Work Text:
So, here’s the thing:
Grunkle Stan is not stupid, nor is he oblivious to what’s happening in Gravity Falls. Sure, he plays ignorant but he’s trying his best to keep all the supernatural away from himself as well as from the kids. He knows what happened to the last person who got too obsessed with finding out the secrets of this cursed town. He’d be damned if he let anything happen to Dipper and Mabel.
But he also knows he’s not a good caretaker at the end of the day. He lets them walk around the town and forest unattended even though they’re just twelve years old. Sometimes he contemplates whether or not he should pay more attention to them, but then he remembers that he and Ford used to play around all day long back in his days without any of their parents looking after them. And they turned out fine… For the most part at least. And anyway, he doesn’t want to coddle them. They need to learn how to take care of themselves, how to fight their own fights.
But now that he looks back at them, sitting in the Stanley Mobile, with Dipper fast asleep and leaning on Mabel’s shoulder, while his sister is looking at some paper with a frown on her normally cheerful face, he’s not so sure anymore.
They fought again today. That’s nothing new of course. They seem to fight often about little things. He thinks of Ford’s creepy room with that old, dusty carpet and how they both wanted to move into it. So, he gave them those stupid chores and hoped they’d grow bored of them. Maybe realize that it’s not really worth all the trouble and that they rather make up and go back to sleeping in the attic.
Mabel seemed to have forgotten about the whole ordeal once her friends came along, content to stay with them in their room, while Dipper still tried to win over his favor. He gave the key to the boy, because he seemed to need the distance more than his sister and still, in the end he moved back upstairs.
But this isn’t anything like back then. Now, that he’s looking Dipper over through the mirror he can see bruises and cuts all over his face. He’s cradling his left arm close to himself and overall seems like he’s in pain even while asleep. Mabel’s hair is all tousled up and she has her fair share of bruises as well. And even though he saw them make up on stage, she’s still upset about something.
“Whatcha got there, sweetie?” he asks casually and turns on the radio to some classical music.
“Oh, it’s nothing, Grunkle Stan,” she tells him and shoves the paper into some pocket, “must be one of my notes from the play. It was a lot of work after all.” Now she leans back as well in her seat, trying not to disturb her brother while doing so.
Obviously, she doesn’t want to talk about it, and he’s not going to press on it either. He knows they’ll come to him if it’s anything serious, and if not then he can always find out on his own.
So, he waits until they arrive home and Mabel helps Dipper get out of the car, who’s still half asleep and leaning on her while she guides him inside. It’s a hassle to get him up the stairs and halfway through, Stanley relents and shoos Mabel aside, before picking the boy up and half dragging, half carrying him into his room. There, he pulls Dipper’s shoes off and loosens the tie around his neck before tucking him in.
Mabel is still standing in the doorway by the time he’s done and staring at them with worried eyes, it almost looks like she wants to cry, but in the end, she walks up to her own bed and lays down without saying a word.
“You two should get some sleep, looks like you need it,” he tells her and tucks her in as well.
“Grunkle Stan, do you-…” she starts but then falls silent while he’s waiting for her to continue. He can see the conflict in her eyes, whatever it is about and the moment she decides against whatever she wanted to ask him. “Never mind, I’m just tired. Goodnight, Grunkle Stan,” she tells him and tries to smile but it doesn’t reach her eyes.
“Good night, Mabel,” he tells her and is about to turn around, but he can’t just leave her like that, all sad and upset. He thinks about it for half a second, realizes it won’t hurt anyone, least of all him and leans down to kiss her on the forehead. “Just get some rest. Tomorrow you will feel all better, trust me.”
Her eyes light up at that and before he can get up again, she slings her arms around his neck, pulls him down into a hug and kisses him back on the cheek. “Thank you,” is all she says, then settles back in her bed and he can see her eyes shining with unshed tears.
They can talk about it tomorrow, Stanley tells himself, as he smiles back at her one last time and closes the door after leaving. Then he walks all the way downstairs to the basement, where he sits down at the chair that he has sat on for the last 30 years as he worked on bringing his brother back.
For a moment he just leans back and stares ahead at the portal that shines a bright blue light ever since he activated it. But tonight, he won’t be working on it. Tonight, he pulls out his camera and rewatches the video he took of Mabel’s puppet show, or sock opera, as she called it.
He had started filming the beginning of it but grew tired after a few minutes of holding the camera. That whole thing was almost three hours long and he didn’t have the patience to sit through it all, no matter how excited Mabel had been about it. It wasn’t until the kids came crashing down and fighting that his interest had been awoken.
When it happened on the stage, he was half convinced it was part of the act. From what he remembers, Dipper was supposed to come down at some point and do whatever Mabel had planned for her opera. It all became a big mess then, with Dipper yelling something at her all dramatically and then Mabel tickling him and then both chasing each other around the stage. In the end, Dipper fell to the ground, played dead and then rose up triumphantly to end it all with the fireworks. Truth be told, he had no idea what the story was about, but if he was being honest, he had been lost from the beginning when it came to Mabel’s visions.
Looking back at it on the camera, he has the chance to replay that part over and over again. First Mabel whacks him over the head with the book, and he realizes that it’s not just playful banter, it was meant to hurt. He replays it again and tries to strain his ears to hear what they are talking about over the noise from the audience.
“…my brother’s body…!”
He thinks he hears her yell, before she hits him and then runs away. Dipper gets up and yells something back about no weaknesses and tackles her. He looks mad, in more than one way as she tickles him, starts screaming and seizing on the ground. There’s a moment where he’s facing the audience and Stanley’s heart almost stops when he gets a better look at Dipper’s eyes. They’re not brown, like they should be. They seem to glow a faint yellow.
He connects the camera to one of the many monitors before him, replays the video again, zooms in onto Dipper’s face, the way he bares his teeth, his yellow eyes with cat like pupils, sees how unnatural all his gestures seem.
There’s only one thought that’s replaying in his mind.
That’s not Dipper
And then an even worse one that grabs his heart and squeezes hard.
It’s alone with Mabel right now
He has half a mind to run back upstairs, grab his gun and shoot that thing for ever daring to hurt his kids.
He replays the video once again, this time keeping all of his attention onto its eyes. Only after Dipper (Dipper’s body?) (that monster’s body?) falls to the ground and he (it?) wakes up the eyes seem to be normal again. Normal brown. Mabel sets the stage on fire. The kids make up, he still can’t hear what they’re talking about, but it all is back to normal.
Taking a slow, deep breath to calm down again, Stanley pulls out the copied pages from the 3rd journal that he kept in a folder. The weird old printer even copied pages that weren’t in the book, half ripped out or otherwise damaged. He still can’t believe the kid has had it all this time, but at least he has them all three now. That’s all that matters.
He flies over every page to look for clues, maybe Ford wrote something down that could help him. Dipper promised him not to get into trouble with the journal, but Stanley was a fool to ever believe he was telling the truth. He most likely found something in here that piqued his curiosity, got into trouble with some kinda monster. Maybe it was just some sort of curse, he hopes against everything. Just a temporary thing that made him all weird and angry and now it’s broken, and they all can go back to how things were before.
Then he comes to a stop on the page with the bunker and that creature that can change its form, how it got dangerous and took to looking like Ford’s assistant to get closer to the journal. Wasn’t that what the kids where fighting about?
The cold horror returns tenfold as he looks up to the ceiling, where he knows Mabel is sleeping in her bed two stories higher. Did the Creature change its plan to get the journal by brute force and try to act like “Dipper” was normal again to give Mabel a false sense of security? If so, then he needs to find out what it did to the real Dipper, and God have mercy if it already killed him, because Stanley wouldn’t have any left then.
He keeps on reading, hoping to find more possibilities in case it’s not a shapeshifter. For a moment he stops at that page.
MY MUSE WAS A MONSTER
It says with big red letters, and Stanley tells himself it’s red ink, but deep down he knows better.
I WAS A PUPPET
The next page is about a creature called Bill Cipher . Stan has read this all before, of course. But back then he believed Ford had gone off the deep end. Lost his mind, to believe some Illuminati Guy with top hat and bowtie was after him. All following pages read like the ramblings of a man gone mad, and when Stanley remembers the person who almost shot him with a crossbow while shouting something about stealing eyes and being followed, he knows it's true.
A few pages further and he looks back at all too familiar eyes again.
… I swear that all their eyes were GLOWING YELLOW. I SCREAMED, “GET OUT OF MY MIND, CIPHER!” …
Ford wrote down in his paranoid state. Stan took the page and compared the drawing of the yellow-eyed people to a still frame of “Dipper” when he was turned towards the camera. Could it be? Was Dipper possessed by some Illuminati demon?
Bill has proven himself to be one of the friendliest and most trustworthy individuals that I’ve ever encountered…
BILL CAN’T BE TRUSTED
Has he possessed others?
DO NOT SUMMON AT ALL COST!
He’s trying to control me. Trying to write in my journal during the few minutes I’m asleep.
Stanley puts the pages back down on the desk and tries to sort his thoughts. So far there are two possibilities. Either that thing upstairs was a shapeshifter, or Dipper has been possessed by a demon and it somehow left his body after Dipper fell (fainted?) to the ground. Either way, he can’t risk waiting till the morning. He needs to make sure the twins are alright now.
On his way up, he grabs some ropes and his brass knuckles in case it’s not Dipper after all and he’ll need to get physical. Maybe he’ll need to restrain him, make sure he doesn’t hurt himself or others. Get Mabel out of the room first, as far away from danger while he takes care of everything.
He comes up with a fairly good plan by the time he arrives at the twins’ bedroom door, but he stops short when he sees light on the other side. It’s dim, probably just the bedside lamp, but it either means, that Mabel decided to sleep with it on or someone was awake. Slowly, he knocks on the door gently, before entering their room, not waiting for anyone to answer.
Mabel whips around from where she’s sitting at their desk, lamp on and journal laying in front of her. The pen she was holding falls from her hand as she gasps out in surprise to see him there.
“Gr-grunkle Stan? What are you doing here?” she asks and turns fully around while trying to shove the journal further behind her. But it’s too late, he’s already seen it and there’s no way she’ll get to talk her way out of it.
“What are you doing?” he asks and can’t quiet manage to keep the anger out of his voice. “I told you to go to sleep, didn’t I?”
She looks guilty now, her lip starts quivering and her eyes fill with tears before she can stop it. She doesn’t say anything coherent as she sobs into her sleeve, whimpering apologies and promises that it’s not what it looks like.
Stanley looks towards her brother who’s still asleep and none the wiser to what’s going on. But Stanley can’t risk losing time, so he kneels down in front of the girl, holds her small hands gently in his own, bigger ones and asks quietly: “Mabel… You need to tell me what’s going on. Is Dipper… Is your brother back to normal ?” He points at the boy’s sleeping form, not knowing how else to put it.
For a moment Mabel looks deep into his eyes, and the tears stop flowing as understanding passes between them.
“So, you know.”
Is all she says for a long moment, before she finally wipes away the rest of her tears and pulls the journal from behind her to show him what she’s been writing. “Dipper is Dipper again,” she starts telling him, “He was possessed by a dream demon, but we made him go away. He doesn’t really know how to live in a human body. And he can’t go back unless he makes another deal with Dipper.”
Stan recognizes the person she drew as her brother, but his face and eyes look all wrong, mad, dangerous, demonic. It reminds him of what his brother wrote so many years ago.
Then his gaze lands on the other page with the glued in note. He reads it slowly, then again when he understands the meaning behind the words. When he realizes that that monster was going to murder his great-nephew and then try to convince his sister to commit suicide herself. When he realizes that this was the note Mabel found in the car while they were on their way home.
It was the same demon that once took away his brother.
That could have taken both their brothers today
They’re both quiet for a long time, both staring at the journal, deep in thought. In the end, Stanley takes a deep breath again, stands up and puts the journal away. He looks at Dipper one last time – Dipper, who sleeps likes he’s dead and he could have died today. Mabel would’ve gone home without a brother this summer…
“Let him sleep for now,” he tells Mabel as he turns back to her, picks her up and holds her close to his chest. With his free hand he manages to turn off the lamp and he walks out, down the stairs into the living room. “I’ll talk to him tomorrow.”
The tears return again as Mabel grabs onto him and holds him tight. “Are you mad, Grunkle Stan?” she whimpers against his chest, while Stanley strokes her hair and back in hopes of soothing her.
Sighing, he sits down in his armchair and maneuvers Mabel so she can sit in his lap comfortably. “Yes, but not at you two,” he tells her in all earnest. “I’m mad at that demon and I’m mad at myself for not taking better care of you.”
“It’s my fault Dipper made a deal with him,” Mabel whispers after a while once she calmed down again, “because I promised to help him with the laptop, but then I was so busy with the sock opera! All because I wanted to impress some boy who turned out to be a puppet-obsessed weirdo anyway! Ugh, I’m so stupid!” She starts hitting her head, but Stanley quickly grabs her arm and puts it down again.
“Hey, none of that,” he tells her and puts his hand over the spot where she was hitting herself. “None of this is your fault, Mabel. You couldn’t have known that your brother was going to make a deal with that thing.”
“But I knew. He told me that Bill-“ she covers her mouth in shock and looks around them, as if making sure that no one else was in the room with them. “He told me that Bill came to him in a dream and offered to help with the laptop,” she whispers this time, so only he can hear her.
Bill Cipher
So, Ford wasn’t losing it at the end. He really was plagued by a demon, that most likely had possessed him at some point and hurt his body while doing so. No wonder he had been so frightened and paranoid about being followed. God, Sixer. What did you get yourself into?
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
Mabel is quiet again, looking down onto her lap and fidgeting with her hands. He already knows why.
“You thought I would take away the journal.”
“Please don’t!” Mabel yells then and grabs his shoulders. “You know how important it is to Dipper! He’d be so devastated if you took it away. He still hasn’t found out who the Author is.”
“Mabel, sweetheart…” he sighs again and pulls her hands away to hold them between his own. “I know, I’m not the best grunkle, but it’s still my job to take care of you kids. Because that’s what you are at the end of the day. Children. I’m the adult here and I need to make sure you guys are safe and no one is out there to hurt you. How can I trust you with the journal, when you kids don’t trust me enough to tell me, when a literal demon is hurting you? That thing was going to kill Dipper, do you understand that?”
She only manages to nod at that.
“Please, no more secrets. You need to tell me everything that happened, so I can keep you two safe next time you get into trouble. Or God forbid, that demon comes back.” Because he has a feeling it will come back sooner or later. It wasn’t done with Ford and now it decided to target the kids.
And Mabel tells him everything. How they met Bill the first time when he tried to get the code from Stanley’s mind, and they followed to stop him. And later, how they went behind his back to check out the bunker in the woods and ran into the Shapeshifter that tried to kill them. About the old laptop that Soos found and fixed as best as he could, but nonetheless Dipper still had to find the password for it.
Stanley just listens to her rambling on and on, sometimes drifting off topic or getting lost in her own thoughts about the situation. He lets her get everything out of her chest that has been bugging her for the last week, about all the troubles and dangers she got herself and Dipper into. In the end, he just holds her close, letting it dawn onto him how close his kids got to certain death.
Once she’s done and exhausted from her stories, she looks up to him worryingly. “I’m really sorry we lied to you, Grunkle Stan.” Her voice is barely above a whisper, like she’s scared he’ll start yelling and berating her for what they’ve done. But that won’t ever stop them from trying to solve this town’s secrets, now will it? Least of all Dipper. He’s too much like Ford and Stanley knows how hard it was to get his twin to drop something once he had put his mind into it.
“Listen, pumpkin. I know that the journal is important to your brother and that he’s too curious for his own good when it comes to mysteries. But I just can’t let you two do this on your own. I’m confiscating the book and all his notes-…” At this she’s about to open her mouth and protest, but he just shushes her. “I’m taking away his notes, but not forever. I want you guys to tell me where you’re going from now on and who you’re with. If he wants to keep digging in the journal, then he’ll have to come and ask me for permission first. And until he proves that he can use it responsibly, I will keep it to myself, is that clear?”
Mabel is quiet for a long while, clearly torn apart by having to decide between her twin brother and Stanley. At long last she looks down again and mutters a defeated “Yes, Grunkle Stan…”
“I’ll talk to Dipper tomorrow once he feels better.” And to Soos and Wendy as well. Those two are still going to have to answer for lying to him as well and putting the kids in danger. “And if that demon ever tries to contact you somehow, whether in your dreams or by possessing another person, you’re going to tell me immediately.” He finishes off.
He feels Mabel nodding off by that point, clearly too exhausted from everything that has happened today. He carries her upstairs again and puts her down in her bed.
He stops next to the closed door as he leans against the wall, trying to sort his thoughts and plan his next steps.
“I know you can hear me,” he then addresses to the darkness, “I know you’re out there. And I know what you’re planning. If you ever get close to the kids again, I will fucking end you.”
He doesn’t expect an answer, but deep inside his bones he feels the darkness just smiling back at him.
“I’d love to see you try, Fez.”