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“You’re not supposed to give them your name,” The girl says. She sounds disgusted, and her lip is curled and her eyes so disdainful that Wendy involuntarily cringes.
She decides she fucking adores the brat when the thing under the girl’s feet twitches, and she snaps the blades of her scissors shut with a sharp flick of her fingers. Stuffing trails after the thing’s decapitated head, yarn hair and gleaming button-eyes flashing in the moonlight.
“That’s not a fairy.” Dipper’s voice is pretty steady for a dude who almost got killed by somebody’s arts-and-craft project from hell, she thinks.
“Maybe not one of yours.” The girl mutters, and then hops off the corpse.
Wendy nudges it with her foot, and more stuffing pools out of the thing’s neck.
“Nice job, kid.” The decapitation had been clean, masterful. Would’ve been cooler with an axe, but the girl has a whole theme going and the scissors kind of fit really well, so, Wendy’ll give her the benefit of the doubt.
“Next time, just get a lighter or something. She’s old-fashioned – these things’ll go up like tinder.”
Mabel shoves past Wendy’s shoulder to lean uncomfortably close to the girl. The girl, to her credit, just leans back on her heels slightly at the intrusion.
“Hi! I’m Mabel! That’s my brother Dipper, and this is our friend Wendy! Do you do this stuff a lot?”
“…You – what’d I just say about names?”
X
Her name’s Coraline. She’s got navy hair and a necklace of buttons of all shapes-and-sizes, and wears a yellow raincoat that comes down to her ankles. She wields a giant pair of delicate, ornate silver scissors, and remains so entirely unimpressed with Gravity Falls that Dipper about gives himself an aneurism.
“I kind of got – adopted. I guess.” She says, when Wendy asks how she got involved in the weird. She sounds as resigned in that moment as the twins do when Bill pops in for his summerly plot. In much the same way that they’ve acclimated to Gravity Fall’s dangers, she’s apparently acclimated to her own.
“She doesn’t like sharing custody. And she gets lonely.”
“That’s the worst.” Mabel groans, and Coraline, for the first time, almost smiles.
“So if you don’t have real faeries, what’s the deal here?” Coraline asks, and Wendy laughs herself breathless at the look of pure affront they get the first time Dipper says dream demon.
X
The buttons, they learn a little hysterically, are eyes.
“Just trophies. She can’t remake them without their eyes.” Coraline says with a shrug. It’s near evening now, and the trees are blinking slowly in the late summer heat at them as they sit on the Mystery Shack’s porch.
“But – “
“’Eyes are the window to the soul’,” she quotes, and Dipper makes a sound like a dying whale.
“How’s she get the buttons, though?” Mabel demands, and Wendy reaches over and slaps a hand over Coraline’s mouth before she can answer.
“Do not go giving nothing here ideas!”
X
It’s dark out when the roar of an engine splits the night’s chattering. A wiry kid pulls up on a battered, smoking death trap of a bike, and shouts Coraline’s name with unadulterated glee. He waves so enthusiastically that he nearly tips the whole bike over.
“That’s my ride.” Coraline deadpans.
“Nice.” Wendy says appreciatively, because the whole thing is clearly hand-made.
Mabel stuffs a wad of paper and glittery pink ink into Coraline’s pocket – to keep in touch. Wendy holds out her fist, and after a brief moment, Coraline bumps her back.
Wendy doesn’t think Coraline would reach out to them, but her friend is so delighted by the offer that she just knows they’ll be getting a call sooner or later.
“We don’t meet too many other...people like us.” Dipper explains awkwardly. Coraline nods slowly, and looks a little amused at that. Her friend throws an arm around her shoulders and beams.
X
She and the twins and the trees watch until even the roar of the bike has faded.