Work Text:
The sun was shining, the birds were chirping, the morning dew was rapidly vanishing from the grass, and Gilbert was hoping that today’s “fun family adventure”, as Oz had called it when he woke the boys up at the ass-crack of dawn that morning, didn’t end up with anyone in a jail cell.
It said a lot, he thought, about his summer guardians that the last time they’d had him and Vincent do a “fun family adventure” it had ended with Alice and Vincent mocking his counterfeiting skills and then all four of them spending the night in a cold jail cell until one of Oz’s friends bailed them out. Today, they were being bundled into Alice’s car with blindfolds on, Alice and Oz singing sea shanties at the top of their lungs as the car swerved down the road.
“Can you please focus less on singing and more on driving?” Gilbert begged. “I think I’m going to be carsick…”
“The window is down,” Alice said unrepentantly. “And if you get any vomit on my car, you’re the one who’s going to be cleaning it.”
Gilbert, who did not want to be stuck cleaning vomit out of Alice’s car, leaned over and stuck his head directly out the window, just in case; from the front seat, he heard Oz laugh.
“Do you have blindfolds on?” asked Vincent.
“No, but with how much Alice is looking away from the road, she might as well!” Oz called back cheerfully. “Shit—Alice—guardrail—”
Alice swore profusely, and Gilbert and Vincent tumbled against each other in the backseat as the car swerved wildly and there were several horrific crunching sounds.
“We’re okay,” Alice said, as though she would personally fight anyone who dared insinuate that they weren’t, and they drove on, the engine making several different unsettling noises.
They made it to their destination safely, though, and when the boys stumbled out of the car on shaky legs and pulled off the blindfolds, they found themselves at the lakeside. There were several families there, laughing and playing happily.
“Surprise!” Oz said cheerfully. “We’re gonna have a fun family day fishing here at the lake!”
“I would rather die, ” said Vincent disdainfully.
Alice scoffed, already walking away. “Sorry, Oz,” she said. “I’m here to fake some pictures of the lake monster to sell to tourists.”
“Ah,” Oz said, smiling awkwardly. “How about you, Gil?”
“I can’t believe it,” Vincent muttered in Gilbert’s ear. “Oz actually wants to bond with us. He wants to go fishing!”
With us, Gilbert thought, he wants to spend time with us, that’s new, but he said, “I’m sticking with Vincent,” anyway. Vincent was, after all, Gilbert’s family; Oz and Alice were not.
“Well…if you change your mind, I’ll be over here…fishing,” Oz said. The four of them stared at each other awkwardly before Alice turned on her heel to go rent a motorboat and Gilbert and Vincent wandered off towards the concessions stand in the hopes of buying or stealing snacks.
After they’d gotten some chips, a flyer caught Gilbert’s eye. It was brightly colored, and was advertising a cash prize for the best picture of a monster.
“What are you looking at?” Vincent asked, wandering over.
“There’s a competition for photos of monsters,” Gilbert said. “I was just thinking—if we’d gotten a picture of that gnome thing…”
“We’d be rich ,” Vincent finished. “We wouldn’t have to work in Alice’s gift shop anymore!”
“We could buy whatever we wanted!”
The brothers looked at each other with shining eyes, and Vincent quickly snatched the picture from the wall. “Alice is out faking lake monster photos,” he said quickly. “What if we stole—”
Oz screamed.
The brothers knew it was Oz because he was the one scrambling up the lakebed as though something had attacked him, eyes wide and face pale, and he was yelling his head off about having seen a monster—a real, live, actual one, apparently, named the Gobblewonker, with metallic scales and a long neck and massive teeth. Most people were laughing at him, and Vincent seemed to take great delight at pointing and laughing as well, though Gilbert felt a twinge of guilt: Oz seemed, after all, legitimately terrified as he scrambled up the beach, but neither Gilbert nor Vincent did anything as Oz was banned from the lake for the day, and, indeed, Oz didn’t seem to mind too much, dropping his frightened expression as soon as everyone was turned the other way and heading back to the car with a sigh. Gilbert and Vincent watched him go—Vincent still pointing and laughing—before Vincent whirled to face Gilbert with a smirk.
“Oz wasn’t lying,” he said.
“What?” Gilbert blinked. “But…I mean, wasn’t he just doing that so that people would believe Alice really got monster pictures? That’s what it looked like to me.”
Vincent smirked. “Yeah, that’s what it looked like, but didn’t you see what happened to Oz’s boat? It was a little bit before he started screaming, right after you found the flyer. Something pitched it over—something big—and it threw Oz onto the shore. Then he started screaming and everything.”
“...A real monster in the lake,” Gilbert breathed. “Vince, if we got a picture of it…”
“We’d be rich,” Vincent finished. “We need to go steal Alice’s camera!”
“We need to convince Alice to let us go with her!” Gilbert said at the same time.
The brothers stared at each other for a moment.
“...Let’s do your idea first, and then steal her camera and sneak off to get the picture,” Vincent said.
“Alright.” Gilbert grinned at his brother, who grinned back, and they hurried off towards Alice and the docks, hoping she hadn’t cast off yet.
As it turned out, Alice had not; she was instead halfway through beating up one of the men who had kicked Oz out, and it was ridiculously easy for Gilbert and Vincent to sneak onto her boat and wait until she’d finished beating every one of them, though, interestingly enough, she didn’t insist they allow Oz back in. Alice, in fact, didn’t even consider it; she’d been banned for life from most places, and so didn’t see the problem with Oz being banned from places for only a day. She knew better than anyone that something as little as a ban couldn’t stop her Oz from doing whatever he pleased, and so all she really needed to do was teach the assholes a lesson.
She was slightly less enthused about the kids on her boat—Oz had been the one who had wanted to take the children for the summer, and even that had been mainly to mess with the couple who’d moved into town for the summer, boasting a broken time machine that they’d been insistent Oz fix and fighting with him over literature, dragging his precious attention away from Alice and away from the project she’d enlisted him to help her with, all those years ago.
But, whatever. Oz had wanted to come to the lake today, for whatever reason, so Alice might as well take the boys so that Oz didn’t have to handle them himself.
Besides, there was…something about them both, something that rubbed at Alice strangely. She couldn’t quite put her finger on it, and she wasn’t given to introspection, so she didn’t really try to put her finger on it, but…she couldn’t honestly say she minded bringing them along.
Whatever. More people to fake getting monster pictures with!
Alice revved up the boat, letting it roar out onto the lake with abandon. It was odd, she thought as Gilbert and Vincent began to examine her collection of cameras, that Oz had suggested going to the lake as a “family fun day”. He had to have another motive—Oz always did—but it hadn’t been fake pictures, apparently, and there was no way it had anything to do with the boys, since if that was the case Alice wouldn’t have been enticed along—
But that was the problem, wasn’t it? Alice never knew what Oz wanted ! He’d always been like this, always—planning his own things, bringing Alice in when he thought she'd have fun and keeping her out when he thought she’d prefer ignorance, always by her side and yet somehow far away. It had gotten even worse after they’d been separated—beforehand, he’d been prone to bursts of melancholy, but he could usually be relied upon to include Alice in his schemes. But after their reunion…
It was like Alice was a stranger to him, and she hated it. It had been years and years of this, and nothing at all had changed, so: Oz wanted to take in a pair of kids for the summer? He got them. Oz wanted to go to the lake with Alice and said kids? They went, and Alice made damn sure she and the boys stayed out of Oz’s way. She didn’t know what he was planning—didn’t know why he was doing this under the guise of a family fun day, since the boys certainly weren’t part of Alice’s family, and Oz seemed to no longer know or care that he and Alice were family, which sucked major fucking ass, but, honestly, Alice was used to it at this point, and Alyss had warned her of as much back when she’d been summoned to Gravity Falls.
“It’s not fair, Raven,” Alice muttered to herself, sprawled over the steering wheel. “Alyss broke him…she broke our Oz, and I can’t put him back together again…”
But there wasn’t a bird in sight, let alone Raven himself, who other than the name had been about as far from a bird as it was possible to get, so Alice shoved away her squishy feelings into a box and pushed herself up and yanked the boat towards the island in the center of the lake.
Alice had never been to this island before, despite the longstanding rumors of its monster. After all, her sister would never have put in all the effort to hide anything here, and if she’d studied the lake it certainly hadn’t made its way into Journal One.
But Alice was running out of ideas, which was why she was heading here and about to fake an exhibit on lake monsters in hopes of finding another journal, but her searching would probably be hopelessly hindered by the pair of children pretending to have stowed away in her boat.
Whatever. Whatever! Fuck this! Oz had better be having a good time doing whatever it was he came here to do, because Alice certainly fucking wasn’t! She almost wished she’d called his bluff on the “family day” thing!
Alice turned away from the wheel—they were in the middle of the lake, they’d probably be fine—and ignored the voice in her head saying stupid rabbit, you’re going to hit something and capicize and die! as she strode purposefully over to the boys and snatched a camera out of Gilbert’s hands.
“Rule one,” she said, putting her free hand on her hip, “we don’t lose the cameras. You can’t fake photos of monsters if you don’t have cameras to take the fakes with, after all.”
“Vince and I are going to get a picture of a real lake monster,” said Gilbert.
Alice snorted. “Good fucking luck with that,” she said, because Oz wasn’t around to scold her for swearing in front of children. Gilbert’s face went very red, and Vincent snickered.
“You said a bad word!” Gilbert said in shock.
“Hell fucking yeah I did, if you’re monster hunting you’d better get used to it,” said Alice, whose most formative childhood experience had involved being carted around by a bounty hunter who regularly swore (though he blushed every time) and who had killed someone in front of her within five minutes of their first meeting. Though Alice had forgotten that experience for a very long time, she was still sure that it had shaped her very being in a way that could never be undone, even by a child’s fickle memory. “Right, you think there’s a real lake monster to get pictures of?”
“Yeah!” said Gilbert. “We saw—”
He was cut off by a swift kick to the leg from his younger brother. Alice raised her eyebrows, but didn’t question it—the boys were, after all, entitled to their secrets.
“Alright,” Alice said, deciding to humor the boys. “Let’s hunt this very real lake monster. Where do you want to st—”
It was at this point that the boat hit the island in the middle of the lake and began to capsize.
Gilbert and Vincent practiced the new swear words Alice had just taught them, as Alice grabbed for as many cameras as she could, though by the time all of them were standing, wet, dripping, and unhappy, on the island in the center of the lake, nearly all of them had been ruined.
“Good thing I brought extras!” Alice said triumphantly as fog swirled around them. “Now, kneel to my glory—”
Something growled out of sight; Gilbert yelped.
“—you peons!”
“It’s the lake monster!” Gilbert cried as Vincent lunged forward with a camera—
—only to illuminate with the cameras flash a pair of beavers writhing in tandem on the ground—not fighting, but, Alice noted with a sadistic glee that came only from forever traumatizing children, doing another activity that began with an ‘f’—as, a few feet away, another beaver gnawed on a rusty chainsaw that was buzzing on and off, making the very same growling sound that had so frightened Gilbert.
Alice laughed at the boys and the beavers enough that she completely forgot to educate the boys on what the beavers had been doing, and Vincent sighed.
“Maybe he wasn’t attacked by the lake monster at all…”
“But you saw it, Vince,” Gilbert reminded him. “You wouldn’t lie to me. Right?”
There was an undercurrent of danger in the twelve-year-old’s voice; Alice, who had been privy to sibling disputes both normal and dangerous, raised her eyebrows high.
“Wow, you’re really giving up on the first setback?” she snorted. “God. Kids these days…”
“We aren’t giving up!” Gilbert said, immediately rising to the bait and hurrying towards the water, camera at the ready. He clambered over some rocks, camera out—
—and shrieked and tumbled into the water as one of the rocks moved out from under him. Gilbert floundered in the shallow water as something huge growled over him, and Vincent slipped his way into the muddy water to try and get to his brother, and Alice grabbed both boys, holding one under each arm, and bolted, hoping they felt as secure in her grasp as she always had when Raven would hold her like this. As a child, Alice had lived to disappoint him, but now, a woman shoving her way through decades, running an unwilling marathon away from her girlhood, she hoped that Raven would be proud of her, though surely if they were ever to meet again he wouldn’t even recognize the woman she’d become.
Alice continued running, one of the boys in her grip screaming his little head off, the other twisting himself around her to continue taking photos of the monster. Fucking Gravity Falls. This was no place for kids!
Alice comforted herself by thinking about how Oz definitely wasn’t strong enough to haul ass back to the boat while full-on carrying two preteens, but that was a hollow sort of relief: Oz’s presence would have enabled Alice to fight the thing, or perhaps pretend it wasn’t there—do anything to retain at least the illusion of control over the situation.
She leapt over a tree root and back down the shore to her unfortunately still-ruined boat. Alice Baskerville, queen of bad choices, had struck again; Alice Baskerville, queen of bad choices, wasted no time in worrying or beating herself up over the situation; instead, she dumped the boys on the sand behind her and squared up, ready and willing to fight the thing.
“Go for the waterfall!” screamed Vincent behind her. “I think—I read somewhere that there might be a cave we can hide in!”
Read somewhere—where? Probably a tourist manual: Alice kept them stocked, though she had never read a single one. She knew where the waterfall was, though, so she grabbed the boys again and ran for the boat, grabbing a lifeboat and hurling it over the side, herself and her summer charges inside. Alice paddled frantically, Gilbert and Vincent assisting with the other paddle, as the lake monster crashed through the island behind them.
“It’s swimming after us!” Gilbert shrieked. He was hysterically sobbing at this point, though his tears went ignored by both his brother and Alice; they had bigger things to worry about.
“Paddle faster!” Alice yelled back, since there wasn’t really anything else they could do. There was a massive splash as the monster slipped into the water behind them, and then it proceeded to—play with them, almost, like a cat played with a mouse, or like Alice had played with her food as a child. It splashed over them, and swam under and jostled the lifeboat, though it never tipped it, and though many of the other people on the lake were endangered, it only showed itself when they were alone in the water with no witnesses.
It was really fucking annoying, but Vincent and Gilbert were getting their pictures, and Alice couldn’t help but think that this was a pretty fun way to spend the day, even though she was making the opposite of progress on her search for the journals. They were quickly approaching the waterfall, though, and the boat lurched through and spat the three of them out onto the muddy ground.
“We’re going to die,” whispered Gilbert.
But the monster did not get to them. Alice noticed, after a few seconds of watching it writhe in the entrance to the cave, that it had gotten stuck in the entrance—that the massive lake monster was too large to follow them through.
Apparently noticing the same thing, Vincent started laughing, and then a few seconds later informed his still-crying brother what was so funny. Gilbert brightened up immensely, and the brothers hurried up an overhang to snap multiple good pictures of the monster, and a few minutes later, after a few rocks had fallen slightly too close for her comfort, Alice folded her arms and followed them, watching it suspiciously, until suddenly a large rock, loosened by the creature’s thrashing, fell onto its head, smashing it into the water with thick bolts of electricity.
“...I don’t think animals do that,” Gilbert said slowly.
Alice shrugged. “I’ve seen a couple that do,” she replied, though—most of those had been less “animal” and more “freaky thing built by Oz to mess with Raven or by her to see what she could do”, so maybe she shouldn’t be bringing that up, but whatever. What the kids didn’t know couldn’t hurt them, and all that jazz.
“What sorts of animals have you seen ?” Gilbert asked, as they all stared at the shaking, slowly breaking down hulk of metal that had been chasing them.
“Your mom, for one,” Alice said distractedly, “just last night, in fact—is that a door ?”
As what seemed to be a hatch on the not-quite lake monster opened up, Alice took a flying leap from the overhang on which she was standing to land directly on the monster; upon seeing she hadn’t been electrocuted, the brothers hurried down the overhang and clambered up the monster’s neck to examine the hatch with her.
The metal was dented around it, which seemed to stop it from opening properly. Alice gave the thing a few good strong kicks to make the hatch pop open, revealing a small control room, screens dark and broken, and a single inhabitant: Oz Vessalius, looking far too pleased with himself for someone who’d just spent the entire afternoon terrorizing a tranquil lake while inside a massive robotic monster.
Alice slammed her fist down on his head reflexively. “What the hell were you thinking, you stupid idiot?!” she shouted.
“Don’t swear in front of the kids!” Oz said quickly back. “And I was thinking—well—today was quite the family fun day, wouldn’t you say?”
“You wanted a family fun day so you could chase us around with a giant robot ?” Vincent said, either horrified or impressed—it was honestly hard to tell. “Are you insane ?”
“No, I wanted to go fishing,” Oz said, leaning his elbows on the lip of the metal and resting his chin on his fists as he smiled winsomely up at them. “But when all of you started talking about hunting monsters, and doing other things without me…well, I remembered I had all this scrap metal lying around, and it’s pretty easy to make a neural map to connect to a computer interface so that I could control the machine completely cognitively—”
“You built a massive monster robot because Alice wasn’t paying enough attention to you?!” Gilbert blurted, eyes wide.
“Guess I did,” Oz said. “You guys got some pretty good monster photos, though, didn’t you?”
They were, indeed, good monster photos; though they weren’t quite good enough to win the competition, put on by a group called Blind Eye who had apparently figured out that the monster pictured was utterly fake, the tourists genuinely enjoyed them, and Alice had a few packs of postcards made out of them, though she kept one on the refrigerator at all times, the newest addition to a collage seemingly entirely dedicated to shaming Oz for building weird and freaky shit.
Oz, for his part, didn’t seem to mind the collage. After all, he had his own on a corkboard in the living room, which he enthusiastically showed the boys and had dedicated to shaming Alice for fighting things, in general, since barely a day went by when she wasn’t beating some person or the other up. Often, it was indeed Oz; oftener still, a policeman or tourist, though it was most often some sort of large creature she found in the woods—a different one every time.
They were ridiculous, Gilbert decided, as Oz and Alice, in different parts of the house, told stories of the other’s idiocy at ever-increasing volume. Vincent was already crying with laughter, and Gilbert wasn’t able to keep from giggling.
All in all, Oz thought to himself as he finished the story of the seventeenth time Alice had attempted to fight a bear, it wasn’t as though their family bonding day had been ruined completely. In fact, he thought with a smile, as Alice loudly began informing them of the massive, metallic dragon Oz had once sent sweeping through town and terrorizing the populace, he rather thought it might have worked, that they were closer than they had been before.
A warm feeling built in his chest, and Oz, for once, didn’t hide his fond smile. Yes, the day may not have started all that nicely, but it had ended well, and today seemed like it would be good too, and really, wasn’t that all that matters?