Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

There is a time, before the end of the world, where everything is still.

The cacophonous noises, the rumbling quakes of stress fractures in the foundation, the howling, screaming wind—it pauses, for a moment, to observe.

The Archivist (the Antichrist, the Archive, to a select few, perhaps even Jon) is limp in his other’s arms, eyes dull and unseeing.

His other is sobbing. The knife between them is warm and wet with blood.

A shuddering gasp—an unspooling of tape. And now they are here.

The world is dark around them, illuminated only by the quickly fading glow in the Archivist’s Eyes. It casts strange shadows on his other, foggy glasses slipping off his face and into the evergrowing pool of blood around them.

For a second, all is quiet.

The one holding the knife strangles a cry in his throat. His hands are shaking, gripped tightly around the hilt. The Archivist is in his arms. His hair is matted down with sweat and ink.

The one holding the knife leans into the fading warmth of his other. Silent tears track familiar paths down his face.

The one holding the knife takes a second to mourn.

He looks up at the corpse ahead of him—the Pupil, Jonah or James or Elias—scrawny and pitiful now that he is not suspended above them, a conduit in which pure, unadulterated terror could spill through.

He exhales quietly. This is just a man.

For all that horror, all that fear—

In the end, this is just a man.

And the universe thinks he’s had enough, and the echo chamber is once again drenched in a symphony of discord and dischordant notes that bleeds the ears that rends that chokes that frees that Sees—

An unwinding, then.

Black tendrils of tape snap themselves around the Archivist, metallic and sharp and silver like lifeblood itself. They’re squeezing, dragging through a hole the size of a quarter, and a question of camels and needles emerges, and is forgotten in the Knowing that is quickly now sucking away like air through a vacuum.

The knife is forgotten, dropped in a frenzy of what is this? What is this? And that is the question, isn’t it, as the tapestrings pull at their Archivist, whip themselves like bruises on the Archivist’s skin.

A whimper, from someone, and a peripheral glance as a corpse is discarded. Why this one? He asks, screams into the biting wind.

The universe tugs, and Martin thinks, no.

The tendrils pull the Archivist away, and Martin thinks, you’re not taking him, too.

He lunges, which shouldn’t be possible, as the weightless feeling of what is no longer Vast overtakes him as the floor loses hold under him. A sucking vacuum, Martin pulls at the strings that have tied his other for so long and he entangles himself in the mess, claws at a piece of exposed piping, drags himself with all the force his weak and weary limbs can muster—

The Archivist is little more than spools of tape and paper in Martin’s hands. Martin doesn’t care—he pushes his fingers into the strings, hugging them close to his chest.

His grip is loosening. Wet with sweat and adrenaline, his fingers cannot readjust for fear of falling, of being pulled away—

A body slam, quite literally.

A breath on his neck.

An expensive tailored suit, dragging him out into shock and his hand opens for protection—

The wind is loud. The Archivist’s voice filters through the air, through every grainy recording, through every speaker in what used to be a world.

And Martin thinks, please.

The universe, typically, does not take requests. The reason for this is disputed—perhaps it’s too much paperwork, or perhaps the universe is simply a little bit rude.

But the universe knows itself, and it knows that this is not how things ought to be. Something very visceral, tied into the thread of the cosmos is losing itself for the last time, and this is not correct.

So Martin pleads for mercy, and the universe says, this is not how it goes.

And something clicks.

And something loosens.

The tape does not unspool, but it does remake—a form, somewhat human, green glowing eyes and sharp-edge hair and hands—Martin almost sobs in relief as something solid presses against his body.

For a second, things are going as planned.

And then something slams into Martin’s side, and everything goes white.
.

Jon wakes up.

The first thing he notices is the absence at his side—warmth, a strong hold, a name at the tip of his tongue—

Martin.

The first thing he notices is that Martin is gone.

Something seizes in his chest, and a strangled cry drags its way out of his throat. His mouth is dry, voice scratchy, but Martin’s voice still echoes in his ears, and he calls him, yells for his love—

“What’s a Mahtin?”

Jon’s Eyes snap open.

The second thing he notices is that there is a child staring at him—no, two children, twins, by the looks of it. Jon blinks—one of them is wearing a bright sweater, and the other a touristy hat.

a flash—a water tower, a gnome statue, a journal with a six-fingered hand emblazoned on the front—

“Woah, look at all his eyes!” one of them gushes, poking his skin experimentally. Jon flinches back, scrambling for—

Where is he?

The ground is…needled. There’s dirt, rich and thick, and he grabs fistfuls of it (the Eyes on his hands close instinctually, the sensitive skin making them screw up in discontent). Hefts them at the children.

You’re hurting children now too? An all-too familiar voice drawls in his head.

Jon drops the dirt. The wind is at his face, and the particulates accumulate on his clothes.

The children look at him with a familiar mix of trepidation and unbridled curiosity. “Are you alive?” the bright-sweater-one asks, tilting their head.

“OhmygodMabel you can’t just ask if someone’s alive like that!” the touristy hat child hisses. The bright sweater one—Mabel, apparently—bats them away absentmindedly.

 Okay.

So they’re American.

Where is he?

America, obviously. Shut up Jon, stop being stupid. Talk to the children. Find Martin.

Jon clears his throat. “I—I suppose I am,” he says, and then gasps. The words are like fishhooks up his throat—every syllable is pushed with a weight like he’s been screaming his throat raw for hours. “Have you—where am I?” he asks, keeping it concise despite the bubbling curiosity in his chest. Conserve energy for the important questions, he decides. He puts his hands under him, but they collapse under his weight.

“Gravity Falls, duh!” The child rolls their eyes good-naturedly. The other one, the one with the hat, fervently flips open a codex of some sort. Jon gives it a cursory glance, but his gaze is…fuzzy. “What, did you fall out of the sky?”

Jon glances quickly at his memories—the dull ache in his lower back, as well as the somewhat-crater he seems to be in at the moment all seemed to correspond with that analysis. “I—yes, I believe I did.” He resists the urge to claw his vocal cords out of his throat with his bare hands.

The sweater child’s eyes grow even rounder, if such a thing were even possible. “Woah,” they breath, brace-filled teeth gleaming in the low light.

Oh.

It’s dark out.

Very dark out, by the looks of it—there are trees, Jon can see, but they’re dark pillars against an otherwise deep grey night. The children are illuminated by a light of some sort, coming from…next to Jon? On top of Jon?

Oh.

Jon looks at his hands, and is perversely reminded of that one episode of Doctor Who with the eye-hands that no one likes. His hands—no, his Eyes are glowing a dull green, bright irises illuminating the children’s faces.

He wills the Eyes closed. The ones on his hand—his palm, large and staring and taunting him in a way a hand-eyes shouldn’t be able to—blink languidly.

An old sort of frustration flares through him, bringing an all-encompassing groan in its wake.

“What’s wrong?” The sweater one asks. Her voice drips with concern, and Jon feels another ache in his chest.

“I—” Jon’s throat is dry. Hot fury boils in his chest, but he clamps it down. He exhales sharply. “My Eyes aren’t cooperating,” he manages, before he has to squeeze his (regular) eyes shut and grit his teeth to keep from screaming.

He—he had this under control. He isn’t—no, this is a different universe. Somewhere Else. This isn’t—there shouldn’t be anything, much less these Things on his skin. He can’t—the whole reason for this is so he wouldn’t be a monster anymore, what was the point if he still had these—

“Hey? Oh, heck, I don’t know your name—uh, Guy? Hey, uh, are you okay?” The touristy hat child put a tentative hand out.

Jon’s Eye’s dilate.

Jon grabs the child’s arm, and pulls.

A sharp cry, of shock if nothing else, and then Mason Dipper Pines twelve years old born August 31st doesn’t like lettuce once saw his own reflection and jumped at the sight is in his arms, and he is so warm, and he can smell his fear—

Jon wrenches himself away. His legs, still shuddering under his weight, are forced to stand as Jon staggers to his feet, and the Eyes are blinking very fast indeed, aren’t they, and Jon needs to find Martin—

 “Kids! What are you doing out this late?”

Jon’s head whips up at the new sound, and Knows immediately that it’s Dipper and Mabel Pines’s Great Uncle Stanford, and that the flashlight has enough battery to last another eighteen hours and four minutes precisely and his Eyes won’t close.

“Grunkle Stan! We found a homeless guy in the woods! Can we keep him?”

Jon’s feet do their level best to leave the rest of his body in their tracks, but they are firmly rooted to the ground. He can’t—he collapses to the ground again, and it’s cool and welcoming in a way it has no right to be.

“Mabel, pumpkin, what the ever-loving waffle sauce do you—Oh. Oh.”

A beam of light focuses on Jon’s crumpled form, and Jon squints. His Eyes flicker nervously in the light—and there’s that exposed feeling again, the one he’d thought would leave him when he came here, to this Somewhere Else Place, but no, emotions are getting in the way again, and Jon hates it.

Jon coughs. The sound is pitiful, even to his own ears. He’d cringe, but he’s physically incapable of moving at the moment.

“M—Martin,” he finally gets out, and every word is like rusty nails up his throat. His Eyes are blinking rapidly, he Knows, and the newcomer’s expression of thinly veiled shock (disgust?) is palpable in the air. “I need—where’s—”

“Oh, he’s a British zombie then,” The newcomer drawls, but the edge to his voice is sharp. Calculating. Jon understands, suddenly, that this is the children’s Caretaker.

“Grunkle Stan, he’s not a zombie, he’s got too much…skin for that—” Dipper flips through the book in his hands (some sort of Journal? All that’s coming out of the unsolicited direct feeding tube to the eldritch knowledge demon is a starburst of nice handwriting, snippets of what looks to be some sort of schematic or blueprint, and... triangles? Lots of triangles, all uniform at an isosceles point).

Huh. Apparently some knowledge was unknowable after all.

“Even if it’s super weirdo eyeball-covered skin?” Mabel interjects, and Jon wrenches out of his head. He’s being talked about.

Hm.

He’d forgotten how much he’d hated that.

Something itches, under his skin.

“I think it still falls under the technical definition of skin, as we can’t actually see his ribcage!”

Crawling under his fingernails, tracing the lines of his back, tapping out patterns in his ribcage.

“You don’t know that, he could be—”

He can taste the itch, can hear the itching static in his ears as well as he can hear his own erratic breathing.

“Maybe he’s a mermaid, Dip, ever think about that?”

The ground is not tilting below him.

“Mabel, that’s literally impossible—"

He is the one doing the tilting.

“Kids!”

The supposed caretaker of the children pulls them apart, and from Jon’s awkward vantage point he can see Dipper shove the book back into his jacket.

The static is loud, but not so loud that he can’t hear every little sound in his general vicinity. It’s almost like the static is on a slightly overlapped version of this place—doubled, slightly, and entirely different than the nature surrounding him.

And the bickering children, of course.

“Yeah, Grunkle Stan?” Mabel asks brightly, like she hasn’t just come across a random guy in the woods covered in Eyes. “So can we keep him?”

‘Grunkle Stan’ sighs heavily. “Kid, he’s literally a lump on the ground.”

“So? We’ve all been lumps on the ground at one point or another,” Mabel counters, which is a very good point in Jon’s opinion.

“Yeah, fair point,” ‘Grunkle Stanley?’ concedes. “But we’re still not carrying a random stranger back to the Shack—”

The static’s buzzing louder, until it’s not really a buzzing but a roar, and Jon still can’t move and they won’t tell him where Martin is—

He wants Martin.

They won’t give him Martin.

There is only one plausible course of action.

The static is screeching, echoing in Jon’s vision and hearing and dancing on his fingertips, and his Eyes are all open, he Knows. Something is illuminating the ground in front of him, and it takes a minute for him to realize it’s coming from him.

He blinks once.

The static is everywhere now. It bleeds into the world and blots out the trees and the ground and the sky.

Twice.

“Kids, get behind me!” The Caretaker calls, and a scamper of child feet and a high voice asking what’s wrong.

His body is moving, and he is standing now, he thinks, and all his thoughts are Martin Martin Martin

He lifts his head, and grins a humorless smile.

“The man introduced himself as John.”

And for a second, there is silence.

Jon Watches the children, studies the young fear that is still so malleable and fresh. The older one’s fear is hardened, long since etched into his face.

The older man’s threat comes off as more of a bark than actual words. “Now, you listen here, you weirdo tea-drinking eyeball, you leave these kids alone or so help me—"

“Hi, Jon,” Mabel interrupts. She brushes her nose with a sweater cuff from behind her…(wait, what is a Grunkle anyway? Jon doesn’t Know yet, but he will) relative. The action is so small, so mundane, and something in Jon’s heart seizes at the sight.

The façade is shattered.

And Jon, for the second time that night, passes right the hell out.

Chapter Text

Mabel likes to think of herself as an Optimist.

Yeah, most people think this is just plain ol’ “Mabel-being-naïve-again-everyone-hide-the-glitter-glue”, but it really isn’t. She remembers learning about ‘philosophies’ in a school video a few years ago and hasn’t changed her stance since. And no, Dipper, optimism isn’t the same as Optimism, Optimism is a moral standing, you plebian—

Anyways.

Mabel likes to think of herself as an Optimist, so when that homeless guy in the forest collapses from whatever weirdo monster introduction he was doing, she decides that he will most certainly be Alive when she goes to check, and oh, look, there’s a pulse! Take that, Pessimist Dipper! Add another onto the tally for Mabel the Optimist! She can do anything with the power of Sheer Positivity!

This doesn’t solve the problem of how they’re going to get the guy to the Shack, because even though he looks like he barely weighs anything, and Mabel is strong for her age, he’s still full-grown. Mabel decidedly isn’t.

Time to pull out the big guns, then.

“Aw, Grunkle Stan! Please can we keep him?” Mabel looks up at her Grunkle with the cutest look she can muster.

Grunkle Stan sighs sharply, putting a hand through his hair. “Sweetie, he’s not a stray dog. I mean look at him.” He gestures out to the man—Jon, Mabel remembers from his crazy magical whatsit—, whose skin eyes are opening and closing every so often, slowly blinking up at them before closing seconds later. “He’s not human.”

“Human is a state of mind,” Mabel says philosophically.

“You’re taking this really well,” Dipper pipes up, squinting his eyes suspiciously. “I thought you didn’t believe in the supernatural.”

“I don’t--It’s not—” Grunkle Stan lets out a frustrated groan. “I—look, kids, it’s too late for this, anyway. Why don’t we just leave him here and I’ll check on him in the morning? Would that make you happy?” He flashes the kids a grin that’s more pleading than anything else. Mabel would say obviously lying, but Dipper’s unconvinced hmm makes the point for both of them.

 She gives her Grunkle another Look. “But he’d be lonely,” Mabel stresses. “And you said the woods are dangerous at night.”

Grunkle Stan heaves a deep sigh. “He’s dangerous, sweetie, did you not see that—” he gestures vaguely at the Jon “thing a second ago? We need to get out of here before he wakes up.” He grabs for Mabel and Dipper’s hands, but Mabel hangs limp.

“He mostly seemed sad,” Mabel says. “And scared.”

Grunkle Stan looks at Mabel. Mabel looks at Grunkle Stan. Mabel waggles her eyebrows. Grunkle Stan’s left eye twitches.

“Dangit, kid,” Grunkle Stan grumbles, trudging up to Jon. The light from the flashlight wavers slightly as he moves. “But only for tonight, you hear me? He’s out in the morning.”

Huzzah! The power of Aggressive Optimism wins again!

“Oh yeah, definitely!” Mabel nods eagerly, using her most innocent smile. Probably a sweater with a giant floaty eye on it wouldn’t be too on-the-nose. She’ll use her nice wool, too, Jon seems like the sort to appreciate finer fabrics.

“Mm,” Grunkle Stan says. His voice is flat as he crouches. For one horrible second, Mabel worries that he’s pulled a muscle (which has happened before, in inopportune moments, like that one time he tried to teach Dipper and Mabel how to climb electric fences without injury). But then he grunts, and lifts Jon’s body over his shoulder in one solid motion.

“Woah,” Dipper breathes, because their Grunkle is a crotchety old man and watching him lift anything heavier than his orthopedic back pillow is, like, super rare.

Grunkle Stan’s eyes flick over to Mabel and Dipper’s, catching them staring. “What? He’s not that heavy.”

Mabel squeals and clasps her hands together. “Secret Grunkle powers!”

Dipper jumps in, rubbing the back of his neck. “We just, ah, didn’t realize that you, uh—” he gestures vaguely in Grunkle Stan’s direction.

Grunkle Stan raises an eyebrow. “What, had upper body strength? Kid, how in the buttery pancakes do you expect me to sabotage my competitor’s businesses if I can’t even lift myself over the barbed wire?”

“You’re going to get arrested,” Dipper says, somewhat morosely.

Grunkle Stan scoffs. “Please. As if.” He shifts Jon onto his other arm. “Meh. Let’s get outta dodge before the cops come sniffing at all this noise. And,” he says, pointing at Mabel and Dipper with his free hand, “Straight to bed with the both of ya. We’re talking about this tomorrow.”

“But where is Dodge?” Mabel asks, tilting her head.

“Er—”

“Kansas,” Jon says, a couple lime-green eyes flicking lazily open on his cheeks. He promptly falls back unconscious.

Grunkle Stan jerks at the noise. “Moses, I—”

“Don’t worry, Grunkle Stan,” Mabel says, patting his arm, “he was just answering my question!”

“Mabel, I think this guy is kind of creepy.” Dipper eyes Jon warily, poking one of the eyelids on his cheek. Grunkle Stan swats his hand away.

“Ey, hands off the stranger,” Grunkle Stan says. “And I agree with ya, kid. At least someone’s speaking my language,” he grumbles, trudging up the path he’d created up to the Shack. “Dipper, here.” He holds the light at an awkward angle towards Dipper, who groans.

“Why do I have to hold the—”

“I’ve been banned from the handling of any electrical appliances for the next two-to-seven business days!” Mabel pipes up cheerfully. “On account of the Incident.”

“That’s right, sweetie. Dipper, take the darn flashlight.”

Dipper grudgingly takes the light. The path they came from is quickly illuminated, the flashlight casting stark shadows that grow and shrink as Mabel and company make their way back to the Shack (hey—that rhymes!). If Mabel strains her ears, she can hear her Grunkle mutter something about darn emotionally manipulative children, but for the sake of their relationship she decides to ignore it.

All in all, a successful day, Mabel thinks! Dipper keeps shooting her Worrywart Looks, but Mabel doesn’t meet his eyes. They’ll debrief back at the Shack. She knocks into his shoulder, just so he knows she’s noticed and she’s not ignoring him. He knocks back, and Mabel smiles.

“Why were you two out of bed so late anyway?” Grunkle Stan asks, shifting Jon on his shoulder as he walks. “I mean, jeez, it’s almost light out.”

“Didn’t you see that green flash?” Dipper asks, the light swiveling as he turns to face Grunkle Stan. “And the earthquake? It was pretty loud.”

“Uh,” Grunkle Stan coughs into his shoulder. “I was sleepin’. ‘Till you woke me up with your screaming about meteors or some junk. You left the door open, by the way. Electricity doesn’t pay for itself, yaknow.”

Dipper squints at Grunkle Stan. “But then why did you—”

“Oh, look, there’s the Shack,” Grunkle Stan interrupts, shouldering past Dipper and Mabel up to the porch. He swiftly opens the door and steps inside, turning to face the twins. “Alright, off to bed with the both of ya.”

Aw, man! But things were just getting interesting! Mabel and Dipper both groan. “But Grunkle Stan—” Mabel starts.

“Upupup, you heard me.” Grunkle Stan repositions Jon with a huff. “I’m gonna find a place for this…” he makes a face, “guy, and you kids are getting’ a full eight hours.”

“Where are you gonna put him?” Mabel asks. Jon looks so weird in the warm Shack light. All desaturated and, somehow, even sadder. His eyes are ringed by even darker bags than Dipper’s when he stays up all night.

“I’ll think of something. Now, get to bed, the both of you.” He shoos the both of them, and when they don’t move, straightens and puts a hand to his ear. “Oh, what’s that, kids? You volunteer for outhouse cleaning duty tomorrow? What a great—”

“GoodnightGrunkleStan!” Mabel yells, racing up the stairs with Dipper on her heels. Not the outhouse. Anything but the outhouse. There are racoons in there, and not even the cute kind Mabel can make kiss. Evil raccoons. Mabel shudders.

Mabel obviously beats Dipper to the top of the stairs—Alpha Twin Power!—but waits as he catches his breath. From her vantage point at the top of the stairs, she can see Grunkle Stan heft Jon towards the living room. Hm. Maybe he’s going to put him in Grunkle Stan’s favorite chair. That’d be nice! …If a little unlikely.

“Man, that was crazy,” Dipper says, wiping his mouth. They’d already brushed their teeth before Dipper noticed the light from outside, so they go right to the attic. Mabel creaks open the already ajar door and does a flying leap into her bed.

“Tell me about it! A mysterious man in the woods—and he didn’t turn out to be secretly gnomes!” Mabel falls back onto her bed, hard, and hugs her pillow close to her chest.

“Yet,” Dipper corrects darkly. “We don’t know for certain if he’s gnomes or not.” He pulls out the Journal again, sitting crisscross on his bed. “I still don’t know what the deal is with all of his extra eyes, though. The Journal mentions Eyebats, but nothing about humanoid eye monsters.”

Mabel feels her eyes glazing over, and blinks, hard. All of a sudden, she feels an overwhelming urge to go to sleep. “You can always ask him tomorrow,” she reminds Dipper. She shimmies under her blankets, and clicks off her lamp. “And tomorrow will come faster if you sleep!”

Dipper sighs, closing the Journal and stashing it under his bed. “Fine,” he says, turning down his oil lamp. “Just one question.”

“What’s up, Dip-dop?”

“Why were you so adamant about bringing him back here?” Dipper asks, eyes wide and white in the dark. “Like, objectively he is super creepy. And you haven’t exactly had the best track record with bringing guys back to the Shack, no offence.” He yawns as he gets under the covers. Like a kitten!

“None taken! I used my Powers of Optimism on him, so now I’m responsible for his wellbeing,” Mabel declares.

Dipper groans. “Oh, not the optimism thing again—”

“It’s Optimism, Dipper, not optimism! Completely different concepts!”

“You’re avoiding my question, Mabel.” Dipper gives Mabel that Look—the one that Mabel knows means to cut the bit. She bites her lip and looks up at the ceiling.

“I dunno,” she admits, softer. “It’s not like with Norman—I mean, I don’t wanna date him or anything. Bleh,” she sticks out her tongue, and Dipper snorts.

“I hope not, he’s way older than you.”

“You’re one to talk,” Mabel breaks into a sly grin. “I know a certain cashier who—"

“Wh—Hey!” Dipper waves his hand towards Mabel, who giggles, safely out of smacking distance. “I don’t even know what you’re talking about, and even if I did that wouldn’t be my point and you know it.”

“Maybe I do, maybe I don’t.” She takes in a deep, deep breath and holds it—until she starts to feel a little lightheaded, and then lets it all out in one big sigh. “I just feel…bad for him.”

“’Bad’,” Dipper repeats dubiously. “You feel bad for the creepy British eye monster we found in the woods.”

Mabel sighs. “Yeah, I know it sounds stupid. But he seems really sad. Like, Grunkle-Stan-when-Wax-Stan-died sad.”

“And how is bringing him into the Mystery Shack going to cheer him up?” Dipper scoffs. “Unless his powers grow through extorted tourists and unethical business practices.” He turns on his side, away from Mabel. “Or unpaid child labor,” he mutters.

“It’s better than being outside,” Mabel says automatically, but she pauses. Why is she so invested in this? She prods at the feeling experimentally. It smells…kinda like sadness, only deeper and more confusing. Like Dipper in the week before going to Gravity Falls, or their parents during family dinners. Mabel stares up at the vaulted attic ceiling. It feels like it could reach up into the sky forever, not stopping until the dusty walls hit outer space and scrape the moon—if she squints, she can almost see between the slats, to a twinkling like loose glitter just beyond her vision. It just goes on and on, she thinks. No one up there but the stars.

That’s where Jon came from, Mabel thinks. All alone in the sky.

“I guess that’s a fair point,” Dipper concedes, looking over his shoulder at Mabel. “It can get pretty chilly at night.” With that, he readjusts himself and pulls the blankets over his head.

“Yeah,” she says, quieter, reaching her hand towards the roof. “At least he’s out of the cold.”

.

Martin wakes up freezing.

This is surprising for multiple reasons. Number one: He hasn’t slept since the tunnels. He hasn’t felt the need to, which had been worrying at first, but now ranked comparatively low on his list of existential dreads. Yeah, it seems strange if he stops to think about it, but spending an indeterminate amount of time in an eldritch apocalypse where one’s primal fears were acted out in obscene caricatures of human life tended to shift one’s priorities.

So. Martin wakes up, for the first time in a while. The groggy tension in his head isn’t unwelcome, though. Surprisingly, it’s comfortably familiar, if disconcerting—a misstep that swoops in his belly and threatens to keel him over.

That leads him to observation number two: bodily discomfort. Sure, he’s had a vague feeling of unease ever since—well, ever since he started working at the Institute, but nothing like cold shock. Nothing so ordinarily painful, the minor aches of a body slowly leaving itself to frostbite. The Lonely had been cool in all senses of the word. But not ever so cold.

Jon.

Martin shoots up, and immediately regrets it. That waking-up headache returns with a vengeance and his vision blots out for a second.

Decidedly not good.

He squeezes his eyes shut, which helps. It lets him breathe, at the very least, and he mentally surveys himself for injuries. Legs: curled underneath him. Aching, wet where his knees make contact with the snow. Shoulders: stiff and obviously bruised. His neck twinges uncomfortably when he rolls his neck, which is probably not great, but manageable. He can work with it, at the very least. There’s a pressure at his chest, too, but Martin’s used to that one. Face: numb. He’s sitting, bare hands braced against wet snow. He can’t hear anything but his own ragged breathing. His surroundings are white. Puffy. Over everything else, unfamiliar.

This is very, very bad.

Something snaps, like wood splintering. Then again, a little closer. Is that—

“Jon?” he croaks out, scanning the monotone landscape for any sort of color or shape. Everything’s just so damn white. His hands dig into the snow, and he curls his fingers around the stuff, feeling it melt under his nails. Why can’t he see anything?

Oh. Wait.

Martin puts a slow hand to his face, his fingers already numb as they grope at his nose. He presses his palm fully against his eye in horror.

His glasses.

Martin lets out a frustrated growl.

Great. Great. That’s just bloody perfect, then, isn’t it? Just as well, with his luck. Lost somewhere else without Jon, actively succumbing to frostbite, and—oh yeah—unable to see three feet in front of him. His head throbs with his pulse and Martin considers screaming.

He feels in the snow for that familiar plastic, but there’s nothing. Nothing but snow and stone and Martin’s freezing hands. He puts them under his armpits with an air of defeat.

There’s that noise again. Closer. Like something snapping, or clicking very quickly.

Martin stills. “Jon, is that you?”

Nothing. A slight wind picks up, and brushes gently across Martin’s damp cheeks.

Hm.

Deliberately, Martin pulls out his left hand away from his body, and snaps.

The clicking picks up again near his hand.

He mimics the motion with his right hand. Just as he expected, a second or two after snapping, the clicking starts again, to his right.

Martin’s fingers twitch, slightly. Something is wrong here—apart from the obvious being-alone-in-the-snow thing. Martin doesn’t have his glasses. Legally, he’s blind without them. There’s nothing but the hazy white of snow, and the dark sky beyond—no shadowy greys to indicate shadow or depth. And yet, the clicking circles him like a cat.

There is something here that Martin can’t see.

He bites his tongue, hard, and covers his mouth with a hand. It’s freezing against his face, but he doesn’t want to scream. Damn it, he can’t scream. He strains his ears, and he hears something at his left side—a slight, soft crunch. Like an imprint in snow.

Martin swallows very, very slowly.

Ok. Ok. This is fine. He’s been hunted before—and at least this isn’t worms. Martin hears the creature (because what else can it be) well enough, though the lack of shadow distinguishing it from the snow is bad. That’s evolution, he guesses. Bet this creature is great at hide and seek. Hah.

Martin is going to die here. The thought pierces him through his sternum and he falters, arms suddenly weak. Like everyone he’s ever known and loved, he is going to die horribly and far from home. Just like Sasha. Just like Tim.

Just like—

Jon.

With a clarity that curdles his stomach, Martin realizes what he has to do.

He shifts slightly. The creature responds immediately with a sharp score of clicking unleashed at his side. Martin lets out a squeak—but does not move.

A moment passes, with only Martin’s heavy breathing and the creature’s movements infiltrating the quiet. It seems to be content to circle, tittering to itself while Martin tries to remember to breathe. Slowly, so slowly that Martin feels like he may fall over, Martin splays his fingers into the snow and pushes.  If he is very, very lucky…

There.

He feels the cool hilt of that awful, awful blade and grabs it. It’s sticky and wet, somehow even colder than the snow itself and Martin feels a hot wave of nausea as he holds it. Still, he keeps his grip. His hand aches.

The creature to his left clicks again, nipping at his ear. Martin does not hesitate. With a range of motion he attributes solely to adrenaline, he arcs the knife over and into the creature’s flesh.

The creature is furry and meaty and very very thick. Martin drags the knife as far as it will go through its skin before it slips through his sweat-slick hands. Good riddance, Martin thinks lightheadedly, watching as a blur of red bubbles through the white before the creature roars and shifts backward. His legs register the panic before Martin himself does—he is off and running into the snow before he can think, stumbling into a sprint in the opposite direction.

It's not long before he hears hoof—paw—whatever beats behind him, and a high, irregular clicking directly at his back. A hot flare of panic spreads throughout Martin’s limbs and he wills himself to run faster—but the snow is thick, and Martin can’t see where he’s going.

He’s vaguely conscious of the pressure in his chest, of his shortness of breath and his closing throat—but he doesn’t think. He can’t think. He feels the breath at his neck, wet and heavy, and he wills his legs to move. Martin’s never felt particularly scared by the Hunt before. Now, though—now Martin feels the fluttery terror of being caught and has no choice but to lean into it, to fuel his adrenaline and blot out all other thoughts. This can’t last forever, though, and he knows it. He feels dizzy, feels sick to his stomach, feels weak—

He trips.

All of a sudden, there is something over him. He sees the shadow, a fuzzy grey that blocks out the dark sky. Something pushes at his arms, pressing them deep into the snow until he can feel the rough ground cutting into his palms. Kicking’s out of the question, too: he can’t feel his feet. Martin blinks through the tears. His breath comes in shallow, rapid bursts. His hands hurt. The clicking is slower, now, almost methodical. Appraising. He feels that breath at his face again. Wet. Wet and close and damn it, he can’t help it—Martin lets out a despairing whimper that claws its way into a shout halfway up his throat. After everything, Peter was right. Martin is prey. Martin is the victim. Martin is going to die alone.

“TAKE THAT, FOUL CREATURE!”

Martin blinks.

The first thing Martin registers is the very loud sound near his face. He cringes, moving to shield his head—and it works? The pressure on his body lets up as a sharp whine fills the air. Martin doesn’t wait before scrambling backward, staggering to his feet as the red-stained creature blots out the dark sky in front of him. Streaks of blue prickle through the red and white. Is that a taser?!

The creature screams. There is no other word for it. The sound is ragged, mournful and long, the red matting the creature’s fur so Martin can see as it stumbles, paces in wobbling circles that get smaller and smaller until it finally stops, teeters, and falls to the snow with a muffled thud.

Once again, Martin cannot distinguish it from the snow.

Everything is silent. Martin heaves, nigh-on wheezing on his knees. He puts a hand to his hair. It’s damp, probably from a mix of the snow and Martin’s sweat. Maybe—

Martin doesn’t have time to react. Before he can think, a dark, humanoid figure trudges toward Martin. Martin can’t see what he’s holding, but considering the creature in the snow, its heft and its sudden death, he’s thinking gun.

“Show me your eyes!”

“I—what?”

The man gestures at Martin’s face. “Your eyes! Show me your eyes, right now!” He crouches down to where Martin’s braced himself against the snow.

“Okay! Okay!” Martin puts his hands up and opens his eyes wide in the direction of the man. Martin can barely make out features on the fleshy pink of the man’s face—a large nose, and glasses.

A tense moment passes as the man assumedly studies his eyes. Finally, he backs away. “You’re safe.” Martin breathes a sigh of relief. “Good.”

“What the hell was that?” Martin asks incredulously. No, scratch that—“Who are you? What is this place?”

“All very astute questions, but I’m afraid we don’t have time for them. If there’s one Yeti, there’s a pack. We need to hide, and we need to do it now.” The man grabs Martin and hauls him to his feet. Martin staggers at the sudden change, but flinches away as soon as he thinks he can physically hold his own weight. His heart pounds in his ears.

“What—Yetis?”

“Oh, you recognize the name?” He swings the silver probably-a-gun into what Martin is assuming is his coat, and Martin takes another step backward. “It’s an indulgence on my part. They aren’t related to actual Yetis. In fact, they more resemble—” Maybe at the look on Martin’s face, the man breaks off. “Ah. My apologies. I tend to ramble. Anyways, the point is, we need to move.”

Martin splutters. “And why should I trust you?”

The man seems to genuinely consider this. “Well, I did just save you from the Yeti. You’re unarmed and not dressed for the weather, so I’m assuming you’re an interdimensional refugee—”

“Interdimensional what—”

“In any case,” the man continues, “I can help you—take you to a place where you would be safe. For now, though, we need to get out of this storm. And look on the bright side—you’re not dead yet!” He thwaps Martin’s shoulder, Martin assumes in a poor attempt at good humor. The stiffness is familiar, in an aching sort of way. Despite his broad stance and space gun, Martin can feel this man’s awkwardness palpably.

What choice does Martin have? The man’s right—he doesn’t have a means to protect himself, he’s absolutely freezing himself to death, and he’s effectively blind. This man, if nothing else, seems capable with a weapon.

It’s a better bet than staying alone.

In for a penny.

Martin swallows, and takes the man’s proffered hand. It seems thicker than normal, but also Martin’s fingers are basically numb anyway—and when was the last time he’d shaken someone’s hand, anyway? Frostbite, huh. He’d almost forgotten about the chill.

“Martin,” he says. “My name is Martin Blackwood.”

“A pleasure to make your acquaintance, Martin Blackwood.” The man shakes his hand firmly. “Stanford Pines, at your service.”

.

Jon is dreaming.

He knows this. He feels it in the hazy atmosphere, in the slightly fuzzy outlines of trees that blur when he focuses on them too closely. Jon has dreamt enough for seven point eight billion lifetimes. He wears the liminality like a second skin.

The deep claw of despair dragging down his throat is familiar, too—he settles easily into the well-worn groove it’s left. Is this just what life is, now? Eyes set into his skin and fear-eating while he sleeps? The grey sky above him flickers in and out of darkness, and Jon does not see any stars.

 Abruptly, Jon notices that someone is singing.

The sound is sharp and clear compared to the out-of-focus treeline, high and somewhat grating. It sets Jon’s teeth on edge. His skin prickles into gooseflesh as he shivers, despite himself and despite the stagnant nothing of the air. Jon catalogues the sensation without thinking—then goes back. An autonomic fear response? From him?

Jon does not have time to dwell. The trees open in front of him, wavering out of space like recorder static and Jon finds himself moving. His feet barely graze the ground. In fact, Jon hardly feels them at all. In the hazy dream logic he has been forced to grow accustomed to, Jon follows a song through the monochrome trees without ever once moving his feet.

He recognizes the melody.

The recollection comes to him muddily as he makes his way through the trees. The mundanity of it is a welcome difference from the full-frontal load he has come to expect from his…benefactor, and it’s oddly soothing. He remembers the glare of the laptop screen first, then the music, then the itchy feel of the headphones rubbing against his ears. He had been—what had he been doing? Looking up old music for an assignment, perhaps? The name Vera Lynn sounds familiar, almost. There are pieces missing; cloudy gaps between moments that bely their inaccuracy. This calms him in a way he does not know how to put into words.

He is relaxed, then, when he comes to a break in the trees. So caught up in the memory, he has neglected to notice them thinning out, and then all of a sudden they are gone and Jon is standing in an open clearing. It’s grey, too, lighter shades overlapping in concentric circles. In the middle of the clearing is a stark white piano.

The music is louder, now. Jon does not remember the song being so long, but then, he’s not sure how much time has passed.

He brings a foot in front of his body and consciously steps closer to the piano.

It’s one of those automated players. Jon sees the keys depressing of their own accord and something twists in his stomach. It’s not natural, the smoothness of the notes or the joviality with which they’re played. It’s anything but mechanical, it has hesitations and the occasional flat note like any other live pianist. Yet—the piano plays itself.

It’s alluring and horrible. He takes another step forward.

A shadow overtakes the piano. It’s black, black like a doorway with no telling what lies beyond its threshold. Black like the absence of light, like the dark sun in the snow. Jon feels electricity up his spine as the shadow solidifies, as the thing that casts it rises far above Jon and into equilateral points. The song is ending, now. The piano slows. The air is dead. All that rings in Jon’s ears is the final note—long, piercing, and far, far too loud.

Jon watches the shadow. Thickly, like treading through soup, Jon realizes that the shadow is staring back.

“Well well well well well,” that voice sounds, from directly behind Jon, “Now what do we have here?”

Chapter Text

John is getting very tired of waking up in unfamiliar places.  

Frankly, he doesn’t think it’s an unreasonable request to ask to just stay conscious for fifteen minutes. Light filters through his eyelids in at least five different places on his body—which doesn’t even make sense. He only had one set of eyes, last he—  

Oh.  

Right.  

Right.  

Jon had forgotten he was experiencing the worst week of his entire life.   

He keeps himself very still. The air is warm and slightly musty, and if he strains his ears he can hear muffled voices from a room beyond his. And isn’t that strange: he’s in a room. Laying on something springy, at that. He remembers collapsing in the forest, remembers the loose dirt and stones that dug into his side. This is not that.  

This couch was stolen fifteen years ago from rival tourist trap the House of Uncomfortable Furniture, Jon Knows.  

“Oh, goddamnit,” Jon says aloud. As soon as he says it, he claps a hand over his mouth—bad idea, because he can feel the soft curve of an eye embedded in the palm of his hand. He flings the hand away from him, disgusted.  

He pauses, slightly surprised. It…didn’t hurt to speak. The pressure’s entirely gone from his throat. He probes his neck gingerly with a finger, cringing at the eye he finds in his Adam’s apple.   

“Oh, you’re awake!” Jon jerks backward at the voice. His head hits the back of the couch—uncomfortable furniture, indeed—and knocks against it with a resounding thunk.   

“Sorry, dude,” the voice says apologetically, “didn’t mean to startle you.”   

Jon blinks up at the man. He’s large, with a friendly face and big hands currently holding a broom. That stain is from the Great Jelly Incident of ’98. Which is absolutely relevant information, Jon thinks with no shortage of bite.  

“It’s fine,” Jon says, rubbing the back of his head to quell the dull ache that’s taken residence there. He squints as he surveys the room. It’s not large, made smaller by the clutter of various tchotchkes, bathed in warm light from a heavy-duty fluorescent bulb hanging slightly higher than the man. He’s standing near a doorway, slightly ajar, and from beyond there is even brighter light. As Jon moves, something in his chest shifts. Something…something open, and empty. No, not empty—hollow. Caved in. Like hunger pangs, but…deeper.  

Jon swallows the dread that bubbles in his throat.  

“You really are British! Wowza!” The man grins broadly like Jon’s accent is somehow exciting. “My name’s Soos,” the man continues, holding out a hand, “What’s yours?”  

Jon eyes the hand warily. The scar tissue on his own prickles. “I—Jon.” Then, almost on instinct, he adds— “The Archivist.” He takes Soos’s hand and shakes it tentatively.  

“Woah, an archivist! Do you work in a library or something?”   

“Er—” Jon swallows. He supposes it makes sense that this man doesn’t know. By all reasoning, Jon is Somewhere Else—not his universe, not anywhere where anyone would recognize the title or its weight. Not anymore. “I worked in an archive.”  

“Cool, dude!” Soos reacts with that same bland enthusiasm, and it sets Jon’s teeth on edge. There is something wrong with this picture. Why is he being so nice? What is this place?  

“ Where —” Jon chokes on his own voice. No. Not doing that. He takes a deep breath and tries again. “I would like to know where I am.”  

Soos ( Jesús Alzamirano Ramírez, Jon Knows suddenly ) doesn’t even blink at the sentence’s clumsiness. “You’re in the Mystery Shack, dude!” He breaks out into a wide grin. “Mr. Pines and the twins found you in the woods last night and brought you here. This,” Soos gestures to the room itself, “is the storage room! For all our extra stock. Haha, it’s so great we had that convenient couch in here.”  

Jon picks out the memory slowly. Two children, standing over him in curiosity as Jon scrambled for a clarity he no longer possessed. He had said something, hadn’t he? He had grabbed at one of them. He remembers a shocked yelp, and the older man yelling, and the static overwhelming him until his breath whirred like recorder tape. He feels a phantom pain in his sternum.  

He’d collapsed. He’d…dreamt, hadn’t he? It’s fading, and shies away when Jon prods at it, but there’s something grabbing at the edge of his periphery. Something dark, towering and black, geometric and malevolent. It’s leaving him, now, but the shadows remain like the notes of an old, old song.  

Jon breathes out until his lungs ache.  

“Hey, you ok, dude? You look a little out of it.” Soos looks so genuinely concerned that Jon has to quickly mask his baffled expression.   

“No, I’m—I’m alright. Just a little confused. It’s—” Jon exhales sharply. Formulates the sentence in his mind. “I’m wondering why you’re not… well, running away in terror.” He feels a few of his Eyes blink languidly at that, and Jon reduces the urge to force them closed with his hands.  

“What do you mean?” Soos tilts his head, giving the impression of a mildly confused gopher.  “I mean, no offence, dude, but you’re not exactly scary.” Gophers are invasive and banned in New Zealand—  

Well, Jon thinks forcefully, we’re not in New Zealand now, are we?   

“ Ohh, you mean the eyes!” Soos bats a hand dismissively. “Yeah, no, dude, don’t worry about it. We’re not like, discriminatory or anything.” He whispers the word, eyes widening at the very thought.   

“I— what?”   

“We here at the Mystery Shack practice a strict tolerance policy towards all walks of life. Including British people,” Soos says solemnly. “As long as you’re a paying customer. But you’re still recovering, so I’ll make sure Mr. Pines gives you a pass.”  

 “…Right.” Jon…doesn’t know what to say to that. What does he mean, British people? He can’t honestly think his Eyes are a cultural thing, right? What is this dimension?  

Soos continues. “—Oh, that reminds me! Mr. Pines told me to tell him when you woke up.” He cups his hands at his mouth. “MR. PINES! HE’S AWAKE!” Jon winces, folding inwards at the sound. “Oh, sorry, dude, was that too loud? My abuela says I need to work on my volume control. But then I tell her that YELLING IS AWESOME!” Soos thumps his chest.   

“Jeez, Soos, you need to work on your volume control,” a gruff voice sounds from the doorway. Jon jerks his head to find that old man from before— Stan Pines, Mr. Mystery, Andrew “8-Ball” Alcatraz?— sticking a finger in his ear and grimacing.  

Postaxial polydactyly is a congenital condition wherein an infant is born with an extra pinky finger.  

Okay, that one isn’t even remotely related.  

“ Sure, Mr. Pines!” Soos says cheerily, about ten decibels quieter. Jon Knows exactly what the equation is for the vibration of his vocal chords. He jabs a finger into the eye in his palm and holds it there.   

“Oh. You.” Mr. Pines’s eyes focus on Jon’s—first the ones on his face, then downwards to the ones that litter his neck and collarbone. He crosses his arms in a defensive stance. “You gonna leave now, or what?”  

“ Mr. Pines!” Soos gasps, putting a hand to his chest.  “He just woke up!”  

“Yeah, after a good night’s rest on my couch. Sorry if I don’t think it’s a good idea to have a monster in the house with the kids,” Mr. Pines says, glaring pointedly at Jon, whose throat is suddenly very dry.  

“But Mr. Pines, our tolerance policy—”  

Mr. Pines pinches the bridge of his nose. “Doesn’t apply to monster eyeball men, Soos. Jeez, I really gotta make an employee handbook or something, this is getting outta hand.” He opens an eye at Jon and scowls. “Well, what did I say? You need an invitation or what?”  

 “I—no. of course. My apologies. I’ll be leaving, then.” There’s a pang of…something, at the rejection, but it’s nothing if not expected. He is not safe enough to be around. He understands. He grabs the edge of the couch, gritting his teeth against the flood of knowledge about the proprietary design of the sofa and how, exactly, they got the stuffing so thin and raggedy. It’s almost ridiculous how much Jon does not care. He pulls himself up, leaning on the couch for support as he gets to his feet.  

…And immediately falls back. His muscles ( quadriceps, hamstrings, elector spinae) tremble pathetically as Jon puts his head in his hands. That empty feeling in his chest seems to yawn, stretching ever wider. A chasm, opening.  

“Mr. Pines, he’s in no position to leave,” Soos says. “At least let’s give him some breakfast! Maybe some Mabel Juice will perk him up!”   

“No, I can go. Mr. Pines is right; I’ve intruded on your hospitality long enough.” Jon staggers upright, planting his feet like he used to in uni before he switched from energy drinks to tea. Steady on. “I have to leave anyway. I’ve got to find—” He clears his throat against its sudden closing. “My partner. I need to find him.”  

“Martin?”   

Jon freezes.  

He feels a slight vertigo as his Eyes all snap to Mr. Pines.  “ How do you know that name?” He tastes the static on his tongue but can’t bring himself to care as Mr. Pines’s eyes glaze over.   

“You were asking about him last night, before you collapsed. Only word you said to me, other than your name.” Mr. Pines coughs dryly. “Wait, what—”  

“Have you seen him? Did you see anyone else in the woods? Where is he?” Jon can feel the pulsing in his head grow stronger and more purposeful as he sees Mr. Pines’s face go slack. His Eyes do not blink.  

“No, just you. I didn’t see anyone else. There was only one burst of light, and I was more concerned with getting the twins back to safety. Those woods are dangerous at the best of times, but especially at night. There are things in there, dark things that’d love to gobble up an innocent kid that didn’t know any better.” Mr. Pines’s voice slows and takes on an almost melodic edge. Jon hangs on his every word. “I realized the woods were bad news my first year in Gravity Falls, heck, my first day. I was walking in the snow from my car to the Mystery Shack, only wasn’t called that then. Back then, it was just—”   

“Woah, woah, woah, Mr. Archivist dude! What are you doing?”  

Jon clicks his jaw shut. His Eyes unfocus, and a few meander over to Soos’s alarmed face. He can hear heavy breathing from Mr. Pines.   

“I—” Jon breaks off. He can’t explain himself. There is nothing to explain. Changing locations hasn’t changed him —and why did he think that it would? All he has done is subject this world to the same torment as his own. He is the same awful monster he’s always been. “I’m sorry.” His voice cracks, and he puts a hand to his mouth.   

“Get out.” Mr. Pines’s eyes stare holes into Jon’s with an anger that makes hot shame bloom in Jon’s chest. He’s leaning over, arms braced against his thighs. In pain. Jon has hurt him. “Get out.”   

“I—of course. I’m sorry. I’m sorry.” Jon ducks his head and stumbles to the door, leaning on the frame before pushing himself into the brightly lit corridor. He is loathe to admit it to himself, but he does feel physically better. His legs are sturdier under him, and that hollow feeling in his chest has receded slightly. He feels an aching wetness prick at his eyes. He blinks, hard.  

“Oh em GEE he’s awake!”   

Jon recognizes that squeal. He looks behind him, and there she is—that girl from yesterday, wearing a different sweater. This one has a music note on it. Mabel, wasn’t it?  

Mabel Caskey Pines. Named after her grandmother and mother, twelve years old and turning thirteen at the end of the summer. Makes all her own sweaters. Does not like acrylic yarn. Appreciates the feeling of dried wax under her fingernails.   

Jon’s head is spinning.  

“I need to go,” he says, and turns away from the girl. She calls to someone behind her—her brother, most likely. The one with the hat and the fear of change. Jon shivers as he remembers it, grabbing his arm and suddenly Knowing. He staggers through what seems to be a gift shop, and leans on a counter for support.   

“Woah, hey, careful, dude!” Jon jerks his head to the side to see a red-headed teenager, eyes wide and staring at him. “You good?”  

Wendy Corduroy’s mother died when she was eight years old. She dreams about her every night.  

Jon doesn’t respond. He doesn’t trust his voice to work. He sees the door and very nearly dives for it.   

“Wait! You don’t have to leave so soon!” This is the boy—Dipper, or Mason? Dipper. For the constellation on his forehead. He ignores the boy and opens the door. It’s early morning, and there’s a chill in the air that Jon feels in his bones. He steps onto the wood porch and hugs his jacket tighter around himself. He’s distantly glad he still has it. Everything else is gone, lost—but this remains.   

“Yes, he does. Let him go, kids.”   

“Grunkle Stan!”   

“But why?”  

Jon does not hear the answer. The door shuts behind him, and he is alone.  

.  

Jon walks.  

He crosses the clearing and does not stop as he reaches the treeline. He doesn’t have a plan, but he does have a goal. Even if Mr. Pines didn’t see him, there is still a chance that Martin could be in the woods. It’s the most likely scenario, and the only lead he has.   

It’s all he has.  

He can see the path ahead of him to where he crashed—he doesn’t even needs his Eyes, though they do chime in that the trees are already starting to obscure the way back. The forest doesn’t trust him, Jon thinks offhandedly, then corrects himself. No. That’s absurd.   

…Or is it? He sees something skittering out of the corner of his eye, and he pretends that he believes it’s just racoons. He Sees the small men in pointed hats that his Eyes supply, but by no means understands them.  

This place is very, very different from his own.  

His mind is whirling. He makes his way through the trees and feels a sudden rush of déjà vu—but from what, he can’t grasp. His heart is racing. He can barely think. The trees all seem to stare at him as he follows the path and Jon wants to shy away from their steady gaze. He wants to leave, to run far, far away—but where would he go? He needs to find Martin. Martin would understand. Martin, who faced down much greater evil than Jon ever did, who went up toe-to-toe with Peter Lukas and won, who is so much stronger than anyone ever gave him credit for.  

Jon feels his absence like a physical blow.  

He feels the impact crater before he sees it—that is, he trips on the edge of it has to catch himself on a tree to keep from falling in. He breathes out sharply. The impact crater is empty, save for the pine needles he’d noticed the night before. Other than that, there’s no sign of life at all. Even the birds have stopped.  

Yellow warblers and Stellar’s jays. Gold-crowned kinglets and crows. All watching, all curious.  

The adrenaline leaves him suddenly, in a rush that leaves him dizzy. Oh, he’s exerted himself, he realizes—his breath comes heavily, and his skin is hot and prickling with sweat under the heavy jacket. His hands are cold and his legs feel weak, and he sinks to the base of the tree almost more out of necessity than despair.   

Maybe he’s crying. That would explain the wetness at his face, the way the Eyes on his cheeks have closed instinctively. He feels lightheaded, breathing shallowly and unevenly. He screws up a hand in his hair and pulls at it as if that will help ease the pressure, the swirling thoughts in his brain that will not settle. He is a monster. Martin is gone. He hurt that man. Is Martin even alive? Is Jon alone? He’s so hungry. Is this all there is? What is he going to do? Should he do anything? Wouldn’t it be better if he just—if he just—  

“You know, you really shouldn’t pull your hair like that, dude.”   

Jon freezes.   

“Aw, c’mon, Soos—I thought we agreed on the entrance! It was gonna be cool!” This is whispered, but obviously from a young child. Dipper. That boy from before. Jon’s heart hammers in his chest.  

“Sorry, little dude, it looked like he was really hurting himself.”  

Jon raises his head blearily to see both Soos and Dipper standing over him. They both look vaguely worried, and trade a glance with each other that Jon cannot begin to parse the meaning of.  

“ What—” Jon cuts himself off, voice garbled. Not again, you monster. “I’d like to know what you’re doing here.”  

“Oh, that’s why you spoke so weird earlier!” Soos bats his forehead like he’s realizing something. “You didn’t want to do that freaky questions thing!”  

Dipper blinks. “’Freaky questions thing?’”  

“Yeah, he did this crazy thing to Mr. Pines—like he had to answer his question! And then Mr. Pines got all freaked out and kicked him out.”   

“He was right to,” Jon blurts. Dipper and Soos both look at him. “You both should go. I’m not—I’m not safe.”  

“Nah, dude, you were just scared!” Soos nods at his own statement. “And Mr. Pines was being kinda rude, too. I’m going to count this as a mutual ‘my bad’ on both your parts.”  

Jon disagrees very strongly with that statement, but he holds his tongue. “I—” Jon swallows. “I would have thought that that hed’ve wanted you back at your house. The…Mystery Shack.”  

“Yeah, he doesn’t exactly know we’re here,” Dipper says, scratching the back of his neck. “Mabel’s distracting him. You said your name was Jon, right? I’m Dipper. Mabel’s my sister.”   

Jon already knows. “Yes. Hello.” Soos offers a hand up, and Jon takes it. He lets himself be pulled to his feet, blinking at the change. “I’m just…wondering. Why you came after me. How you knew I’d be here.”  

“Well,” Soos draws out the last syllable, “It was actually Dipper’s idea!”  

Dipper lights up. “Yeah! So I thought, what was the most likely place for you to be—probably the first place you showed up! And then I noticed there was sort of a path in the trees, basically where we were yesterday—” Dipper bounces on the balls of his feet, speeding up as he talks—“And yeah! Yeah. That’s it.” He rocks back, losing momentum. “Yeah.”  

“And as for your second question: you’re trying to find your partner, right? Martin?” Soos asks. Jon nods, slowly. “Great! Me and Dipper can help you look for him.”  

Wait— “What?”  

“Yeah! We can help you find him!” Dipper nods eagerly. “And you can tell me all about your eyes and how they work—”  

“Woah, buddy, we don’t wanna freak him out,” Soos interrupts in the objectively worst stage whisper.   

“Right, right, sorry,” Dipper says sheepishly. “Later, then.”  

Jon…doesn’t know what to say. He doesn’t want anyone else involved in this. It’s his problem, his fault—but.   

But he needs to find Martin.  

“We can start in the woods,” Dipper continues, “and if we don’t find him there, we can check in the town. Or—” Dipper’s eyes flick to Jon’s Eyes. “Maybe Mabel and I check the town. You can give us a description, though, so we can ask people if they’ve seen him!”   

“You can drive, right?” Soos asks. “’Cuz I gotta get back to work. You can borrow my pickup, but Mr. Pines will totally notice if I’m missing.”  

“I don’t have a license,” Jon says helplessly. He’s not…leaving this child with him, right? Jon is not good with children.  

“Oh, you can take the golf cart then!” Soos grins, that vacant, amiable grin, and Jon feels like he may throw up, break down sobbing, or both. This is… so strange. “And you can stay at my Abuelas’ with me while you’re getting settled, if you want. I think she’d like the company!”  

Settled? Jon doesn’t understand. This man is acting as if all of this is completely normal. It isn’t. Dipper has started poking at the Eyes on Jon’s hand, and they are in the middle of the forest, near the impact crater from where Jon fell from the sky fewer than twelve hours ago after having escaped the apocalypse that he himself incited. Nothing about this is normal.   

But he needs a place to stay. At least for now, while he looks for Martin. If he has to rely on the hospitality of others—well, he doesn’t deserve it, but so be it. This man seems to be hell bent on friendliness. If Jon is to be a monster, he may as well take advantage of other’s kindness while he still has it.  

“Thank you,” Jon says, and hates how wretched his own voice sounds.  

“Don’t worry about it, dawg! Mr. Pines will come around eventually! We’ll have Mabel set up an apology song or something.”  

“…An apology song?”  

“Don’t ask,” Dipper says, with the voice of someone who has suffered greatly. Jon doesn’t get it. He gets a brief flash from his Eyes—something about a yellow tracksuit? Jon decides he doesn’t want to know.  

“So, what does your Martin look like? Is he British, too?” Soos looks…maybe a little too excited at the prospect.   

Well. In for a penny.  

Jon takes a deep breath and tells them.  

.  

.  

Martin does not like caves.  

This isn’t a recent development. He’s never actually gone inside a cave before now, but there had been a National Geographic about caves when he was a kid, one of those True Stories about a man who got stuck in a cave for days and eventually died of starvation, trapped hundreds of feet from the sun. And then the statements hadn’t helped, either. Lost John’s Cave had given him nightmares for days, and the Buried sure loved its enclosed spaces.  

Martin doesn’t have claustrophobia. But he does not like caves.  

This cave, comparatively, isn’t that bad. It’s wide, for one, and tall—really more of an indent in the rock than a proper cave, but it still makes a shiver run down his spine.  

At least it’s warmer here than outside. His mysterious rescuer, Stanford, had taken something out of his jacket and turned it on, and suddenly warmth and an orange light had filled the cave. Probably not natural, but hey, he wasn’t complaining. Martin had taken off his sweater and jacket to dry—“Can’t do anything about the stains right now, unfortunately,” Stanford had said, seeming rather blasé about the whole covered-in-blood-and-ink thing, “But we can at least get them dry.”   

So now they’re sitting across from each other. In a cave. In the middle of a blizzard. On an alien planet. In a different dimension.  

God, Martin is not okay.  

“Now, I understand the terror you must be feeling right now,” Stanford’s in the middle of saying when Martin tunes back in from his existential crisis, “I felt much the same way when I first found myself displaced outside of my home dimension! I, too, was chased by a predatory beast beyond human comprehension, until I found safety with a group of interdimensional refugees.” Stanford pauses, maybe for dramatic effect, maybe to clean his glasses. Martin can’t tell. “Once this weather clears, I can take you to the weak point in the fabric of spacetime where I jumped through to this realm. From there, we’ll swing by a more populous dimension, somewhere where they have protocol for this sort of thing.”  

“Okay,” Martin says, processing. “Okay. But the thing is, I need to find someone. He may have come with me. Is there a way I can look for him here?”  

“Hm. Let me think. Searching is probably a bad idea. Like I mentioned earlier, if there’s one Yeti, there’s a pack, and they’ve got your scent now.” Martin opens his mouth—but Stanford beats him to it, holding up a hand. “Wait. I’m assuming your person is humanoid?” Stanford starts rummaging around in his coat as he asks.  

“Human, yeah.” God, why does he have to specify?   

“Aha,” Stanford holds up what seems to be some silver thing triumphantly. “Now, let’s see…” He fiddles with it, and it starts beeping rapidly. “Now, I picked this up in Dimension .Delta17 to allow me to scan for undercover Time Police—”  

“Time Police?”  

“ Yes, Time Police, but if I recalibrate the sensors, I may be able to do a planet-wide sweep of all humanoid creatures. Just a wire there, snap that into place—” Stanford mutters to himself while he works, and Martin wonders if maybe he’s just hallucinating very, very vividly. “There we go!”  

The beeping slows, and reminds Martin of a hospital blood pressure monitor. Stanford waves it around in figure-eights in front of him. After about thirty seconds, the device makes a clicking noise, and Stanford sighs heavily.   

“I’m sorry, but it seems like we’re the only humanoids on this planet.”  

Martin forces himself to swallow past the lump in his throat. “Okay.” He wets his lips. Folds his hands in his lap. Keeps himself calm . “Is there somewhere else he could be?”  

Stanford seems to consider this. “My best guess would be a refugee planet, like the one I’m planning on taking you to.”  

“Can you, like, look for specific people there?” Martin asks, trying and failing to hide the edge of desperation to his voice. “Is there a database of inter-whatever refugees somewhere?”  

“Probably not as such,” Stanford says apologetically. “The problem with an infinite amount of dimensions is that it’s very difficult to find something or someone specific.”   

“No, there’s got to be something,” Martin digs his nails into the flesh of his palm. “It can’t just be me. He has to be out there. I have to find him.” He feels that familiar dig in his chest, that curling edge of despair that gouges at his lungs. It burns like frostbite. “I can’t do this without him, you don’t understand—" He hates this cave. He hates how small it is, hates how the air is so stuffy and thick and how he can’t even breathe through the pressure at his chest. He can’t walk out into the snow but God, does he want to. He wants to leave. He did so much, he worked so hard—he stabbed Jon and this is it? He’s just—alone, now?   

“You’re not alone,” Stanford interrupts.  

“What?” Martin’s sure he didn’t say that out loud.  

“Like I said,” Stanford says, a heavy note to his voice, “I’ve been where you are. Once the initial shock and terror wear off, the worst part of being stuck outside your dimension isn’t the fear of imminent peril.” He pauses. “It’s that you’ll be alone. Forever.”  

Martin resolutely ignores the aching behind his eyes. He can’t cry now. Not in front of anyone, much less this stranger. Stanford continues.  

“And it’s true, I lost everyone I’d ever known and loved. My own—” He cuts himself off. Exhales sharply. “But I found a purpose. And that purpose has kept me driven. I am going to destroy the being that threatens my dimension. That threatens all dimensions. That goal keeps me focused. It keeps me sane. Yes, I’m alone, but there’s a purpose to it. That gives me strength. I’d say—find something to latch onto. A goal. A drive. It’ll make it easier to bear with.”   

That…makes sense. That’s something Martin can do. Focus on a goal. He’s done it before. He can do it again.  

“Yeah?” Martin inhales slowly. Okay. Freakout’s over. Time to actually think. He straightens his posture, and breathes out through his nose. “Fine. Then my goal is to find Jon.” He looks at Stanford, at where he’s pretty sure his eyes are. Tell me it’s stupid, he thinks. I dare you.   

“Then that’s your purpose,” Stanford says calmly. No derision. Nothing. Martin’s caught a little off-guard by the sudden approval. “It does get easier to deal with. You’ll see.”  

Martin huffs a short exhale. Sort of like a laugh, if you squint. “Well, that bit’s going to be a problem,” Martin says dryly. He sniffs, wiping his eyes.  

“Why?”   

“Because I can’t actually see?” Martin asks, looking up at Stanford. He resists the urge to add on an obviously. “It was a joke.”  

Stanford leans back, obviously startled. “Wait, what? Are you blind? You seem to be tracking my movements well enough.” He waves a hand in front of Martin’s face.   

“Uh, no, I’m not blind,” Martin says, cringing away from Stanford’s hand. “I lost my glasses in the snow.” Can Stanford really not tell? “I can see outlines, and blobs of color, but…not well.”  

“Hm. This does puts a dent in things.” Stanford leans forward, looks up at Martin. “Now wait a second. What if—"  

A loud bang from outside interrupts Stanford. Then another, and another. They’re slow, and methodical, like someone knocking on a door.  

Stanford and Martin both keep very, very quiet.  

“…How likely is it that that came from the Yeti’s?” Martin asks slowly.  

Stanford shakes his head. “Not likely. If they knew we were here, we’d already be dead.”  

“Oh, lovely. So at least whatever’s outside wants to kill us slowly.” Martin swallows the hysterical noise that rises in his throat, but only barely.  

“Now, it could just be rocks falling off the top of the cave,” Stanford cautions.   

“Is it, though?”  

“…Likely not.”  

“Oh, great.” Martin feels for and grabs his sweater and overcoat from near the heating apparatus. He pulls them on—it may not amount to much, but if they have to run out of here, he’d rather be warm.   

“You wait here.”  

“Like hell I’m—”  

Stanford interrupts him. “Unlike you, I can actually see what we’re dealing with. And I have experience with this. You don’t. Here.” He rummages around in his coat—how many pockets does this man have?— and produces a thin, black object.  

 Martin takes it. A switchblade?  

“I saw what you did with that knife—very impressive, by the way—but that trick probably won’t work twice. So here’s a taser.”   

Martin wheezes. “A what—”   

“If I don’t return, or if something enters after me, you need to use it. Then you can…I don’t know. Loot my corpse or something. You’ll figure it out.” He pats Martin reassuringly on the shoulder. Why is he so calm about this.   

“Alright. I’m off then. Wish me luck!” And with that, he walks briskly out of the cave, leaving Martin behind, feeling vaguely thrown.   

The wind whistles through the opening of the cave. Martin stands, taser in hand, and tries not to think about what lays beyond the cave. He hates it. He thinks he hates what may lie beyond even more, though.  

What does he do? Stay here, and wait for Stanford to come back? He’s always hated this part. The waiting. The trepidation, the fear that something has gone horribly wrong and Martin will be left to pick up the pieces alone. He takes a deep breath and holds it.   

Sooner rather than later, he hears the purposeful thud of heavy boots against the cave floor. The deep-seated relief is almost a little bit embarrassing. “Stanford, is that—”  

“Yes, it’s me, no need to worry. There was nothing out there. Or, well. Nothing dangerous.” There’s… something about Stanford’s voice. It’s taken on a monotone edge, which, despite having known the man for less than a day, seems very off from his typical speech pattern.   

“Well—that’s good, isn’t it?” Martin asks. Something’s wrong. Martin can feel it.  

Stanford pauses at the heating device. “…Martin.”   

Here it is. “What is it?”  

“Your glasses.” His glasses?  “They wouldn’t happen to have a clear plastic frame, would they? Horn-rimmed?”  

That can’t be a lucky guess. “…Yeah. Why?”  

“I believe I’ve found them.” Stanford holds them out to Martin. “I had to brush a spider—or, spider analogue, at least—off them, so be careful.”  

“ What?” That’s impossible. Martin lost his glasses, either in the space between worlds or back in the snow. There is no possible way—  

And there they are. With a rising dread, Martin takes the glasses from Stanford. They’re covered in cobwebs, filmy and thready, and Martin clears them with the hem of his sweater. He puts them on his face. They’re cracked in the right lens, spiderwebbing up to the top of the frame, and the nose bridge is slightly bent. Still usable, though.  

“Those are your glasses, then?” Stanford asks, with that creeping trepidation that Martin knows all too well. The disconcerting just wrong enough feeling that Martin had felt every day when he worked at the Institute and has since grown numb to. Still, he knows what this is. A message.  

…And considering the cobwebs and the spider Stanford mentioned, Martin’s pretty sure he knows who from.  

“Yep,” Martin says, blinking up at Stanford. Now that he can actually see, he can pick out the features on his face: thick glasses, greying hair, big nose, wrinkles. He’s frowning, a mirror of Martin’s own. “I don’t know how,” and he isn’t thinking about that, isn’t thinking about the implications of spiders and webs in this new place, what that means for him and Jon, “but I know who this is from.” 

“Who?”  

“No one good,” Martin answers, looking out into the snow. The blizzard is coming to a close, the white flecks of snow thinning out to show the deep gray sky. The monochrome of it all is wrong, in a way Martin feels more than knows. “The more you know about them, the more they can hurt you.”  

“I think I can handle myself,” Stanford says, somewhat haughtily.  

“No,” Martin turns away, to the cave mouth. “You really can’t.” He doesn’t listen to Stanford’s reply. He watches the snow through cracked glasses, and the swirls of white refract and warp through the broken lenses. It doesn’t give him a headache like Martin knows it should.   

Martin knows one thing for certain.  

This is not chance. Martin is here for a reason. That’s horrifying, yeah, but also—if the Web is still watching Martin, it means that Jon has to be alive. It wouldn’t make sense to kill one and not the other, and Jon is objectively more important.  

And if Jon’s alive…Martin feels a sharp bloom of hope unfurl in his chest.  

Martin can work with that.  

Martin is here for a reason . He knows that , even if he doesn’t know why.  

Well. Martin readjusts his glasses. He supposes he’ll just have to figure it out.  

Chapter Text

So the thing is— 

Gravity Falls is Weird. Capital W-weird, with an emphasis on the strange and uncanny. Dipper knows this. He’s got a whole Journal filled with the crazy things that happen in this town, not to mention personal experience fighting off all sorts of creatures. It’s only been a few weeks, but already he’s encountered things that have no logical explanation, and catalogued them as thoroughly as he can in the Journal. He’s scoured the forests looking for mutated birds, and risked looking like an idiot for inspecting the cracks in the sidewalk for uncanny movement. He’s done sanity-defying things in the pursuit of knowledge, and relished in the thrill of it. 

All this is to say that Dipper feels pretty confident in saying that he’s got a finger on the pulse of the town, monster-wise.  

Jon, though—Jon has got to be the strangest being Dipper’s encountered so far. And not just because of his name! Though it is, in Dipper’s opinion, a little strange that his is so normal. Jon. Jawnnn. In a town full of Manotaurs and Gobblewonkers, ‘Jon’ just seems…a little plain. 

Not that Dipper’s disappointed or anything! Jon’d been fascinating as he and Dipper had mapped out the forest on a grid and had gone through methodically, Jon absently saying completely insane things and Dipper furtively writing them down as they came. Apparently gnomes reproduce like bees? Who knew! 

The really weird thing is, though, that Jon acts just like a human—floating and intonation like a chorus of demons aside. He stutters. He pulls at his own hair. He forgets to eat, too, just like Dipper, which is why they’re heading back to the Shack. Dipper’s stomach had, mortifyingly, started growling about a minute into Jon’s lecture about gnome hive politics, a topic which seemed to baffle Jon as much as it intrigued Dipper.  

“It’s alright,” Jon had said, with a weird smile that Dipper thinks was supposed to be reassuring. “I doubt we’re going to find him here, anyway. I doubt—” he cut himself off. “I haven’t Seen him at all. I don’t…” he had trailed off at that, and had to collect himself before continuing. “I don’t think he’s here.” 

Something turned in Dipper’s stomach at that. 

So here they are. Walking through the woods. A bird squawks overhead, and Jon ducks his head like he’s afraid it’ll start shooting at him. Then the bird tilts its head, to reveal another head attached to the birds’ torso. It harmonizes. 

Jon stares. 

Dipper pulls out the Journal from his vest, and flips through it as fast as he physically can. “Looks like a Three-headed Warbler,” Dipper says authoritatively. Jon nods in agreement, the eyes on his cheeks blinking in what Dipper chooses to believe is approval. “It says here that they actually grow another head when they reach adulthood.” He grins up at Jon.  

“Fascinating,” Jon says, and Dipper can’t tell if he’s being sarcastic or not. He hopes not.  

“Yeah, isn’t it? The Journal says that they act like regular warblers, except with added heads. I wonder if they share a stomach?” He trails off, scanning the Journal to see if the Author wrote anything about it. And yep—“Apparently, they do!”  

“ What—” Jon clears his throat. “I noticed your Journal earlier.” His eyes seem to glow, slightly, as they all focus on Dipper, who definitely does not suppress a squee, because that would be super weird. He’s just. Normal. Yeah.  

“Oh, the Journal?” Dipper holds it up, and Jon leans over to get a closer look. “It’s the most comprehensive guide to all the oddities that surround Gravity Falls. It was written by a mysterious Author—” 

“There’s polydactyly again,” Jon mutters under his breath. Dipper nods. 

“Yeah! There’s a six-fingered hand on the cover. The author was a polydactyl, I’m pretty sure.” He angles it so Jon can see the gold embossing a little better. Jon holds a scarred hand out to the decal. Just as he’s about to touch it though, he jerks forward and rips it out of Dipper’s arms.  

“Wh—hey!” Dipper squawks, but he doesn’t think Jon is listening. His eyes—there’s no other way to put it, Dipper thinks, almost incoherently. Jon’s eyes open.  

“ June 18 th . It’s hard to believe it’s been six years since I began researching the strange and wondrous secrets of Gravity Falls, Oregon .” Jon’s fingers curl around the cover, scratching into the leather binding. Dipper gapes.  

“ In all my travels, never have I observed so many curious things. Gravity Falls is, indeed—”  

“ ’A geographical oddity,” Dipper answers, in tandem with Jon. His eyes close—the ones on his skin, anyway, his main ones are wide in an emotion Dipper can’t quite pinpoint. He drops the book like it’s burned him, and Dipper scrambles to pick it up.  

“What,” Dipper manages, “Was that?”  

“I—I don’t know. Don’t let me touch that book.” Jon runs a hand through his tangled hair, before abruptly twisting towards Dipper. “Does it have a sticker in it? ‘From the Library of Jurgen Leitner?’ ” His eyes hold Dipper’s, bright and almost too large for his face.  

Dipper shakes his head vigorously. “No, I found it in the woods. No sticker at all.” His eyes widen. “Wait, is Jurgen Leitner the name of the Author?” He holds the book even tighter. Man, supernatural knowledge for the win!  

“Jurgen Leitner may have been many things, but he was certainly not an author,” Jon says automatically. He starts walking, trudging quicker through the forest, and Dipper can’t help the disappointed sigh that leaves him. “And he doesn’t exist here, anyway. It was a stupid question. This place…” Jon squints up at the trees. “It’s…disconcerting.” 

They come to a break in the trees, and Dipper squints at the sun reflecting off the dirt path to the Shack. “Take a right here,” Dipper instructs. “So, like, could you Know who the Author is? With your mind powers?” 

Jon slows. “No. Probably not. When I first—” he swallows, “ came here, that Journal was a blank to me. I wasn’t able to See anything about it. I don’t know why that’s changed now. This place makes no sense, ” he says to himself, almost as an afterthought.  

“Maybe it’s something about the town?” Dipper suggests, tapping the Journal in thought. “You’re from another dimension. Maybe you needed some time to adapt to the way things work around here.” 

Jon seems to be surprised at that. “How did you—” 

“Figure out you came from a different dimension? It was pretty obvious,” Dipper says, looking away nervously. He adjusts his hat. “I mean, you did fall from the sky.” 

“Soos seemed to think that was just how international travel worked,” Jon says, somewhat dazedly.  

Dipper kicks a rock down the road. “Soos thinks a lot of things.”  

“Frankly, I was starting to think this dimension was just a little strange,” Jon admits. “What with the gnomes living in the forest and such.” 

“That’s mostly a Gravity Falls thing, actually.” Dipper shoves his hands into his vest pockets. “Mabel and I are from California, and it’s super normal there.” Blisteringly normal. His dad works in I.T. and everything. Dipper, not for the first time, wonders how in the world he’s supposed to go back there after all the crazy things that have happened this summer so far. 

“I see,” Jon says, and Dipper can almost watch as he processes the thought. “The Law of Weirdness Magnetism.”  

“Huh?”  

Jon stops, dead in his tracks. “I—strange things congregate here. They’re attracted to this place.” He puts his head in his hands. His eyes stare at Dipper—Jon, on the other hand, looks away. 

“What? What does that mean?”  

“I don’t—” “Something does not want me thinking about this,” Jon says, alarmingly. “It—” he clears his throat dryly. “It hurts.”  

“You don’t have to think about it!” Dipper stashes the Journal back in his vest and waves his hands frantically. “It’s fine!” Oh, god, he doesn’t want to kill him—can asking too many questions kill someone? Is Jon going to die from question overdose? 

The tension releases out of Jon’s body almost immediately, and he slumps onto a nearby tree. 

Oh, thank god. Dipper had no idea how he was going to explain a dead body to Grunkle Stan. 

“My apologies,” Jon says, running a hand through his hair. “We’re coming up on the Shack, anyhow. I…should wait here until Soos is done with his shift.” Dipper looks up—it’s true. He hadn’t noticed, but there’s the curve in the road to the Shack.  

“I don’t get why Grunkle Stan won’t let you in,” Dipper says.  

Jon winces. “He has every reason to.” 

And—Jon keeps saying that, and not elaborating, and it’s driving Dipper a little bit crazy. It itches, in the back of his skull.  

“Right.” Dipper draws out the word into obvious sarcasm. “But, like, why.”   

“Please enjoy your breakfast,” Jon says, nonsensically, turning away. “The milk’s gone bad, so throw that away.” 

Dipper watches him for a second, then walks up the road to the Shack. Sure. Don’ t tell him, see if Dipper cares. 

He doesn’t!  

. 

“Man, what a refreshing walk in the woods!” Dipper calls, subtly announcing his arrival. “I sure love me my morning walks.” Nailed it! Grunkle Stan won’t suspect a thing. 

“Dipper!” Mabel races from the Employee’s-only section. “Grunkle Stan suspects everything!” 

“What!?” Dipper squawks. “How?” 

Mabel rubs the sleeves of her sweater. “Well it’s really hard to distract someone who’s trying to have a serious conversation about stranger danger with you from the person he’s trying to get you to stay away from.” 

“Mabel,” Dipper asks, dread growing in his stomach, “what did you do?” 

“So I had to distract him from his lecture altogether, and the only thing I could think of was about how he talks to strangers all the time so I told him that, and he said that was because he was a professional, and then I said that I thought I could do a better job running the Shack than he could—” 

“You what?!”   

“I panicked, okay? You were gone for a long time!” Mabel shoots Dipper an accusatory look, and he raises his hands in surrender. “So we made a bet—he’s going to take a vacation for three days, and whoever makes more money gets to make the other person do something. And—” Mabel bites her lip. “If I lose, I have to wear a t-shirt with the word ‘LOSER’ written on it! For the entire summer!”  

“Oh, no,” Dipper deadpans. “The horror.” 

Mabel swats Dipper with the arm of her sweater. “Shut up Dipper,” she says, “don’t you think it’s weird that he’s leaving so fast? Like, right after Jon.” 

Dipper stills. Yeah, that is pretty strange. Grunkle Stan had made a big stink about Jon, and yesterday had promised to ensnare both of them in an hours-long old man lecture—but then he decides to just leave?  

“He was talking really weirdly the entire time, too,” Mabel continues. “He kept staring into space.” 

“Do you think this has anything to do with Jon?” Dipper wonders. He makes his way to the kitchen, flipping open the breadbox and examining its contents—stale, but not moldy. Thankfully. “He’s been pretty…out of it, too. Not that I have a lot to compare it to.” 

Mabel hops up onto the counter. “He did just lose his boyfriend.” 

“Yeah, that too—hey, do you think he likes mayo?”  

“He could be lactose intolerant,” Mabel points out. At the look of horror on Dipper’s face, she breaks out into a grin. “It’s probably fine, bro-bro.” 

Dipper…decides against the mayo. And also the cheese. Just in case. Maybe he’s vegan? He’ll keep the ham off, too.  

He stares at the bread. 

After a moment of consideration, he stacks the other piece of bread on top. 

“Bread sandwich!” Mabel whoops.  

“Do, uh. Do you think Jon’ll like it?” Dipper analyzes the grain of the bread, mapping each little pore. Is there a rubric for judging sandwiches? He wishes there was.  

Mabel tilts her head at Dipper, her hair glinting in the morning sun. “Dipper. I think he’ll love it. But—will he love making up with Grunkle Stan even more?” 

Dipper pauses. “Actually, this could be an incredible opportunity.” He purses his lips, considering. “Grunkle Stan is kind of a terrible boss. And all his attractions are super fake. We could probably do a way better job running it than he could.” 

Mabel gasps delightedly. “Dipper, that’s wonderful! And if Jon helps out, we can show Stan that he’s actually harmless!” 

Dipper grins. “This is genius. I’m gonna go tell him!” He lets the bread fall to the counter as he races to the door, only to be stopped by a pull to his neck.  

“Don’t forget your bread!” Mabel sings, letting go of his vest collar.  

“It’s a sandwich!”  

“Sure, bro-bro.” 

. 

Dipper finds Jon exactly where he left him. 

To be fair, he did say he was going wait until the end of Soos’s shift. He’s leaning on a tree, like he was last time Dipper found him, but this time it looks like it’s more out of exhaustion than sheer despair.  

“Hey!” Dipper’s voice cracks. He clears his throat to cover it up. “Uh. I mean. Hey.”   

Jon jerks his head up. His eyes are glowing that unnatural green, faintly, but they fade as Dipper approaches. “Ah. Dipper. Hello. Shouldn’t you be at the Shack?” 

“I got you a sandwich,” Dipper says, holding it out to Jon. “I don’t think you got breakfast, right?”  

Jon stares at the sandwich, mouth slightly parted. “I—can’t take this.” 

Dipper rolls his eyes. “C’mon, dude, take the sandwich.” Jon raises a tentative hand, kind of like a stray dog. Dipper sits next to him. “It’s, uh. Just bread. I didn’t know what you liked.” 

Jon stares at the sandwich, and then back at Dipper. “It’s…perfect. Thank you.” Dipper leans on a tree next to him, nonchalantly. He takes a bite of his sandwich. The bread sticks to the roof of his mouth. It’s very dry. 

He glances over to Jon, who’s nibbling at the crust slowly but consistently. Oh, god, is he just being nice by eating it? Dipper frowns. This was a terrible idea. Dipper puts his hands in his lap and regrets his life choices.  

“You know, I used to eat sandwiches like this quite a lot as a teenager,” Jon says with a reminiscent huff. 

“What—really?” Dipper eats sandwiches like this all the time! What! 

“I’m afraid so. No one stopped me, and it was terribly efficient. Or, at least, I thought so. I actually ended up getting scurvy in year twelve.” Jon laughs at this, so Dipper forces a chuckle, too. “My grandmother was not pleased.” 

“Oh, I don’t think that would ever happen to me. Mabel slips her Mabel Juice into basically everything I drink, and that’s got enough orange juice in it to drown a cow.”  

“Fascinating,” Jon says. 

They continue eating in silence. Jon’s eyes open and close lazily, some staring at Dipper, some looking out onto the Shack.  

Okay. Now or never. Dipper wipes his sweaty palms on his shorts and breathes out sharply. “So I have a proposition for you!”  

Jon blinks. “…What sort of proposition?” 

Dipper wrings his hands in excitement as he explains. Jon listens, eyebrows drawing further and further together. 

“You…want me… to be one of the exhibits at your great-uncle’s tourist trap.” Jon puts a hand to his chest dubiously.  

“Yeah! I mean—you don’t have to, but it’d be really great if you could.” 

“I don’t…” Jon sighs. “I really don’t think that’s a good idea. Mr. Pines made it very clear that I was not to return to the Mystery Shack. And I agree with him. I shouldn’t even be talking to you.” 

“We literally spent the entire morning looking for your boyfriend,” Dipper points out. “If you were going to have a problem talking to me, it should have been then.” 

Jon splutters. “That was different—”  

“Uh-huh. Anyways, I don’t care about that. The thing is, while Mabel was distracting our Grunkle so Soos and I could talk to you, she made a bet with him, so she’s in charge for the next three days—” 

“The twelve-year-old?” Jon interrupts, bewildered. 

“—and we figured that you’d be a great attraction! You’re actually real, and not a cheap scammy knockoff, for one.” 

“I think, technically, I’m an invasive species,” Jon says mildly. “Not native.” 

“No one’s going to care where you came from,” Dipper reassures. “It’s the eyes that really matter! You’re actually supernatural!” He pauses, considering. “I mean, if you really don’t want to, I guess I could always find a Gremoblin or something. They’d definitely be interesting…” he trails off. That’s a pretty good point, now that he’s thinking about it. Gremoblins are big, and intimidating, and maybe exactly what the public has been waiting for. Best case scenario is Jon, of course, but maybe…Jon and a Gremoblin? So you Know what your worst nightmare is before you see it! This is genius! 

“A what? ‘ Gremoblin’?” Jon pauses, staring off into the middle distance with a furrowed brow. Two eyes on the sides of his cheeks blink, and he looks back at Dipper. “Dipper. That’s a horrible idea.” 

Dipper shakes his head vigorously. “No, see—it’s brilliant! Because Grunkle Stan doesn’t have any real creatures in his museum. It’s all Six-packalopes and Sascrotches—” 

“Sas…crotches.”  

“Yeah, exactly! Isn’t it stupid?” 

“And your next choice, if I decline, is to go into the woods to capture another nightmare creature in the woods that makes people reveal their worst fears.” 

Well—“It’s more like it shows them their worst fears when they look into their eyes—but basically! I think you and a Gremoblin would make an awesome dual exhibit.” And he’d only catch one, he’s not an idiot. At the look on Jon’s face, though, he concedes. “ But it can just be you, if you’re like worried about it or something.”  

Jon puts his head in his hands. Dipper doesn’t see why, Jon’s the least dangerous creature Dipper’s encountered so far. There’s no way he’d be a threat. “I am going to get arrested,” Jon says, under his breath, “and this time they really are going to kill me.” 

“Don’t worry,” Dipper says, “Blubs and Durland are seriously bad at being cops.” He pauses. “It’s actually sort of concerning. And anyway, no one’ll call them!” 

“Your uncle will,” Jon says wearily, “after I’ve been breaking and entering for three days to watch unsupervised children.” 

“But that’s the beauty of it! Grunkle Stan will see that you’re not dangerous at all and maybe let you stay as an exhibit .” He strings the words together at the end very quickly—maybe Jon won’t notice? 

Jon looks at Dipper, something in his eyes that vaguely reminds him of his parents. “And you say your…Grunkle Stan isn’t home right now? You and Mabel are alone in the Shack?” 

“Well, Soos is there, too.” Changing into a Question Mark outfit, assumedly. “And we’re not alone yet. Grunkle Stan’s packing right now. I’ll come get you when he’s gone!” 

Jon sighs, shoulders hunching as he sinks into his hands. “Okay. Fine. I’ll...do it. As long as you don’t try to catch any other creatures.” 

“Why would I need to?” Dipper asks. He’s got all he needs right here. Jon looks at him, completely unwarranted suspicion coloring his face. 

He’s going to be the biggest hit ever!  

. 

“That’s so fake it actually hurts.” 

Dipper has lost all faith in the public.  

It’s been a day. A whole day, and not one tourist has even considered the possibility that Jon is the real deal. Is everyone else just stupid? Is Dipper the only sane person ever? 

“It’s obviously plastic surgery—you can see the scars!” 

Jon actually pauses at this one. “That’s just my skin.” He flexes his hand—the scarred one, with the burn marks. His shirt rides up to show the eyes blinking up from his clavicle. He’d rode in this morning with Soos, sporting an almost ridiculously oversized Mystery Employee t-shirt, probably from Soos’s closet. It makes him look really, really tiny. 

“Yeah, right,” a man in a Hawaiian shirt sneers, “like any person has that many scars naturally. Fake! Fake, I tell you!” He raises his fist, and soon the whole crowd’s booing about how obviously fake the man with glowing eyes is. “Ooh, a Six-packalope!” The man is instantly distracted by the obviously glued-on antlers on the rabbit, and the crowd follows him. 

Jon is left in the middle, looking faintly bedraggled on his stool. Dipper can see the rings under his eyes, deep bruises set into his skin. Dipper relates—it can be hard sleeping in a new place. 

“No, wait guys—he’s the real deal!” Dipper turns to Jon desperately. “You can, like… know things, right? You should Know something about one of the tourists!” 

Jon stares, wide-eyed. “That’s really not a good idea.” 

“ Please?”  

Jon exhales through his nose, and thins his mouth into a line. “I’m not going traumatize random strangers to make money for a tourist trap,” Jon says, with more steel in his voice than Dipper’s ever heard from him, “and that’s final.” 

“But they’re all—” Dipper waves his hand helplessly. “None of them believe it!” It feels like something’s fraying under his skin. It’s an incongruency that doesn’t work and it makes him grind his teeth. Jon is real! Why doesn’t anybody understand ! 

“Believe me, it’s better that way. ” Jon looks at Dipper intensely, eyes unblinking. “Sometimes believing just makes it worse.” 

Dipper does not understand. It doesn’t connect! Something rough and chafing rubs its way into his ribs as Jon looks at him, with such an understanding expression that Dipper has to look away.  

Fine. Fine! If Jon’s going to be like that, Dipper’s just going to have to find another option. Jon just sits there, boringly. No wonder everyone thought he was a sham! People want action. People want suspense.   

Dipper knows just how to give it to them. 

. 

Mabel’s a big enough person to admit when she’s made a mistake. 

And oh, boy howdy has she made one—a big one. Being nice is hard, okay, when people are yelling at you about rip-offs and demanding discounts and refunds. But Mabel’s trying her best, because she’s a good person, and Jon is too, if only Grunkle Stan could see it.  

But Wendy’s gone , and Soos went on a peaceful nature walk and Dipper just ran out too, so Mabel’s on her own. She smiles at everyone and tries desperately not to cry as people she doesn’t know demand money Mabel doesn’t have. 

She thought it would be easy—just be nice to people! Just be good, and people will give you money because you’re cute and wearing a silly hat. That’s how it always worked when she did lemonade stands—heck, the one last week had been a rousing success, and Mabel had gotten a hefty tip from a creature in a dark cloak and papery skin, plus a couple of moths that Mabel had stuck in a jar before she got super guilty about it and let them free. 

But apparently people are meaner than monsters.  

So yeah, she’s a little frazzled. A woman is yelling at her about how her son got a splinter on the Six-Packalope and Mabel doesn’t even know how, there’s no wood on that thing—but she’s screaming and demanding a refund and Mabel is about to give it to her, before she spots a scrawny dude in a gross jacket and oversize shirt making a break for the door. 

Is that Jon?  

It is! Jon’s trying to escape, too!  

Mabel narrows her eyes. Oh no, you don’t, buster. Not on her watch.  

To the woman, Mabel grins as widely as she can possible muster. “Not to worry, ma’am! My…” she coughs, “ supervisor will be with you shortly!” She points out Jon, who freezes like a startled kitten. 

“Oh, I should hope so. The absolute nerve! ”  

“JON!” Mabel waves to him, “HI!” 

“Wait, no—I have to talk to your brother—” 

But he can’t get any further, because the woman is on him in an instant. 

“So you’re the manager of this dump?! Well I demand a refund immediately! Letting a child run the counter, for shame!"  

Jon splutters. “I don’t work here—” 

“Trying to shirk the blame? So irresponsible! Just what I’d expect from a man with as much plastic surgery as you.” 

Jon blinks with at least six eyes, probably in the same incredulity that Mabel’s feeling. Man. Dipper was right about some people.  

“No, I really don’t work here, if you could please let me pass—”  

Jon shrinks back, and Mabel feels a curl of guilt as the woman towers over him. But he can’t leave, he can’t— what was this even for if he’s not going to help prove himself to Grunkle Stan? What was this even for if she loses?  

“Uh, hey, can I check out, please?” A man waves a hand in front of Mabel’s face, and she blinks back into that plasticky smile she’s working on—the one that makes her cheeks ache. 

“Of course!” she says, and doesn’t flinch at the mountain of Mystery Shack trinkets that cascade onto the counter. Not even a little bit. 

. 

Mabel spends about fifteen years checking out the man’s items, all the while little kids climb on the Sascrotch and break off one of its arms, and knock the taxidermied goat-bat to the floor, unleashing the dead flies stored within. Mabel forces Jon into cleaning that one with a puppy-dog face unrivaled by any other—all that time practicing in front of the mirror did end up paying off, Dipper . Still, he keeps shooting glances at the door. Mabel pretends it’s fine.  

The guy didn’t even tip well! 

“I’m back!” Dipper calls. Mabel looks up as the door swings closed. Oh, thank god, he’s back. She could really use her brother right about— 

What.  

Jon scrambles to his feet. “Dipper, put that back right now!” There’s a frantic edge to his voice, something Mabel’s only heard before from Dipper when he’s sure one of her boyfriends is actually a monster. 

Dipper scowls. “I’m not listening to you!” He drags the writhing bag, pulling on it with his whole body weight. “This guy’s gonna be a hit!” A hairy arm emerges from the hole in the top, clawing at Dipper. Mabel gasps, but before she can do anything, Dipper’s bashing it, jerky motions that make him seem…very violent. Mabel purses her lips, and eventually, the bag stops moving. 

“Um, Dipper?” Mabel asks. “Are you sure that’s a good idea?” 

“It’s the best idea ever, Mabel, don’t question my methods!”  

Mabel…is a little bit questioning his methods, if only because Jon looks like he’s about to explode.  

“You have to get that thing out,” Jon insists. “Dipper, please. I told you, it’s not safe!” As if in agreement, the thing in the bag howls like the souls of the damned. Or, Mabel thinks, Dipper’s stomach when he hasn’t eaten in a while. 

Dipper stops in his tracks. “I’ll tell you what’s not safe! People not believing in the supernatural! Especially in Gravity Falls! Do you realize how many crazy things are in the woods? In the town? It’s literally a miracle no one’s died.” 

Jon wets his lips. A few eyes blink open and closed on his hands. “What would your great uncle think if he—” 

“He’s just as bad! He’s always making fun of me and pretending like he doesn’t know what I’m taking about!” He drops the bag, using both hands to gesture aggressively. It ripples, slightly. There’s— 

Oh, heck. 

“Dipper—” 

Dipper waves her off. “No! Mabel, you know I’m right! I’m tired of being treated like just some dumb kid!” He steps off the bag altogether. 

“No, Dipper, the bag—”  

Mabel watches in horror as the bag is ripped. Between one second and the next, the Gremoblin frees itself, letting out an ear-splitting roar that sounds, uncannily, like the worst dream Mabel’s ever had.  

Hoo boy. 

The Gremoblin lunges at Dipper, who yelps as he’s enveloped in a clawed hand. Mabel hears herself screaming for him, but she doesn’t have the time to do anything before the Gremoblin unfurls its leathery wings and plants its feet like it’s about to fly away—so Mabel doesn’t think. She fumbles for the grappling gun in her sweater, and aims at its wings and hopes hopes hopes she doesn’t hit Dipper— 

“ Gremoblin.”   

Jon speaks. 

The sound is quiet. Mabel, objectively, knows that. It doesn’t feel that way, though. It feels like the whole room’s gone silent. It feels like he’s speaking into a microphone, something crackling and magnifying his voice into something huge and monstrous. It sounds like it lasts forever, like there has never been a moment that has not felt like this one. 

Dipper slips from the Gremoblin’s grasp and lands on his knees. He scrambles up, and to Mabel, clinging onto her sweater. Mabel clings right back. 

Jon’s voice is laced in static. 

“ Tell me.”  

“ I—” the Gremoblin chokes. It writhes, coughs and shudders under Jon’s Gaze. The shadows lengthen and warp. The stained window watches. Mabel wonders, somewhere far away, if this is what it feels to die. Things flash in front of her eyes: the ghosts from the convenience store, Quentin Trembly, the Gobblewonker—all of the crazy things she and Dipper have encountered in Gravity Falls so far. Everything that has made fear curl like a root behind her ribcage. She stands there, and watches the Gremoblin struggle uselessly against Jon’s impenetrable gaze. 

“Stop—stop looking at me—” The Gremoblin whimpers in a voice like cut gravel. “ Stop—”   

Mabel does not think Jon is going to stop. His hair blows in an invisible wind, and his eyes glow steadily like they did last night. A toxic, unnatural green. 

“ Tell me ,” Jon repeats. There’s an edge to his voice, something solid and dark. Mabel feels a shiver run down her spine, and she holds her brother’s sweaty hand very, very tightly. “ Tell me now.”  

“I— I’m—” The Gremoblin screams. It seizes, back arching, and Mabel feels eyes on her back, and— 

It’s gone. 

Just like that—Mabel rubs her eyes. It’s gone. Jon’s…vaporized it? There’s a smell like burning plastic in the air, and she covers her nose with her arm. The air is thick. 

Jon Blinks like a full-body convulsion, and collapses. 

Mabel rushes over to him just as soon as she’s sure he’s not going to make her relive the worst experiences of her entire life. “Jon? Jon!” He’s limp, eyes open but unseeing, and oh god can Optimism even fix this? Is Jon actually dead? “Please don’t be dead!” 

Jon groans. 

The heady rush of relief that flows through Mabel almost makes her forget about her running Optimism tally.  

“Is it—” he coughs, wetly. “Is it gone?” 

“Oh. Em. Gee.” Mabel doesn’t even know what to say. Dude. Dude!  

“Yeah,” Dipper says faintly, “yeah, it’s gone.” 

Jon curls onto his knees. “Good.” 

“You just— smited it!”  

“Smote,” Jon corrects, then winces. “Sorry.” 

“’ Sorry?’” Mabel exclaims. “You don’t need to be sorry, you just saved us! That was crazy!” 

“I—“ Dipper swallows. He looks pale—Mabel touches his arm in concern. He allows it, but keeps looking at Jon. “Are you okay? That didn’t look…super pleasant.” 

Jon shakes his head. “No,” he grunts as he props himself up into a crouch. “It wasn’t. But I’m alright,” he adds, at Mabel and Dipper’s twin stricken looks. “I’m alright. I’ve done this before. Sort of.” He turns to his hands. His extra eyes are all closed, except for a couple at his neck that squint at Mabel and Dipper. “Not nearly so…intensive. And…” he trails off. “It was different.” 

“Different how?” Dipper asks, but Mabel puts a hand to his chest. Sometimes, she wishes she could beam into her brother’s head good question-asky times. Like not right now. 

“Hey, guys— whoa.” Wendy opens the door, Soos ducking in behind her.  

Soos gasps like a character in Ducktective. “Woah! Dude, are you okay?” 

“Ah, Wendy. Perfect. I need your phone.” Jon, still crouching, holds out his hand. It glints in the light, a sheen of sweat just visible enough for Mabel to worry. “And yes, Soos. I’m fine.” 

“Uh, why?” Wendy asks. 

“Please. I’m calling your boss.”  

Mabel gasps in betrayal. “Jon! How could you?” 

“No. This has gone on long enough. I’m calling your guardian, and then I’m leaving, and—” 

A hot and fuzzy feeling creeps in on Mabel’s brain. “You can’t leave! We’ve got to get more money than Grunkle Stan in the next eighteen hours! Or I have to wear a loser shirt for the rest of the summer and he’ll never forgive you for whatever you did!” Doesn’t Jon understand? She looks desperately to the oversize profit jar near the register. It’s near empty, and has a huge crack in the side. This whole thing was so Grunkle Stan would like Jon. How is that going to happen now? Everyone’s going to be lonely forever and there’s nothing Mabel can do .  

“You can’t tell Stan about the Gremoblin!” Dipper pleads. “We’ll be grounded for a week!” 

“You almost died,” Jon states. “I’m calling your guardian and staying until he gets back, because it would be irresponsible to leave you alone right now.” He blinks, with about four eyes, and sighs. “Four hours away. Of course. Wendy, please may I borrow your phone.” 

“Uh, yeah, sure, dude,” Wendy hands her cell over to Jon, like a traitorous traitor from traitor town. “What did you say about almost dying?” 

“Dipper brought in a nightmare-eating monster to show as an exhibit for the Shack,” Mabel explains.  

“Woah, Dipper. Rockin’.” Wendy side eyes Jon, who’s mashing her phone screen so hard the tips of his thumbs are turning pale. “…Hey, look, Mabel. I think I’m gonna take today off. I’ve got a little headache.” She steps deliberately towards the exit.  

Mabel’s eye twitches.  

“And I actually just met this pack of wolves, and I think they’re going to raise me as their own,” Soos adds apologetically. “So I really should be getting back to the den. Hey Jon, you want to join?”  

Mabel has always considered herself an Optimist.  

This is how she gets through life. She thinks things will work out for the best, because things always do. But this isn’t working out at all. Everyone’s against her, and every second they aren’t serving customers is money they aren’t earning. Does the Universe just hate Mabel now? Is she just not being Positive enough? 

Mabel frowns. That can’t be right. Mabel is the most Positive person she knows. 

Maybe for Optimism to work, Mabel thinks, she has to punch it in the face repeatedly. Maybe she needs to strangle it until it does her bidding. Maybe, she realizes, she has to force destiny to bend to her will. 

“No!” 

“Huh? What’d you say?” 

“I said, NO!” The pen in Mabel’s hand breaks. “I have had ENOUGH! I have been working my behind off all day and I’ll be darned if I let you guys wriggle your way out of more work!” Mabel points a finger at Wendy. “You! Man the register!” 

“Aw, but Mabel—” 

“No buts except for yours on the floor, cleaning!” Mabel whirls around to Dipper. “That means you, Dip-Dop! And Jon!” Jon visibly swallows as Mabel’s attention turns to him. She falters, slightly. “You can call Grunkle Stan. It’s probably a good idea, considering…yeah. But that doesn’t mean you get to skimp out on work! I expect to see you leading tours ASAP!”  

Jon balks. “But—” 

“You imposed the deadline,” Mabel says cooly. “As the boss, I officially pronounce you an honorary Mystery Shack employee! You don’t get paid and there are no benefits.”  

Soos claps dutifully.  

“Congrats, dude,” Wendy says. “Indentured servitude is super in right now.” 

“What’s all this blabbering I’m hearing?” Mabel yells, a twitch of irritation making itself known in her stomach. “I don’t pay you guys to laze around all day! C’mon, people! Let’s get moving!” She claps, and feels a perverse sense of satisfaction as her employees flinch away. She ducks as she feels a soft fabric fall onto her head—Grunkle Stans’s fez. 

“Wow, little dude,” Soos says, impressed and cowering, “you sound just like Mr. Pines!” 

Mabel stills.  

She looks at her hands. Young, childlike hands. She flexes them, and tiny wrinkles form in the creases of her fingers. Portents of the endtimes.   

Her Grunkle’s fez sits heavily on her head. “What have I become?” she whispers in horror. 

“What you’ve had to,” Dipper says solemnly. “What you’ve had to.” 

That’s true. She glances at Jon, who’s putting the phone up to his ear like a dead man. He’s had to change, hasn’t he? He’d been so scared when she and Dipper had first found him. And now he was talking like he was the responsible one, like he didn’t have a choice but to save two random kids. 

He looks so lonely.  

Maybe Mabel can fix that, too.  

She straightens Grunkle Stan’s fez on her head, and gets to work. 

. 

Four hours and about three hundred legally earned dollars later, Stan Pines rips into the Shack with the fury of a thousand angry customers. 

“Oh, Mr. Pines! You’re back!” Soos waves cheerily from behind the protective glass case he’s currently being displayed in. Grunkle Stan ignores him. 

“You. You.” Stan strides over to Jon, pointing a crooked finger at his face. He’s in the far corner of the gift shop, a mop clutched tightly in his hands. “You better have an incredible excuse for being in my house right now.” He drops his bags with a thunk that reverberates in Mabel’s ears.  

“I’m—I’m sorry, I was trying to look after the children—” 

“’ Look after the—’ Excuse me?” 

“You were out of town!” Jon blurts this, a heavy bite to his voice. “I did call you!” 

“Wait, is that why you agreed to be an exhibit?” Dipper asks, breathy. No one answers him, though, because Stan’s cornered Jon, and Mabel runs up to grab at his Hawaiian shirt. 

“Grunkle Stan, wait!” Mabel cries. “It wasn’t his fault!” 

“Yeah,” Dipper says, quieter. “It was mine. He…” he stops. “He saved us. Grunkle Stan, I…I messed up. I brought the Gremoblin into the Shack.” 

“And I let him! I stopped Jon from going to stop him! It’s my fault too, Grunkle Stan!” 

Grunkle Stan looks at Mabel and Dipper incredulously. “Kids, this isn’t your fault. I got a call from Mr. Monster over there telling me to get home right away, but clearly, that was a clever trick to…” Grunkle Stan trails off. “Do. Somethin’. Somethin’ devious. You guys look like you’re doin’ fine.” 

Mabel wets her lips. “No, Grunkle Stan. We weren’t doing fine until Jon killed the Gremoblin.” 

“Okay,” Grunkle Stan says, letting go of Jon, “I’ll bite. What in the Belgian Waffles is a Gremoblin?” 

“ Half Gremlin, half Goblin, the Gremoblin is a formidable foe—”   

“Wasn’t askin’ you, Limey,” Grunkle Stan interrupts. Jon clicks his mouth shut. 

“He’s right,” Dipper says. “It’s a really terrifying monster that shows people their worst nightmares when they look into their eyes. I…” Dipper winces. “Okay, so it sounds really bad now, but at the time it sounded like a great idea—” 

“You brought it into the Shack,” Grunkle Stan interjects. 

“…I brought it into the Shack.” 

“Okay,” Grunkle Stan says, clasping his hands together, “New rule! No bringing monsters into the Shack!” Stan points at Dipper. His hand shakes, so slightly that Mabel almost doesn’t notice.  “This means you, bucko. Outhouse cleaning for a week.” 

“For a week?! Grunkle Stan!” 

“You want me to make it two? Quit your blabbering!” 

Dipper groans. 

Mabel feels a twinge of sympathy from both ends. She knows, now how it feels to have to give the orders. She also knows, perhaps even more viscerally, how awful it is to clean the outhouse. Raccoons.    

“Mabel, honey.” Grunkle Stan crouches to be at her eye level, which is super touching because Mabel knows how hard it is for him to get back up from that position. “Can you tell me what happened when I was gone?” 

Mabel nods. “It was crazy! Jon totally blasted the Gremoblin with his mind!” 

“Did he now.”  

“He did,” Mabel says. “And he helped me run the Shack with everyone else after I yelled at all of them!” Mabel sighs. She’s…she’s gotta say it. “I’m really sorry, Grunkle Stan. I thought I was able to run the Shack and get you and Jon to make up and I was so wrong. Now you hate Jon more than ever and we were only able to break even.” Mabel swallows.  “I’m sorry. You’re a good boss. I trust you.” She braces herself. “And…I promise to wear the loser shirt for the rest of the summer! Just stop hating Jon!” 

Grunkle Stan, suddenly, looks very lost. “Sweetie, I don’t—I don’t hate Jon.” 

“What?”   

“ What?” Jon repeats. 

“Shut up, you heard me. So stop worrying about that.” 

“Aw, Grunkle Stan!” Mabel squees. “So we can keep him!” 

“I did not say that. I never said he wasn’t dangerous, I’m just saying I don’t hate the guy. I’m being pragmatic here.” 

“Grunkle Stan, he really did save us today,” Dipper says. “I know you’re pretending to not believe in monsters or whatever, but we would probably be hurt or dead if it wasn’t for him.” Mabel is sort of taken aback at the bluntness, and it looks like Jon and Grunkle Stan are, too.  

Grunkle Stan looks at Dipper. “Look, kid. It’s not that you don’t make a good point. It’s just not that simple.” 

“I think it is,” Dipper says. Mabel nods in agreement. “I think it’s really simple. You were afraid of him hurting us. He saved our lives today. That…kind of makes it even right?” 

“That’s not how that—” 

“Shaddup, Eyeball.” 

Jon shuts up. 

Grunkle Stan sighs, deep and heavy. 

“Look. I’ll promise I’ll give him a try, alright?” Mabel and Dipper both cheer, but Stan looks sternly to Jon. “That means no funny business.”  

Jon raises his hands in surrender. “I wouldn’t dream of it.” 

“I’m going to regret this.” Stan puts his head in his hands. “And Mabel. You don’t have to wear the ‘Loser’ shirt, Mabel. I didn’t end up winning any money, either. Guess that makes us even.” 

Mabel grins, and tackles Grunkle Stan in a hug. 

“Wait, kid—bad back, bad back—”  

“Ack, sorry!” 

 “Aw, you guys, it’s just like in Abuelita’s telenovelas!” Soos wipes an entirely genuine tear from his eye, and Mabel’s heart crinkles in sympathy. Grunkle Stan looks up, like he’s noticing him for the first time. He squints. 

“Soos, what are you doing in that horrible baby costume?” 

“Oh,” Mabel says, “we have got a lot to catch you up on.” 

. 

Stan corners Jon, after Mabel and Dipper have finally scampered off. Jon’s waiting as Soos changes out of that grotesque Question Mark outfit, and stumbles as Stan shoves a broom into his hand.  

“If you’re gonna stay, you’re gonna work,” Stan says gruffly. “So get to work.” 

Jon pushes past the knowledge of the type of wood grain in the handle of the broom, and braces against it. The gift shop’s already been pretty thoroughly swept, but Jon thinks he understands.   

“Thanks,” Stan says lowly. Jon has to strain his ears to hear. “For savin’ the kids.” 

“I—of course,” Jon answers. “They’re children. They shouldn’t have been left alone at all, much less for three days.” He can’t hide the incredulity he feels in his voice. He can’t be the responsible one here. All he sees, though, is how small they are—how terrified they’d looked when the Gremoblin had escaped.  

Jon wonders, in some quiet part of himself, if he had looked that scared. Back then, when he was a child. 

“I deserve that.” Stan sighs. “Before you say anything, I know I shouldn’t have left,” Stan continues. “I knew it when I left and I know it now. But what you did—” he cuts himself off. There’s something glassy in his eyes. “It’s not right. It messes with a guy’s head, you know? You know.” he says, eyeing Jon’s expression. “I had to get out. It’s not an excuse. But it’s what I got.” He looks at Jon, hard and heavy. 

Jon knows all too well. This is not his first ill-conceived trip to America. “I understand.” 

“But I shouldn’t have left the kids on their own.” He sighs. “It’s like ya said. They’re twelve. Zero preservation instincts to speak of between the two of them.”  He grimaces. “I really need to have a talking-to with them about looking for spookums. This is getting out of hand.” 

“It’s partly my fault, too,” Jon volunteers. The broom scrapes against the wood floor, oddly soothing. 

Stan snorts. “Oh, no kidding. But you did clean up after yourself. I can respect that. I…I really appreciate you calling me when you did.” The words seem to claw their way up his throat. He looks profoundly uncomfortable. “You care about the kids, and Soos seems to like you. Soos…” Stan scratches the back of his neck. “Say what you will about the guy, but he’s a good judge of character. Dipper said you’re staying with his Abuelita?”  

“Yes. He’s been…very kind.” Jon doesn’t know how to articulate it. It’s…a strange feeling, being in someone else’s home. Being welcomed. The pull-out couch had been springy, and the smell of the huevos rancheros Jon had woken up to Ana Lucia Córdoba Alzamirano (“You call me Abuelita,” she had insisted with a steel glint in her eye) cooking was almost suffocating, but that didn’t matter. She had let him into her home without so much as a second glance. She saw his eyes, and his Eyes, and didn’t say a single word.  

“Good. He’ll take care of ya. Don’t take advantage of that.”  

Jon doesn’t plan to. Suddenly, an Eye opens at his clavicle, and informs Jon of how many wood spiders currently reside in the rafters. He smacks it with an open palm. 

Stan follows the movement. “This…this is new to you, huh.” At Jon’s confused look, he clarifies: “The Eyes, I mean.” 

Jon grimaces. “You could say that.” It’s true. Even at his most monstrous, back in his world, he’d only opened his Eyes when…well, when smiting things. Ugh. Jon hates that word. It sounds so much more righteous than it is. Obliterating is probably more accurate. Watching definitely is. “How could you tell?” 

Thirty-six flies have died by electric fly swatter in this house. They burned alive. Jon tries to hide his sour expression at that particular tidbit, but Stan raises his eyebrows pointedly. 

“Well, for one, you look at ‘em like they’re about to eat you.” 

Jon can’t refute that. They are manifestations of a higher being’s influence on him, after all. A higher being that wants nothing more than for Jon to suffer, just so it can watch. His very skin has been gouged out for their presence. “They are certainly…unwanted.” He grips the broom even tighter, and attacks a caked-on mud stain. The past two days have been very long. Very lonely, despite the children. The Eyes absolutely do not help. 

Stan seems to consider this. He scrutinizes Jon and Jon averts his gaze. He recognizes that look. Something old, and weary. An appraisal, a summation. A calculation. 

“You know what?” Jon looks up at Stan, who raises his hands. “Sure. What the hell. You’re allowed in the Shack again. Hell—you got a job?” Jon shakes his head. “Obviously not. Well, congratulations. You have now graduated from indentured servant to paid employee. Minimum wage, obviously. Under the table. Keep the shirt, too, I’ll take it out of your paycheck.” 

Okay, Jon was not expecting that. “I—what?”  

“What can I say?” Stan shrugs. A little bit of that showman is back, Jon notices. His back is straighter, his words a little more articulate. “You proved you don’t want to hurt the kids. Heck, you saved their little butts today. Might be good to keep you around in case they do get tangled with another monster.” Jon doesn’t flinch at the word, but it’s a very near thing. “Call that your job description, or whatever. Professional twin detangler.” 

“But I want to make one thing crystal clear for you.” Stan steps forward. Jon, suddenly, Knows exactly how many people the man in front of him has killed. It’s not a high number. But it is a number. “You will not make the kids Tell you things.” He accentuates the word, and Jon knows exactly what he means. “ Apparently, they’ve met a lot of strange things in the town, and thank Moses they’re resilient little twerps.” There’s a gruff affection to his words, something that is both familiar and foreign to Jon. “But I’ll be damned if you’re the one who scars them for good.” 

“I won’t,” Jon says. “I swear, I won’t touch them.” 

Stan gives Jon a once-over. “I’m holding you to that,” he says. “One wrong step—and, well.” He doesn’t finish the sentence—nor does he need to. Jon nods. He doesn’t need the threat, though he understands and appreciates it. If he did do something to hurt the children—he’d want Stan to step in. He’d need him to. 

“Oh, hey, Mr. Pines!” Soos opens the door to the bathroom, question-mark costume in hand. Jon is supplied a frankly terrifying thought about the last time the suit was washed, and forces a neutral expression. “Did you and Jon make up for real?” 

Stan side-eyes Jon, who shrug slightly. “Uh. Sure, Soos.” 

Soos breaks out into a wide grin. “Awesome! That’s totally epic, dudes. Forgiveness, though hard-won, ultimately sooths the aching soul.” 

“…Right.”  

“You sure you don’t need any more help in the Shack?” Soos asks.  

“Nah. Boss Mabel actually did a pretty good job keeping everything tidy,” Stan replies. “Don’t tell her I said that. You better get this guy back to your place. He looks dead on his feet.” He shoulder bumps Jon, who almost falls over. 

“Jet lag,” Soos says solemnly. Jon does not correct him. What would be the point? 

Jon follows Soos down to the pickup truck. He looks back at the Shack—the warm, bright light from within is an odd kind of comforting. The sky is darkening, and the first pinpricks of stars are starting to bleed through the cloudy blue night. Four hundred and thirty-three light years away.  

He thinks about promises he’s made. Not to feed. Not to consume. He thinks about what he’s broken—the people’s he’s hurt. That he’s made suffer.  

He thinks about the children and their inexplicable faith in him.  

He thinks about the promise he made to Martin. He thinks about the promise he made to Stan. 

He’s good at promising. Not great at following through. 

This one, though? 

This one, he intends to keep. 

. 

In his dream, Jon is recording. 

The details don’t matter, and the dream seems to agree. All that comes out of Jon’s mouth as he reads the monochrome Statement in front of him is a babbling gibberish, something out of a child’s approximation of human English. And even that doesn’t matter—not really, because then the warm fog of his Other appears in front of him, and Jon begins to cry. 

His Other murmurs to him. He sets a warm cup on his desk, the steam curling in on itself into smooth edges. Jon hears himself give a chuckle in return, and as he leans over to grab the mug, his Other takes his chin and kisses him softly. Jon feels warmth bloom in his chest, light and soft. He tastes salt on his lips. From the tears, most likely, but his Other doesn’t seem to care.  He laughs into his mouth, runs a hand through his hair, and grabs onto his jumper like it’s the only thing the world. 

For a moment, there is peace. Jon takes a deep breath, and holds it.  

The salt on his tongue congeals. It rusts and turns acrid in his mouth. Jon breaks away to ask a question, but it is already too late. His Other is gone, and Jon is alone. The air turns smoky and dark and Jon feels it, seeping into his bones, until all he can feel is flame. 

Jon feels a stabbing jolt in his sternum. He looks down, and there is blood. Blood and ink, staining his hands black as death. He feels its bitterness in his mouth as it bubbles over—onto his clothes, out of his heart, through his hands, up his spine. Jon is crying. He doesn’t think he has ever stopped. 

“Whoo— wee, buddy, now this is depressing!” 

What? 

“Now—I’ve been in some sad mindscapes before. Picasso, wow, that guy was down in the dumps. Had a whole blue period, how moody can you get?” A high, grating laugh. Nails on a chalkboard. “But this? This is downright demoralizing.” A click, like the snapping of fingers, and Jon is floating in a black void. 

“There. Much better.” The disembodied voice says again. Jon can’t quite place it, but like the notes of an old song, it tickles in the back of his brain. It’s familiar, almost. Very, very nearly. “Take a seat. Get comfy.” Suddenly, Jon is sitting in a very familiar chair. He remembers it, from the main room of his grandmother’s house. Jon wasn’t allowed to sit in it, but his grandmother was gone most of the day, anyway. It was perfect for reading in, in the afternoons. 

The cushions are just as comforting as he remembers.  

He stares at his hands. They are older than they were the last time he sat in this chair. More scarred. 

“You’re a quiet one, arentcha?” The voice asks. “That’s fine. I can work with quiet.” 

And just like that, Jon’s dream veers off into utter nonsensicality.  

A bright yellow triangle falls from the top of Jon’s field of vision. It’s glowing, and small, and very, very strange. 

“What?” It is the first word Jon has spoken, and he feels it sums up his experience quite well.  

“ What?” The triangle mimics. It turns, to reveal a giant eye in its middle, and a bow tie directly below. It’s wearing a top hat, and has thin, black arms and legs. It looks like a character from a children’s picture book. It is inherently menacing. “Man, you Brits have the craziest accents! Gotta love ‘em!” 

“ What,” Jon asks, again, and this time he hears the static in his voice, “ are you?”  

“The name’s Bill! Bill Cipher!” The one-eyed triangle dips his hat, and gravity inverts with it. Jon clutches to the chair with white knuckles as it rotates on a ninety-degree angle. Was he not polite enough this time around? The triangle—Bill—puts his hat back on, and gravity rights itself. Jon remembers how to breathe, slowly.  

“I’m…Jon,” Jon replies. “Hello.” Politeness. Remember to be polite, Jon, you don’t want to be falling forever again , do you. 

“Oh, I know all about you, Jonathan Sims.” The triangle swirls around Jon’s face, eye watching intently as Jon follows his movements. “Head Archivist of the Magnus Institute, London. Talk about a stuffy job description! I gotta admit, I woulda just liberated the whole joint the first week there and been done with it.” There’s that laugh again, that high, awful sound like a dying killdeer. “But oh, well! Better for me, I guess! Here, have some tea. Brits like tea, right?” A cup floats over to Jon in a picturesque little teacup. “I put extra wormies in just for you!” 

Jon does not throw up, because he is dreaming. He comes very, very close. 

“Is that a no on the tea, then? Oh, well. Your loss!” The ‘tea’ is tossed away, and distantly, Jon hears the sound of shattering and a cat yowling. “Onto business, then.” 

“Business?” Jon manages.  

“Business!” Bill repeats cheerily. “Buckle up, Limey. We’ve got a lot to talk about.”  

Chapter Text

Martin, historically, has not won many awards.   

This doesn’t bother him. He’s not a very competitive person, and all that attention that comes with trophy-receiving makes him anxious. Through his thirty-one years on this…on his Earth, Martin has been content to clap for other people.   

This, though? Martin had better win a gold medal for his compartmentalization.   

Open the portal through the weak point in dimensions. Okay. Great. Martin’s got it. Portal opens into an existential nightmare realm? That’s fine, Stanford just got the settings wrong. Click that strange silver thing that doesn’t make any more sense with his glasses on, and get deposited onto another alien world, this one so crowded with smells and sounds and activity that the air is thick with it. Martin breathes deeply through the heavy atmosphere as he fights to keep his balance.   

Stay calm. Stay grounded.   

Martin’s fingers twitch.   

They are in the middle of a crowd. Martin parses this despite himself, despite the part of his brain that’s screaming at the sudden sensory overload. He scans the visual onslaught as best he can. Streaks of red and purple, warm bodies forced together and scratchy fabric tearing at his face and clothes. It’s hot, here. Martin finds himself suddenly, wildly, missing the frostbite.  

“And here we are!” Stanford says over the noise, sweeping his left hand broadly to indicate their surroundings. “Dimension Domus. Probably.” He checks his watch. Or—Martin assumes it’s a watch. He’s probably wrong, considering everything, but he can’t think over this damn noise. “Colloquially known as the Refugee Dimension. I myself spent a bit of time here back when I was first—”  

Whatever he is about to say, though, is interrupted by an ear-splitting honking to their right. Martin grits his teeth against the sound, forcing himself to straighten. This is fine. Better than that damned apocalypse carousel domain, right?   

Right?  

“Oh, of course! I apologize,” Stanford says, nonsensically. “We’ll be out of your hair, then.” With that, he grabs Martin’s hand and tugs in a random direction. Martin lets himself follow—he doesn’t know what the alternative would even be. He uses his other arm to shield his face, letting the darkness press against his eyelids. Stay calm. Stay calm.  

Martin breaths. He has to, because the alternative is holding his breath until he dies and damn it, he will not die here. His own breath is hot and suffocating through the grimy, scratchy wool of his arm. This is the only reason why he lets his arm drop from his face. He keeps his eyes closed, though, even as Stanford guides him into sitting on something cool and slightly uncomfortable. The hardened space warrior puts an awkward hand on Martin’s back, and Martin can’t bring himself to shrug it off.  

“What,” he finally musters, after his ears have stopped ringing, “was that all about?”  

“We were in the wrong line,” Stanford explains. He pulls the bandana from his mouth, working his jaw.   

They were in a line? Martin squints at Stanford. “How could you tell?”   

“She just told us. Haven’t you—ah.” Stanford grimaces. “This is, admittedly, an oversight on my part.”  

“What is?”   

“I have a universal translator that allows me to understand any language.” He pulls down his shirt collar to show a black band around his neck, thin and faintly glowing. Martin’s life has become a sci-fi nightmare. “We’ll have to see if we can get you one, too.”  

“Oh, great, thanks.” Martin puts his head back in his hands.  

Stanford pauses. “You don’t seem to be excited by the prospect.”  

“No, I’m okay. It’s just an entirely different dimension, no, I’m fine. This is normal.” He inhales, slowly, forcing the cool air into his lungs. “I’m calm.”  

“Are…” Stanford fiddles with something in his coat, “are you sure? I’m sure this would be very stressful for a newcomer.”   

Martin cannot take one more second of this. “No, everything’s fine. Let’s go.” He stands abruptly, despite the tilting feeling of blood rushing to his head. “The sooner we start, the better.”  

“I did see what I believe to be an intake line where we first arrived. That’s probably our best bet.” Martin braces himself to face the world, and lifts his gaze to Stanford’s, who blinks. “Are you sure you’re—”  

“I said I’m fine.” Martin bites this out and then bites his tongue, hard. His nails dig into his palms. He’s got to keep calm. “Can you please show me where the intake line is.” 

Stanford raises his hands in surrender. Good. “Alright, if you insist.” Martin does not appreciate his tone. For the sake of their working relationship, he doesn’t bring it up. He grits his teeth until his jaw aches.  

Martin steels himself. They walk, excruciatingly, towards the noise.  

.  

Martin studies the alien in front of him.  

 It is vaguely ant-shaped, in that it has mandibles and is that rusty red-orange that Martin associates with the meadow ants that used to make their home in his cupboards. He’d let them stay there, for probably longer than he should have, health wise—but then Prentiss had attacked, and he had gone to the cabinet with a can of Raid and the reckless abandon of a man who had corkscrewed worms out of his own ankle. No more Mr. Nice Martin. Not with insects.  

Martin sort of wishes he had a can of bug spray right now. Or a fire extinguisher. Or any sort of blunt object, really. It is only Stanford’s grip on his arm that keeps him from doing something he’d probably regret later.  

“No, it’s—I’m looking for someone,” Martin explains, for what has to be the fifteenth time. Martin is at the end of his tether. He is so at the end of his tether that he has found as-yet unexplored tether that has in turn been used by the sheer, never-ending bureaucracy of this god damned space rock.  

The first line had been bad enough. He’d stood, and waited, until the yellow sky had faded to burnt orange and Martin was about four seconds from passing out or screaming. The receptionist—a cyclops with green skin—had been kind enough to hand him a universal translator before kicking them out into a different line. They didn’t meet the criteria for the first line. Or the second.   

This is the fourth planet they’ve been on. If Martin has to go through another transport beam, he is actually going to die. His hair smells like ozone, his clothes are singed, and his eyeballs have just about fried out of his head. In another world, he would have been almost pleased about that last bit.   

Not here.  

“Lost and found is on Electros B,” the alien at the counter drones. “This is processing. Do you consent to being processed?”  

.“But we’ve already been to Electros B, they said to come here!” Electros B was, of course, the nonsensical name of the planet Martin and Stanford had first landed on. If Martin hears its name one more time, he may actually lose it.  

“Well, I’m telling you to go back to Electros B,” the alien clicks its pincers together. “That’s where lost and found is.”  

Martin doesn’t scream. It takes rather a lot of self-control on his part.  

“Maybe we should take a break,” Stanford suggests. Martin has the urge, suddenly, to whirl on him, ask him what the hell he’s doing here, anyway. Why is he helping him? Why? He swallows the questions. Don’t look a gift interdimensional traveler in the mouth. Stanford turns to the clerk. “Excuse me, do you know if there’s any humanoid-friendly dining establishments near here?”   

“There are some on Electros B,” the clerk says dryly.   

Martin makes an aborted motion that might have been something violent, if Stanford didn’t grab his shoulder at the last minute.  

“…We’ll try our luck here,” Stanford says, pulling Martin gently away from the desk clerk. “Thank you for your time.”  

Martin takes a deep breath and releases it. Stanford steers the both of them to a clearer patch, a stretch of space-concrete that doesn’t host quite as much traffic as the rest of this stupid planet.   

No, Martin. Come on, now. Calm.   

Martin is very calm.  

The planet itself would probably be beautiful if it weren’t for the concrete stands marring the purple landscape. They stick out like brutalist thumbs against the otherwise lovely environment.  

“ The Domus Dimension was created out of necessity,” Stanford had said, about two planets ago, when Martin had asked about the recurring thematic elements. “ After the Great War of Temporal Displacement. I believe it falls under Time Baby’s authority, and babies aren’t typically known for their sense of style.”  

Martin…had left with more questions than answers. Better not to ask anything at all.  

“So…” Stanford says in the present, clasping his gloved hands together, “this place is much…slower than I remember.”  

Martin resists the urge to scoff. “How do you remember it?”  

“Quieter,” Stanford says. “Much quieter. Perhaps there have been an influx of dimensional catastrophes?” He puts a hand to his chin and frowns. “Maybe—but no. That doesn’t make any sense.”  

“What?”  

“Simply a theory.” Stanford scans the booths. “It’s probably nothing.”  

“Right.” Martin doesn’t believe that for a second. He flexes his hands. “Of course.”   

Stanford puts a hand up to his jaw in contemplation. “We could always—"  

We. We we we. Stanford keeps saying ‘ we’. Like they’re working together. Like Stanford cares about finding Jon. Like Martin is not excruciatingly, entirely alone.  

Something in Martin snaps, quite suddenly. Before he realizes it, he’s jerking away from Stanford, whirling on him with an emotion he can’t quite discern over its intensity.  

“Okay, why are you helping me?” Something skitters over the edge of his ribs, under his skin. It’s jittering and frantic and Martin cannot turn it off. “You got me to the planet. You’ve done your job. Why are you still here ?” He sits on the concrete bench, hard.  

“Because you need it.” Stanford follows suit, leaning back on the bench. “When I first…left my dimension, I almost died. It was only thanks to the generosity of a group of refugees that I survived.”  

“So this is…what? Returning the favor?” Stop it, Martin. Be grateful. He bites the inside of his cheek until his eyes water.   

Stanford doesn’t match Martin’s ire. “Not as such. I admit that I see much of myself in you,” Stanford says. “I recognize the look in your eyes.”  

“What’s that supposed to mean?”  

“I’m afraid to say I’ve gotten used to it. The…noise.” The look Stanford gives the ground triggers a sort of incongruent pity in Martin’s chest. “It comes with the territory. But before I did, I admit I was not as put together as you see me now.”   

Martin looks at Stanford, who looks more like a character out of Doctor Who than a real person. Seriously. He’s got a black trench coat.  

“I’ve been doing this for years. Decades, most likely.”  

“You don’t know?”  

“Relativity is a fickle thing. It’s quite famously hard to set a watch to.” He furrows his eyebrows. “I believe it was…nineteen eighty-one when I left? Perhaps later.”  

“19…81,” Martin repeats. “You’ve been dimension hopping since 1981?”   

“That I have.” Wow. Wow. Martin can’t even begin to think about that. There’s something in his chest, something foggy and gaping like an open wound. He can’t think about how long it’s been for him. How long it might be for Martin. That skittering feeling lessens, slightly, losing its balance above the void in Martin’s ribcage. “What year is it for you?”  

“2018,” Martin says, then pauses. “Or something like that. Time got a bit…wibbly, at the end.”   

Stanford, graciously, doesn’t ask any follow-up questions. He does, however, hum thoughtfully, tapping his chin. “That would make me sixty-seven. Give or take. Mind you, time may move differently in our dimensions, so there’s no way to be certain our timelines match up.”  

Martin studies the wrinkles around Stanford’s eyes. “No, sixty-seven looks about right.” A previous version of Martin probably would have balked at the rudeness of that statement. Not this Martin. “Maybe a little younger.”  

“Good to know. Still, more to my point—it takes time. Of course you’re overwhelmed, I just dropped you into the middle of a wholly alien planet with no preparation. Which…may not have been the best option.”  

“To be fair,” Martin says, “the other option was freezing to death.”  

“Fair point.” They sit, together, in companiable silence, staring over   

Martin’s sort of surprised this area is clear at all. It’s an outcropping, grey-yellowish concrete that seems like it’s been stabbed into ground into something that’s vaguely bench-shaped. It’s not comfortable by any means, obviously, but Martin would have thought that it would be swarmed by like-minded refugees desperate to get out of the crowd. Everyone seems to be conglomerated in this specific area, anyway. It’s…strange.   

Finally, Stanford clears his throat. “Can you stay here for a minute? I’m going to see if I can find any drinkable H2O configurations.”  

“You know,” Martin says, forcing some levity in his voice, “you could just say water.” 

Stanford grins, and holds up a finger. “Ah, but then it wouldn’t be as accurate!”  

That punches a hole in Martin’s lungs, for reasons he can’t quite articulate. He smiles, weakly, and raises a hand that he wills not to shake. “Of course.”  

Martin cranes his head to look at the sky. It’s bruised, like an overripe plum, red with splotches of deep purple bleeding through. It seems to stretch on forever, making the bustle of the bureaucratic nonsense below seem miniscule in comparison. Unimportant in the face of the cosmos. He can see yellow stars if he squints. They twinkle like something out of a fairy tale, huge and expansive and like something out of a child’s primer on galaxies. Haunting, yet beautiful.  

“It’s gorgeous, isn’t it?”  

Martin jumps. He scrambles to a standing position, hands raised—then releases his breath in a sharp huff. There is a woman next to him, or at least someone who is humanoid enough to look feminine. She only has one eye, in the middle of her forehead, glowing a vibrant blue that is somehow sharper than everything else. She’s wearing muted colors, like Martin, ragged yellow fabric that has clearly seen better days. A refugee.   

“Don’t worry,” the woman holds up a hand, good naturedly, “I don’t bite.”  

“I—sorry, sorry,” Martin says, rubbing his neck. He does not untense, but sits back down on the concrete bench. “Habit, you know.”  

“I do. It’s the sort you get around here, for sure.” She speaks in what cannot possibly actually be a British accent, but the familiarity of it does…something, in Martin. It sounds like home. “The halfway home for wayward spirits.”   

“No,” Martin mutters despite himself, “I’m afraid that would be Electros B.”  

The woman brightens. “Oh, you talked to Txalas, too? God, what a nightmare!”  

A sudden, burning kinship flares alive in Martin. “Oh, my god, right?”   

“Yeah! I think it’s actually an intern.” The woman pauses. “Or at least, I hope so. Right now, it’s just redirecting everyone to Electros B. Last time I talked to it, it was just lying through its mandibles.” She sighs, sounding just about as tired as Martin feels. “I’ve had to talk to it about four times, and every time it’s given me different, completely useless information.” There’s a sudden weariness in her eyes, something Martin identifies and empathizes with on a visceral level.  

“I used to have a boss like that,” Martin tries for a joke, and the woman throws back her head and laughs. She’s got at least a few more rows of teeth than a human. Martin is fine with this.  

“You are funny.” The woman wipes her mouth. “You’d be surprised at how rare that is here. Or,” she considers, studying Martin’s face “maybe you wouldn’t.”   

Martin attempts a weak smile at that, and succeeds in turning his lips up, slightly. “Yeah, probably not. This place is really slow.”  

The woman sighs, a heavy thing that wracks her shoulders and slumps her over. “You have no idea.”  

“So…” Martin drums his fingers on his knees. “You’re a refugee, then?”  

The woman hums. “Yep. Evil dictator got a little too powerful, destroyed half of my known universe—” she shrugs. “Thankfully, my brother was a scientist, and had an experimental portal in his basement. I don’t know what we would have done, otherwise.” She scratches at her arm absently, pulling up her sleeve to reveal cloudy blue skin. “How about you?”  

Oh. Martin’s throat closes.  “I—”  

The woman blinks. “You don’t have to say if it’s still raw. I was just making conversation.” She leans back, eye closed. “I’ve been here for so long now, it doesn’t really mean anything to me anymore.”  

That…doesn’t bode well. “Really.”  

“Yep.” She pops the ‘p’.   

“How long?” A morbid curiosity prickles the hairs on Martin’s neck.  

“Oh, I don’t know. Time doesn’t work here the way it did back home.” She makes an iffy gesture. “Six months?”  

Martin chokes on air. “ Six months?!”  

“Maybe seven?” She shrugs. “Something like that. It’s been a while, is what I mean.”  

Martin leans over, bracing his elbows on his knees and putting his head in his hands. “I can’t stay here for six months!”   

“It’s really not that bad! They have housing and everything. It’s just…a lot of standing and waiting in line.”  

“But—” Martin has the sudden urge to pace. Between this and Stanford’s thirty years—he can’t. “I don’t know if I can—he might be—”  

“He?”   

“It doesn’t matter,” Martin says automatically. “I just can’t wait here that long.”  

The woman looks at Martin, tilting her head. “Have you been processed yet?” she asks. “That sped up things for me.”  

“What does that even entail, though?”   

“Nothing much. They just put you in the system.” The woman holds up her hand to show off a metallic bracelet gleaming at her wrist, small triangles embedded into the material.  “I got this, but that’s it.”  

Well, that doesn’t seem so bad.  

“I mean, you could convert to the corporate religion of our bureaucratic overlords…” the woman shrugs. “But it’s not necessary.”  

“I’ll keep that in mind,” Martin snorts. “Thank you.”   

“No problem! I hope you find whoever your ‘ him’ is,” she blinks, in such a way that Martin is sure it holds some significance. “I’ll pray for you, if you want.”  

“I—” Martin sighs. “Thanks.”  

No one’s prayed for Martin since his mother was put in the care home. There were nurses who’d say so in hushed tones, sometimes, but the sentiment became sort of muddied after years of his mother screening his calls. They mostly just avert their gaze, now. Martin knows he makes them uncomfortable.  

Or—then. Back then, before everything. Martin swallows the nausea that rises in his throat at that. God. That’s going to take some getting used to.  

“Well, I’ve got to be going.” The woman brushes off her skirt, and pushes herself up. “So many lines, so little time.” She grins at her own joke, then looks at Martin with that bright blue eye. “It was nice talking to you.”  

“You, too,” Martin says reflexively. He reflects, and realizes he means it. He feels calmer than he’s felt since—well. Since Before. His hands have finally stopped shaking. “Wait—” the woman turns back to him, “Sorry, I realize I didn’t ask—what’s your name?”  

The woman smiles, higher than a human mouth would be able to. “Willa,” she says. “Willa Dey.” She tilts her head. “It was nice to meet you…” she trails off.  

“Martin.”  

Willa nods. “Martin. Look me up in the registry if you need anything. I’ve been here a while, I know the ropes. If you need help converting, or anything…” she waves with a four-fingered hand in a sort of salute.   

“I’ll keep that in mind,” Martin says, quirking up his lip. “Thank you.”  

“No problem. Just helping out a fellow struggler.” She smiles lopsidedly. “Hail the yellow beast, and all that.”  

Before Martin can parse that statement, she’s walking back out into the crowd. Martin watches as she leaves, back into that damned administrative abyss.    

Martin takes a deep breath and holds it. The air is cooler, now, and deep swells of indigo have melted into the now-orange sky. The soft glow from the lamps lining administrative booths is more pronounced, and Martin watches the dark mass of people as they bustle through their day. It’s almost like back in London.  

“Martin!”   

Martin jerks out of his reverie. “Stanford! Hi!”  

Stanford looks back at Willa as he passes her, then turns his focus back to Martin. “Who was that?”   

“Oh, you know. Just another victim of pointless bureaucracy.” Martin rolls his back out. It cracks, somewhat concerningly, but he’s also been sitting for a little bit. He stands, and Stanford hands him a flask of what Martin is going to assume is water.  

“A victim?” Stanford frowns.   

Martin takes a swig and shakes his head. “Not, like, an actual victim. She’s just been here a while.”  

“What did she say?” Stanford asks. “Did she attempt to get you to join any evil death cults? For example.”  

Martin snorts humorlessly. The joke is appreciated, at least. “She mentioned getting processed.” Martin takes a swig from the water flask. “I think it might be a good idea.”  

“Uh,” Stanford says. “Perhaps not.”  

“What? Why?” Martin squints. “This planet isn’t an evil fear cult in disguise, is it?”   

“No! Or I don’t believe so. No, this place is perfectly fine.” He pauses. “I think.”  

Martin thins his lips. He’d meant it as a joke. Why didn’t Stanford? “…Okay, then. Then what’s the problem?”   

“Nothing!” Stanford answers, much too quickly. Martin levels him with a stare. “I’m, er. Not exactly.” Stanford coughs. “Legal.”  

Martin pinches the bridge of his nose. “…What does that mean.”  

“Well,” Stanford says, “It’s a long, arduous story. You must understand that there aren’t many options for a man trapped outside his own dimension, especially when he’s attempting to create an interdimensional superweapon that happens to need several…shall we say unique elements.”  

Martin sighs deeply, until he can feel the bottom of his lungs. “Stanford.”  

Stanford swallows. “Martin.”  

“Are you a wanted criminal?”  

Martin can see Stanford sweating. “…I may be.”  

“Okay,” Martin says, “Okay.” That’s fine. Who is Martin to judge? The fact that it makes finding Jon a thousand times harder— well. It’s not his fault. Martin digs a fingernail into his palm. “Was it, you know, like—hm.” Martin tries again. “You didn’t murder anyone, did you?”  

“No!” Stanford shakes his head vigorously. “It was only grand larceny.” He pauses. “And arson. In an empty building, though! And,” he straightens, here, and looks off into the distance with a sudden look of fierce determination. “It was for the greater good.”  

Oh, well in that case. Martin sighs. He can’t even bring it in himself to fear the man in front of him. He saved his life, after all. And Martin’s seen killers before. He believes Stanford when he says he’s not a murderer.  

“So,” Martin says, “No getting processed, then.” He slumps back. “That puts us back at square one.”  

“Not necessarily.” Stanford hums thoughtfully. “You know, I think we may be looking over the obvious solution here.”   

“Which would be?”  

“Breaking into the secure facility.”  

“…You’re really not trying to hide the criminal thing, are you.”  

. 
The plan, ultimately, goes like this: 

They wait in line for what feels like about fifteen years. Martin feels like he’s worn holes through his boots, aching pain radiating up his calf. When they finally get to the front of the line, Txalas drops a stack of papers the thickness of which Martin hasn’t seen since the early Archive days. It levels an unimpressed look at him, the likes of which Martin also hasn’t seen since the early Archive days. It’s an odd mix of nostalgia and churning rage.   

“This is ridiculous.” Martin reads the first page. “Interdimensional I.D.?  

“It is what it is,” Txalas drones. “If you don’t have an I.D, you’ll have to request one from El—”  

“If you say Electros B I swear.”  

“Electros B. It’s protocol.”  

“Is there no way to expedite the process?” Stanford asks. “You understand, as weary interdimensional refugees, we’d like to be fostered to a safe planet as soon as possible.”  

Txalas blinks sideways at Stanford’s excruciatingly bad lie. Martin resists the urge to cringe, but holds his ground. “…Sure. But you need the paperwork.”  

“I wouldn’t be able to read it, anyway,” Martin says. “I don’t speak, uh—”  

“Intergalactic Basic,” Stanford supplies.  

“—that. I’m using a translator right now.” He levels Txalas with a look. A practiced, specific look, the kind that Martin’s floundered under countless times. He looks over the rims of his glasses and thins his lips into a line. “I have to say, I am incredibly disappointed with the service here.”  

Txalas coughs. “Well, it’s just protocol. I have to—”  

Stanford sighs loudly. “Just what I expected. I suppose my report back to the Authority will reflect this inefficiency and incompetence.”  

“Wait, but—”  

“What did you say your name was, again? Txalas?” Stanford pulls a notepad out of his jacket and starts scribbling. “Is that with one ‘x’ or two?”  

For a moment Martin thinks it’s not going to work. He can’t read Txalas’s face, can’t see if he’s falling for the bait. Martin’s never used this tactic before; it’s always made him feel sort of slimy. He’s seen his mother use it before, when he was little, and on nurses who won’t give her something, but never himself. Still, he looks at Txalas, trying to infuse his glare with that familiar mix of condescension and authority.  

God, he hopes this works. Stanford stands to the side, still scribbling in that notebook. Martin thumbs the recording device in his pocket, courtesy of Stanford. They’d agreed that Martin would be the one to actually infiltrate the place, on account of him not being a wanted felon. He’d just…slip away when no one was looking.   

Stanford had not seemed convinced at Martin’s ability to fade in the background. Martin had almost laughed in his face.  

Txalas twitches, slightly, under Martin’s gaze.  

Martin raises an eyebrow.  

And just like that, Txalas seems to break.   

“ Ohmybeast PLEASE don’t tell my boss!” Its mandibles click together frantically. “I’m just an intern! I didn’t even want to apply, but my brood-mother said I had to and I can’t get fired already! She’d be so disappointed in me!” It starts to vibrate, breath coming in shallow bursts. Is it…hyperventilating? Did Martin give an ant a panic attack?  

“We…won’t,” Stanford says, slowly. “We promise.”  

Txalas lets out a shuddering breath as it flexes its pincers. “Okay. Okay. Thank you.” It turns to its computer, glancing back at Martin and Stanford. “I guess I can type it in manually. But that might take a while.” It leans over in its seat past Martin and Stanford. Martin follows his gaze—it’s at the next person in line, a large, gelatinous human figure. “…It looks like they’re asleep. It’s probably fine.”   

It seems looser, now that Martin and Stanford seem to have spooked it. It seems more like a teenager than a stuffy employee. Martin almost feels bad for it.  

Txalas makes a sound like an ant clearing its throat. “Name.”  

“Martin Blackwood.”  

Txalas taps something into its computer. “Dimension name.”  

“How in the hell am I supposed to—”  

“I’ll put it down as unknown,” Txalas interrupts hastily. “Type of dimensional collapse.”  

“I don’t know. How am I supposed to know?”  

“How did you get here? Why are you seeking asylum?”   

“I’m seeking asylum because evil fear entities turned my planet into a hellscape,” Martin snaps.   

Txalas shakes its head. “I’m sorry, but that’s not specific enough.”  

Martin runs a hand through his greasy hair. “There was an apocalypse, okay? There was an apocalypse, and we had to stop it. So—my—” Martin can’t say it. “We did what we had to. But it’s gone. It’s gone and we can’t ever go back.”   

It’s like fabric in his chest, ragged and torn. His breaths are caught on its edges on their way up his throat.  

Txalas taps its mandibles together slowly. “I’ll put it down as ‘Total Dimensional Collapse.”   

“Fine.” Martin doesn’t know how accurate that is. He doesn’t think he wants to. He ignores the fog at the corner of his vision, and focuses back on Txalas’s rusty-red antennae. Just keep it up for a little while longer.   

“How did you hear of Dimension Domus?”  

“Um,” Martin glances at Stanford. “A friend.”  

Stanford makes a sort of choked noise at that.   

“Religious affiliation?”  

“Is that really necessary?”   

“It’s for our records.”  

“Uh, then agnostic, I guess.” Does being marked by eldritch fear entities count as religious affiliation? The skin on the back of Martin’s neck prickles. He definitely doesn’t worship them. Not like Jude, or Manuela. He definitely doesn’t believe they’re gods.  

Txalas nods. “You know, there’s always time to change that, if you want. The beast always hungers for more.”  

Didn’t Willa say something about that? “The beast?”  

“Of course.” Txalas tilts its head, pincers raising above the keys. “The beast oversees all. That’s what brood-mother says!”  

Hm. “Stanford,” Martin says, “Is the refugee planetary system a cult?”  

Stanford nods slowly, slowly placing the notebook back in his coat. “…I’m beginning to suspect so.”  

“Brilliant.” Martin puts both hands flat on the counter. “Okay, listen. We’re going to go—"  

“Wait.” Txalas stills. “What did you say your accomplice’s name was?”  

“Uh,” Martin has a very sudden bad feeling.   

“Stanford. You said Stanford. Stanford Pines?” Txalas’s voice is suddenly very high, more animated than Martin’s heard it. “ The Stanford Pines?! Stanford Pines, interdimensional felon? On my shift?!”  

“I think it’s rather time we leave,” Stanford says, backing away.   

“No way, you guys aren’t going anywhere!” There’s a tinny undertone to Txalas’s sudden animation. It slams a button on his desk, and suddenly the booth is engulfed an in a vibrating blue light. Martin squints through it as Txalas hides under its desk. It prickles like electricity, and refracts through the cracked lens of his glasses into a thousand fractaling shapes.   

“No,” Stanford whispers. “That color…”  

Martin turns to ask him what the hell he’s talking about, but he’s interrupted as two armed(!?) figures materialize in front of them. God damn sci-fi transport beams! He hates this stupid hell dimension!  

“Stanford Pines,” the armored figure on the left says, “you are under arrest.”  

“On what accounts?!” Martin exclaims. He looks to Stanford, whose face is frozen in horror.   

The guard clears his throat. “Arson. Aggravated arson. Arsonus Maximus. Animal smuggling. Arson involving animal smuggling. Active intent to pilfer, pickpocket, or peruse. Aggravated—”  

“Did you memorize all of that?!” Martin interrupts, incredulous.  

The guard seems to shrink under Martin’s scrutiny. “Well, I mean, it’s Stanford Pines. ”   

“Okay,” Martin says, voice high and frantic, “I’m sure this is just a big misunderstanding! Why don’t we all just—”   

“And you’re arrested, too,” the figure on the right pipes up. “Aiding and abetting a known fugitive is also a capital offence.”  

“And conspiracy to commit corporate espionage,” the left guard says. “Don’t think we didn’t catch that, too.”  

Martin bites the inside of his cheek. “Look, don’t we have rights?” He turns to Stanford, still frozen in place. “ Right, Stanford?”  

Stanford jerks. “The man is correct!” Stanford raises a fist. “Interdimensional Martial Law dictates that we have the right to defend ourselves at the scene of a crime!”  

“Not that we’ve committed any crimes,” Martin adds hastily.  

“The Holy Eye does not recognize the rights of the arrested,” the right guard says solemnly.   

“Oh my beams, shup up about the Holy Eye,” the left guard elbows his compatriot. To Martin and Stanford, he says, “The All-Seeing Eye is not officially affiliated with the Domus Police Force.”  

Hey, what.  

“…The Holy Eye?”  

The cult. Oh, god. The cult.   

“Yeah, the One-Eyed Beast. He Whose Name Brings Naught But Ruin. That Which Beholds All. The Yellow-Eyed.”  

“No,” Stanford’s eyes are wide. “No, it can’t be. Not here. Not—”   

Martin feels a rolling revulsion in his chest. “You don’t mean—”  

No.   

It makes sense.  

An awful, mind-numbing bureaucracy, intentionally opaque. People stuck, reliving the worst experiences of their lives in excruciating detail for a vague, never-elaborated-on purpose? Martin knows this. Martin lived this.  

Martin can’t think over the roaring in his ears. He barely feels it as his hands are clipped behind his back,  barely registers Stanford as he pulls out a space gun and is promptly tackled. The world blurs at the edges.  

He is right back where he started.  

Chapter Text

“So, Eyeball,” the triangle says, “we’ve got a lot to talk about.”

.

Jon stares at the vending machine.

See—it doesn’t make any sense, and in that nonsense a question is formed, of which the implications are fundamentally groundbreaking. Life-changing. Jon stares at the vending machine and he doesn’t see a selection of bafflingly overpriced snacks behind a dusky wall of glass, spiderwebbed with cracks. No. What Jon sees is an enigma. A conspiracy that likely spreads like mold to the roots of this place. Jon knows this sort of rot, and knows with absolute clarity that it infects the whole town, no—this whole dimension. His Eyes will not answer this question for him, no matter how he wills them to. Perhaps they, too, are fearful of what may come if Jon follows into the depths of his dark curiosity.

Jon looks into the machine and knows he will not find peace in this place.

“Hey, dude, do you want something from the vending machine?” Soos asks. Jon startles, jerking into the broom at his side. Blood wells to the surface of his skin, he Knows; a nasty bruise where his rib would have been. “I recommend the Pitt Cola! It’s the Pitts!”

Jon has to fight the urge not to physically recoil at the name. “I apologize, Soos, but I cannot, in good conscious, ever drink a Pitt Cola.” Even the slogan is horrendous. What sort of a marketing team would ever come up with something so self-deprecating? It doesn’t make sense. Nothing about this place makes sense.

“You sure? You didn’t eat any of Abuelita’s chilaquiles this morning.” Soos looks at him with concern so open Jon doesn’t need his Eyes to spot it—and guilt settles in his stomach like spoiled milk. He’d thought he’d hidden it better than that. He’d woken up this morning without much of an appetite, and hidden shamefully in the bathroom until Soos had told him it was time to leave. Because Jon is, fundamentally, nothing but a coward in human skin. Or—well, not human. But similar enough.

He’d dreamt last night. About what, he’s not certain. Whatever it was, though, it’s left a muddy soreness in his limbs and tears in his eyes. And, of course, a still-present nausea that left him nearly retching at the smell of refried beans.

“Oh. Yes. I—” He clears his throat. “I apologize. I wasn’t that hungry. I do appreciate Señora Alzamirano’s hospitality.”

Soos gasps. “Oh, dude, don’t let her hear you call her that. She’s Abuelita.” He shakes his head darkly. The Eyes, halfway through a lengthy breakdown of bruise formation, shut suddenly closed.

Jon blinks at the sudden loss. A sudden cloud passes over the skylight: for a moment, Soos’s face is bathed in murky shadows that shape his face into a visage of terror. If he strains his ears, he can hear muddled whispering at the edge of this place. “Sorry. Yes. Of course. Abuelita.” Jon coughs.

“No problem!” Soos grins, all previous unnaturalness forgotten. “I just don’t wanna have to take another mandatory sick day. For grandma reasons.”

Jon doesn’t even try to parse that and turns back to the machine, squinting suspiciously at the Pitt Cola. Its cheery orange can mocks him from inside the case.

“You doin’ okay, dawg?”

Jon shakes his head slowly. “No, I’m fine.” There is a thick layer of dust on the inside glass of the vending machine. Human skin and lint.

“Doesn’t look like it, dude.”

Jon sighs sharply. “It just—it doesn’t make any sense. I can’t make it make sense. It—” Jon runs a hand through his hair, frustrated. An Eye unhelpfully lets him know that the oil deposits in his hair are well above the average of males in his age bracket. Lovely. Thank you, eyes. “It’s aggravating. What is the point of having functionally infinite knowledge at one’s disposal if one cannot even use it to investigate the true conspiracy behind the town?”

“...You mean the grandma thing?”

“No.” Jon shakes his head and stares at Soos, hard. He must understand the gravity of the situation. “I mean something much, much worse.”

“What is it, dude?”

“The Pitt Colas.”

“Oh, the Pitt Cola’s! They’re the Pits, you know,” Soos grins.

“Did someone say Pitt Cola?” Wendy Corduroy—dead mother, fifteen years old, switchknife in her back pocket—adjusts her ushanka as she ambles into the main room, leaning on the counter next to the vending machine.

“Sup, Wendy!”

“’Sup, Soos,” Wendy returns the proffered fistbump from Soos, “What are you guys doing?”

“Oh, Jon’s just showing me one of his British tricks, I think.”

“That is not what I—” Jon takes a breath. “There is something wrong with that soda brand.”

“Oh, shit, really? What?” Wendy leans forward, suddenly interesting. “Is it radioactive sludge? Please tell me it’s radioactive sludge.”

“Aw, I was going to guess that!”

Jon purses his lips. “It’s easier if I show you.” He rummages around in his jacket for a dollar coin. Himself, Jon is still incredibly wary of Stan’s decision to pay him exclusively in silver dollars. Something about dollar bills being too traceable by the Shadow NSA, which. Okay. Jon’s not one to speak on the intricacies of this dimension’s federal bureaus—and he is certainly not one to talk about secretive bureaucratic agencies with malevolent intentions—but it all seemed a little…much. But what does Jon know. They’re the only kind of coin that works in the vending machines, anyhow. Stan Pines is nothing if not a canny businessman.

Jon Sees Soos and Wendy watching him at a vertigo-inducing angle as he inserts the coin into the slot, and thumbs in the code for Pitt Colas. He is forcibly made aware of every other code to snacks in the vending machine, and a few extraneous codes besides. He ignores them and focuses on the task at hand. The cola itself jostles into the pick up box, and Jon gingerly retrieves it.

“This is a popular drink brand, yes?” Jon looks between Wendy and Soos, who both nod. “Have you ever noticed anything off about it?”

“Once I saw a cricket in mine,” Soos volunteers.

“Did you drink it?” Wendy asks, morbid curiosity in her voice that Jon does not share. Still, he Knows the answer instantaneously.

“Well, I let Mr. Cricket take a sip first, obviously.” That cricket is dead now, Jon Knows. It spent its last hours drunk on high fructose corn syrup and trace amounts of polonium.

“Obviously,” Jon echoes faintly. He shakes his head to clear the taste of syrup from his tongue. “Anyway. The question is fairly obvious. It’s staring everyone in the face, and people don’t even realize.” Jon’s Eyes blink rapidly as he approaches the truth of his statement. Every muscle in his body tenses in anticipation.

Soos’s eyes are wide. “Well, what is it?”

“C’mon, dude, tell us!”

Jon takes a deep breath and steels himself for the static on his tongue. “How do they get the pits in the cans?”

The question, with no being to latch onto, turns inward, and Jon again searches himself for the answer. The Eyes have no response.

There is a second where everything is silent, and Jon lets the gravity of his words sink in. Then, he explains. “The aluminum is fully molded—there are no seams, so they couldn’t have wrapped the can around the pit. This is already highly unusual. The rim is too small to fit a pit in, and there’s no way to open the top of the can. There is, physically, no way this could work.” He purses his lips as he holds the drink in his hand. “Believe me when I tell you I’ve checked.”

The silence stretches, and Jon stares into Wendy and Soos’s wide eyes. They both look agape, like Jon, unable to comprehend this blatant design flaw.

When Wendy bursts out laughing, then, Jon has to admit he feels a little lost. “Oh! Oh, dude, that’s a good one!”

It takes Soos joining in the laugh to make Jon lower the can. “..What? Don’t tell me you know how it’s done.”

“No one knows how they get the pits in the cans! It’s part of the fun!” Wendy reaches over to grab the can out of Jon’s hands. She pops the tab and holds it to her mouth in one fluid motion.

“Chug! Chug! Chug!” Soos pumps his fists as Wendy downs the drink. Jon frowns deeper.

“You’ve never once been curious.”

“I just always assumed it was like those ships in bottles things,” Wendy says, shrugging,“But no, not really. Like, does it matter?”

Jon stays silent. No, there is something about the cans in the vending machine. It must be the cans, because there’s nothing else of note there. Perhaps the machine itself? But no, Jon brushes his fingers against the cool glass and Knows the last fourteen people to press their noses against it. No secrets there. Jon can feel the beginnings of a migraine coming on.

“Hey, speaking of weirdest things about this town,” Soos tilts his head. “you wanna help me rig the games for the Mystery Fair today?”

“Mystery Fair?” Jon repeats, eyes still on the machine.

“Oh, do they not have Mystery Fairs in England?”

“Ah, no, I’m afraid not.” Jon opens his mouth to ask for elaboration, but his Eyes answer before he has a chance to speak. An image of Soos stretching duct tape over a basketball net flashes in his mind’s Eye, followed by a child holding a question mark-shaped corn dog, tears streaming down his face as he stares up into Jon’s vision.

“GET MYSTERIED, SUCKER,” Stan bellows in a 1920’s bathing suit, shaking his fist at the crying child from a dunk tank, “DON’T FORGET THE TIP!”

Ah. Yes. Of course.

“They sound...exciting,” Jon ventures.

“Yeah, it’s , like the tourist event of the season.” Wendy stretches her arms behind her head to lean on the wall. “Stan let me take the time off so I can,” she puts in scare quotes, “’spend all my money on worthless trinkets.” She shrugs. “It’s kind of lame, but Dipper asked me to show him around, so I’m gonna play some rigged games with him.”

“Get a Mystery Meat Stick in my honor,” Soos says with the solemnity of a fallen soldier.

“Hey, what are you hooligans gabbing on about?”

Jon jumps at the same time as Soos, who tips the brim of his hat at Stan as he shoulders onto the main floor, Mabel right behind him. “Hi, Mr. Pines!” Soos says, “Oh, hi, little Pines!” Mabel bursts from behind Stan, today wearing a striped knit sweater that took her three months to finish and is made out of scrap yarn. Jon closes his eyes.

“Hi Soos! Hi Wendy! Hi Jon!” Mabel strings together in quick succession. “Are you guys excited for the Mystery Fair or what?”

“Heck yeah, little dude!” Wendy ruffles Mabel’s hair, who giggles.

Soos puts a hand on his heart. “It is my solemn duty to watch over fair happenings.”

Mabel turns to Jon. “You’re coming too, right?”

“Jon’s got a Shack to sweep,” Stan interjects, swiftly cutting the head off Mabel’s protests. “And you and your brother have a Mystery Fair to be affiliated with!”

“Aw, but Grunkle Stan!”

“Can it, pipsqueak. Everyone loves little kids. Eye monsters…” Jon hides his flinch as well as he can as Stan squints at him, “not so much. He’d be bad for business.”

“But what if there’s another actual monster?” Mabel asks, nudging Stan. “Eh? Eh? What if we need him to protect us?”

“They’d be turned out at the door,” Stan answers swiftly. “You think monsters have cash on them? Think again. They’re all dead broke!”

“Wait,” Mabel says, “that’s not true. One bought lemonade from me last week! And they paid in real money, too, not just moths.”

“Mabel, honey, for my sanity I’m gonna pretend I didn’t hear that.”

“It’s—fine,” Jon looks up at Stan, who’s crossing his arms as he surveys Jon, “I’d be happy to help set up.” Better than staying in a room with that vending machine. He eyes it again, that black hole of knowledge. If not the Pitt Colas, and not the machine itself, then what?

Stan raises a skeptical eyebrow. “I don’t want you going all freaky on the guests, you hear? This is a family establishment. By which I mean I charge extra for families.”

“I could really use his help in setting up the dunk tank, Mr. Pines,” Soos says. Saying this, he gives Jon an anything-but-subtle thumbs up.

“You two better not be plotting against me,” Stan warns. “But sure. What am I gonna say, don’t work? Hah!” With this, he clasps Jon on the shoulder, leaving him careening into the wall. Well. At least this boss is more outwardly antagonistic. Jon knows what to expect.

Mabel brightens immediately. “Optimism strikes again!” She punches her fists twice in the air. “I’m gonna go get Dipper!” She goes back the way she came, ostensibly to grab her brother, who is currently lip syncing to disco...BABBA? Jon puts a hand over an Eye on his cheek. He does not have the mental energy to figure that particular oddity out at the moment.

“They better not get into any trouble, twin wrangler,” Stan mutters as he walks past Jon.

Honestly, Jon is flattered by the assumtion that he would be able to stop them.

.

Jon, it turns out, is not good at unfair games.

Or, rather, rigging them. He’s built IKEA furniture in his time, of course, desks and cabinets for poorly furnished apartments, but Jon is quickly learning those experiences—tears and splinters and despairing calls to Georgie besides— were much simpler than intentionally building something wrong. He itches at it.

“We are building them the right way, dude!” Soos says brightly. “The Soos way.” With this, he slams the butt of his wrench againt the wood of the dunk tank target he’s currently rigging. The things caulked together and plastered on top of that, until it’s stiff enough that no force save...oh, Jon, doesn’t know, a laser gun, would be able to move it. Jon’s Eyes perk up with a sudden statistic on the prevalance of birth defects in ostriches, and he grimaces.

“Aw, yeah, we did it! High five!” Soos lifts his hand, and Jon mirrors the motion instinctively before pausing.

“I rather think it was you who did most of the work,” Jon says. “I admit I’m not the most...adept handyman.” He runs the thumb of his left hand over the soft bulge the closed Eye embedded in his palm leaves in his skin.

“Don’t worry, we can’t all be Soos, Handyman of the Gods.” Soos shrugs serenely, hand still up in the air. “Well, don’t leave me hanging!”

“Are—” Jon swallows. “Are you quite sure?”

“Dude, I promise you are not the weirdest thing I’ve high fived,” Soos says seriously.

Jon frowns. There’s a certain...trepidation, something that Jon truly wasn’t expecting. It’s skin, just skin, save for the parasitic entities infecting it. Soos waits, hand raised. He seems content to allow Jon to come at his own pace. It is a patient kindness, fragile in Jon’s hands.

The origin of the high five is widely disputed, but was truly invented in 1964 as an intimidation tactic during the Fourteenth Annual Thumb Wrestling World Championship, held in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Two men dropped out of the running, a third suffered heart conniptions and was disqualified.

Jon pinches the bridge of his nose and goes in for the high five.

“Keep it coming, Soos! New guy, put some elbow grease into it!” Stan Pines crosses his arms as he approaches, embodying the Mr. Mystery in every aspect in spite of the admittedly unflattering gray-striped swimsuit he’s donned.

“We actually just finished, Mr. Pines!” Soos says cheerily.

“Then what are you sitting around for? Go man some rides!” He shoos both of them, and Jon gingerly makes his way off the platform.

“Limey, over here,” Stan snaps and points to an empty blue booth with a yellow, haphazardly painted sign reading Delicious. “You’re going to man the meats.”

“The..”

“The Mystery Meat Skewers,” Stan elaborates. “They’re in a fridge in the back, just microwave ‘em when someone asks. And do not,” Stan puts his arm into an ‘x’ shape, “do not tell people what’s in them.”

“...Of course not.”

“There’s a good man,” Stan grins toothily, and levels his hand to pat Jon on the back. Jon stumbles from the force of it. “Seriously, do not tell people.”

“Mystery meat skewers,” Jon mutters to himself, and doesn’t try to hide his grimace as he is dutifully informed what exactly constutites ‘mystery’ meat.

He locates the microwave, the tangle of wires connecting it and the freezer to the main power conduit, and the family of rats living in said tangle with rather less screaming than he’d expected.

So there’s his first task.

Lovely. It’s his first flat all over again. Jon kicks at the wires, and the rats screech and scurry away under the fabric of the tent. It’s the best he can do right now, he figures. He settles on the stool, facing the clearing where people are already beginning to gather.

“It’s now twelve-o’-clock!” Stan’s voice bellows from a loudspeaker. “Try to dunk Mr. Mystery..IF YOU DARE! HAH! LOSERS!”

“Oh, Jon, hi!”

Dipper and Wendy approach the booth in different shades of...probably happiness? Dipper seems...more frenetic than usual, in the prescence of Wendy. Ah. A crush. Jon can’t say he’s very well versed in the intricacies of teenaged romance, but Dipper seems to be having a good enough time. That’s nice.

“On the house,” Jon says, and pretends he can’t hear Stan in his minds’ eye calling him a money-losing hooligan. In his mind, Jon retorts money-filching madman, but it’s halfhearted and even Mind-Stan gives him a raised eyebrow.

“That’s cool of you, dude! Thanks!” Wendy grins as both her and Dipper grab their microwaved corn dogs.

“So what’s actually in these things?” Dipper asks, holding the skewer at an angle.

“You don’t want to know,” Jon says. “Trust me.” He supposes his expression must seem haunted enough, because both Dipper and Wendy nod somberly.

“I guess the only way to get them into this shape would be dark magic,” Dipper muses. Jon agrees that the question-mark contortion of the sausage and bread is ungainly, both difficult to make and difficult to eat, but frankly that’s the least horrifying thing about the skewers. Still, he says nothing. Jon knows firsthand that sometimes it’s better to live in ignorance.

“But Dipper, they’re so—” Wendy puts the corn dog up to the sign, “delicious?”

Dipper laughs slightly too loudly. Ah, Jon thinks wryly, young love.

“I take it things are going well,” Jon says, smiling faintly.

Dipper genuinely squees, a sound Jon has only ever heard before with Mabel and certain dogs. “Oh my god!! Jon I am having the best day of my life—”

“Oh, hey, Dipper, let’s check out the games!” With that, Wendy takes Dipper’s hand and leads them back into the clearing, assumedly to the ball toss game. The horribly rigged game, but Jon’s sure Dipper already knows that. The statistical probability of winning the game is below ten percent.

“Okay!” Dipper responds, voice strangled. Jon watches them go, amused.

The day stretches on lazily the way hot summer days tend to, and Jon mans the Mystery Meat booth with increasing depression itowards the state of humanity in this universe. He’s slowly been coming to terms with the general melancholia that settles heavily in his gut at all times, now, and vague people-watching (and subsequent invasive people-Knowing) hasn’t done much to deter that. His only other customer service experience was a very brief stint as a teenager at a local outlet mall in Bournemouth—and though he wouldn’t ever be stupid enough to miss that particular work enviroment, at least it was air conditioned. And there were fewer...strange customers. Which really says a lot about this dimension’s oddities.

For example: The woman approaching Jon’s tent for the third time today with symapthetic eyes and a baby in her arms. She looks Jon up and down, lips curled down, and again asserts “you don’t need plastic surgery to be beautiful, you know. Your skin is your own.”

Jon actually has some valid evidence against that, but whatever. “As I said the last time you pointed that out,” he says, world-weary, “this is my regular skin.” For a given margin of regular. Jon gestures to the Eyes on his uncovered arm, which blink back with dull green pupils. “Plastic surgery physically cannot do this.” Not that, according to the highly concerning medical study suddenly beamed into Jon’s head, certain doctors haven’t tried. At the woman’s uncomprehending stare, Jon sighs heavily. “Would you like to purchase another Mystery Skewer?”

The woman nods, eyes still crinkling sadly. She puts her money on the counter, and Jon hands her both the skewer and her change. She wanders off again, stumbling slightly.

Mabel pushes past the woman, who stumbles into another man. Jon frowns. Maybe she’s ill? “Jon! Jon!”

Jon thinks his name has been said more in the past twelve hours than it has in the past year. He turns to Mabel, who is barrelling towards him at full speed with a...Yorkshire pig?

“I won a pig!”

“Dear lord,” Jon lets out in an exhale as a snuffling pink thing is thrust into his field of vision. Five weeks old, only just eating solid food, six siblings, all sold off during the fair. This onslaught of information runs like sludge through flashes of other pigs. 014027. Second of July, 2014, statement taken from Dylan Anderson concerning what could only be described as a carnivorous pig.

Oh, Jon does not like pigs.

“Hm,” Jon says with a grimace as close to an encouraging smile as he can physically push it. “What a—nice pig.” He clears his throat, and Mabel grins dazzlingly. The pig itself is brought away from Jon and tucked between Mabel’s arm and waist. Still too close, but even so.

“I’d like to know where your brother is,” Jon says, eyes anywhere but at the creature in Mabel’s arms. “I take it his date didn’t go as well as he’d hoped.” A nicer way of putting it than mentioning hearing the gut-wrenching wail of a twelve-year-old’s broken heart echoed through prepubescent vocal cords about thirty minutes after Jon saw he and Wendy off.

Mabel bats the not-a-question away. “Oh, he’s doing goober things like a goober,” she says vaguely. “Aren’t you going to ask what I named my new perfect porcine pal?”

An eye blinks open on Jon’s shoulderblade—“Waddles,” Jon and Mabel say at the same time. Damn it. Jon grimaces.

“Jinx!” Mabel crows, and reaches over the counter to punch Jon in the shoulder.

“Augh,” Jon says. She punches like her great uncle.

“The guy who gave him to me said I should eat him! Can you believe that?!” Mabel shakes her own head. “Crazy. Anyway, I’m gonna go find sadsack Dipper and make him look at Waddles.”

Just take that pig away, Jon thinks, only slightly manic. He waves as she runs off, pig pressed to her chest. Jon puts his chin on his hand, listening idly to the specifc penal codes his Eyes tell him this fair violates. What a day.

In the comparative silence, Jon’s mild headache makes itself known again, slight and pulsing. It’s better than the ones that used to plague him, that’s for sure, and Jon focuses on the pain if only for a distraction. It comes in waves, up the side of his temple.

He allows his eyes to drift, and through the crowd he notices Soos, who’s ended up running some sort of...barrel ride attraction. Jon takes a moment to comprehend the ride itself. It’s some sort of...spinning teacups-esque adventure, but it’s clearly not that popular. There’s only one person there, a bald, sweaty man who’s giggling to himself.

Jon blinks.

Something isn’t clicking. What. His Eyes blink rapidbly, then close, one by one, until it is only Jon, staring at this man. Like the vending machine, Jon can do nothing but drink in the wrongness.

The man in the grey tracksuit looks up from his ride, and stares straight at Jon with thick glasses. Jon blinks, and Blinks, and cannot stop himself from frowning. This man is an anomaly. He is—displaced. How does he know this? His clothing is strange, yes, but that’s not it. His Eyes are giving him snapshots: a wide black sky, glittering with stars and cosmic gas, soldiers in strange black uniforms, a giant floating baby so baffling and out of place that it jerks Jon out of the vision entirely. He shakes his head, dispelling a sigil of an infinite hourglass, and swallows against the oncoming migraine he can feel like a storm on the horizon.

This man is wrong. Jon needs to speak with him immediately.

He stands, staggering slightly, and falls more than walks to the barrel ride. He opens his mouth to speak, as the man lifts his leg clumsily over the rim of the cup in Jon’s direction, to ask him who he is, what are you doing here, have you seen my partner—

And, in what is beginning to resemble a running theme, his vision goes dark.

.

“So the thing is, Eyeball—” the triangle splays its thin, black arms, “I’m caught in a bit of a pickle here. Now your crash-landing—” his eye glows, and displays a blue holographic image in front of him—of Jon, limp in a crater. Jon shivers. “—rrrriiipppped this universe wide open. So much for semipermeable membranes, you tore this world a new one. Literally!” The image shifts to something amorphous, dark and curling infinitely in on itself. “Unfortunately,” he spits the word, eye narrowing, “that hole repaired itself. But you—” The image shifts again, this time to Jon, hovering, Eyes open and hair moving faintly, as if in a breeze. “You stayed.”

“I—I don’t understand.”

“Of course you don’t,” Bill says. He dispels the hologram, and turns his pupil fully to Jon. “That’s not your job, is it?”

.

Jon wakes up.

Or—wait. That’s not right. He’s standing, holding a broom, and staring at a vending machine. He waves his hands frantically as a wave of vertigo threatens to bowl him over, leaning over to catch himself on the machine.

Bulletproof glass, his Eyes tell him.

What?

Jon lets himself rest on the glass, curling his fingers against his reflection. Bulletproof glass. Of course. Logically there isn’t anything more important in a tourist trap’s budget than protecting expired snacks from would-be armed robbers, Jon thinks with no shortage of sarcasm. Still, the thoughts are hardly able to right themselves; his brain is tangled, the room is spinning. He breathes slowly. What was he doing?

He was staring at that sweaty man in the bottlecap glasses, and his head had hurt, and then he was—

Somewhere else.

Here.

No, something is wrong. He knows something is wrong. He was outside, in the blooming dark of twilight, and the man he was looking at was wrong—not just wrong but incorrect. Just thinking about it makes the pain in his head spike.

“Hey, you okay, dude?”

Jon can’t help the way he jolts at the noise, cringing away from the voice and shielding his face. He is dreaming, but he’s—

“I—” the words catch in his throat. Jon swallows, and nods.

“You sure?” “You look a little bit like me after I accidentally swallowed Mr. Cricket,” Soos laughs to himself. “Fun times.”

Jon frowns. “You told me that story.”

“Oh, did I? Must have been sleepwalking!” Soos chortles. “Abuelita says I have a very healthy imagination, which only manifests itself in the wicked hours of the night. Oh, hi, Wendy!”

“Sup, Soos,” And there’s Wendy, adjusting her ushanka. “Sup, Jon.”

Jon mentally prods at his Eyes. Nothing, save for the information Jon already knew about Wendy, information Jon had learned...earlier today. Yesterday?

“Oh, hey, Jon, did you wanna help me set up rides at the Mystery Fair today?”

Jon zones back into the conversation to Wendy and Soos staring at him, expectant. “I already said yes,” Jon says. He shakes his head. “I’m sure I did.” He looks to Soos, but the handyman looks at him with a clear concern that does nothing to help Jon’s unsteadiness.

Oh. Stan is here, too. Jon didn’t notice him come in.

“You’re not going crazy, right? Can’t have a crazy on staff, it freaks out the customers,” Stan says gruffly. “Already bad enough having this guy.” He just his chin at Soos.

“I love you too, Mr. Pines,” Soos says cheerily.

“No, this is wrong,” Jon says. “I’ve done this before.” He wills his eyes to Blink, but they don’t settle on any information, much less any that would be helpful to Jon. Where are Mabel and Dipper? “You haven’t seen a—a yellow triangle, have you?”

“A what?”

But no, that’s wrong. Jon turns back to the vending machine. “Nevermind. I think—” Jon shakes his head.

“Do you, like, wanna lie down?” Wendy asks. “You, uh, don’t look so good.”

“Oh, no you don’t, Eyeball,” Stan says, “I’ve got a Mystery Fair to run, and a brand new sucker to help me run it.”

“You said that before,” Jon says. Or something similar. “Or you didn’t. Something’s changed.”

“Yeah, what’s changed is that you’re in America now,” Stan shoots back. “You’re not on payroll just for the heck of it. I don’t know how you do it in England, but here in America we have to work for our money.” Jon opens his mouth and closes it.

‘Of course,” Jon finally settles on. “My apologies.”

This can’t be right. Maybe it is just deja vu. He nods, faintly, and follows Soos, whose running commentary about soda drinks is just to the left side of familiar.

.

Jon, as it turns out, is getting better at unfair games.

Or, at least, rigging them. He knows this because Soos remarks on it as Jon caulks up the diving target, just as he saw Soos doing it earlier—or, no. Wait. That didn’t happen. Or did it? Jon puts a hand to forehead, skirting the edge of a closed eye.

“Woah, dude, you’re on your way to becoming Second Handyman of the Gods! Have you considered an apprenticeship?”

Jon frowns. “I’d assume it takes more than plaster to get at seat at that particular table.”

Soos chortles. “You’d be surpised, dude!”

“Keep it up, Soos! New guy, put some elbow grease in it!”

“Actually, Jon’s been a great help!” Soos responds, waving a wrench. “And we’re actually basically done.”

“Then what are you waiting for! Go man some rides!” Jon hops off the platform with slightly more grace than last time (last time?) and faces Stan, arms crossed in his 1920’s swimsuit. “Alright, Limey, follow me. You’re gonna be manning the—”

“—Mystery Meat tent,” Jon finishes.

Stan slaps Jon on the back—he stumbles forward, catching himself on the diving tank. “Hey, it seems your creepy eye powers can be used for some good!” He grabs Jon by the shoulder. “But no more reading my mind. Capiche?”

“Capiche,” Jon says, “but—”

“Glad we understand each other! And remember, do not—” Stan puts his arms in an ‘x’ formation, “and I mean do not tell the customers what’s in them.”

“I wouldn’t dream of it,” Jon says, faintly. He stares over Stan’s shoulder, to where Dipper and Wendy are playing some sort of ball game. Like last time. Or...something.

Stan squints at Jon, assessing. “Look, Eyeball. If you fall asleep on shift, I’ll boot your behind into next week,” Stan warns. “Better, uh,” he coughs, “better to do that inside. On the uncomfortable couch. Obviously.”

“Of course.” Jon manages a smile at this. With a final long look, Stan turns to yell at Soos.

Jon side-steps the rat’s nest of tangled cords and takes a seat. The headache, his companion, keeps him company as he shoos the rats out. He settles down in the stool he already knew was there, and as if on cue, the loudspeaker grates out—“It’s now twelve-o’-clock! Try to dunk Mr. Mystery..IF YOU DARE! HAH! LOSERS!”

Jon puts his head in his hands.

Dipper trudges past the Mystery Meat tent with what looks like the weight of tragedy on his back.

“Dipper, what’s wrong?” Dipper looks up, and takes whatever silent cue Jon was giving to slump over the booth counter.

“Oh, nothing, just embarrased myself in front of Wendy again,” Dipper grumbles. “And now she’s going to be hanging out with Robbie all summer.” Dipper crosses his arms with a dark huff. “This sucks.”

“I’m sure there will be other opportunities to, er,” Jon clears his throat, “win her affection?” Strange, he didn’t hear the prepubescent scream this time. He must not have been paying attention.

“Yeah,” Dipper says, clearly unconvinced, “sure.”

“I think your sister is looking for you,” Jon supplies. “She wants to show you her new...pig.” Jon has memories of that, he’s certain. Mabel looking up at him, shoving that pink mass in his face. It’s hazy, though. Grainy. Perhaps he should lay down.

“Again,” Dipper rolls his eyes, and pushes off the counter. “I guess I’ll go find her. Not like I have anything else to do.”

Hm. Interesting. That interaction was different than what he thinks he remembers. Wendy wasn’t there, for one. As the day wanes on, the customer interactions are generally unchanged from how Jon...remembers.

Strange.

“Uh, I’d like one corn dog, please,” says a voice with a distinctly nasal quality that reverberates painfully in Jon’s ears. Jon looks up to ask how long he’d like it microwaved for—and promptly stops.

It’s the man. The one who looks wrong.

“You,” Jon breathes, or growls.

“Ack! What are you?!” The pasty man cries, swatting at Jon. He speaks into his watch— “Temporal anomaly detected, must be taken in to custody immediately! Time police, come in, time police! This eyeball man stole my belt!!”

Jon splutters. “What belt?!”

“You know what you did!” The man jabs a finger at Jon’s chest. “There will be repurcussions! Give it back, anomaly!”

“I don’t have any idea what you’re talking about!” Jon puts his hands up. Is he going to go to space prison? Was Gravity Falls simply a break before the true horrors started? The man is sweating, but his face is set in a grave expression.

“We thought the anomalous signals were just basement testing,” the man says into the watch, “but there is a real-life anomaly right in front of me! This is a non-native creature, I repeat, a non-native creature!”

“’Basement testing—“

But the Mystery Shack doesn’t have a basement.

But, his Eyes whisper back, it does.

Jon turns to—do something, likely, but the world shifts, and everything goes still. It’s just for a second, though, staring into the pasty grey man’s sweaty face before Jon blinks—

And everything goes dark.

.

“Now your dimension sounds like fun.”

Fun?

Suddenly, Jon is not here. He is Back, back in that terrible world he created, and everything is screaming and he cannot help but watch. Some awful part of him relaxes. Some awful part of him calms at the familiarity of the dread that settles in his stomach.

Someone is screaming. Everyone is screaming. He can see it all.

“What a riot!” Bill Cipher crows. Jon cannot stand to look at him. He Sees him, all the same. The triangle twirls around the carnage, the evisceration of the Flesh and the mindless confusion of the Spiral. He looks oddly out of place, the cheery yellow incongruent with the horror beyond. “I gotta say, I love what you’ve done with the place.”

Jon shakes his head helplessly. This isn’t him. He can’t—please. He needs to make it stop. They all know he is Watching and they hate hate hate him for it and he cannot help but stare.

“Uh, Eyeball?” A black thing waves at the edge of his vision. He hears something snapping. “Eyeball! You in there, buddy?” The Archivist cannot move. The Archivist watches the fear and torment and terror and drinks it in like second nature. This is where he’s always belonged, he thinks despairingly. Magnus was right. Martin is gone and the Archivist is—

“Yeah, okay, this isn’t working.”

And they are gone.

.

“Aw yeah, man, we did it!”

Jon jumps back to awareness mid-high-five, perched precariously on the stepladder from earlier that morning. So things are getting—faster? His Eyes blink rapidly, one after the other, but they can’t do anything to abate the metaphorical icepick stabbing his temple. Something isn’t clicking.

“Soos, I think I’m going insane.”

Soos shrugs like this is a normal thing to say. “That’s okay, dude! Do you wanna go back to the Shack? I can finish up here.”

Jon does need to go back to the Shack. It’s something about that vending machine, Jon knows it. ‘Basement testing.’ It scratches at the base of himself, something Jon can’t quite reach. If he could just—dislodge whatever it is that he can’t quite get to. “I think that’s a good idea,” he mutters, waving vaguely in Soos’s direction, and falls rather unelegantly from the ladder.

“What, hey—where are you going?”

“Don’t worry, Mr. Pines! He’s on break!” Soos calls.

“What am I, Franklin Delano Roosevelt? We don’t have breaks here!”

Jon doesn’t stop walking. He opens the door to the Shack and makes a beeline for the vending machine. It blacks out the vision from the Eyes and, no, Jon was wrong. It’s not the sodas. It’s the vending machine itself, or something very close to it.

Jon wonders.

He runs his hand along the wood of the Shack. He’s gotten safety violations, the fire code beamed directly into his skull—can’t he just…

The floor plans. Yes. There. Thank you, Eyes. His head pulses.

“Basement testing.”

Jon brushes the keypad with his fingers. He’s so close. This has got to be what’s causing this migraine, and by extention the temporal...looping. His Eyes are pushing him back—there is a wall here. There is nothing to see. But that’s not true, because there is a basement to this place. It was built that way specifically

Oh.

Jon remembers this feeling. The Institute cannot help but draw comparisons to itself, and this is not the first tunnel his Eyes have not been able to turn themselves on.

There is a hole in the wall that Jon can’t See.

Jon is not good at unfair games. Here, though, he has a home advantage.

.

It is almost a force beyond himself that makes him speak to Stan. If he had a worse sense of humor, he would have called it a compulsion, but as it is, he simply crashes past Soos, maneuvers through a gaggle of teenagers, and ignores his eyes as they screech at him about safety violations and penal codes and the exact shade of brown of the damn wooden booths.

“Mr. Pines,” Jon says, panting, “there is something wrong with your basement.”

Stan stills. All the purposeful energy he’s been waving to the fairgoers with is killed in an instant as he turns to Jon. All the hairs on Jon’s neck bristle at the attention.

“What,” Stan says slowly, “do you mean by that?”

Jon shakes his head, out of breath. He puts his hands on his knees and wills his limbs to stop shaking with exertion. The Eyes blink, silent witnesses, and Stan ignores them all for Jon’s own. “I thought it was the sodas at first. The Pitt Colas, you know, how do they get the pits in them—”

Stan narrows his eyes as Jon talks.

“—But it wasn’t the sodas. There’s a block on your vending machine. I can’t See it.”

“So?” Stan shifts his stance. “I can’t see five feet in front of me without my glasses. Doesn’t mean there’s a cactus I don’t see.”

Jon snaps his fingers. “The temporal anomalies! Don’t tell me you haven’t felt them. Déjà vu, right?” Jon wets his lips, “Like you’ve done something before. Something is messing around with time. And I think it has to be coming from the basement.”

“I have no idea what you’re talking about.” Stan’s voice is stony. His face is closed. Every inch of his sixty-two years and fourteen days suddenly makes itself known in his stature. “I don’t have a basement.”

“What are you talking about? Of course you do. It’s in the plans for the house.”

“And how do you know the—” Stan pinches the bridge between his eyes. “Forget I asked. Of course you have the floor plans memorized.”

“I really wouldn’t call it memorization,” Jon starts, and then stops himself. “It’s not important. Look. It’s a matter of safety for the children, you must realize that.”

“Look, Eyeball, I have no idea what you’re talking about.” “And even if I did, I sure as hell wouldn’t talk about it in front of an entire crowd of people.”

“But—” Jon looks around. “Oh. Then can we please speak in private?”

“YOU!”

If Jon had a nickel for every time someone pointed him out in this manner, it would likely amount to his hourly wage. Still, he looks towards that man despite the way his vision warps around him. “Stop! Stop right where you are, fiend!”

“What in the hell are you talking about?!” Jon bursts out, hand at his head. He bites his tongue, but it’s already too late—

“You took my belt! And you’re travelling back in time!” And that’s a non sequiter if Jon’s ever heard one. But no matter. The man clutches his head and hisses. “And now you’re attacking me with your terrible powers!”

“I don’t even know what you’re talking about,” Jon puts a hand to his forehead. “You’re not in the time loop. I don’t know what you have to do with the basement, but I swear, I will find out.”

“What basement? I’m talking about my futuristic utility belt!”

So this isn’t just a cosplayer. The glimpses Jon has been seeing are from the future; that’s why they burrow into Jon’s skull like...worms. They don’t exist, not really. Only in this impossible man’s memories.

But if that’s the case, that means someone is traveling back in time. If all this was only a natural progression of someone repeatedly traveling back in time, reliving the same few hours over and over and over again—

Jon thinks about Mabel, how she hadn’t shown up to the second ‘loop’ except to win her pig. Dipper, too, acted much earlier, ‘losing’ Wendy to Robbie much earlier the second time around.

Oh, Jon thinks. I’m an idiot.

This is, of course, the point where he blacks out.

.

“You know, it’s funny how freaked out you were.” The triangle will not stop talking. “I gotta say, you’re pretty wimpy for a guy who destroyed his entire world.”

Jon lets out an involuntary whimper, at that.

“You’re makin’ my point for me, Eyeball.” The triangle runs a hand over its—well, eye, Jon supposes, it doesn’t have a face. “Just a sad sack of flesh and bone, like all the others. Who thought it was a good idea to give you cosmic powers?”

Jon has no answer.

“Oh, well,” the triangle raises its arms in a sort of shurg, “Sucks to suck, I guess. In this state there’s no way you’ll be able to get to your boy toy. What was his name—Mayo, Macaroni, Milton…” Its body shifts again, to that face, that face he knows better than he knows this place, the glasses framing sad eyes, dark hair shot through with white streaks. He’s frowning, perhaps crying, and the right lens of his glasses is significantly cracked. But he’s alive. Oh, god, Jon knows that face, and he’s alive.

“Martin,” Jon breathes, and everything stops.

“Martin, that’s it!” The triangle snaps his fingers twice, as if remembering. “Your pet human.”

No, that’s not right. The triangle shifts back to that toxic yellow, but the imprint of Martin’s face is clear in Jon’s mind. Older. Alive. He’s alive. “I love him,” Jon says helplessly.

“And I love fleshy Earth deer, but I still tear the teeth out of their head! C’mon, Jon, stop being such a Debbie Downer!”

“Is he alive?”

“Sure he is!” Bill Cipher lets out another peal of laughter. “And I know where he ended up!”

Jon’s throat tightens. He can barely move, barely speak. He is not drowning but it feels the same. “Tell—”

“Upupup, not so fast!” Bill Cipher puts a finger to Jon’s lips. It burns like static and freezing water. “Thought the English were all about their manners! Oh, well, guess you are acclimatizing!”

Jon curls his fingers into the fraying fabric of the chair.The world around him is black and glistening, like the innards of a wet beast. His grandmother’s chair will not save him.

“Anyhoo, I’m more than happy to help you find him!” The triangle leans close to Jon, wide eye taking up his entire frame of vision. “You’ve just got to do something for me, too.”

.

Jon doesn’t wait when he snaps back to consciousness . He snaps up from his tent and heads straight for the ball toss booth, ignoring the woman as she tries to speak to him, the flashes of red fabric and blue light that follow her ignored. Something about measuring tape, something about time travel—this is not a time loop. Of that Jon is now certain.

He spots Wendy’s red hair first, and then Dipper, gesticulating to her in front of a wooden booth that breaks so many penal codes that Jon has to squeeze his eyes shut, for a moment. His head hurts, and even looking at Dipper is like picking at a fresh wound.

Dipper’s eyes widen when Jon approaches. Jon has a brief moment to consider how he must look to the boy. Haggard, covered in eyes, storming towards him like some ghastly apparition. He’s only been here a week—this is the first time Dipper has looked remotely apprehensive towards him.

“You need to stop this,” Jon says, stepping in front of Dipper and Wendy. “I don’t know how you’re doing—whatever it is you’re doing, time wise, but you’re giving me a hell of a headache.” And also likely messing with the space-time continuum. One of those is clearly more important than the other, but through his pulsing migraine, Jon can’t quite tell which is which.

Dipper squeaks. “Jon! Hi!” He scratches the back of his neck vigorously. “I don’t know what you’re talking about. Oh, Wendy, what did you say, you wanted to go back to the Tunnel of Love and Corn Dogs? Let’s go!”

Jon widens his eyes at Wendy and shakes his head. Do not. Do not.

“What, hey, stop shaking your head—“

Thankfully, Wendy is intuitive enough to catch Jon’s subtle hint. “Look, uh,” Wendy looks between the two of them, “clearly you have your own things going on. Dipper, let me know when you’re done, okay? Peace,” she says, holding up the associated hand sign before turning back into the clearing. A similarly teenaged boy with black skinny jeans and a band hoodie sidles up next to her—Jon hears, “Oh hey, Robbie, what’s up?”

“No, wait—” Dipper starts to go after her, but Wendy has already disappeared into the crowd. Jon takes a second to catch his breath before Dipper whirls on Jon.

“Oh, my god!” Dipper nearly yells, “I can’t believe you just did that! My one chance with Wendy, and you just ruined it!” He tugs at his hair. One hundred thousand four hundred and seven hair follicles on his head—Jon grits his teeth and breaths. Well. If Jon is right, this was clearly not his one chance with Wendy.

Jon feels that he’s rather earned the right to pedantacism, given the circumstances.

“Dipper! Did it work?” Jon looks up to see Mabel rushing out sans pig from the main clearing. She must not have won it yet. So she knows about the time—thing too. Perfect.

“Yes it did! At least—until someone,” Dipper squints at Jon angrily, “decided to mess everything up!” Again goes unsaid. Still, it hangs low and heavy in the air.

“You can always try again, bro-bro,” Mabel says, patting her brother symapthetically on the arm. “Don’t worry! I’m sure it’ll work out one of these times.”

Under the laws of typical temporal linearity, that sentence does not make sense. “I would like to know what you mean when you say that,” Jon says through gritted teeth. “And I would like to know now, please.”

Dipper crosses his arms. “Fine! I was going to show you anyway, after I got the meeting with Wendy perfect,” he says, somewhat petulantly. From within his vest, he pulls out what looks to be a yellow safety measuring tape, with a sigil of an hourglasss on the side. “I couldn’t afford any outside forces,” he says pointeedly.

Jon is suddenly accosted by that same wrongness as the pasty man in the grey suit. Time bends around the thing, glowing slightly not to his main eyes but to those pockmarking his skin. The information comes to him jumbled, the make and model, the name of the woman who designed them, the year it was invented—

Ah. The puzzle pieces fall into place.

“You…” Jon opens his mouth. Closes it. Opens it again. “You’ve been time traveling. With measuring tape.”

“Actually, no,” Dipper says. “It’s called Time Tape, and it—”

“Yeah, basically measuring tape,” Mabel says, “but it measures time.” She wiggles her fingers in front of Jon’s face. He grimaces away, both from the sudden near-contact and the knowledge of how much glitter glue is trapped under her nails.

Dipper rolls his eyes. “That’s called a watch, Mabel.”

Mabel shrugs. “Either way, we’ve been using it so Dipper can romance Wendy and so I can relive the best moment of my entire life: rewinning Waddles! Oh! Speaking of which, I need to rewin Waddles!” Mabel spins around and races back to the main booths. So much energy in that child. Jon is faintly jealous.

Wait—but if the tape is the thing that’s causing the time travel what was all that about the vending machine?

“And you’re sure you haven’t been anywhere near the vending machine in the shop today.” Jon checks. He Knows the answer before Dipper answers, but wilts anyway as Dipper shoots him a confused look.

“No, we’ve been at the fairgrounds.”

“Okay, then.” So that was just entirely unrelated? Jon refuses to believe that. “So let me get this straight.” Jon focuses his attention back on the measuring tape—sorry, Time Tape—in Dipper’s hands. He dares not pick it up. “You’ve been traveling back in time repeatedly, despite the numerous obvious risks, to impress Wendy enough at rigged carnival games that she’ll go out with you.”

“Wh—hey, that’s an oversimplification on like three levels! And haha, no, absolutely, not! I just don’t want her to go out with this stupid guy!” Dipper’s squawk is indignant and distinctly prepubescent. “It’s either me or that jerk Robbie. And he sucks! Jon, he sucks so bad.”

Oh, dear lord. Jon takes in Dipper’s earnest expression and prays this was not how he acted as a teen. “Wendy is fifteen, Dipper, it’s perfectly normal for her to go out with people her own age.” Jon cannot be the one to have this converstion with him. Dipper’s face is shiny with sweat. “Please give me the tape.”

“No! I’ve got to go back in time so I can fix this! I almost had it right, too!” The frenetic energy in Dipper’s eyes is all too familiar. He hugs the tape measure close to his chest. “I wouldn’t have to go back if you didn’t mess it up!”

Jon takes a breath. This is so different from Archive work. “Dipper, I want you to look at me very carefully.” Jon kneels to Dipper’s height, ignoring the screeching pain in his joints and the screeching Eyes telling him exactly which ligaments are being torn. “Remember the Gremoblin. Meddling with forces beyond your control is a bad thing.”

“Yeah, but this is different!”

“Dipper, you can’t force people to be in your life.” Jon exhales shortly. “Wendy is your friend, if I’m not mistaken.”

“Yeah,” Dipper narrows his eyes. “Why?”

“Then you should want her to be happy. I want you to ask yourself if this is making her happy.”

“Who could be happy with Robbie?” Dipper spits the name out like bitter coffee. “He’s the worst.”

“Dipper, I know what you’re going through. I know it hurts, but you have to let Wendy make her own decisions.” Oh, and doesn’t that just sting.

Dipper furrows his eyebrows like he has a counterargument, but he doesn’t have a chance to refute his point. Mabel’s cry outpaces Dipper’s by orders of magnitude as she runs to Dipper, shaking him vigorously.

“Pacifica stole Waddles!” Mabel wails with the force of a thousand suns. Jon winces away from the noise. “I was too late and she stole him!”

“Oh, no,” Jon says monotonously. “That’s horrible.”

“Don’t worry, Mabel, we need to go back anyway.” Dipper pulls the tape close to his chest as if to pull on it.

“Oh, no you don’t,” Jon braces himself and grabs the tape measure from Dipper. The onslaught of wrongness almost topples him over, and his Eyes blink rapidly as the world attempts to right itself. “Do you two even realize how dangerous this is?”

“It’s just a little time travel,” Mabel defends. “And just a few hours back in time!”

“You’re just as bad as Grunkle Stan!” Dipper yells. “Why can’t we just have this!”

“Dealing with unknown forces is inherently unsafe,” Jon shoots back. “You can’t know the risks!”

“I don’t care! Give it back!” Dipper reaches for the tape, and Jon is a little bit too slow—

.

“This is a one-of-a-kind deal, Jon! I don’t make deals like this with just anyone! You’re special.”

Jon’s heard that one before. “Why should I trust you?”

“Because I can prove it to you. Check out the vending machine in the front room of that rat-infested den you call a place of employment. You’ll see what I’m talking about.”

.

—And Jon is in a valley between two hills, and the air is dry and hot. Mabel and Dipper stumble into him from two different angles, Dipper clutching the time tape.

“Woah,” Dipper looks around, “when are we?”

“No, the question you should be asking is ‘when are we’—oh, you already said that.”

“Dipper, Mabel, are you alright?” Jon winces in the light and does a squinting once-over of the children. Not visibly harmed, except for dirt on Mabel’s sweater and Dipper’s hat. “Oh, your great uncle is going to kill me.”

“He didn’t last time,” Mabel points out. “He really is just a big softie, you know.” She puts her sweater arm to her nose. “Wow, it smells bad here!”

“That was a rather different scenario,” Jon says. “And is really not an assumption I want to test. Please,” he turns to Dipper, “give me the time tape.”

“What—no! I know what you’re going to do!” Dipper hides the time tape in his jacket. “I need it!”

“Dipper, no twelve-year-old needs unrestrained access to time travel.”

“This one does!”

“And me!” Mabel shifts to stand near Dipper, in direct opposition to Jon. “I’ve got to save Waddles from Pacifica’s evil mansion!”

“Oh, what an amazing, glorious day on the Oregon trail! Only half my children got dysentary this morning!” Jon jumps as a jovial voice calls out from behind them. “Way hey, travelers, why don’t you hitch a ride on my wagon! Share in our good fortune!” Jebediah Maple Woodbeam the fifth, thirteen children, four dead. A stabbing pain shoots into Jon’s head at the knowledge. This is wrong.

Dipper and Mabel glance at each other, and Jon realizes a second too late what they’re going to do before they lunge into the wagon, tearing the fabric—oilhide stretched thin over hickory bows, ow—of the wagon.

“You have got to be kidding me,” Jon growls, headache pounding. His knee is going to hate him for this one tomorrow. Steeling his grit, he jumps into the wagon, creating a new tear right next to the Pines twin’s.

“You know, we do have a door!” Jebediah Maple Woodbeam the Fourth calls cheerily from his place in the front of the wagon. “Unless your species of beast doesn’t do that!”

“Fertilia, it seems you’ve birthed two more children and one horrifying man-creature,” a lanky, gaunt man says from inside the wagon, sitting on a barrel and looking rather like a corpse already. He’s got cholera, Jon Knows. He will be dead within the week. Jon has had aura migaines before. The white spot at the edge of his vision throbbing in time with his pulse agrees with his assessment.

“It seems I have,” the woman who must be Fertilia notes, eyes half-lidded. “More hands to tallow the fields.”

“Tallow,” Mabel says. “Funny word.”

“Children, please, I can’t even begin to describe how many paradoxes our prescence here is causing,” Jon entreats unsuccesfully. Dipper and Mabel scramble to the edge of the wagon, near Fertilia and her haggard children.

“I don’t care about any paradoxes!” Mabel cries, whipping a calculator out of her pocket and shoves it in a young boy’s face. “Look! A cool button-pushy thing!” She turns to Fertilia. “Guess who gets the right vote, girl!” She raises her hand above her head, and slaps Fertilia’s hand with her own. “That’s called a high-five! Tell your friends!”

Jon grimaces as a wave of nausea slams into him. The origin of the high five is widely disputed, but was invented by colonists on the Oregon Trail—

“Uh,” Dipper says, “are you okay?”

“No, Dipper. There is so much wrong with this. I can’t believe—” Jon breathes out through his nose. “Four years of actual hell and now I’m trying to get two tweenagers to give me time travel measuring tape so we can go back to the present. Look, just—give that here—” Jon grabs for the Time Tape through the starbursting pain, and reaches the edge of the tape. Oh shit, he only grazes the teeth of the thing, which quickly measures the growing space between Dipper and Mabel. Which of course means Jon blacks out—

.

“I don’t want to hurt anyone,” Jon says.

“What a crybaby! You’re not gonna hurt anyone, silly! In fact,” Bill Cipher stretches its arms out wide, “you’re going to be helping everyone! Just like you always wanted!”

.

—And Jon is in a humid jungle, and there is a roaring Gigonotosaurus (ninety-nine million years extinct, this is wrong) and Dipper, Mabel, and himself let out triplet screams as Dipper fumbles with the Time Tape—

.

“All you gotta do is help ol’ Stan with the thing in his basement! I’ll do the rest.”

.

—And Jon is standing on an open expanse and there are stars, and people, and a gunshot (laser shot?) whizzes past his head so past the pulsing screeching of his Eyes he grabs the twins by the backs of their shirts—

.

The environment shifts again, and Jon cringes in anticipation, but the landscape does not morph into primal fear and pain. No. They are in a large concrete room, strewn with wires and odd bits of machinery.

And in the middle—

Oh. Jon does not have the words to describe the device in the middle of the room. Still, he attempts to—a metal frame stretching up to a cavernous roof, all rigid angles and thick bolts. The middle circle whirrs with inhuman light, colors that Jon’s Eyes track but Jon himself cannot begin to comprehend. It is a tear in this world. It is a hole punched through dimensions. It is the inky black of blood and the swirling brightness of oil, the glistening of film tape.

Jon knows what this is, and he knows what it does.

.

—And they are in a snowy clearing in the woods.

“Mabel, you have to give that to me,” Jon says, schematics for technology he doesn’t understand flashing through his mind. “It’s overheating, we need to rest it—”

“Hot! Hot hot hot!” Mabel fumbles with the time tape, and drops it in the snow, and Dipper and Jon both lunge for the thing—

.

“So what do you say, Eyeball? Wanna make a deal?”

.

—And they tumble in a heap in the grass.

Dipper and Mabel, of course, possessed of the agility of children, get to their feet much faster than Jon, who valiantly fights the rising urge to vomit. Breathe through it. Breathe through it. Jon sucks in breath and remembers to exhale. Sometimes.

“Ah hah! We’re back!”

“But which back are we in?”

“Come on, pig!” Pacifica growls within earshot, pulling a recalcitrant pig along the green. Mabel lets out an anguished cry that Jon hisses and presses a hand to his temple at. At least his hand is cool.

“Damn time travel,” Jon mutters under his breath. And he thought the withdrawal headaches were bad.

Mabel blinks, and looks fully at Jon. “Are you...okay?”

Jon exhales through his nows. “Time travel...doesn’t agree with me. I have a hell of a migraine.”

“Oh,” Mabel says, quieter. “It’s...hurting you?”

“I’ve been passing out all day,” Jon says pointedly. “Something about time travel just—doesn’t gel with Knowing things, I suppose. Everything is out of place. Nothing lines up.” Jon grimaces, and his Eyes blink as if in agreement.

“Well, why didn’t you just say so!” Mabel throws her hands up. “We don’t wanna hurt you! Even on accident.”

Dipper coughs. “But—”

“Even on accident, Dipper.” Mabel unsubtly pokes her brother in the ribs.

“But Mabel, you know what we’re losing! You’ll never get Waddles, and I’ll never get Wendy!” Dipper gesticulates wildly. “Do you want Pacifica to eat Waddles?!”

“Dipper,” Jon says, shocked. Mabel’s eyes well with tears.

Dipper, to his credit, seems to realize that was overkill. “Ack, sorry, Mabel, I didn’t mean it—“

“It’s—okay,” Mabel says. “It’s fine. I’ll—just get another pig—” With that, she turns away, brushing her eyes with her sweater sleeve.

Jon sighs. Okay, he knows how to solve this one, at least. “Mabel, wait.” Mabel turns around, eyes shiny. “I have a solution.”

“What?”

“Mabel,” Jon says seriously, looking deep into Mabel’s red-rimmed eyes, “We can just steal the pig from that other girl.”

“Pacifica,” Mabel whimpers. “But her parents have a mansion.”

“If there is one thing I know about your great uncle, it’s that he likes to commit felonies.” Jon gives Mabel a weak reassuring smile. “And breaking into a mansion is certainly that.”

Mabel wipes her nose with her sleeve. “You really think so?”

“I Know so.”

“But—but what about me?” Dipper waves his hands. “Wendy can’t hang out with Robbie all summer!”

Admittedly Jon doesn’t have an easy answer to that one. “Well, er—isn’t Wendy a little too old for you?” Jon asks, wetting his lips. This is so not his area, and the headache isn’t helping with cognition.

“Don’t discount true love!” Mabel cries, pointing a finger at the sky. “Or tweenage boy crushes!” She turns to Dipper, the only record of her previous anguish the slight red tinge to her eyes and cheeks. “Don’t worry, Dip-dop, I’ll sic Waddles on him,” Mabel promises, “and we can sneak into his house and shrink all his stupid tight pants!”

“Mabel,” Dipper says seriously, “that’s a great idea.”

“Well that sounds like all loose ends tied up!” Jon clasps his hands together. “Except for all the ones that weren’t.” As if in response, his left temple twinges.

“Thanks, Jon,” Mabel says, beaming up at him, “you really are a cool eyeball monster from space.”

Hah. Jon actually does smile at that. Despite everything, it’s a sweet thing to say.

“YOU GUYS!”

Of course, it can’t last.

Jon bturns around to that pasty man as he points an accusatory finger at him. There’s another nickel for him, at least. The man shoulders into him, sending Jon stumbling back. Dipper and Mabel brace him, and despite the touch Jon can’t help his gratitude. “Do you have any idea what you all have done!”

“Uh,” Dipper says, “time traveled?”

“With my belt! Do you have any idea how many Time Violation’s you’ve broken?! The Temporal Prime Directive?! Come on guys!” The man’s voice cracks with anger, and Jon manevuers the children behind him. The man is an open gash in spacetime, but if Jon focuses, he’s sure he can find his name—

Yes. Blendin Blandin. Mother Belinda Blandin, keeps a pet deep-space jellyfish. Swore the Blood Pact to the Time Baby at a young age. Jon looks at this twenty-seven -ear-old man and he Knows him. His head is pounding. He channels this, pours that pain into his eyes, his arms, his teeth. He opens his mouth to speak. The wind picks up, slightly.

Jon’s efforts are , of course, immediately and utterly put to waste by the arrival of two men built like brutalist buidings appearing in a sudden burst of blue light.

Okay. Whatever. Fine.

Jon squints his eyes to look at the men—but If Blendin Blandin hurt to look at, these men are downright impossible. Jon stares at the ground and Knows the chemical composition of the soil.

“Oh my god??”

“Who are you guys?!”

The twins’s questions go ignored, however—the men are entirely focused on Blendin Blandin, who demonstrably shrinks under their gaze.

“Blendin Blandin, you are hereby charged for Time Crimes against the Continuum,” one of them says. Jon cannot discern which.

Blendin lets out an affronted gasp. “Me?!” He gestures to Jon wildly. “What about this guy? He has the tape! And too many eyes for this dimension!”

“It’s your Time Tape,” one of the men says, clearly irritated. “Your responsibility.”

“I—I apologize,” Jon says, throat unsticking, heart pulsing in his ears. He raises his hands above his head. Just in case. “I’d like to take full responsibility for the actions of the children.”

“Unnecessary,” the other man says. “Temporal Regulations state it is the responsibility of the owner of the Time Tape to monitor its use. You,” he says to Blendin, “are a very poor time agent.”

“But…” Jon shouldn’t say this. Still, the words leave him without his say-so. “I am an intruder here. He wasn’t wrong about that.”

“Jon,” Dipper hisses, pulling at his shirt, “what are you doing?!”

“We’re not going to let you take him to space prison!” Mabel cries, stepping in front of Jon. Dipper joins a second later.

“Yeah! He works here and everything!”

“If you gave us some cardstock, black markers, and about an hour we could even find his work visa!”

“Mabel, oh my god.”

The police officer hardly looks at the twins. He glances at his partner, then back at Jon with that same impassive look. Jon thinks he is going to explode. ““You are irregular,” one says, in a voice like nails, “but not uncommon. Debris is bound to get throug the cracks. It’s not our jurisdiction.”

“So…” Jon lowers his hands tentatively, “you’re not going to put me in space-time prison.” What a sentence. Jon can hardly believe it’s leaving his mouth.

“Jon, stop talking about time prison!” Dipper tugs at Jon’s shirt even harder, so Jon feels the collar pressing at the back of his neck.

“We will be watching you,” the other officer interjects.

“O-of course,” Jon swallows. “Quite.”

One of the officers grips Blendin’s shoulder who wriggles out of the grip. “But don’t you see, he’s the one that caused this mess! Him, and those two ringleaders!” He points wildly at Dipper and Mabel, who both widen their eyes to, Jon realizes, look as innocent as possible.

The blond officer fixes Blendin with a look. One of them grabs his arms to handcuff him in holographic lights that Jon has to look away from. “Those are children, Blandin.”

“EVIL CHILDREN!” Blendin shrieks.

Jon looks at Dipper and Mabel, who both shrug. He turns back to the officer and stammers, “thank you. I think.” He looks askance. Their voices ring in his ears.

And just like that, they’ve disappeared in a twin flash of blue light to the one they entered in.

For a moment, the world is quiet, save for the low chatter of fairgoers. Then, as if a breath was exhales, motion returns to the world.

“Oh thank the lord they’re gone,” Jon breathes. He lowers himself to the ground, hands curled in the grass. His headache is gone. His headache is gone! Jon could cry. This migraine really was one for the history books. Damn addictive substances, he thinks, somewhat dazedly, the absence of pain is better than any drug. He mentally rummages around his brain, poking gingerly at the memories from earlier. The memory of pain is there, but Jon has many memories of pain.

Oh.

Oh, Jon remembers.

“Oh, my God, Jon, you can’t ask time cops about going to time prison!” Dipper puts his head in his hands. “What if they said yes?!”

“Yeah, that wasn’t a great move,” Mabel agrees. “But I know how you can make it up to us!”

“Yeah…” Dipper looks at Mabel, then to Jon with just a hint of guilt. “...Not telling Grunkle Stan about this!”

“Yay!” Mabel procures glitter from her sleeves, and Jon finds himself showered in pink sparkles. He blinks through them, to the yellow triangle at the edge of his vision. At the contraption in the basement of the Mystery Shack. Of the question he must now ask.

Of Martin’s face in the cold of snow.

“Perhaps not,” Jon agrees from somewhere far away. As they walk to the Shack together to grab Stan, Dipper and Mabel chat amongst themselves, something about mansions and pigs and appropriate heist music. Jon doesn’t listen. He can’t.

He knows what he has to do.

.

Later, much later, after the fairgoers have left and Dipper and Mabel have easily talked Stan into breaking into a rich person’s mansion, Jon finds himself alone with Stan once again. Jon is taking inventory, and Stan is 'supervising'. Which is a nice way of saying 'watching Jon out of the corner of his eye as he reads 'Gold Chains for Men Monthly'.

“What is it, Eyeball?” Stan looks over at Jon, who’s stilled in his work. “Don’t think you’re squeezin ’ a raise outta me for one day’s labor.”

“No, no, that’s—” Jon sighs. “No, that’s not it.” He wets his lips. Now or never. “I have something I need to talk to you about.”

“Well? Speak up, my hearing ain’t what it used to be.” He sticks his finger in his ear. He’s in a good mood, Jon realizes, taking in the looser movements and glinting eyes. Jon’s going to ruin that. Jon ruins many things.

“No,” Jon wets his lips, “I think you’ll want to sit down for this one.”

Stan squints at Jon but acquieses, taking a seat in the gaudy throne technically meant for the invisible man. “You’re not dying, are you? I swear, if you die right after those kids imprinted on you—”

“No, no. Well, not actively.”

“Well? Spill the beans! I’m not getting’ any younger.”

Here it goes. “I know about the thing in your basement,” Jon says in a rush.

There is no in-between. Jon sees Stan process the information, the moment it clicks—and then Stan unflinching expression is all Jon can see. He slams Jon against the wall, hand gripping the collar of the shirt Jon is borrowing from Soos, and Jon’s head is suddenly full of the other times Stan Pines has threatened someone like this. The dull fear here is familiar, a blooming in his chest Jon knows well. “You better start explainin’ right now, buddy—”

“Wait! Wait. Please. I know about the thing in your basement. Yes. But I’m not trying to, to threaten you, or extort you—”

“Then what the hell are you playin’ at, Eyeball?”

Jon stops. Takes a breath. This is it. That thing, the truth he couldn’t quite remember, the twisting nag in the back of his mind. He’d dreamt last night. Of that he is certain. And now he knows exactly what about. “I can help you with it.”

.

“Okay,” Jon says, barely a whisper. “Okay. For Martin.”

He can’t help the flinch as he brings his scarred hand to the triangle’s, nor the tremble as his hand engulfs it, cold and hot in equal measure. Bill Cipher does not care if the flame brings sickness clawing up Jon’s throat.

Either way, his fate is set.