Chapter Text
********
Dipper dropped his backpack on the floor of the sub-basement lab. Ford looked up from turning a chunk of log over a glowing, hot disc, using modified timber tongs. "Dipper! Good. You're back. Is it summer again already?"
"No, Grunkle Ford, it's barely the beginning of autumn. I dropped out of high school and came back to study with you."
"Is Mabel upstairs?"
"Mabel's not coming."
"What?"
"She said she didn't want to come."
"Why not?"
"I have no idea."
"Haven't you asked her?"
"Of course!" Dipper flung his arms wide. "She keeps coming up with reasons, but they're dumb ones and obviously not true. Stuff like school structure, and discipline, and other words that sound like teachers put ideas into her head." He folded his arms and kicked at his backpack. "She almost acted as if she was afraid to come to Gravity Falls."
"That's strange," said Ford, as the log melted into streaky beige and black goo. "What could she have to be afraid of?"
"I have no idea." Dipper frowned and shook off his frustration. "What can I help with?"
"Today is melting day! It's a lot of fun, so I'm glad you could join me. Here, let me get you started with melting a few beams of light."
********
The attic was large and silent.
Soos had duct-taped mosquito netting over the most recent hole in the triangular window. It had been accidentally broken—grappling hook, mini golf—repeatedly in Dipper and Mabel's first summer at the Mystery Shack, and again this past summer, after they had graduated from middle school. The window wasn't plain glass any longer. Dipper and Mabel had found a stained glass artist who attended the flea market each week, and he routinely patched their window in whatever hodgepodge of colors he liked. Other than the piece of screen, it hadn't yet been repaired from Mabel's grappling hook incident of the past summer, so clear moonlight shone through the broken spot.
The first few nights, Dipper couldn't get to sleep in his own bed, not when Mabel's was empty. He moved his blanket and pillow over to her bed, where, if he tipped his head back, he could see the moon through the broken place. It made him smile, thinking of Mabel and her trusty grappling hook. He curled up again and fell asleep in the patch of white light.
********
Dipper knew Mabel would call him every evening. He sat on the couch with his books after supper, so he could answer the phone on the end table without moving. He picked up halfway through the first ring.
"That you, Dipdip?"
"It's me. Hey, Mabel."
"How's it going, studying with Grunkle Ford? Is it good?"
"Yeah, it's good." Dipper wiggled to dislodge a heavy book that was hurting his knee. "How are you doing at the old regular school?"
"I dunno. Dad isn't as good as you are at helping me with my homework."
"I can help you over the phone."
"I should just send you my papers, you fill them in and mail them back!"
"I'm not going to do that."
"Did you go over to Gravity Falls High School for their Homecoming?"
"I guess I missed it."
Mabel was quiet for a few seconds. "Nobody asked me to Homecoming."
Dipper's jaw tensed and his fingers clenched on his note-taking pen. "I would have taken you, if I'd stayed in school."
"I know you would have. You've always been my back-up plan. I don't know what to do without you."
"I'm sorry."
"It's okay. I went to the dance anyway. I tried to hang out with some friends, but they paired off with boys."
"Did you dance with anybody?"
"Yeah—no boys asked me, so eventually I started asking girls to dance with me. One of them said yes. Maybe we’ll be friendly at school now. I don't know. The music was too loud, anyway. Middle school dances were more fun."
"Middle school in general was more fun."
"Yeah. I don't know ... I suppose high school will pick up."
"What do you like about it so far?"
"Nothing yet ... but give it time. Mom says it's an adjustment period. But not seeing you at school, for a kind of pick-me-up, to let me know I'm in the right place ..."
Dipper gave the end of his ballpoint pen a few doubtful clicks. "Maybe I should come back."
Mabel let out a long sigh that ended on a little squeak. "Not this semester. I'll be fine. It takes some time adjusting, like Mom said."
"Adjusting, shmadjusting. You should ditch that joint and come up here. I don't understand what good that school is doing you."
"Well, it's not doing me any good yet, but maybe it'll kick in. Then I'll have fun and get good grades. That's what everyone always says: have fun and get good grades! Like you can do both at the same time."
********
The fall winds picked up and rain came in at the taped-on mosquito netting over the attic window. The good-natured stained glass artist who understood that nobody at the Mystery Shack respected nice things came and took the window and repaired it. He helped Soos and Dipper re-set the window in the frame, and made sure it opened and latched smoothly in the middle.
Afterward Dipper went down to the gift shop, where Stan crooked a finger at him. "Dipper, c'mere. I got you something."
Dipper sidled warily toward the counter. "What is it?"
He perked up and approached more readily when Stan thunked a pile of used books onto the counter. "I swiped you a set of the freshman textbooks from Gravity Falls High School. Learn these."
"Uh ... thank you, but ... why? Grunkle Ford is teaching me."
"Ford'll teach you super advanced whatchamaphysics and, I dunno, smartology. I'm sure you'll be terrific at it. Meanwhile, overwhelming evidence points to you not being able to tie your own shoe."
Dipper looked down. He sighed, took the pile of high school textbooks up to the attic and dug in. They were fast reading, with large print. Not enough work to take his mind off of Mabel's absence.
He switched to one of the books Ford had given him. It smelled dusty and the edges of its cover were wrinkled. Some of the pages were stained in various liquid colors, with fingerprints here and there, plus notes in the margins. Dipper tried to decipher the notes, imagined Ford writing them, wondered what had been happening in Ford’s life at the time.
Dipper was half-aware of Stan coming up the stairs, and remained deeply involved in reading when Stan opened the attic bedroom door. "Dipper. I need you to do something about your sister."
"Why, what's she done now?"
Stan put his finger in the middle of Dipper's book and pushed it down, away from his face. "I need you to call her on the phone and make her come and live at the Mystery Shack. You can't leave the kid in sunny California with responsible adults. It's not fair to her."
"Believe me, I had no intention of leaving her there. She was almost packed to go. Mom and Dad had already bought her bus ticket. Waddles kept trying to open the door to his travel cage for the bus."
"So what made her cancel?"
"It was nothing I did. Please don't look at me that way, Grunkle Stan."
"What happened, exactly?"
Dipper sighed and let the book slide onto the bed. "First off, something that Grunkle Ford taught me this past summer made me too good at math. Which meant I got into a big argument in class with the math teacher. He told me to stay after class. So after class, I explained it the way Grunkle Ford explained it to me, except, you know, simplified for a high school math teacher. We had a really great, fun math discussion. Then my teacher said, 'This is too advanced for the classroom.' He said we had a lot to get through, and we couldn't have discussions like that with the group, that we didn't have time.
"I didn't make it the rest of the school day. I quit in the middle of history class and texted Mabel to meet me outside as soon as she could. She texted me back to ask what was wrong, and I said, 'Nothing that Grunkle Ford can't fix.'"
"Huh! What about Grunkle Stan?"
"You fix things, too, Grunkle Stan."
"Darn right. So what happened with Mabel?"
"She came to meet me between classes. I told her to get all her stuff out of her locker, even the decorations. Empty everything out. I said I was calling Dad. 'We're quitting school and moving to Gravity Falls.' That's what I said. She spun right around and went to her locker and came back carrying all her stuff.
"She started packing that night, to come up here. I got all ready, and I found her stalled out in her room, and she said that she'd forgotten that she needed cold-weather clothes instead of all summer stuff. So I said I'd help her pack. I asked her what she needed, but she just kind of moped around. Then she asked me a really stupid question."
"Yeah? What was that?"
"She said, 'You don't need me to go with you, right?'"
"And you told her you did need her," Stan said decisively.
"I don't know what all we said. The conversation got dumber after that."
Stan sat silently on the corner of Dipper's bed for some time. Dipper didn't have a pen to click, so he touched his fingertips to his thumb, in sequence. At last Stan spoke. "Hmm. She's at least coming for Christmas, right?"
"Christmas is a given."
"Has she specifically said she's coming?"
"No, but we'll obviously be spending Christmas together."
"Call her and check. I will stand by the door while you go downstairs, and I will follow you down. You get on the phone and call your sister and check."
"Okay, I'll do it now."
"Yeah, you will. Leave her alone at home for one Christmas, the next thing you know, it turns into a ten-year separation."
Stan loomed and watched with narrowed eyes while Dipper got his sister on the phone. "You're coming for Christmas, right?"
Her pause was a little too long.
"Mabel!"
"Yes! Yeah, I'm coming for Christmas."
"Yeah," Dipper said, relieved. "Yeah, you'd better."
"Does Grunkle Ford plan on giving you a break for Christmas?"
"I guess so. We haven't talked about it."
"You won't be learning and doing experiments the whole time?"
"Well, I gotta come out of the lab for fresh air and eggnog sometime. Plus, I have personal reading to do. So, yeah, I'll do things besides experiments, you know I will. We can watch the Christmas movies on TV."
"Yeah! That sounds great."
"Why don't you come up now?"
Mabel groaned. "I can't. I'm trying to pass finals."
Dipper snorted. "No such thing as finals here. Grunkle Ford just quizzes me whenever he thinks of it. It's great."
"Yeah ... sounds great. I gotta go. Waddles is at the bedroom door—he wants his apple juice."
"I'll let you go, then. Love you."
"Love you, too, Dippin'sauce."
********
Dipper and Soos caulked and stuffed rags in cracks all over the attic in time for Christmas. Dipper's bed was in the warmest corner of the attic, by the chimney. He lay in Mabel's bed for half an hour each time the wind changed, to check comfort on her side of the room.
Three nights before Christmas, Dipper waited in the hallway by the porch door. He couldn't see out the windows through the sleet, and kept imagining he heard, through the wind, the bus grinding along the road and stopping near the Shack. He repeatedly opened the door, saw nothing, closed it again and shivered until he got warm.
Finally he felt sure he saw bus lights moving across the windows and opened the door again. No bus and no Mabel—had it stopped by the gift shop? He ran through the Shack and got to that entrance just as the bell on the door jangled, and Mabel, bundled up and covered in sleet, beamed at him from under her hood.
He skidded to a stop in front of her and she threw her arms wide, hugged him, and rocked him side to side. "Dipper!"
Dipper chuckled and hugged her back, kept her in place with his hands on her sides, and pulled back to see her face. Mabel threw back her hood. The Christmas lights from the multicolored string across a rafter of the gift shop glinted green, red, and yellow off of her brown hair. Her big, brown eyes reflected the lights and twinkled on their own power, her cheeks shone red, and her smile was one of breathless delight.
Dipper's eyes followed a line of shine in her hair, down over her ear, and he started to run a strand of it over his finger.
"Is there something wrong with my hair?" Mabel gave him an anxious glance and picked at the strand Dipper had ribboned over his finger. "Is something caught in it?"
"No. No. There's nothing wrong with it. It looks nice. You look great."
"Thank you!"
"Are you ... jingling?"
"Yep!" Mabel opened her coat to reveal a garish medium-green sweater covered in red pleather reindeer silhouettes and a string of large jingle bells on a strip of red pleather around the middle.
Dipper opened the gift shop door to check the porch. "Where's Waddles?"
"Mom said it wouldn't be practical to bring him for only a few days."
"I guess I was hoping—" Dipper stopped short of saying hoping you'd stay. He amended lamely, "—hoping you'd bring him along."
"I told Mom it was Christmas, and Waddles couldn't miss it, but she wouldn't let me. I promised to bring something back for him. He wants an all-day sucker. But what am I doing standing here? I gotta go kiss the Grunkles!"
Dipper swallowed. "Do, uh, do I get a kiss?"
"Sure!" Mabel leaned in and kissed him on the cheek. She tilted her head and waited.
"Oh—" Dipper saw what she meant. He returned the light kiss on the cheek.
Mabel began to fling her coat off, stopped with her arms in the sleeves behind her back, wiggled. "Dipper? My sweater bells are stuck in my coat."
"Here, let me help you."
"Thanks!" Mabel, free of her coat, speedily jingled toward the kitchen, but Stan was already coming to meet her.
"Here's my girl."
Mabel gave Stan a short but quality greeting cuddle, with promise of more hugs later, put in the code on the vending machine for the lab, and trotted down the steps to the elevator, shouting, "Merry Christmas, Grunkle Ford!"
Ford’s muffled voice came up from the basement lab: "Wait, Mabel! Don't come down here yet! I'll come to you."
A loud pop sounded from the lab. Mabel backed up the steps, driven by a series of cracking noises, a whoosh, an explosion—the roar died down, followed by more popping noises and an ethereal shriek, then Ford pounded up the steps to the gift shop, covered in soot and smelling like charcoal. He held his arms open. "Mabel!"
"Grunkle Ford!" Mabel jingled into his arms. She came away from the hug with smudges on her cheek, her forehead, and her pleather reindeer.
"Sorry about the soot," said Ford.
"That's okay. It's like getting a Christmas hug from Santa Claus after he's come down the chimney."
"Stand back now." Ford headed back downstairs. "Dipper, come and help me catch this thing!"
"Be right down, Grunkle Ford!"
********