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It’s the middle of the night when Dipper gets the text on his phone. Well, “middle of the night,” more like 11:51 PM. Not a late hour in this rickety old house—even the house itself is still awake. Mabel is curled up in bed, snoring, Waddles splayed across the end of it. But downstairs there is the quiet murmur of the television, and at the very least, Ford is still awake.
Fourth summer in Gravity Falls. Things feel as familiar as always. Just as familiar is the text on his phone. Pacifica’s name in the notification.
Are you awake?
He stares at his phone for a few seconds, unblinking in the cold light of it. He taps out a response, one-handed.
Yeah. Everything okay?
For a moment, there’s just silence, as it shows Pacifica typing. It goes on for a solid thirty seconds, like she’s trying to figure out what to say. Dipper’s brow furrows, just slightly.
I need to get out of this house. come get me.
Dipper blinks, staring at the words like they’re a foreign language. His expression clears, and as he swings his legs over the edge of the bed, he writes: Okay.
He pulls his jacket on over his t-shirt, the old blue varsity jacket that Mabel rescued from a thrift store and fixed up for him as a Hanukkah present two years ago. The pine tree symbol is embroidered on the front pocket, in place of where a school logo had been. Dipper slides his phone into his pocket and his feet into his sneakers, and leaves the room with one hand sliding his journal into his jacket, too. The stairs are hushed beneath his feet, because the house is quiet when he asks it to be.
The second floor is quiet, too. Soos and Melody must be asleep, because their room is dark from what he can see through the crack of the door. He continues downstairs, reaching the hallway with the front door, and he peers around the door frame into the living room. Stan is sitting in his old armchair, leaned to the side. The Twilight Zone is playing on the television. Stan is asleep.
Dipper nods to himself. Good.
He swipes the car keys from where they hang on the wall, and then notices Ford standing in the kitchen, watching him with raised eyebrows. He freezes for a moment, just staring back at him.
“Don’t tell Stan,” he whispers, as to not wake the sleeping bear.
Ford just hums, turning to refill his tea. “Text me every hour,” he says, and Dipper grins, because he’s won.
The Stanmobile is a noble steed, if not slightly ugly in its performance. The engine snarls like a wild animal when it starts, and Dipper feels a small thrill as the car rumbles beneath his hands on the wheel. He adjusts the mirrors, then the radio, and pulls out of the Mystery Shack parking lot. Melody’s car is left alone in the dark.
He’s driven before—mostly his mother’s car, in the parking lots of Piedmont—though not a lot. Enough to know how. His license is a somewhat new thing, a year or so old at this point, but he’s confident as he prowls across town in this awful thing. Stan had very resolutely said no when both he and Mabel asked if they could borrow the car from time to time, and so they’ve borrowed Melody’s instead. But tonight feels different, and Dipper wants something that feels more like he does on the inside. And this car, old and a little ugly and a little troublesome as he shifts gears, reflects the feeling in his heart.
The way to Pacifica’s “new” place is a well-worn road. He’s been down it a few times, usually by foot or by bike or by Melody’s car. Usually in the day time, too. The trees are tall and strange in the dark. They almost don’t look real. But they’re reliable old pines, even if the car’s headlights casts them as unfamiliar, and Dipper has always felt at home among them.
He’s practically one of them, after all.
The old manor that serves as the new Northwest Manor is… well, Pacifica called it “quaint.” It’s not quaint, really. It has a rustic, woodsy sort of charm, sure, but it is still a sprawling house with cleared out fields behind it, and the gardens out front sprawl with decadence as Dipper parks at the end of the driveway. Pacifica told him, the first time he did this, to not come all the way down. He turns down his headlights and waits, fingers drumming against the steering wheel, the smell of gasoline hanging around him. The radio is fuzzy around the edges. Dipper tilts his head as some kind of old jazz plays from the station Stan keeps it tuned to.
At the end of the driveway, the front door to the house opens. Pacifica steps out, closing it behind her.
In the three years it’s been since he met her, Pacifica has changed quite a bit. For starters, she stopped dyeing her hair that platinum blonde—it’s brown, now, and she’d cut it shorter, last year, so it hung down to her shoulders, then so it was an inch or two below her ears. This year, she’d cut it short. All the way down to a sort of shaggy mullet type thing. It looks quite nice on her, even if the point was to spite her parents, like the nose piercing she’d gotten as well. It makes her face oddly lovely. Dipper is somewhat startled by the thought, and quickly shakes it from his head as Pacifica approaches the car. There is a seething sort of look in her eyes, but not directed at him. Her head tilts, snakelike, as she pulls open the passenger side door.
“Stan let you borrow the car?” she asks, as if it was even an option.
Dipper smiles. “No,” he says, because he knows it will please her, and sees that it does. “Where are we going?”
Pacifica slams the door as she climbs in, already beginning to put down the window. “Anywhere,” she says. “Away.”
They drive for a while. Down through town, which is quiet at this time of night, through the darkened buildings and dim streetlights. There are no signs of life, really, around midnight. They drive past the diner and its black windows. Pacifica sneers at the sign, but Dipper knows it is all performance, and that she rather enjoys the job she has there, waiting tables—another thing done to spite her parents, because despite the “loss” of much of their wealth, she still didn’t need to work.
She’d told Dipper, though, that once she’d gotten a taste of rolling up her sleeves and getting something done, she never wanted to go back to waiting on others to do it for her.
From there, they drive down to the lake, still quiet and dark, the lights in Tate’s cabin all out. There’s nobody here—sometimes, there are night fishers, or teenage delinquents having a party, but tonight it’s just Dipper and Pacifica and the slight summer breeze that ripples the water against the shore. He parks partway on the sand, and for a little while, they just fool around. Skip stones, play around in the shallows. Dipper shows Pacifica how to coax water spirits out from the lake, and she laughs as the one he calls upon ends up stealing his hat and making him wade out even further to retrieve it.
“Thanks for your help,” he remarks, drily, as he trudges back onto the shore, the bottoms of his shorts all dark with lake water. He wrings out his hat as best he can, before giving up and tossing it into the car through the open windows before moving back down the beach.
“You picked that battle,” Pacifica says from where she sits, perched on the side of the dock. “Not me.”
He rolls his eyes, flopping down onto the wood beside her with a wordless little huff, more amused than irritated. For a long second, they sit there in the quiet.
“Nice night for this,” Dipper says, finally, looking up at the stars. His gaze slides sideways. Pacifica is looking out at the water, still.
“Yeah,” she agrees, quieter than before. “Thanks for being awake.”
Something happened, he reasons, or has been happening, or will happen. With Pacifica’s family, it can be all three. She doesn’t always want to talk about it, and Dipper is never sure how to tell what kind of night it is. Talk about it, or talk around it. Instead, Dipper just shrugs.
“You know me. Always am.”
He types out an I’m still alive to Ford on his phone. After a few seconds, it’s marked as read. Dipper slides his phone back into one of his many jacket pockets. His fingers itch for a pen as he turns his eyes back toward Pacifica. She’s unfairly pretty in the moonlight. He’d like to draw her.
Dipper swallows as the thought refuses to be shaken away. Something happened, or has been happening, or will happen. He feels it between his ribs, hammering along with his heart. Pacifica is pretty, and Dipper is prone to noticing it. He cannot stop himself from documenting the fact: she is pretty, and he cannot chase the thought away.
“Let’s go somewhere else,” she says, and Dipper waits for a second, so she looks over at him. Her eyes are dark and gleaming in the moonlight.
He’s unfairly pretty, at night like this, he does not hear Pacifica think, because he is not privy to her thoughts. An unfamiliar expression flicks across her face, and Dipper pushes himself up. “Okay,” he says, and they do.
They drive outside of town. They take the back roads, because they feel more like Gravity Falls than the main route out of town. Dipper feels it when they cross the border of the town, like a shift in his chest, a sudden longing so sharp that it makes his breath stutter and fingers twitch against the wheel. He feels it every time. Pacifica does not seem to react, but her gaze catches curiously on his hands as he forces himself to keep the car moving forward, as he refuses to swing it back around. Like his breath, the radio stutters, and the station shifts. Dipper’s brow furrows as the old jazz turns into a regular, current pop station.
“Huh,” he says, because that’s strange. “That’s strange.”
“Everything about this town is,” Pacifica says. Dipper nods, because this is true.
“Local station,” he muses, “or the frequency getting intercepted by another, bigger one.”
Pacifica rolls her eyes. “Scientific explanation,” she says with a yawn. “The boring one.”
More likely than it being magic, though, and they both know it. Gravity Falls is weird, but it’s not all magic weird. Sometimes it’s normal weird. Sometimes it’s radio frequencies and strange readings on EMF readers. It’s not always ghosts and monsters. Though the magic weird does tend to closely follow behind the normal weird, too.
Regardless, they are not chasing mysteries tonight. It would feel wrong, without Mabel, and…
… well, she could have come with. It’s just that, sort of selfishly, Dipper wanted Pacifica to himself tonight. There’s a peacefulness that comes with a quiet car and a quiet night. They drive down through the trees and Dipper sets them on course up into the mountains. There is nothing but the rumble of the engine and the slowly fizzling radio as they go further and further into the night. Dipper pauses on the side of the road to send another text to Ford, since they’re going into what will probably be sparse cell reception, and then the two of them are deep in the dark, quiet woods.
The trees go by like shadowy monsters. Pacifica turns the radio off once it goes to static. The two of them are quiet as they slowly rise above the rest of the world. Eventually, they reach a point where they’re seeing the tops of the trees, and Dipper pulls over into a small dirt portion of the road shoulder. Clearly, a place where people stop to admire the view.
The car quiets as Dipper pulls the keys from the engine, and the two of them get out. For a second, they just stand there, looking out at everything.
Then, Dipper turns to Pacifica, and Pacifica turns to Dipper, and he asks, “Can I kiss you?”
It’s not what he expected to come out of his mouth. He was going to ask if she wanted to talk, he thinks, but he’s betrayed himself. Before he can backpedal, Pacifica leans in and kisses him. It’s nothing big, and she has done it before. But it feels different this time. Like maybe she means it more. Dipper’s hand curls into the space between her shoulder and her collarbone. One of her hands slides around his waist.
And then it’s over, and they pull apart, standing next to each other by the car. Pacifica leans on it. Dipper does not. For a moment, they are quiet.
“Thanks,” Dipper says. Pacifica laughs.
“Thanks?” She grins, leaning against his shoulder. “God, you’re awful.”
“Says you,” he says, cheeks flushed warm and red. “Ms. Northwest.”
Pacifica swats at his arm, hard enough to hurt. Dipper just laughs, ducking away as she aims another swat at his face. Then she’s lunging forward and grappling him in a choke hold, and they’re both laughing as Dipper stumbles under the weight, and they move away from the side of the road so they don’t tumble down off the side of the mountain. After a minute or so, Pacifica releases him, blowing out a sigh as she leans back against the car again, glancing out over the trees.
“I wish I wasn’t,” she says, so suddenly soft and longing that it catches him off guard.
“Awful?” Dipper perches on the hood of the car. “You’re not.”
She shakes her head. “A Northwest. It would be so much easier.” She scrunches her nose. “God, I wish I was like, a Pines. You guys always seem so much happier.”
Dipper’s shoulders tense. He thinks of possession and paranoia and thirty years of anger, simmering, simmering, simmering. Of sleeping with guns under pillows and the trees watching you. “I… don’t think you do, really.”
A pause, then: “Did something happen?”
Pacifica doesn’t look at him. “When doesn’t something happen?” Her voice turns bitter. “I’m tired of being a little political pawn, instead of their daughter. Oh, Pacifica, why were you so rude to the State Governor, you said hi instead of hello, how barbaric,” she mocks, copying her father’s tone so well it sends a shiver down Dipper’s spine.
“Your family is not real,” Dipper says, because that’s how it feels.
“I wish. There was a gala last night,” she says, then frowns, because it is one in the morning, “like, last night, not tonight, at the State Treasurer’s estate, and my dad’s running for State Senate—” Dipper nods, because he has heard much grief about this whole campaign, “—and his wife was talking about this haunted mirror they have, and…”
There is a sort of far-off look in her eyes. It is one that Dipper recognizes well. Wonder, and longing, and love for the strange and supernatural. “I just wanted to see it. See if it was real, you know? So I asked, and… oh, you know, there was a ghost inside, and after all those exorcisms last summer, I was feeling pretty confident, so…”
Pacifica sighs. “I got rid of the ghost, but the mirror shattered. Apparently that was enough to be an “embarrassment to my father,” so I got sent home, and he hasn’t stopped berating me for it, and… god, Dipper, I’m so fucking tired of it. Every little thing I do is a problem. My mom also got mad because I was wearing the wrong colored shoes.” She throws her hands up. “Shoes, Dipper. Fucking shoes.”
“I have one pair,” he deadpans, and she snorts.
“And I’m the barbarian,” she says, though it loses some of the heat. “Do you really?”
He shrugs. “Why would I need more than one?”
“So you don’t wear sneakers to a fucking red tie event, Dipper, Jesus.”
“Hey,” he says, “I don’t go to those. And when I do, you always want to dress me up anyway.”
Pacifica rolls her eyes, but Dipper can tell she’s pleased with the sentiment, that he would rather let her help him than figure it out himself. To be fair, it’s true. It’s about here that Dipper notices Pacifica is trembling, and for a brief moment he’s bewildered by it, before he sees the goosebumps that have covered her bare arms, and then he recalls that they are on a mountain at night and she is wearing a cropped halter top as the chilly breeze brushes past them.
Wordlessly, he shoulders off his jacket and hands it over. This, too, he can see that she is pleased with. She takes it from him with a smile, swinging it around her own shoulders.
“How gentlemanly,” she says. Dipper just goes pshaw.
“You should’ve brought a sweater,” he teases, like either of them knew they would be up here tonight.
For a few minutes, they lapse back into quiet. Dipper looks out over the trees. There is a tug in his chest all the more pronounced for their proximity to Gravity Falls. He can see it, in the distance, the cliffs beyond the valley. The houses and small bits of light. Between one blink and the next, Dipper is standing at the edge of the road, where it drops down into a steep incline back down the mountain. Not a sheer drop. But what would be a painful one.
He swallows, and steps back. Pacifica is looking at him strangely out of the corner of his eye.
“You’re a weird one,” she says, “Dipper Pines.”
“Tell me something I don’t know,” he responds. Then, quieter than before: “We’re not as great as you think we are, you know. I know your parents are bad. Ford and Stan aren’t bad, but they’re…”
He tries to think of the least concerning story possible. There is not one that does not sound scary, so he admits it freely. “One time, Mabel woke Ford up from, like, a nightmare or something, and he—he almost pointed a gun at her.” He feels distant from himself, like he’s not quite attached to his body. “He didn’t. But he had it in his hand before he realized where he was. It’s not—” he sighs, inclining his head slightly, “—it’s not like any of us hate each other, or are scared of each other. It’s just… there’s a lot of jagged edges. We get splinters, sometimes, when we touch.”
Dipper does not realize the faraway look in his eyes. “Sometimes I worry that I’ll get stuck in the past like they are, when I’m older.”
A hand lands on his shoulder. Dipper startles, slightly, glancing back over at Pacifica. She draws her hand away, leaning their shoulders together instead.
“Well,” she says, “no offense to your uncles, but I think you and Mabel are, like, way smarter than they are. Like… emotionally. You’re not gonna do any of the stupid things they did, you know?”
Dipper shrugs. “I guess. I mean, full offense to your parents but you’re definitely way smarter than they are. In like… every way possible. So I think maybe we’re both gonna be fine.”
Pacifica laughs. Dipper quite likes the sound of it. He’d like to keep it somewhere he can listen to it, again and again and again.
“God, it’s fucking freezing up here,” she says. “C’mon. Let’s head back down.”
Pacifica keeps the jacket all the way down the mountain, and even then some as they get back onto familiar dark roads. Dipper feels it when they pass back into Gravity Falls—something settles in his chest like relief, and he sighs into it, shoulders relaxing. Pacifica raises a perfect brow, but does not comment on it. She’s more than used to him and his weird attunement to the physicality of this place, much like she is more than used to Mabel’s strange attunement to the energy and magic of it that lingers in the air.
They don’t head back to her house. They keep driving around for a while, circling the town. At one point, they pass Sheriff Blubbs-Durland and Deputy Durland-Blubbs on their night patrol. Dipper waves. They wave back. It’s good to be known, in a place like this.
He texts Ford again. This time he gets a reply.
Planning on coming home any time soon?
He glances at the time. Nearly two o’clock in the morning.
Maybe. You don’t have to stay up.
Of course, though, he does. Ford’s response is near immediate.
Yes I do. Be back within the hour, please.
Dipper sighs, leaning forward to press his forehead against the wheel where they sit in the gas station parking lot. He’s just refilled the tank, because he’s sixteen, not a monster. Pacifica snorts.
“Aw,” she says, “did somebody get caught?”
He rolls his eyes. “Ford knew I left. I’ve got an hour left, unless you want to just come over for the night.”
Pacifica wrinkles her nose. “I do, but that’ll make things worse.”
Dipper wants to tell her to hell with your parents, man, to grab her arm and ask her to just stay with them, to just leave. She won’t, though, no matter how nicely he asks, or how pathetically he begs. Pacifica, he knows, is too proud for that. She will not leave unless it’s her choice. Why she doesn’t just take money from them and move out, he doesn’t know.
… it’s a fair question, actually. “Why don’t you just move out? Surely you can get the money for it.”
Pacifica raises her brows at him. “Well, one, we are sixteen years old,” she says, “and two, I don’t want their money for it.”
Again, her pride. “Why not? If my parents were willing to throw money at me to get me to move out, Paz, I’d just take it.”
She stares out the windshield, straight ahead. “I’d feel like I owed them,” she says, slowly. “Like I didn’t really get away.” She sniffs. “I’m saving money, Dipper. It’s not like I spend it on anything else. That’s what the family credit card is for. But the money I’m making at Greasy’s, that’s… that’s for me. That’s for my future. The rest of it is all just… superfluous.”
“SAT vocab,” he says, drily, like he doesn’t do the same thing. Pacifica rolls her eyes. “I guess that makes sense. I don’t really understand it, but…”
“You don’t need to understand it,” Pacifica says, looking over at him. “Just let me do it. Okay?”
He lifts a hand in the universal sign of surrender. “It’s your choice,” he says, softer this time.”Sorry. I didn’t mean to…”
Frustrate her? Upset her? He isn’t sure he did either. Pacifica shakes her head. “Whatever. Let’s… can we hit one more stop? I want to see the tree.”
Another glance at the time. That’s all the way across town from Pacifica’s house, which is halfway across town from the Shack. He’ll get back by 3:30 at the earliest. Dipper sighs, and shifts gears, and pulls them back onto the road.
“Okay,” he says. “If Grunkle Ford kills me, it’s your fault.”
The tree is the latest oddity in Gravity Falls that Dipper has been investigating. He told Pacifica about it yesterday—a weird, twisting thing with gnarled, leafless branches in the middle of summer, and when he’d gone to take a sample of the bark, because he’d never seen this kind of tree before, the wood had bled. Not just, you know, sap so dark it looked like blood or anything like that. It had been blood. Ford had tested it.
Human blood, type A+ with no match for any DNA that they could find, even running it through the resources they had with the police. Notably, the tree was surrounded by a half-ring of stones on one side and backed by a stream on the other. It was just odd. Dipper was fascinated by it.
Pacifica had been curious when he’d told her about it, and she remains curious now, peering up at the pale branches against the darkened sky. Dipper stands behind her, just outside the ring, because standing inside of it makes him feel strange. He watches her, her head half-cocked, eyes searching along the length of the branches like she can find some secret hidden in the bark and twigs. Who knows. Maybe she can.
The cut that Dipper had made, that first day, is still open. Sluggishly, a line of red—black, in this instance, in the dark—drips down the side. It hasn’t stopped bleeding, now that it’s started. Dipper wondered if he should patch it up, but something felt wrong about the idea.
“What do you think?” he asks, stepping past the stones. For a brief moment, when he is aligned with them, he feels the power of them thrumming through his hands like a second pulse.
And then he’s on the other side, and he just feels Strange, with a capital S. Pacifica hums, tonelessly. “I think this is a weird tree. Look at the branches. They all split exactly the same way. Perfectly even.”
… he doesn’t notice it until she says it. Peering up at the tree, it is oddly symmetrical in a way he hadn’t seen before. Each branch travels out to a certain length before splitting into two smaller ones… continuing on until they reach the smallest twigs on the ends. He hadn’t noticed the symmetry before, possibly because one side of the tree is technically missing a large limb, if he looks for the symmetry now. Curiously, he strains his neck to try and see the stump. Shouldn’t it be bleeding, if that’s the case?
But it isn’t. Strangely enough, though, now that he’s looking more closely, it’s like he’s looking at a scab, not tree bark. Dipper shudders, watching the slow movement of what must be blood beneath the thin surface of the stump hanging off the side of the tree.
“Something with the circle, maybe,” Pacifica says, gesturing to the stones and then the creek. It does curve in an oddly perfect way to create the other half of the circle. “What happens if you move a rock?”
Dipper shivers again. “I feel like,” he says, “that’s a really bad idea.”
Pacifica shrugs, still wearing his jacket. Dipper really likes the look of it on her. “Well, you love those. It’s the Pines way.”
They don’t mess with it tonight. Not on their own, without anyone around in case it goes wrong. Much as Dipper wants to, now, burning with curiosity—they agreed, wordlessly, no mysteries without Mabel. So they don’t push it any further. Instead, they go back to the car, and Pacifica stops him before he can get in. She catches him by the jaw, sliding against him, burying her face in the crook of his neck. Dipper freezes, for just a moment, before returning the hug.
“Thank you,” she says into his shoulder. “I needed this, tonight.”
Dipper gives her a little squeeze. “Whenever you need it. Are you sure you don’t want to come stay the night?”
She sniffs, almost a little tearfully. Oh, no. But her voice is relatively even. “I’m sure. Maybe next time. Mabel would be mad if I came over for a sleepover without, like, telling her first.”
“Oh, one hundred percent.”
They don’t kiss again, because they don’t very often, and Dipper always asks, first. To be quite honest, they still haven’t exactly talked about the kissing. But this feels like a moment for it, maybe? Dipper is never sure. Pacifica just pulls away, though, one hand trailing down to squeeze his own. He runs a thumb over her knuckles, before grinning all playful like and dipping into a bow, pressing his lips to her knuckles.
Pacifica snickers along with him. “So noble,” she says, and Dipper just laughs as he swings himself back into the car.
“Me,” he agrees, teasingly, “noble.”
The drive back is in remarkably better spirits than the drive away had been. Pacifica seems lighter, almost, less tension in her brow and in her shoulders. She hangs an arm out the window and they sing along to the 70’s station that Dipper likes and that his uncles often frequent, which once upon a time was embarrassing but now is just nice to share with them. By the time they make it back to Pacifica’s house, she looks as carefree as ever.
“You probably want this back,” she says, finger brushing the collar of Dipper’s jacket. “Don’t you?”
Dipper looks at her for a few seconds, eyes flicking across her face. He bites his lip for half of a second, worrying at a scab on the lower one.
“… keep it,” he says, “you can give it back in the morning.”
Pacifica’s eyes light up like she’s pleased by this. Dipper is glad to have found another thing that makes her look like that. He changes gears, getting ready to reverse back out onto the road.
“You gonna ask me out for real, any time soon?” she asks, before he can pull away.
Dipper wrinkles his nose. “I kinda like the nameless thing we’ve got going on, I dunno.”
“Nameless,” she says, rolling her eyes. “We kiss.”
“Friends can kiss!”
“So can friends who are dating,” she says, all forceful and pointed. Dipper rolls his eyes back at her.
“You can ask me out first,” he says, “if you want it so bad.”
Pacifica laughs, sharp and bright, and Dipper just grins as he looks up at her outside of the car. She tugs on one of the sleeves of his jacket, smiling. “I dunno,” she echoes, “I guess I kind of like the nameless thing we’ve got going on.”
It’s Dipper’s turn to laugh as he pulls back out of her driveway. “Chicken,” he calls, but they’re both smiling as they return to their respective nights.
When Dipper gets home, Ford isn’t pleased that he’s late by twenty-six minutes, but he lets it slide and promises not to tell Stan that Dipper took the car, even though they both know that he will just know, somehow, that it’s been touched. Dipper returns upstairs to his quiet bedroom, Mabel still asleep, and his bed is warmer now for the night’s adventures.
His phone buzzes.
Hope Ford didn’t kill you.
He grins.
Not this time. Lucky you.
Exhaustion lays heavy over his limbs. He turns onto his side. Already, he is eager for the morning.
See you tomorrow.