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Everything was fine.
The Shack was almost back to its former sort-of-glory, thanks to the dedicated and boisterous efforts of pretty much the entire town. Grunkle Stan had recovered most of his memory, and seemed certain to regain the rest with a little more time. Most of the scrapes had scabbed over and the bruises yellowed and faded away, and even Grunkle Ford's burns were healing nicely. It was a warm and beautiful late summer afternoon and birds were singing and the world was healing.
Everything was fine.
Mabel sat in the grass, not caring that her skirt and shoes were getting muddy, and skipped a stone across the surface of the little pond she'd found hidden away in the woods. She watched as it skipped one-two-three times before it disappeared into the murky water, and felt absolutely terrible.
Everything was fine except it hadn't been fine when she saw all her friends imprisoned in screaming images at the snap of a finger, when she and Dipper were running down a corridor with a howling, furious demon hot on their heels, when she was staring into that vast red eye and watching the symbols sliding back and forth like a demented slot machine, waiting to know whether she or her brother would die first. It hadn't been fine when Stan was kneeling on the floor and Ford had slowly raised the memory gun in trembling hands and she had realized all in a great terrible rush what he was about to do. It hadn't been fine when she had run to Stan in the meadow, so sure that everything was alright now, only to see the blank, empty look in his eyes and realize that he no longer knew her.
It wasn't fine. It wasn't fine when she heard Dipper crying in his sleep, when he woke up in the middle of the night with a yell. It wasn't fine when she saw Ford wince as he moved, or run a hand over his wrists when he thought no one was looking. It wasn't fine when Stan hesitated over some behavior that should have been familiar, or gave her that bemused, I'm-sorry-I'm-trying-my-best smile that didn't belong on his face at all.
It wasn't fine but everyone was acting like it was, like it was all over and done with and they were all better now only she didn't feel better. She felt awful and twisted-up inside and she didn't know how to be happy and bright again. She didn't know if she ever would be.
There was a big work party going on to finish up the Shack, with food and soda and loud incoherent music for everyone, and she should have been there, should have been enjoying it, cheering everyone on, eating sheet cake icing and singing at the top of her lungs and generally being the life of the party. That was how things were supposed to go. That was how she was supposed to be. And she had tried, she really had, but every forced smile and half-hearted stab at a piece of food made her feel like she was falling apart, hairline fractures spreading farther and farther across her surface like an old china doll, until she was knew that one more crack would make her shatter into a million pieces.
She hadn't meant to run this deep into the woods. She hadn't meant to run away at all. She'd just had to get away.
She didn't even know where she was, really. She hadn't been paying attention to where she was going, until she looked up and realized she had wandered into some patch of the woods she hadn't seen before. The only identifying marks were a small pond and a few old rocks jutting up out of the grass. It looked more or less like any other part of the woods, beautiful, sunlit, meaningless.
Given the nature of the woods in question, of course, there was probably some ancient secret or hidden treasure waiting to be uncovered in that very spot. Maybe the muddy little cattail-flooded pond was actually a magic pond, and if she threw enough stones into it everything would go back to being alright, properly alright, like it had been before the wood had ended.
She threw another stone into the pond. It skipped once before sinking with a sad gurgle.
The worst thing, the thing she couldn't tell anyone, the thing burning a cold hole in her chest, was that it was all her fault.
She hadn't really remembered, at first. Her memories of being in the bubble were all strange and sticky and unclear, like someone had pulled them out and shuffled them around and messed with all the filters. It had been a lot like a dream, timeless and hazy, where the strangest things made perfect sense, and she had no idea how it had all started. At some point she hadn't been in the bubble, and then at some point she was, and the space between those two points didn't seem to properly exist.
But she'd worked it out, slowly, in bits and pieces in the dead of night, in quiet moments of aftermath, crawling pace by pace to the terrible but inevitable conclusion: she had given the rift to Bill. He had been able to enter their world, to take over, to do all of the terrible things that he did, because of her. Because she had been scared of middle school. Because she had wanted her perfect summer to last a little longer.
Her fault, her fault, her fault: the burns and the blank eyes and the crying in the night. She hadn’t told anyone. She couldn’t. It sat in her throat like she’d swallowed a rock, like something choking her that she couldn’t cough loose, and every time she saw some evidence of the terrible days behind them it dug into her and hurt a little more.
She couldn't get away from it.
Angrily, she picked up another rock and threw it, giving it a good sharp twirl that send it skipping all the way across the pond, and dropped her head onto her knees, waiting for the splash.
It didn't come.
“Ow!”
Mabel jerked her head up in surprise, expecting to see one of the forest denizens-a gnome or a Manotaur or something-and already feeling guilty. Careless, all over again-even sitting on her own in the middle of the woods she made mistakes and they hurt people-
It wasn't a gnome or a Manotaur or any of the other things she'd been imagining. It was a unicorn.
For a moment she just stared at it, forgetting everything else. It was beautiful, graceful and shining in the late afternoon sun, and looking at it made her feel a lot like she had when she'd first seen Celestabellabethabelle: sort of awestruck and overwhelmed and guilty for being so plain and grimy and ordinary compared to that. And she'd hit it. With a rock. She'd beaned a unicorn with a rock.
“Do you mind?” the unicorn said, in that weird way unicorns seemed to talk through their horns. “I'm trying to get a drink here.”
Mabel abruptly remembered that unicorns were actually jerks.
“Go away!” she yelled at it, balling her fists into her sweater, sharp, brittle anger washing away her guilt. Stupid unicorn probably deserved to be hit in the head with a rock anyway.
“Oh, that's nice,” the unicorn said. The voice wasn't quite what Mabel would have expected; it was feminine, but not at all like Celestabellabethabelle's high, flouncy whine. This unicorn sounded...grumpy, and low, and a little gritty and a lot older. “This is your pond, is it? You get to decide who comes and who goes?”
“I said go away!” Mabel bawled back at it. “Leave me alone!”
“I was leaving you alone,” the unicorn snapped. “Minding my own business, me, not bothering nobody. You're the one who threw a rock at me.”
“I'll throw another one if you don't leave me alone!” Mabel yelled, barely even aware of what she was saying; all the anger and guilt and awfulness was racing on ahead of her like an out of control roller coaster and all she could do was try to hang on. “I'm not afraid of you! I know what unicorns are really like! You're all...all...selfish and judgy and you lie to people and make them feel bad!”
The unicorn slowly raised her head from the water she'd been lapping at.
“Really,” she said slowly. “And what, pray tell, are you basing this comprehensive value judgment on?”
Mabel scratched at the dirt with a rock. “I've met unicorns before,” she mumbled.
“Have you,” the unicorn said. “My memory must be going. I don't remember ever meeting you at all.”
“Well...no...I haven't met you,” Mabel admitted. “But...but I've met other unicorns. And my Grunkle Ford has met a bunch too,” she added, rallying a little, “and he said they were all jerks, and he's super smart and knows what he's talking about.”
“Ah. I see. So, having met some members of my species, and knowing someone else who claims to have met some members of my species, you feel confident in your assertion that we all share exactly the same qualities,” the unicorn said. “Sound logic.”
Mabel felt her stomach twist around. For a moment it was like she was back in the glade and feeling lower and lower as a voice from on high trumpeted that she was not pure of heart! But it had been a trick that time. She didn't want to get tricked ever again.
“You're just trying to...to confuse me with your...words,” she said.
“Yes. Definitely,” the unicorn said, sounding dryer than ever. “Getting hit with a rock and called a jerk has all been part of my master plan to make you feel bad. You've figured me out. Bravo.”
She lowered her head and went back to drinking.
Mabel stared across the pond and she wanted to be brave and strong and good and clever, like the Mabel who punched monsters and stood up to mean jerks from any species and made her family proud. She wanted to tell that unicorn what was what and back it up with a good left hook if it tried to argue. She wanted it so hard her fingers dug into the dirt like she might be able to hold onto it, get a grip on her better self before it could slip away, but the horribleness was bubbling up through her like a volcano, like an untended kettle getting ready to scream, and it was all drowning her out.
She leaned her head against her knees and scrunched her face up tight and felt like the world was ending all over again.
After a long, long moment she heard a soft, delicate plish splish plish sound, like hooves stepping daintily through mud.
“...Alright, kid,” the gruff voice said from somewhere above her. “What's eating you?”
Mabel screwed herself up even tighter and willed the unicorn to just go away already. “Nothing,” she mumbled.
“Yeah, right,” the unicorn said. “I'm not so near-sighted I can't spot a blind funk when it's right in front of me. Or are you going to tell me that glowering at a pond and chucking rocks around is how you normally express exuberant happiness?”
Mabel scowled into her skirt. “Why do you care?”
“I'm sure I don't know,” the unicorn said witheringly. “But apparently I do care, so you might as well take advantage of the opportunity.”
Mabel peeked up from her knees to glance at the unicorn. This one was white, shading to silver, with a silvery-blue mane that ran wild halfway down her back. Up close she was still graceful and pretty, but not quite as breathtakingly beautiful as she had seemed from a distance. More...normal, more like an actual creature and not a painting come to life. At the least, Mabel could see that she wasn't nearly as well groomed and coiffed as Celestabellabethabelle; there were burrs in her mane, spots of dirt and mud on her coat, and the edges of her hooves were rough and worn.
For a moment the two of them just looked at each other, and then Mabel burst into tears.
She'd never cried so hard in her life, not even when she was seven and the family cat had died, not even when she was ten and a girl at school at pushed her down and stolen her favorite backpack, not even when when she was twelve and her brother was going away forever. It felt like everything she'd kept pressurized inside her for the past few days was rushing out in a torrent so powerful she could barely even breathe. She cried so hard it hurt.
There was a shifting of silver in the corner of her eye as the unicorn lowered herself onto the grass next to Mabel. She didn't say anything, not even when Mabel huddled against her and got tears and snot on the lovely white coat, just lay there and let Mabel cry until she was finally spent.
For a while, then, there was just quiet, nothing but the sound of the woods gently stirring around them, and Mabel sniffling and hiccuping to herself.
“...'m sorry,” she said eventually.
“Apology accepted,” the unicorn said calmly. “But don't expect me to believe all that was over a mis-aimed rock.”
“...'m sorry I called you a jerk.”
“That's...not really what I meant,” the unicorn said. “But I'll accept that one too, if you want. I take it you've had an...unpleasant interaction with unicorns before?”
“Yeah,” Mabel mumbled. “It ended in a lot of punching.”
“Really? From who?”
“Me.” Mabel sniffled and wiped her nose on her sleeve. “And my friends. We had to get some unicorn hair so my uncle could protect our house. So we went to the glade and we met this unicorn called Celestabellabethabelle-”
The unicorn groaned loudly.
“-and she kept saying I wasn't pure of heart, and I was trying really, really hard to be better, but, um...things happened, and then, and then she admitted that it was all just a con anyway. That unicorns just told people that they weren't pure of heart so they didn't have to give away their hair. And she laughed at me. So I punched her.”
“About time someone did,” the unicorn muttered. “I've half a mind to go around and sort that mare out myself. I knew Celestabella was a stuck-up twit, but torturing kids with that business is a new low.”
Mabel shifted uncomfortably. “I...guess I just thought all unicorns were like that. I mean, she said-”
“Of course she did,” the unicorn muttered. “That's the sort of thing she would say, isn't it? Much easier to claim that everyone's like that than to admit that she's just being a jerk all on her lonesome.”
Come to think of it, that sounded a lot like some humans Mabel knew.
“I'm sorry,” she said again.
“Eh,” the unicorn said. “I admit, we have some bad representatives. There aren't a lot of us, so it's a lot easier for a few to speak for the lot. Especially if they're attention hogs, like some people I could name.”
“Is that why you're out here and not in the glade?” Mabel said curiously. “Because you don't like the other unicorns?”
The unicorn twitched an ear, which Mabel thought might have been something like a shrug. “Not really. The company can get a bit grating in the glade, to be sure, but it's not all bad by any stretch. I just tend to prefer my own. And I like to get out when I can, get some fresh air. Too many rainbows give me a headache.”
“Oh,” Mabel said.
“But enough about me. How about you tell me why you're out here in the woods all on your lonesome, crying up a storm?”
She didn't want to. Once upon a time Mabel had been convinced she was pure of heart; now, she knew that if this unicorn told her that she had done bad things, it would not be a lie. But the unicorn was waiting, patient as an old tree, and Mabel couldn't stand the rock in her throat any longer. She had to tell someone.
“I did something bad,” she said whispered at last. “Really, really bad.”
“Really,” the unicorn said, sounding faintly amused, but not unkind. “What heinous crime did you commit?”
Mabel swallowed hard. “I...think I kinda...caused the end of the world.”
There was a long pause.
“Well...okay,” the unicorn said eventually. “I can't say I was expecting that one. You wanna give me some context here?”
So Mabel told her.
About staying in Gravity Falls with her twin brother and her great-uncle and having great adventures except they got scary sometimes and there was this freaky one-eyed triangle demon that kept pestering them, only at some point he wasn't a pest anymore, he was terrible and threatening and he tricked her brother, and then he tricked her, and she had given him something she shouldn't have because she thought it would make things better but instead it had made everything much, much worse, and lots of people had gotten hurt and Grunkle Stan had lost his memory, had lost himself, all because she had thought, I just want summer to last a little bit longer, had thought, this is just some dumb science thing of Dipper's, had thought, it won't hurt anything.
It took quite a while.
“...and now everyone keeps acting like everything's okay but it's not okay, it's my fault and they don't know it's my fault and I can't tell them but they're gonna find out eventually and then everyone's gonna hate me and I'm not a good person!”
This last came out a lot louder than she had really intended, and startled a few birds.
“...I thought I was,” she said, after a minute. “I thought I was but...I think Celestabellabethabelle might have been right after all. I think I am a bad person.”
The unicorn sighed-a big, snorty, horsey sigh. “Hoo boy. That's a big 'un, alright. Hmm. Hmm. You got anything to eat?”
Mabel blinked, torn out of her reverie with this abrupt comment. “Um. I...have half a bag of gummy koalas.”
“Give 'em here.”
Bemused, Mabel pulled out the wadded-up bag and shook the contents onto the grass. The unicorn nosed around for a moment and selected a green one.
“Mmm. Sugar. Good. Now, then.” The unicorn looked up at Mabel sternly. “First thing, we're going to discard the notion of Celestabellawhatsherface being right about anything, on general principle.”
That made Mabel smile a little despite herself.
“Second.” The unicorn picked up a couple more gummis and mouthed over them thoughtfully. “You didn't know what was going to happen when you handed that thing over, did you?”
“Well...no,” Mabel said.
“So it's a bit rich to say you caused the end of the world. Sounds to me like it was this Bill character who was responsible.”
“Yeah, but...but...” Mabel twisted a hand around in the damp grass, pulling up a few stalks in agitation. “But I still shouldn't have given it to him. I mean, I keep thinking about what would have happened if he had done what he said he would and...I don't think that would have been a good thing. Not really.”
Not after the bubble.
“Well, no,” the unicorn admitted. “Probably not.”
“So...so I still did something really bad,” Mabel said.
The unicorn swished her tail through the grass. “You did something you shouldn't have done, yes,” she said. “There's no getting around that.”
Mabel looked down at the mud and felt her eyes start to swim with tears all over again.
“But everyone does,” the unicorn said. “Everyone screws up sometimes. We're none of us perfect-not even unicorns, and don't let anyone tell you otherwise.”
Mabel looked up. The unicorn looked back at her, calm and still.
“But...doesn't that make me a bad person?” she said.
The unicorn sighed. “Kid, I'm going to level with you on something. It's a hard truth, but it is true. You ready for this?”
Mabel wrapped her arms around her knees and nodded.
“People like Celestabella, they like to sell you on this idea that there are Good People and Bad People,” the unicorn said. “That goodness is inherent somehow. Ain't so. No such thing.”
Mabel frowned. “That's not true! There are good people, I know that- ”
“Good grief, I'm not saying everyone is terrible,” the unicorn said, rolling her eyes. “I'm talking about this whole pure of heart business.”
“I mean...I know that's baloney,” Mabel said. “I know Celestabella was lying. She said herself.”
The unicorn sighed. “Yeah. I think that might be the problem.”
She nosed through the grass for more gummies, tail twitching thoughtfully. “Look. I'm guessing you believed in this whole 'pure of heart' thing even before you met Celestabella. If you didn't think you were a Good Person, capital letters, would you have been so upset when she told you that you weren't?”
...I'm probably the most pure-of-heart person in this room!
Mabel sighed. “Yeah,” she said. “I guess.”
“And then you found out that she was lying, and she was a jerk, so you must have been a Good Person all along, right? You were in the right and she wasn't, so it didn't matter much what she said.”
Mabel tugged on her skirt and thought about this. “Well...”
“Which, I'm not saying she was right,” the unicorn went on. “But...sometimes knowing that someone else is wrong can stop you from seeing that you're also wrong. It's a tricky thing. My point is, I'm guessing that whole encounter didn't do a lot to convince you that you weren't fundamentally a Good Person, or that Good People didn't exist. It just convinced you that unicorns weren't any good at telling who was and who wasn't. And that may have done you more of a disservice in the long run.”
“So...so I'm not a good person after all, then,” Mabel said, feeling her heart sink down somewhere into her stomach.
“No, that's not what I'm saying,” the unicorn said irritably. “What I'm saying is that being good...it's not a quality that you just have. It's not some shiny thing in you, or anyone else. Neither is being bad, for that matter. Being a good person is something that you do. And here's the hard part: it's something that you have to keep doing. It's not a prize that you win if you get enough points. It's...like a marathon that you have to keep running, every day, and there's no finish line. And sometimes you're going to run really well and cover a lot of ground, and sometimes you're going to trip and plant your face in the dirt. That's okay. The important thing is that you keep going.”
Mabel frowned this over. “So...so I have to keep doing good deeds? Like every day?”
The unicorn flicked her ears. “Not exactly. I mean, good deeds are, well, good. Generally speaking. But it's not about doing things just to be good. It's more of a mindset. Just...when you do things, think about why you're doing them, and what impact it'll have. Be good to the people around you. Give back what you receive. And when you make mistakes-because you will-learn from them. Own up to them. Do what you can to fix them. And then move on. That's the worst part of this whole stupid pure-of-heart idea. If you define yourself as a Good Person, when you do eventually slip up, well, one of two things can happen. Either it completely breaks you, because you don't know how to think of yourself as anything but a Good Person, or, worse, you get to thinking that because you're a Good Person, anything you do is automatically good. Which is how crusades get started, but that's a whole other topic. Point is, it doesn't help anyone.”
“That...that doesn't sound so hard.”
“It's not, by and large. Except when it is. Mostly, you just have to do what you can with what you have. Some days that might be giving to charity and rescuing kittens from trees and some days it might be all you can do to not haul off and punch anyone who doesn't deserve it. It'll come and go. Just do your best. Okay?”
“Okay.”
The unicorn hunted around for more gummis. “Now, for what it's worth,” she said, “I'd say you're doing pretty well. You made a mistake, alright, but only because you were in a vulnerable spot and someone took advantage of it. After all, you figured out what was wrong with that decision. You owned up to it. A lot of people wouldn't have ever made it that far, you know. So chin up, girl. Don't let one thing throw you off the track for good. After all, the world may have ended for a while, but it seems to have come back just fine.”
Mabel nodded slowly.
For the first time in several days, the rock in her throat seemed to ease up and shrink away a little.
“I daresay it'd do you some good to talk about this with someone else, though,” the unicorn said. “I know it hurts to open up sometimes, but it'll hurt more in the long run if you don't. Otherwise, this thing is just going to sit on your chest and make you miserable forever, and that won't fix anything.”
It hurt just to think about, but deep down Mabel had to admit that the unicorn was right. She couldn't imagine keeping this secret much longer. It felt like something was eating her up from the inside.
“Okay,” she said. “I will. But can I...um...ask a favor?”
“You can ask,” the unicorn said. “I may not grant.”
“Can I have some of your hair?”
The unicorn cocked her head to one side and eyed Mabel thoughtfully. “Well, that depends. Are you a girl of pure and perfect heart?”
Mabel hesitated. “No?”
“What are you?”
“I'm...I'm a person trying really really hard to be good but sometimes I make mistakes and I'm not perfect but I'm going to pick myself up again and keep trying.”
“In that case,” the unicorn said, bowing her head, “I grant you a lock of my mane. Use it well.”
Mabel pulled out the penknife Grunkle Stan had given her and gently began to saw off a lock of the silvery mane.
“Though I confess, I don't really see the appeal,” the unicorn went on. “It's just hair. But perhaps that's because I'm attached to it. The novelty's worn off a bit. What are you going to do with that, anyway?”
“I'm going to knit it into a sweater,” Mabel said, tucking the hair carefully into her pocket. “Or...no, a scarf, I think. So I won't outgrow it. I can keep it and remember.”
“Huh,” the unicorn said. “That's a new one. I like that.”
“A girl in a movie I really like did that,” Mabel said. “Well, sorta. She went to a really strange place and it was hard at first and she had to do some really scary things but it got better. And in the end she had to leave but first some of the friends that she made wove her a new hairband to remember them by. Only I don't think any of my friends know how to knit so I'll have to do it myself.”
“Mabel!”
Mabel jumped. That was Dipper's voice.
“Sounds like you're wanted,” the unicorn said.
“I'd better go.” Mabel said, and then, on sudden impulse, threw her arms around the unicorn's neck.
“Thank you,” she whispered into the soft, sweet-smelling mane.
The unicorn nuzzled her gently. “Oh...go on. Get on with you. Your family's waiting.”
Mabel stood up, wiping grass off her knees, and, waving hard all the way, ran off in the direction of her brother's voice.
As she got closer she heard other voices calling her name as well: Wendy, it sounded like, and Grunkle Ford. She ran harder, stomach fluttering as she realized that they all sounded worried. They must have noticed she was gone and come looking for her.
In the end she almost ran into Dipper, who was coming up the path ahead of the other two. They both skidded to a halt, kicking up leaves.
“Mabel!” Dipper gasped. He was out of breath. “Where have you been? We were all worried!”
Mabel twisted her hands, feeling guilty all over again. “Is...is everyone looking for me?”
“No, just me and Wendy and Ford right now. We-we didn't want to make a big fuss about it at first. Where'd you go? Are you alright? Did something happen?”
“No...well...not exactly.”
“Mabel, thank heaven.” Ford came jogging up the path, gasping a little, one hand held gingerly to his side. “You're okay.”
“Maybe don't go wandering off in the monster-filled woods without telling anyone right after the apocalypse,” Wendy said, managing close approximation of her usual careless tone, but not quite so close that Mabel couldn't tell that she was also relieved. “Especially when you've got this guy looking out for you.” She jerked a thumb at Ford. “We only just barely convinced him to try looking for you first instead of charging into the woods guns blazing. Literally. Did you know he just carries a gun around? Like, all the time?”
Ford glared at her, but he did look a little bit sheepish.
“I didn't mean to worry anyone,” Mabel said, twisting her hands in her sweater. “I just...”
She'd done it again. Careless. Silly.
Everyone was looking at her.
“Are you okay?” Dipper asked quietly.
The rock was back in her throat and she had thought this would be easier after getting it out the first time, after everything the unicorn had said, but it was still really, really hard.
“Mabel?”
“I have...something I have to tell you guys,” she whispered.
All three of them glanced at each other in bemusement. “What?” Dipper said.
Mabel squeezed her eyes shut and clenched her fists and choked out, “It was all my fault. Everything that happened. I gave Bill the thing he needed.”
Silence.
“You...you what?” Dipper said.
Mabel couldn't look at him. She couldn't look at any of them. “I, I ran out of the house cause I was all upset cause I thought everything was going to be awful and you were going to leave and I took your backpack only I didn't know it was your backpack and then that time traveler guy showed up and he said he could make summer last longer and I just, I just wanted a little more time! And he said he just needed one little thing and it wasn't that important so...so I gave it to him, only it turned out it was actually Bill and he did all the bad stuff with it and it's all my fault and I'm sorry!”
She wadded herself up with her eyes closed tight and waited for the anger, the hatred, the rejection. The how could you, the you horrible person.
Instead she felt a broad hand rest gently on her shoulder and opened her eyes to see Ford kneeling in front of her. He didn't look angry. He looked...sad.
“Mabel,” he said gently. “Bill...tricked people. That was what he did. And he was good at it. He tricked me. He...he tricked a lot of people. It's not your fault.”
“Yeah, I mean, I fell for him,” Dipper said. “And he pretty much spelled out what he was going to do to me!”
“But...but I shouldn't have given your thing away,” Mabel said. “I should have known better.”
Ford shook his head. “I should have told you about the rift. If you'd known what it was, you wouldn't have given it away. But I...I was foolish, and I didn't want to trust anyone, I thought I had to be the hero and do everything myself and...and...and if anyone's to blame for all this, it's me.”
“Hey, I have an idea,” Wendy said. “How about if instead the person actually to blame for all this is the flippin' demon who wanted to end the world.”
“I like that,” Dipper said with a grin. “Let's blame Bill.”
Ford blinked, slowly, like this thought had never occurred to him. “I...yes, it...perhaps it is time to put the blame back on the shoulders where it belongs.”
“He didn't really have shoulders,” Dipper pointed out.
“Metaphorical shoulders,” Ford amended. “The point is...you certainly aren't to blame for what happened, Mabel. You were just in the wrong place at the wrong time. If it hadn't been you, it would have been someone else.”
“Bill was really good at knowing right when the best time was to try and trick you,” Dipper said. “I mean, he waited to get me until I was really desperate and, uh, I'd been awake for a really long time. And he came after you when you were really upset...”
He hesitated and glanced at Grunkle Ford.
“That...is certainly true,” Ford said. “Bill was extremely good at spotting vulnerabilities.”
“Operative word being was,” Wendy pointed out.
“That's right.” Ford smiled a little. It wasn't something Mabel had seen very often, and it changed his whole face. “He's gone. We beat him. We won. Which we would not have done if you hadn't been very clever and stubborn and brave and good. So let's have no more of this, alright?”
Mabel smiled.
“C'mere, squirt.” Wendy hoisted Mabel up onto her shoulders. “We gotta get you back before Stan notices you're gone.”
“You didn't tell him?”
“We didn't want him to worry,” Dipper explained. “And it's really busy back there. I only noticed you were gone cause I went to see if you wanted to help me make some more Punch-Aid and you weren't anywhere.”
“Yeah, it's dangerous enough having one Mr. Pines freakin' out,” Wendy said. “God only knows what would happen if both of 'em thought you might be in danger. Might not be a town left afterward.”
“You're a very impudent young lady, you know that?” Ford grumbled.
Wendy grinned. “So I've been told.”
“But...um...why did you leave?” Dipper asked, looking up at Mabel with those little creases between his eyes that he always got when he was worried. Which was most of the time.
Mabel fiddled with the back of Wendy's cap. “I just...everyone was being so happy and I felt really rotten and I was trying really hard to be all happy and okay but it wasn't working and I...I don't know. I guess I kind of freaked.”
“Oh, Mabel.” Ford reached up and gently took Mabel's hand. His hand dwarfed hers and she thought of the first time she had met him. A whole finger friendlier than normal. “You...you don't have to try and act happy if you don't want to. It's, it's okay to not be okay sometimes.”
“Yeah, everyone feels rotten occasionally,” Wendy said. “Especially right now. Shhhh-shoot, man, you think everyone back at the Shack's making all that noise and using lots of power tools cause they feel really mellow? A lot of that's stress relief. It's like when my dad gets really worked up about something and he goes out and chops a bunch of trees. I mean he does that anyway, but, y'know.”
“You could always come help me and Ford down in the basement,” Dipper said. “We're fixing up the lab. It's quiet down there. Erm- that's okay, isn't it?” he added, glancing at Ford.
“Of course it's okay,” Ford said. “Frankly, we need all the help we can get down there. It's a mess, and I'm not letting Manly Dan anywhere near it-no offense, Wendy.”
“Listen, tell me something I don't know.”
Mabel perked up. “I could help you guys with your science stuff?”
“Absolutely,” Ford said.
“Oh man, there's some really cool stuff down there,” Dipper said. “Um, which I take very seriously,” he added when Ford glanced at him.
At the start of this summer, Mabel would have thought that spending an afternoon sorting out a dusty old science lab full of nerd stuff with her nerd family when there was a big loud party going on right above her would have been some kind of horrible ironic hell.
Right now it sounded like heaven.
“Oh!” she said, realizing something. “Grunkle Ford, I know something you can add to your journals!”
Ford blinked. “Oh?”
“Yeah! It turns out there are nice unicorns!”
“What,” Ford said flatly.
“Get out,” Wendy said. “When did this happen?”
“Just now! I met one in the woods! She was old and grumpy and she ate all my gummy koalas but she was nice actually even though I accidentally hit her with a rock and she talked to me and then she even gave me some of her hair and I'm going to put it in a scarf!”
“Wow,” Dipper said. “Sounds kind of like Grunkle Stan.”
Ford very nearly stopped walking altogether. “What a horrible mental image.”
Mabel giggled. “It's going to be my summer memory scarf. I want to put things in it from all my friends.”
“Uh, you don't mean like, more hair, do you?” Wendy said. “Because that would be kinda weird.”
“Noooo,” Mabel said. “Just like...yarn and things. Maybe I could ask around and get everyone to pick a color of yarn.”
“That sounds rather nice,” Ford said. “I like red.”
“Dibs on green,” Wendy said.
“I call blue,” Dipper added.
“You guys do know that there are like, multiple shades of color, right?” Mabel said. “We can have different reds and greens and blues.”
“Is there a flannel shade?” Wendy asked hopefully.
“This is going to be a really interesting scarf,” Dipper muttered.
“It'll be beautiful,” Mabel said, and smiled.
But there was still one person left to tell.
Later, when the work party had broken up and everyone had gone home, leaving the Pines and one adopted honorary Pines alone in their mostly reconstructed house, Mabel sat on the arm of Grunkle Stan's chair and squirmed.
They'd gone through every scrapbook, every ancient video reel, everything concrete they could get their hands on that might jog Stan's memory. The twins had recounted every story from the course of the summer, from the biggest adventures to the tiniest anecdotes. Soos had described, at more length than was possibly strictly necessary, everything he could recall from the years that he had known Stan-if it was embellished a bit here and there, no one had said anything.
Once, Ford and Stan had gone into the kitchen and talked quietly until well after the twins had gone to bed; when they come downstairs the next morning, they found both men asleep at the table, with an empty bottle sitting between them. Dipper and Mabel had glanced at each other, fixed their bowls of cereal as quietly as possible, and crept out again without a word.
What was left now were things that no one could rediscover for Stan but himself: the things about his time in Gravity Falls that he had never told anyone, the long ten years of silence that now had no witnesses to tell the tale save a small box of keepsakes waiting in Stan's office. Stan didn't talk much about what he thought about all this, what he had remembered or not remembered; he tended to shrug it off and, laugh and steer any inquiries into another topic entirely. No one really asked much anyway.
“It's kind of like those old maps,” Dipper had said one night, as the two of them lay awake in bed talking uncertainly about it. “You know, really old cartographers, when they were making maps and there was some area they didn't know anything about, they would draw a dragon or something there instead. Like, we don't know what's out here, but it's probably really dangerous and you don't want to go there anyway. Here be dragons. Like that.”
Mabel didn't know about really old cartographers one way or the other, but it sounded right to her. Here be dragons. That was how it had felt when they had uncovered the box of fake IDs and started wondering if Stan was really even their great uncle after all: like something terrible jumping out at them from the mist. That was how it had felt when she'd been trying to figure out how Bill had gotten the rift.
For the moment, anyway, there seemed to not be much more the rest of them could do, and by general unspoken agreement it was universally felt that everyone wanted to think about something else for a little while. Dipper had suggested a movie night. This of course had immediately run into a speedbump, as no one could agree on what movie to watch, the end result being that they had decided to take turns. The disparity of tastes meant it was shaping up to be a very interesting marathon.
Dipper and Soos were in the kitchen making a small avalanche of popcorn, and Ford was off somewhere rummaging for a part that he swore would allow him to significantly upgrade the TV, leaving Stan and Mabel alone in the living room for the moment. Stan was going through the stack of movies. Mabel was fidgeting.
She knew she had to get it over with, but somehow it still wasn't any easier the third time.
“Grunkle Stan?” she said at last.
“Yeah?”
“I have to tell you something.”
She told him. It took a while. Stan wasn't entirely clear on how the whole business with the rift worked to begin with; neither was Mabel, really, come to that.
“So?” he said, when she had finally finished.
Mabel stared at him. “So...so it's kind of my fault. Um. That everything happened. That you...”
She didn't want to say it.
“I just...thought you should know,” she mumbled into the collar of her sweater.
“No it ain't,” Stan said calmly, not looking up from the pile of DVD cases.
“But...but... if I hadn't given Bill the thing-”
“There wouldn't have been a rift if I hadn't pushed Ford into that portal in the first place,” Stan said, still sounding inexplicably calm. “And spent thirty years tryin' to bring him back even when he told me not to.”
“But that was a mistake!” Mabel blurted out, horrified. This was not at all how this was supposed to be going. “It...it was an accident! You didn't mean to-”
“And you're saying you did?” Stan said, finally looking up at her.
In the sudden silence, the sound of far too much popcorn popping at once drifted in from the kitchen, along with a few panicked shouts.
Stan got up and shuffled over to the chair Mabel was sitting on. “Look,” he said, dropping into it with a sigh, “you really think I'm gonna hold something like that against you? I mean, look at all the mistakes I've made, and here you all are calling me a hero.”
“You are a hero,” Mabel said firmly.
He gave her a wry look. “Well, you can't keep calling me a hero even though I screwed up a whole lot, and keep beatin' yourself up for screwin' up. They're, uh...what's the thing. Mutually exclusive. Now, me, I'd prefer you went with the first one. It's a lot nicer for everyone.”
Mabel wasn't quite sure what to say to this.
“Anyway, take it from someone who lies to people for a living,” Stan went on. “It's not your fault. It's the other guy's fault for lyin' to you in the first place. And I punched him dead, so. Problem solved.”
To her own surprise, Mabel realized she was starting to cry again. She didn't even really know why, except that she seemed to have too many feelings all of the sudden and they were all overflowing and pouring out of her.
“Aw, c'mere, kiddo,” Stan said, holding out one arm. Mabel leaned against him and let herself be enveloped in a bear hug of the sort only Stan could provide.
“I love you, Grunkle Stan,” she whispered.
“I love you too, sweetie.”
“FOUND IT!” Ford bellowed triumphantly from somewhere deep in the house, at almost exactly the same time that the smoke alarm went off in the kitchen.
Stan rolled his eyes. Mabel giggled.
Maybe everything wasn't fine just yet.
But it was getting better.