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Dipper finally made his way down to the kitchen for breakfast at about ten forty-five that morning, still feeling a bit bleary-eyed. Mabel was already there eating a bowl of cereal, fully dressed in a sweater and a pair of cut-offs, with her make-up done, her hair brushed and styled, and just generally looking far too chipper for someone who had still been going strong when Dipper had crawled up to bed at four thirty the night, or technically the morning, before. Grunkle Stan and Grunkle Ford were milling about the kitchen as well, which was a little weird. They had both gone to bed at a reasonable time last night, on the grounds that the party didn’t need any adult supervision, since all the attendees were technically adults. That is, all of them except Gideon, who had been invited due to the momentousness of the occasion, despite not being fully back into Mabel’s good graces after his increasingly annoying attempts to woo her over the past year. And Dipper knew that the noise couldn’t have kept them up, because he and Mabel had been tasked with dragging their grunkles’ mattresses down to the lower lab yesterday so it wouldn’t. Not that there was any reason why they couldn’t be hanging out in the kitchen right now – the Mystery Shack wasn’t opening until one that day, to give plenty of time to make sure everything was in order after the party, besides which Grunkle Stan had been sort of semi-retired ever since he’d named Soos manager and Soos had immediately turned around and named Melody co-manager, and Grunkle Ford had always worked on his own schedule – but still, it was weird.
“Good morning,” Dipper said, pouring himself a bowl of cereal as well.
Grunkle Ford and Grunkle Stan returned his greeting, and Mabel gave an enthusiastic, “Good morning, Sleeping Beauty!”
“I’m not a princess,” Dipper said, taking the open chair between Mabel and Grunkle Ford.
“I think you’d make a great princess,” Mabel assured him. “Dare I say, a pretty, pretty princess?”
“Mabel, no. That game is for five year old girls. I don’t even know why you still have it.”
“Pfff,” Mabel said, poking him in the arm. “You’re just jealous because I’m so much better at it than you are.”
“It is literally one hundred percent based on luck. You can’t be better at a game that requires no skill to play,” Dipper objected.
“Says you,” retorted Mabel.
“As much as I hate to break up this conversation between two mature adults, I’ve got something for the both of you,” Grunkle Stan said, sitting down at the table as well. He pulled a pair of manila envelopes out of somewhere – Dipper had learned a very long time ago not to ask where, exactly – and passed one each to Dipper and Mabel.
“You do know our eighteenth birthday was yesterday, right?” Dipper said, accepting the envelope.
“Believe me, I noticed,” Grunkle Stan said.
“These gifts are a bit… special,” Grunkle Ford explained. “We wanted to give them to you separate from everything else.”
“Why does it say ‘From Mom and Dad’ on it?” Mabel asked. “Is this your way of telling us that one of you is actually our grauntie? Ooooo do I get to give you a make-over?”
“No, we’re both perfectly happy as grunkles, thank you. Or, I am at least,” Grunkle Ford said, turning to look at Grunkle Stan.
“I’m good, thanks,” Grunkle Stan said.
“Can I give you both make-overs anyway? I promise I definitely, probably, maybe won’t make you look like a tiger this time,” said Mabel.
“That’s what you said the last two times,” Grunkle Ford pointed out.
“Maybe I did, but I can’t help it if tiger is a good look for you two,” Mabel said.
“Well, I think it looks fantastic, pumpkin,” Grunkle Stan said.
“You would,” Dipper and Grunkle Ford said at almost exactly the same time and the two of them smiled at each other.
“Alright, that’s enough outta the peanut gallery,” Grunkle Stan said. “Anyway, the reason the envelopes say they’re from your mom and dad is because they’re something that your real mom and dad left you when they died.”
Intrigued now, Dipper pulled open the envelope, only to be confronted with a very official looking piece of paper that read “Change Registration from Custodian to Single” on the top and had Grunkle Stan’s forged “Stanford Pines” signature on it. “What is this?”
Grunkle Stan stood up from his chair a bit so he could lean over and look at the paperwork that Mabel was holding and regarding with equal confusion. “Oh, sorry, I meant to put that part at the back. That’s the form so you can get the accounts put under your name instead of my name.”
“You mean my name,” Grunkle Ford said mildly.
“Yeah, well the investment guy that Shermie hired still thinks I’m you, so…”
“Wait a second, accounts, investment guy; are you saying our parents left us money?” Dipper asked.
“More or less,” Grunkle Stan said. “Apparently when you two little niblets were born, they went out and did the responsible parent thing and got life insurance. Then when they both died all that money went to the two of you, though I’ve been the one watching it for you both while you were still minors. Probably they meant it to be to help raise you kids, but me and Ford managed just fine on our own, so I dipped into it a couple a’ times, but mostly just left it and let it grow.”
“And by that he means he refused to touch so much as a penny of it except for when I convinced him it was for a good investment for the both of you and basically forced him,” Grunkle Ford said in a tone of fond amusement. “Your attic came out of that money, for example.”
The attic, or the remodeling of the attic rather, had been Dipper and Mabel’s twelfth birthday gift. About three months before that, Fiddleford had moved out into a new house of his own where he could live with his son Tate. That meant that there had then been two open bedrooms on the second floor, and it was decided that it was time that Dipper and Mabel each had their own room. That left the attic empty, and Grunkle Stan and Grunkle Ford had declared that it was going to be belatedly undergoing the same remodeling that the rest of the house had two years prior, and that the space was temporarily off-limits to the younger twins for safety reasons.
Then really early in the morning on Dipper and Mabel’s twelfth birthday – apparently the room had been done for over a week and their grunkles were too excited to wait any longer – the two of them were woken up and led upstairs to see the new attic. The wall separating their old bedroom from the rest of the attic had been taken out, opening the whole thing up to one wide space that had then been given the illusion of different sections by the groupings of furniture. There was the long low table surrounded by piles of cushions and pillows and placed next to a bookshelf filled with all their various board and card games. There were the bookshelves with actual books on them, ensconced next to two puffy arm chairs with a little table and reading lamp in between. The old TV from downstairs that had been replaced earlier that year had been brought up, along with all their video games and movies. But the best part was along the back wall. There were two desks in either corner, each with a new laptop on top of it. The desk on the left side of the room was heavy and solid looking, and was filled to the brim with anything and everything Dipper could possibly need to study anomalies. The wall next to it was corkboard floor to ceiling for about three feet, and there were two rolling whiteboards and a rolling corkboard as well. The right corner of the room had a desk that looked much airier in it, despite having about the same amount of storage space as the other. This desk, however, was filled with all kinds of crafting supplies, and next to it was an easel and a pile of yarn so big a person could dive into it. Which, come to think of it, was exactly what Mabel did. And then the whole back wall was painted with whiteboard paint, and their grunkles had written on it in large letters “Happy Birthday, Dipper and Mabel!”
It had been, and still was, the most amazing thing Dipper had ever seen. It never occurred to him before to wonder how very much something like that must have cost to do up. And if that had been paid out of these accounts and there was still money left, then how much was in there?
Dipper was flipping through the paperwork looking for a statement when another thought occurred to him: Grunkle Stan had said he “dipped into” the accounts a couple of times. The wording would imply that however much he took out was small relative to the size of the account as a whole. How much was in there?
“Holy Jumanji, that’s a lot of zeros!” Mabel exclaimed. Assuming that Mabel was looking at the same number he was, there was technically only one zero in it, right after the one right at the beginning. But there were also two commas and seven digits before the decimal place, so Dipper couldn’t disagree with the sentiment. “This is all our money to do whatever we want with?”
“It’s your money,” Grunkle Stan confirmed. “I feel like this is where a responsible parent would tell you to be smart with it. But I’m an uncle, so yeah, do whatever you want with it. Go nuts.”
“But Grunkle Stan, this is over a million dollars!” Dipper had spent the last year so stressed about college, not just about getting in, but how he was going to afford it. He applied for scholarships and financial aid and loans and all the while Grunkle Stan and Grunkle Ford kept telling him not to worry about it, that it would be taken care of. Dipper had assumed they meant they were willing to help him pay for it, which was really nice of them, but it wasn’t exactly a cheap college he was going to and he didn’t want to put that on them. But now Dipper could pay for college out-of-pocket all the way through getting a Ph.D. if he wanted to and still have money left over. Because now Dipper had over a million dollars.
“Yeah, well when I was eighteen Pa kicked me out of the house-“
“He kicked you out of the house when you were seventeen,” Grunkle Ford corrected, his voice low, even, and dangerous. Grunkle Ford didn’t like talking or thinking about when Grunkle Stan got kicked out, and as the years passed he only got more and more upset by it.
Grunkle Stan leaned over and cuffed Grunkle Ford on the back of the head. “You’re ruining my parallels here, Sixer.” Because the more and more upset Grunkle Ford got over the whole thing, the less and less it seemed to bother Grunkle Stan. “I was roughly you two’s age when Pa kicked me out of the house and told me not to come back until I made millions. I thought we’d keep the tradition going here, but flip the script on it a little bit.”
“It’s not fair!” Mabel suddenly exploded. “Your dad was such a poop. It’s not fair that you had to have such an awful dad while Dipper and I have the two best dads in the whole world, and it turns out our birth parents were totally awesome and looking out for us too.”
“And Grandpa Shermie,” Dipper added.
“And Grandpa Shermie! How come we get to be so lucky?”
“Hey, the way I see it, all of us are pretty lucky,” Grunkle Stan said.
“You are such a sap,” Grunkle Ford commented.
Grunkle Stan smacked him on the back of the head again. “I can keep this up all day, Ford,” he said, and Grunkle Ford smiled at him unapologetically.
“You know what I’m gonna do?” Mabel said. “Next time one of those time travel guys shows up, I’m going to steal their time machine, go back in time, and punch your dad right in his stupid face. Then I’m going to steal the little Mystery Twins Classic and raise them as my own.”
“That’s ahhh… a lovely thought sweetheart, but probably not one you should follow through on,” Grunkle Ford said.
“Yeah, we don’t really need another reason for Time Baby to be mad at us,” said Dipper.
“Fiiiinnne,” Mabel said. “But I would do it! I would totally do it, and I would knit you both so many sweaters.”
“Literally half our closets are sweaters that you’ve knit for us,” Grunkle Stan said.
“Yeah, but those are grumpy old man sweaters. These would be adorable tiny twins sweaters. I can picture them now: bright red, with a white circle on the front and inside the circles it would read ‘Stan 1’ and ‘Stan 2.’”
Dipper felt his eyes go wide as he turned to look at his sister. “Do it. Screw Time Baby, do it and take as many pictures as you possibly can.” Mabel’s wide smile met Dipper’s evil grin and they said simultaneously “Blackmail!” “Scrapbook-ortunity!” and high-fived.
“Yeesh, you take a pair of kids in, raise them for thirteen years, and then give them a million dollars, and this is the thanks you get,” Grunkle Stan said.
Mabel lunged across the table, knocking her bowl of cereal to the ground in the process – luckily the bowl was made of some kind of plastic, so it didn’t break, but she did splatter milk everywhere – and caught Grunkle Stan up in a tight hug. “Thank you so much, Grunkle Stan!”
Dipper, being a normal person, actually got up out of his chair and walked over to Grunkle Ford. “Thank you,” he said, wrapping his grunkle up in a hug.
“Of course,” Grunkle Ford said. He placed his hands on either of Dipper’s shoulders and looked him in the eye. “You are going to change the world one of these days, my boy. If that’s what you want to do. We didn’t want something as petty as money to be what stood in your way.”
Dipper wasn’t all that great at using words to express how he was feeling – neither of them were; that was really Mabel’s department. So he grabbed Grunkle Ford in another hug, and hoped he understood.
“My turn!” Mabel had crawled across the table, tipping over the salt shaker and knocking the lid off the butter dish on her way, and was now kneeling on the table next to them with her arms open for a hug. So Dipper let go of Grunkle Ford and made his way around to Grunkle Stan.
“Now I know you’re too smart a kid to need me to tell you to be smart with this money,” Grunkle Stan said after Dipper had hugged him. “But have some fun with it too, alright? Go buy yourself one of your nerd games, or a car or something, I don’t know.”
Dipper felt a smile overtake his face as an idea occurred to him. “I” he announced loudly for the whole room to hear, “am going to buy you and Grunkle Ford a boat.”
“What?” Mabel turned around and sat down on the table facing Dipper, heedless of the fact that her foot was now in the butter. “No fair, Dipper, I was going to buy them a boat.”
“Well I already called it,” Dipper said. “You snooze, you lose.”
Mabel scowled at him for a moment, before giving a tentative smile. “Halfsies?” she suggested, holding one hand up in the air.
Dipper slapped his hand against hers to seal the deal. “Halfsies.”