sounding curiously strained, as though it was only quiet because he was forcing it through a narrow aperture. “This is what Stan didn’t want me gettin’ my hands on!” He spun, staring up at Ford with a disconcerting intensity. “What’s it do?”
Ford didn’t look away from the looming portal, though she could feel Gideon’s eyes boring into her like lasers.
“It breaks down the barriers between dimensions,” she said, finally. “Or, perhaps I should say, broke down the barriers between dimensions. Before Bill Cipher used it to drive my best friend out of his mind, strand me in the infinite multiverse, and tear open the fabric of this reality to unleash his weirdness onto it, which if left unchecked will eventually destroy it utterly and wipe it from existence, as it has every other dimension he’s done this to.”
She still didn’t look down, but judged from the series of squeaks and aborted half-words that Gideon was flapping his mouth like a fish.
“Bill told me so many things, to get me to do what he wanted and build the portal,” Ford said, reaching out to brush a hand against the cool metal, the pads of her fingers gliding easily over its smooth, almost oily surface. “Promised me so many things. Recognition, prestige, knowledge.” She hesitated, just for a moment, before pulling her hand away to clasp in the other behind her back. “Friendship. And in the end, he delivered all of them - and then laughed in my face as he took them all away.”
Gideon’s voice faltered. “You - your journal said Bill Cipher was a true friend an’ offered ya the key to unlimited knowledge an’ power!” His tone was dark, furious, as he went on, “You listen to me, Stanford Pines, I’ve been underestimated by reason of my size and my age before, kept from what’s mine by rights by people who thought I was too naive and innocent to handle it. D’you know where those people are now?”
“You wanted to know where I’ve been, these last thirty years,” Ford interrupted, speaking up a little over Gideon’s burgeoning tirade. “Well, I’ve been trapped on the other side of a portal of my own creation, cut off from the world I know, set adrift in an infinite number of worlds. I’ve watched my best friend turn from a brilliant, promising engineer into a gibbering wreck, more animal than man, from abuse of his own memory-erasing invention, trying to forget the things he saw on the other side of this blasted portal. I’ve been betrayed and humiliated by someone I thought was my friend, someone I trusted, someone who made me enormous, grandiose promises that he never intended to keep. All because I was foolish enough, wanted what he was promising badly enough, to trust Bill.”
She stopped, finally turning to look Gideon in the eye. His expression was unreadable, caught halfway between guilt and defiance, and Ford had to take a deep breath and let it out slow before she could go on.
“Bill Cipher took everything from me,” she said, low. “I am far from the first person he’s ever done this to. And unless I can stop him, here, now, I won’t be the last.”
Gideon didn’t say anything. His face had turned a curious shade of red, and he seemed to be struggling to put words together.
Ford turned back to the portal one last time, gazing up at the ruined monument to her folly. Its hollow centre stared back, like a single dead eye in the centre of its triangular body, and Ford couldn’t suppress a small shiver.
“Come on,” she said, turning on one heel to put her back to the portal and starting to walk towards the elevator, feeling the empty gaze of the portal cold on her back. “There’s a lot of work to be done, and I’m not leaving you alone down here.”
She glanced back over her shoulder once, to make sure that Gideon was following. He seemed somehow subdued, some of his smugness worn away. Ford couldn’t say that she was sorry.
“And don’t call me Stanford,” she said, shortly, stepping into the elevator.
...
Gideon didn’t hang around Ford once they made it back to the main floor, hurrying off towards the stairs with some mumbled, half-formed excuse. Ford was more than willing to let him go.
“Ugh. I hope that little creep wasn’t bothering you,” Dipper said, looking up at Ford as she stopped at the edge of the graph-paper map they’d made of Bill’s new world. It was filled almost to the edges, now, with bright crayon and marker sketches of various monsters and threats, large, looping handwriting and small, cramped lettering spelling out the dangers of various patches of terrain. Someone - probably Mabel - had drawn little smiley faces on all of the monsters.
“No,” Ford said, after some consideration, lowering herself to sit beside where Dipper was lying, flat on his stomach, studying the map around the triangular prism that was standing in for the Fearamid. More of the map was blank, here, but Ford knew better than to assume that meant it was less dangerous. “I think we had a good talk.”
“Okay. Well, if he starts getting weird, just let me know. Me and Mabel have experience dealing with Gideon, we’ll take care of him.” Dipper looked up from the line he was penciling onto the map, taking in Ford’s expression with a worried look. “Hey, are you okay? Look, don’t listen to anything he said. Gideon’s a little weasel, he’ll say whatever he thinks will get to you if he thinks you’ve got something he wants.”
Ford managed a smile. “I think I’ve got quite enough experience in dealing with that kind of individual. No, I’m more concerned about him than about anything he said. He seemed quite thoroughly convinced that Bill Cipher would be a powerful and desirable ally.” She couldn’t stop herself from grimacing.
Dipper shot a dark look in the direction of the stairs. “That’s what I’m worried about.”
It worried Ford, too, a nameless nagging unease that settled in the back of her mind, but she tried to push it down. Her little foray into teaching object lessons had cost her enough time already. There were more important matters at hand.
As if to illustrate the point, Mabel came charging down the stairs, a brightly-coloured bundle gathered in both her arms. She skidded to a halt just inside the living room door, breathing hard, Candy and Grenda coming up behind her.
“Grauntie Ford!” Mabel complained, pushing her way past a unicorn who gave an indignant sniff and a little shudder. Ford didn’t miss the way the unicorn watched warily as the girls passed by, or the stink-eye it got from Candy and the not-at-all-subtle way Grenda flexed her biceps. “Do we have enough information yet? Can we please do something? It looks like it’s just getting worse out there the longer we wait, and - what if - what if we wait too long and Grunkle Stan -”
She stopped, biting her lower lip and looking down at the floor.
Ford felt as though she’d swallowed a chunk of iceberg.
“You’re right,” she said, looking from Mabel to Dipper and back again. “We’ve gathered more than enough information here, now we need to put it to use.”
“Okay.” Mabel plopped herself down to sit beside Dipper, setting her bundle down beside her. “Please tell me you two nerds have come up with a plan.”
Dipper tapped his pencil against the map, staring at the line he’d drawn. “I was trying to chart the safest route between Bill’s monsters, but -” He sighed, turning his pencil over to furiously erase the ending of the line. “I don’t think there is one. Bill’s really gone to town out there.”
Ford frowned down at the route Dipper had charted. He was right, it was far less than ideal, and if they encountered even half of the obstacles on the way, they would be worn out and practically defeated before they even reached the Fearamid. But, given the state of the rest of the map, she couldn’t say she could see any better options. And that was even without accounting for Bill’s ‘friends’, who no doubt were roaming the carnage outside right now, just waiting to hunt them down...
“I wonder if Fiddleford would be willing to volunteer his monsterbot for transport,” Ford mused aloud, remembering how the thing had roared up the drive. “Perhaps it would camouflage us from the lesser creatures of the Nightmare Realm enough that we might only have to fight Bill’s henchmaniacs -”
“Yeah, but then when we do have to fight, we won’t see it coming,” Dipper said, tapping the eraser of his pencil against his lower lip. “I’ve been inside that ‘bot, the visibility is...not great. And - I don’t think it’s really built to hold up against superpowered nightmare monsters from another dimension.”
They were both quiet for a moment, staring at the map.
“Okay, well, if you two don’t have any ideas, why don’t we ask everybody else?” Mabel said, rolling up her bundle into her arms again. Ford was tempted to ask what it was, but somehow it really didn’t seem to be the time. “And I bet they all really want to help, too, they just don’t know how yet!”
“That’s an admirable idea, Mabel, but...” Ford shook her head. “We can’t ask that of anyone. They came to us as refugees, and we offered them a safe place to stay. We can’t expect them to go back out there, into the throes of Weirdmageddon, to help fix a mess that we - that I, a complete stranger, made.”
“Noooo,” Mabel admitted, leaning back with a glance down at the bundle in her arms, “but I bet they would!”
Dipper glanced up from the map, meeting Mabel’s eyes, before he looked over at Ford, pushing himself up to a sitting position. “Mabel’s right. All these people had Bill take something away from them, not just you. I think they all understand what this is about.”
“Yeah!” Mabel chimed in. “And even if they wouldn’t do it just because you asked, I bet they’d do it to save Grunkle Stan!”
“Wh-” Ford started, but before she could voice any of her objections (this was ridiculous, Stanley was a con man, he’d surely flim-flammed at least half and probably more like ninety percent of the people in this room, not to mention lied to the entire town about who he was for thirty long years!), Grenda interrupted.
“Yeah! Mr. Pines is a town legend!”
“Stan Pines?” a voice piped up from somewhere behind the snoring manotaur who’d taken over the couch. “I can’t imagine this town without him!”
“If it weren’t for the Mystery Shack, Gravity Falls’ economy would’ve collapsed when the logging crisis hit,” a burly man said, behind Ford, making her spin. He crossed his arms, scowling in a way that Ford took to be more a default facial expression than an actual expression of distaste.
“I can’t count the number of times he’s turned nosey paranormal researchers off our scent,” the unicorn added, in a high, fluting voice that somehow sounded like cough syrup tasted. “There’s a whole exhibit in the Shack devoted to making unicorn sightings in Gravity Falls look fake. Or there was, until a selfish little girl’s pig ate it down to the wire frame.” The unicorn leveled a vicious glare at Mabel, who stuck out her tongue at it.
“It just isn’t a day at the diner without Stan comin’ in for coffee,” a woman with a silver bouffant agreed, nodding so hard that the drooping lid of her left eye flapped a little. “And he’s such a funny guy!”
“When he found out I never got to play catch with my dad growing up, he made it a habit that every time he came to the grocery store, he’d ask me to toss him a dozen eggs,” a reedy-looking man piped up. “Of course, he acted like he was doing it to show off his dexterity and sleight of hand, but he always has been crotchety like that.” His fond smile dipped into a frown. “Is he in trouble?”
Ford looked at Dipper, then at Mabel.
“Actually, yes, he is,” she admitted, feeling the press of eyes on her. “Stanley went missing earlier today, and - we believe that Bill may have had a hand in his disappearance.”
The reaction around the room was instantaneous. People and creatures Ford would never have expected to have the slightest concern about Stanley or his well-being burst into a buzz of worried and excited chatter, voices rising in horror over the hum.
“Well, that won’t do,” the silver-haired woman with the drooping eyelid said, at last, apparently summing up everyone’s feelings on the matter. “How d’we help?”
“That’s what we’re trying to figure out,” Ford muttered, turning back to the map. “But whatever it is - in order to bring Stanley safely home, we need to defeat Bill Cipher for good.”
The living room went deathly quiet.
“Well, that’s nice, but...” a small voice said, from somewhere near the back of the room. “Aren’t we safe behind this barrier?”
Mabel frowned. And then - to Ford’s surprise and horror - she grabbed her bundle and clambered up to stand on the back of the armchair, wobbling precariously for a moment before she found her balance.
“Okay, people, listen up!” Mabel shouted, making Ford jump. Ford thought she tried to clap her hands, but the bundle in her arms got in the way. “That stupid three-sided jerkface smashed up your town, turned a bunch of people into stone, and took Grunkle Stan. Are we just gonna take that lying down?”
There was a smattering of murmurs from around the room, but for the most part, everyone seemed as surprised by Mabel’s sudden outburst as Ford had been.
Mabel crossed her arms as best she could around the bundle she was carrying, tapping one foot on the chair’s back. “I said are we just gonna take that lying down?”
This time, the murmurs resolved into a few clear ‘no’s.
“That’s right!” Mabel yelled. “Are we going to sit back and eat brown meat and watch TV while some talking trigonometry takes over our world?” When this was met with a slightly more enthusiastic halfhearted mumble, she plunged forward. “Okay, well, maybe you are, but I’m not! That thing has my grunkle, and I’m not giving up until he’s back and we’re all safe!”
This time, the mumble was actually starting to turn into a cheer.
Dipper shot to his feet, nudging aside a gnome to climb up on the dinosaur skull that served as an end table beside the armchair. “Mabel’s right! Look, I understand that this is scary, and it’s going to be difficult - but if we all work together, we might have a chance! And isn’t it better to try than just to stay hidden here until the brown meat runs out and we start turning on each other?”
“Dipper,” Mabel hissed. “Getting kind of dark, not exactly helping...”
“Right!” Dipper said, puffing out his chest and resting one foot on the stack of magazines balanced on the crown of the skull. He faltered, though, his posture shifting into something a little more relaxed, a little more natural, as he met Ford’s eyes.
“One of the kindest, bravest people I know taught me that even when something looks impossible, you only really lose all chance when you give up,” he said, his soft voice ringing loud in the rapt silence. “Grunkle Stan showed me that.” He cleared his throat, thumping a fist against his chest, clearly trying to get his voice to sound less choked.
Mabel nodded. “Grunkle Stan wouldn’t give up on the people who matter to him. And that’s the only reason we’re all here right now. Because he didn’t give up on us.” She pumped a fist in the air. “So I’m not gonna give up on him! Who’s with me?”
This time, the cheer was less hesitant, more certain and solid. Mabel beamed. “Right! We’re gonna get our town back! We’re gonna get our families back! We’re gonna kick Bill Cipher’s pointy butt right back to where he came from!” She paused, looking out over the crowd. She definitely had their attention now, Ford realised, looking around. Every face was turned towards Mabel, and there was - something in the air, something a little bit charged, like the slow build of static electricity as a thunderstorm rolled across the sky. The quiet felt heavy, loaded, waiting.
“All right!” Mabel cheered, unfurling the bundle of fabric she’d been holding to reveal a banner with Stan’s smiling face emblazoned across it in fabric puff paint and appliqué, along with the legend STAN SAVIOUR SQUAD. Ford caught herself wondering how long it had taken Mabel to make. “Then let’s go rescue Grunkle Stan!”