Work Text:
The little bell over the door chimed as Dipper Pines stepped into the gallery.
Outside, the late-summer sun hung low over Gravity Falls, casting long shadows across Main Street. Inside, the cool air smelled faintly of wood polish and paint. Soft acoustic guitar music played from an unseen speaker, the kind that made you instinctively slow your steps.
Dipper didn’t usually have time for this. Between grading lab reports and prepping for his AP Biology class, most of his free hours disappeared into lesson plans and coffee refills. But he’d passed the gallery every day on his walk to the school, and the window displays had been… intriguing.
Today, he’d finally let himself be pulled inside.
The walls were dotted with paintings that seemed to hum with light. Rural Oregon scenes: pine forests under pink sunsets, a deer looking back through morning fog, an old barn half-collapsing under the weight of blackberry vines. But between them were stranger pieces, abstracts that seemed to pull the forest into shapes you couldn’t quite name.
He stopped at one in particular: a swirl of golds and deep blues, as if twilight itself had been captured in a painting.
“Most people say that one feels like a memory they can’t quite place,” a voice said from behind him.
Dipper turned. A woman stood a few feet away, blonde hair falling in smooth waves over a light denim jacket, a folded stack of postcards in her hands.
“It’s… yeah,” Dipper said, feeling a little foolish for not coming up with something better. “Like… like standing in the middle of nowhere just after sunset, and the air’s that exact temperature where you forget you exist for a second.”
The corner of her mouth lifted. “That’s better than most reviews I get.”
He chuckled. “I’m a science teacher. Not much practice in the art critique department.”
“Science teacher, huh?” She stepped closer to the painting, glancing at it as if seeing it anew. “Guess that explains why you were looking at the brush strokes like they’re a lab sample.”
Dipper smiled sheepishly. “Guilty. I guess I’m just… impressed by anyone who can get a feeling onto canvas. I’ve tried sketching before, but my stick figures come out like crime scene evidence.”
She laughed, an easy, warm sound that made something in his chest loosen. “Well, for what it’s worth, you’re looking at a piece that took… a while to figure out. I had the colors first, but I couldn’t make them say what I wanted until I stopped overthinking it.”
He tilted his head. “So you’re the artist?”
The pause that followed was just long enough for him to wonder if he’d asked something dumb.
“Yes,” she said, and moved toward the next painting. “This one’s my personal favorite. Though I might be biased.”
He followed, drawn in by both the painting and her presence.
They kept talking, drifting from piece to piece. She asked him what he saw in each one, and he found himself answering more honestly than he expected. He told her about camping trips as a kid. In turn, she shared little details about the work, how a certain shade of green was mixed from three pigments, how sometimes the hardest part was knowing when to stop adding more.
When they reached the far wall, he realized they’d walked the whole gallery together.
“So,” he said, “do you work here? Or do you just lease out your art?”
Her smile widened. “Both. I own the place.”
Dipper blinked. “Oh. Wow. So—” He looked around, then back at her. “—you curated all this?”
“And painted about two-thirds of it,” she said lightly. “Name’s Pacifica.”
The name rang a distant bell. He thought he remembered a “Pacifica Northwest” from his own high school years, someone he’d never spoken to, who’d been way out of his league in every imaginable way.
“That’s… uh. Amazing.” He rubbed the back of his neck. “You’re insanely talented.”
Her eyes softened. “Thanks. Most people in this town don’t expect much from a gallery, so I try to surprise them.”
They lingered there a moment, the quiet between them comfortable. Outside, a car rolled past, tires crunching on the asphalt.
“Well,” Pacifica said eventually, “I should let you get back to your day. Thanks for stopping in.”
“Right,” Dipper said, suddenly reluctant to leave. “It was… great talking to you.”
They both stepped toward the door at the same time, then instinctively moved in opposite directions, he toward the street, she toward the back room.
Something in him tugged hard, and before he could overthink it, he turned back.
“Hey, Pacifica?”
She looked over her shoulder.
He swallowed. “Would you maybe… want to grab coffee sometime? Or dinner. Or… something that’s not me just monopolizing your gallery hours.”
For a split second, her brows lifted in surprise. Then she laughed, not unkindly, but with genuine amusement, like she’d just been pleasantly caught off guard.
“You’re asking me out?”
Heat crept up his neck. “Uh. Yeah. If you want.”
Pacifica studied him for a moment, head tilted, a small smirk playing at her lips.
“You know,” she said, “most people wait until at least the second conversation before asking.”
“I’m… not most people?”
Her smirk turned into a grin. “Apparently not.”
She pulled a pen from her pocket and took one of the postcards she’d been carrying earlier, scribbling a number on the back.
“Here,” she said, handing it to him. “Text me. And yes, I’ll get coffee with you. But only if you promise to show me some of your own art, because if you can talk about paintings like how you did today, you’ve definitely been underselling yourself.”
He took the card, smiling so wide he had to consciously rein it in. “Deal.”
Pacifica stepped back toward the gallery’s interior. “See you around, Mr. Science Teacher.”
“See you around.”
The bell over the door chimed again as he stepped out into the golden light. For the first time in months, the walk home felt like the start of something new.