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There were times Willow wished she was more like her mother. Then, there were times she was glad she wasn’t.
Take Mabel’s childhood, for example. Albeit the first twelve years of life being moderately normal, everything after the Transcendence involved taking care of a demon twin brother and battling supernatural evil-doers.
Willow and her siblings enjoyed listening to their mother’s stories of when she was little like them. Time travelling with Uncle Dipper? The origin of Mabel’s beloved pet was one of Willow’s favourites. The tale of the mini-golf tournament against Northwest gone wrong was told when Pacifica had come over for dinner three months ago. Willow often wondered how many adventures her parents had had, total.
Willow doubted that she knew all of Mabel’s and Dipper’s adventures, but also doubted that her mother was holding them back to ‘protect her’. She was probably keeping them to herself until the right moment arose, or until they were older to fully understand the stories; Mabel didn’t keep secrets.
It was winter and the triplets were ten. Snow on the ground usually meant fewer tourists in Gravity Falls, but business nonetheless. The travellers would generally be coming to or from the skiing mountains nearby, and in the search for a place to rest would stop by the Mystery Shack.
It also happened to be a Saturday, so the three siblings were not only enslaved indoors but in need of a distraction. (Their father didn’t want them playing out in the snow, due to a flu that was going around.)
Hank was reading a comic, lounged across the sofa. Willow, however, knew for a fact that he had already read that particular edition, so he was mainly flipping through the pages aimlessly. Acacia was doing homework on the floor, while Willow watched. She hadn’t been assigned those math work-pages just yet, so she wanted to be sure she knew what was coming for her on Monday. Dipper was probably out doing demon things.
Mabel poked her head in from the gift shop doorway. “You kids doing okay?” she asked. Hank shrugged. Acacia looked up from her work with a jaded expression.
“Just a bit bored,” Willow translated.
Mabel thought for a moment. “Hmm. Hey,” she began, “you think you could help me out with something?”
Acacia sat up on her knees and nodded devotedly. “Yes. Whatever you need, Mom,” she said, eager for an excuse to pause her homework.
“Yeah, if you guys could organize the attic for me, it would be fantastic. The Shack closes in twenty minutes, so I’ll be up with you then.”
“Sure thing!” Acacia called as Mabel disappeared with a smile. The eldest triplet jumped to her feet. “Come on, you heard Mom. We have an attic to clean!”
Hank and Willow exchanged looks, but it wasn’t as if they had anything better to occupy their time with. They followed her up into the attic.
Willow didn’t regularly go up there, so she felt rather neutral about the place. The window reflecting red light was comforting, admittedly, but especially during the winter the place was cold and there wasn’t anything related to comfortable furniture in residence—the place was used as a storage room, mainly, for personal Pines family items.
“How should we organize this?” Hank asked as the triplets gathered around the cluster of boxes.
“…Categories, I guess,” Willow replied. “Clothes, electronics, furniture, and crafts?”
“Sure.” Acacia nodded. “I suppose… two can start by going through the boxes and sorting them into piles, and someone else can organize the piles into boxes.”
That’s what they did. Acacia scavenged for some empty boxes while Hank and Willow began on taking things out and sorting them.
“Hmm… would pictures go in ‘furniture’ or ‘crafts’?” Hank wondered out loud.
“Put them in ‘crafts’!” Acacia called from behind a pile.
Willow sat with her legs crossed on the wooden floor while arranging the contents of her first box in front of her. There were several trinkets, a couple she’d seen before—a yearbook from when Mabel and Dipper were eleven; a pair of earrings she recalled seeing Mom wear when she was younger; pictures of Willow and her siblings when they were babies—and a couple she didn’t—what seemed like a handheld video game that must have been Dad’s; a couple of Mom’s old sweaters; a fancy dream-catcher.
She was near the bottom of the pile when she found an antique-looking video camera with ‘STAN 2012’ labelled on masking tape stuck to the side.
“Whoa, guys!” Willow called, turning over the camera in her hands. “Look at this!”
Hank scooted his way to her. “Do you think it still plays?” he asked, which prompted Acacia to come over as well.
“Huh. Never seen this before.” She took it and looked it over also. “You think Mom knows it exists?”
“We could ask her,” Willow proposed. Acacia and Hank both agreed.
They found their parents shutting down the gift shop for the evening. Mabel was counting the money while Henry invited customers to make final purchases before they closed. “Hello, parents, yes,” Acacia began as they entered. Willow waved the video camera. “We found this in the attic and were wondering if you knew about it.”
Mabel frowned in thought as she took it. You could visibly see it hit her while she was mulling it over. “Oh my God!” she cried out. “Henry, please!”
He came over and she handed it to him. “The kiddos found this in the attic—it’s all of my adventures in Gravity Falls before the Transcendence! Isn’t this wonderful? You think you could find a way to play it?”
Henry thought about it. “Maybe, but I’d need some time. An hour, tops.”
“I’ll help you, Daddy,” Acacia offered almost immediately. Willow suspected her motivation came from some unfinished homework lying on the living room floor.
“We could watch it tonight, and I could get Dipper and Stan to come too,” Mabel started, clearly excited. “This’ll be great! I wonder what’s on there… probably Wax Stan’s funeral, and maybe my Guides… wait, no, I think that was on another camera… it doesn’t matter—” She stopped herself. “Kids, if this works, we’re having pizza tonight. Acacia, go help your father with the tape—Willow, Hank and I will finish up the attic.”
Willow loved her mom.
They summoned Dipper over for three hours so he was able to watch the video with them. They invited Stan, but he already had plans, apparently.
While Mabel and Hank organized the pizza, and Henry and Acacia set up the TV, Willow settled with Dipper on the couch. She remembered that when she was little she would occasionally curl up in his lap for Movie Nights, but now she couldn’t possibly do that (even as the smallest of the siblings). Instead she simply sat beside him with a couple pillows.
“What do you think is on that tape?” she asked him.
Dipper shrugged. “Stuff from before the Transcendence, I would imagine. You’ll probably see a lot of twelve-year-old me running around, embarrassing myself.”
Willow grinned; she’d seen pictures of kid human-Dipper. “This’ll be entertaining,” she decided.
“Got it!” Acacia cheered with her arms pumped in the air. Mabel and Hank appeared with the boxes of pizza, which they laid on the ground. Henry snatched the remote before settling on the couch beside Willow. Mabel sat on one of the chairs while Acacia and Hank made themselves comfortable on the ground, closer to the pizza.
Hank pressed a couple buttons on the remote. “Let’s hope this works…” he said, rewinding the tape to the beginning. The quality of the videos was poor, at least compared to the future’s standards, but Willow found that distracting only for the first thirty seconds before being entirely immersed in the film.
“Okay, future watchers of this video,” began a female voice on the screen. It took Willow a moment, but she came to recognize the voice as the fifteen-year-old version of Aunt Wendy. She turned over to her father, who was already wearing a goofily large smile. “I’m on a top-secret mission to create profiles on the people in my surroundings, which basically means I’m bored at work and am making a documentary with my boss’s stolen camera. Here we go.”
“Oh my God,” Mabel gasped, biting her finger. “Henry, we should have invited your sister over!”
“Here we have the one-and-only, amazing, devilishly-handsome, Soos!” The film cut to Soos unpacking some Mystery Shack T-shirts. He noticed her and waved. “Soos is awesome and wins in all aspects of life. Hi, Soos!
“And on the opposite side of the cool-spectrum, we have Mr. Pines.” There was a clip of Stan at his desk, counting money. It was clear Wendy was now whispering. “Mr. Pines never smiles, unless he’s cutting our pay-checks or dreaming of inappropriate images of women.”
All three adults cracked up at the same time, so they missed out on the following couple seconds, but it was clear that Stan had seen her and was not happy.
“Oh, crud—” you could hear Wendy swear before the video cut to—
“Dipper!” Mabel shouted, sitting upright quickly and fanning her hand towards the screen. “Dipper, it’s us!”
Dipper was laughing. It showed him and Mabel getting off of a bus, both twins completely weighed down with luggage. Willow stared at the screen. You couldn’t tell who was filming. Dipper was wearing a brown, dull, faded hat with a star on the front, and was clearly looking sceptical about their journey. Mom seemed a little more enthusiastic, bouncing on her feet as if high on sugar. They were both obviously a little older than the triplets.
“Welcome to Gravity Falls—!” Stan was heard starting before it cut off.
“This is amazing!” Mabel exclaimed. “How did we not find this camera until now?”
“Mom, Dipper, you guys were so cute!” Acacia shouted. “Seriously!”
Willow rested her shoulder in her uncle’s lap. The entire tape was nearly ninety minutes long, which meant they had a lot to go through.
Sure enough, as Mabel predicted, there was the filming of the funeral of a wax version of Stan. Willow didn’t completely understand that part, but she rolled with it, and it was funny up until the rest of the wax figures came to life and began attacking Mabel and Dipper. At that part she looked up at her uncle with awe and shock, and she noticed the bittersweet nostalgia but amusement in his eyes.
“No way,” Acacia said with pizza in her mouth. “Did the wax people just attack you guys?”
“That’s the paranormal, Acacia,” Mabel replied.
The next videos were mixes of supernatural adventures and ordinary, random clips in Gravity Falls. There was a prank Dipper and Wendy pulled on Stan (gluing a ten-dollar bill to the ground), and a video of Stan doing some silly song/dance in an orange neon outfit, as well as a clip where Mabel gave a lesson on how to be Dipper (filmed by a hysterical Wendy). Waddles also made various appearances. Then there were videos of Mabel gushing over five blond clones she was obviously hiding in her bedroom, which Willow expected to bring a reaction out of her father—but he just laughed along without a bother.
Of the group, it was clear Dipper and Mabel were the ones enjoying themselves the most. Willow, while time went on, came to conclude that this was because they were the ones that the past hurt the most. This changed her perspective, and numbed her laugher a bit.
“Remember those Guides we made, Dipper?” Mabel brought up at one point. “I still might have those, but on a different camera.”
“Oh, please don’t show them to these guys,” Dipper replied, gesturing the triplets and Henry.
“What! Why not? They’re amazing!”
“They’re embarrassing.”
“…I’m getting more pizza!” Mabel announced loudly instead of replying, sauntering off into the kitchen while giving Dipper a playfully-evil look, accompanied with a maniac laughter.
“Mabel!” he shouted and went after her.
Willow extended across the couch freely, resting her head against her father’s shoulder. On the screen there was a puppet show going on, apparently. “Here we are, at Mabel’s puppet show,” Stan narrated neutrally. “Waiting for it to begin.”
“Mr. Pines, come on, you can do better than that,” Wendy commented, and the camera swung to the right to face her and Soos. She cleared her throat. “Here Stan is with the gorgeous Wendy Corduroy and amazing Soos Ramirez, about to witness the most spectacular puppet show to have ever hit Gravity Falls! There, that’s how you do an introduction, boss—”
The clip cut to the puppet show. A minute into it, Willow noticed a huge smile on her face. It was so adorable and sweet, and so totally Mom. (However, this Gabe character she didn’t really like.) The triplets and Henry had a riot listening to the beginning song, but apparently Stan got lazy at filming and skipped several scenes, so they hardly got to see the show.
“I remember this,” their father noticed. “Wendy had gone to help out with the show, but I didn’t go, unfortunately. It looks like it had been amazing.”
“Sock puppets, huh,” Acacia commented. “I wonder how Mom managed to convince the theatre to let her use their stage for this.”
“By paying, probably,” Willow responded as if it were obvious, which it totally was.
“Please,” her sister snorted, “do you even know who Stan is? If any money was placed into this production it would have had to come from his pocket, and he never spends what’s in his wallet.”
“Oh, I don’t know,” their father replied. “This Gabe is a real person—your mother mentioned him to me, and I remember seeing some of his posters around town years ago. Love can make people—”
There was a sudden loud crash from the screen, not unlike a rush of static, which made all four people in the group jump.
“Get out of my brother’s body—!” Mabel shouted on the television. The camera zoomed in on Mabel and Dipper, fighting on the stage over the ruined props.
Henry shot upright, pushing Willow off him gently but pressingly. Willow turned to find the reason, and saw a scared confusion on his face. “Mabel,” he called into the other room urgently, “what’s this?”
“Mom?” Acacia gasped.
Dipper was dressed as a priest, his face a torn expression of hatred and malevolence. His eyes flickered a yellow as deep as crimson, and he sneered as if he weren’t human. Whenever he shouted threats at Mabel—what the heck?—his speech sounded different too, as if someone else was using his voice.
“Dipper wasn’t a demon by this!” Hank exclaimed in alarm. “Why is he a demon? Why is he attacking Mom?”
Mabel and Dipper reappeared from the kitchen, wearing confused and worried expressions. Mabel took one look at the television screen before freezing. “Oh my God,” she spoke. “Grunkle Stan had that filmed?”
“What?! What’s wrong?!” Acacia shouted more forcefully.
“Oh my God!” Willow screamed as on the screen, Dipper appeared to fall down, dead. The video skipped, and all you could see were explosions and people shouting in alarm. Suddenly the frequency became so loud all you could hear was static. Henry reached for the remote and paused the film.
There was a heavy silence.
“Mom?” Willow dared to begin, unable to take her hands away from her mouth. “Dipper?”
Acacia cried, “What the bleeding hell—!”
“Language, Acacia!” Mabel chided sharply.
“…What was that?” Hank asked in a small, shocked voice. “Why was Uncle Dipper attacking you? Just… what—?”
“That,” Dipper began, wincing and easing into a chair, “would be the time Bill Cipher possessed my body for the first time. Come on, I think we have a story to tell.”