Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

“So. Season two. Any ideas about how to start it off with a bang?”

There was a general shuffling of papers and buzz around the writers’ room table. Zelda, unsurprisingly, was the first to speak. “Well, the viewers are still losing it over Bael. I thought -”

“Just a moment,” Ian interrupted. “Do you guys think we can hold off on having Bael show up again until the finale?”

Around the table, the team exchanged looks.

“What, like…like a horror movie, kind of suspense build, sort of thing? Yeah dude, that makes sense,” Ricardo said, but he still sounded uncertain. “But - all the way to the finale? That seems like too long, man. Now he’s shown his hand, wouldn’t Bael be trying to kill Stella, like, constantly?”

Ian blinked. “What? Why would he be trying to kill her?”

The look Zelda shot him was one Ian knew she only turned in his direction when he was being particularly inscrutable or ridiculous. “We did just literally finish the season with him using Sam as a puppet to try to drop her down a bottomless pit.”

“Yeah, but Stella doesn’t know that’s Bael! We revealed him to the audience through Alcor, but she still doesn’t know he even exists. Why would he try to kill her? Think about his endgame, guys.”

The faces around the table were still blank. Ian met Zelda’s eyes, hoping for understanding from the writer who was practically his second brain, but she just gave her head a shake so small it barely disturbed her bubblegum-coloured hair.

“I thought his endgame was to kill her. And Alcor. And open the gateway to the Dungeon Dimension, and unleash his true power and wrath on the world, and finally get caught up with Political Intrigue: But With Dragons,” Chris piped up, and Ian pressed the heel of his hand against his right eye.

“Yes, but that’s what he wants you to - Do you remember how we decided the Dungeon Dimension had to be unlocked?”

“With Alcor’s power, yeah.” Zelda tapped her pen against her lip piercing. “That makes sense, that Bael would want to keep Stella alive to use her to persuade Alcor to open the gateway - but then the bottomless pit doesn’t -”

“Sheesh, you guys, are you all brain-dead today?” There was a dull pressure building against Ian’s prosthetic, not quite an ache yet but definitely threatening to become one, and he could swear he caught a whiff of ozone and…margaritas?

Ricardo made a face at Zelda, who sighed. “Sorry, boss, but whatever you were plotting really didn’t come across this time.”

“What? But -” Ian shook his head, blowing out a breath that was halfway to a laugh. “We were all on the same page setting up the season finale! We all knew where this was going, right? It’s obvious.” It was, a series of simple, shining steps to world domination. They’d all brainstormed over Bael, talked his goals and motivation and personality to death - did they really not see - “Stella was never really going to fall in the bottomless pit. That was why Sam got to break through and save her, remember? It was just to show her how little Alcor really cared about her, that he could just let her fall!”

“But he does care about her,” Chris pointed out, and Ian could just strangle the guy with his own trachea, he really could. “So that’s not going to -”

“It doesn’t matter if Alcor really cares about Stella or not! Jeez, were you paying any attention when we hashed out Bael or were you just taking a nap that day? All he cares about is whether Stella thinks Alcor cares about her.” Ian leaned forward expectantly, letting out a sigh when the confused faces didn’t instantly morph into looks of realisation. Zelda looked like she might be catching on, but Ian could almost see the wheels spinning uselessly in all of the others’ heads. “Look, fine, I’ll spell it out for you. Stella’s only in this because she thinks Alcor is a good guy, that he’s on her side. Alcor would do just about anything to keep Bael locked up and the world safe, Bael’s not an idiot, he’d know that after Alcor locked him up in the first place. He’s not going to pin all his plans on another demon, even a weirdo like Alcor, being enough of a stupid sap to let him out just so one puny human doesn’t bite it a couple years early.“

He paused for a moment, feeling a hollowness growing under his feet with every note Chris scribbled in his binder and every tap of Zelda’s pen against her lip ring. "But humans are a whole bunch more sentimental, and a lot more gullible. All Bael needs to do is convince Stella that Alcor’s using her, that she can’t trust he’s got her or humanity’s best interests at heart - and Alcor himself will help out with that, he’s not exactly the most forthcoming guy, and he’s been keeping some pretty big secrets - and Stella and her soft, tender little heart will go running straight for somebody she thinks she can trust. Another human who she already loves, who understands what it’s like to be under a demon’s control - another human who’s still under a demon’s control, because no matter how powerful love might be or what it might be able to conquer, he still didn’t put a time limit on his contract with Bael. And because of her deal with Alcor -”

“Stella can use Alcor’s powers,” Ricardo said, looking like Ian had just pulled the tablecloth off a fully-set table without spilling a drop from any of the wineglasses.

“Wait, do you mean Sam didn’t actually get control back from Bael in the last episode?” Chris asked, and Ian reached for his coffee mug, only to find it missing. 

“Of course he did, but only because Bael let him. That’s why that line to Alcor about love not conquering all and the code about fine print! Didn’t you -” Ian cut himself off, hearing his own voice very quiet in the suddenly-stifling stillness of the meeting room. “It’s really obvious, isn’t it?”

“Obvious? No way, man!” Ricardo was grinning ear to ear, spinning his pen between his fingers. “Having Bael use Stella to set him free is an awesome idea! The hard part’s gonna be driving that wedge between Stella and Alcor naturally and hinting at Bael being involved so it doesn’t look like it came outta nowhere when the reveal hits, but doesn’t give the game away too soon… That’s evil genius at work, man.”

Ian managed a smile, but it refused to stay on his face for more than half a second.

“Yep. Coffee,” he managed, pushing his chair out from the table and giving it a nasty shove when it caught on the carpet and refused to move. “Keep talking.”

...

Zelda cornered him in the office kitchen, drumming his fingers rhythmically against the counter as he watched the coffeemaker drip erratically into the pot. “Are you…feeling all right?”

Ian stopped drumming. “Hm? Fine! Haven’t had my coffee yet! Eye’s kind of aching, but it does that sometimes! Yup, everything’s peachy, if this coffeepot would just hurry up -” He slammed a fist against the counter, and the coffeepot shook. “Evil genius. I’m -" 

He took a deep breath, let it out slowly, uncurling the fingers of his fist. Zelda was giving him a look that was somewhere between weirded out and seriously alarmed, but there wasn’t a trace of pity or fear in it.

"I’m a jerk,” Ian said, instead of whatever had been running around his head. It took effort to cut the train off, but he managed it. “I should apologise to those guys. Not their fault I didn’t share enough of the plan. I gotta remember that even if this is my show, it’s not just my show.”

“Yeah,” Zelda agreed, reaching around Ian to grab the carafe and pouring herself a mug of the coffee that must have been brewed earlier that morning. She stirred in a spoonful of whitener, meeting and holding Ian’s gaze. “Look, is something going on? Because that didn’t seem like usual story frustration. And I mean we all know you want it to be perfect, but that sounds like a pretty solid plot to me, so I doubt it’s the problem.”

Ian glanced down at his hand splayed against the counter, then back up at Zelda. “You think? It’s not too obvious?”

Zelda shrugged. “Well, you stumped your own writers, so I think even your famously dedicated fans will have a little trouble with this one if we play it right. Seriously, boss, you gotta cut yourself some slack.” Her voice was heavy with admiration as she said, “I don’t know anybody else who would’ve come up with an idea that makes that much sense and is still such a challenge to figure out, right off the top of his head. It’ll be a really satisfying reveal if we build it up right and get all the pieces in place. We’ll work out how to make it amazing for the show.”

Ian blew out a breath. 

Zelda tapped her spoon against the lip of her mug to shake off a few drips of coffee before dropping the spoon into the sink. “So. You still wanna talk about it, or -”

“Absolutely no way,” Ian said, and watched relief wash over Zelda’s face. “No, I just needed to take a breather. Get some perspective. But thanks. And sorry for calling you all brain-dead.” He somehow managed a smile that didn’t seem forced or too tight. “You’re the best henchmen an evil genius could ask for.”

Zelda’s grin was bright and gleaming. “We do our best. Now come on, you’ve got a bunch of henchmen to apologise to. And we’ve got a secret evil plot to…plot.”

…

The ring was distracting.

Mira kept having to stop in the middle of typing to look at it, the sparkle leaping out and catching her eye. It was strange - it wasn't like she wasn't used to wearing bright, sparkly, eye-catching jewellery. But then again, none of the jewellery she was used to wearing had been an engagement ring.

Her engagement ring.

Maybe it was normal to not be able to look away from your own engagement ring. Mira wouldn't know. This was the first time she'd ever had one. She was pretty sure, though, that it wasn't normal to feel a little bit sick every time you looked at it.

She forced her eyes back up to the screen. It wasn't like she wasn't happy about it. She was thrilled! Ecstatic, even! Not even a teeny, tiny little bit...nervous. That’d be silly. Because there was nothing to be nervous about! She was marrying the man she’d fallen head over heels in love with, the man who loved everything about her, no matter how silly or unconventional, the one other person she’d trusted with the...stranger side of her life, and who hadn’t run screaming in the other direction when she’d done so, the man who’d literally put out his own eye for her, the man who’d been completely willing to die for her - 

Nope. Absolutely nothing to be nervous about there.

Mira huffed out a sigh, trying to make her eyes focus on the blinking cursor in front of her. It was almost hypnotic, the little black bar vanishing from existence only to reappear again, and again, and again...

"He's doing it again!"

Mira's strangled scream nearly covered the sound of her chair collapsing to the floor, backwards. Thin air caught her before she slammed into the ground, a soft cushion of nothing that she could feel herself sink, slowing, into for a moment before she hit the point where the air bounced her back upright. She abruptly spun around, fixing Alcor with a glare.

"What did I say about popping up behind me when I'm working?"

Alcor at least had the decency to look sheepish, though it was a little unnerving with his gold-on-black eyes. "Not to. But, Mira -"

"Ah," Mira interrupted, holding up one finger in front of the demon's face.

Alcor let out a breath Mira hadn't seen him take, slouching forward in midair to dangle by the little batwings sticking out of the small of his back.

"Sorry," he muttered, to the gold-tipped toes of his shiny black shoes.

"Apology accepted," Mira said, settling back in her chair. "So what emergency needs my special touch this time?"

“Your boyf-fffffffffiancé. He’s doing the thing.”

It took everything Mira had not to roll her eyes.

“We talked about this,” she said. “Actually, we’ve talked about this, like, multiple times. I’m pretty sure we had an entire giant fight over this. You might remember it? It ended with Ian losing an eye...?”

“That’s not fair,” Alcor grumbled, sinking lower in the air, crossing his arms over his chest and pouting like a little kid. “You know that’s not what I’m talking about.”

Mira let out a long, slow breath that she had to work hard to keep from turning into an exasperated sigh. “Right, right. You trust Ian. It’s Bill you’re worried about. Et cetera, et cetera - look, would it kill you to just be happy for me for once?”

She regretted the words as soon as they came out of her mouth. Mira huffed out another breath, shaking her head and holding up a hand before Alcor could say another word. “No, no, I’m sorry. I know why, and I know that was outta line. I’m just -”

Alcor nodded, and shot Mira a rueful smile. “Yeah. The whole wedding thing’s a little overwhelming, huh?”

“It’s a lot overwhelming!” Mira slammed both hands down beside the keyboard. “Why is there so much that needs doing? And why do I have to do it? Don’t answer that, I know it’s because Ian’s got a major deadline coming up and I was the one who decided we should try and book the Castle on the Hill and have a tea party theme and I know Rosa’s been a huge help and my parents and his parents are trying to help and we’ve got plenty of time and - !”

She stopped, breathing hard, realising that at some point she’d thrown both hands up in the air. Alcor had sat down cross-legged in midair, leaning his chin in one hand as he watched her rant.

“Okay, I came here to talk to you, but it sounds like you might need to talk more than I do,” he said, when Mira stopped and dropped her arms into her lap. “What’s going on?”

“Nothing,” Mira muttered, glaring down at her ring. “I hate wedding planning.”

“I don’t think there are a lot of people out there who just love it,” Alcor said, reasonably.

“Noooooo,” Mira admitted. “But it’s getting in the way of anything nice I want to do with Ian, and this deadline I’ve got coming up, and - it just sucks." She huffed out a breath over her top lip, staring at her bangs as they fluttered in the draft, and then turned back to Alcor. “Okay. I think I’ve got it out of my system. Hit me. What’s Ian done now that’s freaking you out?”

Alcor took a deep breath in, opening his mouth wide, and then huffed it back out again, his shoulders drooping as his mouth fell shut again. 

“I just ran what I was about to say through my head before I said it out loud, and it turns out it’s really dumb,” he admitted, and Mira couldn’t help but laugh.

“Well, you could say that about a lot of things you say,” she said, as gently as she could manage, hoping Alcor was picking up on the gentle teasing in her words. 

“Yeah, ha ha ha. Has anyone ever told you that you’re hilarious?” Alcor asked, crossing his arms over his chest. “Because they were definitely lying.”

Mira stuck her tongue out at him. Alcor stuck his out in response, forked end waggling before he tucked it back into his mouth.

“You should keep an eye on Ian, though,” he said, after a moment, a note of seriousness bleeding back into his voice. “I mean, it sounds really dumb to be worried about him because he’s too good at his job - but, just, look out for him? He seemed really upset about this plot twist he planned that none of his writers picked up on, and I don’t think it was just because it was probably too convoluted for Gisnep.”

Mira pressed a hand to her forehead, covering her eyes. “Are you spying on my boyfriend again.”

Alcor’s wings flared. “No! Well. Maybe. A little.” 

“Okay, I see a simple solution to this problem. Step one: don’t spy on my boyfriend.”

“Miraaaaaaaa,” Alcor whined, dragging out Mira’s name. Mira ignored him. 

“Seriously. None of us need this right now. You’re just going to worry yourself into another fit of paranoia and do something that’ll set all of us off and we’ll all end up regretting it. Just don’t even go there, okay?” She turned back to her keyboard, huffing out another breath. “I know you’re going to bring up Area 51 when I say this, but - it’s not gonna kill you to trust him a little.”

Alcor didn’t respond. Mira didn’t look to see whether he was still there, instead turning her attention back to the seating chart. This would be so much easier if she knew whether Mythri was planning to bring a date, or a dragon.

...

"Writing your resume?"

Ian looked up from the drawing table, blinking a little to bring Xander into focus. "Hm? Oh, no, just - drafting. Scripting. Making hilarious jokes that'll probably never see the light of day thanks to Standards & Practices. Idly daydreaming about world domination. You know."

"Artist stuff," Xander agreed, with a grin. "I finished those colour keys for the haunted lumberjack camp, and you're the only other person left in the building. You planning on heading home anytime tonight?"

Ian managed to muster a smile. "Nah, there's a couple jokes here that still need tightening up, some lines I'm not sure about, and this is going to the animators in the morning. I'm just gonna stick around until I'm either sure they're good enough or I'm delirious enough with sleep deprivation that they start looking good to me."

Xander huffed out a laugh, raising a hand in a wave goodbye. "I'll drop by your office and wake you up before your first meeting, then. Night!"

"You're a lifesaver," Ian called after him, as Xander started down the hall.

He stared at the storyboards in front of him until he heard the alarm beep and the door slam behind Xander, the boom of the heavy steel echoing through the empty studio and picking up eerie, off-key harmonics in some corner somewhere. Then Ian sighed, pushing the boards aside.

A little rummaging in his desk drawers (under the piles of Mizar the Magnificent code keys, napkin sketches and notes, fan letters, business cards for people he'd forgotten to call back, hate mail, business cards for people he didn't want to call back, letters from people who really, really wanted him to know about the highly specific sexual things they wanted to do to Stella's pet platypus, and his emergency shaker of chocolate sprinkles) revealed a hard-bound book, rather shabby with age and poor maintenance, labeled MYTHS AND LEGENDS OF THE PACIFIC NORTHWEST.

The book was so old that its maps still showed California as all part of the mainland, and it was written in a dialect that was a slog to wade through even for somebody who read codes quite literally in his sleep, but even though most of its scant number of pages were dedicated to things that really were just myths, it was still one of the best resources he'd found so far. Even the trawl he'd done online (on his work computer, under the pretense of researching demons for MtM) hadn't been able to turn up much information on the supposedly-infamous Bill Cipher.

This might have been because, according to the slim volume in Ian's hands, the demon's 'official' name in the pantheon (pantheon? Demons were beings of chaos and nightmares, spawning and devouring each other throughout eternity, sometimes going dormant for centuries at a time, what single-life-spanned idiot had thought they could catalogue all of them?) was not the incongruously mundane Bill Cipher, but the much fancier-sounding Triangulum. Still sounded stupid and fake to Ian, but whatever.

They said to 'know your enemy'. Ian still wasn't sure who 'they' were, but he had to agree. He'd been researching Cipher ever since Mira had confessed she still had nightmares about what had happened last year. The more he knew, the better he could avoid ending up in situations like - well, like the one he'd ended up in earlier that day. If he knew more about Bill Cipher, more about what he'd been like and how he'd worked and what had made him tick, maybe Ian would've been able to tell if the plot that had fallen together so easily in his thoughts had really just been the product of creative inspiration, hard work, and firsthand observation of the way demons did business, or if it was...

It didn't help that it was impossibly frustrating to research Cipher. And not just because of the scarcity and age of the resources that held even a scrap of actual information about the thousand-year-dead demon, or because Ian had to keep his research a secret from Mira so she wouldn't feel any worse than she already did (there was no hiding anything from Alcor, but he still tried). Because...

Well. If Ian was being honest, because it still felt like he ought to just know. 

Rationally, he knew he shouldn't expect it, but - he still should be able to just reach out and have all the knowledge he needed, right there at his fingertips. He'd always felt that, one way or another, but... Alcor might have taken the memories of the things Bill had known, but he hadn't taken the memory of how it had felt to know them. Sometimes Ian still had dreams about rising above everything, looking down, seeing it all finally slotting together into a perfect pattern below him -

"You can't keep doing this to yourself," Ian muttered angrily to himself, grabbing the sprinkles out of his desk drawer and shaking out a handful. He shoved them into his mouth and slammed the book open before his nerve could fail him, picking back up in the section where he'd found the first mention of Triangulum.

Chapter Text

Mira picked the phone up on the fourth ring, plugging it into the wall port to bring the call up on the TV's screen and toggling the camera to 'off'. She was in no state to be seen by anyone, especially not the photo-perfect Rosa Darling, who had probably never gotten a giant stress zit on her chin in her life.

"Rosaaaaa," she sighed, as Rosa's face appeared huge and bright on the TV screen, beaming like she'd just won the lottery. "What's going on? Are the dress fittings not going well? Oh no, did the dresses not come in? I specifically made sure to order two months ahead of when the bridal websites said to order, but I know I left the fittings too close to the date, I just didn't want anybody's figure changing between the fitting and the wedding and then for the dress not to fit -"

"Calm down, sugarplum," Rosa laughed, cutting Mira off mid-ramble. "Everything's fine, never you fear." A frown creased her forehead, and she asked, "Is there somethin' the matter with your video feed? I see you've got me up, but -"

"Oh, yeah, sorry," Mira lied. "You know what Ian does to electronics. Haven't got it working again since the last time he used it. So what's going on?"

“What, I can’t just give my good friend, the future wife of my best friend, a neighbourly social call?” Rosa asked, teeth blindingly white as she flashed a smile in Mira’s direction. Mira felt her own eyes narrowing in suspicion without her input even before Rosa was halfway through the sentence.

“Not in the middle of wedding planning, you can’t. What’s going on?”

“Oh, nothin’,” Rosa said, the smile not even wavering. “Just thought you sounded a little stressed when I texted you last night, so I figured - what better time for a spa day? Just us girls, masseuses, and mimosas! And you could get your mani-pedi done for the wedding at the same time...” Her smile turned soft, a little pleading, and Mira sighed.

“You need a break, don’t you.”

Rosa’s smile vanished. “I never knew planning a tour could be so stressful! I’m fixin’ ta scream if I hear one more word from the mouth of some two-left-footed tin-eared square in a three-piece suit! Mira, please.”

Mira huffed out a sigh, but it turned into a laugh without her input about halfway through. “Fine, fine,” she laughed, rolling her eyes. “You twisted my arm. I guess I could take a break from trying to write these stupid vows for massages and facials, if I have to.”

Just like that, Rosa’s smile was back, beaming megawatts from the screen. “Great! Just you get your pretty li’l self dolled up, I’ll be over to pick y’all up in an hour.”

Before Mira could say anything, the screen winked off as Rosa hung up. Mira let out a groan, and dropped her head into her hands.

...

Ian opened his eyes, and immediately shut them again.

When he opened his eyes again, though, it was still there. Ian groaned, and leaned his chin against one fist.

"Really?" he asked, even though he already knew the answer.

The little pixel star with wings staring back at him from his tablet screen conspired to look innocent. It would have been doing a pretty good job of it, too, if Ian hadn't caught the eye winking shut in its very centre as he scrolled down the page.

"I know you're still watching," Ian said, idly flicking the winged star with the tip of one finger. "Mind telling me what you're doing spying on me?"

The eye blinked back open in the middle of the symbol, somehow managing to look annoyed even though it was only a handful of pixels high. "Mind telling me what you're doing researching summoning rituals?" Alcor's voice echoed out of the tablet's speaker, made tinny and small. Ian had to stuff down a grin.

"Mizar the Magnificent stuff. Hey, wanna see the storyboards for the next episode?" he asked, and the little symbol of Alcor on his tablet screen raised an eyebrow that it hadn't had a moment before.

"Would you actually show them to me if I said yes?"

"Probably not," Ian agreed, with as much cheer as he could muster. "How's Mira doing? I didn't make it home last night, these deadlines are killer. You know if I go one second over, Ricky Louse shows up in my nightmares?"

"He can't do that," Alcor said dismissively. "Not since my Flock got their hooves on him." The brow over his eye furrowed deeper. "Weren't you supposed to be helping Mira with the seating charts for the wedding last night?"

Ian sucked in a breath. The symbol of Alcor somehow managed, even without a face, to look smug.

"Oh, noooo," Ian moaned, running both hands through his hair as he leaned back from his desk. "Oh, shit. I completely forgot."

“She’s really stressed about it,” Alcor added, with what Ian thought was unnecessary relish. 

“I am the worst boyfriend,” Ian groaned, letting himself fall forwards until his elbows bumped against the desk. He rested his head in his hands, staring down at his knees. “What can I do to make this up to her?”

“Who’re you talking to?”

Ian jerked his head up. Zelda was standing in the doorway, a hand on her hip and one eyebrow quirked. Ian glanced back down at his tablet, but the symbol of Alcor was back to an innocuous cluster of yellow pixels.

Ian gestured vaguely at his tablet. “Wedding stuff.” He paused, thinking, and then said, “Flowers aren’t gonna make up for forgetting I promised to help Mira with the seating chart last night, are they?”

Zelda gave an exaggerated wince. “Oooh. Nope. Well, maybe if by ‘flowers’ you mean ‘singlehandedly ordering all the flowers for the entire wedding’.”

Ian slapped a hand to his forehead. “I’m an idiot,” he muttered.

“Sure are,” Zelda agreed, a little too chirpily. “Now c’mon, mister idiot genius, we’ve got a meeting with S&P in five and I hear they are not happy about how you decided to get around not using Alcor’s actual symbol in the show.”

Ian let his head fall slowly back to rest against the back of his chair. “They were the ones who didn’t want me using the real thing!”

“Yeah, but I think just giving it a top hat wasn’t what they had in mind.” Zelda grinned, holding out a hand. “Come on, up you get.”

Ian gave a long-suffering sigh as he levered himself out of the chair. “Fine. But there’d better be coffee.”

...

"Okay, fine," Mira admitted, turning to face Rosa as she pushed open the spa door. "Maybe I did need a break. And yes, the hoverlimo was very cool, but you still didn't have to -"

The rest of her sentence was drowned out in the shout of, "SURPRISE!"

Mira froze in the doorway in horror, staring in at the crowd assembled in the lobby. Four of her sisters, her mother, and Ian’s mother smiled back.

“You lied to me,” Mira muttered to Rosa, through a smile that was more like gritted teeth.

“ ‘Course I didn’t, sugar,” Rosa said, patting Mira’s shoulder condescendingly. “I told you it’d just be us girls, I just didn’t elaborate on which girls I was talkin’ about. Happy bridal shower!”

“You’ve been spending way too much time around Ian,” Mira grumbled, under her breath, before Ian’s mother scooped her up into a hug.

“How are ya, pumpkin?” She gave Mira a squeeze that all but knocked the air out of Mira, and then stepped back so that Mira’s own mother could get a look at her daughter.

“Parvati sends her regrets, but she’s in the middle of a conference and couldn’t get away,” Mira’s mom said, brushing Mira’s bangs back from her face. “These are getting long, do you have a hair appointment booked?”

“Mom,” Mira complained, ducking out of her mother’s grasp. 

“Just trying to look out for you! There’s so many things to be organised before a wedding, it’s easy for a little thing like that to slip through the cracks,” Mira’s mom said with a smile. “I’ve brought my wedding jewellery, if you’d like to wear it -”

“And I’ve got a laser wand you can use to take care of that zit,” Aniya interjected. 

Before Mira could say anything, sarcastic or otherwise, she had the air nearly knocked out of her again by a slap on the back. Mythri grabbed her around the shoulders, hugging her one-armed with an enormous grin. “Hey, baby sis! Surprised to see us?”

“You have no idea,” Mira muttered, shooting a glare at Rosa, who beamed innocently back at her.

“I did call your friend Sun-mi, but she’s in Iceland studying elf habitats and won’t be back stateside until the wedding, so it looks like it’s just us!” Rosa clapped her hands together in apparent delight, and Mira had to stuff down the nearly-overwhelming urge to roll her eyes. 

“Yep,” she managed, in a tone that was only slightly sarcastic. “Just the...eight of us.”

“Oh, don’t be such a gloomy-guts,” Hana said, coming up on Mira’s other side and throwing an arm around her shoulders too, over Mythri’s. The two of them started walking towards the spa entrance, and Mira had to stumble along to avoid getting knocked over. “This’ll be fun!”

...

“Mr. Beale. Ms. Asuhtyra. Please take a seat.” One of the censors gestured towards the empty chairs at the very end of the ridiculously long conference table they were seated at the other end of. For a moment, Ian debated the merits of taking one of the chairs and rolling it out of the room and back down the hall to his office. The looks on both censors’ faces told him, however, that this would not be taken in the spirit in which it was intended. Ian sat down in one of the chairs instead, Zelda taking the other.

The censor who hadn’t spoken yet leaned forward across the conference table, folding her hands in front of her. Her expression was open and concerned, her navy-blue blazer and pale pink shirt both impeccably pressed and professional, and Ian was suddenly and absurdly reminded of a therapy session.

“Mr. Beale,” she started, “why is it your intention to lead innocent children down the path of cultism, demon-worship, and eventually to the demolition of the fabric of society as we know it?”

Ian blinked.

...

“So when do you two think you’ll start having kids?”

Mira opened her mouth, but was thankfully spared having to come up with some kind of response to Hana’s question when the masseuse dug the heels of both his hands into her shoulders. “Oooumph.”

“Don’t be - oof - ridiculous,” Mythri all but yelled, from Mira’s other side. “Mira’s a - no, a little lower, oh yes thanks - she’s a driven career woman, she’s not thinking about popping out any kids any time soon.”

Mira almost thanked her sister, but then Mythri added, “Besides, you’ll have enough trouble finding time for your own work between the unpaid, unacknowledged labour of keeping up a house and propping up your hubby’s creative career, right, kiddo?”

“Mnrgh,” Mira said, pressing her face as hard as she could into the padded ring at the end of the massage table.

...

“Excuse me?” Zelda asked, leaning forward across the conference table as well. “I don’t think either of us have done anything to warrant this kind of accusation.”

“Uh,” Ian said.

“Of course not,” the censor who’d invited them to have a seat interjected smoothly. “But that’s what the parent groups are going to want to know, when they see the unaltered symbol of a very real, very dangerous demon appear on a GisnepXP show.” He glanced sidelong at Ian before adding, “I don’t have to tell you that, while a sense of humour is greatly valued in our cartoon properties, this is no joking matter.”

Ian bit down on his tongue, and wound his hands together under the table, and didn’t say anything.

“I’m sure that no one needs reminding of that,” Zelda agreed, shooting a pointed glance in Ian’s direction. Ian bit down harder on his tongue.

“Gisnep is trusted by millions of families around the world,” the second censor started, primly, her gaze flicking to Ian's prosthetic eye. “They hold us to the highest of standards for integrity and quality family-focused programming.”

“Okay, but ‘family-focused’ -“ Ian started, and Zelda elbowed him, hard, in the ribs. Ian stifled a sigh, and stopped talking.

...

Mira pulled the tissue paper out of the box and unfolded the garment underneath.

Her first, overwhelming impression was of taupe. Details started to sink in the longer she looked - boxy silhouette, small, structured collar, fake-woodgrain buttons.

"Er," she said. "It's a...coat?"

"It's the Jackie overcoat from Xara," Aniya pointed out, helpfully.

"It definitely is," Mythri agreed. Aniya shot her a dirty look.

"It is the must-have item for fall," she proclaimed, and then, reaching over to put a hand on Mira's knee, "Look, I know our tastes don't always align, but if you'd like, I'll take you on a shopping trip in the city." Mira assumed, here, that by 'the city' Aniya meant 'New York'. "I'm sure we can fit you up with a sweet pastel wardrobe that's a little more...well, mature. I mean, not that you don't look cute, but...now that you're getting married, you're getting serious about your own life, are you sure that 'cute' is the impression you want to give to the world?"

Mira carefully folded the taupe thing and placed it on the chaisse beside her. 

"Thank you," she added, perfunctorily, after a beat.

...

"And just for the record, slapping a red circle with a line through it over the symbol is not an acceptable method of censoring Alcor's sign either," the first censor said, with a pointed look in Ian's direction, and Ian wished wholeheartedly that he had his sprinkle shaker with him for moral support.

"You could have told me all of this in an email," he pointed out. "Why did you decide we had to meet in person?" He didn't add 'so close to the air date'. It showed, Ian decided, admirable restraint.

The two censors exchanged a look.

"You signed the technology use agreement when you signed on to work at Gisnep," the first censor said.

"Which means you may have no expectation of privacy when using company devices to browse the internet," the second censor chimed in, glancing uncomfortably at Ian's eye again.

The bottom fell out of Ian's stomach so fast he thought, for a moment, that he was riding The Magic Fiefdom's famous Crash Mountain coaster.

"Ian?" Zelda asked, and Ian turned back to the censors to avoid meeting her concerned gaze.

...

"I'm not saying that it isn't worth it," Hana elaborated. "I'm just saying, it isn't easy. And it takes compromise." She rolled her eyes. "A loooot of compromise, sometimes. You gotta keep reminding yourself why you love this person."

"Mm," Mira agreed, staring down at the little bot that was pressing purple rhinestones into the pearlescent white polish on her toenails.

Mira's mother nodded. "I remember the first few years with your father," she said, drily. 

"Finn didn't know how to use a washing machine when we got married," Hana agreed. "I mean, a washing machine!"

"Rantej still leaves his dirty socks in the middle of the bedroom floor," Mira's mom said, still nodding along. "Once, I stopped picking them up and washing them to see if he'd notice. When he ran out of socks...he went out and bought a new pack."

Hana, Priya, and Mythri all let out a simultaneous groan, and Aniya sniffed.

"This is why I'm not married."

The bot attending to Mira's toes beeped a cheery little tune, indicating that it was finished, and then extended a silvery rod from its middle and proceeded to gently blow warm air onto Mira's toes.

...

"I do need to research demonology for the show," Ian said, as mildly as he could manage, trying not to let his voice shake. "I'm sure I don't need to tell you how dangerous it could be if I misrepresented a demon in a piece of popular media with a very, very..." He considered his words for a moment, before settling on "...enthusiastic fanbase."

"A danger which could be easily avoided by not featuring demons on a children's television show," the second censor said, a little too sharply. She wasn't even trying to hide that she was staring at his prosthetic eye, now, and Ian felt a vague wave of irritation rush over him.

"It's pretty difficult to tell someone to be careful about something if you can't give them any information at all about what it is or how it works," he shot back. 

Thankfully, Zelda raised a hand to interrupt before it could turn into an argument. "Does this have to do with the introduction of Bael? I know he's been a surprise favourite with the fanbase, but -"

"It has more to do with Mr. Beale's fascination with a certain demon that was presumed dead as of the Transcendence," the first censor said, almost regretfully. "A demon that bears a more than passing resemblance to your Bael. I'm certain no one here intends to be responsible for the resurrection of Bill Cipher, but -"

Ian had to lean his face into one hand to make clapping his hand over his mouth to stifle the snort of laughter look nonchalant.

"Is something funny, Mr. Beale?" the second censor asked, her voice icy enough to keep food fresh for weeks.

Ian waved his free hand dismissively. The second censor's eyes narrowed, but she didn't say anything. 

Instead, she unfolded and refolded her hands in front of her, clearly composing herself. "This meeting is a courtesy to you, Mr. Beale. Whatever your intentions, we hope you will be aware, when making creative decisions in the future, of Gisnep's stance on...these matters. Your...personal interests should remain in the realm of your personal life."

"Got it. I will make sure to remove any and all references to fiddle music from Mizar the Magnificent," Ian said, around his hand. Zelda elbowed him in the ribs again.

"Again," the first censor sighed, "I assume no one here needs to be reminded that this is no joking matter."

Ian drew in a long breath, and then let it out again, slowly, wishing once more that his trusty shaker of chocolate sprinkles would fit in his back pocket for occasions like this one.

...

"I'm guessing you've got a dress all picked out, this close to the date," Ian's mother said. After all the husband horror stories, Mira latched onto the conversational thread like a lifeline.

"Yeah, actually - just a second." She pulled out her phone, flipping through screenshots until she found the one she wanted and holding it out for Ian's mother to see. "Angelic Petti released the Moon Dream Lapin Nuptials collection this year, I had to take a vacation day from work so I could camp out on the webpage and place an order as soon as they opened up preorders - but isn't it perfect?"

"You bought a dress?" Mira's mom said, and even though she was smiling, Mira's heart slowly sank at the tone in her voice.

"Yes, and it's perfect," she said, with what she hoped was a note of finality.

"You didn't need to do that," Priya said. "I've still got great-grandmother's saree from when I matriculated, you could -"

Mira's smile was starting to feel frayed around the edges, but she held it in place as she shook her head. "You're so much taller than me, and I wouldn't dare try to hem all that gold trim."

Mira's mother pressed both lips together. "That's a shame. Your father would have loved to see you in it. You know one -"

"One woman from every generation of his family since great-grandmother has worn that saree at her wedding, yes, I did know that," Mira said, through gritted teeth. "I've already paid for this preorder -"

Hana, peering over Mira's shoulder at her phone and the screenshot of the dress, sucked in a sharp breath. "Not that it's not...adorable," she said, "but please tell me you didn't pay that much for it."

Mira drew in a deep breath, and then let it out slowly, deciding she wouldn’t tell them about the shopping service and shipping fees. Or the taxes.

“This is the dress that I want to wear for my special, once-in-a-lifetime day when I marry the man I love,” she said, through gritted teeth, before turning to Rosa. “You said you had dinner planned too? I’m feeling pretty hungry.” She did not add that she was also feeling a strong and desperate need for a glass of something bright pink and very alcoholic. 

“Sheesh, okay, bridezilla,” Mythri muttered, and Mira had to shut her eyes.

Rosa clapped her hands together. “Dinner! Yes, that sounds like a wonderful idea.” She slung an arm around Mira’s shoulders, muttering, “I am so sorry,” into Mira’s ear as she started to lead Mira towards the spa doors. “Hoverlimo’s this way!”

“Just please tell me you didn’t also plan me a surprise bachelorette,” Mira muttered back.

Rosa’s silence told her all she needed to know.

...

"So correct me if I'm wrong," Ian started, "but your concern is over us...glorifying demons and demonic worship in our television show all about how dangerous and ultimately harmful summoning demons always is? And of us accidentally resurrecting a cult that worships a demon who's been dead a thousand years by showing him as a pun-obsessed, annoying jerk antagonist in a children's cartoon, who takes advantage of and ruins the lives of everyone who tries to summon him?"

The two censors exchanged another look.

"Well, yes," the first censor said, finally. 

Ian nodded.

"Good to see we're on the same page, then," he said, pushing his chair back from the table. 

"Mr. Beale -" the second censor started, but Ian cut her off with a look.

"We're hitting the crunch here before we go back to air, and I'm personally vetting all the episode scripts, so unless you had something else to add, I have a billion other things I need to be doing right now," he said. "Unless you want to delay the new episodes? I mean, your call. I'm sure the executives will understand about the lost ratings and revenue."

The second censor opened her mouth, then closed it.

"No, that - that was everything," she managed. "Please have the new symbol designs in to us by ten o'clock tomorrow morning for approval."

"Great," Ian said, turning and starting to take a step towards the door. He stopped and spun back on his heel to face the censors, though, one hand raised with his index finger pointed at the ceiling.

"Actually, there is one more thing," he said, as Zelda got up from the table to follow him. "I've been researching Cipher because he's so similar to Bael. Thought it was worth it to make sure I didn't use any of Cipher's real, unaltered symbols or powers and accidentally resurrect him or his cult." His own smile felt a little too strained, too wide, his prosthetic eye sitting uncomfortably in its socket at the unfamiliar stretch to his face. "Trust me, if I ever resurrect Bill Cipher, it's going to be on purpose."

...

The apartment door slammed with a satisfying finality behind Ian, and he kicked his shoes off with more force than strictly necessary, one colliding with the wall and leaving a black streak. Ian sighed, kneeling down to scrub at it with his thumb until it came off. 

“I have had the worst day,” he complained, as he stomped out into the living room. “I’m pretty sure they’re going to replace me with Rachel Spice and we’re going to have to move into a cardboard box under an overpass and live on rainwater and napkins -”

He stopped. 

Mira was sitting slumped down on the couch. At least, Ian was pretty sure it was Mira. It was hard to tell behind the five feet of tulle standing up in the air between them.

“Is that...every petticoat you own?” he asked, looking at the bare brown legs sticking out of the pile of cotton-candy-coloured floof. The toenails of the feet propped against the coffee table were each painted a pretty opal colour, he noticed, with a single purple rhinestone decorating each.

“Mmhm,” Mira hummed, from somewhere behind the petticoat barricade.

“Why are you wearing all of your petticoats at once?” Ian asked, carefully, resisting the urge to gently brush his finger down the sole of one of Mira’s feet to hear her shriek. That hadn’t sounded like a happy ‘mmhm’. 

Mira’s next words just confirmed Ian’s suspicions. “I thought it would make me feel better.” There was a pause, and then Mira added, unnecessarily, “It didn’t.”

“Oh, starshine,” Ian sighed, deliberating for a moment before plopping down on the couch beside his girlfriend, and the petticoat monster slowly devouring his girlfriend. “What's the matter?”

Mira’s arms were crossed over her chest, she was slouched down as far as she could go without sliding right off the couch, and she was pouting. And worse, she was trying to pretend she wasn’t pouting. So this wasn’t a ‘sad kitten eyes trying to get something’ situation. Ian was suddenly and forcibly reminded of his conversation with Alcor, earlier, the one that had all but been driven out of his head by his horrible meeting with S&P. “Oh, Mira, shit, I am so sorry. I really meant to be here last night to help with the seating chart, but things got crazy at work and I had so many things I had to finish and I completely forgot -”

“Let’s not do it.”

Ian blinked. “What?”

Mira turned her face towards Ian, the light catching two shiny streaks down her cheeks as she moved. “I said let’s not do it. The whole...wedding thing.”

Ian swallowed, hard, his heart giving an unpleasant lurch in his chest.

“Okay,” he managed, at last, his mouth dry, his prosthetic eye throbbing in its socket. “Okay, if that’s what you want -”

“Let’s just not get married and keep living together like a couple of weird roommates who’re also in love with each other forever,” Mira continued, and Ian let out a long breath, feeling his fingers shaking. “Weddings are dumb and stupid and I can’t believe I ever wanted one in the first place and I hate them.” She must have kicked her feet, because the petticoat avalanche fluttered. 

“What? No, you don’t, you were so excited about planning this - what about the tea party at the Castle on the Hill? That’s not dumb, that’s -”

“Cancelled,” Mira said, flatly turning back to stare at her petticoats. “I got back from the worst surprise bridal shower ever and I’ve got two missed calls and one of them is from the venue saying they overbooked by accident and can we push our wedding to July of next year and one of them is from the bridal shop saying they have lost my entire order of bridesmaid dresses and I hate this and weddings are dumb!” She punctuated this with another furious kick of her feet, her face screwing up like she was trying not to cry.

Ian opened his mouth to tell her that weddings weren’t dumb or stupid and that she wasn’t dumb for wanting one, that if she really didn’t want one anymore then that was fine but if she did still want one then they should have one, that he’d help, that he’d make sure she didn’t have to do all of the hard work and planning on her own, that they’d make certain it would be beautiful and fun and wonderfully imperfect together. But instead of any of that, what came out of his mouth were two words. “Let’s elope.”

Mira stared at Ian as though he’d told her she had a duck on her head. 

“Let’s elope,” Ian repeated, liking the idea more with every passing second. “Forget the wedding. Forget the venue and the seating chart and the bridesmaid dresses. We'll go somewhere neither of us have been, do the ceremony, have our honeymoon, and be back for work on Monday, married."

Mira put her head on one side like she was seriously considering it.

"We can still read the vows we wrote, right?" she asked, and Ian pressed his lips together, forcing a smile.

"Definitely, if that's what you want," he said, trying to push the files and files of discarded drafts stored on his tablet out of his mind. "Where’s somewhere in the country that you’ve always wanted to go?”

Mira was still staring at him like she was trying to read his thoughts printed on his forehead, but her eyes narrowed, that steely glint of determination that Ian liked so much settling in behind them. “The cat cafe in Austin?”

Ian considered it for a minute. “Maybe somewhere where they wouldn’t ask us to buy pastries before we could get married there? I was thinking a little more public, like..." He realised how silly the words sounded even as they came out of his mouth. “The Extraterrestrial Highway in Nevada?”

Mira pursed up her lips and put her head to one side like she was considering it. “I think that would be dusty. And hard to get a JP all the way out there.” She tapped a finger against her chin thoughtfully. “What about Niagara Falls?”

“Too busy,” Ian said. “Want tourists in all of our wedding photos?”

Mira shuddered.

“Hm,” she said. “Where’s somewhere in this country, that’s out in the open, cute and fun, and touristy enough that they’ll let us get married there but not so touristy that it’ll be crowded and miserable, that’s also weird enough for both of us?”

She looked up in sudden realisation, her eyes meeting Ian’s, and a smile broke across her face as they both said in near-perfect unison, “Gravity Falls!”

...

Several hundred miles north, in the heart of a forest, the bucket of an excavator bit into dirt and sank down, deeper than the worker operating it expected it to go. She pulled the bucket up, and the ground came with it, revealing a hole sloping down, cutting deep into the bedrock. From where the excavator was parked, the operator couldn’t see more than rock walls, leading down a few feet before they disappeared into darkness.

And, for just an instant, from the depths of the cave she seemed to have uncovered, a flicker of gold.

Chapter Text

In the Mindscape, something stirred.

Dipper felt the ripples, less like a water droplet landing in a still pond and more like the aftershocks of an earthquake. He stopped in the middle of seeding a particularly good Ghost of Presidents' Day Past nightmare in the mind of a slumbering corrupt public official, and listened, hard.

The ripples died away, slowly, to a faint tremor and then only a dissatisfied grumbling. But something had changed - something had shifted. The tenor of the Mindscape had modulated to a different key. And by the sounds of things, that key was minor.

Dipper groaned, and twisted together the ends of the dream, leaving it on a cliffhanger with a heavily-implied 'to be continued'. He'd be back the next night to give the lady Presidents' Days Present and Future and work the moral in there. Probably. Unless whatever had caused the ripples was more interesting, or he forgot.

It took some tracking to locate the source of the ripples - they'd all but died away by the time Dipper started to look, and there were enough echoes and distortions around the Pacific coast what with all the pockets of residual demonic energy that were still hanging around even a full millennium after he'd destroyed half the coastline, it was like California itself was holding a grudge - but eventually, Dipper managed to narrow down the epicentre to a few square miles.

And groaned, again.

He knew exactly where the ripple had started. Because, of course, right smack-dab in the middle of those few square miles was the town of Gravity Falls.

"How is it that, even after the entire world gets turned into a museum of the weird, this is still the weirdest place in it?" Dipper asked the town at large.

Gravity Falls, obviously, didn't answer, sitting innocuously quiet and cheerful in the summer sun.

A metaphysical tug pulled Dipper's attention away from the town before he could spend too much time staring at it and reflecting on one of the few secrets of the universe he still, for all his omniscience, hadn't managed to crack. Mira was calling, with apparently impeccable timing.

"What's up?" Dipper asked, popping into Mira's living room. Mira was beaming head to toe, wearing what looked like every petticoat she owned, and holding Ian's hand with the hand that wasn't waving a bag of candy-coated chocolate-covered peanuts. 

"Guess what? We're moving this wedding to Gravity Falls! Like, right now. As in we are eloping. Candy-coated peanuts in exchange for a little help getting there?" She gave the bag another wave.

Dipper looked from Mira, to Ian, and back to Mira again.

"You're kidding me, right?" he asked, finally.

Mira glanced over at Ian, both of their smiles slipping slightly.

"Oh no," she said, her voice dropping. "Now what?"

"Okay, I'm putting Niagara back on the table," Ian said. "The tourists aren't as bad after the summer season...or we could take the rebooking the Castle on the Hill offered us, and that'll give us time to find that shipment of bridesmaid dresses -"

"No," Mira said, not looking away from Dipper’s face. “What’s going on, Alcor? I thought you'd be happy we'd picked somewhere that was so important to you." Her voice was too sweet, her smile too tight. Dipper had to stuff down a shudder.

“I...actually don’t know yet,” he admitted. He scowled at the way Mira rolled her eyes and crossed her arms over her chest. “Hey, a random magic ripple came out of there not five minutes ago! The whole Mindscape’s still humming! And then you summon me up and want to go there? Something is weird here.”

Mira's eyes narrowed, and Dipper had to resist the sudden and almost overpowering urge to look over at Ian.

"Yeah, I'm actually with the literal demon on this one," Ian said, finally giving Dipper an excuse to turn in his direction. "No offence, but last time we got mixed up with mysterious forces beyond our comprehension..." He finished the sentence by waving one hand vaguely in the direction of his prosthetic eye.

Mira sucked in a long breath, her expression terrible, and then slowly let it out again.

"Can you find out what this magic ripple was?" she asked, her voice the particular kind of tight of a very angry person trying to be calm and rational.

"Probably, but it might take a little while," Dipper answered, honestly.

"Great. How about an overbooking at our venue? Can you fix that? And find my lost order of bridesmaid dresses? And while you're at it, do you want to finish our seating chart? Please bear in mind that I'm pretty sure one of Ian's relatives may actually drop dead if she gets startled or touched by a cool breeze, and that my sister is planning on bringing an actual baby Chinese Fireball as her plus one." Mira set the bag of candy-coated peanuts down on the couch behind her, ticking off things on her fingers as she listed them. "Oh, and we still need to sort out whether or not Grandmother is coming and whether or not she's bringing her boyfriend, and whether he's bringing his boyfriend, and get the rest of the invitees who haven't RSVP'd to get on that so we can get numbers and any food sensitivities to the caterer so that we know how much we're going to have to pay them so we can decide how much budget we have left for flowers -"

"All right, I get it!" Dipper interrupted, and Mira sucked in another long breath, this time less like she was trying to keep her patience and more like she was trying to catch her breath. "Seriously, I get it, this wedding planning stuff sounds like a nightmare. But can't you, I don't know, just go down the street to the JP and get it done this afternoon?"

Mira slowly sank down onto the couch, her pile of petticoats enveloping her and the bag of candy-coated peanuts.

"Yeah," she muttered, from somewhere within the cloud of tulle. "I guess so." Even if Dipper hadn't been able to see and feel the soggy concrete-coloured blanket that fell over her aura, the defeat was obvious in her voice.

Ian shot Dipper a helpless look, and Dipper winced in sympathy. 

"Look, give me twenty-four hours," Dipper finally said, making up his mind. "I'll figure out what's going on in Gravity Falls and whether or not it's safe for you guys to go up there. And if it's not, or if I can't..."

He sucked in a deep breath he didn't really need, feeling lungs he hadn't had a second before inflate. "Then I'll help you with your - ugh - seating chart."

...

Gravity Falls was nothing like Dipper remembered it, and yet, somehow, it was exactly the same.

Oh, on the surface it had changed a lot over the years. The forest had grown up, and been cut back; businesses and families had come and gone; a city had sprung up around the protective magical bubble surrounding the site of the world’s greatest magical disaster, and then withered away again as magic became more commonplace, its birthplace protected by a national park. Generations had come and gone, each leaving its small but significant mark. The statue of Nathaniel Northwest had been pulled down and replaced by, of all things, a buffalo.

But the UFO-shaped hole in the cliffs still loomed over the town, protectively cupped in its little hollow. The five-times-great-grandchildren of the Manotaurs Dipper had met on his and Mabel’s first summer there still roamed the mountainside, challenging unwary travellers to arm-wrestling competitions and antagonising the Multibear. The gnomes still migrated underground every winter, only to emerge, freshly energized and doubly annoying, every spring. Dinosaurs still slumbered, encased in ancient sap, beneath the townsfolk’s very feet. Something still lurked in the lake, dropping the occasional enormous tooth or eyelash to wash up on the shore. 

But more than anything, Gravity Falls had still somehow kept its sense of mystery. Dipper Pines had been a demon for a little over a millennium, now. He’d survived having his puny human skull cracked open and the whole universe crammed inside. He’d had a little more than a thousand years of experience of the world. He rarely, if ever, got infodumps anymore, because he’d grown into his near-omniscience, learned how to handle and harness it. Very little remained hidden from him anymore, and even less shocked him.

And yet, every time he arrived in Gravity Falls, it still felt like the first time. Like there was something bigger going on than even he knew, something hidden, like he was only glimpsing the very nearest curve of something impossibly vast and mostly buried. That same old, familiar thrill of stumbling over a mystery that had been hidden in plain sight all along.

And, even a full thousand years since magic had become mundane, Gravity Falls still kept its mysteries closely guarded.

Dipper popped into the Stanley Pines Memorial Library of the Supernatural first, in its airy, sleek new building at the edge of town. He’d lost track of how many new buildings the Library had had since it had finally had to be moved out of the crumbling Mystery Shack several centuries ago, but this one was still pretty new, less than a hundred years old. There were still a few people living in Gravity Falls who could trace their family history back to Willow Pines, but only one of them still worked at the Library, and none of them could still see Dipper if he didn’t want to be seen.

He concentrated for a moment on perfecting his ‘Tyrone Pines’ disguise before venturing out of the basement stacks, climbing the stairs and shooting the reference librarian on duty his most charming grin. Too late, he remembered to make sure his teeth were appropriately blunted. It hadn’t been fashionable to wear fangs for at least three decades. If he got caught out because of a fashion faux pas, Mira’d never let him live it down.

“Hey,” he said, strolling up to the reference desk as casually as he could. Did people still use ‘hey’ as a greeting? Dipper couldn’t remember. “How’s your afternoon going?”

The reference librarian smiled toothily at Dipper, and that was when he realised she was a hologram. He was talking to a customer service AI. Well, great. She probably wasn’t going to have the gossip he was really there for.

“It is a pleasant afternoon,” the AI agreed. “Is there some information I can help you look up? A book or resource you’re looking for?”

Dipper considered for a moment. “Is there any social media chatter about any recent, strange phenomena in Gravity Falls?” He thought about it for another moment, before adding, “Strange by Gravity Falls terms, that is. And - only within the last day.”

The reference librarian beamed, literally, the holopixels in her teeth emitting a fraction more light than before. Her expression went a little still for a moment, before she blinked and said, “Nope! If you’d like, I can expand your parameters and do another search.”

Dipper managed not to sigh. That was pretty much what he’d been expecting. “Sure, all right. Give me anything out of the ordinary in Gravity Falls in the last week.”

The reference librarian went still again, her smile glowing a perfect white. It glowed, and glowed, and glowed, until it got hard for Dipper to look at with his jelly-filled human eyeballs. The reference librarian blinked, and then blinked again, and again, the blinks speeding up until her eyes were a blur, her head beginning to twitch spasmodically back and forth - 

“Oh no no no,” a voice said from behind Dipper, and he stepped out of the way for the harried-looking young person who ran up and leaned over the desk, toggling a switch behind the desk back and forth. “What did you ask her?”

Feeling a little sheepish, Dipper said, “Uh, for anything out of the ordinary in Gravity Falls in the last week...?”

The young person fixed Dipper with a stare that clearly said they thought he was as stupid as he felt just then. “Well, that’d be why she overloaded, yep,” they said, hopping up and vaulting over the reference desk to land beside the frozen hologram, still flickering with glitch. They knelt down so that Dipper could only see the top of their head over the desk, shaved almost bald and with what looked like a metal mohawk glittering with tiny LEDs sticking out of it. “What were you doing asking for something like that?”

They must have pressed some button or crossed some wire, because the hologram jerked, the top of its head and the middle of its torso stretching away in opposite directions, turned abruptly into a tall, attractive man, then into a small bowl of petunias, and then vanished. The person with the metal mohawk re-emerged from behind the desk, breathing hard and not looking particularly impressed, to give Dipper a searching look. “You’re a new face around here.”

“Tyrone Pines,” Dipper said, extending a hand. Metal mohawk looked down at it like they were trying to work out whether it was likely to explode. Dipper tucked the hand back down at his side, feeling self-conscious. “Our instruments picked up an unusual surge of magic from somewhere in this area about half an hour ago, and I’m trying to figure out what might have caused it. Have you seen or heard about anything out of the ordinary for Gravity Falls occurring recently?”

Metal mohawk looked Dipper up and down. “You’re a little young to be a researcher, aren’t you?”

“Grad student,” Dipper lied. “And I’m older than I look.” At least that wasn’t a lie. “And I might be missing out on the opportunity of my academic career here, so...can you help me out?”

Metal mohawk gave Dipper another long, searching look before saying, “Don’t they still teach you guys how to effectively use search engines in undergrad? AI’s come a long way, but processing power still costs money, y’know.”

“I just didn’t think,” Dipper ground out, the tips of his manufactured ears burning. He barely resisted the urge to check and make sure they hadn’t gone pointy on him. “Figured she’d have a filter for Gravity Falls background weirdness radiation.”

Metal mohawk shook their head. “How would anyone ever decide what was significant and what was ‘background weirdness radiation’? In Gravity Falls? Do you want to try coding that nightmare?” They took a deep breath, visibly composing themselves, and ran a hand down one shaved side of their skull. “What you’re looking for, basically, is gossip. Am I right?”

“You’re not wrong,” Dipper admitted. 

“Sorry,” metal mohawk said, not sounding particularly sorry. “I’m not real big on gossip.” Their LEDs all flashed once, in unison, and they said, like they were just remembering, “I do know they’re just breaking ground up by the cliffs to put in one of those awful hovervator tour centres. With the glass floors? Maybe they dug something up, people are always finding weird buried crap around here.”

“By the cliffs?” Dipper asked, a sinking feeling burrowing into the pit of his stomach for no reason he could explain and making itself at home there.

“Yeah, just at the base there. Apparently it’s a great launch platform for the hovervator cars.” Metal mohawk’s face split in a vicious smile. “Wonder what they’ve decided to do about the wonky magnetic fields up there, though. Last I heard, the company the state hired to put the thing in was six weeks behind schedule trying to figure out how to get the cars out over the valley without them falling out of the sky.”

“That sounds dangerous,” Dipper said, thinking of the UFO buried in the middle of the valley with a shudder.

Metal mohawk shrugged one shoulder. “Well, maybe if they did dig up something of magical significance, they’ll have to abandon the project, or move it somewhere else. Anything that might be part of the world’s magical heritage is super protected as part of the park, you know.” They paused, pointing one finger at Dipper. He noticed, vaguely, that their nails were all painted silver - or maybe covered in some kind of silvertoned metal plating. “Which means you and your prof are going to need alllllll kinds of clearance and paperwork if you want to remove anything for study. Don’t go getting any big ideas.”

“Definitely won’t,” Dipper agreed, with a nod. “Thanks, I think I’ll head up that way and check it out.”

“Don’t mention it,” metal mohawk said. “Oh, and if you ever short-circuit my reference librarian like this again, I’m going to personally find you and make you reboot her yourself.”

...

Dipper stepped out of the Library, and took a long, deep breath. The air seemed somehow fresher here, less tainted with smog than New California and faintly scented with pine and petrichor. Somewhere off in the trees, there was a warbling of birdsong and the firecracker rat-tat-tat of a woodpecker. The sun beamed down hot and crystal-bright, warming Dipper's fleshsack from the outside in.

He'd really forgotten what it was like to be physical - not just present in the physical plane, but inhabiting a body, tailor-made to his specifications, for no other reason than to be in a body. It was...nice. Maybe just in small ways, but they were small ways he definitely hadn't appreciated enough when he'd had a meat body full-time. Dipper wondered, vaguely, whether he'd be in town long enough to justify getting a meal. A memory of Greasy's pancake stacks drifted to the surface of his thoughts, and Dipper gave himself a moment to mourn for things lost to the passage of time. Say what you liked about the rest of the food at Greasy's Diner, they'd made really good pancakes.

It was a nice day, Dipper decided, at last. He hadn't taken the time to human properly in...a while. He didn't want to get out of practice and forget how. The hike up to the cliffs would be just the thing to enjoy the fresh air and the sunshine, and the hike back would be just the thing to work up an appetite.

He managed to get to the other side of town before giving up and teleporting himself up to the foot of the cliffs. That was another thing he'd forgotten about flesh bodies - how quickly they wore out.

"How does anyone get anything done with these noodle limbs?" Dipper complained to no one in particular as he rematerialized, just on the inside of a fence made of bright orange plastic netting.

"Hey! You! This is a private work site!" 

Dipper looked up, to see a woman built like a bear crossed with a monster truck bearing down on him, her expression thunderous under her scuffed yellow hard hat. "How'd you get in here? Where's your PPE?" she demanded, pulling to an abrupt stop only inches away from Dipper.

Dipper gulped nervously, and a bright orange hard hat popped into existence on his head.

The woman's eyes flicked up to it, and narrowed. "Damn wizards," she grumbled, turning away from Dipper. "Bet you dollars to donuts that thing's not up to international standards. Or rated for heavy construction." She started to walk away, turning and spinning when she realised Dipper wasn't behind her. "Well? It's this way."

Dipper weighed his options for a moment, and then followed her.

"We'll just need you to sign off that it's a natural formation, that it's nothing to do with the Transcendence," the woman said, as she led Dipper through torn-up dirt and between flags planted in the exposed earth, ducking under the extended arm of an enormous earthmover. "Damn national parks, damn Preservation of Magical Heritage act - this is, without a doubt, the most godawful jobsite I've ever worked on, and that's saying something."

"Is it, though?" Dipper asked. "Like, really?"

The woman snorted.

"Maybe in your line of work, it's normal for the trees to get up and start wandering around." She slowed, and then stopped, in front of a dark, gaping hole half-buried in the ground, half-sunk into the cliff face. "Well, here we are. A hole in a rock. You gonna sign off on this for me, or d'you wanna try to argue that it's somehow magically significant?"

Dipper walked closer to the cave, and then stopped.

Even before he could see anything, he felt it. That deep, constant thrumming, that minor note in the chord of the world - whatever it was, it was coming from somewhere inside the black hole before him. A breath of cold, stale air wafted out of it, smelling of dry earth and ages, and Dipper had to fight down the crawling feeling that the cave was breathing.

Dipper coughed, suddenly stricken by the overwhelming sensation that he was suffocating.

"I'll - I'll need to take a closer look," he managed, between coughs.

Beside him, the woman let out a heavy sigh. "We'll have to get some people in there to shore it up, make sure it doesn't collapse -"

"No, no," Dipper interrupted. "I'm a...wizard. It's fine."

The woman gave him a skeptical look, but she didn't push him.

Dipper conjured up a handful of soft white light with a thought, raising it over his head as he ventured closer to the cave. The light illuminated only a foot or so of the rock lining the walls, a sloped floor worn smooth leading down into the impenetrable dark. The feeling, the magic, whatever it was, pressed around and against Dipper like quicksand, flowing sluggishly but bleeding into everything until it was nearly impossible to move, to breathe. Dipper could feel his aura prickling on contact with the strange magic, bristling protectively around him.

"There's...definitely something magic here," he said, and the woman groaned, pinching her nose between thumb and forefinger. "I'm just not sure what it is, yet."

"Well, get in there and find out!" the woman snapped. Dipper raised both hands placatingly, and started forward into the dark.

The cave mouth led into a long, winding tunnel, carved into the rock of the cliffs. It looked ancient. It felt ancient. It smelled ancient, the earthy smell of the living rock around him clashing with the musty, stale smell of unused attics and basements, museum display cases, old sealed trunks full of relics from a great-great-something-or-other. This place wasn't related to the Transcendence, Dipper was sure, and he only got more sure the farther he ventured in, leaving daylight and the fresh air and the woman behind. It was much, much older than that.

It also reeked of magic, that slow, sliding, suffocating flood of primordial power that had assaulted Dipper back on the surface. The deeper he went into the cave, the more it seemed to resist him, like he was wading through molasses with every step.

But that wasn't all. The deeper he went, the more that magic started to feel...familiar. And not just the magic. Something like déjà vu washed over him as he turned around a bend, and his handful of light illuminated a natural doorway, the tunnel widening out into a larger chamber in the rock. The chamber beyond was still in shadow, Dipper's light not quite strong enough to reach its far walls, but that didn't matter. The magic surrounding him pressed on him like a physical force, but that wasn't what stopped Dipper in his tracks.

He knew what he'd find once he passed through that doorway. Knew it just as surely as he could feel its magic pushing against him.

Saw it as clearly as he could see the red markings on the cave walls.

...

In general, Ian didn't mind waiting.

Anything you cared about was, after all, worth getting right. And getting things right took time. So sometimes you didn't get what you wanted right away. So what? Still, eventually, you got what you wanted. No, so long as what he was waiting for was something good, Ian didn't mind a bit of a wait.

What he did mind was being helpless. 

There wasn't anything he could do about whatever was going on in Gravity Falls. And sitting and worrying about whether the idea to visit there had truly been his, or if there were other, sinister forces at play, really, really wasn't the way he wanted to spend the rest of his day. It was ironic, really. He'd been trying to get Alcor off his back for nearly a month, but now that the demon was actually gone, all Ian wanted was for him to hurry up and get back.

He was idly doodling on his tablet screen, having given up on actually trying to do productive work on MtM or on his vows (why was it so impossibly difficult to find the right words to say 'I love you and I literally put my eye out for you, I'm in this for the long haul'?), when Alcor blipped into existence in the middle of the living room. His face was twisted, like he'd smelled something bad, and Ian looked down at his tablet again, only to see he'd covered the entire screen in triangles of all shapes and sizes. Groaning, he closed the file without saving, putting the tablet aside.

"So what's the damage?" he asked Alcor, who gave a little shudder before answering.

"Well, the good news is that it's nothing new," he said, with a wince, and Ian braced himself for the bad news. "Actually, it's really old. They're putting a new tourist attraction in by the cliffs and the excavation opened up a cave that was used for some kind of rituals by Gravity Falls' native people before the Transcendence." 

"Okay," Mira said slowly, and Ian could tell that, like him, she was trying to figure out what the bad news was. "That doesn't sound so bad -"

"They were rituals to summon Bill Cipher."

Ian groaned, and pressed a hand over his prosthetic eye, dragging it slowly down his face.

"And to banish him," Alcor pushed on, relentless. "He used to have a cult there, but it looks like they wised up to what he was up to when he tried to get them to open him a portal into our world from his Nightmare Realm. Nobody's used that cave or those rituals for something like a thousand and thirty years. I think the leftover magic just got disturbed when it was unsealed."

"So what does that mean for us?" Mira said, a little too sharply. Alcor shrugged one shoulder in a surprisingly human gesture.

"It might just be a coincidence. Or you might've subconsciously picked up on the residual energy from the summoning rituals. Either way, it's...probably not a trap." Alcor shifted uncomfortably in midair, his wings twitching.

"But you think it is anyway," Mira said, thankfully voicing Ian's thoughts for him. He shot her a grateful smile, but she didn't turn to look in his direction, her gaze still fixed on Alcor.

Alcor's wings gave a nervous flutter.

"I don't know if it's a good idea for you guys to go up there," he said. "I mean, residual magic's still magic. And Bill was smart, and tricky -"

"We're going."

The words seemed to fall out of Ian's mouth without his having to push them. Adrenaline made the tips of his fingers a little numb, his lips clumsy, but the words came out crystal clear. Alcor turned to look at him, and so did Mira, a flicker of fear flashing across her eyes for a second before resolve replaced it.

"Are you sure?" Alcor started, and Mira cut him off, pressing a hand against his chest when he started to drift towards the couch.

"If Ian's okay with it, then yes. Let's get this show on the road!" Her bright, cheerful tone sounded strained, but Alcor didn't seem to notice, watching Ian carefully instead.

"Look, it's not that I don't trust you, but even the big cat enclosure at the zoo is relatively safe unless you walk into it wearing a dress made out of raw meat," Alcor said. "I'll help you guys sort out this wedding stuff, but why don't you postpone the Gravity Falls trip until this thing is safely buried under a couple thousand tons of concrete and steel?"

"No," Ian said, pushing himself up off the couch despite the fact that he couldn't properly feel his legs. "I'm sick and tired of letting a dead guy run my life. I'm done being scared of Bill Cipher." He folded his arms over his chest, staring Alcor down.

"And I'm sick and tired of whatever's been sabotaging this wedding," Mira agreed, with a pointed glance in Alcor's direction, which the demon didn't even seem to notice. "This day's going to be special, and we're going to have it right away before anything else can go wrong and get in our way!"

A whole variety of expressions flashed across Alcor's face, so fast that Ian would've given each of them their own frame if he'd been animating the scene.

"Fine," Alcor said. "It's up to you guys. But don't say I didn't warn you."

"Never do," Mira said flippantly, flouncing away down the hall. "Ian, come help me pick out something to wear. We're getting married!"

...

The forest has no sense of time. Trees sprout, grow, die. New trees take their place. Fire kills and cleanses. Animals come and go. The forest goes on.

And the forest remembers.

Deep within the woods of Gravity Falls, something that had slumbered for centuries stirred. It did not have a name. Something had given it one, once, but that was a very long time ago and it was forgotten now. It did not matter. The forest went on. 

And the forest remembered.

It remembered fire, not cleansing but destroying, decimating. It remembered change, transformation, terror, agony.

It remembered the one who tried to bring the end of the forest.

Deep within the woods of Gravity Falls, something that had slumbered for centuries raised its antlered head, and sniffed the air. Caught the scent of destruction on the wind.

Chapter Text

"This is gonna cost you more than just one bag of candy-coated chocolate-covered peanuts, you know."

"Mmhm," Mira agreed, barely listening. She’d lived in the Pacific Northwest her whole life, only a few hundred miles from the place where she was standing. Heck, she remembered family vacations in the Redwood National Forest, in the eerie underwater hush of a forest as old as the world. But somehow, nothing had prepared her for Gravity Falls.

It wasn’t anything obvious, that she could easily put her finger on. The trees weren’t anything special, compared to redwoods. The huge cliffs, she knew, had once both had those curious cantilevered tops, but one had sheared off and crashed down into the valley over a century ago, taking out a chunk of the sprawl around the historic town and leaving the cliffs relatively ordinary. (If she was remembering her history right, that was also when Gravity Falls and its woods had been declared a national park and construction had been restricted - unless that had been after the Shedu rampage of 2283?) The sun shone, the wind ruffled the treetops and blew the occasional chill and waft of spruce in her direction, somewhere off in the woods a woodpecker’s rat-tat-tat echoed. A squirrel darted quickly out along a branch of a pine tree just in front of her, and was just as quickly snatched off the branch by a lurking gnome.

It seemed...peaceful. Pretty. Idyllic. Just another small town nestled in the woods of the Pacific Northwest.

But...

Mira had felt it the moment they’d arrived. It wasn’t something she could easily describe, but her writer’s brain struggled to wrap words around it anyway. It was a sense of...not danger, exactly, but there was danger in it. Not excitement either, though that was part of it, too. No, what struck her was more the sense of vast and incredible...potential. Like something huge and important and earth-shaking was waiting, just around the corner, for her to stumble across it. Like the whole world was holding its breath.

Above everything, though, it felt familiar.

Alcor glanced over in her direction, and Mira noticed he had a strange half-smile on his face, a smile she had only seen a handful of times before.

“You feel it, huh?” he asked, and Mira could only nod, slow and awed, as she looked up and around at the woods unfolding around her.

And at Ian, who was making a face. Mira caught his gaze and raised an eyebrow, and he managed a watery smile, though it quickly turned back into a frown as he looked around at the hidden and half-overgrown clearing Alcor had chosen to land them in, far away from curious stares and gossip. His eyes narrowed warily as he surveyed the circle of birch and pine trees surrounding them.

“Sorry,” he said. “Something about this place is just giving me the heebie-jeebies. I’m pretty sure it’s these trees. Nothing needs that many eyes.”

Mira sucked in her lips, trying not to smile. “Oh no, not the heebie-jeebies,” she managed, before the smile grew too much to hold in.

Ian watched her for a moment with an expression like a Buckingham Palace guard being shown the funniest video of all time, before sighing and rolling his eyes. Mira didn’t miss the little smile he shot in her direction, but chose not to mention it.

“Seriously though, can we get out of these trees? I think there’s supposed to be a town around here somewhere,” Ian said, starting towards the opposite edge of the clearing.

Mira exchanged a look with Alcor, who shrugged, and then turned to follow her boyfriend into the trees.

In the woods behind them, something watched them go.

...

In sixth grade, Ian and everyone else he knew had been forced to take a History unit on the Transcendence.

Not that it had been bad, or anything, they'd just all been hitting the age where learning about stuff that happened a thousand years ago was starting to take a backseat to learning about the mysteries of what went on in the other locker room. But Ian's teacher had really tried to make the lessons fun and interactive, even going so far as to host a '2000s Day' where everyone got to dress up in old-fashioned, neon clothes and eat all kinds of deep-fried foods that never should have been deep-fried and talk like they were totally tubular, man. 

It had been fun, and Ian had even caught a little of Ms. Polinsky's enthusiasm. There really was something arresting about the story of a sleepy little town, hidden in the mountains, where the end of the world was stopped in its tracks and magic itself was born. Ian had imagined what it must be like to actually be there, even so many centuries later, had daydreamed about walking over the place where a demon had died and the weird had spilled out into the world. He'd imagined that it might feel solemn. Grand. Maybe even a little tingly. Above everything else, though, there'd have to be a sense of awe, of immense time and power and meaning. It'd be hushed, of course. He'd stand there, and feel the world settling down around him, feel simultaneously dwarfed and exalted by the sheer importance of where he stood.

A bicycle sped past, nearly knocking him over, and the cat in its basket yowled at him as it flashed by. The bike kicked up a spray of mud, spattering Ian's face. He brushed it away with one flannel sleeve, spitting onto the sidewalk to get the taste of mud out of his mouth.

"Hey!" a voice squeaked from the other side of the street, and Ian looked around to see the smallest, oldest person he'd ever seen in a police uniform shakily waving a nightstick in his direction. "Hey, you, that's vandalism, you know! I could give you a citation!"

Ian pressed his lips together to keep from laughing. There was something about the deadly solemnity with which the little old officer threatened a citation that was nothing short of hilarious, but he had a feeling it would be a bad idea to laugh where the officer could see it.

"Thanks for the warning!" he called instead, waving a hand in the officer's direction. The officer eyed him suspiciously, before turning their motorised scooter away down the street and starting to putter off. Ian was sure he caught them muttering something about 'hooligans' as they went.

"Welcome to Gravity Falls, huh?" Ian asked nobody in particular, looking up and down the street he'd found himself on. At one end, an enormous bronze statue of a buffalo dominated a small square. At the other end, the backside of a big concrete sign thanked him for visiting and asked him to please come again soon. In between...wasn't much. A few bakeries, several competing souvenir shops with pathetically half-hearted almost-pun names and stock that they'd probably bought from the same Bangladeshi wholesaler in the windows, a coffee shop, a chain restaurant masquerading as an independent local restaurant, an actual independent local restaurant with an aura of insufferable smugness that radiated a full five feet from its perimeter. Standard issue for any tourist town.

The sound of footsteps behind him told him that Mira had followed him. Ian turned to shoot her a smile. “Hey, great news, stardust! I didn’t get arrested!”

Mira opened her mouth, and then stopped and blinked like she had to recalculate the response she’d been about to give. “Was there...a danger of you being arrested?”

“Based on the look that officer gave me? I’d say about a 16% chance.” Ian slung an arm around Mira’s shoulders, and Mira squawked, pushing him off. 

“Ack! You’re all mucky!”

“Yup! Courtesy of a citizen of this fair metropolis!” Ian gave his sleeve another futile wipe with one hand. He’d thought the mud would’ve started to dry by now. “You know, usually I’d chalk this kind of thing up to superstition, but I’m getting the feeling this town really doesn’t want me around.”

Mira gave him a shove in the side that was just slightly too hard to be playful. “Don’t be silly! It’s just a town. Small city? It’s bigger than I expected.”

“It’s definitely grown, but it was pretty big for a town to start with,” Alcor said, from somewhere just behind Ian. Even though he should really have been used to the demon popping up out of thin air by now, Ian still jumped. Right into the puddle in the gutter in front of him. 

“Oh man, you are so gooped,” Mira laughed, as Ian stared down at his jeans in despair. “You look like a Mud-squatch.”

Ian forced an irritated, too-wide smile onto his face before he turned back to face Mira and Alcor. “Hey, here’s an idea! How about we find a honeymoon hotel to check into before we get married, so I can wash my stupid clothes? And body. I should probably get the mud off my face.”

“Oh, Alcor can -” Mira started, but Alcor shook his head. 

“Not until you pay up for popping you out here. You still owe me, remember? I can’t just keep giving you freebies all the time, it's bad for my mental health.”

“I mean, you own my literal soul, so in a sense I’ve already paid you more than any of the deals we’ve ever made are worth,” Mira started, and Alcor’s wings twitched. “Joking! I was joking!”

"All right, new plan," Ian said, firmly. "Before we do anything else, we're going into that café over there and I'm getting a coffee."

Mira and Alcor both looked at him expectantly. Ian shrugged. "I would’ve included you, but I don't know what you two want to order. I'm not omniscient here!"

Mira winced. Alcor's face stayed perfectly still, but his wings gave one sharp, violent flutter and his clawed hands clenched and then slowly unclenched.

"Still too soon," Ian sighed, half to himself, shaking his head as he turned and started towards the café. "Coffee."

The car that screeched out of nowhere only missed hitting him because Mira grabbed him and pulled him back onto the sidewalk.

...

“Okay. So we’re going to need a place for Ian to clean up, an officiant, and some witnesses,” Mira said, before taking a sip of her toasted marshmallow steamer. She licked sweet foam from her top lip, smiling a little despite herself as the warmth from the drink seeped into her hands where they were wrapped around the cup. “I think the witnesses are gonna be the hard part, unless we’re doing a standard courthouse service.”

“No way,” Ian says, reaching across the table and putting his hand on Mira’s wrist, giving a little squeeze. “We’re gonna make this special. Which reminds me, we should walk around town a bit, find a nice place to do the ceremony -”

“I liked that clearing we landed in,” Mira said. “It was...nice. Peaceful. So pretty. And, I don’t know, there was just something about it. It felt...welcoming.”

Ian stared at her blankly.

“Welcoming,” he repeated, flat and disbelieving. Mira raised an eyebrow at him, taking another sip of her steamer. “I mean, I guess the feeling of being watched could be...welcoming.”

“Being watched?” Mira asked, blinking. Ian stared at her, looking almost as confused as she felt.

“Interesting,” Alcor said, leaning back in his seat and crossing his arms over his chest. He looked profoundly uncomfortable in the plain black tuxedo-printed t-shirt and black jeans he’d picked out for his human disguise to wear, shifting around in his seat and constantly reaching up reflexively to adjust a bow tie he wasn’t wearing. Mira recognised the motion. Ian did it every time he was in the same room as her parents. 

Ian’s left eye twitched, and he just barely covered it by taking a sip of his coffee.

Alcor took a long slurp of the excessively sweet frozen coffee drink Mira had bought him as a sacrifice, raising his eyebrows over the glass at Mira like he’d made some kind of joke.

Mira ignored both of them, staring into the pile of foam slowly dissolving from on top of her drink. 

“Can - Tyrone - be one of our witnesses?” Ian asked, a little too loud, and Alcor shook his head.

“I mean, I’m not legally a real person.” He started, his head snapping up as he stared at the door. “But they are. At least, I think they are. What are they doing here?”

Mira looked up, turning to glance over her shoulder. She caught sight of the people Alcor had noticed at the same time as they noticed her. 

Rosa’s face lit up, and she hurried over to Ian and Mira’s table. Sun-mi hung back just a little, looking from Mira to Ian to Alcor like she was trying to work out the answer to a riddle, but when Rosa flung her arms around Ian’s neck and he hugged her back, she broke into a big smile and walked over.

“I wasn’t sure if it was really you for a second,” she said, leaning against the table beside Mira. “Why are you here? And who’s your friend?”

“Well, if this ain’t one hell of a coincidence!” Rosa boomed, giving Ian a ferocious noogie. “What’re the chances?”

“Slim to none,” Alcor muttered, eyeing her suspiciously. Sun-mi glanced in his direction, then turned back to Mira, raising one eyebrow.

“Tyrone,” Mira sighed. “This is Sun-mi, my friend the journalist, and Rosa Darling, Ian’s best friend from way back and international popstar -”

“Excuse you, I never renounced my title of punk princess,” Rosa laughed, as Ian tried unsuccessfully to slip out from under the arm she’d wrapped around his neck. 

“- and Sun-mi, Rosa, this is Tyrone.” Mira shot a pointed glance in Alcor’s direction, and Alcor took another petulant slurp of his iced coffee slush. “We go way back.”

Sun-mi’s raised eyebrow climbed higher. “I thought you didn’t have friends growing up.”

“Very tactful, thanks,” Mira said, raising her mug to Sun-mi. “What brings you back here? I thought you were in Iceland.”

“I asked you first,” Sun-mi said, a half-smile blooming on her face. She turned and grabbed a chair from the empty table beside Mira, pulling it up to Mira’s table. “I actually received a call from the university, they wanted someone to investigate an ancient cave they got a call about and for some reason they thought I was still in the country. I dropped everything and came as soon as I heard about it, though. They’re thinking it dates back to well before the Transcendence and might be one of the missing pieces in the puzzle of how we came to have magic.” She stopped, sounding a little breathless, her eyes bright, and cleared her throat, gathering her composure. “Of course, elves have a long and storied tradition dating back well before the Transcendence -”

“But they’re not nearly so sexy to a grant committee as a brand-new archaeological find?” Mira said, smiling. Sun-mi smiled ruefully, and Mira grimaced in sympathy.

"An' I'm booked ta play this place's music festival next week," Rosa interjected, ignoring Ian's muffled protests. "It's got - some silly name, Treebark or something -"

"Woodstick," Alcor said, into his iced coffee. Rosa ignored him too.

"Figured I might as well turn up early, do the touristy thing. Y'know, I've never been here before? And we just live down the coast!"

"That's what Ian and I thought too," Mira said, and Sun-mi folded her arms on the table, leaning forward to get a look at Mira's face.

"Speaking of which, it was a strange enough coincidence running into Rosa here." Her stare was pointed. Mira tried not to shift uncomfortably under it.

"Ian and I..." She glanced over at Ian, who stared helplessly back from Rosa's chokehold. "Are...eloping?"

Rosa gave an exaggerated gasp. Sun-mi blinked.

"Surprise?" Mira said, weakly, shrugging.

"Beale!" Rosa exploded, noogie-ing Ian harder than before. His yelp was quickly muffled by her solid arm. "You were gettin' married and ya weren't gonna tell me?"

"Honestly, it was a very wise idea," Sun-mi said, but she sounded disappointed. "Wedding planning is an unnecessary hassle."

“You said it, not me,” Mira said, with a smile. “Hey, would you guys like something to drink?”

“London fog, please,” Sun-mi said, at the same time as Rosa finally released Ian to point at Alcor’s coffee slush and say, “Whatever that is, I’ll take one with chocolate shavings on top.”

“Great. I need a refill too. A-Tyrone, would you come help me carry drinks?”

They’d placed their order and were waiting for the barista when Mira said, in an undertone she hoped couldn’t be heard back at the table, “This was a wonderful surprise. It really means a lot to have our friends here for the wedding. Thank you so much. ”

“I - uh.” Alcor reached up to rub awkwardly at the back of his neck. “Would this be a bad time to tell you that that wasn’t me?”

Mira stared at him for so long that his nose started to twitch. 

“You don’t look like you’re lying,” she said.

“I’m not!”

“But it’s too weird of a coincidence for both of them to be here, today, in this exact coffeeshop, when one of them wasn’t supposed to be here for another week and one of them was supposed to be in Iceland -”

“I don’t know!” Alcor said, sounding miserable. Mira watched his face for another long moment, before huffing out a sigh.

“Yes, you do. You’re pretty sure it’s something to do with this secret ancient Bill Cipher cave, but you don’t want to tell me because you think I’ll be mad.” She reached over the counter to take Sun-mi’s drink from the barista, quietly thanking him as she did. 

“You’ve known me for too long,” Alcor grumbled. “Okay. So I have a theory. The first two times Bill rose to power in Gravity Falls, there were ten souls who appeared in this area along with him. And there’s a prophecy in that cave that says those ten souls can seal him away in his Nightmare Realm forever.”

“So you’re thinking...what, because that leftover Bill-stink got let out of its secret hidey-hole, it’s drawing those ten people back to Gravity Falls?” Mira asked.

“Well, I wouldn’t put it in exactly those words, but yeah, pretty much,” Alcor said, taking Rosa’s drink from the barista. Mira eyed him as he raised the straw, unthinkingly, to his mouth, and he slowly lowered it again. 

“So this isn’t a bad weird magical coincidence,” Mira said, thoughtfully, watching the barista foaming the milk for her steamer. “Actually, it’s kind of the opposite. If any weird Bill-stuff happens while we’re here, then there’s already a backup plan in place to take care of him!” She smiled, wondering if she smiled big enough if it’d make its way into Alcor’s eyes. 

“Yeah, I guess that’s true,” Alcor said, thoughtfully. Mira had to glower at him again to keep him from taking a sip of Rosa’s coffee slush.

“Do you need another one of those?”

Alcor looked down at the chocolate shavings sprinkled on top of the whipped cream. A too-long, too-prehensile pointed tongue slipped out of his mouth and licked his lips just as the barista turned around to hand Mira her steamer. The cup slipped out of the barista’s hand, as he froze in apparent terror, and Mira shrieked as hot steamed milk sloshed all over her front. 

“...Ian’s right,” she said, setting Sun-mi’s London fog down on the counter and carefully peeling her sodden t-shirt away from her front. “I think we might need to find a hotel.”

...

The hotel, when they finally found one with a vacancy, was close to the centre of town and so heavily decorated with beady-eyed taxidermy that it made even Ian a little nervous. 

“Oh man, we stayed in this place when my sister Belle and I came here!” Alcor exclaimed, loudly, as they walked into the lobby. “I can’t believe it’s still here! And that they haven’t got rid of that beaver!”

“Did you actually ever have a sister Belle, or is this ‘Tyrone’ speaking?” Ian asked, under his breath, and Alcor shot him an enigmatic smile. “You know what, forget I asked. Hi! We’d like a room for two, please.”

The teenager behind the desk looked from Ian, to Mira, to Alcor, and back to Ian.

“Oh, he’s from around here,” Ian said, with a glance in Alcor’s direction. “Doesn’t need a hotel room.”

“Okay,” the teenager said, clearly already bored. “Can I get an account code and a retinal print?”

The hotel room, once they got there, was smaller than the living room in their apartment and smelled faintly of something that might have been left over from the taxidermy process. Mira instantly pronounced it ‘charming’. Privately, Ian thought that it needed some sprucing up - some wallpaper, curtains, maybe a blowtorch. 

“You know what,” Mira said, drawing the drapes before she stripped off her shirt, “I honestly kind of want to just sleep on everything that’s happened today and pick up again where we left off tomorrow. I mean, we have a hotel room now, we have witnesses. I think we’ll have better luck finding an officiant and having the ceremony tomorrow if we’re all fresh and clean and not worrying about things.”

Ian tried not to let her see his breath of relief. “I think that’s a fantastic idea, stardust. The light’s too low for pictures now anyway.” And it’d give him time to try to come up with some vows. Mira had forgotten about them for the moment, it seemed, but there was no way she was going to forget when it came to the actual ceremony. And they’d cut so much out of their plans, it was really the least Ian could do. He just...had to...write them.

Mira beamed. “Great! So...where d’you want to go for dinner?”

For their last dinner as an unmarried couple, they ended up at a greasy spoon diner in a beat-up trailer stuck onto a Quonset hut halfway into the middle of the woods. Alcor wouldn’t shut up about the pancakes and the abandoned rail car slash redwood log that used to serve as a diner and Ian picked at his hash until it got cold. There was a knot of something heavy and greasy and cold in the pit of his stomach, and when he looked up, he thought he saw a trace of desperation in Mira’s manic smile as she nodded along to all of Alcor’s stories about Gravity Falls Back In The Day. 

They were going to be married. He was going to be married. To an actual, whole entire other person. Forever. Until they were both dead. 

Starting...tomorrow. 

At least Mira seemed almost as nervous as he was.

...

At least Ian seemed almost as nervous as she was.

Mira tossed the covers off, then rolled back over and snuggled down under them. Ian had gone to sleep what felt like hours ago, but she just couldn’t seem to get there. The ancient hot-water heater in the hotel room kept clunking and thunking and spewing wave after wave of suffocating heat. Mira could swear that, once, it had gone silent for ten solid minutes, only to burst out with a perfect ‘C’ chord at the top of its pipes. Ian was a warm weight in the bed beside her, dead to the world and oblivious to the streak of blindingly silver-white moonlight that fell through the crack in the curtains and right across Mira’s face. 

She had to sleep. She had to sleep. She had to sleep.

Somewhere in the hotel room, a clock ticked off quiet seconds with a steady beat. Mira’s body felt heavy, so heavy, but her eyes refused to drift closed. She lay still, feeling like she was sinking slowly into the bed like a cartoon character into a cloud, watching the moon through the crack in the curtains. There was a gentle night breeze wafting in from the window they’d cracked open when they’d finally admitted defeat against the heater, and it ruffled the curtains just enough that the shaft of moonlight that lay across Mira’s face wavered back and forth, just slightly. Combined with the steady tick of the clock, it was almost hypnotic, to watch the shadows of the curtains drift back and forth, back and forth, back and forth...

Mira’s eyes slowly sank closed, her lashes brushing against her cheeks for a moment before they fluttered open again, and then sank closed once more. 

She didn’t see the antlered shadow that fell across the bedspread, blocking out the moonlight.

Chapter Text

When Ian woke up, the other side of the bed was empty.

The covers were all rumpled and pushed down to the foot of the bed, the blue light on the coffeemaker was on, and the window was forced wider than it had been last night, wide enough to blow the curtains out into the room like a couple of very ugly snot-green-damask ghosts. Somehow, it was still unbearably hot in the room.

Ian patted the mattress beside him, but it was only about as warm as the rest of the room. He couldn't tell how long Mira must have been up before he was.

Ian pulled the pillow over his head and pressed his face into the mattress. The radiator's rattle was muffled, but he could still hear it, drumming out a syncopated rhythm. Every so often, a beat would turn into a hiss, and Ian held his breath until the next clunk or pop finally came.

He wasn't getting back to sleep. And he wasn't thinking of anything brilliant and beautiful and meaningful and human to say to his girlfriend when she became his wife. And it was way too hot under this pillow. 

Finally, Ian shoved the pillow off his head with a sigh, sucking in a long breath of fresh, relatively cool air. He lay still for a moment, bracing himself, before letting his arms, then his legs flop over the side of the bed.

The bathroom door was closed, so Ian started to pull on his clothes, thankfully (and maybe magically) dry after last night's hasty hand-wash in the tub. The coffeemaker turned out to be covered in buttons, all of which had little iconographic symbols on them, none of which seemed to correspond to the prompts on the device's tiny LCD screen. Ian jabbed at buttons at random until the screen froze, and then gave up.

"I'm gonna run down to the lobby and see if they have coffee," Ian said, rapping on the bathroom door. "You want any?"

There was no answer.

Ian gave the door another, harder knock. "Mira? You all right in -"

The bathroom door swung open under Ian's hand. The lights were off, and the room beyond was empty.

"Seriously?" Ian asked the empty hotel room. He cast around for a minute, before finding his phone in his back pocket, and fired off a text to Mira.

hey early bird, where r u?

He waited a few minutes, leaning against the doorframe, but didn't get a reply. Ian sighed, stuffing his phone back into his pocket.

"Coffee first," he said, out loud, for no real reason than to hear a human voice in the hotel room, which, even with the clunks and rattles of the radiator, suddenly seemed unusually quiet. "Then whatever this is. But coffee first."

...

There wasn't, as it turned out, coffee in the lobby. Ian had to go into the restaurant attached to the hotel and actually order one. And at that point, he might as well just order breakfast too. Ian texted Mira to meet him at the restaurant or miss out on waffles, and then turned all his attention to his breakfast, resolutely ignoring the little sliver of worry building in the back of his mind. Alcor hadn't been hanging around annoying Ian, either. This wasn't the first time they'd disappeared on a cult bash or something without leaving so much as a note. Ian briefly entertained a thought of Mira showing up at the front desk of their hotel covered head to toe in blood. He wondered if that would get a reaction out of the front desk clerk.

Besides, there were all kinds of mundane reasons she might be gone. Maybe she was scouting out an officiant or a location for their hasty nuptials. Maybe Alcor had popped her over to Japan to pick up her wedding dress. Maybe she'd just gone out for breakfast with Rosa or Sun-mi. It wasn't usual for her not to text him back, but maybe she was just having such a good time that she'd forgotten to check her phone.

Mira hadn't decided that the whole idea of marrying him was cursed and backed out at the last minute. She wouldn't. At least, she wouldn't without telling him.

The waffles were delicious. Mira didn't show up.

...

The construction site was in an uproar when Sun-mi arrived. Apparently, a wizard had been in the day before to inspect the cave, but hadn't left any official record of the investigation and nobody could figure out who he worked for. To make matters worse, the wizard who had been called in had arrived to do the inspection, been told his services wouldn't be necessary because one of his colleagues had already been there, and had left annoyed. The upshot of all this, Sun-mi gathered from the information the site overseer spewed at her at top speed, was that it would be another few days or even a week before they'd have a solid assessment of whether and how they could start work again.

"Fucking ridiculous," the overseer complained, as she lifted the orange tape cordoning off the cave for Sun-mi to step under. "And now we've got press. Wonder what else can go wrong here. Maybe we'll have a surprise inspection, who knows."

Sun-mi offered an apologetic smile, but she couldn’t bring herself to focus much on the overseer’s litany of complaints. The hole in the side of the cliff consumed all her attention, drawing her eye like a black hole drawing light. There was something about the sight of it that unsettled her, a strange feeling she couldn’t quite put a name to, somewhere between enchantment and dread.

The overseer must have noticed where Sun-mi’s eyes went, because she cleared her throat, and Sun-mi realised she’d been quiet for a while. “Well, there it is. Never knew a hole in the ground could be such an almighty pain in the ass.”

Sun-mi had just enough presence of mind to pull out her phone and snap a few pictures of the construction site, the hole stark black and unnervingly out of place in its aggressively mundane setting.

“Guess you’ll be wanting a tour next,” the overseer said, a note of frustration in her voice.

“If at all possible,” Sun-mi agreed.

“It isn’t. Our wizard inspector was a fraud, we got no guarantee it won’t all collapse on top of you. Or turn you into a newt.” There was a relish in the overseer’s voice that made Sun-mi sure she was finally seeing a silver lining in her wizard problem. “You could try coming back later, but like I said, it could be a week before we can get somebody in here to look at it.”

“Oh,” Sun-mi said. She glanced over at the hole again, and tried to convince herself she was more disappointed than relieved. “That’s too bad.”

“Not that I care if you get turned into a newt,” the overseer said, without malice. “Damn reporters. Just one more thing I don’t need right now.”

“I’ll try not to take up too much of your time,” Sun-mi promised. “So how was this discovery made?”

“Marybeth!”

The voice made both Sun-mi and the overseer start, the overseer turning to face the approaching newcomers. Sun-mi glanced over her shoulder, but didn’t turn. There was something about the hole leading into the cliff that made her not want to turn her back on it.

The young man who skidded to a halt just outside the barrier of orange tape was breathing hard, but beaming. He waved the person who was following a little ways behind him forwards, but didn’t wait for them to catch up or even check to make sure they were following. “Marybeth! I found the wizard!”

“What?” the overseer - Marybeth - asked, looking over the young man’s shoulder at the person following him, and then let out an exasperated sigh. “Oh, no. Rashid, that’s not -”

“No, no, the wizard we sent away yesterday!” Rashid gasped, seemingly starting to recover his breath after his mad dash. “He was still in town, he stayed the night, I caught him at the diner having breakfast and he’ll do the inspection for us now.” He beamed.

The overseer - Marybeth - didn’t look particularly impressed by this, but Sun-mi caught the shadow of a smile crossing her broad features. Sun-mi herself felt a flutter of excited apprehension at the news, and stole another glance at the cave. It hadn’t moved.

“For a hundred-dollar call-out fee,” the wizard interrupted, ambling up behind Rashid. Sun-mi took a moment to look him over. He didn’t look much older than she was, wiry and insubstantial, but there was a certain cast to his expression, a shadow of disdainful superiority, that she disliked instantly. “And travel expenses paid. I don’t like getting jerked around like this.”

“None of us do,” the overseer said shortly. “When I catch that so-called wizard...” She cleared her throat into her fist, letting the rest of the sentence dangle like a sword suspended in the air overhead.

“Whatever,” the wizard said, clearly not interested. “Are we doing this thing, or are we standing around here talking all day? My time is valuable.”

The overseer rolled her eyes, but stepped around Sun-mi, lifting the orange tape with a wordlessly-raised eyebrow. The wizard attempted to duck under it with dignified grace, and only half succeeded. He brushed simulcrete dust from his black dress pants, taking the yellow hard hat that Rashid offered and clearing his throat pompously before putting it on. A snap of his fingers, and a ball of bluish light appeared hovering just above his head. Another snap, and a tablet and stylus appeared in his hands with a small thunderclap of displaced air.

“Cool. Let’s get this over with,” he said, affected boredom filling his voice, and turned, walking fast into the black hole sinking into the base of the cliff. His light illuminated the cave around and a little ahead of him, rough rock and dangling stalactites gleaming wet in the dimness. After he’d taken a few steps and nothing had fallen on him or turned him into a newt, the overseer and Rashid followed him.

After a moment’s hesitation, fighting off a sudden and inexplicable reluctance, Sun-mi hurried after them.

...

Finally, finally, after what felt like hours and might actually have been, Ian's phone dinged. He nearly dropped it, fumbling to get it out of his pocket, but the message wasn't from Mira.

Ian let out a sigh as he tapped out a response to Rosa's complaint. If she was already so bored, then why had she bothered coming to town so early in the first place? He knew, of course, it was probably because of ancient demon magic, but still.

Stars, was there even anything left in his life anymore that wasn't because of ancient demon magic? Had there ever been? Even trying to get away from it had just brought him straight into the middle of another mess that had probably been set in motion centuries before he was even born, and Ian was sick and tired of it. Just once, he wanted to make a decision and be sure it was his idea, and only his idea. And that it wasn't going to bring about the end of the world.

His phone dinged again, and Ian sighed. He also wished Mira would start leaving a note or something when she had to go out on cult-bashes and other dark and terrible Mizar errands, like getting milk. He couldn't even lay the blame for this one on Alcor being petty, Mira just had her mind elsewhere half the time. She'd come back bursting with stories and he'd ask her, again, to let him know when she was going to need to disappear with no warning for several hours, and she'd very solemnly promise never the let it happen again. The very next time she had to go out, she'd leave a note, or text him. Then she'd forget all over again and they'd have to start over from the beginning.

Ian opened his new message. Rosa wanted to know if he could meet up to do something entertaining. Ian huffed out a sigh, and sent back a text telling her to meet him at the hotel in ten minutes.

Rosa was there in fifteen, with a holographic lipstick and a very pissed-off expression on her face. She stomped up to the door of the restaurant, slamming it open and throwing herself into the seat across from Ian.

"Transportation in this place!" she huffed, bringing up the menu on the tablet surface under the table glass. "You know I had to walk here?"

"The hardship," Ian said, and Rosa's eyes flicked up to shoot him a glare under her brows.

"I'm a celebrity, B- Ian. I don't walk places." She didn't seem to be able to completely wrestle down the smile, and quickly turned back to the tablet. "Tell me this place does a decent caramel macchiato."

"Don't know, haven't tried it," Ian said, and Rosa looked up, frowning.

"Where's Mira? What're you doin' eating breakfast so late, anyway? Aren't you two gettin' married today?"

Ian leaned his chin in one hand. "I'm actually not sure."

Rosa's eyes went wide and almost perfectly round, and she clapped a hand to her rosebud mouth. Ian groaned and buried his face in his hands.

"Beale," Rosa hissed. 

"Look, just don't ask, okay? I don't know, and I'm trying not to worry about it."

"Do you even know where she is?" Rosa demanded, poking Ian in the shoulder, hard. Ian shook his head, without removing his face from his hands. Rosa's gasp was audible. "Ian Thomas Beale! Why didn't ya call me right away? What the hell happened? Did y'all have a fight?"

"This is why I didn't call you," Ian groaned, finally lifting his head from his hands. Rosa paused mid-poke, but the look on her face said clearly that she'd gladly complete it if Ian said anything stupid. "Because I knew you'd worry, and make a big deal out of it, when I don't even know for sure that anything's wrong. It's probably just -" He paused, significantly, meeting Rosa's eyes like that might help her pick up on his meaning. " 'Tyrone' business."

A frown creased Rosa's forehead. "What, that skinny nerd y'all had with ya at the coffeeshop yesterday? Who is he, anyway? Mira ain't never mentioned anybody named Tyrone before, but she said she'd known him since - oh." Her eyes went wide all over again, though thankfully not in worry and outrage this time. "Ohhhh. Y'mean that was -"

"Shhhhhh," Ian said, leaning across the table to press a hand over Rosa's mouth before she could finish the sentence. Rosa's eyes narrowed, and something slimy and warm that could only be her tongue swept over Ian's palm. He yanked his hand back, wiping it hastily on his pants. "Okay, you're disgusting, but yeah. That's him, and I haven't seen him all morning either. They're probably just off together, doing - that thing they do."

Rosa batted her eyes innocently. "Disgustin'? That there's a perfectly natural bodily function."

"Just what I said. Disgusting." Ian gave up wiping his hand on his pants. "You know what, I'm going to the bathroom. Gotta wash the digestive enzymes off my hands."

"There aren't digestive enzymes in spit," Rosa scoffed, but she looked perturbed. Ian gave her his best, most perturbing grin.

"Wanna bet?" He pushed himself up from his chair, leaning across the table to rub the palm she'd licked on Rosa's rosy cheek before walking away from the table towards the bathroom.

Behind him, he heard Rosa make a little strangled noise, and then scrabble for the napkins.

...

The sunlight at the end of the tunnel was the most beautiful thing Sun-mi had ever seen. She stumbled towards it, bashing her knee against a stalagmite as she went. She barely noticed.

The air outside was fresh and warm and faintly pine-scented, a welcome relief from the stifling air in the cave. It had started out cold, like a mausoleum, in the tunnel leading through the rock, but the cavern at the end -

Sun-mi sucked in a long, deep breath of fresh air, leaning heavily against one of the stakes holding the orange tape in place around the cave.

"Hey, are you all right?" Rashid's voice called from behind her, and Sun-mi half-turned. Just the sight of the cave mouth, black and hungry, sent a fresh wave of sick terror through her. Out here in the sunlight, with the normal sounds of life all around her, it wasn't quite the all-consuming, driving force that it had been underground, but a shiver still ran through her at the sight of it.

"Seal it back up," Sun-mi rasped, a little astonished by the sound of her own voice and by the words coming out of her mouth. She deliberately shut her mouth and swallowed, trying to get the feeling of sandpaper out of her throat. "Nobody should be in there. Nobody should see that. It should be lost and forgotten forever. Seal it back up."

"That's what we want to do," the overseer said, emerging from that black hole in the side of the cliff. Her voice was as gruff and as unbothered as ever, but she crouched down next to Sun-mi (when had Sun-mi sat down? She wasn't sure) and put a broad hand on her shoulder. "You aren't some kinda psychic sensitive or something, are you?"

Sun-mi shook her head no. The strange terror that had seized her when she'd laid eyes on that cave painting of the wheel was starting, slowly, to fade, and she felt more and more embarrassed of her reaction with every passing second. When she tried to stand up, though, her knees still felt like they were made of very weak springs, wobbling in unpredictable directions and threatening to collapse at any moment. She sat back down on the dirt pile, silently mourning her pencil skirt.

"You have any idea what happened down there?" the overseer asked, almost kindly, and Sun-mi shook her head again. She should have brushed the woman's hand aside, should have composed herself and regained control of the situation, but - there was something very comforting about the hand on her shoulder.

The overseer and Rashid shared a look.

"Rashid, get back down there and make sure the wizard doesn't disappear," the overseer said, finally, before turning back to Sun-mi. "You got a friend or somebody I can call to come pick you up?" she asked. "I don't think you should go down there again."

Sun-mi started to shake her head no, again, but then remembered.

"I - I can call my friend Mira," she said. "I'm sorry about what I said, I don't know what came over me. Obviously that cave is a vitally important archaeological find, it would make no sense to seal it up again now that it's been found."

The overseer shrugged one shoulder. "It does if you're planning to build a tourist trap on top of it. Give your friend a call. I'll sit with you until she gets here."

"Thank you," Sun-mi said, and the overseer nodded.

"But we're not sitting on this dirt. Think you can make it over to the site office?"

...

Ian looked at his face in the mirror, and sighed.

The cold water tap took a couple of solid yanks, but finally it turned in his hand. The faucet shuddered, and then belched up a flood of icy water. Ian stared at it. It was brown.

"Hotel that's hundreds of years old, in the middle of a national park," Ian reminded himself, before leaning over to splash cold water over his face. It didn't exactly help, but it did make the buzzing restlessness of anxiety a little easier to ignore. It was fine. It was fine. The hotel probably drew its water from a well, and Mira was fine, she was with Alcor -

Ian straightened up, groping for a towel to dry his face, and saw Alcor's face reflected in the mirror just behind his right shoulder.

Ian swore, spinning around with his arm raised to hit the demon before he even really knew what was happening. Alcor yelled too, flailing backwards, and there was a confused moment before Alcor slipped on the tile floor and went flying into one of the stalls headfirst. There was a splash, and a gurgle, and Alcor emerged a second later, glowering up at his dripping hair until it dried, seemingly from the heat of sheer embarrassment. 

"Not one word," he grumbled to Ian, who had pressed a hand over his mouth to hold back the snicker.

"You have got to stop popping up behind me in mirrors like that," Ian said, in return.

“Maybe when your reactions stop being hilarious,” Alcor said, putting his pinkie into one ear and wiggling it around. When he pulled it out, a small waterspout shot out of his ear and splashed onto the tiles. Ian noticed that he hadn’t bothered to put on his ‘Tyrone’ body again. “How’s Mira doing? Did you guys finally settle on a venue?”

Alcor suddenly seemed very far away, down the end of a long tunnel. “I don’t know,” Ian said, but he could barely hear his own words over the hollow ringing that grew in his ears. “I haven’t seen her this morning. I thought she was with you.”

Alcor stared. “I thought she was with you.”

Ian’s limbs suddenly felt as though they were both leaden and light enough to drift off and float away. “It’s okay,” he heard himself saying, as if from behind a thick glass wall. “Maybe Rosa’s seen her. Or - maybe she’s with her other friend, Sun-mi -”

As if on cue, Ian’s phone started to ring. Ian and Alcor both stared at it, blank, for a long moment, before Ian finally picked the call up. “Hello?”

“Ian?” Sun-mi’s voice blasted out of the speaker. Ian winced. He’d forgotten he’d had the sound all the way up to play jazz in the kitchen two nights ago. “I’ve been calling Mira and she isn’t picking up - is she with you? Would you two come and pick me up?”

Ian and Alcor locked eyes over the phone’s glowing screen.

“You go get her,” Alcor said, finally. “I should be able to find Mira, wherever she is.”

“Hello?” Sun-mi’s voice echoed out of the phone speaker. “Who is that?”

“Mira’s friend Tyrone,” Ian said, hurriedly. “Look, I’ll pick you up. Where are you?”

“Do you not know where Mira is?” Sun-mi asked, and now she sounded anxious. Ian wasn’t sure if he’d ever heard her sound anxious before. As far as he knew, she had two modes: suspicious and sarcastic. “Please tell me you know where Mira is. I have -” She stopped, cleared her throat, and continued, sounding sheepish, almost like she was embarrassed of the words coming out of her own mouth. “A really bad feeling.”

“Me too,” Ian answered, honestly. “We’ll figure it out. Where do you want me to pick you up?”

Chapter Text

There was something that Mira was supposed to be remembering.

Whatever it was, it was on the tip of her mind, but she couldn’t seem to quite get it out. It was starting to annoy her, almost enough to disturb the sense of peace that had settled over the woods.

But only almost. There was something about the quiet, the absolute stillness of the trees around her, thrown into stark black and white by the moonlight and the shadows it cast. The sounds of traffic, the people bustling through the streets, the quickfire rapping of woodpecker bills against trees and signposts, the chatter of squirrels, even the late-evening noise of crickets had all vanished. The night air was chilly, but not cold, and Mira found herself drifting as if in a dream through a black-and-white movie set.

Was that what she was supposed to be remembering? The reason she’d come out here in the middle of the night? 

Ahead of her, the street came to an end, trailing out into a river of gravel and disappearing into a black hole between the trees. The gravel crunched under her feet as she followed the road, out of town, past the first arch of trees, into the dark embrace of the forest.

The darkness swallowed her without a trace.

...

“Okay, you just have to not panic,” Ian said, hardly believing the words even as they spilled out of his own mouth. Not panic? That was the exact opposite of what he was doing. “She’s Mizar, right? So her soul is inextricably tethered to Alcor and he should be able to find her. Even if he wasn’t basically omniscient. Which he is. There is nothing to worry about.”

He nodded, taking a sharp breath in and holding it as he ran a hand through his hair. Nothing to worry about. He’d get back to the hotel and Alcor would probably already be back with Mira in tow. Nothing at all to worry about.

Except for the little fact that his fiancé had somehow managed to slip away right out from under her demon guardian’s nose, and nobody had noticed anything was wrong. Except for the fact that they were in the most magical place in the world, where the metaphysical equivalent of the used tea leaves of the worst demon to exist in human history had just been unleashed from a long captivity. And that demon had already almost taken her away from him once, even though he was supposed to be dead - 

“Nothing to worry about,” Ian muttered to himself, again, curling the hand in his hair into a fist and giving a little tug, just enough for a prickle of pain to cut through the fog of worry. He squeezed his eyes shut, then blew out a breath and stepped out from behind the front-end loader where Alcor had dropped him off.

Sun-mi grabbed him before he’d made it two steps.

“What took you so long?” she demanded, her eyes sweeping over his face like she was looking for something. Ian was pretty sure he didn’t want to know what she thought she was going to find. “Did you figure out where Mira is? I just have -”

“A bad feeling. You said,” Ian said, with a smile that was trying its best to be apologetic. Sun-mi’s fingers were so tightly clenched in the fabric of Ian’s flannel that he was a little worried it might rip, and she kept looking back over her shoulder at - 

At the hole in the base of the cliff.

“Oh, crap,” Ian muttered, pulling back. Sun-mi took a step after him, before apparently realising what she was doing and self-consciously untangling her fingers from the front of his shirt. She cleared her throat into her hand, deliberately taking a step back from Ian. It was lost on him. Ian couldn’t tear his eyes away from the hole in the cliff. “We, uh. Should get out of here.”

“Absolutely agreed,” Sun-mi said, shortly, and pushed past Ian, hurrying away from the cave open in the middle of the construction site. Ian lingered, for a moment longer, looking. Were his eyes playing tricks on him, or was that a glimmer of gold he saw in the depths of that black pit? Was there a whisper of cruel laughter on the wind that ruffled his hair? Was there a spark of familiarity, an almost-tangible thread of connection, drawing him inexorably forward?

No. There wasn’t. It was sort of anticlimactic. Even, if Ian was being perfectly honest (which he rarely was), a little disappointing.

Ian breathed out, slow.

"Are you coming?" Sun-mi demanded, from somewhere behind him. And then, "Wait, where's your car? How are we getting back?"

...

"So. Mira has cold feet?"

Ian bit his tongue for what felt like the five millionth time since he'd arrived at the construction site. Sun-mi had obviously been badly shaken up by whatever had made her try to call Mira in the first place, and she was Mira's best friend, after all. Ian probably shouldn't be taking the opportunity to play up her worst fears just to see how much he could ruffle her composure.

Besides, it wasn't very funny to see somebody else scared when what they were scared about was Mira being missing.

"I hope not," Ian managed, with a laugh he didn't bother trying to make sound anything but forced. "I'm sure she's fine, though. Al- Tyrone's got some ideas where she might be, he's looking for her right now." He put on a smile that had really been meant to be reassuring, but which still made Sun-mi alter her course to put another foot of sidewalk between them. "Maybe they'll be back at the hotel by the time we get there."

Sun-mi was silent for a few paces, watching Ian's face and then staring thoughtfully down the street.

"You don't really believe that, though," she said, finally, flatly. "You can feel it too, can't you. Something's not right."

Ian bit down on his tongue again, this time hard enough to sting.

"This is ridiculous," Sun-mi huffed, crossing her arms over her chest and rubbing her upper arms as though trying to work some warmth into them. "Listen to me, I sound like a hedgewitch." She didn't sound all that convinced of her own ridiculousness, though. Ian couldn't say he blamed her.

“Your brain does process information faster than you can consciously pick up on,” Ian said, in what he hoped was a convincing imitation of a reassuring tone of voice. “Of course, it’s working off the usual human cocktail of existing social schemas, cultural biases, and ingrained prejudices, but hey! It’s still processing!”

Sun-mi was looking at him strangely. Ian flashed her his biggest, most cheerful smile.

“I’d understand if Mira got cold feet,” Sun-mi said, at last, as though pronouncing a verdict. “I don’t know what she thinks she sees in you.”

Ian shrugged one shoulder, the smile starting to feel more like a grimace. “Probably my oodles of natural charisma and rugged good looks. Or maybe it’s my musk!”

Sun-mi’s eyebrows drew together, and she turned to look away from Ian, shaking her head. She didn’t say anything more.

They were about a block away from the hotel when Ian finally worked up the courage to ask, “She didn’t…tell you she didn’t want to marry me, did she?” The words stung his tongue like acid, and he wanted nothing more than to swallow them back down, lock them up somewhere where somebody like Sun-mi would never be able to hear them and turn them against him.

Sun-mi’s steps slowed, and then stopped altogether, so that Ian was a few paces ahead before he realized that she wasn’t walking alongside him anymore. 

“Oh no,” Ian said, trying and failing to laugh through it. “How bad is it, doc?”

Sun-mi glanced up, her dark eyes meeting and holding Ian’s for a moment before they flicked away.

“It hasn’t been easy, you know,” she said, as if that was an answer. “For her. When you’ve had all this success, you’ve got this huge fanbase, and she’s still struggling to get her career off the ground.”

“She told you that?” Ian said, and Sun-mi nodded, once.

“Her family assumes she’s going to give it up to support you. You know that, right?” Sun-mi put her head to one side, crossing her arms over her chest and fixing Ian with a laser stare. “Because she’s going to be your wife. She makes excuses for them, she doesn’t think they’re doing it on purpose. But it doesn’t really matter if they mean to or not, does it? The end result is the same.”

Ian swallowed, hard. “She didn’t tell me about that,” he managed. And if Mira hadn’t told him about something that important, what else hadn’t she told him?

“I’m not surprised. She thought you had ‘enough on your plate’. And obviously you didn’t notice enough to ask,” Sun-mi said, raising both hands to waggle a set of air quotation marks. She must really be pissed, not to bother trying to keep her hands inconspicuous like she usually did. “Look, Mira is my best friend. For some incomprehensible reason, she’s decided she wants you to be a permanent fixture in her life. I care about her and I want her to be happy, so as long as you keep making her happy, I can keep my mouth shut.” Sun-mi jabbed index and middle finger at Ian in an accusing point. “But right now? If she wanted to leave you, I’d help her pack.”

For a moment, Ian couldn’t make the discordant jangle in the back of his brain form into words. When it finally did, what came out wasn’t an apology, or an explanation, or anything else that might actually have been helpful. “So she didn’t tell you she was leaving me.”

There was a moment of very, very dangerous silence.

“No,” Sun-mi said, softly, at last. “She didn’t say anything to me at all.”

Ian huffed out a breath.

“So if she didn’t say anything to you, and she didn’t say anything to me…” He stopped, the horrible realization curdling his relief almost instantly. “Then she probably didn’t disappear of her own free will.”

Sun-mi’s face didn’t shift much, but Ian could still pinpoint the moment when her expression turned from icy fury into sick realization.

“Oh, shit,” she said, and Ian nodded agreement. “Oh, shit. You’re right. Where was this Tyrone planning to look for her? How long has she been gone? We should call someone, the police, alert the media, get her picture in circulation -”

"Pretty sure they don't do anything about missing persons until they've been missing for more than twenty-four hours," Ian said. The words felt like concrete drying quickly around his tongue, tasted bad and sucked all the moisture out of his mouth.

"Then we post it to the Gravity Falls alerts boards! That's what they're for, isn't it?" Sun-mi's eyes narrowed. "Don't you want to find her?"

"I literally just found out she was missing!" Ian protested. "I thought she was with Tyrone!"

Sun-mi's eyes narrowed further.

"Just who is this 'Tyrone', anyway?" she demanded, taking a step forward into Ian's personal space. "Do you know you can trust him? Do you remember when he showed up and how he entered your life? Because I know Mira says he's an old friend, but I've been her friend for years now and she's literally never mentioned him. She's even told me she didn't have friends growing up, so unless you've got something to prove he isn't some kind of shapeshifting, mind-altering parasite -"

"Some kind of what now?" Ian asked, holding up both hands with the palms toward Sun-mi. He didn't step back, though. She'd probably see that as admitting defeat. Instead, he made eye contact with her and resolutely held it until she blinked. "Look, we can trust Tyrone. He wants to find Mira just as much as we do."

Sun-mi's eyes flicked to Ian's golden right eye. "I don't know who this 'we' you keep talking about is," she said, shortly, but she took a step backwards. Ian silently counted it as a win. "All I know is that someone took my best friend. And until she's back, safe and sound, then there's no one in Gravity Falls I can trust."

Before Ian could come up with a coherent response to that, Sun-mi pushed past him and stalked towards the hotel. She didn't look back.

"Ian!"

Ian managed not to yell out loud at the sudden whisper less than an inch from his ear, but it was a close thing. Thankfully, the strangled yelp that did escape him wasn't enough to make Sun-mi turn around. "What did I tell you about popping up behind me?"

Alcor didn't look ashamed, or even like he'd heard Ian. He was, thankfully, still wearing his 'Tyrone' disguise, though Ian seriously wondered whether anyone would buy it if he kept popping up out of thin air.

"Did you find Mira? Where is she?" Ian asked, and the frown Alcor's pretend human face was wearing grew deeper.

"No. I didn't find her," he said. "But I know where she went."

Chapter Text

The first thing that caught the eye, entering Gravity Falls, were the cliffs.

It had been true in 2012 and it was true now, a little over a thousand years later. The valley in which the town nestled sloped gently downwards, only to abruptly terminate in a towering wall of rock. The cliffs loomed over the valley like enormous sentinels, keeping watch over everything that lay before them. One of the huge outcroppings of bare stone that hung over the valley had lost its top, a chunk of rock almost the size of the town itself sliding off and crashing into the base of the opposite cliff, but the distinctive UFO shape could still be made out, if you knew what you were looking for.

Gravity Falls had changed too much, and not at all. 

The landmarks that Dipper remembered, like the cliffs, had all been weathered or beaten or even completely broken down by the inexorable passage of time, the one force in the universe that even he couldn't overcome. And yet, when you looked at them with an eye that knew what they once had been, it was impossible to miss the way the new still wrapped itself around the bones of the old.

The borders of the town had sprawled out into the encroaching forest (and fought some pitched battles to do so), but at its core it remained the same small town Dipper remembered. The people, if the handful of locals he'd run into since arriving could be considered statistically significant, hadn't stopped being quirky and full of personality - and almost preternaturally unobservant. The original building housing Stanley Pines Memorial Library of the Supernatural had long ago disappeared into the forest's depths, but the town was still a go-to for scholars of the supernatural. The storefronts had changed, probably hundreds of times, but the layout of the streets in the centre of town were the same. Dipper could stroll through the town core with his eyes closed, and only have to worry about cars and hovercraft and the occasional pedestrian. 

He wasn't closing his eyes on this particular walk through downtown, though. He had a breadcrumb trail to follow.

The path that Mira had taken into the woods was clear, bright as a trail of searchlights leading down the street from the hotel and out to the edge of town. They were getting closer and closer to the cliffs, Dipper noticed uneasily. He very, very gently let his ‘Tyrone’ disguise slip another few notches, just enough to see the world through a few more senses humans didn’t have.

Mira’s trail flared to brilliant life before him, a rainbow of glittering colours the height of a human trailing down the street. Dipper breathed out, long and slow, when he didn’t see any traces of yellow or gold hanging around it. There was a thread of brighter green twining its way around the rainbow, a little like ivy, but it didn’t smell of Bill.

He could have seen more, of course, if he’d been able to shuck the human suit altogether, but -

“How can you tell which way she went?” Sun-mi...’complained’ wasn’t the right word. Maybe ‘demanded’ was closer. “I don’t see anything but street.”

“I think my senses are probably a little better than yours,” Dipper muttered, not particularly caring if Sun-mi heard him. It wasn’t all that unusual for someone to look human and not be, or to look human and not be entirely. He’d found over the years that it was much easier to misdirect people into thinking he was a different, more benign supernatural entity than he actually was, rather than trying to convince them that he was 100% authentic hand-squeezed human. 

Of course, he wouldn't have had to bother pretending anything if the only one of Mira's friends who didn't know about him hadn't insisted on coming along, but - fine. This was fine. He probably wouldn’t have been able to stay behind and let somebody else handle things if his best friend was mysteriously missing either, even if anyone else could have found Mira in the first place. Or, at least, found her trail, which was the problem. 

Dipper should have known exactly where Mira was. Her soul belonged to him, for Pete’s sake! He could always find her!

The fact that right now, all he could find was her trail did not exactly give him confidence in his decision to let - to help her come to Gravity Falls. He'd let his own nostalgia blind him to all the red flags. He'd thought, irrationally, that they'd be safe here. That Gravity Falls, despite all evidence to the contrary, wouldn't let anything happen to Mizar. He'd thought - 

Well, it didn't matter what he'd thought. Because he'd thought wrong. 

And now Mira was missing and it was all his fault.

"Werewolf?" Sun-mi asked, a trace of interest breaking through the irritable worry in her voice. It took Dipper a moment to backtrack far enough in his train of thought to figure out what she was talking about.

"Kind of a personal question, don't you think?"

"Are there any questions I could ask to learn more about you that aren't personal?" Sun-mi shot back. "How did you and Mira meet? How long have you known each other? Why hasn't she ever mentioned you? Who are you, anyway?"

"Not a werewolf," Dipper muttered, turning back to the trail.

...

The path ahead of Mira brightened slowly, from dark to dim grey to rosy, dappled with bright spots of gold where the sun slipped through the endless trees. The curious hush of the sleeping town was slowly but inexorably filling with birdsong. It was getting closer to morning the deeper she wandered into the woods.

Maybe she should have turned back the moment she'd realised the sun was starting to rise. Everyone would be worried - she hadn't left a note. 

Even as the thought crossed her mind, though, her feet still carried her forwards, the soft patter of her bare soles against the packed earth never faltering. Something swelled strange and fierce and triumphant in her chest, even as she ducked to avoid an overhanging branch. She wasn't sure if she remembered why, but - let them worry about her a little. She'd done enough worrying, for what felt like far too long, and the woods were peaceful and calm.

And welcoming.

...

The line between town and trees seemed weirdly abrupt.

Ian stared at it distrustfully. It stared distrustfully right back. If a solid wall of dark green could have a facial expression, he'd say it looked smug.

It absolutely wasn't frightening. Ian wasn't scared to go in.

"You're sure she's in there?" he asked, and Alcor - 'Tyrone' - grimaced.

"I'm sure she went in there." 'Tyrone's' eyes flicked over to meet Ian's, and Ian caught the unspoken flicker of worry in his expression. It was the opposite of reassuring.

"Then we're going in there too," Ian said, and started forward. Nobody tried to stop him, and he reached the treeline in only a few steps.

The pines and spruce towered overhead, like the walls of some huge fortress. A breeze eddied past, carrying the fresh scent of greenery, and for reasons he couldn't explain to save his life, a shiver danced up the back of Ian's neck. 

Somewhere above him, where the treetops took jagged bites out of the blue overhead, a crow's coughing cackle mocked Ian's bravado. Go on, then, it seemed to be saying. If you're so tough.

Ian gritted his teeth and stepped into the shadow of the trees. And then took one more step, into the forest.

The moment he lost sight of the sun behind the evergreens, it was as if he'd stepped into a cave. The air around him turned cold, the summer heat he'd taken for granted fizzling away into the cool, green, underwater dimness of the woods. The light shifted, shimmering through the trees and picking up a pale greenish hue as it fell. Even the background noise of the town seemed suddenly muted, like someone had turned the volume most of the way down. Ian had never been particularly outdoorsy, but he was pretty sure the entire atmosphere around him wasn't supposed to change that fast.

He turned, half-expecting to find himself alone, with only miles and miles of forest stretching out behind him, as far as he could see. But there was Gravity Falls, just the same as it had been half a second ago when he'd walked into the trees. Alcor was just a step behind him, Rosa and Sun-mi trailing a little further behind.

"This way," Alcor said, passing Ian and pointing them towards a bend in the path. Sun-mi hurried after him, dogging his heels, while Rosa slowed to wait for Ian.

"Doin' all right there?"

Ian managed a grimace that might, in the right light, be mistaken for a grin. "Don't worry about me. We've got a Mira to find."

"You know that don't make me worry any less, right?" Rosa said, looping her arm through Ian's and all but dragging him after her.

"There's just something creepy about these woods. Something more than just the fact that they apparently ate my fiancée," Ian admitted. "I feel like something's watching us."

Rosa jerked a thumb over her shoulder, to where a pointy red hat was just visible in the undergrowth.

"Ha ha," Ian said, yanking his arm back from Rosa. Or trying to, anyway. Her grip was like iron.

"Beale -" Rosa started, but Ian cut her off.

"Rose, please, I asked you to stop calling me that."

Rosa recoiled, looking stung, and then scowled. "All right. I'm sorry for that. But I'm just tryin' ta help -"

"Yeah, like you helped last time?" Ian muttered, and Rosa's scowl deepened.

"Fine. Be a miserable cuss if it makes ya feel better. But Mira's my friend too, an' I'm not sittin' round with my thumb up my ass whinin' while she's missing."

With that, she hurried ahead to catch up with the other two, leaving Ian alone with the feeling of eyes on his back.

...

"Changeling?"

Dipper paused, shut his eyes, and opened them again to a world overlaid with aura colours. Mira's trail was getting harder and harder to find in the layers of green, and somehow that worried him almost as much as the cave in the cliffs. Mira's trail should have been growing stronger as they got closer to the source, not fainter. True, they were in what was probably the most magical forest the world, but...

"What kind of changeling?" he asked. At least Sun-mi's incessant questions were a good distraction.

"Mm." Sun-mi was silent for a beat, surveying Dipper, which was not a good distraction. "Not troll, I don't think. Fey, maybe - I mean, you did just lure us all into the woods. I suppose there's also deal-born, though most of the deal-born meet unfortunate and ironic fates around puberty, it doesn't mix well with demon magic."

Dipper took a breath and let it out carefully, making sure it didn't sound too much like a sigh of relief. Mira's friend was just a shade too knowledgeable for comfort. Dipper was just lucky she'd been knowledgeable enough to talk herself out of getting too close to the truth.

"Not a changeling," he said, and paused. Ahead of him, the trail forked, and though he could still make out the vibrant colours of Mira's trail through the thick, cloying green of the forest's own magic, something made him stop and drop an arrow of gold light into the trampled-down earth and leafmould of the path, pointing back in the direction they'd come. It shone preternaturally bright in his second sight, but even as Dipper watched, that green crept in and around and over it, dimming its brilliance and dulling its sharp edges. Well, that probably wasn't good.

"Wizard?" Sun-mi asked. "I know they're not naturally gifted in the senses department, but there must be spells -"

"Sun-mi, A-Tyrone, how're we doing?" Rosa interrupted, throwing an arm companionably over Dipper's shoulder. Judging by the expression on Sun-mi's face, Rosa had done the same to her with the other arm. "Please tell me we're gettin' close."

"Hard to say," Dipper answered, grateful to have something to talk about other than magical-creature-twenty-questions. "You know how they say Gravity Falls is the most magical place on Earth? The town's got nothing on the woods. It's making it really hard to tell where Mira went or even how long ago she came through."

"The forest's magical field interferes with your tracking abilities?" Sun-mi said, and Dipper gave himself a sharp mental kick. "Interesting."

Rosa shot her a confused look, before turning back to Dipper. "That don't mean you can't find her, though, does it?"

Dipper wished he could take it as her being spoiled and demanding, and ignore the note of plaintive worry in her voice.

"I sure hope not," he muttered, and, before anyone else could ask any questions, plunged forward down the path where Mira's trail had gone.

...

The path, Mira noticed with interest, had all but disappeared under her feet. A soft, plush carpet of fallen leaves and moss cushioned her every step as she wound her way around the trees, brambles and low bushes almost seeming to curl back out of her way with every step. 

They were growing fewer and farther between, though, as the trees grew larger and farther apart. A vague memory from a long-ago science class told her that as she moved deeper into the forest, she was also moving back in time. These trees must have been here for hundreds, if not thousands, of years. Their branches arched overhead like the vaulted ceiling of an ancient cathedral, a reverent hush gathering among the enormous trunks.

Even without a path, Mira found, it was impossible to get lost. Her feet seemed to know where they wanted to wander, and she was content to follow them. 

It was strange. She'd left her hotel in the middle of the night to walk into the woods, without leaving a note or telling anyone where she was going, with no clear plan or destination in mind. And now it was morning, and she was still walking, into the very oldest depths of the most magical, least trustworthy forest on Earth. She could swear that the plants were moving to guide her and clear her way, and she had the faintest feeling that the movement she'd been seeing among the trees wasn't only birds and squirrels and gnomes.

And yet, she wasn't afraid. She wasn't even worried. That in itself might have worried her, but - how could it? She wasn't lost. She didn't exactly know where she was going, but her feet knew how to get there. And Dipper would always know where to find her. 

And the woods weren't frightening. In fact, much like the clearing they'd first arrived in, they felt - not friendly, maybe, but welcoming. Familiar. Like - like an older relative's house she'd visited lots when she was younger, well-known but still a little bit mysterious, but still safe, still comfortable. Almost, but not quite like...

Home.

...

The path Alcor had been leading them down had long ago faded into the underbrush. Ian's arms were scratched and bruised where he'd tried (with varying degrees of success) to push the brambles and bushes out of his way. He really hoped he didn't have any ticks embedded in his legs after all this tromping around in the brush, but he wasn't going to count on it. Rosa's petticoat had gotten so hopelessly snarled that they'd all had to stop and untangle her twice, and Sun-mi had finally conceded defeat and tucked her silky scarf away in her purse after it had caught on a branch and nearly strangled her.

"Can't you do something about this?" Ian grumbled to Alcor, once he was sure Sun-mi's attention was fixed on liberating her scarf.

"I'm trying," Alcor muttered back, turning to look at Ian, and Ian took a sharp step backwards before catching himself. 'Tyrone' looked terrible, pale as death but with a bright fever-spot of red on each cheek, and his eyes - they looked normal, at first glance, but when you were paying attention and knew what you were looking for, it was obvious that the yellowish cast to his skin was at least partly due to the glow coming off his eyeballs. "But it's fighting me."

"I thought you were the most powerful -" Ian started, his voice rising, but Alcor glanced pointedly over in Sun-mi's direction and Ian swallowed the rest of the sentence. "Are you saying this patch of trees is stronger than you are?"

"No! I'm saying the further in we get, the harder it is to keep this forest from doing what it really wants to do and just throwing us out!" Alcor reached up, like he was going to adjust the brim of a hat he wasn't wearing, then huffed out a frustrated sigh and ran his fingers up into his hair instead, grabbing a lock so that it stood up in all directions. "Okay, maybe that does mean this patch of trees is stronger than I am, but it was here before I was Al- was me, and it's had more practice!" His voice went suddenly small as he added, "Believe me, I'm doing everything I can."

Ian managed to bite back the complaint that had been lining up on his tongue, ready to spill out. It wasn't like he couldn't see that Alcor was trying. Or like he didn't know Alcor wanted to find Mira as much as or more than he did.

"Okay," he sighed. "Is there, I don't know, anything I can do to help?"

Alcor started to shake his head, and then stopped. "Actually, if you and Rosa can keep Sun-mi distracted so she stops trying to figure out what I am and how I fit into Mira's life -"

Ian nodded. "Say no more."

...

Ian stepped away from Dipper's side, and Dipper breathed a mental sigh of relief. It was enough work just keeping 'Tyrone' intact while holding the forest at bay, trying to hold a conversation at the same time was borderline impossible. And he hadn't actually lied to Ian, but - it probably wouldn't increase anybody's confidence if they knew that the further into the forest they went, the weaker Dipper was starting to feel. 

Of course, that still made him more powerful than ninety-nine percent of demons, but - this wasn't supposed to happen. He'd gotten so used to being the strongest that suddenly having that pulled out from under him was not a fun or pleasant experience. Nothing was supposed to be able to do this to him anymore! And yet, he could still feel the slow, steady sucking that was draining his power, little by little, growing stronger the closer they drew to the heart of the forest - and, if his sense of direction wasn't as clouded as his sixth sense was, the cliffs. 

Just as it had with Mira and her trail and the breadcrumb arrows he'd left along their way, the thick green web of the forest's power obscured Dipper's Sight, making it impossible for him to tell what it was that was leeching off his power. Unfortunately, Dipper thought he had a pretty good idea what it was anyway.

He cast a wary glance back at the trio following him, his eyes landing on Ian's back with a wince. It probably hadn't been a good idea to bring him. If Dipper wasn't putting two and two together and coming up with paranoia, then Mira'd been taken as bait. Bait to get him within range of the thing that was stealing his power. Bait to get Ian up to the cliffs.

Bait to get them all assembled, again, in a place where Bill Cipher could be summoned.

Rosa let out an uproarious laugh about something and punched Ian in the arm, and for a moment, Dipper was forcibly reminded of another trio who'd trailed after him like this, so many lifetimes ago. Just being here was dragging so many old memories he hadn't thought about in forever back out of the depths of his mind, and Dipper had to admit that it was bittersweet. Everything had changed so much since the last time he'd set foot in these woods.

Well. Almost everything.

Dipper turned back to the faint echo of Mira's aura hanging in the air. It was all but swallowed by green now. They'd have to make better time.

And he'd have to figure out what he was going to do once they reached the cave.

...

The trees and the undergrowth finally started to clear, but while it made it easier to walk, it didn’t actually make things better. Mostly because it meant Ian could now see the birch trees all around him. Hundreds, maybe thousands of big black eyes surrounding him on all sides, boring into his back no matter where he turned. 

It was unnerving enough on its own, but that wasn’t all. The first few times he saw it, Ian thought it was just trees swaying in the wind, that he’d glimpsed out of the corner of his eye, green sweeping across his peripheral vision and then vanishing again. He’d only realised it couldn’t possibly be trees when one of them flickered red. 

After that, they were impossible to miss. It didn’t take long before the others started to notice, too. Rosa’s elbow in his side and raised eyebrow said everything, to Ian. Sun-mi was a little less tactful.

“We’re being followed,” she said, shortly. 

“No, we’re not,” Alcor said. “I lost Mira’s trail fifteen minutes ago.”

There was a moment of quiet as everyone tried to work out what he meant. The creatures following them, the lightening undergrowth, the way the forest had seemed to stop fighting them -

“You’re saying we’re being herded,” Ian said. 

Alcor just grimaced, and kept walking.

...

It felt like hours, or maybe days, before Mira's feet slowed and then came to a stop, hours that still somehow passed in the blink of an eye. Time seemed to have bent dreamlike around her, leaving her here without a real sense of how she'd gotten there.

For the first time since she'd entered the forest, Mira paused and looked around. The sunlight finally burst through the canopy in full, pouring down around her and flooding the clearing laid out before her with golden light. Every blade of pale green or gold grass, rippling gently like a shimmering sea in the faint breath of breeze, every needle on the branches of the towering evergreens and every silver-coin-flashing leaf bursting from the birches that ringed the open space, every delicate petal of the explosion of multicoloured flowers filling the clearing, were gilded with light.

But, beautiful as the whole scene was, one thing inexorably drew her eye.

The tree standing at the centre of the clearing was unlike the other trees around them, and not only because it was the only apple tree Mira had seen so far. Nor was it simply because it looked like the oldest apple tree in the world, so fantastically gnarled that it almost looped in on itself, its explosion of branches twisting like serpents. There was something about it that seemed to have its own gravity, strong enough to draw her all the way from town into the middle of the woods. It was in full leaf, its branches laden with perfect fruit. Mira's mouth watered at the sight of them.

She took a step forward, into the clearing, her mind empty of everything but the brilliant red glint of sunlight off the flawless skin of the apples.

And that was when she saw the figure standing at the base of the tree, its bare, branching antlers almost hidden by the leaves.

...

The half-glimpsed green creatures left them at the edge of a clearing. Ian could still see their flowing garments and shocking red hair peeking out from behind the birch and spruce that ringed the small circle of grass, though. The message was clear: there would be no going back the way they came.

He stepped reluctantly out into the clearing, uneasily watching the birch trees watching him. He'd had nightmares that started like this. Lots of them, in fact. Ever since he'd had a lifetime's worth of memories that didn't belong to him dropped into his head.

Ian's attention was so focused on the trees that he didn't notice Alcor had stopped walking until he collided with Alcor's back. Alcor was frozen, staring at something in the centre of the clearing, and if it could make the world's most powerful demon look like that, then Ian wasn't so sure he wanted to look and see what it was.

He finally forced himself to step out from behind the demon, to confront what Alcor had seen. If it had anything to do with what had taken Mira, then he had to face it, had to know what it was.

At first, though, he wasn't sure what the big deal was. All he saw was what looked like the oldest, ugliest apple tree in the world, the dark wood of its trunk twisted and knotted until it almost looked like it had been carved into the rough shape of a crouched human body, the bare branches springing from the bulbous knot that represented its 'head' pronged like antlers. Someone had left an axe leaning against it, and though the handle was weathered silver and half-overgrown by the tree, the blade still glinted deadly sharp.

Then it opened its eyes.

Twin blue stars flashed to life in the middle of the creature's face, blue stars flaring in the depths of impossibly deep sockets, like gazing into infinity. They seemed to bore straight into Ian, as though they were looking into his soul and out the other side.

The creature slowly unfolded itself, its body wrenching away from the tree, Ian now saw, it had begun to grow into. And it kept unfolding itself, unnaturally long limbs extending, until it towered over the four assembled searchers, seven feet or more of gnarled dark wood and inexplicable malice. One of its gangling arms ended in a clawed hand, fingers like questing roots, pointed and irresistible. The other ended in the axe.

Rosa gasped, grabbing Ian's shoulders. Sun-mi also gasped, though it was an entirely different-sounding gasp, and took a step forward, one hand scrabbling blind for her phone, her eyes never leaving the creature's face. Only Alcor didn't move, didn't react, almost like he'd known this was going to happen. Which, Ian reflected, he probably had.

The creature's knot-face cracked, splitting right across the middle, jagged edges like sharp teeth, and it let out a bone-shattering roar. Crows scattered from the treetops around them, the trees around them shook, even the ground seemed suddenly unsteady under Ian's feet.

Sun-mi jumped back, and Rosa ducked down behind Ian's back. Alcor didn't move. He stood, perfectly still, until the creature's roar slowly petered out into a curious sound, and then stopped altogether. Ian couldn’t see any real change in his appearance, but Alcor still somehow seemed taller, almost towering. Ian could feel the press of Alcor’s power on his skin, not unlike the pins and needles of blood flowing back into a limb, insistent and uncomfortable and impossible to ignore.

In the ringing silence after the roar, Alcor's voice was like a bell tolling.

"Woodsman. Where is my Mizar?

Chapter Text

Once upon a time, there was a seed.

The greatest redwood forests start from a single seed, and so too it was with this seed. Dormant, it lay for decades in rich and fertile soil, waiting only for the right conditions to unfurl its tentative leaves. To put forth its questing roots.

...

The moment the words fell out of his mouth, Dipper knew he’d made a mistake.

But he’d been challenged! On his own ground! In his home, of all places, by one of his own creations! Who did the Woodsman think he was? The moment he’d seen those antlers twined into the branches of Henry’s apple tree - 

"Now hold on, hold on, back it up just a tick," Rosa said. "Who's this now?"

...

Once upon a time, there was a sapling.

It had grown from a seed, a seed nourished by magic both ancient and entirely new, a seed planted in rich and fertile soil. It was young still, its trunk no wider than a slender wrist, but its roots ran strong and deep.

The sapling grew tall and strong, entwined with the narrow trunk of an apple tree, so closely that their fruits intermingled, that they could not be told apart. Who watered one watered the other; what nourished one, nourished the other. Apple and sapling shared all things; water, sunlight, soil, the love of the one who tended their orchard, of those who sat in the shade and shelter of their branches.

And then, one day, the apple tree fell.

...

The apple tree arched shimmering branches overhead, laden with both delicate, almost translucent blossoms and glossy fruit so rich and red that Mira could swear they were dripping colour into the detritus of leaves and needles below.

In the strangest way, the scene was familiar. She couldn’t, if asked, have explained why, but - this tree was real and huge and healthy, and heavy with fruit, blossoms, and lush foliage (which, the closer Mira looked, seemed to be in all of the different seasons at once), but somehow it reminded her of nothing so much as the scrawny, spectral soul-tree she and Alcor had destroyed. 

She wasn’t scared.

That was strange, too. Maybe the strangest of all. Mira had the funniest feeling - maybe just because of the memory of that other tree, and what she’d seen and done that day - that she was supposed to be scared. And yet, the tree was unusual, maybe a little eerie, but it wasn’t frightening. In fact, just being under the canopy of its branches made Mira feel - warm. Safe. Sheltered. 

Protected.

Without, Mira realised with a start, the feeling of being maybe just a little bit...watched which came with the territory of being Mizar. She couldn’t remember the last time she hadn’t felt Alcor’s all-seeing eye trained on her back. It was a feeling she’d learned to live with, long ago, a feeling that had been a comfort at times, even as it had been a giant pain in the ass at others. She’d gotten so used to it that she hardly even registered it anymore. Hardly noticed it was there.

And now it was gone. 

Mira didn’t know whether to feel worried or relieved.

...

Once upon a time, there was a tree.

It stood alone, and yet not alone. A forest surrounded it, a forest of old magic and older growth, a forest filled with seeds of its fruit. The number of those who sheltered under its branches grew and grew with each passing year, as the forest itself grew, as its canopy enfolded the mountainside.

And yet, the tree still stood alone. No longer intertwined with another, its trunk seemed gnarled and twisted, its branches barren but for its curious stolen fruit. Its roots ran so deep and wide now that no seed dared take root near it. No other tree dared risk tasting the soil that nourished it.

It had become an exceedingly thin and bitter soil.

Without the apple beside it, the tree was but half a tree, roots and branches spreading ever outwards, seeking after something that, in its heartwood, it knew it had lost. Something that it needed to be fully whole.

...

The hairs on the back of Ian's neck were standing on end.

That probably had something to do with the huge tree-monster with burning blue eyes roaring at them. Or the aura of power rolling off of Alcor's disintegrating human disguise. Or the redheaded figures ringing the clearing like guards, peering balefully at them from between the birches. Or the fact that, despite Alcor's accusation, Mira still wasn't anywhere to be seen. There were actually so many things to be frightened or unsettled by that Ian was starting to feel a little spoiled for choice.

But it wasn't just fear. At least, Ian didn't think it was, though, judging from the way the other two humans in their party had drawn closer together, they might be inclined to disagree. He was vibrating with energy, both nervous and strangely excited - literally vibrating, he realised, fingers drumming a staccato tattoo against his bouncing leg.

The sheer ambient magic hanging around the forest was making his mechanical eye go haywire, too, Ian realised, looking around. It had taken him an embarrassingly long time to realise that what looked like indistinct red and green shapes when seen through his left eye, easily mistaken for drifting leaves or shaking branches or the dappled shadow on a tree trunk shifting, became ethereal, green-tinted human figures with shockingly red hair when seen through the right. 

But now that they were standing inside the ring of trees, what Ian could see through his right eye had gone practically psychedelic. One minute there was nothing there but the wind in the evergreens; the next, tall redheaded figures with greenish skin and unusually long fingers; the next, everything was black and white save for the fist-sized balls of blue fire hovering where the green people had stood, shedding leaves made of blue flame that shaded to autumnal yellow at the tips and edges. 

And it wasn't only the...dryads?...that Ian's eye had decided to warp. It flickered from the clearing in full colour, to black and white interrupted only by the glow of what Ian assumed had to be magic, to a greenish haze that made it hard to tell anything apart, to fire. The enormous tree monster in the centre of the clearing was now a slim, tall, antlered figure made of blue flame, now a pale human man whose eyes were black holes and whose antlers dripped with severed hands and feet, now a hideously gnarled, blackened tree rooted firmly in the earth and twined so closely together with the apple tree that stood at the centre of the clearing that they almost looked braided together. Alcor was now Tyrone, now a crackling ball of golden light as tall as Rosa with enormous wings sweeping out to encircle the clearing, now - Ian blinked, and it had vanished, but he could have sworn he'd seen a small, dark-haired boy, about twelve or thirteen, in strange, old-fashioned clothing, standing where Alcor had stood.

The view from Ian's left eye stayed constant, steady, while the view from his right jumped wildly from one vision to the next. It was enough to give a guy a headache.

And he was getting a headache. A slow, dull throb was starting to build behind his right eye, like the prosthetic was growing too big for its socket. 

It was a familiar feeling. Ian really hoped it didn’t mean what he thought it meant.

...

Once upon a time, there was a deep, dark forest.

It had stood for a hundred hundred years, and it would stand for a hundred hundred more. And, at the very heart of the forest, there was a tree.

It stood at the centre of a clearing, a clearing it had made for itself. And for years, for centuries, it stood alone.

And then, one day, a little rabbit came hopping along and nestled down in its roots.

...

"The hell kinda magic's goin' on around here?" Rosa complained, from somewhere behind Dipper. He ignored her. "Feels like I'm seein' double."

"You're not the only one," Ian muttered, and Dipper resisted the urge to turn and look. He was talking about his artificial eye and its artificial Sight. That was all. Nothing more.

"Oh, for - am I the only person here who isn't somehow magically sensitive?!" Sun-mi protested. "What's going on? Where's Mira? What is that thing?" Dipper was sure it wasn't his imagination that that last sentence sounded more curious than annoyed or frightened.

"Based on context, I'm gonna go out on a limb and say it's an ancient forest spirit," Ian said. "And that it does not like us being here."

Dipper could hear the grimace in his voice, and, despite the fact that clinging to a human mask was growing more difficult and confusing by the second, couldn't help but echo it. Ian was no fool; he'd probably worked out exactly what Dipper had. If the Woodsman was walking again, these days, it almost definitely meant he felt his forest was under threat. And what greater threat than...

"Wait. You never met the Woodsman, did you?" Dipper broke concentration long enough to ask. If any of the other three noticed that the movement of 'his' lips didn't exactly sync up with the words, they were too polite to mention it.

Ian gave Dipper an odd look, made odder by the way his prosthetic eye was flickering and roving in his head. "On the one hand, you're absolutely correct, but on the other hand, I get the feeling you're talking about something else completely that I don't know if I should be agreeing with."

Dipper cleared his nonexistent throat and nodded in Sun-mi's direction. Ian winced.

"Oh, what?" Sun-mi demanded, planting both hands on her hips. "Look, I'm not exactly an idiot. I know there's something here you all aren't telling me, and I'm getting pretty damn sick of it! Especially if it has some bearing on the mysterious disappearance of my best friend! You owe me the truth. Spill."

Ian glanced over at Dipper. Dipper met his eyes with a wince of his own.

"Gruargh," the Woodsman said, and Dipper started. He'd almost forgotten the big guy was there.

"Hold your horses, we'll get to you," he said to the Woodsman, whose eerie, sunken blue eyes somehow managed a kicked-puppy look, before turning back to the three humans with him. "Ian? Do you want to...?"

Sun-mi crossed her arms over her chest, fixing Ian with a penetrating stare. "I don't particularly care who it is, but somebody'd better start talking. Now."

Ian pressed his lips tight together, glancing down at the waving grasses to his left. He shook his head, but didn't speak.

"Fine," Dipper said, with a sigh that rattled the remaining particles of his temporary meatsuit. "I -"

He didn't get to finish the sentence.

With a roar that literally shook the clearing, the Woodsman lunged. His impossibly long arm swept forward, knocking Rosa off her feet, and grabbed Dipper by the throat, hauling him up into the air. The Woodsman drew Dipper up close to his face, seemingly oblivious to the screams and shouts from the humans below, until Dipper was eye-to-glowing-blue-eye with the Woodsman. Through the sudden fear that spiked through him, Dipper realised the Woodsman's head seemed a lot larger than the last time they'd seen each other. Like, a lot larger. Like, the Woodsman's head was as tall as Dipper's entire meatsuit larger. It seemed the Woodsman had been isolated out in the woods for so long that he'd forgotten human scale.

Either that, or, the way he was one with the woods now, he'd grown with them.

Neither, Dipper thought stupidly, spelled good things for his very squishy human companions down below.

"Oh my stars!" one of the girls was shrieking, over and over again. Dipper hadn't pegged either of them as likely to lose their heads in a situation like this, but then again, he supposed, you never really knew until you got somebody there. Well. He knew, of course, he knew lots of things, but...when humans were involved, they could always surprise you.

"Uh," Dipper tried, into the baleful glare of that actinic blue eye. "Guess that was the wrong response...?"

The Woodsman answered by opening the gash in his bark that served as a mouth and letting out another bone-shattering roar. Literally bone-shattering. Dipper felt his meatsuit buffeted mercilessly in the wind of that roar, could feel the particles stripping away in that wind like confetti. He tried to hold them in place, but it was no use. The sheer power pouring off the Woodsman shredded his human disguise like wet tissue paper, leaving Dipper scrambling to put on an appropriately humanoid face and rein his wings back in. He'd been aiming to intimidate the Woodsman when they were only visible on the magical level, but now, without his constructed body and with his power laid bare for everyone to see, he didn't feel like burning out anybody's eyes.

The short shriek Sun-mi let out told Dipper that he hadn't been entirely successful.

"Alcor!" she yelled, waving an arm in Dipper's direction. "That's Alcor!"

Ian grimaced. "Got it in one."

"That's a demon!"

"And now you're two for two," Rosa agreed, with forced nonchalance, though Dipper was pleased to note that she did at least look pale.

"And you all knew about this?" Sun-mi demanded, the shock in her voice starting to shade towards anger. "Oh my stars, did that poor schmuck he was possessing just get obliterated!?"

"What? No! That meatsuit was all mine," Dipper protested.

"No humans were harmed in the making of this motion picture," Ian muttered, under his breath. Sun-mi's existential crisis didn't seem to be holding his attention any more than the Woodsman did, though - he was still busy looking around, watching the redheaded dryads who encircled the clearing, jumping at shadows. Dipper wondered if he was feeling the tug of ancient, familiar power too.

And that was all he thought about that, for a while, because it was then that the Woodsman started to squeeze.

...

Mira's attention was so taken by the tree that she almost didn't notice the man standing under its branches. She wasn't sure when he'd appeared, wasn't sure whether he'd been there the whole time, standing almost inhumanly still and silent, watching her look around. The lush green grass and the laden branches waving around him made his stillness all the more pronounced.

Mira took a half-step back.

The man under the tree raised his head to look at her, but the dappled shadows of the tree's branches still obscured his features. He was tall, though, the top of his head and his shock of bright red hair hidden behind the leaves and flowers of the tree, and pale as milk. He seemed strangely familiar somehow, but the more Mira looked, the less sure she was of what he actually looked like. Was he wearing a plaid flannel shirt and jeans? A dark, formal suit? Leaves and birchbark? Anything at all?

She took another step back, and the man reached out an arm towards her. She couldn't make out his features, couldn't tell if his nose was large or small or if his eyes were wide-set or close together, but somehow she could swear that his expression was pleading.

Against all her better judgement, Mira stopped moving.

Slowly, the tall man lowered himself to one knee in front of her. As the top of his head came down out of the branches, Mira realised that it hadn't all been branches that she'd been seeing. A rack of impressive antlers, shaped like a deer's but gnarled like wood, sprouted from the man's head. Rich, red apples hung from the antlers, their colour so deep and true that Mira's mouth watered at the sight.

( - for a second, she could swear they were dripping with it, bloody drops splashing against the leaf-littered ground - )

Mira took a cautious step forward, and then another. The tall man's arm was still outstretched, but the closer Mira got, the easier it was to tell that he wasn't simply reaching out for her. Something was taking form in his fingers, and for a second Mira recoiled, thinking she was seeing a little brown snake crawling out of his sleeve (leaves?). 

But it wasn't, when she looked closer, a snake at all. It was a slender brown root, twisting and twining itself into an empty, elaborate coil. Almost like -

The tall man raised his head, then, and looked Mira in the eye. She still couldn't seem to pin down his features, but she found herself frozen in place by eyes that were the most vibrant midsummer-sky blue.

The tall man held the ring up to Mira. She couldn't see his lips move, but the wind in the leaves, the rustle of the grass, the low buzz and hum of the bees dipping into the flowers, all seemed to come together to form one sound.

No. Not one sound. One word.

Stay.

Chapter Text

The clearing was so quiet.

Mira had noticed it, when she’d first arrived, the almost reverent hush between the trees. She’d thought it was peaceful.

In the silence after the antlered figure’s…proposal, there was no other word for it, the quiet was almost oppressive. Mira could feel it sucking at her, trying to pull her down, trying to drag her in. Trying to tug words out of her mouth.

The antlered figure didn’t move. The birdsong and soft susurrus of the wind in the branches all seemed hushed, muted. Hanging on Mira’s next words.

Mira looked around her, drawing in a deep breath.

She’d had dreams like this. Well – not literal dreams, though there had been those too, subconscious swirls of raw-boned cliff reaching up through sun-washed pines. Half-dreamt memories of another lifetime. But they weren’t what sprang to mind as she stood in that sheltered, expectant green silence. No, that was a different kind of dream altogether. The kind Mira had had as a much younger (and much more single) girl, the kind that involved dark and mysterious men in lots of black leather with inhuman powers and brooding expressions, long-lost princesses of equally long-lost kingdoms like Atlantis or Los Angeles, secret magical worlds, ballgowns, and a lot of smouldering.

It was, Mira realized, like something out of one of her own novels.

And as soon as that realisation drifted across the surface of her mind, everything shifted into focus.

…

The mad whirl of the clearing was speeding up. Its different faces flickered past Ian’s Sighted eye faster and more furiously, until he had to squeeze the eye shut or risk introducing his breakfast to the toes of his canvas sneakers. But, to his horror, shutting his right eye didn’t stop the flickering.

Alcor and the tree-creature, Green Man, forest god, whatever, were strobing so violently that Ian’s brain throbbed painfully in his skull. Their power threw psychedelic spirals through the woods as they lashed out at each other. The air seemed thicker, harder to move through, and Ian could swear he could see it sparking against his skin.

The little tableau in front of the apple tree certainly drew the eye, but Dipper and the tree-creature were impossible to really look at for more than a second at a time. It was like trying to stare directly at the sun – too bright, too hot, and it left shimmering neon afterimages on Ian’s retinas.

As he looked away, trying to blink his vision clear, something else caught Ian’s attention. He couldn’t quite say why. Compared the rest of the madly flickering versions of the clearing, it was dull. Muted. Subdued. And yet, somehow, it stopped him in his tracks, staring, searching for another glimpse.

For the briefest sliver of a second, Ian was sure he’d caught sight of Mira’s face.

…

“Ian!” Mira shouted, reaching out, but her fiancé had already disappeared. Now, she wasn’t even sure she’d really seen him.

For the first time since she’d arrived, a gentle breeze wafted through the clearing, blowing with it the scents of clean mountain air and sharp, fresh pine. It set the boughs of the birch trees rustling, and Mira was pretty sure it wasn’t her imagination that they seemed to fold together, closing the clearing more tightly in.

Mira turned back to the antlered figure under the tree. It – he – hadn’t moved, but somehow his presence seemed to press closer than before. She still couldn’t make out any distinct features in the shadows of his face, but she couldn’t deny that his eyes were fixed on her.

He raised the hand holding the ring towards her, again, and Mira flashed a distracted smile in his direction, taking a step back as she searched the empty clearing for another glimpse of Ian.

She jumped when something touched her back, whirling around with fists raised, but all that greeted her was a low-hanging branch of the apple tree. The sweet scent of the tiny white blossoms covering it made Mira sneeze, and she tried to wave away the cloud of pollen that threw a golden haze over everything. A few lazy bees bumbled through the cloud of pollen, one of them bouncing off the side of Mira’s head before settling back into the apple blossoms.

The antlered figure was still looking up at her, those eyes Mira couldn’t quite make out staring directly into hers. She wasn’t sure how she knew that they were, other than a feeling. It only grew stronger as the cloud of pollen sparkled in the air around her, that sweet, heady scent of the apple blossoms mingling with the crisp pine scent on the wind. There was something about that smell that whispered to Mira of summer, of freedom, of home.

The antlered figure didn’t say anything. At least, not in words. Mira was beginning to understand that that wasn’t how he worked. But the breeze ruffled her hair, fluttering it up to caress the nape of her neck, and crowned her with tiny white petals shaken down out of the apple tree. The little blossoms rained down around her, catching on her pyjamas and on each other, until she almost seemed to be draped in a full skirt and bodice of fine white lace. Pollen gilded the edges of each ruffle, glittered on her skin and in her hair.

Through the storm of blossoms, that antlered figure just kept looking up at her. Only at her. As though, in this whole magical world he inhabited, she was the only thing worth his wonder.

And Mira understood.

This was exactly what she’d seen with such clarity such a short while before. It was a fantasy. One she’d dreamed, once, one she’d been working to wrap words around, to share with others, her entire writing career.

This dark, fey creature would love her, in his own way. And it would be a dream. He would give her anything she wanted, anything the magic of his woods could provide. It would be his greatest joy, to see her happy, to see her every whim fulfilled. He would do anything she asked, be anything she needed, share any secret she wished to learn. He wanted her, not to keep his house or raise his children or support his career. He simply wanted her. He only wanted to keep her.

And never let her go.

…

“Mira!” Ian shouted. This time – this time he was sure, he knew he’d seen her there, dressed in white, standing underneath the apple tree. She was gone again as soon as he blinked, but – she was there.

He hadn’t really expected his outburst to get any attention, with Alcor and the forest god still going toe-to-toe. But Sun-mi’s head snapped around, a painful hope on her face. Rosa parted her fingers from where she’d pressed both hands over her eyes, darting Ian a glance. And – the tree-monster turned, fixing its burning blue gaze on Ian.

For a second, Ian was frozen, rooted to the spot. Those eyes seemed to be staring right through him, reading everything he’d ever done, every thought he’d ever had, everything that was written on his soul. And they didn’t seem impressed.

And then, Alcor, twitching forgotten in the tree-creature’s grasp, lashed out. Golden fire ripped through the air, a stench of burnt ozone replacing the fresh pine breeze, and the tree-creature’s trunklike arm fell away from its body, severed with a perfect, smoking cut.

The tree-creature roared, a shattering sound that had Ian clapping his hands over his ears, and spun back to the demon still clutched in its severed arm. The fingers of its fallen hand were starting to blister and char, blue flames licking up from the wood, while Alcor stared the creature down. Ian was suddenly, indescribably grateful not to be on the receiving end of that stare.

Ian turned away when the severed tree-arm’s burning fingers tightened on the demon again, golden lightning and blue fire lashing through the air. It wasn’t heartless, just practical. When the tree-creature’s attention was focused on Alcor, it seemed like its concentration slipped. And the more its concentration slipped, the more trouble it was having keeping Mira hidden. A faint green haze shimmered in the air between her and Ian, but – there she was again, standing under the apple tree, long white skirt trailing around her in a breeze Ian couldn’t feel.

As he watched, Mira reached out one hand towards him, like she could see him too.

Ian ran forward, ducking under a lashing, whiplike branch and the burst of blue fire that immolated it in a black, smoking line. With every step he took closer to the fight, the air grew thicker, soupier, harder to push through, saturated with magic. The tree-creature and Alcor were impossible to ignore, much as Ian tried, keeping his eyes fixed on Mira’s indistinct face and her outstretched hand. The sheer bulk of the tree-creature, the brightness of Alcor’s flickering form, the brilliant magical signatures they splashed across his Sighted eye, all dominated the clearing.

And then, Ian pushed through the green mist, and they were just - gone.

…

Mira shook her head, trying to clear it. The thick, sweet scent of the apple blossoms and the pines encircling the clearing seemed to be filling her head, stuffing her skull with cobwebs. The birches drew closer together again, bright sprays of green leaves blocking out whatever she thought she’d seen. Her head ached as she tried to remember what it had been.

The antlered figure was still looking up at her, that hand outstretched with the root-ring offered, his piercing blue eyes staring directly through her. For a dizzying instant, Mira couldn’t tell if she was looking into the eyes of the antlered figure or of her own fiancé.

“No,” she said, kindly but, she hoped, firmly, to the antlered figure with his hand outstretched, to the ring he offered, to his silent-not-silent proposal on the wind. “No, I – no. I can’t. Please let me go. I have to get back.”

The figure’s eyes, such a pale, piercing blue, narrowed. For the barest sliver of a second, Mira could swear they were glowing, were burning, in the shadows of that face. The delicate breeze suddenly howled arctic around her, the apple tree’s branches dripping with jagged icicles. And they weren’t the only things dripping from those branches. All of those apples, red and fat and glossy enough to make the mouth water just to look at, were…wrong. For that scant second, Mira could swear they were, not apples, but hands, severed and dripping brilliant crimson drops of blood to splash against the carpet of crimson leaves covering the ground.

Then she blinked, and the macabre vision was gone, as though it had never been there at all.

Mira took a step back.

“No,” she repeated, though even to her own ears it sounded less determined and more frightened.

The antlered figure stood. Well, stood didn’t quite do it justice. It was more as though he…sprouted, unfolding upwards through the earth, antlers and limbs extending as he leaned towards the sunlight – and towards Mira. In no time at all he towered over her, tall and slender as one of the pines ringing the clearing, the shadow that obscured his face deeper and darker. In its deepest depths, twin blue flames burned bright.

Mira stood firm, even though a not-insignificant part of her just wanted to turn around and run away. She was Mizar, dammit! She’d faced down horrors most people couldn’t even begin to imagine! And so far, she’d always survived! She’d saved the behind of the world’s most powerful demons more times than she could count on one hand! She wasn’t just Alcor’s tagalong, wasn’t just the girlfriend of the creator of Mizar the Magnificent. She was a force to be reckoned with and she wasn’t scared! If anything, this two-bit monster of the week should be scared of her!

“Let me go,” Mira said, hoping she sounded confident and firm and not like she was whining. “Now.”

The antlered figure didn’t move, didn’t react, only watched her with those burning eyes. Mira swallowed around the lump that settled into her throat, squaring her shoulders and planting her feet more firmly shoulder-width apart. She crossed her arms over her chest, and, despite the way the antlered figure loomed over her, its staring eyes like ghastly twin flames, stared resolutely back. Maybe it was silly to get in a staring contest with somebody whose eyes were literally fire, but then, no one had ever accused Mira of being overly serious.

The antlered figure stared her down for a handful of seconds that felt like an eternity. Mira hoped he couldn’t see the way her heart was rabbiting in her chest.

Then the antlered figure’s shoulders slumped. Before Mira’s eyes, he seemed to shrink, to shrivel into himself, until, even though he didn’t lose his inhuman height, he no longer seemed to tower over her. The blue flames of his eyes banked, dimming to a much more bearable soft glow. Finally, Mira could meet them without blinking.

Her breath caught in her throat.

There was something about those eyes, now that they no longer flared like they were trying to burn their way out of the antlered figure’s head. There was something…sad, something longing, something pleading as they looked deep into Mira’s eyes.

Something almost…familiar.

Mira swallowed, hard, shaking her head. She wasn’t sure where the sudden lump in her throat had come from, why her eyes were stinging. It felt a lot like – the ending of a book or a movie she’d loved, a story that wasn’t hers and yet that had somehow grabbed some of her heartstrings in an iron grip and pulled. Hard. Like saying goodbye to someone who she’d never really met, but who she’d gotten to know better than her own best friend.

“I’m sorry,” Mira said, and was surprised to find that she meant it. “But I can’t. I can’t stay.”

The antlered figure hung his head, and for the first time, the blue glare of those eyes vanished.

The breeze stilled. Around the clearing, the birch trees began to unfold. Through the motionless branches of the apple tree, Mira caught a glimpse of golden light against the blue of the sky.

And of Ian, stumbling through the softly-waving grass, waving both arms wildly like he was trying to brush a cloud of insects away. He stopped, breathing hard, and looked up, locking eyes with Mira, and the lump that had settled in her throat felt like it was going to choke her. For no reason Mira could explain, she suddenly wanted to laugh as well as sob. Even though she was trapped in a mysterious fairyland even she didn’t know how she’d found her way to, Ian had found her. He’d come for her.

For the briefest of moments, Mira let herself exhale. Somehow, it just felt like everything was going to be all right.

And then Ian stepped forward, and the sunlight glinted off the gold of his right eye, sharp and cold.

The antlered figure swung around so quickly Mira didn’t even see him move, the fires of his eyes flaring up fierce and bright. And, like a sweeping piano piece suddenly striking a minor key, she could feel everything starting to go wrong.

The antlered figure’s face split open, revealing jagged teeth.

And he roared.

…

The sudden change in the air was so startling that it actually pulled Ian up short.

The abrupt absence of tension and power crackling in the air had him holding his breath, waiting for the trap to spring. But nothing seemed to be hiding, nothing seemed to be lying in wait to leap out at him. The clearing really was just that calm, that quiet. That…peaceful.

“Well, something’s wrong with this picture,” Ian muttered to himself, looking around. For no reason he could name, he suddenly felt like crying. He couldn’t understand where the feeling had come from, why just looking at the blooming branches of the apple tree felt so strange and momentous, like he was looking for the first and last time at something he’d spent his whole life searching for.

It took him entirely too long to realise that the feeling wasn’t his.

Mira was standing under the tree, so draped in blossoms that at first glance, Ian hadn’t noticed she was there. Hadn’t realized she wasn’t merely another branch. There was something about her, something that pulled Ian up short in his tracks and yanked the breath right out of his lungs. He’d never seen her like this, surrounded by flowers, glittering with pollen, crowned with a humming golden halo of bees, gowned in white like –

Like a bride.

Ian was so consumed by the sight of Mira that he almost didn’t see the antlered shadow towering beside her. Didn’t realise it was there until he stepped towards her, and its eyes suddenly flamed blue.

The very ground seemed to shake under Ian’s feet as the shadow opened a mouth full of jagged fangs and roared. And then Ian realized that there was no ‘seemed’ about it. The ground actually was shaking. The apple tree’s branches wobbled violently, shedding blossoms. Red shapes, dangling from the branches, spattered Mira’s white gown with a spray of bloody drops. Ian couldn’t tell, from a distance, if the shapes were candy apples or bleeding, beating hearts.

Gold lightning cracked across Ian’s vision, striking the tree, and a branch fell with a thunderous sound. It hit the ground bare and gnarled, and the shadow standing over Mira made a noise like a trapped, wounded animal. It looked less like a shadow, now, wooden antlers spiraling from its shadowy head. The tree had changed, too, the blossoms and bright leaves all vanisheing, leaving only the withered, blackened trunk. The brilliant blue of the sky was duller, too, Ian realized, the flowers and flowing grasses that filled the clearing less vibrant, when they were there at all. In fact, it looked a lot more like the clearing that he’d just left –

“Ian!”

Ian whipped his head back towards the tree, just in time to see the antlered shadow grab Mira by the arm. She yelled, but the cry was sharply cut off when something snaked out from the shadowy figure’s hand and around Mira’s ring finger.

Ian ran forward, but the antlered shadow wrapped an arm around Mira’s shoulders and stepped back. There was a moment of dizzying uncertainty that left Ian blinking, unable to trust his own eyes.

And then, the shadowy figure and Mira were both - gone. As though the apple tree had swallowed them both without a trace.

“Mira!” Ian shouted, throwing himself against the tree’s bare trunk, the rough bark scraping his palms as he drummed both hands helplessly against it. “Mira!”

Behind him, something screamed.

Only it wasn’t exactly a scream. “Scream” barely began to scratch the surface of the sound. Ian spun around like someone had grabbed the top of his head, picked him up, and turned him around. It sure felt like something had. It didn’t feel like he had much of a choice in the matter.

He was just in time to see the tree-monster reach up and grab one of the crackling bolts of golden lightning that Alcor was throwing. Even as its hand charred and blackened, it gripped the thread of light, which was quickly turning blue in its hand, and pulled.

The noise that Alcor made was indescribable. Literally, indescribable. The closest Ian could come was ‘static, recorded on an old digital recorder, passed through a voice changer to make it sound like Garth Tater, played backwards over the screams of the eternally damned and also a vuvuzela choir’. Even that didn’t capture the full sonic horror that assaulted the ears of everyone in the clearing.

Rosa dropped to her knees, hands over her ears and eyes screwed shut in apparent agony. Sun-mi’s eyes went wide, her face freezing, but a little trickle of blood worked its way down from her nose and over her top lip. The noise bit like a sawblade through the top of Ian’s head, severing thought from intent from action. He wasn’t sure which way was up. He wasn’t even entirely sure that he was actually in the clearing, or whether he ‘was’ at all.

The tree-creature kept pulling, and pulling, golden light unspooling from around Alcor and threading back towards the tree-creature. The char that blackened its fingers spread back, up its arm and over its torso, blue light leaking through the cracks, but it didn’t stop pulling. The scream, for lack of a better word, went on and on, drilling through the silence of the clearing until it seemed almost solid. The sound was a presence more felt than heard, filling the very air around them.

And then, it just…stopped.

Alcor slumped, dropping to his knees in the grass. It took Ian a moment to realise what was wrong with this picture. Alcor wasn’t a burning golden presence too bright to look directly at, wasn’t a black hole of nightmares and terror, wasn’t a shark-toothed uncanny-valley distortion of a mockery of a human form. In fact, he looked…like a kid. A short, scrawny, dark-haired kid barely into his teens, in strange, old-fashioned clothes, with black and gold eyes that looked wrong in his almost cherubic face.

Alcor looked up, locking eyes with Ian, and sucked in a breath. The humanoid shape in front of Ian flickered, once, twice, between the child and ‘Tyrone’, before settling back into the child. Alcor’s eyes flew wide, and Ian didn’t like the look in them. Anything that could surprise a millennium-old demon with enough power to unintentionally shatter a tectonic plate was probably not a good thing.

“I – I can’t,” Alcor said, sounding as shocked as he looked. “I don’t have any power left -”

There was a curious noise, from somewhere uncomfortably close overhead, and a shadow fell over Ian. He looked up, and further up, directly into the blue-burning eyes of the massive tree-creature. Its bark-skin had blackened, burned, blue light dancing along and behind it like sparks of electricity. And if it had been big before, now it was enormous. Its head alone was at least as tall as Ian was. Probably taller. Its huge, hulking body hunched over Ian and Alcor, peering down like – Ian’s mind threw up the incongruous image of a child looking down on an anthill.

A shout from across the clearing made Ian look up, to see Rosa ringed by redheaded dryads. She was yelling and struggling as they slowly but inexorably dragged her towards the trees, away from Ian. A little way away, two more dryads were settling a crown of little white flowers onto Sun-mi’s head, weaving them into her dark, shining hair. The glazed look in her eyes and the slack set of her shoulders said that whatever she was looking at, it wasn’t in the world Ian was currently occupying.

Ian slowly, slowly raised his head back up to meet the eyes of the monster looming over him.

The tree-creature blinked.

The ground under Ian’s feet trembled. And then, with a sudden flash of blue, it cracked.

The bottom dropped out of Ian’s stomach as the ground split open under his feet. He clawed at the grass, grasping for something to cling to, to keep him from falling, but all he got was a handful of dirt and roots.

The last thing Ian saw as he tumbled down, before the earth closed over his head, were a pair of huge branching antlers silhouetted against the sky, and the flames of twin burning, blue eyes.

Chapter Text

The backyard behind the Shack was transformed.

They’d held events and parties there before, of course – the night of the walking undead came to mind – but those had all been different. For one thing, those were just supposed to be fun. Exciting. They hadn’t had this strange sense of weight over them, almost like sadness.

After all, even though something was beginning here today, something else was also ending.

Rows upon rows of seats looked up at her as she stepped out into the aisle. Everyone was there, familiar faces peering around familiar faces, the figures at each of her elbows a warm presence more felt than seen. She didn’t have eyes for anyone but the people – one person in particular - standing, waiting, under the brilliantly multicoloured canopy at the end of the grassy aisle.

The thick syrupy glow of late-afternoon sun burnished everything, but especially his unruly copper curls. They gleamed in the low, golden light, looking even brighter contrasted with the blue of his satin vest and matching bow tie. She took a moment to be impressed by how well they matched his eyes, almost like –

She smiled, to herself, realizing she’d just about thought “almost like magic”. Like magic? Knowing her family, it probably was magic.

(- the eyes. something about the eyes. had they always been that electric shade of blue -)

She looked away, suddenly shy, when he met her eyes and smiled, that smile that she’d seen a thousand times but never seen before, never quite like this. Her heart fluttered like a bird caged between her ribs, its wings wild and frantic, and she had to turn her gaze to the friends and family ranged around the canopy instead of his face.

It calmed the desperate pounding of her heart, just a little, to see everyone she loved standing up there waiting for her. Like they’d always been there. Like they always would. Waiting, ready, but content to let her take her time. They couldn’t start without her. They would wait forever, if they had to, until she was ready.

(- what was the name? -)

- looked radiant with her dark hair braided up around her head, delicate flowers threaded through the crown of braid. The heavy gloves she wore looked a little strange with her gown, but the dragon resting sprawled across her shoulders made them necessary.

(- no, that was wrong, wasn’t it? there had been another one with the dragon -)

- and there she was, on the other side of the canopy, in hot pink ruffles and a huge smile -

(- bound around with boughs? -)

No. Something about this wasn’t – wasn’t…

(- for a second, the entire backyard flickers, like a screen glitching out. for a second, the past and the present collide, try to occupy the same space. for a second, everything is wrong -)

…

The backyard behind the Shack was transformed…

…

“This is all my fault.”

Ian glanced up from the pebble he was dropping and then picking up again, dropping and then picking up again, on the rough ground between his feet. The dim blue glow coming off of the luminous mushrooms growing up the distant sides of whatever underground cavern he and Alcor had fallen into wasn’t quite bright enough to make out the expression on the demon’s unsettlingly cherubic face, but the slump of Alcor’s tiny shoulders made how he was feeling pretty clear.

“Well, I think the giant, angry tree-monster slash forest god slash Great Old One might have to take some of the blame,” Ian said. He scooped up the pebble, again, and weighed it in one hand, wincing as another jolt of pain shot up through his ankle. The bruises smattered up his arm and over his hip twinged too, and he still couldn’t draw a full breath without a sharp stabbing pain in the side, but the ankle was definitely the worst of it. Ian was just counting himself lucky he hadn’t split his head open on the way down. “Did you know that guy? He seemed to know you.”

“Sort of,” Alcor said, in a tone of voice that sounded strangely like an admission. And also, strangely like a twelve-year-old. Ian was having real trouble mentally reconciling ‘ancient and nearly omnipotent demon’ and ‘squeaky voice cracks’. “That’s the Woodsman. Or, at least, it used to be. I...maybe…kinda…might have sort of…created him.”

Ian dropped the pebble between his feet again. It clattered against the jumble of broken rock that covered the bottom of the cavern.

“So it is all your fault,” he said, and Alcor snorted.

They sat in silence for a little while longer. Somewhere in the depths of the cavern, water trickled softly over rock, the sound loud in the vast, silent emptiness. The mushroom glow pulsed gently, slowly brighter, then gently, slowly dimmer again. The pain in Ian’s ankle pulsed gently, slowly worse, then gently, slowly better again.

“What does he want with Mira?” Ian asked, at last. He wasn’t sure he wanted to know the answer, not while he was stuck down here, sealed away in the dark underground, with a twisted ankle and a depowered demon. “This is an Alcor and Mizar thing, isn’t it.”

Alcor didn’t answer. He also didn’t move. He just sat, in a little ball, with his little legs tucked up to his little chest and his little arms wrapped around them, his little chin tucked in to his knees and staring blankly at the wall.

“Alcor?” Ian asked, suddenly nervous.

Alcor sighed, heavily.

“It’s not…exactly an Alcor and Mizar thing,” he said, at last, still not looking at Ian. “It’s more of a…Dipper and Mabel thing.”

Ian looked at Alcor. He didn’t recognise the names, but they clearly meant something to Alcor. Meant everything.

“You’re going to have to back that one up and run it by me again,” Ian said, and for the first time, Alcor turned to look at him. Ian caught genuine surprise in those inhuman eyes for a moment, before they narrowed in suspicion.

“You mean those names don’t mean anything to you?”

“If I’m supposed to…” Ian waved the hand holding the pebble vaguely through the air. “Remember something about it? You ate all of those.” He tried to squash down the note of bitterness that tried to work its way into his voice. This was really not the time to pick a fight with the guy who’d helped save his soul and sanity. “Nothing left. Hah, we’re all totally normal in this head!”

Alcor raised one eyebrow.

“Artistic license,” Ian said, firmly. “Anyway. Based on context, I’m going to guess that Dipper and Mabel are somehow you and Mira. And also, that you have one mindscape of a story to tell me.”

The mushrooms were cycling through their darker phase, so the look Alcor gave him was mostly lost in shadow. Ian only caught the glint of gold from Alcor’s irises, reflecting like a cat’s eye when he turned to face away from Ian. Ian wondered, for a moment, whether Alcor was seeing something similar when he looked at Ian, whether the gold glint of Ian’s artificial eye was still bright down here.

Alcor’s voice was very quiet, but it rang in the underground silence like a shout. “It’s a long story.”

Ian settled back against the rockfall he’d leaned himself against, tucking both arms behind his head, and stared up at the distant blackness that hid the ground, closed over their heads. “Well, unless you get your powers back in the next five minutes, I think we’re going to be down here for a while.” He shut his eyes. It didn’t make a lot of difference. “So you might as well start telling it.”

…

The day had arrived.

It had felt like such a terribly long wait, and yet now, looking back, it felt as though no time had passed at all. It had taken so much work, so much planning, and yet now that they were all here, it seemed the most natural, effortless thing in the world. As though it never could have been any other way.

The bride, her best friend, turned the corner, flanked on either side by

(…)

her parents, and everyone assembled in the rows of rented and borrowed chairs let out a soft, collective sigh. She must have made her own gown. There was no way she’d found such a thing in a store, hanging on a rack. It was made up entirely of

(petals?)

stitched together with glittering thread, a cacophony of colours, a riot of flounces and frills that might have swallowed a lesser woman whole. Barefoot, she padded nearer and nearer to the canopy at the head of the aisle, shimmering and resplendent. Every head turned to follow her as she passed by.

Every pair of eyes was trained on the bride. But the bride only had eyes for the man at the end of the aisle, standing beneath the canopy.

The man she was here to give herself to, for the rest of their lives. The man she was here to marry.

…

She was in a tree.

Rosa Darling had found herself in some seriously unusual situations – the antigrav skating rink in Milan or that eco-yacht off the coast of New California came to mind – but this had to be the weirdest yet.

She was in a tree. Not up a tree. In a tree. Tucked into the trunk like a kid in a costume in a fourth-grade play. Except that she didn’t have the luxury of having her arms and legs free.

The redheaded dryads standing guard over Rosa’s tree prison looked pretty serious, but Rosa’d caught them stealing glances in her direction. She recognized those expressions. That was the same Look she got in cafes and dive bars and anywhere else a reasonable crowd might be found. It was the Look of ‘I know who you are, I just don’t know if I’m allowed to come up to you’. It was the Look of a fan.

So far, the menacing presence of the antlered tree-monster lurking by the apple tree at the centre of the clearing was keeping them under control, but Rosa had no doubt that, as soon as its attention wandered, the dryads’d be on her like flies on fruit. At least they’d have to let one of her hands free if they wanted an autograph.

She looked around the clearing again, taking in the situation. It wasn’t good. There was still a jagged brown scar in the grass where it had opened up and swallowed Ian and the little kid Alcor had turned into. Under the apple tree, Sun-mi was staring at empty air, a crown of flowers in her hair and a glazed look on her face. Rosa didn’t need to be sensitive to see the glamour hanging thick in the air around her head.

She didn’t see Mira until it was almost too late. Mira had that same glazed look, but – it was different. Sun-mi’s glamour was tight around her head, anchored in the crown of flowers if Rosa had to guess. Clearly, it was working from the outside in.

But Mira…

Mira walked in a haze of dark green nostalgia. A gown made of thousands of tiny white petals, glittering with golden pollen, hugged her bodice and trailed out behind her, a veil of fine cobweb drifting over her dark curls. She’d lost her shoes somewhere, if she’d ever had them, and where her bare feet fell, flowers burst into bloom. Something curled off of her, something that glowed like the sun in the hour before sunset, something that smelled hot and bright and warm as a long summer day, something that made Rosa want to burst into tears or laughter or both at once.

What Rosa had wasn’t quite the Sight, or at least wasn’t fully the Sight. She didn’t See things, as much as she got feelings. But in Mira’s wake, Rosa could swear she was catching glimpses of…something. People, their faces indistinct, gathered on the lawn. Swirls of colour – streamers? Paper lanterns? Something standing under the apple tree, something brightly coloured that glittered when it caught the low, honeyed light –

And the antlered tree-creature, pale as death and dark as shadow, with its eyes burning blue, seemed to change before her eyes as Mira approached them. Seemed to soften, to shift, until he started to look almost…human.

Whatever this magic, this glamour, was, the antlered creature was forcing it onto Sun-mi. But with Mira? With Mira, it seemed to be drawing it out.

Rosa swallowed. This was bad. This was very bad.

…

- nasal laughter, high and manic and echoing -

- the burning of blue flame creeping up his arm, scorching the flesh but searing deep into the soul -

- the taste of iron in the back of his throat -

“Alcor?”

Dipper blinked. For a second, his first and only and impossible thought was that he’d been dreaming. But that was absurd. He hadn’t dreamed in centuries.

What little he could see of Ian’s expression looked concerned, even worried. Dipper tried, with little success, to squash the flicker of ire. He was sitting, so powerless that he couldn’t even see in the dark, at the bottom of a sealed cavern. Ian looked worried for him. And wasn’t that just embarrassing.

“So this Mabel’s your sister,” Ian said.

“She was my sister,” Dipper said, to his toes.

“And that – that monster out there used to be her husband?”

Dipper tried, and failed, not to wince. “You know that saying about those who live in glass houses?” He took the sudden silence as embarrassment. “Yeah. So -”

“No, I don’t.”

Dipper stared at the sliver of Ian’s face that he could see. The bluish glow from the fungus growing from the walls threw a dim, underwater glow over half of Ian’s face, but left the other half in shadow. The gold of his artificial eye glinted green in the blue light, a gleam Dipper had to try hard not to interpret as sinister. “You what?”

“Don’t…know that saying? About glass houses?”

Dipper squinted suspiciously at Ian for a long moment, trying to figure out if Ian had just picked an abysmal time to try to make a joke. But all he could see of Ian’s expression looks sincere.

“People who live in them shouldn’t throw stones?” Dipper tried, but there was no flicker of recognition in either of Ian’s eyes. “Man, what are they teaching the kids these days?”

“Well, I don’t know about anybody else, but I’m teaching them to reject moral order, disrespect authority, and unleash chaos on an unsuspecting world,” Ian said brightly. He grinned into the teeth of Dipper’s glare. “Oh, and, according to concerned parents and Gisnep’s Standards & Practices division, how to summon Bill Cipher for fun and profit.”

Dipper stared, hard, but it was really hard to tell ‘Ian smiling sinisterly’ from just ‘Ian smiling because he thinks he’s funny’. The darkness did not help.

Not for the first time, Dipper really, really wished he could at least still see in the dark. But a cursory tug in the metaphysical direction of his powers still found only emptiness. The Woodsman must have drained him worse than he’d realized. Even something as old and powerful as the Woodsman shouldn’t have been able to siphon off enough of Dipper’s power that he wouldn’t have already recovered it by now.

Then again, nothing should have been able to siphon off Dipper’s power and leave him trapped in this helpless mortal form in the first place.

Dipper hadn’t felt this weak since – since he’d pretended to be Belle’s brother. And wasn’t that something. It’d been centuries since he’d last thought about her. And yet now, here, he’d had her spring to mind twice in two days.

It was his own fault. Dipper should have realized that coming back here would be a mistake. But he’d been sentimental. Again. Once again, he’d let his memories distract him. And once again, they’d betrayed him and the people – the person – he cared about.

“So…” Ian started, but stopped when Dipper looked up, clearly thinking better of whatever he’d been about to ask. He couldn’t have thought too much better, though, because it was all of a couple of seconds before Ian said, tentatively, “So that’s how this works? Your power made the Woodsman, so it can steal power from you now. And – you were a kid before you were Alcor, so that’s why you ended up -” He stopped, gesturing at Dipper’s huddled form like that finished the sentence. Which, Dipper reflected, it kind of did.

Dipper still didn’t feel like dignifying Ian with an answer, though, or giving Ian the satisfaction of knowing he was right. It most certainly didn’t have anything to do with the fact that, without his power, the thing Dipper had long since stopped thinking of as ‘his omniscience’ and started considering just part of his thoughts was ominously silent. Everything he knew, he’d had to piece together the same way Ian had. At this point, Dipper didn’t have any better idea than Ian did. And it definitely didn’t have anything to do with the fact that every other time Dipper opened his mouth, his voice did that embarrassing cracking thing he’d thought he’d long ago put behind him.

Instead of answering, he shrugged one shoulder.

Ian’s expression already wasn’t easy to read in the dimness, but Dipper could swear it suddenly got a lot harder. “And you think – do you think it went after Mira because she – her soul – whatever used to be its wife?”

Dipper bit his bottom lip.

His silence seemed to be response enough for Ian, though, because Ian let out a long sigh, slouching forward over his own knees.

“Then I’m guessing it remembers me too,” he said, flat and cold and with a bitter edge that Dipper decided not to acknowledge. “And that there’s no way we’re ever getting out of here.”

Dipper opened his mouth, maybe to answer, maybe to drop some platitude, maybe even to agree. But he never got the chance.

A dull throb, like a low, low bass note more felt than heard, rolled through the rock below their feet, filling the hollows of Dipper’s artificial chest with a temporary heartbeat. The glowing mushrooms flickered, flared bright, then went so dim Dipper could barely make out the outline of his own hand in front of his face.

“Wh-” Ian started, but cut himself off. Both his eyes widened, the left following a second behind the right to fix on something behind Dipper’s shoulder. Dipper turned, but only just had enough time to see there was nothing but blackness there before the cavern…changed.

The change seemed to sweep over the cavern from the point Ian’s Sighted eye had fixed on, moving outward in a huge curving wave. Rows of lights – a pale fluorescent blue – snapped on one by one, illuminating soap-bubble shimmering metal, gleaming silver walls, black hexagonal rubber tiles covering an even floor under Ian and Dipper’s feet. Dipper could feel the change rush over him, and found himself standing, wearing a sterile white jumpsuit, carrying a clear sheet of what felt like glass with little lights and symbols glowing through it. The change sparked through him, a feeling that both reminded him strangely of his own power but also felt like no demonic power he’d ever encountered.

A feeling that was, nonetheless, familiar. Dipper had only felt it once, but he’d never forgotten it. It was kind of hard to forget something that had ended his life as he knew it.

He looked up, and saw a wall of darkness advancing towards him from that same point the lights had started from. They were snapping off just as quickly as they’d lit, but the darkness didn’t overtake him fast enough that Dipper couldn’t catch a glimpse of what stood there, at the end of the cavern, in the dark.

The last reflections of the blue strip lights overhead died in the shining face of the enormous, inverted metal triangle that dominated the underground room. Its huge, dark, circular central eye was the last light to wink out, so that, for a moment, the absolute blackness under the earth was imprinted with a blue-glowing ring of symbols hanging in midair.

Then they, too, went out, and all that was left was darkness.

Dipper stood frozen for he wasn’t sure how long, staring at the place where the portal had been. He stared until the dim underwater glow of the mushrooms reappeared to illuminate the rubble, the strange charged feeling bled out of him, and the sound of retching broke whatever spell the sight of the portal had cast over him. Dipper looked back, to see Ian doubled over, the contents of his stomach spilled over the broken rock. Or – was it rock? Dipper still didn’t have the benefit of omniscience to be certain, but he was suddenly, unshakably sure that it was really broken and extremely weathered concrete.

Ian straightened up, at last, sucking in a deep breath. The glint of murky blue-green light off his artificial eye still looked sinister, but the other eye looked more scared than anything.

“What the -” he started, again, then cut himself off for the second time, pressing a hand to his mouth and turning to heave, noisily but to not much effect, for several more seconds. When he finally resurfaced, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand, Dipper thought he looked a little less green, though it was hard to tell in the mushroom light. “What was that?”

“I don’t know for sure,” Dipper admitted, grudgingly. “But I have a pretty good theory.”

He could feel Ian’s eyes on him as he turned back to face the place where the portal had stood.

“That was Henry’s tree up there,” Dipper said, staring into the dark. “And the house walked away…” He wasn’t sure what he was looking for. The dull gleam of mushroom glow on extraterrestrial metal? The red afterimages of the ring of glowing constellations?

But that wasn’t possible. The portal had been destroyed over a thousand years before. Dipper should know. He’d been the one to destroy it.

“The house?” Ian repeated, sounding like a man who was doing his level best to keep up with the plot, despite having had to get up and go to the bathroom in the middle of a critical scene. “Walked away?”

“Yeah,” Dipper said. “I thought it was an urban legend, but it looks like the Shack really did grow legs and wander off. And this must be why.”

He took a careful step forward, into the dark, kicking aside a clump of rubble as he did. What he’d thought was rock revealed a tangle of dark wires, and Dipper smiled grimly to himself.

“The – wait, your Mystery Shack?” Ian asked. Dipper noticed he was hanging back, apparently reluctant to venture any closer to the void of solid black that had taken the place of the vision of the portal, but that both his eyes were still trained on a spot in its depths with an almost hungry concentration.

“Well, it wasn’t really -” Dipper started, and then thought about it, really thought about it. “Yeah. Our Mystery Shack. Don’t you have, like, a flashlight or something in that eye?”

Ian stared into the darkness for just a beat too long before looking back over at Dipper. His expression was blank, uncomprehending, and Dipper was just opening his mouth to explain the question in smaller words when Ian suddenly smacked the palm of one hand into his forehead. “Right.”

Ian blinked, and a beam of white light shot from his artificial eye, sweeping over unnaturally squared corners and the remnants of pipes as he looked up towards the ceiling. “Forgot it could do this. I never use it, you gotta be careful not to look people in the eye – what is this place? That doesn’t look like natural rock. Unless Gravity Falls has some very weird natural rock formations. What am I saying? It’s Gravity Falls, of course it does.”

“Oh, no, it definitely does,” Dipper said. “But this isn’t one of them. Unless a couple hundred years of near-omniscience have really taken the edge off my deductive reasoning…this used to be the secret basement under the Mystery Shack.”

“Secret basement,” Ian said. He did not sound particularly thrilled.

“It used to be my great-uncle’s lab,” Dipper said, quietly, picking his way over a pile of rubble. How long had it been since the last time he’d been down here? The triplets wouldn’t have been born yet. Heck, he wasn’t even sure Henry had been in the picture yet. Stan would still have been alive.

Mabel would still have been alive.

“That would be the great-uncle who made an extremely ill-advised deal with my…predecessor?” Ian said, an edge in his voice, and Dipper swallowed around the lump that had appeared without warning or invitation in his throat. Being powerless, mortal, and short again must have been messing with his head. And he didn’t feel like discussing Ford – or Stan – with Ian right now. Or ever.

“Yep. That one,” he said, instead, shortly. “And this is where he was building the thing Bill wanted from him.”

“That triangle thing we saw?” Ian asked, and Dipper nodded.

“An interdimensional portal. A rip in the fabric of reality.” Dipper bit down on his tongue, surprised by the unpleasant jolt of pain. “I thought we destroyed it, along with Bill.”

“I sense a ‘but’ coming up here,” Ian said, clearly trying for flippant but coming down closer to scared.

“Well,” Dipper said, scrambling up and over a fallen beam, “we can’t have done too good a job of it. Because it’s still here.”

He waved an arm, and Ian’s flashlight beam swept obligingly over to him.

And the wobbling, star-spackled rift hovering before him in midair.

Chapter Text

The ground shook.

Whatever train of thought Mira had been following quietly derailed. She tried to back up to it, but it was already sinking back into the depths of her mind, never to resurface.

She looked around, hoping to remind herself of wherever it was her mind had just been, and started when she saw the ranks of assembled dryads. They hadn’t been there just a moment ago. Had they? Mira scoured her memory, but all she could find there were rows of indistinct faces. She’d thought they were familiar, but now, she couldn’t really tell.

She looked down at herself, and was a little surprised to find her pyjamas replaced by the petal gown. Something trailed shivery over her bare arms, and she tried to brush it aside, only to find that she was draped in a spiderweb veil. And the hand she’d raised to brush it away was wearing the root ring she’d refused.

Mira drew in a long, shaking breath. She looked around, again. The clearing seemed to have filled with a truly alarming number of dryads while she was distracted (by what? She wasn’t sure). Mira didn’t think it was usual for dryads to have such vibrant red hair outside of autumn, but she had to admit she didn’t know enough about dryads to be sure. Sun-mi and Rosa were both standing by the canopy – Mira shook her head – under the reaching arms of the apple tree.

She didn’t see Alcor or Ian.

Sun-mi was dressed in a green gown that Mira suspected was all leaves the same way her own gown was all petals, with a truly impressive wreath of flowers in her hair. Rosa – Mira blinked – Rosa was stuck halfway through a tree and looking none too pleased about it.

“Mira!” she shouted, as soon as their eyes met. “Mira, is that you?”

It seemed like a weird question. Who else would Mira be?

But before Mira could say or do anything, a creeping green vine coiled up the tree’s trunk, slithering fast towards Rosa’s face. Rosa didn’t seem to notice it, or if she did, thought it was more important to keep calling out to Mira. “Stay awake! Whatever you do, don’t let -”

The vine curled up and choked off whatever warning she’d meant to give at the same time as something Mira had taken for the trunk of the apple tree moved.

The antlered figure bowed his head towards Mira, and for one disorienting second, she thought – but it must have been a trick of the light, a reflection of the sky off of…something. There was no way that a terrifying ancient forest spirit was really wearing a bright blue bow tie.

Mira took a step back, and the figure froze. He looked almost comical, those electric blue eyes wide and perfectly round, one arm outstretched, standing absolutely still. It was definitely not the time or the place, but Mira still had to hold back a little snort of laughter. Maybe her sense of humour was warped. Or maybe she just needed to release some of this tension, somehow. Yeah, that was probably it.

She took another tentative step back, and the antlered figure slowly, carefully, withdrew his hand, straightening up. Mira was struck by the bizarre certainty that he was trying not to startle her.

They stood there, for a moment, the seven- or eight-foot monster and the girl in the white dress, sizing each other up. The dryads gathered around the clearing all seemed to be frozen, waiting, watching the antlered figure for what to do next, how to react. Other than the whisper of the breeze through the apple tree’s branches, not a sound broke the stillness.

“What did you do to my friends?” Mira asked, finally, a little surprised by how clear and steady her voice sounded. “Let them go.”

She might have been imagining it, but she thought the antlered figure looked confused.

“My friends,” Mira repeated, gesturing to Sun-mi’s thousand-yard stare, Rosa’s extremely convincing tree costume, the total absence of Ian or Alcor.

The antlered figure’s brow furrowed, the little blue pilot lights of his eyes dimming. Mira had to force herself not to take another step back. That would be too much like showing fear, and something told her that that was the last thing she wanted to do.

Besides, it was the strangest thing, and she couldn’t have explained it if she’d tried, but…the antlered figure actually seemed more confused than angry.

Mira almost ate those words when the figure’s arm swept out, inhumanly fast and long, like a lashing bough in a high wind. But he only gestured in Sun-mi’s direction, with a tilt of his head that Mira took as a question.

“Yes,” Mira said, firmly.

The antlered figure waved his other arm in Rosa’s direction, or at least in the direction of the tree that had been Rosa. Mira couldn’t see her face anymore for leaves.

The antlered figure tilted his head in the opposite direction, at a deeper angle than before.

“Yes,” Mira repeated, even more firmly. “They’re my friends. And I think you’re suffocating her,” she added, nodding in Rosa’s direction. The vines coiled around the tree’s trunk retreated almost sheepishly, Rosa’s face emerging from underneath them. She coughed, and spat out a mouthful of leaves.

“That’s better,” Mira said. “Now what did you do with the other two?”

The antlered figure only looked at Mira with those mournful eyes, but Rosa took full advantage of her mouth being free.

“I think it killed them.”

…

The starry thing hanging in midair hurt to look at.

It was bad enough as it looked to Ian’s regular eye – the thing didn’t belong, hovering in his field of vision like a migraine aura made solid. But through his artificial eye, through the filter of the Sight –

It was like trying to look directly at the sun. If the sun was also rapidly cycling through every colour imaginable and several that weren’t, while strobing, and glittering, and also somehow doing all of those things simultaneously while being, impossibly, much larger than the space it occupied. Looking at it hurt.

Still, Ian couldn’t look away.

“What…is it?” he asked, resisting the dueling impulses to reach out and grab the thing with his bare hands and to run away as far and as fast as he could.

“An interdimensional rift,” Alcor said grimly. The expression he was wearing, so serious, looked incongruously silly on his cherubic face. “Like I said, it’s a hole in reality. And like any hole, it wouldn’t take much to tear it farther open.”

Ian was only half listening. There was something about the way the rift wobbled that was giving him a headache, but he couldn’t seem to look away.

“Actually, this explains a lot,” Alcor said, and Ian got the feeling he was no longer being considered as a participant in the conversation. He squared his shoulders, and took one step closer to Alcor and the rift, then another. It was just a hole in reality. Nothing to be afraid of. “The Shack growing legs and gaining sapience, this place still being so strange relative to the rest of the world even after the Transcendence…I wonder how I never knew it was here? I’ve gotta have been within five feet of this thing I don’t even know how many times, but it’s never jumped out at me like this.”

“Maybe it’s because I’m here,” Ian said, and almost instantly regretted it. The suspicious glare Alcor gave him made a little hot coil of resentment glow in the pit of his stomach. Ian swallowed it, hard and went on. “You said it was Bill’s big plan – part of Bill’s big plan, anyway – to open this rift, or something like it. What if he…I don’t know, could have hid it somehow, and it’s just reacting to my presence?”

It definitely felt like the rift was reacting to Ian’s presence, every time he moved closer to it. Somehow. Maybe not exactly the way he’d implied to Alcor, but – well, Ian didn’t know anything more about Bill Cipher’s plans and intentions than the next animation-industry professional, did he? Alcor had definitely taken care of that.

Alcor’s glare softened a little, though his gaze stayed a little suspicious and kept darting in Ian’s direction more often than before. Ian shook his head, trying to shake off the restless, irritable energy that jittered through all of his limbs. He was really losing it down here in the dark, and there was nobody to blame for that but himself.

Well. And the tree-monster-old-god-forest-spirit that had stolen his fiancé.

But it wasn’t fair, tempting though it was, to take it out on Alcor. Alcor had helped him, done him an unimaginable favour for a miniscule price. And it wasn’t like Ian had wanted a long-dead demon in his head. It was better this way and he definitely would rather believe that all the weird and evil shit his brain threw up was just a fundamental, inescapable part of who he was.

Definitely.

It wasn’t like someone had shown Ian what was wrong with him, said they’d fix it, given him foolish hope, uprooted the thing they thought was causing all the trouble – and it hadn’t changed anything. Oh, except for making Ian paranoid that a third complete breakdown was lurking somewhere in his future,  that the simple fact of who and what he was would hurt the people around him again, and that there was nothing he could do about it. And turning him back into a furious, frightened, helpless fourteen-year-old at the mercy of his own mind and unable to cope with the crushing knowledge that there was no easy way out. Wait – make that no way out at all. That nothing would ever get easier, and this constant, fragile scaffolding of Managing It was all that would ever keep him even the shoddiest semblance of ‘together’, and he couldn’t afford to ever let it slip even the slightest inch –

Nope. Definitely nothing like that.

If any sign of this little internal monologue made it to Ian’s face, Alcor didn’t seem to notice, even though he was usually uncomfortably interested in whatever was going on in Ian’s head or aura or whatever. He seemed much more interested in the rift. Somehow that wasn’t surprising. What was Ian to Alcor, anyway? Just the leftovers of an enemy who’d been soundly defeated, a threat to keep an occasional eye on, a parasite who’d latched onto the one person in the world the demon cared about. So long as Ian wasn’t trying to take over the world or make Alcor look like a dork on his TV show, what did Alcor care?

“Ian?”

Ian blinked. He’d been staring at the rift, and it left blotchy, red-purple-ultraviolet afterimages on his eyelids. “Mm?”

Alcor was giving him that suspicious, searching look again, and this time, Ian let the coil of resentment smoulder. “I said, do you feel any different around it? What does it look like to you?”

“I don’t really see how that’s relevant,” Ian said. “I mean, we know who the monster of this particular week is. Can’t you just lay off of me for once?”

Alcor blinked at him, like a small, pink, chubby-cheeked goldfish. “What? You were the one who brought up -”

“Oh, yeah. Just pin it on me! You’ve never used that trick before.” Ian rolled his eyes. “Bill Cipher this, Bill Cipher that. It sure must be nice, to have a universal excuse who’s dead and can’t contradict you.”

“Are you feeling okay?” Alcor asked, and Ian bristled.

“Oh, like you care. Admit it, Pine Tree! You just like having somebody around who you think is worse than you -”

Alcor stumbled back, like Ian had slapped him, tripped over a chunk of broken concrete, and hit the floor on his tiny, shorts-clad butt. He didn’t make a single sound of pain, though, and didn’t take his eyes off of Ian. The naked fear in his expression was such a disproportionate response that it actually threw up a little red flag.

Unfortunately, Ian was already seeing red.

“Oh wow. Did I say something unintentionally horrifying again?” he sighed, folding his arms over his chest. “Guess you better have another dig around in my brain, rip out anything you don’t like! Maybe one of these days you’ll get what you want, and get to scoop out the last of my personality! Maybe then we’ll both be happier!”

“Ian,” Alcor started, and then stopped, apparently, for once, lost for words. “I – I don’t – I didn’t -”

“No, you didn’t, did you? You just ripped a bunch of memories up at the root and called it good. You never considered that maybe that might not have been enough, did you? Or if you did, you just thought that you might have to do it again. You never thought that maybe you’d taken out my only line of defense -”

“You didn’t have any way to handle all those memories! You wanted me to kill you!”

“Yeah, and maybe you should’ve!”

In the ringing silence that followed, the rift pulsed, once.

…

“I think it killed them.”

Rosa’s voice was low, not very loud, but it carried through the clearing as though she’d shouted. There was a rustling and general tensing among the dryads, but the antlered figure still didn’t move.

“I watched,” Rosa went on, her words rushed, like she thought at any moment she’d be stopped. “The ground cracked open an’ they fell in, then that – that thing closed it up over ‘em.” Her eyes flicked over to a patch of grass with a dark brown scar in it. Mira tried and failed not to stare.

“That’s not – Alcor could -” she started to protest, but Rosa’s expression was solemn and inarguable.

“He looked like a little kid, Mira. I don’t know what that thing did to him, but I didn’t sense he had a lotta power left.” Her voice went quieter, softer, like that would somehow make it better when she said, “And now I can’t sense ‘em at all.”

Mira looked up, but the antlered figure was still and silent.

“Did you?” Mira demanded. It came out low, threatening, even though she felt like she was screaming. “Did you – did you kill my fiancé and my best friend?”

The antlered figure simply watched her, its blue-flame eyes wide and round and, Mira couldn’t help but think, hurt.

Then it shook its head.

“You liar!” Mira shouted, the strange block in her throat finally cracking open to let the yell out. She flew at the antlered figure, hardly caring that she was unarmed, unarmoured, without backup, without anything. “You liar! I told you I wouldn’t stay, so you hurt the people I care about to try to make me? You -”

She’d barely raised her arm before the antlered figure caught it in one long-fingered, bark-covered hand. It held her out, apparently effortlessly, at arm’s length, while Mira kicked and squirmed and finally fell still, breathing hard.

“I hate you,” she said, into that impassive flaming gaze, and was surprised to see the flame gutter, like a flinch. “I hate you! If you’ve hurt them, I’ll kill you! I’ll chop you and your stupid tree into splinters and burn you both to ash! I’ll -”

She cut herself off with a strangled cry as the antlered figure’s grip tightened on her wrist, grinding the bones against each other. The creature thrust its huge, nearly featureless face into Mira’s until she couldn’t see anything but gnarled black wood and blue flame. 

That enormous face cracked, jagged splinters forming fangs the length of Mira’s forearm as its mouth split open. For one heartstopping moment, Mira was convinced it was about to pop her right into its gaping maw like a jellybean. She tensed, trying to decide if it was worth it to try to hit the thing in the eyes or whether she’d just get burned.

But the antlered creature didn’t try to eat Mira. Instead, it just looked at her, through her, with those electric-flame eyes filled with a sorrow Mira couldn’t name. It stared until she stopped struggling, hanging helpless and transfixed, feeling like nothing so much as a butterfly at the bottom of a killing jar, slowly smothering. It had to be some kind of spell, but even knowing that wasn’t helping Mira break it.

And then, from the rumbling depths of its wooden trunk, in a voice Mira had never heard before but somehow knew, the antlered figure spoke one word.

“Remember?”

…

The thing about souls, Dipper had come to realise after a little more than a thousand years, was that they were never quite the same person twice.

But he’d be lying if he said he hadn’t also noticed that souls had their habits. Their little preferences. The grooves they tended to wear for themselves in the great wheel of Time. Sure, most souls – the ones that didn’t get sold to sentimental demons and carefully preserved through lifetime upon lifetime – started each new life with a clean slate, but…not that clean. The lives souls led left…shadows on the soul, shadows that influenced what kind of life the soul led the next time around. Which left more shadows, which…

Over time, souls, even as they shed memories and personalities, built up a set of characteristics they preferred and gravitated to, until the soul itself could almost be said to have a personality.

Not really. Not, say, enough to fill the aching void of an accidental immortal who’d lost the last of his family.

But…almost.

The single word Remember reverberated throughout the clearing, rippling the grass, tossing dryads’ red hair, and shaking the limbs of trees. It rattled down through earth and rock, through steel and concrete. It rose towards the towering clouds starting to build in the perfect blue sky, startling ravens and wyverns alike into flight.

Up on the surface, in the clearing, Sun-mi Lee blinked momentarily awake and wondered, irritably, why she was wearing a dress. Where was her notebook? She’d never seen the likes of the creature dominating the centre of the clearing before, she had to document it before it vanished again, but – this darn impractical skirt had no pockets –

Trapped in the trunk of a tree with no way to move, Rosa Darling was unprepared for the swell of rage that rose up in her. It filled her with boiling red anger from tip to toe, leaving no room for fear. Just who did this overgrown walking scarecrow think it was, anyway? Treating her this way? What had being stuffed in this stupid joke of a prison done to her hair? The tree man was going to pay for this, and pay dearly –

Under the earth, in the secret darkness of a long-lost hidden laboratory, Ian Beale shuddered and squeezed both eyes closed, extinguishing the brightest light in the cavern he was trapped in.

And under the apple tree where they’d buried her husband, draped in petals and cobweb and glittering with pollen, Mabel Pines opened her eyes.

Chapter Text

The summer she turned thirteen, Mabel Pines’ world changed.

Well, technically everybody’s world changed, because of the Transcendence. And probably there were lots of people whose worlds changed more than Mabel’s. Her own twin brother, for one. But Mabel didn’t know most of them, and Dipper was the reason for a good chunk of the change her world underwent, so Mabel still felt like, overall, she was one of the people with a high score in the world-being-changed game.

In the years that followed, Mabel had seen some pretty crazy stuff. Though nothing ever quite topped that summer she turned thirteen, some of it…some of it was up there. She’d learned to take a lot of weirdness in stride. And she meant a lot of weirdness.

Still, suddenly finding herself in the middle of a crowd of redheaded dryads, in a clearing she didn’t recognize, in a dress of white petals and a spiderweb veil, with a tree…monster…demon…thing with a strong resemblance to her husband looking at her with pleading blue-fire eyes was pushing it a little, she thought.

“If you guys kidnapped me to marry me, I’m gonna have to give you the same answer I gave the gnomes,” Mabel said, to the world at large. She wasn’t the biggest fan of the way some of the dryads were looking at her. “I’m happily engaged already, okay? I don’t do queenship, I don’t do poly marriages, and I definitely don’t do cults.” She looked around again. “Supernatural or otherwise.”

The tree-guy gave her a pleading look. Mabel crossed her arms over her chest. “Nope. Nuh uh. Life with a demonic Dippin’ Dots has made me entirely immune to puppy dog eyes from terrifying but weirdly adorable inhuman entities. You’re gonna have to do better than that.”

And that was when it got even weirder.

The tree guy’s bark split open, and a voice – a familiar voice – groaned out of the depths of its trunk. “Mabel.”

Mabel gasped, suddenly not caring that she still didn’t know how she’d ended up here, what the dryads were all about, how she’d wound up in what looked suspiciously like a forest-fairy wedding dress. This was a mystery that was way more important.

“Henry?”

…

Ian grabbed his head as the world splintered.

Even with his eyes (eye?) squeezed tightly shut, the bruised neon glare of the rift still pulsed sickeningly against his vision. He could swear he could feel it against his skin, like a breath of air cold enough to prickle.

Alcor took a step closer, his voice heavy with worry and something that might have been either guilt or fear. “Ian, I -”

He stopped, though, all the emotion in his voice turning to pure horror as he said, “N̮͉ơ.̸̪̘”

Ian forced his good eye open, feeling like he’d just swallowed several ice cubes, but Alcor wasn’t looking at him. Instead, he was staring at the rift.

And the thing that had come out of it.

The stranger who smiled back at Ian, tipping his top hat with a mocking flourish, seemed familiar in a way that Ian couldn’t quite place. He didn’t look all that different from Ian himself, but Ian somehow knew he wasn’t looking at a simple mirror image of himself – Ian was skinny, but not, since he’d moved in with Mira, malnourished, and he didn’t look or move quite so much like a baby giraffe. The stranger appeared to be made up entirely of elbows. He gangled.

He was also far more nattily dressed than Ian ever felt really comfortable with except on the most extravagant of occasions, decked out in a suit that even Alcor might’ve called old-fashioned. With it, he wore a top hat and a cape with what looked like a wedge of yellow cheese stitched on the back, black gloves and a hooked cane that he twirled carelessly between both hands.

And, perhaps most strikingly, his left eye socket sagged over emptiness, while his right glittered with – not quite malice. Mischief?

“You know,” the stranger chirped, and there was something familiar about his voice, too, overloud and exuberant, with an oddly grating quality that set Ian’s teeth on edge. “It doesn’t end with losing an eye!”

The stranger smirked at the suspicious glare Ian fixed on him, meeting Ian’s gaze. His good eye sparkled with the laughter of someone in on the great cosmic joke, while the left stayed blank, a dull reddish darkness in the socket behind the sagging lid. Somehow, that empty darkness still managed to feel watchful.

“Losing an eye’s just the beginning!” the stranger cackled, while Ian was still trying to catch the breath the sight had inexplicably driven out of him. “Better buckle your seatbelt, kid, ‘cause you’re in for one hell of a ride!”

Then, before Ian had a chance to speak, to think, to do anything, strange symbols etched themselves white-hot over the surface of the stranger’s skin, beginning to melt it away, the stranger boiling red and flames bursting out of his collar and off of his dancing fingers and out of his empty eye socket, burning, burning –

The rift pulsed, again.

The secret room under the earth was plunged into sudden darkness, the fire vanishing along with the light it had cast on the distant walls. Ian blinked, and light streamed, again, from his prosthetic eye. Thankfully, it didn’t land on a charred corpse. Unsettlingly, it landed on nothing at all out of the ordinary. The stranger seemed to have disappeared as quickly and as completely as he had appeared.

“An illusion,” Alcor said, a little too quickly. “It’s just the rift, messing with reality. It’s not r– well, okay, it was real, but it wasn’t really here.”

Ian hummed agreement, but he still felt like he was shaking in his own skin. It had been so real. And in those last few seconds –

In those last few seconds, it had felt like he was the one who was burning away.

…

“Henry?”

As soon as the word left Mira’s lips, Rosa’s stomach dropped through the soles of her boots and kept plummeting. By her count, that there was game, set, and match. If Mira – or whoever Mira thought she was when she was high on magic pollen – recognized that tree-monster-thing enough to call it by name, it was a safe bet that they weren’t getting the real Mira back any time soon.

There was a faint rumble, like far-off thunder on a hot August day. Nobody else seemed to notice.

Rosa blinked a few times, wishing she had a hand free to rub her eyes, even if it did mean smearing her makeup. But it wasn’t her vision that was blurring. The tree-monster had gone a little wobbly around the edges, and the longer Rosa watched, the more it seemed to fold back on itself. When it stopped, the rough bark that had covered it entirely had retreated, ringing the edges of a pale, ghostly face with eyes like holes burnt through paper, blue flame still licking through.

It looked, Rosa had to admit, a lot more like a person than it had. Though, admittedly, that was a pretty low bar to clear.

“Henry?” Mira – or whoever Mira thought she was, or whoever was possessing Mira, or whatever, trying to think about it was making Rosa’s brain hurt – asked, taking a few quick steps forward, towards the creature. She gently raised one hand towards its face, as though to cup its cheek in her palm, and then – poked it in the cheek right where the bark peeled back to reveal something like skin. “Whoa, what happened to you? Not that it’s not a good look, I mean. I’m all for tall, dark, and spooky.”

The tree guy reached up and wrapped Mira’s hand in one of its, as much to stop her poking it in the face as out of any romantic sentiment, Rosa suspected. The way it looked down at their clasped hands, though, was pure romance. If it hadn’t been for all the kidnapping and brainwashing and black magic, Rosa had to admit, she’d’ve been charmed.

“Babe?” Mira said, her voice going soft, and she turned her hand to hold the branchlike limb more like – like she was holding hands with it. Oh, that was just great. This was going to end so well for everyone involved. “Hey. What’s going on?”

The tree-guy didn’t answer, not that Rosa really expected it to. Instead, it just leaned its head forward until its forehead softly bonked against Mira’s, its antlers tangling in her spiderweb veil, and stood like that for a long moment.

“Hey,” Mira said, her voice going soft and fond, her eyes sinking closed as she leaned against the tree-guy. “Hey, it’s okay. We’ll figure it out. Just tell me what happened, okay? I can’t kiss it better if you don’t show me where the boo-boo is.”

There was another rumble, like thunder, but closer now. Rosa fancied she could feel it coming up through her feet.

…

“I told you, they’re not really here!” Dipper shouted, bashing a chunk of concrete into the skull of the nearest zombie. He tried, again, to summon an eldritch demon flamethrower or something, to no avail. His power was still running low, and he didn’t want to find out what would happen if one of them bit him. “We just have to hold out until the rift pulls them back!”

“Can’t you just snap your fingers and make all of this disappear?” Ian snapped.

Dipper paused in the middle of zombie-bashing to fix Ian with a flat look. He raised a hand, and snapped his fingers.

Nothing happened. Even the sound of the snap was swallowed up in the moans and groans of the zombies.

Ian narrowed his eyes at Dipper, but said nothing, instead spinning and flailing his way out of reach of the advancing horde.

Darkness swept over the underground cavern again, the zombies vanishing along with the eerie greenish glow that had illuminated them. The silence rang after the constant background of moans.

Ian blinked, and light bloomed in the cavern again, beaming from his artificial eye. Dipper squinted against its glare when Ian’s gaze flicked up to meet his eyes. “Okay, this is getting ridiculous. And dangerous.”

“Tell that to the Woodsman,” Dipper grouched. “If he hadn’t drained so much of my power – well, actually, I probably would’ve been sucked back through the rift myself the first time it reversed.”

Ian gave him a blank look, and Dipper sighed. “Technically, I don’t belong in this reality. I’m supposed to be in the Mindscape.”

Ian shook his head. “Wait. I though you said the rift was letting weirdness leak out.”

“Oh, yeah, it’s definitely doing that,” Dipper agreed, with a baleful look at the innocently rounded shape of the rift, pulsing quietly to itself in midair. Even from here, he could feel the power rolling off of it. Could see the other dimensions, the alternate timelines, the other worlds and versions of this world that flickered past behind those distant stars just visible in the rift’s amorphous shape. He could see them crackling at its edges, like charged particles seeking somewhere to earth themselves. Like lightning searching for somewhere to strike.

Ian was still watching him, with a confused expression that bordered on suspicious. Dipper cleared his throat, thrusting his chest out and trying to pretend he knew what he was talking about.

“It’s not all the way open,” he said. “It – right now, it’s just one huge potential. Anything too big that gets through will just get sucked back in again, unless there’s something on this side to anchor it.”

He didn’t say, but knew Ian must also be thinking, like Bill was trying to do.

“So – what’s trying to get through is an alternate dimension?” Ian asked, and Dipper shook his head.

“Try lots of alternate dimensions. Or alternate timelines. Versions of this reality where something in the past went a little differently.” He shrugs. “And sometimes, a realm of pure, random weirdness, if the Shack growing legs is anything to go by. But the others so far definitely look like alternate timelines.”

Ian gave the rift a deeply distrustful, almost angry look. It had the side effect of making the rift look like it was being illuminated by a spotlight.

“Great,” he said. “Last question: how do we close it?”

He looked over at Dipper when Dipper didn’t answer. Dipper cleared his throat, reaching up to adjust his bow tie before remembering, again, that it wasn’t there.

“I, uh.” He coughed into his fist. “Don’t know.”

Ian blinked at him, momentarily plunging the cavern back into inky blackness.

“You’re supposed to be omniscient,” he said, accusingly.

“Near-omniscient!” Dipper protested, hating the way his voice cracked. He thought he’d left all of that behind over a thousand years ago. “I know lots of things, not all the things! And closing it was never part of Bill’s plan! Exactly the opposite, actually.”

Ian glared at him for another long moment. Dipper glared back.

Ian seemed to deflate at the same time as Dipper did, letting out a long sigh and shutting his eyes as he sat heavily on a lump of concrete, tipping his head back to stare at the distant ceiling.

“Okay,” Ian said, at last, and Dipper stopped fiddling with the zipper on his puffy vest. “Before the rift throws another horde of horrible monsters at us. If it were Sam and a de-powered Alcor stuck down here, how would I get them out?”

Dipper stared at him. “You’re going to pretend this is an episode of your show.”

“Yep,” Ian said.

“We’re trapped in a sealed-off secret basement nobody else knows exists, with a rift to another dimension that I can’t get too close to without getting sucked into, that keeps spitting out monsters, that we don’t have any idea how to close, without my powers, in the dark. While up there your girlfriend, my Mizar, and all our friends are being held hostage or possibly worse by a giant forest deity who’s apparently been driven out of what little mind it might once have had by loneliness. Oh, and also this might all be an elaborate trap set up by Bill Cipher before he died. And you’re treating it like an episode of your TV show.”

“Yep,” Ian repeated, not lowering his head or opening his eyes. “Thanks for laying out the obstacles so clearly, by the way. You’d be a good fit in the writers’ room.”

Dipper stared at him.

“I’d say our objectives are, first, to get out of here, and then to rescue Mira and get your powers back,” Ian went on, apparently oblivious. “What resources do we have?”

When Dipper didn’t answer, Ian cracked an eye, looking over in Dipper’s direction. He raised an eyebrow in question.

“We’ve got rocks,” Dipper said, flatly.

Ian broke into a smile. “Don’t sell us short. We’ve both got our minds.” He tapped his chin with one finger. “And rocks.”

Despite himself, Dipper snorted out a laugh.

“And a rift into alternate versions of our reality,” Ian said, thoughtfully. A little too thoughtfully, Dipper decided.

“That I can’t get too close to without getting sucked back into the Mindscape,” he reminded Ian, warningly. “And that’s not a convenient backdoor. I’ve got so little power, if I get dragged back, I don’t think I’ll be able to make it back to the physical plane unless I’m summoned.” Dipper considered it. “Maybe not even then. I haven’t been this weak since -”

He bit off the rest of his sentence. Ian was giving him a strange look.

“Let’s just say I’m not eager for a repeat of last time,” Dipper said, finally.

Ian still looked like he was bursting with questions, but thankfully, he seemed content to wait until everyone was safe and they were well away from this stupid basement cavern to start asking them.

“All right,” he said. “You can’t go anywhere near the rift.” Dipper also didn’t entirely like the way Ian grinned. “But you didn’t say anything about me.”

Dipper was already shaking his head before Ian finished the sentence. “Are you crazy? You’ve got no idea where this thing goes. Walk through it and you could be walking straight into some horrible thing’s mouth, or a world where there’s no oxygen, or – or – or a dimension entirely inhabited by gerblin puppets! If your fleshy human body even makes it through at all!” He realized he was waving his arms a little too enthusiastically, and tucked both hands into the pockets of his vest. “And don’t even think about coming back, unless the rift realigns with that one dimension out of an infinity of possible alternate dimensions. You’d be stranded. Doomed to wander the multiverse for the rest of your pathetically short mortal existence!”

Dipper cleared his throat, returning his voice to a more normal pitch. “And Mira will kill me if that happens. Powers or no powers.”

Ian’s grin didn’t change.

“Oh, you do care! I’m touched. But don’t worry. I’m not planning on trying to go through the extremely dangerous little rift in the fabric of existence.”

For reasons he couldn’t quite articulate, a whole lot of little alarm bells suddenly started clanging in Dipper’s head.

“You’re not?” he asked, cursing himself for how spooked, how silly he sounded.

“No, I’m not,” Ian said, sounding a little more level, just a sliver less excited, and Dipper breathed out. “It’s alternate timelines, you said, right? Realities where something in the past went differently.”

His grin slipped a little, the sharp glee in his eyes fading. “You don’t have your powers. And you can’t get close enough to the rift to steal them back from a timeline where you do without ending up trapped in the Mindscape, whatever that is. Right?”

“Right,” Dipper said, slowly, warily.

“And anything too big that tries to come through the rift gets sucked back after a little while, unless it has some kind of anchor here. Right?”

“I don’t like where this is going,” Dipper said.

Ian sighed, running a hand through his hair. “Neither do I. But it’d only be temporary. And unless you’ve been sitting on a real doozy of a plan, I get the feeling you don’t have a better idea.”

Dipper shook his head. “Please tell me you’re not about to suggest what I think you’re about to suggest.”

“You heard the man in the top hat,” Ian said, reaching for devil-may-care and not quite making it. The smile he turned in Dipper’s direction briefly, before he aimed it grimly at the rift, was just a little too wide, a little too bright.

His voice sounded distant, somehow, like he wasn’t hearing himself as he said, “It doesn’t end with losing an eye.”

Chapter Text

It would not be entirely fair to say the Woodsman was not intelligent.

What the Woodsman was not was human. Yes, what he had sprung from had been, once, but as the two he’d locked underground could attest, what a thing once was often had little or no bearing on what it would become.

The Woodsman, steeped now in magic older and deeper than just the upstart Alcor’s, lived in cycles of sylvan time, measuring it – if he measured it at all – in seasons’ turnings. In the slow growth of new rings. In the persistent push towards sunlight.

The Woodsman, not being human, had little use for human faces. Their shifts and changes meant as little to him as the autumnal turn and fall of the leaves of a venerable tree, the burst and bloom of bright spring growth.

The foliage changed. The tree remained.

…

There were clouds gathering over Gravity Falls.

Marybeth watched them with a critical eye. Sometimes the valley acted like a gigantic sink, and clouds swirled slowly around it before dumping buckets of rain on the town square, but every once in a while, storm systems ran up against the cliffs and got stuck there, and then it’d pour for hours. That was the last thing the construction site needed, so, of course, that was what it looked like was headed their way. Lucky thing they were already shut down due to the stupid hole in the ground, or she’d be really pissed about how much time they were losing. At this rate, she might as well go home to her tropical fish.

There was a prickling charge in the air, a tinny taste on the back of her tongue. Marybeth tried to tell herself it was just lightning, even though lightning was rare enough in the Pacific Northwest.

She’d lived in Gravity Falls long enough, though, to know better.

…

The impending storm had Rashid running around the construction site, pegging down tarps and rolling up windows and reinforcing weatherproofing charms. He wasn’t really sure they were going to get anything out of it, but Marybeth had taken one look at the sky and said, “Better batten down the hatches, kiddo,” and Marybeth was always right about things like that. Also, Rashid loved it when she called him ‘kiddo’. Marybeth didn’t do friendly things like nicknames. If you got a nickname from Marybeth, it meant something.

Okay, mostly what it meant was some variation of insult, but still.

Rashid had to pass by the mouth of the cave in the cliffs to get to the front-end loader, and he felt a little shiver, like somebody’d walked over one of his preincarnations’ graves. He knew, logically, that it was just an extremely magical hole in the ground, but something about that cave down there gave him a bad feeling. It looked like weird ancient cult stuff. Nothing good ever came of weird ancient cult stuff.

He wasn’t sure why the wizard – either of the wizards – hadn’t just told them to seal it right back up. He wasn’t really sure how it was messing with the gravitational fields around the cliffs, or if that was some other thing, and if so, what and where that other thing was. He also wasn’t sure if the redheaded dryads he’s been seeing around were real or not. Marybeth didn’t think so, but then, they always seemed to disappear whenever anybody else was around.

Rashid had so many questions, and, as usual, nobody else seemed as interested as him in the answers.

…

The wizard (who infinitely preferred to be called by his full legal name of Dr. Norbert Wexler, Ma.D. (Magical Doctorate) but was constantly subjected to the indignity of being called ‘the wizard’, an outdated term with connotations of superstition and chicanery which were quite incompatible with the professional majick he practiced, thank you very much) was…enjoying was too strong a word, but he was certainly eating a meal at the local greasy spoon. It was a subpar meal, but Dr. Wexler was sufficiently distracted not to particularly care.

He was, in a word, heartbroken.

Not about being stiffed out of a job by some wand-waving asshole who probably hadn’t even bothered to get a two-year community college degree before setting themselves up as a ‘magical inspector’, although Dr. Wexler was pretty sore about that as well. It didn’t surprise him, though. The way his luck was going, it had been bound to happen.

Not about the fact that his live-in girlfriend had walked out the morning before he’d left Gravity Falls, either. If she wanted to go back to Ohio to live with her sister, well, that was just fine. Norbert wasn’t going to stop her. She’d started to get in the way of his research, anyway, always demanding his attention at the most inconvenient times. He could hardly work on serious majickal research under such conditions. Good riddance. He definitely hadn’t cried for an hour solid and ended up with a wretched headache.

No, what had left Dr. Norbert Wexler’s battered heart in pieces on this particular occasion was the short, formal email he’d reread precisely fifty-seven and a half times since he had received it that morning. The email, in two neat sentences, cordially disinvited him from attending the conference on potions microbrewing at which he’d been engaged to present a panel. Disinvited him now, and in the future.

Just because he’d called that huckster Ruud out for the snake-oil salesman he was after the release of that bilious concoction Ruud had the nerve to call ‘fermented flight oil’. And because he’d threatened, taunted, and finally forcibly engaged the lying charlatan in fisticuffs. And because he’d then had to be dragged out of the Soul Foods by security. And because he’d then penned a lengthy article for the Mystic Tymes about it, decrying the censorship he’d experienced from the majickal community.

Persecution, that’s what it was. A veritable witchhunt.

He’d really been looking forward to that conference, too.

Outside the diner window, it was starting to cloud up. Norbert watched the dark clouds slowly swirling over the cliffs. They, he decided, were a perfect mirror for his feelings.

…

Yaz considered the darkening sky outside the library windows with a frown.

The sensors in their ‘hawk were going haywire, which meant that that low-pressure system wasn’t just pushing an electrical charge in front of it. And magic storms were bad enough anywhere else, but with the sheer amount of ambient power piled up around Gravity Falls at any given time, they could really wreak havoc on the valley. Last time a big thunderstorm had hit town, years ago, the buffalo statue from the town square had come to life and rampaged through the streets. Four people had been gored or trampled – not fatally, thankfully – and just about every shop on the main street had had to replace their window glass.

Magical storms could really throw a wrench in the delicate calibration of most of Yaz’ projects, too. Not just the reference librarian who was out and in use on the floor, but also the projects Yaz hadn’t deemed ready to share with the reading and researching public yet. A storm of any size could set them back months. And by the looks of things, the storm brewing up outside was going to be a doozy.

Yaz adjusted their reading glasses on their nose, and turned back to the open circuitry panel in front of them. They had a little time before the storm really hit. Seemed like a good time to get really interested in warding.

…

Fitzherbert Maximilian Archibald Godwin-Sherman-Boggs the Third, known to his small and exclusive circle of friends as Archie, stared down at the smoking engine of his rented maglev buggy in disappointment.

He wasn’t sure what part of it was smoking or why, but he was reasonably certain that, whatever it was, it shouldn’t be. If it were supposed to be smoking, after all, then the buggy should most likely be in the air, instead of on the ground and not moving, like it actually was.

He turned away from the buggy. The crowd of farm animals – were they sheep? Somehow, Archie was sure sheep didn’t have necks that long – that had clustered interestedly around the barbed-wire fence when the buggy had crashed were still watching him with their beady black eyes. Archie flapped his hands at them, which did absolutely nothing.

The throaty roar of an engine passing on the road slowed and lowered as a motorcycle pulled into the shoulder of the road beside him. Even pulled to a stop, the engine was almost loud enough to drown out the voice of its rider. “Hey, do you need a hand?”

Archie looked up, his heart sinking, and did a double-take. He’d half-expected the rider to be some young hooligan, but the person sitting astride the black beast of a bike was a woman, seventy years old if she was a day, with her iron-grey hair scraped back in a ponytail and a battered leather jacket thrown over a high-collared blouse and – were those leather pants?

“I’m quite well, thank you,” Archie said stiffly, which earned him an amused snort.

“Sure. I might not know much about maglev buggies, but I’m pretty sure they’re not supposed to smoke like that.”

Archie started to puff himself up – how dare this insolent peasant – but then he glanced back at his poor beleaguered buggy, which the long-necked, woolly creatures were starting to nibble curiously at, and felt himself deflate. “That was rather the conclusion I had reached, as well.”

The motorcyclist’s eyes crinkled up in a smile. “That’s what I thought.” She glanced up at the sky, which, Archie had been trying not to notice, was starting to turn an alarming shade of grey. “Have you called a tow yet?”

“No,” Archie admitted, miserably. “I’d hoped to have it running again – I’m meant to be in Portland -”

“Well, you’re not gonna get there tonight,” the motorcyclist said, apologetically but firmly. She patted the seat of the monstrous motorcycle behind her. “Hop on. I’ll run you into town, and you can call a tow from somewhere safe and dry.” Her eyes flicked warily back to the sky. “There’s a real monster of a storm brewing, and I’d bet my bike there’s hail in it.”

Archie cast a last, despairing glance at his buggy.

“I’m never going to get my damage deposit back,” he sighed, resigning himself. “What town is out here? This is the middle of nowhere.”

The motorcyclist smiled at him, a smile that was ever so slightly unnerving.

“You really must not be from around here,” she said. “But hey, it’s your lucky day. You broke down just outside of Gravity Falls.”

…

The star stood in a tree in the heart of the wood.

The hand rested under its shade.

Under the earth, buried, waited the pine tree and the eye.

And the shooting star sheltered under the canopy of the Woodsman’s outstretched arm.

…

It wasn’t the first time someone Mabel Pines loved had been transformed into something other than human. Somehow, though, this one was managing to be the weirdest.  

“Okay, don’t panic, don’t freak out,” she reassured herself as much as Henry, giving him a pat on his…bark. “So you can’t really talk? We’ll just have to act it out! Like charades!”

The tree-man her fiancé had somehow transmogrified into just gave Mabel an extraordinarily soulful and, unfortunately, inscrutable look, and closed his hand over hers.

“Gotta say, though, anything that involves me also turning into a tree-person so we can entwine our roots for eternity? Romantic, but off the table.” Mabel drummed the fingers of her free hand against her chin as she considered what to do next. Her first thought, of course, was to give Dipper a call, but something held her back. This was her cursed boyfriend-soon-to-be-husband, after all. Dipper didn’t have the monopoly on weird magic stuff just because he was all demon-y now.

Besides, where was Dipper? Why wasn’t he here already?

It was a good question. The best question, actually. If Mabel was in any danger, he’d be right there, with a big roll of conjured bubble wrap, ready to roll her up. So the fact that he wasn’t here could be a good sign? Except for the fact that Mabel was standing in an unfamiliar clearing in a dress made of vegetation and Henry was a tree.

Less-good signs. And Mabel couldn’t shake the nagging feeling that she was forgetting something.

“Bro-bro?” she tried, cautiously, not entirely surprised when she got no response. “Hey, was this one of your infodumps?” It had been years since the last time Dipper had had one, but they’d also gotten more spectacular as he got older and more powerful. The splash zone had gotten bigger, too. “Hey, nobody’s mad at you, goofus. Come on back and we’ll figure out how to fix this.”

The wind kicked up a little, shaking the tops of the trees far overhead with a dull roar like surf breaking against a shore. Down in the shelter of the clearing, Mabel only felt the faintest breath of air move, but it was still chilly enough to raise goosebumps on her bare arms. There was a funny tinny smell to it, too, one she thought meant lightning. Still, the sky overhead, when she looked up, was a perfect, even blue.

“Okay,” Mabel said, smiling back up into the haunting blue gaze of her transfigured boyfriend. “Well, it was worth a shot. Can you tell me what happened here?”

Her – fianc-tree? Arbour amour? – only gave her a long, blank stare. Mabel squirmed a little, inside. This was giving her bad flashbacks to that lumberjack ghost dude who’d wrecked the Northwests’ fancy party that one time. She looked around the clearing, eyes peeled for any flicker of blue flame, but all she saw were the other two women in the clearing and the occasional flash of red hair through the trees.

There was something about those two women that was weird, too, though. Other than the fact that one of them was staring into space with an expression that seemed to say that there was nothing going through her head but elevator music and one of them was halfway through a tree. Mabel had kind of just assumed at first glance that it was Candy and Grenda and focused her attention on why Henry was a tree. But, now that she looked closer, she realized she didn’t actually recognise either of them.

Just like – she did a double-take. Just like she didn’t really recognize the hands at the ends of her own arms, either. Or the coil of what looked like a root, wound around the ring finger of the left hand.

“Whoa, wait,” Mabel said, looking up at Henry and narrowing her eyes. “Henry? Henbone? What is going on here?”

A sudden and terrible thought struck her, and she jabbed a finger at him, feeling a little guilty about how he flinched back. “And where’s my brother?”

…

It doesn’t end with losing an eye.

Stars, what was Ian thinking? That was the last thing he wanted.

And yet, even as that thought crossed his mind, a traitorous, nasal voice whispered, in the back of his mind, liar.

Alcor was still giving him that unimpressed look. The glower was hilariously incongruous on his childish face, especially when he squinted and blinked in the glare from the light coming from Ian’s artificial eye. “Yeah, that’s what I was afraid you were gonna say.”

“It could work,” Ian said, but even as the words left his mouth, he heard how hollow they sounded.

Alcor crossed his arms over his chest, squashing the puffy vest-thing he wore, and gave Ian a look that had probably set cultists aflame and turned lesser demons to stone. It probably worked better when it didn’t hit them somewhere around the midriff. “You think you can just shove your hand into a hole in the fabric of spacetime, steal powers from an alternate version of you who didn’t make it out of the trap your evil demonic mastermind former self lured him into, and keep enough of your sanity to use those powers to bust us out and save Mira without getting caught in yet another extremely obvious trap and causing the apocalypse.”

Ian glanced back at the rift. It undulated.

“Not really,” he admitted.

Alcor glared at him for another handful of interminable seconds, before his shoulders slumped and he looked away.

“I don’t know what I’m doing. I know it’s stupid,” Ian said. “But – I don’t see any other way out of this. You can’t swoop in and save the day this time. Neither can Mira.”

He kept his eye on the rift as he said, “And I’m tired.”

The rift danced in midair, its edges bleeding into the dimness around it. If it weren’t for the strange, almost ultraviolet luminosity it threw off, it would have been nearly invisible.

“I’m not going to apologise for you not trusting me,” Ian said, a bubble of anger rising in his throat. “And I’m not saying you were right. I’m just – tired. It’s so much work to try to be normal.”

He looked down at his right hand, giving it a flex. Effortlessly, his artificial eye flicked between seeing it by visible light, in shades of heat, in a dim, diffuse aura of magic. Mira’s mother had been right. It really did look like a hole. “To be human.”

Alcor’s voice sounded subdued, even childish. “I know.”

“Do you.” Ian tried to laugh. It came out horrible, and he stopped. “Well, that’s just great. The only other person who understands isn’t technically a person at all.”

He must have been imagining that Alcor’s silence sounded hurt, somehow.

“It just feels like I’ve been trying, so hard, for so long,” Ian said, dully, to the rift. “And the only thing that ever happens is that it gets harder. I’m so tired of no one trusting me. I don’t trust me! And I shouldn’t! It’s so easy for everything to go wrong! I always have to do everything just right, every time, or…”

“Yeah,” Alcor said. “But the alternative is worse.”

Ian ran his tongue over his lips, realizing as he did that his mouth had somehow gotten very dry.

“Yeah,” he agreed. “The alternative is worse.”

They sat, looking at each other, in the dim glow from the mushrooms, for what felt like a very long time.

“You don’t really want to do this, do you?” Alcor asked, finally, and Ian huffed out an angry sigh.

“No! Of course I don’t! But -” He drew a breath in, and let it out slowly. “I’d rather lose myself than lose Mira.”

“Yeah,” Alcor said, after a moment, and Ian was surprised to hear his voice crack. “Me too.”

In the silence, the rift pulsed, once.

Chapter Text

It had been a beautiful day for a wedding. But there was a shadow gathering over the clearing.

The bride did not sound happy anymore. Her voice was raised and impatient, even if the words were hard to make out. The maid of honour hoped nothing had gone wrong. The dress looked beautiful, but admittedly the venue wasn’t prepared. There was no seating, and the flowers had all withered away as the clouds began to gather overhead. If it rained, wouldn’t that just be a disaster.

The groom was starting to grow impatient, too, if the lattice of branches and brambles that sprang up in a fence around the clearing were anything to judge by. Combined with the clouds overhead, they made the clearing darken even more.

No – that wasn’t the clouds. That was the canopy, closing over them even as the trees closed in around them. Closed them in.

The groom’s voice rumbled out a single word, a word that shook the ground. Or perhaps the ground shook on its own? It shook, at any rate, one single violent heave as the groom said, “Stay.”

“Well, of course I’m not going to leave you here alone, you big silly,” the bride said sharply. “But I want to know what’s going on! What happened to us? Where are we? Why don’t I remember?”

She turned her head, hopefully not disturbing her veil, and locked eyes with the maid of honour. “And who are they?”

The canopy overhead shivered, with a roar like the sea. The clearing grew darker as the bride stamped across the open clearing and came to a stop before the maid of honour, eyes searching over her face.

“And why do you look familiar?” she said, quietly, more to herself than to the maid of honour.

The answer to that seemed obvious. If the bride had chosen the maid of honour, it must be because they were great friends, mustn’t it? And they were friends, obviously. The best of friends.

“Hello?” the bride said, when she got no response, leaning in closer and snapping her fingers in the maid of honour’s face. “Anybody in there?”

That seemed unnecessarily rude.

The bride pursed her lips, and looked long and hard into the maid of honour’s face. And then, her eyes flicked up.

The maid of honour reached up, to check her hair, to be sure her crown of flowers was still in place. If her coiffure was disturbed, if she didn’t look her best –

The bride’s eyes narrowed. That was all the warning the maid of honour got before the bride reached up and snatched the crown of flowers from her head.

…

“It’s not just yourself you’d lose, though.”

Ian didn’t say anything to that, only bit his bottom lip and glared at the rift.

“People still have to live in the reality you don’t mind torpedoing.” Dipper ignored the octopus-like creature lying on his head, its tentacles draping over his shoulders. “Mira still has to live in this reality. Not that a resurrected Bill Cipher would care.”

Ian opened his mouth like he was going to say something, but then sputtered, batting away the questing tentacles of the octopus-creature trying to climb his leg. They were really pretty, Dipper decided. All delicate bioluminescent pastel frills. Mira would love them. They were probably extremely venomous.

“I know,” Ian said at last, succeeding in shaking the octo-creature from his leg, only for another one to drop from the ceiling onto his shoulder. He looked at it, and then sighed, sounding resigned. “Do you think I haven’t thought about it? Do you think I’m too stupid to know what might happen, or just too selfish to care?”

“If you care about blowing up the world, you’ve got a funny way of showing it,” Dipper pointed out, as a wave of darkness pulsed from the rift, wiping the octo-creatures from existence and conjuring, in their place, a huge glittering orb with a spiderweb of ominously-humming wires leading from it to all corners of the cavernous room.

“Oh, don’t worry,” Ian said, stepping around the orb and yelping when one of the wires sizzled and spat green sparks. He pulled back with a wary look in the wire’s direction, before turning back to Dipper. Dipper didn’t at all like his rueful half-smile, or the unamused little laugh he let out before saying, “Trust me, I’ve got a plan for that.”

“Great. Mind letting me in on it?” Dipper asked, and then ducked to avoid a swinging, singing wire. A moment and a pulse of darkness later, the wire was an enormous, three-headed python, hissing in Dipper’s face. He let out a very manly yelp of surprise, stumbling backwards and landing hard on the seat of his shorts. Luckily, he landed on something soft. Unluckily, the something soft turned out to have very big teeth.

Ian didn’t answer, just yanked Dipper out of reach of the something soft’s snapping fangs. “You’ve noticed these pulses are coming faster and faster, right? We’re hardly getting a break between them anymore. We’ve gotta do something -”

He broke off as the rift pulsed again, and the fanged creatures all around them vanished.

“Before we get eaten,” Ian finished, a little sheepishly. “Also, it is very weird how little you are right now.”

“I’m not little!” Dipper protested, realizing too late how petulant he sounded. “And you’re not changing the subject. Do you actually have a plan? Or is this just a bluff?”

In the moment of silence that followed, the rift blorped and spat out a stream of pale-furred, dimly luminescent bats, which flocked, chittering, to the ceiling and settled in its corners.

“Even if it goes wrong,” Ian said, at last, slowly, like he was turning over each word in his head before he said it. “If I can’t keep hold of the reins. I don’t think Bill Cipher would put up with being trapped in this cavern for long. Or with having some upstart vegetation getting in the way of whatever it is he’s planning.”

“He wouldn’t put up with a reality that’s sane and habitable for humans, either,” Dipper pointed out, and Ian put on that grin again, turning it down towards his feet briefly before looking back up to meet Dipper’s eyes. Dipper squinted, and Ian blinked, the cavern falling into deeper darkness as the light from his artificial eye winked out.

It was impossible, in the sudden dark, for Dipper to read Ian’s expression as he said, “That’s where you come in.”

…

The dark-haired girl blinked, as Mabel pulled the flower crown off her head, the glassiness slowly clearing from her eyes. Her eyebrows drew together, and her gaze focused, at last, on Mabel’s face –

And then the flower crown grew vines and latched back onto her head.

“What the -” Mabel started, and the girl yelled, and the ground shook, and a crowd of redheaded dryads burst from the trees to try to pull them apart. And the whole time, tree-Henry just watched.

Mabel gripped the handful of flowers until petals mashed under her fingers, spilling an almost overpoweringly sweet perfume into the air. She spun around, ducking under the outstretched arms of one of the dryads even as she tore the flowers away from their grasping vines. It didn’t seem to make much difference. As she bashed an elbow into the nose of another dryad, who’d wrapped both arms around her middle, Mabel saw the flowers regrowing from the vines, unfurling their white and yellow petals from the other girl’s dark hair. She was tearing valiantly at them by the handful, but her eyes were already starting to go glassy again when two more dryads grabbed her arms and pulled them behind her back.

“Mira!” she called, locking eyes with Mabel for a moment before the dryads started to hustle her away towards the encroaching trees. Mabel didn’t miss that they were exchanging uncertain looks the whole time. “Mira, don’t…don’t…”

Her voice trailed off, her features going slack again as flowers devoured her head. Mabel shoved one of the dryads off of her, spun on her heel, and punched another in the face. All those boxing lessons with Grunkle Stan had clearly paid off – the dryad went reeling, but Mabel did too, shaking out her hand. “Ow ow ow! Wow, hitting you guys is like hitting a tree.”

The dryad she’d punched gave her a hurt look, pressing a hand over its eye. Mabel stuck out her tongue at it. “Well, if you hadn’t tried to kidnap me, then I wouldn’t have had to use force! Oh, don’t give me that look, you should see what I can do with a leaf blower.”

She started towards the trees where the dark-haired girl had vanished, but had to hurriedly pull back as new growth erupted from the ground under her feet. Within seconds, her path was entirely cut off by a wall of dense, dark foliage and tangled, brambly undergrowth. Blackberries the size of golf balls hung dark and heavy from reaching, thorny vines.

Mabel took a step back.

She turned around, and the dryads drew back at the look on her face, pulling aside to let her through as she stomped across the grass and up to the apple tree with her fiancé’s face. Their whispers were like the sigh of wind in autumn leaves behind her.

Henry – or whatever was pretending to be Henry – didn’t shy away when Mabel stopped in front of him and put her hands on her hips, but the blue flames in his eyes did bank a little and his shoulders slumped with what looked like embarrassment when she pursed her lips.

“Henry John Corduroy Pines,” she said, “you are going to tell me what is going on. Right. Now.”

…

“I don’t like it.”

“You don’t have to like it,” Ian said.

“I kind of do,” Dipper protested. “You’re making a couple of big assumptions here. One, that Bill wouldn’t turn me into ground beef as soon as he laid eyes – okay, eye – on me, two, that I’d get my powers back if he did something nasty to the Woodsman, and three, that I could stop Bill at full power.”

“You don’t have to stop him,” Ian said, darkly. “Just obliterate him.”

Even though he’d half-expected it, it still took Dipper a moment to figure out how to respond to that. “And now you’re assuming I’d be willing to -”

He stopped. There was a sudden, sweeping darkness, and the chittering and rustling from the bats overhead disappeared, replaced by the cavern’s echoing silence.

“You were willing to when he put Mira in danger the last time,” Ian said, and there was something ruthlessly emotionless in his voice. “You were eager to.”

“Yeah, but that was -” Dipper started, and then, swallowing down everything he’d wanted to say, “That was different.”

Ian’s laugh was as hollow as the quiet in the vastness of the cavern. “How?”

Dipper didn’t say, it was different because you didn’t ask me to so nicely. He didn’t say, it was different because we didn’t sit down and plan it beforehand like we were setting up a coffee date. He didn’t say, it was different because it was Cipher, and it was simple. He didn’t say, it was different because when I was willing to do it, it turned out to be a trap. He didn’t say, it’s different because I’m trying to be someone Mira wants in her life. He didn’t say, it’s different because I’m trying to remember I used to be human, and I want to believe that part of me still is.

What he said was, “It was different because you didn’t give me a choice.”

“Well, you still chose not to go through with it. You had a choice then. You have one now. So what’s changed?” Ian continued, not giving Dipper time to answer. “Because from where I’m sitting, it doesn’t look like anything has. I’m still a liability. You still don’t trust me. You still can’t trust me.”

He turned away to stare at the rift, again. “And now we know why.”

“I trust you,” Dipper protested, maybe just a little too quickly. The deadpan look Ian turned on him made him fidget with the collar of his t-shirt. “Just…not completely.”

Ian huffed out a noise that was halfway to a laugh.

“Hey, I haven’t wiped you off the face of the earth or sold you to the fairies or turned your tongue into an eel or anything!” Dipper protested. He was starting to feel like he was doing a lot of protesting, here. “I didn’t even eat any of your childhood memories while I was poking around in your brain – and that was tempting, okay, you were one messed-up kid and childhood memories are delicious -”

Ian was making a face. Dipper bit off the rest of the sentence.

“I get it, okay,” he said, looking at his feet. “It’s not easy, knowing nobody can really trust you. Knowing you can’t really trust yourself.”

He almost felt bad about breaking the silence that followed with an accusation. Almost. “But you haven’t exactly been doing yourself any favours.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

Dipper paused. But he’d already gone this far. “I know you’ve been researching Cipher. And that you’ve been trying to hide it.”

“So?” Ian demanded. “I told you, it’s research for Mizar the -”

“And,” Dipper added, in a rush, “I know what you said to the execs.”

Ian’s face froze. The expression on it remained unreadable, no matter how long Dipper looked at it.

“That if you ever resurrected Cipher,” he said, at last, when Ian didn’t try to defend himself, “it’d be on purpose.”

He considered saying more – how to say more – but then the rift pulsed again, and suddenly they were both underwater.

…

The ground shook. Overhead, the sky gave an answering rumble.

The tree-thing unfolded itself, and kept unfolding, rising to tower over Mira’s tiny form. Mira – or whoever that was in her body – didn’t move a single inch. She stood her ground, arms crossed over her chest, staring the tree-thing down.

The most surprising thing, to Rosa, was that she didn’t look angry or afraid. Mostly, she just looked…disappointed.

“Okay,” she said, with a glance in Rosa’s direction. Rosa tried, again, to wriggle out of the clutches of the tree which, irritatingly, still refused to let her move. “You aren’t doing much talking. I get that. You’re a tree. Duh.”

Mira – or whoever - tapped one foot against the grass, and the enormous, towering tree-monster actually shrank back a little, its shoulders rising defensively towards where its ears would be if its trunklike head had had any. “But you’re gonna have to figure out a way to explain yourself, because it looks to me like I’m not myself, the forest itself is trying to keep me here and keep me from finding out what’s happening, and so far you’ve done exactly nothing to try to help me. Which is not what I expected from my fiancé.”

If Rosa’d had any doubt that the person currently inhabiting Mira’s body wasn’t Mira, it would have dissolved at the word ‘fiancé’.

To her surprise, the tree-monster-thing shrank back a little more. There was something almost sheepish in the slope of its shoulders and the way it hung its head.

“Yeah, that’s right! I’m disappointed in you!” The person wearing Mira’s face crossed her arms and tapped her foot more aggressively, and the tree-monster-thing wilted even more. “You know, I’m not even a hundred percent sure you’re Henry!”

The tree-creature slumped forward, seeming to fold back in on itself until it stood only a foot or so taller than Mira. Its head hung down between its shoulders, until it was nearly eye-to-eye with her.

There was something softer in Mira’s – or whoever she was right now – voice as she said, “Are you Henry?”

The tree-creature-thing was motionless for a long, long moment. Rosa almost missed it when it did, almost imperceptibly, shake its head.

Mira’s – or whoever’s – voice stayed soft, but there was a certain menace to it as she said, “So why do you want me to think you are?”

The tree-creature didn’t move, or make a sound, for long enough that Rosa started to wonder if it had even heard.

Then its face cracked, those jagged-bark teeth still as long and sharp as ever but somehow less frightening than before. There was something almost pathetic in its voice, which was a shadow of its former crackling roar as it repeated its earlier words – well, word.

“Stay.”

Mira – or whoever she was – did not look impressed.

“Well, if you don’t want me to walk straight out of here, mister,” she said, “you’d better start telling me the truth.”

…

Ian had just enough time to suck in a lungful of air before the wave smashed into him.

It was like a wall of concrete slammed into him at high speed, knocking him off his feet and sending him spinning through a dark, airless swirl. For one long, dizzy, terrifying moment, he couldn’t tell which way was up.

A line of desperate fire had stitched its way between his lungs, and it was growing nearly impossible not to draw a breath by the time Ian’s head broke the surface. He took deep, greedy gulps of air, only pausing to look around when he no longer felt like he was drowning.

As the surface settled and he found his footing again, Ian saw that the water wasn’t quite as deep as he’d thought. Instead of filling the cavern all the way to its ceiling, Ian found that, when he stood with his feet on the rough ground, the water only rose high enough to force him to crane his neck a little to put his chin above the surface.

That wasn’t going to last long, though. Even as Ian looked around the cavern for any sign of Alcor, he could feel the water around him moving gently with a constant current, could hear a quiet burbling as more and more water gushed from the rift. He couldn’t clearly see the water level rising, though – that first wave had knocked many of the glowing mushrooms from their roots in the walls, and the cavern was now even dimmer than before, the faint glow of the remaining mushrooms filtering down from around the ceiling. The surface of the water was choppy, throwing back a thousand shifting shadows under the sweeping beam of light from Ian’s artificial eye.

When Alcor’s head broke the surface, Ian heard the splash more than saw him in the gloom. Alcor’s dark curls were plastered close to his head, eyes squeezed closed as he bobbed in place. It took Ian a moment to realise he was probably having to tread water to keep his head above it. It was strange to think of someone – something – as old and powerful as Alcor being so small. Looking so much like a little kid.

He'd been so young, when Cipher had turned his world upside down. Ian had known that, but somehow, he hadn’t really understood it.

“You think I did this on purpose?” he called, over the water. “That I brought us here just so I could get locked in an underground ruin with an apocalyptically powerful tear in the fabric of reality and unleash ancient evil on the world? For…kicks?”

Alcor sputtered and spat a spout of water, before shooting Ian a flat look. “Did you?”

“No!”

Alcor didn’t say anything in response, the only sounds in the cavern the murmur of the rift spilling more water into the flooded space and the soft splashing as he treaded water. Ian realized it wouldn’t be long before he was treading water, too. He already had to go up onto his tiptoes to keep his chin above water.

“Why would I want to?” Ian demanded, narrowly managing not to inhale water. “I’ve got a successful show, I’m getting married to the love of my life – everything in my life is perfect, why should I want -”

“Because you’re tired?”

In the silence, the quiet lap of the water against the rocky walls and the soft trickling as it poured in to the cavern sounded as loud as waves breaking against shore.

“You took my memories,” Ian reminded Alcor, with a little more bitterness than he’d meant. “I don’t remember what Cipher was planning, or why. You want to know why I’ve been looking into Cipher? I was stupid enough to think that maybe if I knew more about him, more about what he was like, maybe I could figure out what he was up to and do something about it. That maybe I could fix things. For once. For good.”

He bit his lip. “And I guess I’m getting my wish!”

Alcor took a deep breath, like he was about to say something. He must have gotten a lungful of water instead, though, because he broke into a coughing fit that didn’t let up. By the time it subsided, the water had risen enough that, even on tiptoes, Ian couldn’t keep his head above the surface with his feet on the ground. The whole cavern stank of brackish water, and he could swear something long and snakey had just brushed past his ankles. He hoped this version of reality would change soon, before the cavern filled or he got too tired to keep treading water.

When he finally managed to choke out words between coughs, the first thing Alcor said was, “Have you talked to your therapist about this?”

Ian stared him full in the face, and then laughed, hollowly.

“Okay, not your therapist,” Alcor sputtered, before bobbing back under the water for several interminable seconds, then emerging with a gasp. “But why not Mira?”

“Are you kidding? I’m not putting this on her. Especially not now. Not when everything’s so perfect for me.”

“If it was perfect, you wouldn’t be asking me to kill you,” Alcor said flatly.

“Not me. Cipher.”

“Who was it who told me it was all him? That there was no difference between them?”

Ian didn’t have an answer for that.

“Do you really think I’d be asking you to do this if there was any other choice?” he managed, eventually. Treading water was harder work than it looked. Ian had to set his feet flat on the ground for a rest, for a moment. The water closed over his mouth and nose as he did, lapping at his ears. Alcor’s words, when they reached him, sounded distorted.

“Yeah. I do. In case you’d forgotten, I’ve been in your head.” Between his red face and dripping hair, and the way he kept briefly disappearing under the water as the little waves battered against him, Alcor did not look very intimidating or formidable. He certainly didn’t look like someone whose words should be landing like a punch to the gut. “You aren’t even trying to think of any other options. You lied to me. You do want to do this.”

“Oh, yeah! Sorry, forgot to mention that I hate all of reality! Think the place could use a little redecorating! Starting with my own friends and loved ones!” Ian gave a particularly vicious kick under the water. It was not satisfying in the slightest. “Of course I don’t want to do this. I want one of us to come up with the perfect solution right at the last minute. For us to break out of here and effortlessly beat the bad guy with a cool soundtrack playing in the background. I want to sweep the girl into my arms and kiss her breathless as you fly us all out of the woods while something explodes behind us, and for us all to live happily ever after. But that’s not how real life goes! That’s not how my life goes!”

He was treading water, now, gasping in air between words. Still, Ian had the sense that Alcor’s silence was more due to not knowing how to respond than the difficulties of staying afloat and holding a conversation at the same time.

“I’m not an action hero,” Ian snapped. “I’m not a hero at all. I’m the villain in this story, and villains get blown up by their own doomsday devices. They don’t get happy endings.”

“You’re going to base your life and death on what does and doesn’t happen in action movies,” Alcor said, so deadpan that it pulled Ian up short.

“No,” he sighed, splashing pointlessly at the ever-rising water. “Just – doesn’t it feel even a little bit inevitable? You’re supposed to be omniscient. Couldn’t you see this coming?”

Alcor pointedly looked around. Ian shook his head, and then lay back, letting his arms and legs trail in the water. He floated, for a few seconds, but then his heels started to sink again and he had to start paddling again or risk slipping under. “Okay, maybe not this exact scenario, but – you knew this was always how it was going to end. Why else would you have been spying on me in the first place?”

“Because I didn’t know!” Alcor gasped in a breath, tilting his chin up to keep his nose and mouth above water. He looked like he was starting to struggle with keeping himself afloat. “Why would you say you’d resurrect Bill Cipher on purpose, if you don’t want to?”

“Because at least that way it feels like I have a choice!”

Ian had to duck back under the water again, to rest on the ground. This time, the water closed over his ears, lapping at his closed eyes. He held his breath until his lungs began to burn, before reluctantly paddling back up to put his head above water. “I just want to feel like I have some kind of control. Even if that control’s only over when and how it happens. If I’m gonna crash and burn anyway, why not drive off the road? At least that way, I get to pick what I hit.”

He drew in a long, laboured breath. His arms were starting to ache, but he didn’t dare stop paddling. The rift seemed to have been open to this reality for far longer than any other so far. Surely it had to end soon? Surely the water wasn’t just going to keep rising forever? “If I’m going to fall into one of Cipher’s traps, if I’m going to cause the apocalypse. If I have to be…permanently stopped from causing the apocalypse. I at least want it to be on purpose.”

The words that Alcor muttered were garbled, between the lapping water and the way he kept sinking nearly below the surface, but Ian thought they sounded like, ‘Anything human breaks eventually’.

A moment later, he shot up out of the water like a dolphin, head and shoulders rising above the surface as he sucked in a long, deep breath. Almost as soon as he’d done so, though, Alcor settled back with his head barely above water, treading furiously. Ian wasn’t sure what he thought he’d accomplished, what he’d been trying to do.

“You know that’s – just – giving him what he wants,” Alcor puffed, one arm briefly breaking the surface as he paddled, and Ian realized that, small as he was now, Alcor must be even more tired than he was. “Sure, maybe Bill winning is inevitable. But – if it’s not – and you give up now -”

“But if it is, and I keep fighting -”

“Hey. My turn to talk now,” Alcor interrupted, sharply.

Ian shut his mouth, and gratefully saved his breath for swimming.

“You say - you want - control,” Alcor ground out. “Choice. You do this? You give up your choice. You hand over control. You choose – letting people get hurt. Hurting people.” He gasped, disappearing under the water again for a nervewracking second. “Hurting Mira. Didn’t you tell her – you were never gonna hurt her?”

Ian didn’t answer, focusing on keeping his face out of the water. His legs felt like lead, his kicking slow and useless. How long had he even been treading water like this? How long could he keep it up?

“All I ever do is let her down,” he managed, with his eyes on the ceiling, the dimming and brightening pulse of the mushrooms’ glow. “Get in her way. Everything keeps going wrong – maybe – maybe that’s a sign. Maybe this – is how – I stop hurting Mira.”

“Don’t be an idiot,” Alcor said, shortly.

“I’m not -”

“Mira had a destiny.” There was a moment of nothing but silence, the harsh saw of breathing, the faint splash of two people trying to keep their heads above water. “She said no. Didn’t matter. Caught up to her anyway.”

“I know. She wouldn’t want me to -”

“What part – of my turn to talk -”

Ian shut his mouth. Alcor splashed a little more.

“Mira chose no.” There was a pause. Ian wasn’t sure how much of it was Alcor gathering his thoughts, and how much was Alcor trying to breathe. “So maybe she didn’t get out. But she didn’t give up either. She chose you. Didn’t see that coming. She made things different. Made me different.”

His voice sounded very small, and very young, and very tired, when he said, “Made me more human.”

The mushrooms pulsed brighter, then darker again. Ian reached down for the bottom with one foot, out of curiosity. He couldn’t find it.

“Do you,” he started, stealing sips of air. His lungs were burning. His arms were burning. His impossibly heavy legs barely moved through the water, which had started, again, to seep into his ears and lap tantalizingly at the edges of his face. “Honestly think. That would work on Cipher.”

“It did once.”

Ian took a long breath, staring up at the mushrooms near the ceiling as they pulsed slowly brighter, then darker again.

“You had a choice then. You have one now.” Even though he couldn’t see Alcor’s face, even though his voice sounded breathless, Ian could hear the smile in it as Alcor said, “So what’s changed?”

Ian looked over, just in time to see Alcor’s curls disappear under the surface.

The light dimmed, and then rose again. The rift pulsed, and the water vanished, dropping Ian to the ground with a jarring thump. He took a long, deep breath, glad not to have to struggle for it, and looked around. The broken mushrooms still lay dark and scattered on the broken concrete, the dim glow of the remaining mushrooms barely anything but a graveyard glimmer near the ceiling.

Once he’d caught his breath, Ian blinked on the flashlight embedded in his artificial eye. It took three sweeps of the cavern to confirm what he’d thought he saw. The rift still hovered, undulating, where it had stood before it had spat out a temporary lake, nothing but a faint starry darkness against the shadows.

And there was no sign of Alcor.

Chapter Text

There was no sign of Ian.

To say that that wasn’t good would probably be the understatement of the year. Dipper looked around the empty cavern as he gasped in lungfuls of delicious air, feeling all over again the loss of his power. He shouldn’t need to catch his breath. And he should know who and what else was in the cavern with him, shouldn’t have to have light to see by –

He should have been able to stop the Woodsman. Should never have been captured like this in the first place.

He should have been able to save Mira.

And that was it, wasn’t it? It wasn’t just that he’d let himself get used to being the cool demon guy. Wasn’t just that he was used to having all these great powers at his disposal, to being able to do just about anything with a snap of his fingers, to being scary and powerful and unpredictable enough that nobody’d even consider laughing at him anymore. It wasn’t just that, without his powers, he was stuck back as a scrawny, noodle-armed twelve-year-old without even a mysterious journal to tell him what to do next.

He couldn’t help the one person he’d do anything to protect.

And if he couldn’t do that, then what was he?

Caught up as he was in contemplation, Dipper didn’t register the sense of powerful magic pressing in all around him at first. He was used to knowing things like that, after all, and here, today, there was a whole lot of powerful magic to go around. It took him entirely too long to realise that, even though either the rift or the Woodsman, let alone both of them together, should have had all his mental alarms screaming long ago, he hadn’t had any sense of the oppressive presence of occult power since the Woodsman had drained him.

Whatever this was, it was something he hadn’t noticed before. And it was big.

…

The sky seemed to open up without warning.

Storms were always unpredictable in and around Gravity Falls. Had been for as long as anyone could remember. Electrical storms were rare along the West Coast, where it rained so often, where it was so cool and close to the sea. Magical storms were rare, too, when the site of the Transcendence was practically underfoot and strange, impossible things happened with almost clockwork regularity. As with the thunderheads, it was hard to get a good charge massed.

Which only meant that, when such storms did happen, they were all the more spectacular.

…

Marybeth and Rashid took hasty cover in the tin can of a trailer that served as the site office while the wind did its best to tear the tarps from the equipment and the bruise-black clouds overhead pelted the cliffs with alternating jagged forks of green-white lightning and splatters of tropical fish. The little trailer rocked horribly on its blocks, threatening to roll right over as the wind battered it like a boxer’s fists. The thunder was deafening.

…

Dr. Norbert Wexler joined the rest of the diner’s clientele in cowering under the tables when all the windows exploded inwards at once, showering the patrons with glass and hailstones that, on closer examination, turned out to be eyeballs. One landed on the cracked vinyl of the booth, making eye contact with Dr. Wexler. He noticed, with the peculiar clarity of detail that came with blinding terror, that its pupil was long and horizontal, like a goat’s. The optic nerve trailing behind it twitched in a grotesque approximation of a wagging tail.

Dr. Wexler absolutely did not, if anyone asked, scream like a little girl.

…

At the first roll of thunder, Yaz had thrown the library into lockdown mode, steel shutters slamming over all of the windows and doors, shelves retracting into the ceiling, anything digital autosaving and going into standby mode, ready to switch over to backup power as soon as there was any disruption to the grid. Now, they were busy tearing around the library with a felt-tipped marker, scrawling additional protective symbols to complement the ones that were supposed to keep the foundations steady and the walls intact in case of earthquake, fire, or buffalo rampage. There had to be something that would keep out or otherwise neutralise magic –

It was with slowly-dawning horror that Yaz put the last line of the last symbol in place, just as they remembered the texts from the original Memorial Library stored in Special Collections in the basement. The extremely magical, extremely-unshielded-from-the-extremely-experimental magic-banishing spell that Yaz had just woven over the entirety of the library, texts.

The explosion, as would later be reported, was seen for miles.

…

Archie and the motorcyclist had not quite made it into town when the first few drops of rain spattered against Archie’s face. The motorcyclist looked up at the sky, and swore.

“I don’t think we’re gonna make it,” she said, with a quick glance back over her shoulder at Archie. “We gotta get under cover, or this is gonna turn both of us into -”

Whatever the storm would have turned both of them into was lost to the rising moan of the wind. And, Archie realized, every hair on the back of his neck rising to stand to attention, the rising moan of once-human voices.

“Excuse me,” he said, and then, a little more urgently, “Miss!”

“Yeah, I see ‘em,” the motorcyclist said, through what sounded like gritted teeth, though of course Archie couldn’t see through the mirrored dome of her helmet. “Hang on tight.”

She twisted one hand on one of the handlebars, did something with one of her feet, and the motorcycle gave a roar like a sleeping dragon awakened and shot down the highway like a bullet from a gun, leaving the shambling horde of animate corpses pouring from a chasm bleeding green light far behind them.

Overhead, lightning briefly cast the surrounding woods in stark black and white.

…

Thunder cracked the world in two.

Mabel jumped, and immediately wished she hadn’t. But the tree-guy – Henry – whoever wasn’t looking at her. Instead, his blue-flame eyes were turned skyward, and for all that his cracked-bark mouth was drawn open in a low snarl, he kind of looked…

Well. If he weren’t a giant tree-monster who’d somehow managed to brainwash at least one stranger and might have kidnapped Mabel and forced her into somebody else’s body, she might actually say he looked scared.

Lightning crackled overhead, making the-tree-who-might-be-Henry-kind-of look very much more ominous than he really needed to, and – Mabel was just going to start calling him ‘not-Henry’, she was pretty sure by now that he wasn’t really Henry or at least wasn’t totally Henry, and ‘the-tree-who-might-be-Henry-kind-of’ was a brainful to think every time – threw his head back and roared at the sky.

Thunder roared back.

Mabel wasn’t sure what was happening at first. All she knew was that the world went bright and loud all at once, and for one horrible moment she was back in that basement, Grunkle Ford’s portal exploding around her, time stretching out like saltwater taffy as Dipper –

And then the thunder died away, and she was still in the clearing, and there was no sound but the faint crackle of flames.

Mabel turned, seeing the tree split down its trunk and merrily burning from the inside out, just as one of the redheaded dryads let out a scream like the whine of a sawblade. The other dryads started to race around, clustering around the screamer as she sank to her knees, some of them flapping at the burning tree with their dresses, only succeeding in causing the flames to lick up and out of the trunk that had contained them so far. Their panic was almost palpable.

And they’d left the woman trapped in the trunk of the other tree unguarded.

Mabel picked up her flowing flower-petal skirts and ran over to the tree-prison, bracing a foot against the trunk and pulling at the thick, viney branch that had grown over the woman’s mouth with both hands. It didn’t want to come away. Mabel pulled harder.

Overhead, the sky split open again, thunder blooming out more like a physical force than a sound as lightning stabbed down in a green-white column directly for the gnarled apple tree at the centre of the clearing. Mabel was only able to see it as a bolt instead of just a blinding flash because not-Henry straightened to his full height and – it was hard to tell exactly what he did, especially with the lightning, but it was very bright and very gold and flashed over the apple tree for a split second. The lightning seemed to – bounce off of the gold, somehow, earthing itself in another tree across the clearing, which split neatly in two.

This time, the dryad didn’t scream, just fell flat in the grass as though someone had hit her in the head. When Mabel looked again, she couldn’t tell where the dryad had fallen except by a patch of slightly darker green grass. The other dryads screamed, instead, and Mabel was pretty sure that, this time, she heard some rage mixed in with the panic.

“Hm,” Mabel said, thinking, and then redoubled her efforts to tear the branch away from the terrified face embedded in the tree.

…

The Woodsman was old. But the woods were older still.

The patch of land at the base of the cliffs had been weird since long before it was called Gravity Falls. And it remembered.

It remembered the taste of power, gold light and blue flame. It remembered the sting of other worlds, bleeding through a wound in its skin. It remembered angles. It remembered ancient malice, and ancient laughter.

Like the Woodsman, though, it had no use for faces.

It had not quite been awake yet, when a pine tree had burnt in blue flame and become all gold light. By the time it had grown to know itself, it had known the pine tree as well as it did itself. Perhaps better. The blue flame with which the pine tree burned was no threat. That was known, as well.

But now. Now, the pine tree lay burnt black and flickering with nothing but embers. Now, the little wounds in the world’s skin, wounds it had worked hard to bury, were torn open afresh. Now, ancient malice, ancient laughter, set foot upon its soil again, and now, it knew what that malice meant. Now, blue flame spread.

And the woods knew wildfire.

It was awake, now, the place that had been named Gravity Falls. Perhaps not awake in a way a mayfly mind could comprehend, not awake in the brief and furious speed of mortals, but awake in the way of mountains, slow and deliberate, on the scale of ice ages. It was awake. It remembered.

And it had had quite enough.

Lightning stabbed, again and again, towards the apple tree that stood wreathed in blue flame, towards the wounds in the skin of the world. Again and again, lightning was flung back by gold light and blue flame.

Sooner or later, lightning would make it through. But ‘sooner or later’ was not soon enough. Not with angles and ancient malice drawing ever nearer to one of the wounds in the skin of the world.

The place that had been named Gravity Falls needed something that moved in human time. Something smaller – and, being smaller, faster.

Somewhere deep in the woods, something that had been lying dormant for many long years, gathering a coat of moss and spruce needles and autumn leaves, letting saplings sprout from its roof and through its floors, blinked awake. Like a slumbering dog disturbed from its rest, it gave itself a shake, disturbing a nest of starlings that had settled between roof and sign. They fluttered up in a chorus of angry song, as something unfolded scaly chicken legs and slowly, with much groaning, tilted itself upright.

…

There was a distant rumble, like thunder.

The rift quivered in response, like a puddle of water rippling when something heavy hit the ground nearby. The stars within it winked, like thousands of tiny eyes.

Ian sat on the floor and stared at it.

It was a trap. There didn’t seem to be much point now in trying to argue otherwise. He wondered what it had done with Alcor. He wondered, vaguely, whether it had been responsible for everything. The mad tree-monster. The bicycle that had splashed Ian, the cop, the car that had nearly run him down. The overbooking at their wedding venue. Everything that had led them here.

It was difficult to believe, looking at the starry not-quite-substance of the rift, that only a day ago, Ian’s biggest concern had been ordering the wedding flowers.

The mushrooms’ greenish glow pulsed slowly brighter, and then slowly darker again.

Ian looked around the cavern again, halfheartedly, though he knew what he’d see. Alcor had had at least one thing right. Ian hadn’t bothered looking for another way out. But it was pretty obvious that it was because there wasn’t one. No one else to ask for help. No other exits. All roads led to the strange constellations on the other side of the undulating blob hovering in midair no more than six feet from Ian’s face.

It was probably some kind of metaphor. If so, Ian thought, it was a little on the nose.

Somewhere overhead, somewhere out in the real world, there was another, louder rumble. The rift gave an answering quake, and spat out a halfhearted shower of rainbow sparks and what appeared to be a single piece of metallic confetti.

Ian stared at it.

For a moment, he was furious. No – furious was too small a word for it. The old familiar anger, at such a stupid world, at the pointless futility of life and human effort, flared up. But then it only kept on flaring, consuming every other little ember of annoyance and frustration and exhausted despair that had built up since he’d found out the name of the rotten thing that had lived inside him all along, until it was a blaze that felt too big to contain under his skin. He’d been treated like a criminal just for trying to learn about it, to try to manage it, to keep it under control. Trying to learn more about it had meant he’d hurt the person he was most trying to learn about it, manage it, for. He’d been unable to trust a single one of his own thoughts, his own desires – and he still was. He’d been trapped, long before the earth closed over his head, and there was still nothing he could do about it that didn’t mean that it – that Bill fucking Cipher – would win.

Of course he didn’t have any control. Of course he couldn’t have even the illusion of it. Of course he couldn’t stop it. Of course there wasn’t any other way out.

Ian didn’t know what made him madder. That he’d never had a choice, and never would.

Or that he’d been stupid enough to think, however briefly, that things could be different.

“Well?” he said, at last, more to hear the sound of his own voice than because he expected an answer. “Now what?”

“Now, kiddo,” said a voice behind his left shoulder, “we find out what you’re made of.”

Chapter Text

The rift pulsed.

…

Lightning struck.

…

The grove burned.

Lightning stabbed wildly down, like a masked killer with a butcher’s knife going to town on a pretty co-ed. What it lacked in precision, it more than made up for in enthusiasm. The dryads’ screams had turned to one long, horrible wail.

“He’s letting you die to protect that tree,” Mabel pointed out, as three dryads descended on her and her attempt to free the woman she’d first thought was Grenda. “Serious question, do you really still want to do his dirty work? Because no pressure or anything, but this would be a great time to unionise.”

The dryads paused, looking between Mabel and the woman in the tree. Mabel didn’t think she was imagining that the looks that darted toward the woman in the tree were considerably more considering than the ones coming in her direction. She decided not to worry about it. None of her business what consenting dryads got up to in their free time.

After a moment of apparent deliberation, one of the dryads gestured, and the branch Mabel had been trying to pull away from the woman’s face suddenly slithered away. The rest of the vegetation webbed around her started, creakily and in lurching, jerking movements like old stop-motion animation, to retreat into the soil.

Two of the dryads had already gone to join their sisters trying to battle the flames. The third paused only long enough to catch Mabel’s eye and give her a long, hard stare, before hurrying off to join them.

The second she was free, the woman Mabel had taken for Grenda gasped in a breath and then asked, almost demanded, “Mira?” She was looking right at Mabel.

“No, sorry,” Mabel said. “Hey, how’d you get inside a tree?”

The woman gave her a stare almost as hard and as pointed as the dryad’s had been.

“Three guesses,” she said, her heavy accent surprising Mabel. There was only one person in Gravity Falls she knew with that kind of a twang, and it was even odds whether or not she’d try to rescue him if she found him stuck inside a tree. “Listen, whoever y’are, that body belongs to my friend. Mira. So if you wouldn’t mind vacatin’ the premises -”

“Yeah, uh, that one’s going to be…a little difficult,” Mabel admitted, squinting one eye all the way shut and putting her head – well, okay, apparently somebody named Mira’s head – to one side. “Because I don’t actually know how I got in here. I kinda hoped you could help me out with that.”

The woman who had recently been inside the tree didn’t stop giving Mabel that hard look. But it softened quickly when there was another flash of gold and another ear-shattering crackle of thunder.

“We ain’t got much time,” the woman said, kicking off the last few strips of bark still hampering her feet. “Tell me who y’all are, and who the heck Henry is, and maybe I can tell ya what happened.”

“Mabel. Mabel Pines,” Mabel said. “Henry’s my husband.” She glanced over to the apple tree and the war currently raging over it, the tree-creature roaring defiance at the flickering sky. “Although he’s…usually not a tree-monster.”

“Usually?” the woman from the tree started, before obviously remembering her own words about not having much time. “Nope, don’t matter. Mabel, you ever hear tell of a ‘Mizar’?”

“Of course,” Mabel answered, suddenly wary. She didn’t know how much this woman – or her friend, Mira – might know –

But the woman’s round face lit up with a huge, relieved grin. “Oh, good. Mira’s the Mizar, right now. Which means, I’m hazardin’ a guess, that you used to be.” She nodded toward not-Henry, before raising a hand to pat distractedly and ineffectually at her flop of bleach-blonde hair. “That thing said to remember. I think – I think ya did. Or maybe more like Mira did. An’ now…”

She punctuated her sentence with a sweeping gesture, taking in all of Mabel and the gown – and body – she’d found herself wearing.

Mabel didn’t know what to say. Didn’t even really know what to feel. This woman was telling her she’d basically bodysnatched one of her own future incarnations, which would be bad enough on its own. But…

If she had a future incarnation. If that future incarnation had her own life. Then that must mean…that she, herself, Mabel, was…

Another crack of thunder so loud that Mabel couldn’t really hear it, only felt it like a full-body blow, broke her out of the momentary melancholy the thought had swarmed her with. If it had happened, then it had happened long enough ago that this Mira had her own friends, her own life. It was done. No changing it now.

And the smoke from the burning grove was stinging Mabel’s nose, now, making her eyes water. The hiss and pop of the flames that could be heard between deafening bursts of thunder definitely seemed to be getting louder. And Mabel was getting uncomfortably hot.

They had to do something about this.

“Okay,” Mabel said, trying to think. Talking to not-Henry hadn’t worked, so far. She was going to have to come up with a different approach. “That other girl, the one with the flower crown. She’s one of Mira’s friends too, right?”

The blonde woman nodded.

“Great,” Mabel said, a plan already beginning to come together in the back of her mind. “Can you go try to get her away from that thing?”

She turned, slowly, to face the inferno ringing the somehow magically-still-untouched apple tree.

“I’ll deal with this guy,” she said, hoping she sounded braver than she felt.

And, as she strode across the clearing, ripping handfuls of little white blossoms off her – Mira’s – clothes as she went, Mabel hoped like heck that this was going to work.

…

Lightning struck.

…

Where the shiny, modern glass-and-steel building that famously housed the Stanley Pines Memorial Library of the Supernatural must have stood, now there was nothing but a flattened pile of rubble, still smoking slightly in places. Eldritch fire glimmered purple-green in between a few tumbled, broken concrete pillars. Bits of broken glass twinkled in the grass of the park that surrounded it and glittered over the asphalt of the road that passed by in front.

The motorcycle crunched over that glass and pulled to a halt, the woman in front putting a foot down to brace herself before pulling off her mirrored helmet and shaking out her iron-grey ponytail. An expression of melancholy crossed her face as she took in the wreckage, melancholy shading toward despair.

Archie could see why. He couldn’t imagine that anyone could have survived whatever calamity had destroyed the library – and, quite likely, caused that enormous percussive boom that had nearly knocked them off the road, earlier. Whoever they’d been coming to see, whatever information they’d hoped to find, whatever remedy to send the hordes of the undead back to their restless graves which they’d sought – all of it was now buried under the smoking ruin.

“Shit,” the motorcyclist said.

Archie found that, vulgar as her language was, he was forced to concur.

He’d only been staring mournfully at the ruin for a scant few seconds, though, before motion caught his eye. At first, he thought it was simply the smoke, or possibly one of those unnaturally-coloured flames, or maybe the rubble settling. But as he watched, a slender hand burst up through the wreckage.

Archie absolutely did not scream like a little girl. He had just barely escaped a gruesome demise at the hands of rotting zombies that punched up through the ground in a very similar fashion, anyway. If he had let out a short, masculine cry of distress, why – he could hardly be faulted, could he?

Whatever the reason, though, the motorcyclist turned.

For a split second, her expression froze, turning grim as she grabbed a piece of shattered rebar from the rubble at their feet. She raised it like a baseball bat as she took several careful steps toward the hand, which was now groping blindly at the broken concrete around it like, Archie thought a little hysterically, someone searching for a dropped contact lens. “Hey! Are you alive?”

For one tense, agonising moment, there was no reply.

And then, muffled, from somewhere under the heaps of concrete and steel, a voice piped up. “That’s kind of vitalist, don’t you think? What if I was a vampire?”

The motorcyclist sighed, a full-body release of tension, and swung the rebar down into the grass before clambering over the rubble to where the hand was still searching. There was an exasperated fondness in her voice as she started to pull the crumbling chunks of concrete aside. “Stars’ sake, Yaz, only you could think of something like that while trapped under a collapsed building.”

The exasperated fondness was echoed in the subterranean voice. “And only you would give me shit for it, Wanda. Hey, are you digging me out? You’d better be digging me out, or I’m going to haunt your skinny ass.”

“Yes, I’m digging you out,” the motorcyclist – Wanda? – grumbled, pulling aside a piece of girder as she looked back over her shoulder at Archie. “A little help, here?”

…

Lightning struck.

…

Ian turned around, and found himself eye to winking single eye with –

Himself.

Only. Only it wasn’t himself. Not the him he was now, anyway. Ian couldn’t have explained the sudden certainty that locked into place within him, like an iron gate slamming shut with a key twisting sharply in the lock, to anyone else. But there it was, anyway. Whatever was looking back at him from behind his own face was old, impossibly so, and strange in a way that even Ian, who had for his whole life felt most comfortable with the strange, thought he could spend a lifetime studying and never fully understand.

“Not bad!” the thing chirped, with Ian’s mouth. “Not bad at all! Most people take wayyyy longer to recognize me!”

That single eye narrowed, the dangling lid over the empty socket crumpling unnervingly, as it smiled and put Ian’s head to one side. “But then, you’re not most people. Are you.”

It drew out the last two words horribly, the sound distorting like a recording played at half-speed. It set Ian’s back teeth on edge, raising the hairs along his arms.

He forced the feeling down. Forced himself to meet the apparition’s one-eyed gaze. “Oh. It’s you. Kind of predictable, don’t you think?” Ian asked, aiming for a nonchalance he didn’t really feel. “Little cliché.”

His own eyes – well, eye – blinked at him. And then his own face smiled at him. “Hey, can’t beat a classic!”

“Look,” Ian sighed, sinking down to sit on a chunk of what was almost unrecognisable as crumbling concrete. “Can’t you just – save it? We both know you don’t have anything to say that I haven’t already thought of.” He was tired, he realized, as the jagged edges of the concrete bit into his butt through his jeans. Bone-deep weary of – well, just about everything. “If you’re just here to torment me -”

“Oh, but I’m not!” the other him announced, like he was emceeing his own entrance out onto a Vegas stage. “I, you three-dimensional flesh-sack of sad, am here to offer you a way out.”

It didn’t come as a surprise. The dull cold horror of it settled over Ian like it was nestling comfortably back into familiar, deeply-worn grooves.

“Fuck off,” he said, automatically.

The other him seemed to treat that with all the effort and consideration Ian had put into it in the first place. “Now, is that any way to talk to the one guy who’s really got your back down here?”

Ian sighed, dragging a hand down his face. He’d been treading water for too long. All of his limbs felt like concrete had been poured down them, and it was starting to set up. “Don’t tell me. Let me guess. All I have to do is surrender my mortal presence to you, and you’ll take care of everything. I never have to worry about anything, ever again. Of course, that’ll be because my consciousness has been entirely erased from existence, and I’ll have unleashed a deadly ancient evil with a horrible grudge against the people I love most and made it unstoppable, but hey! Small price to pay for peace of mind, right?”

He stared directly through the other him, who squinted and raised a hand to shield his single eye against the glare of the flashlight beam Ian was aiming right into his face. “Tell me I’m wrong.”

“No, no, that’s about the size of it,” the other Ian said, with such flippant, casual humour that Ian just wanted to wrap his hands around the guy’s neck and squeeze until he stopped choking. “But hey, smart guy, why don’t you riddle me this one.”

And then, between blinks, he was right there. Ian hadn’t even seen him begin to move. It was like he’d simply teleported across the scant few feet of space between them.

His sagging eye socket and madly-glittering single eye stared Ian down as he bent over Ian, their noses so close that they nearly brushed. This close, Ian should have been able to feel the ruffle of the other him’s breath against his own face, should have been able to smell whatever the other him had had for breakfast wafting out from behind that crooked, manic grin. But he couldn’t. He wasn’t even sure if the other him was actually breathing.

The other him’s grin split even wider, until Ian could count the back molars, as he said, in a voice that shook dust down from the cavern ceiling and made the mushrooms flicker into frightened dimness all around them, “WHAT OTHER CHOICE DO YOU HAVE.”

…

Lightning struck.

…

This time, when lightning stabbed down and traced a blinding zigzag to a poplar which exploded almost instantly into flames, there was no panicked screaming and running from the dryads. Instead, a deathly, eerie stillness fell over the clearing. Not a sound rose over the roar and crackle of the flames. Apart from the flickering dance of little fires in the trees and the long, waving grass, nothing moved.

Nothing moved, that was, except for each of the dryads turning, slowly, smoothly, as one, to stare directly at the antlered figure looming at the centre of the clearing.

It was wayyyy ominous. Mabel was grateful she wasn’t the one on the receiving end of that stare.

“Oh, these ladies are done being your cannon fodder!” she crowed, making direct eye contact with the antler-tree-guy. Gazing straight into twin blue flames without blinking wasn’t exactly easy, but nobody had ever accused Mabel Pines of backing down from a staring contest. “I would not want to be in your shoes right now, mister! If…you…were wearing any.” Okay, so that idiom didn’t work so well for forest spirits. Whatever.

Somehow, even though he had blue flames for eyes, the antler-tree-guy managed to give Mabel the exact same look she’d been getting from adults for her entire life.

“That’s the first reason I know you’re not Henry,” Mabel pushed on, staring him down. “Because my Henry would never make other people suffer for something that was his fault.”

A shudder went through the antler-tree-guy like a high wind shivering through branches, and Mabel smiled to herself. Oh, yeah. She had him exactly where she wanted him.

“You wanna know how else I know you’re not Henry?” she yelled, over the howl of the wind. And – another sound, one she’d hardly noticed through the wind’s fury but which was growing and growing, building on itself as it rose from all around the clearing. A whispering, a discontented murmuring, a rattling susurrus like a stiff autumn breeze through dry leaves.

The antlerman crouched forward and roared, turning in a wary circle to glower at the dryads. The rattling rustle dimmed, a little, but didn’t stop.

Mabel ripped the last vining frill of little white flowers away from her waist, and threw them down on the ground in front of her as hard as she could. And then, for good measure, when she was sure the antlerman was watching her, stomped on them.

The antlerman’s eyes flared. He started to let out a low, grumbling growl, somewhere deep in the back of his throat. At least, Mabel assumed it was his throat. He did look kind of made of wood. Trees didn’t have throats. She was pretty sure.

“My Henry,” she threw back in his face, “would never try to control me because he didn’t like my choices!”

The antlerman’s eyes flared, again. But this time, what Mabel thought was about to become a growl died back in his throat, into a confused-sounding grumble.

Mabel looked him in his burning eyes, and, for a moment, felt an almost overwhelming wish to just fall into her Henry’s arms and push her face into his chest and just…hold him, for a little while. Because the ways in which this wasn’t him were only growing and building up on each other the longer Mabel was stuck here.

His hands weren’t calloused, just twiglike and raspy with bark. There were no faded razor-thin scars on his upper arm, no little round burn marks on his legs and arms, only knots and gnarls in the dark, twisted wood. He didn’t smell like old books and sweat and Irish Spring, he smelled like earth and growing things and decay. Also, he wasn’t violently ginger. Just crowned with crooked branches in the shape of antlers.

And, most importantly…

“And my Henry,” Mabel said, holding the antlerman’s fiery gaze. The words came out softer than she’d meant them to, at first, and sadder. But it didn’t take long to stoke her own fire back up from its miserable embers. “Would never take away an innocent person’s life, just because he wanted his fiancée back!”

Mabel was no expert in the body language of Green Men, dryads, and assorted nature spirits. But she’d seen enough puppies – and enough Dippers - right after getting a scolding to be pretty sure that that expression, that posture, screamed ‘guilt’.

Her moment of triumph didn’t last, though. Mabel just had time to think that maybe she’d actually gotten through to whoever – whatever – the antlerman really was, whatever part of him was so desperate to believe that he was Henry Corduroy. She just had time to let herself start to feel relieved.

And then the guilty expression evaporated so fast that Mabel had to wonder if it teleported, and the antlerman howled.

That was all the warning Mabel got before lightning sizzled down between them, with a crash of thunder that tore the world in two.

People talk about ‘a blinding flash of the obvious’. For the first time, Mabel thought she understood what a blinding flash actually looked like. She blinked, hard, a whole bunch of times.

But her vision didn’t clear. The clearing around her was still a smeary, blurry black and white and grey. Like somebody’d painted a scene from an old movie, and then dragged their sleeve through it while it was still wet. The fires burning around her had all turned a brilliant blue, wavering in slow motion as they sent licks of thick grey smoke up into an ash-coloured sky. Before her, a massive bolt of lightning, so bright a white it hurt to look at, so bright a white it made the whole dirty sky glow, stood frozen in the moment of striking, sizzling and snapping and zigzagging in slow motion, one end disappearing into the clouds above and the other anchored firmly in the earth.

Mabel was pressing the heels of her hands hard against her closed eyes, partly to try to get the world to come back, partly just because she’d gotten distracted watching the colourful abstract patterns that kaleidoscoped across the inside of her eyelids when she did that, when she heard the voice behind her. A new voice. Not the antlerman. Not somebody she recognized, either. Except – in a weird, deja-vu-y kind of way, it felt like she should know it. Like maybe she should know who it belonged to. Like maybe she had known. Once upon a time.

“What’s going on? Where are we?”

Mabel turned around. And knew, as soon as she saw the other person standing in that smudgy grey landscape, exactly who the voice belonged to. And exactly why she sounded like Mabel ought to know her.

“Oh, hi!” she said, because even if they were in the middle of the Mindscape and also everything was on fire, it never hurt to be friendly. “You’ve gotta be Mira!”

Chapter Text

In the days and weeks and months to come, as the town of Gravity Falls picked itself up, shook itself off, and started taking stock of the damage, a number of theories would start to emerge about exactly what had happened. What had caused the wave of magical calamities that had all struck the town and the valley at once.

Unsurprisingly, the head librarian of the Stanley Pines Memorial Library of the Supernatural’s latest iteration was a suspect. The library literally exploding, what with Yaz Alzamirano’s documented predilection for experimental (and highly unstable) magitech, made it a pretty compelling argument.

The magic storm that had brewed up out of the mountains was a more popular target for blame. Gravity Falls saw such storms only rarely, but when it did, they were record-breakers. This one, people were already speculating, would rank higher for sheer thaumic output than the one that had destroyed Sandy Hook’s guardian lighthouse some century or so before.

But far and away the most popular – and most plausible – theory was that the construction on the hovervator tour centre, the digging at the base of the cliffs, had disturbed…something.

Something better left buried.

…

The person Archie and the motorcyclist – Wanda – had excavated from the wreckage of the library, thankfully, had their own transportation. Archie wasn’t entirely sure how to describe it any better than that. If a gyrocopter collided in midair with a magic carpet, and the resulting crash somehow knocked them both halfway through an antique dune buggy, the end result might have looked something like the librarian’s…conveyance.

They offered that Archie could ride with them, instead of on the back of Wanda’s motorcycle. Archie took a second look at the contraption and politely declined.

The librarian – ‘Yaz’ - and Wanda had a hurried conference while the three of them beat away zombies, quite literally, with a stick. At one point, Wanda asked Archie if he could sing harmony, but when Archie had to apologise that he couldn’t carry a tune in a bucket, she and Yaz seemed to change plans.

As they fled the library’s wreckage, buildings grew thicker and closer together around them. Soon, they were speeding down the streets of what Archie took to be Gravity Falls: a small city, with the touristy kind of downtown that you got in small cities up in the mountains. They were also speeding, it didn’t escape his notice, directly into the eye of what was now starting to look like an extremely small, extremely localized inland hurricane.

“Excuse me,” he said, tugging at Wanda’s sleeve. When she paid him no attention, Archie yanked, hard, on the back of her jacket. “Wanda! I understand we’re fleeing the undead, but it won’t do us much good if we drive directly into the storm of the century!”

“Oh, this?” Wanda asked, twisting her head and raising her visor to look back at Archie, shouting over the thunder and the throaty rumble of the motorcycle’s engine. And the bubbly, determined putt-putt of the contraption hovering alongside it. “This isn’t the storm of the century.”

Archie was about to tell her he still didn’t feel reassured, and would still prefer if they went in another direction instead, preferably immediately, when she grinned a wicked grin and said, “More like the storm of the millennium. Also, don’t pull on my jacket like that again if you like not crashing into buildings at high speed.”

“Have you totally taken leave of your senses? What are we doing driving straight for it, then?”

It wasn’t Wanda who answered, but Yaz, drawing up alongside the motorcycle in their machine. “We’re getting the band back together. Isn’t that right, Wanda?”

Archie couldn’t see Wanda’s face once she pulled down the shining visor of her helmet, but somehow, he was certain she was still grinning. “So glad you’re still on my wavelength. They’ve all got to be here, if this is happening. They would’ve been called. Just like our new friend here.”

“Me?” Archie looked back and forth between the two – very strange strangers he’d found himself saddled with, an icy unease trickling down his back. “I say, the only place I was called to was Portland. It was total coincidence that my maglev broke down here -”

“Exactly,” Wanda said, with a little too much triumph in it. “Riddle me this, Archie. When is a coincidence not a coincidence?”

“I can’t say I understand – or appreciate – your implication, madam.”

“How’re you planning to find the others, then?” Yaz asked. “I’ve been working on a tracker, it’s almost ready, we could test it on Arch here, it’s just -” Archie had heard the expression that someone’s face fell, but Yaz’ seemed about to droop all the way off their skull and down to their contraption’s floor. “Back…in…the basement of the library.”

Wanda didn’t respond to either of them. Only leaned farther forward over the handlebars of her motorcycle, coaxing it into a greater speed.

Archie thought, though it was difficult to tell under the roar of her engine, that he heard her mutter, “Coincidence.”

…

“WHAT OTHER CHOICE DO YOU HAVE.”

Ian bit his lip, and didn’t answer. He didn’t want to give the other him the satisfaction.

And he wasn’t sure he had an answer.

Not yet, anyway.

By the gloating smile that stretched across the other him’s narrow face, Ian thought he knew it too.

“You’re not just in my head, are you,” Ian started, slowly.

In answer, the other Ian reached out, with one slightly-overlong black-gloved finger extended, and booped Ian, hard, in the nose.

Ian took a step back, the tip of his nose tingling faintly. The other him let out a nasal, cackling laugh. Ian was sure he didn’t sound like that. Positive.

“You’re me? If I hadn’t taken out my eye, back in Area 51? If I’d given in to Cipher?”

“What you could have been,” the other Ian agreed, cheerfully. “And what you could still be!”

Ian nodded, slowly, thoughtfully.

“If you’re me,” he started, just as slowly, trying to give his frantically whirling mind time to come up with something good, “if you were there at Area 51, if you have all of Cipher’s knowledge and memories -”

“Oh, I do!” the other Ian chirped, canting his head to one side and oh-so-accidentally jerking uncomfortably close into Ian’s personal space as he did. “Jeaaaaaalous?”

Ian gritted his back teeth together, and didn’t dignify that with an answer. “Then you must know what happened, on my side of the looking glass. What I did.”

He stared that face right in its rictus grin. “And why I did it.”

“For your precious Shooting Star!” the other Ian agreed. His forced cheerfulness was really starting to get on Ian’s nerves. “Hey, tell me, just how many of the wishes you’ve made on her so far have come true?”

“Don’t talk about Mira.”

“Oooh, ‘don’t talk about Mira’.” The other Ian raised both hands, palms out, waggling his fingers beside his face with an exaggerated pout. “Somebody sounds a little defensive! What’s the matter, champ? Happily ever after not going quite as happily or for quite as ever after as you thought it should?”

His too-wide grin was also too knowing.

“Face it, pal,” the other Ian said, slinging an almost-companionable arm around Ian’s shoulders, squeezing just a little too tight. That faint tingliness was stronger when he did, like Ian’s arms were waking up after falling asleep. It wasn’t pleasant. “I’m the only game in town! And hey, it’s not like it’s so bad. After all, omniscience is a preeeetty tasty perk!”

“I’m not giving in to you,” Ian said, doggedly. “Mira’s worth it.”

The other him patted him condescendingly on the shoulder. “Methinks the lady – oh, you know the rest!”

He dropped Ian’s arms, though, jumping backwards like the proverbial scalded cat, when the rift gave a little belch and spat a short shower of starry sparks. But it wasn’t a full second before he was back, pressing the side of his face with the empty eye socket up close against Ian’s as he poured his poison into Ian’s ear. “Sure, maybe things are different here! Maybe your Shooting Star really does grant all your wishes! Maybe she’s everything you could ever want and you’d do anything for her, even live! But that’s not going to save you! Because guess what?”

His voice distorted again, drawn out into a sneering electronic whine as he hissed into Ian’s ear, “She’s not heeeeeeeeere.”

…

“You’ve gotta be Mira!” the familiar stranger said.

Mira wasn’t sure how to respond. She wasn’t sure what had just happened. One second she’d been challenging the antlered man in the clearing, and the next, she’d been here, in what looked like the inside of a ping-pong ball. She had the faintest, vaguest sense that time had passed in between those two points. But she also had the sense that, somehow, she hadn’t been there for it. Not like she’d been somewhere else while everything had been happening. More like she hadn’t been anywhere at all.

It was a little scary. But what was scarier was how scary it wasn’t.

Mira had no memory of it. Obviously. But from the way she felt, she got the sense that it had been…kind of nice, for the short time it had lasted.

That it was kind of nice to just be nothing.

Mira, of course, because she was an adult and knew how to interact with other people, didn’t tell any of that to the familiar stranger.

“Hey, your friends are really worried about you,” the familiar stranger said. “And I think somehow our bodies got mixed up, because I definitely wasn’t in mine, so you should probably get back in there and let them know you’re all right.”

“Yeah,” Mira mumbled to herself. “Probably should.”

The familiar stranger squinted at her, putting her hands on her hips and her head to one side. “Okay, that sounds like you put your frowny pants on this morning.”

Mira couldn’t stuff down a little snort of laughter. “Do you teach kindergarten? You sound like you might teach kindergarten.”

The familiar stranger beamed a huge smile at her. “Who needs to teach kindergarten when you’ve got a trio of toddlers of your own to chase?” A frown crossed her face as she said it, though, and she put a hand to the side of her head. “What…? No, I…Henry and I were just getting married, right?”

“Henry? Who’s Henry?”

The familiar stranger scowled. It didn’t look like an expression that belonged on her round, sunny face. “The man I married. The man I love. I thought he was the guy out there. But apparently he’s changed.”

Her eyes found Mira, her voice going weirdly soft for a second before she said, “Apparently a whole bunch of things have changed.”

“Who are you?” Mira asked. Her own voice came out quiet, too. For some reason, she didn’t want to break the hush.

The familiar stranger’s smile had an unexpected tinge of sadness to it.

“You are Mira, right?” she said, smacking a floppy sweater-sleeve against her own chest. “I’m Mabel!”

A horrible certainty swept over Mira, rooting her feet in place. “Mabel…Pines?”

“The one and only! I have a twin brother and a pig and I -” The other woman’s voice snagged, abruptly dropping in both pitch and volume as she added, “I think I’m your preincarnation.”

Mira’s breath was caught, frozen, in her chest. Mabel squinted at her, and for a moment, looked exactly like a twelve-year-old girl.

Like she could be the twin of a powerless, shrunk-down Alcor.

“Yes, I’m Mira,” Mira managed, finally, faintly. “And Mabel?”

Mabel opened her mouth, to say something, probably.

She didn’t get the chance.

Because Mira’s fist closed her mouth for her.

…

The wizard was not at all what Archie would have expected.

“I say,” he said, scrutinizing the tweed-wrapped beanpole of a man before him, “don’t you chaps ordinarily wear pointy hats?”

“Pointy hats!?” The wizard drew himself up like he was about to challenge Archie to a duel for his honour, but Wanda elbowed him and he deflated again, sullenly mumbling something. Archie thought he caught the words ‘outdated symbol of a regressive, repressive traditionalist hierarchical establishment’ and ‘hell on my hair’.

“I’m sure you’ve noticed the magical discharge affecting the area, Dr. Wexler,” Yaz interjected smoothly.

The wizard adjusted the lapels of his jacket and raised his chin with a sniff. “Naturally. Naturally, such a thing would never escape my notice -”

“Great. Because Wanda and I have a theory about why it’s so bad and how to stop it. We just need somebody who can find something very old, very well hidden, and very, very magic.”

“I am an accredited expert in dowsing out hidden sites and artifacts of ancient magic,” the wizard said frostily. “And my fee is -”

“Thanks for volunteering,” Wanda interrupted smoothly. “How much do you know about the native peoples of Gravity Falls?”

“Well, I – well, obviously it’s not my primary area of study, um, although of course I’m aware of the basic, uh, structure of -”

“What,” Archie interrupted, his attention momentarily diverted by what was taking place beyond the shattered windows of the organ-strewn diner, “is that?”

The other three looked at him. And then out the window.

There was a long moment of silence, broken only by the rattle of dishware with each booming, earthshaking footstep, as the lurching, hulking shape passed by outside. The shadow it cast over the diner momentarily plunged them all into darkness.

“Well,” Yaz said, once the eerie green stormlight had returned, the footfalls had started to fade, and the floor had stopped jumping under their feet with each one. “I guess we could always just follow – that.”

…

“She’s not heeeeeeeeere,” the other Ian crooned, all smugly self-congratulatory. He clamped his arm tighter around Ian’s shoulders, jostling him back and forth as he smeared his own cheek up against Ian’s with that rictus grin, and Ian hated him.

It bloomed up through the numbing dullness of despair gradually but with surprising speed, a hot atomic cloud of sudden, complete, absolute loathing. Ian hated this other him’s stupid smarmy grin. He hated the slightly staticky feeling of the other him’s touch, the way his cheek was starting to go numb where the other him had pressed his face against it. Hated the hint of nasal whine in the other him’s voice, mosquito-shrill, hated the crisp right angles of his piss-yellow bow tie, hated hate hated hated HATED the brilliant electric blue of his one, grinning eye.

At that moment, Ian would cheerfully have agreed to spend the rest of his life trapped in this dank, miserable cavern if it only meant he could force the fucker to suffer along with him.

And the one person Ian had always known best how to hurt was himself.

“Is that what happened to you?” he asked, delicately peeling back the fingers of the hand clenched on his shoulder. “Mira didn’t make it to you in time, so you just caved? Just like that?”

The other Ian’s smile didn’t so much as falter. But his one remaining eye did narrow, until it was a winking sliver of cerulean.

“ ‘Just like that’,” he repeated, mockingly. “Oh, yes. I’m sure you remember how easy it is to just say no to demons!”

For the first time since he’d appeared, the other Ian’s death’s-head grin faltered. Just a little. Just enough to almost make Ian feel bad about how much he hated the guy.

But only almost.

“You’re a hack.”

The other Ian’s grin immediately fixed itself back into place, glittering and sharp-edged. His voice went silky-soft and dangerous, though it didn’t lose that nasal whine. “What did you just say?”

“You heard me. You. Are. A. Hack.”

“Oh, that’s rich, coming from the great creative mastermind who -” The other Ian’s single eye narrowed again, the blue of it flaring bright, and his grin got suddenly sinister. “Still hasn’t written his wedding vows? Tsk, tsk. And here I thought you were supposed to love her!”

“Seriously, do you have a single original thought in your abnormally pointy head?” Ian took a step back, sweeping a critical eye – and the beam of light it emitted – over the other him. “Your dialogue’s so hackneyed I’d be ashamed to put it in my cartoon show for children. Every word out of your mouth so far is like something from one of those bad Bael-slash-Sam Cyrus angst fics that I legally have not been forced to listen to Mira dramatically read out loud when she’s mad at me! Speaking of which, whose idea was ‘Bam’? That’s one of the many, many occasions where mushing their names together is not the way to go. ‘Sael’ isn’t better.”

“What,” the other Ian started to say, but Ian was on a roll now.

“The bow tie? The suspenders? The top hat? If you were any bigger of a cliché, you’d have a yellow triangle eyepatch. And that’s not even getting into the plot! Seriously, what’s the endgame here? Get me to succumb to the darkest, weirdest exhortations of my soul, question mark question mark question mark, profit? Are you just trying to get me to join you because misery loves company?” Ian paused for effect. It was only a little bit also for breath. “Or is it because that’s what Cipher would do?”

“You -” the other Ian started, thunderously, but he didn’t get a chance to even start the sentence.

“No, you had your turn and you failed. I’m talking now. Is there anything to you that’s not just a pale shadow of the real Cipher? Face it. You’re a ripoff. A cheap imitation! A soulless cash-grab nostalgia-bait remake!”

Ian stepped forward, shoving his face up into the other him’s, glaring down the red darkness of that empty eye socket. “You, sir, are a hack.”

The other Ian’s face, in the glare of Ian’s artificial eye, had gone a darker red than his hair. The muscles in his scrawny neck – what was visible of them above the offending bow tie, anyway – were standing out in cords against his skin, and he started to open his mouth like he was going to yell –

The rift gave a wobble, and the other Ian reflexively jerked away from it, like a cat flicked with water.

The momentary break in his concentration seemed to give the other Ian a chance to recover his composure, though. He gave his head a little shake, minutely adjusting his bow tie with both hands. The colour in his face was slowly starting to retreat, the nasty, too-wide smile beginning to creep back across it, as he said, “Maybe! But hey! I’m not the one trapped in a forgotten secret dungeon with no way out! No way out, of course, except for me!”

“Of course except for you. Hey, tell me,” Ian asked, brain whirling frantically. Something had just happened, something important, something he didn’t totally understand. But he had an inkling of an idea. It wasn’t enough yet to even accurately call a hope. But it was more than the nothing he’d had before. He just had to keep this guy talking. “Was there ever any way to stop you? Or was this just inevitable all along? Was I doomed from the very start?”

The other Ian waved a dismissive hand. “What, you mean like the -”

Ian’s breath snagged in his throat, but the other him didn’t finish the thought. His eyes – well, eye – narrowed again, but this time it looked more amused than anything. “Nice try, kiddo! But that wouldn’t help you now! Even if the symbols weren’t scattered to who knows where – well, me! I know where! But hey, you get the picture!”

He leaned in closer, moving too fast, making Ian jump when his voice was suddenly right there in Ian’s ear. “If telling yourself it was always going to end this way helps, then hey, go ahead! It’s not like you’re wrong!”

Even knowing that he’d just been trying to get the other him talking, Ian was pretty sure he’d turned as red as the other him had been a moment before.

But the more he fumed, the more he thought about it, and the more the anger trickled away. Sure, maybe this two-bit conniving knockoff of an extradimensional weasel really did know some ancient secret, some demonic wisdom, some piece of millennia-old memory fragment, that could save Ian from his own fate. And maybe he really was deliberately withholding it, because he was an asshole. But equally as likely, he didn’t. It was not just possible but plausible that he’d made up some big secret that he'd nearly let slip, just to jerk Ian’s puppet strings. After all, he’d already shown that he just liked to watch Ian squirm.

It really did suck. Not knowing.

The other him, of course, apparently oblivious to Ian’s inner turmoil except to gloat over it, had gone right on monologuing like nothing had ever happened. “We’ve already had every argument you can possibly imagine! Literally! So you already know -”

His teeth flashed bright in the flashlight beam, like blinking neon, as the smile curved impossibly wide across his face. Again. Because he had, like, two facial expressions. Because he was a hack. “I always win.”

The problem was that he was right.

Nothing the other Ian was saying was anything Ian hadn’t thought himself, in the long dark quiet hours between midnight and sunrise, in the middle of yet another endless, pointless S&P meeting, even in Mira’s arms. He had no choice. No choice at all. He never had. What choice could he have, when the problem just – was him? And could never be changed? What good was fighting, in the face of that? All he was doing was prolonging the inevitable. So why not give in now, if it was where he was always going to end up anyway?

But. Hard on the heels of that question, as it always did, came the other. Sometimes, of course, it was a struggle to remember, to force it to the forefront. But it was always there, as inescapable a truth as all the others.

Why not give in now? Then why not have given in then?

“I don’t think so,” Ian said, as nonchalantly as a guy trapped in a hidden secret underground basement that had been abandoned for over a thousand years, by a godlike nature spirit that wanted to steal his girl – what was with that, anyway? Why did antagonists always want to date Mira? Not like the answer wasn’t in the question, of course, Mira, but still, it was enough to give a guy a complex – and currently being menaced by his own alternate-timeline evil – okay, eviler – self, could manage. “I’m still here, aren’t I?”

The other Ian blinked, once, at that.

“It’s not me who needs this to have always been inevitable,” Ian continued, feeling faintly light-headed. Feeling the first traces of a grin of his own starting to tug at the corners of his mouth.

The other Ian actually scoffed - Ian hadn’t known people did that outside of recording booths – lightly and airily, and squinted at Ian, the lid of his eyeless eye flopping disconcertingly. But Ian was paying attention, now. Thought he caught a flicker of worry in that expression.

And this other him had been awfully jumpy every time the rift had moved…

“Why do you want me following in your footsteps so bad?” Ian pressed, advancing on the other him in a wide semicircle, stepping out from between the other him and the rift. That squint the other him was wearing turned into a scowl – oh look, he had three whole expressions! – as the other him scuttled backwards like an oversized spider, slightly-too-long limbs akimbo. “It’s not just because you can’t think of anything better to do, is it.”

“Sheesh!” the other him cackled, a little too high, a little too quickly. He was still shifting, turning to keep facing Ian but also shuffling himself farther back from the rift than Ian was. “You try to do a guy a favour -”

“See, that’s the thing. You don’t do ‘favours’. You,” Ian said, feeling a strange exhilaration pouring through him, making him nearly giddy, “make deals. I can’t believe I didn’t think of it before. So what are you getting out of this?”

From the way the other Ian scowled, Ian knew he’d just asked the question the other him had been hoping he wouldn’t ask.

“Iiiiiiinteresting. Let me guess, it’s got something to do with that rift over there?” Ian jabbed a thumb in its direction, and the other him made a valiant effort at regaining his composure.

“Oh, wow. You really don’t know anything anymore! I keep forgetting just how little cosmic knowledge can fit inside that -”

“Just skip the villain monologue,” Ian sighed.

The other him aimed a death glare that probably couldn’t actually kill, but he did, at least, skip the villain monologue. “That tacky lava lamp bubble there is the single most powerful thing in any dimension. Because it’s the single greatest possibility in any dimension!”

Ian nodded, slowly, the vague, sketchy outline of an idea starting to fill in with details in the back of his mind. “Because it’s a doorway to everything that’s possible in every dimension. Right?”

“Got it in one, smart guy!” The other him aimed and fired black-gloved finger guns at Ian. Ian wondered if it was that annoying when he did it. “And whoever controls that wobbly little bundle of nightmares -”

“Controls everything.” Ian looked down at his chest. The fingergunshots had not, somehow, left twin harmless, perfectly-clean holes in his chest. He had a vague idea that if it had been Alcor standing in front of him, making that gesture, they would have.

He looked up, into the sagging eyelid and empty socket of the other Ian’s missing eye.

“It didn’t work,” Ian said, slowly, the knowledge dawning over him even as he did. “For either of you. Right? That’s the difference between you and me. It was memories they were trying to bring back. Soul-memories, but still, just memories. Putting out your eye didn’t stop Cipher, he still ate everything interesting or unique or you about you, but the protection from the eye also kept him from making it all the way back. You’ve got all this incredible cosmic knowledge, but only itty-bitty human noodle arms to do anything with it. That’s why you’re here. That’s why you want the rift. You can’t do anything but lie and manipulate and hope other people react the way you expect them to!”

“Oh, come on! Don’t insult both of our intelligence. People always react the way you expect them to! People are predictable! People are nothing but puppets of their own biological needs and unexamined emotional issues!” The other Ian smiled a smile that seemed to stretch just slightly too wide for the limitations of his face. It was starting to get old. “And we both know we never bother with a lie when the truth’ll get us exactly what we want!”

Ian chose to ignore that last part. “You can’t touch that rift yourself, can you? You can’t even get close. That’s why you need me. Is it because the rift and I originate in the same dimension?”

The brightness of that too-wide grin was bleeding dangerously out into the dark, now, causing strange heat-haze distortions in the air around it. Somehow, without actually changing size or height at all, the other Ian seemed, suddenly, to loom.

His voice came out deep and distorted, booming loud enough that the rock shards by Ian’s feet jittered and clattered against the floor. “WOULDN’T YOU LIKE TO KNOW.”

“What’d you do to Mira?” Ian pressed, with what might possibly be interpreted as suicidal bravado. Maybe. If it turned out that the theory that was unspooling spiderwebby red threads between the corkboard pins in his mind was wrong. “Or – wait, no. What’d Mira do to you? You sure sounded unnecessarily smug about her not being here earlier. And the eye thing obviously didn’t work, not the way it was supposed to, so you must not have dealt with Alcor to eat your memories, but you don’t have any powers, so you didn’t strip them out of him, so that means -”

The other Ian said nothing. Only loomed.

Two more loops of red yarn wound their way around pushpins.

Ian couldn’t help a broad grin of his own, whistling softly under his breath. “So what was that about unexamined emotional issues, again?”

“She isn’t here to save you, either,” the other Ian said, in a voice like poison if poison was a thousand mosquitos all whining directly in Ian’s ear.

“She isn’t here to put my eye out for the greater good, either,” Ian said, with a shrug. “This? Right here? Isn’t about Mira and me. Or even about you and Mira! This is about me and you. And the fact that you haven’t figured that out yet is why you’ve already lost.”

The looming, somehow, got more so. The distortion voice was back. “YOU REALLY SHOULD’VE LEARNED BY NOW! YOU CAN’T BEAT ME!”

“I know,” Ian said. “But I don’t have to.”

Any uncertainty he’d had about the conclusion he’d come to, about whether he’d timed this correctly, evaporated as the rift gave a violent wobble in midair.

And then pulsed, once.

Well, okay, it was real, but it wasn’t really here.

As it turned out, the other Ian had a grand total of four whole facial expressions. And the fourth one was ‘afraid’.

The faint feeling of static as he grabbed the collar of Ian’s shirt in both fists was stronger than before, buzzing like the back-teeth-raising sense of standing too close to a ward. His teeth bared in something that could no longer be called a smile, his single blue eye wide with barely-restrained panic.

Ian smiled into it.

“I just have to wait you out.”

Darkness swept over the underground cavern, as swift and as silent as death. The grip on Ian’s collar turned into a desperate pull, all but strangling him, yanking him stumbling to his knees. The whole world was filled with static, a buzzing, whining, constantly-rising note, jittering under his skin with the energy of mania and making him want to throw his head back and laugh and laugh and laugh.

The voice echoed hollowly through all of it, coming from everywhere and nowhere all at once, sonorous in that artificial, distorted way. “YOU HAVEN’T WON! I’LL BE BACK! I’LL BE -”

And then it all stopped.

The silence rang, in the sudden absence of static. The dim greenish glow of the mushrooms rose slowly, gently, out of the dark.

“I know,” Ian said, to nothing and no one. Maybe to himself. His knees were stinging where they’d hit the rocky floor, and he was still trapped in a secret underground basement that had been forgotten for more than a millennium by an elder god that wanted him dead with no way out, and he couldn’t wipe the exhausted smile off his face. “I’ll be here.”

“Ian?”

Ian let his eyes sink shut for just a moment, before he turned to face whatever fresh hell this was.

But it was just Alcor, tiny, shrunk-down Alcor, in his silly puffy little vest, looking worried and slightly alarmed. The sight of him was suddenly so unbearably funny that Ian couldn’t help the little cackle that snuck out.

That did not make Alcor look any less alarmed.

“It’s okay,” Ian sighed, even though, in a lot of very material, significant ways, it was very much not okay. “I’m not going to do the stupid thing. We’ll figure something else out.”

All that reassurance got him in return was a suspicious squint. “And you’re definitely not Bill?”

This time, Ian managed to bite off the cackle before it could do any damage. “No more than usual!”

Alcor still didn’t look particularly reassured.

But he at least abandoned that line of questioning. “Where did you -”

He didn’t get to finish the sentence before, with a rumbling and roaring that seemed to fill the whole world, the roof of the cavern cracked in two.

Chapter Text

With a rumbling and roaring that seemed to fill the whole world, the roof of the cavern cracked in two.

Dipper’s head snapped up, hands balling into fists at his sides as he turned to face the threat, ready to –

And then deflated.

Ready to what?

The Woodsman still had all of his power. All Dipper had were these stupid shorts and his own two noodle arms. He didn’t even have a Journal, now, to tell him what to do.

He had exactly what he thought he’d always wanted, what he’d tried to recapture, time after time after time. He was just Dipper Pines again, twelve going on thirteen, and as normal as he was ever going to get.

And helpless.

But. But Mira was up there, somewhere. Maybe not his twin, but his twin star. And she was in trouble, the kind of trouble she couldn’t get herself out of this time.

Dipper had let her down enough times already. He wasn’t going to let this be another one.

At first, the glare from overhead blinded him, after so long trapped in the darkness of the cave. He flung up an arm to shield his eyes against the greenish-blue blasts of lightning, the dull red glow of flames.

But the light didn’t last long before a huge, hulking shape loomed into the crevice above them, blotting out the light. It was hard to tell, from below, but Dipper thought he caught a glimpse of a peak, the jutting point of a triangle –

And then darkness, with a series of creaks and groans, settled over them again.

“Great,” Dipper said, not trying very hard at all to resist the urge to be sarcastic. “Just fantastic. Well, that really helps us out! Just what we needed! Gee, thanks, Bill! What is this, one last screw you from beyond the grave?” Oh, great, his stupid twelve-going-on-thirteen-year-old voice was cracking. Dipper’d forgotten how much he hadn’t missed it doing that.

“I…don’t think that’s him.”

Dipper started, jumping nearly an inch off the floor. He definitely hadn’t forgotten Ian was there, he’d just…mostly forgotten Ian was there.

“I don’t know what it is,” Ian added, admitted. “I just don’t think it’s Bill Cipher.”

As if to prove his point, the mushroom glow flared suddenly bright and then went dark as two long, thick pillars abruptly unfolded from above to slam against the rocky floor of the secret basement. One narrowly missed hitting Dipper, who tried to jump out of the way and ended up flat on his butt on an unfortunately pointy piece of broken concrete. Of course the air hadn’t held him up. He didn’t have wings. And he was stuck in this single, stodgy, physical form.

“What…?” Ian mumbled, from somewhere in the dark in front of him.

As the mushroom glow came slowly back up, Dipper found he had to agree. What he’d taken for pillars were ridged in horizontal stripes all the way up their length, and crooked into a crouching sideways V about halfway down. And they both ended in –

“Chicken feet?” Ian asked, a hand on one black, shiny spur.

Despite himself, Dipper felt a grin strain the corners of his mouth wide open.

“It’s our way out,” he said, jumping up onto one of the feet and hugging the leg it was attached to, feeling out how deep the ridges were, how difficult it was to get a hand- or foot-hold. If only he’d been better at climbing ropes in gym class!

Into Ian’s disbelieving stare, Dipper said, “Don’t worry, it’s friendly! I think,” he added in an undertone, just in case.

“What’s friendly?”

“Mira needs us! Are you coming?”

The climb was both longer and harder than Dipper had anticipated, especially with his noodle arms and legs. He didn’t want to admit to how many times he slid right back down all the way to the bottom. Didn’t even want to think about how much time he was wasting doing something he should have been able to accomplish with a simple snap of his fingers. But finally, finally, he reached the top of the chicken leg.

And the opening in the floorboards where an elevator to the secret basement had once descended.

“I feel like I’ve seen this place before,” Ian said, in a hush, as Dipper struggled to haul himself up out of the hole in the floor. Of course Ian had made it up the chicken leg on the first try with no issues, with his long, adult limbs and his stupid ‘muscles’.

“Only in your nightmares,” Dipper said. “Can I get a hand here?”

Lit only by the reddish glow of the fire filtering through the grime-coated, overgrown windows and the brilliant strobe of lightning, the building they found themselves in looked like something out of a horror movie. The layout, thankfully, hadn’t changed, although Dipper and Ian had to beat their way through a thicket of blackberry brambles and fend off a centipede the size of a footstool as they made their way toward the front door. Walls slanted, doorways gaped. The ceiling dripped with cobwebs, the corners burst with leaves and vines, and things, half-unseen, skittered along the baseboards. A sapling had thrust its roots down through the living room floor and its crown up through the ceiling above. What had once been a house had thoroughly embraced and been embraced by the wilderness.

Still, Dipper knew his way through it like the back of his hand.

And it wasn’t long before he was stepping out the front door and hurrying down the collapsing porch steps of what had once been called the Mystery Shack.

The clearing outside was in chaos.

Trees ringed around its outer edge were blazing merrily, and the only reason Dipper could see for why the fire hadn’t spread further were the frantic efforts of the redheaded dryads beating back the flames. And even they had started to turn away, led by what appeared to be Rosa Darling doing her best Valkyrie impression, to concentrate their energy – and their wrath – on the crackling golden dome that dominated the centre of the clearing where Henry’s apple tree had stood. Still stood, Dipper saw, when a fork of blue lightning stabbed down toward the earth and cut a jagged crack across the dome, and he managed to catch a glimpse of what lay inside.

The Woodsman was backed up against his apple tree like he was trying to fuse with it, just like he had been when Dipper and company had first come out into the clearing. And, like he was the monster in one of those old black-and-white horror movies that Stan had always made them watch on Summerween, the Woodsman’s branchlike arms cradled the supine figure of a woman, long hair flowing, draped in white.

“Mira!” Dipper shouted.

The roar of flames and thunder and the angry woods swallowed his voice.

Behind him, just as drowned out by the riot, Ian yelled, “Sun-mi!” Dipper was about to spin and grill him on his priorities when he caught sight of the woman in question, pushing her way between two dryads as she hurried toward them. She’d almost blended in with them at first, in the gown of green leaves she was wearing. Dipper was sure she hadn’t had that on when they’d gotten here. “What happened? What’s going on? Where’s Mira?”

Sun-mi didn’t answer right away, taking her bottom lip between two teeth and looking back over her shoulder toward the golden dome. “That’s…a complicated question.”

“What do you mean? Where is she?”

“The Woodsman has her. In the dome. I just saw her.” Dipper looked back and forth between Ian and Sun-mi, and asked, “…right?”

“I didn’t see how it happened,” Sun-mi apologised. “I was…a little out of it. But Mira -” Her words caught in her throat, and Dipper’s heart leapt into his. “Mira’s not herself.”

“Not herself?” Ian shot a wary, worried look over at Dipper. Dipper barely heard him. A terrible premonition was creeping up on him, and it had nothing to do with near-omniscience. “Who else does she have to be?”

Sun-mi answered. Dipper wasn’t surprised. He’d already known what she was going to say.

He didn’t know whether to laugh, or scream, or cry, as Sun-mi said, “Rosa said she called herself…Mabel Pines?”

…

“What was that for?” Mabel squawked, pressing a hand against her lip where Mira’s knuckles had collided with it. Mira thought, with the faintest twinge of guilt, that she could already see it starting to swell.

“You have to ask?” she snapped, gesturing with one arm toward the grey, streaming shadow of the apple tree. The vague, dirty off-white featurelessness that she’d first found herself in had been filling with shades of grey, like ink dropped through water, ever since she’d become aware of her surroundings again. Now, there was enough to make out the shape of the clearing she’d been standing in when the antlerman had done…whatever he’d done.

There was no sign of him, though. There was just the smudgy grey outline of the apple tree, and a brilliant white bolt of lightning, strobing erratically brighter or dimmer, pinned in place in the moment of striking.

Mabel turned around, to look at the apple tree and the lightning bolt, and a queasy expression twisted her open, cheerful face. “Oh. Ah hah.”

“Really? That’s all you have to say for yourself?”

Mabel squinched up her eyes in an apologetic smile. “Look, even when he’s all Woodsman-y, Henry’s not usually like this -”

“Yeah, you still haven’t told me - who the fuck is Henry?”

“Hey!” Mabel crossed her arms over the sparkly star on her sweater. “There’s no need for that kind of language, Ms. Grumpy-pants!”

Mira’s first impression had been right on the money. Kindergarten teacher. Definitely kindergarten teacher. “When your precious ‘Henry’ is trying to kill my fiancé and my best friend, I think that’s exactly the time there’s a need for that kind of language!”

“He what?” Mabel’s eyes narrowed suspiciously, and she leaned forward, jabbing a pointed finger at Mira. “Hang on. You’re not in a cult, are you, sister?”

Mira couldn’t help the disbelieving laugh that burst between her lips.

“You know what?” she said, to no one in particular.

And then punched Mabel again.

Or, at least, she tried to. But Mabel moved like a striking snake, ducking out of the way of the blow and diving into a neat somersault that left her springing up behind Mira. It took Mira a moment of staggering déjà vu to realise that was one of her own moves, and by then, Mabel had already grabbed her right arm and was trying to pull it up behind Mira’s back.

Mira let herself move with the motion, turning herself into a spin before Mabel had a chance to crank her arm at an angle that would pin her in place. She turned the spin into a spinning kick partway through, one foot flying toward Mabel’s knee – but Mabel followed Mira’s motion, too, stepping forward into the spin and giving Mira a hard shove in the shoulders with both hands.

With only one leg under her and momentum against her, Mira didn’t have a good chance to catch herself. She was falling backwards before she even really knew what had happened, and all she could do was try to brace herself so she wouldn’t hurt anything too badly as she collapsed into –

Something soft.

Mira tried to struggle her way upright, but the soft thing fought her, sucking her down. Panic more than anything made her breath hard to catch, and it wasn’t until she was sitting upright with her shoulders clear of – whatever that was – that she was able to take a deep breath and a clear look around.

The greyscale clearing was gone.

In its place, a candy-coloured fever dream spread out as far as Mira’s eye could see. Soft, blobby shapes in bright day-glo pastels left afterimages printed on Mira’s retinas as they drifted into one another, almost taking familiar forms for a moment before gradually abandoning coherency again. Like looking for shapes in clouds. Except that the clouds were multicoloured, glittery, and iridescent. And made up the sky, the land, and what Mira thought passed for water. Without a single recognizable landmark, and with the blobby shapes occasionally coming maddeningly close to familiarity but without any apparent regard for scale, she couldn’t accurately judge size or distance. Mira could have been an ant in a vast endlessness, or a giant stuffed inside a snowglobe.

It was gorgeous. It was fascinating. It made her head hurt.

And right through the middle of it, still stabbing downward from sky to earth, a pure white bolt of frozen lightning still snapped and sizzled.

“Okay,” Mabel huffed, sweeping a lock of brown hair out of her face and back behind the pink hairband she wore. “Now. You can just stay there until you answer my question. Are you in a cult?”

Mira laughed, again. But when she tried to push herself back up to her feet, her hands sunk to the wrists in the…surface…below her. It was – nothing like anything she’d ever felt before. Like if somehow quicksand was made of Play-doh. But sitting on it was like sitting on a waterbed, constantly shifting uneasily under her weight.

There was no way she was getting back up without Mabel’s help.

The thought hit Mira like a bucket of icewater to the face.

“Not unless you call being Alcor’s emotional support human ‘being in a cult’,” she said, an exhausted resignation starting to seep in around the cracks of the rage, trying to pry it apart. “In which case, guilty.”

She wasn’t prepared for the unexpected twinge of sympathy that raced through her when Mabel pressed the flat of one palm against her forehead and groaned.

“Ohhh, Dippin’ Dots. What’d you do this time.” She lowered her hand to flash Mira a sheepish smile. “I keep trying to tell him not to make one person the foundation of his entire mental health. But does he listen?”

“Oh,” Mira said, short, trying to twist sharply out of the substance surrounding her and only succeeding in flopping herself over onto her front. “Oh, you tried telling him not to. I guess that makes everything okay, then? Not your fault! That’s all that matters!”

She couldn’t really see the look on Mabel’s face, struggling as she was just to keep her own face from dipping into a shifting miasma of purple-green glittering cotton-candy-puff…stuff. Mira had the strong feeling that it would suffocate her, given half the chance. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

“I’m saying, your brother and your ‘Henry’ are out there right now duking it out over – over – over I don’t even know! You, I think! Some half-baked, dead-wife-montage, idealized memory of you! And between the two of them, my friends are trapped, in the middle of a forest fire, in a clearing that wild magic seems to be trying to wipe off the map, and my fiancé is -”

Mira couldn’t bring herself to say it. The shout was on the tip of her tongue, but her voice cracked and it fell back down her throat before she could force it out.

“I didn’t -” Mabel started, but Mira was trying to haul each forearm up out of the stuff, trying to keep her face clear, and only succeeding in sinking in farther each time, and – and she’d been patient for a long time. A long time.

Maybe too long.

“You know what? I don’t really care what you did or didn’t do! You get back out there, and you get your ‘Henry’ in line. Right. Now.”

“Mira,” Mabel said, and oh Mira was not having any of that. “I - I don’t think you get it. I was in your body -”

“Who cares!? That’s what he wants! He is not listening to me! He just wants you back. Not unlike certain other people I could name! And speaking of Alcor, I have been babysitting your stupid brother since before I was old enough to see clear shapes and colours, and I’m sick of it! Okay! I am sick and fucking tired of being the one who has to fix everything for everybody! Especially when it can’t ever, ever be fixed! And nobody even wants you to fix it, and they all just get mad at you for trying!”

“Whoa-ho.” There was a nervous edge to Mabel’s chuckle, drawing closer, a tentative brush of fingers against Mira’s shoulder. “Sounds like you and Dipper need to hug it out -”

“I have hugged it out!”

The tentative fingers against Mira’s shoulder disappeared for a hesitant moment, and then a hard grip took their place. Mira didn’t manage to swallow an undignified yelp when Mabel hauled her up out of the glittery muck and set her back on her feet.

“Look,” Mabel said, and there was something softly sympathetic in those big brown eyes that made Mira just want to punch her all over again. She didn’t, because somehow she knew, if Mabel dodged and Mira lost her balance, if Mira went over facefirst in the soft suffocating stuff of this place, Mabel wasn’t going to haul her up again. “I get it, okay? Dipper and I -”

Mabel stopped, biting at her bottom lip. She hadn’t taken her hand from Mira’s shoulder. “Everything’s weird. The demon thing made everything weird. The selling-my-soul thing made it worse. But – we worked through it. Dipper’s not a bad guy! And Henry’s not -”

“Were you listening to a single word I just said!” It felt, Mira realised, weirdly like trying to shout in a dream, when you were on the cusp of waking up. Trying to shout, and realizing that it wasn’t coming out as a shout. That maybe it wasn’t coming out at all. “That was you. They tried for you. They loved you. Okay? I don’t care what you think Henry’s not. Right now, in my life, Henry is a giant angry magical forest spirit that is killing all the people I love most in the world except my extremely frustrating family! Because! He! Wants! Me! To! Be! You!”

Mabel shut her eyes, her hands balling into fists, and for a second she was clearly and obviously a child. Ten or eleven or twelve, definitely no older. For the first time, Mira realised just how unclear she’d been until then, somehow a woman and a girl and a child all at the same time without it really registering.

More of an idea than a person.

“Okay,” Mabel said, after a moment, carefully unballing her fists. “You’re mad -”

“No shit!”

“I knew they were gonna get like this, I didn’t want them to either -”

“Then why didn’t you stop them!”

“Because I was dead! Okay? You try making anybody do anything when you’re dead!”

“You – ruin – everything!” Mira screamed, and the fluffy soft colourful pastel stuff all around her muffled the sound like it muffled everything. “You ruined my life! You keep on ruining my life!”

“At least you still have one!”

The words came tearing out of Mabel with a raw, ragged edge, and the pastel fluff – ripped. Like the waterbed had split under Mira’s feet, the tension that had been holding her up suddenly gave way in a gush of – it looked like blood, gleaming obscenely in the light of the frozen lightning bolt, and smelled like it, too. Arterial red swirled up and up, melting the blobby shapes on contact like cotton candy in the rain, filling the indeterminate space with the stench of an abattoir. Mira sank in up to her knees in one swift, disorienting drop, and then slowed, though she could still feel herself continuing to sink.

In front of her, Mabel yelped as the ground gave way beneath her, too. Mira threw out a hand on instinct, and caught her just before she fell over backward into the blood. The motion nearly dragged Mira forward off her feet, and only the fact that her legs were now buried in whatever lay under the rising crimson lake saved them both.

“I should’ve let you go,” she growled, under her breath, as Mabel regained her balance. “I should let you drown. You screwed me over before I was even born, do you even know that? Did you even think about that when you sold your stupid soul? Did you ever think about anybody other than yourself?”

Mabel went dangerously still. The rising bloody tide gently lifted the edges of Mira’s skirt, to float like a jellyfish on its surface. Overhead, the pastels were fading through pinks and oranges into a dull, glowering red.

“You know,” Mabel said, a little too conversationally, a little too casually, “you’re starting to sound a lot like a unicorn I used to know.”

“Maybe,” Mira said, even though the words meant nothing to her, “that unicorn had a point.”

“Yeah, at the end of her horn.” Mabel flashed a brief grin at her own scintillating wit, but it didn’t look like the kind of grin that Mira was coming to expect from her, sheepish or radiantly joyful. There was something sharp in it, something mean, and somehow Mira wasn’t surprised when Mabel’s hands raised and a spout of blood leapt from the rising lake around them, coiling through the air into a shape in her hands.

A familiar sort of shape, Mira realised.

A baseball bat with nails in it.

“She was wrong, too,” Mabel said, still conversational. While smacking the end of what looked like a glass baseball bat filled with sloshing blood against the palm of one hand.

The thrill that raced through Mira was vicious and nasty and as mean as Mabel’s smile. She raised a hand, and with a thought, there was a handle taking shape against her palm, briefly the nauseating softness of a massive clot before it firmed up to the smooth heavy hardness of marble.

Mira wrapped her fingers tight around it, and looked up to see the star-points of a medieval mace extending from the handle in her grip.

“Cool,” she said.

And then lunged at Mabel.

…

“Sorry,” the woman in the hard hat and hi-vis vest said, from atop the pile of fish she was standing on. Her deadpan stare didn’t change one bit as a herring whipped from the sky and bounced off of her hard hat. “Site’s closed. Adverse weather conditions. Try again tomorrow.”

“Tomorrow’ll be too late,” Wanda said, firmly, over the howl of the wind. “And the weather conditions are just going to get more adverse if you don’t let us through.” She glanced to her right, toward the wizard, who nodded once. He had both arms extended, a fine tracery of dancing, glowing red lettering and symbols etched in the air between his splayed palms. Archie had seen a chap do something like it once in the plaza in Venice for tips from tourists. He had a sneaking suspicion that whatever ‘dowsing’ the wizard was doing, this part was primarily for show.

“It’s in here. All the signs are pointing to the same place -”

“Wait, aren’t you the other wizard who came by earlier? For the site assessment of the cave we found? Not the one who did the assessment, the other one.”

Archie didn’t miss the look Yaz and Wanda exchanged at the word ‘cave’. He hoped that didn’t mean what he thought it meant. He did get so terribly claustrophobic.

The wizard abandoned his scowl of intense concentration to flash a cocky little smile at the gangly kid who’d come rushing out from the site office trailer, a metal lunchbox held above his head against any sudden showers of halibut. “I am indeed. Dr. Norbert Wexler, Ma.D, and my colleagues and I need entrance to your worksite. Immediately.”

“Marybeth, this is perfect!” the kid enthused, but the woman in the hi-vis vest didn’t so much as uncross her arms, her flat stare fixed on the wizard with every sign that she was totally unimpressed.

“I’m not payin’ for two site assessments, kid. We’ll find that other wizard after this clears up -”

“Free of charge,” Archie interrupted. He’d just spotted a shape in the whipping rain that he was fairly certain was a falling octopus.

The wizard turned to shoot Archie a betrayed look.

The woman in the high-vis vest looked their little group over with a baleful eye. “Free of charge?”

The wizard looked like he’d swallowed a lemon. Wanda nodded. Yaz nodded with considerably more enthusiasm.

The woman in the high-vis vest shrugged, and then unlocked the chain holding the temporary fencing closed, grunting a little as she tugged it open against the buildup of fish. “Hard hats all round. I don’t want anybody running crying to OSHA because a tuna fell on their head.”

…

The weapons made from the lake of blood didn’t sound like metal against metal when they clashed against each other. They didn’t really sound like ringing glass or grinding rock, either. Actually, what they sounded like the most was screaming.

It was really disconcerting the first few times one of them blocked the other’s blow, but Mira had gotten used to it, now.

She let out a wordless yell of her own as she swung the mace out from under Mabel’s bat, breaking the deadlock but opening herself up to Mabel’s next blow. Mira tried to step quickly backwards out of reach, but she was still knee-deep in – something a little too viscous to call mud and a little too solid to call quicksand. She took one stodgy shuffling step, wobbled, but managed, somehow, to keep her balance.

The swirling lake of blood had risen nearly to her waist, now. That wasn’t helping.

Mabel gave her bat a twirl in one hand, changing her grip over as she did, and then wound up and swung like she was aiming for a home run. Mira gasped and threw out her arms blindly. She needed something with more reach – she needed something with more leverage – why’d she chosen a mace, anyway –

With a sound uncomfortably like a human scream and a sharp juddering jerk along Mira’s arms, her swing slammed to a stop. Mabel’s did too, about a foot away from where Mira would have expected her mace to interrupt it.

When she looked, the reason for that was obvious – she wasn’t holding a mace. Not anymore.

The ball and chain of a wicked-looking flail had wrapped themselves around Mabel’s bat and jerked it clean out of her grip.

Mabel’s eyes narrowed. With a wet, repulsive noise, the bat dissolved back into a gigantic clot and then a fat gush of blood, seeping out through the chain of the flail and vanishing back into the lake at their feet. When Mira looked up, it was to see Mabel with a gleam in her eye – and the last few inches of a gigantic cartoonish mallet filling in with sloshing, churning blood.

Mabel smiled.

Mira threw the flail aside and dove, just in time to miss getting splattered like a bug as the mallet came down. An enormous fountain of crimson gore splashed up from the place it slammed down, but the lake flowed back in in seconds, keeping Mira from more than a glimpse of what lay below it.

She was absolutely drenched, the remnants of the white floral gown she’d been wearing stained scarlet, dripping like an angry psychic girl at her prom. She’d lost her weapon. But her legs were mostly free again. And the blood had kept her afloat, kept her from landing directly on whatever was below it. Kept it from sucking her down.

Mira gasped and whipped her soaking hair out of her eyes, spinning as she pushed herself back up. Already trying to conjure another weapon into her hand.

Mabel tackled her bodily with an ululating warcry, and they both splashed back under the surface.

After that, everything was flailing, airless confusion. Mira’s elbow made contact with something, her knee with something else. Her lungs burned, and then an unexpected blow to her stomach emptied them, an involuntary gasp filling her mouth with the taste of iron and violence. She choked, coughed, sputtered, but couldn’t find the air above her, and then there were strong hands firm on her shoulders, and Mira –

Stopped.

An endless second later, her head broke the surface and she was gulping down huge lungfuls of blissful oxygen. It took her a moment to register that whatever she was swimming in, it wasn’t blood. Not anymore.

Unnaturally-turquoise water surrounded her, lapping at the shores of an eye-searingly yellow beach dotted with green cutout palm trees and bleach-white deckchairs, choppy little waves sparkling in the light of a sun beaming down from behind a gigantic pair of sunglasses. The frozen lightning bolt cut through the middle of it all like the white bar separating panels in a comic book.

Mabel’s hands were still gripping Mira’s shoulders. Not pushing down. Pulling up.

“What the heck was that?” Mabel demanded, as soon as Mira stopped trying to cough up a lung and spitting blood into the strangely opaque water. Blood was still dripping off of her, too, looking black against the bright, bright teal-blue of the water, staining the sea all around her in sinister swirls.

“I could ask you the same question!” Mira shot back. “You started it!”

“Okay, forgetting for a second that you are definitely, one hundred percent the one who hit me first -”

“What is this place?” Mira asked, putting a foot down and feeling for the bottom. She couldn’t find it.

Mabel waved a hand, with a ‘psshhh’ noise. “Doesn’t matter. Just a place. It’s not real.”

“Is this – is this the beach from Dream Boy High II: Even Dreamier!?”

Mabel’s eyes widened, and she blinked at Mira. “Wait. How far in the future did you say you’re from?”

“My boyfriend’s in animation, it’s kind of a big deal, the way they animated the surfing sequences – doesn’t matter. Doesn’t matter.” Mira let herself slip down and float for a second, keeping just her face above the water. It was uncomfortably warm, almost exactly the same temperature the blood had been.

“Mira.”

Mira continued to float.

“Mira, why didn’t you try to get up?”

Mira could feel her hair drifting out around her head, like a mermaid princess. She hoped it wasn’t staining the perfect water black.

“Miraaaaaaa. Mira. Mira!”

There was an exasperated sigh, and finally, Mabel stopped talking at her. Mira spread out her arms and her legs, turned her face toward the heat of the sunglassed sun, and shut her eyes.

She wasn’t sure how long she drifted there before she heard Mabel say, softly, “Why didn’t you try to come up for air, Mira.”

Mira opened her eyes. The sky overhead was a perfectly even Crayola blue, in every direction she could see.

“At least, if you took over,” she said, feeling a little like she was the last person alive on the planet, “one person in my life would be happy.”

“Mira,” Mabel said. The gentleness in it made Mira kind of want to punch her again. “Your friends out there were asking for you. They’re worried about you.”

“I know, I know,” Mira sighed, scrubbing the back of one hand under her eye until it burned, a little. Just being in this not-a-place felt like she’d already sunburnt, and bad. “Give me a minute and I’ll go be positive and well-adjusted and supportive for them again.”

Mabel leaned over her, into the sunlight, casting a long shadow, just to give Mira a Look. Mira didn’t particularly like being on the receiving end of it.

“Look,” Mabel said, and fell back with a little splash, so she wasn’t looming directly over Mira anymore. Her voice was still as soft as it had been, but that raw edge was sneaking back into it, too. “I didn’t know. Okay? I didn’t know this was going to happen.”

Before Mira could launch herself up out of the water and shove Mabel’s head down under it until Mabel stopped struggling, Mabel held up a hand. “But…maybe I could have. Maybe I should have. If I’d had a chance to really think it through. I just – I didn’t. I was dying, and I was still just a kid, and I hadn’t done basically anything yet, and Dipper - it wasn’t fair.”

Mira straightened up, treading the not-really-water so she could keep her head above the surface, look Mabel in the eye. It didn’t take a genius to read between the lines. It only took another Mizar. “You were worried about what he’d do without you, too. You did it for him as much as for you.”

Mabel didn’t answer, just combed her wet hair through her fingers in front of her face as she looked away.

“I didn’t wanna die, either,” she said, quietly, and for a moment a shadow passed across the sunglassed sun, in the cloudless, pure blue sky. “I still don’t wanna die.”

“Then -” Mira started, but Mabel just gave her another Look. This one involved puppy dog eyes.

“Okay, but I kinda already got my chance to live at your expense once already, though, right?” She gave a wet-sounding chuckle. Mira had the feeling that it didn’t just sound wet because they were both still soaked. “Once is…proooobably enough.”

Part of Mira kind of wanted to argue.

She didn’t.

Instead, she shut her eyes.

When she opened them again, it took them a moment to adjust. The brilliance of Dream Boy High II: Even Dreamier!’s Surf’s Up Beach had vanished entirely, and at first, all Mira could see was darkness.

And then, as though someone were turning up the lights on an empty stage, she saw them.

Stars.

Thousands upon thousands upon thousands of stars, scattered across the depths of the sky above her like a handful of glitter flung on velvet. The water around her, flat and still as a mirror, flung their light back toward the sky, doubling and even tripling it as little phosphorescent algae flickered blue-green just below the surface. Only a single dark patch marred the endless expanse of starlight, a blot of matte black where the beach had been. Still split by the crackling white glow of that frozen lightning bolt.

Mira dragged a hand through the water, watching the trail of light her fingers left in their wake, the way the reflected stars shimmered in the ripples it cast.

It was the Sea of Stars. Exactly as she’d imagined it. Exactly as she’d written it, in the first book she’d ever put up for other people to buy and read and judge and, hopefully, love. A dizzying array of distant pinpricks of light overhead, or, if you turned your thoughts the right way, below. A vastness so huge, so incomprehensibly more than your small self, that all you could do was let it wash over you.

She remembered, clearly, exactly where it had come from. She’d written it in after the night she and Ian had gone stargazing.

Mabel splashed forward, suddenly, and grabbed Mira around the shoulders with one clammy arm. The look on her round, sunny face had turned fierce, determined in the algae’s bluish glow, and if Mira hadn’t seen the way she’d fought back in the lake of blood, it almost would have surprised her. “You gotta promise me something, though. When you go back.”

“I can’t -”

“When you go back,” Mabel repeated, firmly, and Mira shut up. “Tell Dippin’ Dots I told him he should grab a clue, okay? You’re not me. You don’t have to be me. And it’s your life. Not his. Not mine. You should live it for you. Because you only really get the one.”

“Mabel,” Mira started to say, and didn’t know how to finish.

Mabel gave her shoulders a soggy squeeze. And when her face broke in a brilliant grin, a streak of blue-white light across the starry dome briefly haloed her, its twin shining in the water below.

“Oh,” she said. “And kick Woodsman-Henry’s big stupid butt for me, okay?”

Mira looked down at the dark water between them, the thousands upon thousands of stars caught in its ripples. The swirls of blood staining it had all but disappeared, as though they’d never been there.

She treaded water, and thought about it.

“They were asking for me?” she asked Mabel, finally, and Mabel beamed.

“You know they were, girlfriend.” She held out a hand. “Ready to head back in?”

Mira hesitated only a moment before she took Mabel’s hand.

Mabel turned over in the water like she was born there, giving a few short, powerful kicks, pulling Mira along.

And a moment later, Mira was alone, swimming for shore.

Chapter Text

Mabel Pines.

Just inside of that shimmering bubble, she was waiting.

For an endless moment, the crackling flames and roaring thunder and angry shouts of the redheaded dryads all seemed to fade into background noise. Nothing but unimportant static surrounding them and that bubble.

In a thousand years, she’d never been so close.

In a thousand years, she’d never been so out of reach.

Neither Dipper Pines nor Alcor the Dreambender had ever been accused of being good at emotions, other people’s or his own. But he didn’t think that even a thousand years of practice could have prepared him for this.

Luckily for him, while he was silently having his crisis, Ian was actually paying attention to Sun-mi’s story about mind-controlling flower crowns, David-Bowie-guy-puppet-maze-ballgown bubble dreams, and the redheaded dryad rebellion Rosa was apparently leading. When the fog of static started to clear from between Dipper’s ears, the two of them were engrossed in a fervent and urgent discussion of what had been tried, what hadn’t worked (everything), and what to try next.

“She’s definitely inside that bubble?” Dipper demanded, interrupting them both. The flash of blue-white lightning that split the clearing as he did threw the looks both Sun-mi and Ian shot him into comic-book black-and-white. “Mabel.” He shook his head. “Mira.”

Ian’s grin looked more like bared teeth. “Shooting Star?”

Dipper just gave him a flat stare. He didn’t have room to get mad at Ian. Every space inside him was already full with what it took him only a moment to identify as pure, slow-boiling, incandescent rage.

It was just. Everything about this was wrong.

It wasn’t just the wrongness of working with – ugh – Bill, even knowing that Ian wasn’t Bill Cipher, not in the ways that mattered. Although that was definitely part of it. Not a small part, either.

That was only the tip of the iceberg of the wrongness. Gravity Falls had been Dipper’s home, once. It had opened its arms to him when the rest of the world, his own parents, had turned their backs on him. It had always been here, no matter how changed, to welcome him back. To remind him who he was, what really mattered. But now it was turning against him.

His own body, his own self, had been twisted into something Dipper had never wanted. It had taken him longer than he’d like to admit to become okay with that. To get to know it, to get to even like what he was capable of, to get comfortable with who and what he was. But now, he’d gotten what he’d thought he’d wanted all along, he’d been given back what he’d never wanted to lose in the first place – and it sucked. He couldn’t protect anyone he loved, couldn’t save anything that mattered.

Mabel had known Dipper better than anyone before or since. She’d been his twin. The other half of his binary star. He’d loved her enough to break his own rules about dealing for souls for the first time, enough to do everything in his power to preserve her forever. And he’d ended up losing her anyway, the edges and angles of whatever made her Mabel worn gently smooth under the constant, irresistible flow of lifetime after lifetime.

But they’d made it work. Dipper had always been there for his twin star in whatever form she took, and – and he’d gotten to know them, to like them, for themselves. To the point where he’d nearly let himself get caught in one of Bill’s machinations and lose his powers to save Mira, even knowing that Mabel’s soul would continue even if Mira died. Even knowing he could just start over.

Maybe he could. But Mira couldn’t.

Mira wasn’t Mabel. But, Dipper had already learned, he wouldn’t trade Mira for Mabel back. She wasn’t his twin sister. But she’d become his best friend.

The Woodsman was half Dipper’s own creation. He was all that was left of a man Dipper had once called his brother. His power, whatever it was now, had started out borrowed from Dipper. Which was why he’d been able to take that power away. How he’d taken Dipper’s best friend away.

And, in a moment of sudden, unexpected clarity, Dipper realised, he wanted them back.

“She’s definitely in there,” Sun-mi agreed. “Rosa and the dryads have been trying to get through the bubble, but with the way the lightning seems to be drawn to it -”

“Don’t worry about the bubble,” Dipper said, his thoughts whirling in a way he’d almost forgotten they could, without being able to simply reach out and grab information he needed, spinning a plan on a few known variables and hope. “Somebody has to get in there to Mira. And make sure that she’s Mira.”

“I don’t know how to do that. Mabel tore off the flower dress, but it didn’t make her go back to being Mira, and that’s the only mind-control vector that I know of for sure -” Sun-mi started, her eyes taking on a slightly distant focus as though she were trying to do a difficult calculation in her head. But Dipper wasn’t looking at her.

Ian met his gaze after a moment. “I don’t know why you think I -”

“She managed it for you,” Dipper said softly, and Ian shut his mouth. “Please. I don’t – if she really is Mabel, I don’t know if I can…”

He trailed off without finishing the sentence, gripping his right elbow with his left hand and shrugging at the grass. He could feel Ian’s eyes on him, but didn’t dare look up.

There was a moment of crackling silence, the hear of the fire pressing against the side of Dipper’s face, the low long constant moan of the wind like the sound of his heart under the strain of being tugged in two opposite directions.

But he’d made his choice.

The past was past. This was his life, now. And that meant these were his people. He wasn’t about to lose any of them now. Not if he could help it.

“Okay,” Ian said, at last, and Dipper let out a long breath. “Okay, I – I think I have an idea.” He brushed his palms against the thighs of his jeans nervously, but Dipper could see the steel slipping in behind his expression. “Yeah. That might work. If we can get through the bubble -”

A smile started to tug at the corner of Dipper’s mouth. “Just leave the bubble to me.”

…

Afterward, when words couldn’t adequately describe it, Ian would try to draw an approximation of what he’d seen. He’d always been better with pictures than with words, anyway. But this time, even his trusty pencil skills would be doomed to fail him.

After the stillness and silence of the cave-that-wasn’t-really-a-cave, Ian had almost forgotten what a riotous whirl the clearing had been. If he’d thought the fight between Alcor and the Woodsman had been psychedelic, it had nothing on the battle between the Woodsman and Gravity Falls itself.

The string of small annoyances and misfortunes since they’d gotten here, the strange feeling of hostility that Ian hadn’t quite been able to put his finger on, had half-convinced him that Gravity Falls, the place, didn’t want him there. Ian had almost managed to convince himself that that was just paranoia talking, that a place couldn’t hate a person. But what his right eye was seeing now was making him reconsider that.

He didn’t know whether it was just because of the ambient magic floating around, or their proximity to the rift below their feet, or what it was, that was showing him what he hadn’t been able to see in the town. But lightning, Ian could see now, as he crept closer, wasn’t the only thing being flung at the golden dome dominating the centre of the clearing. And the redheaded dryads, no longer trying to hide themselves from the prying eyes of the humans in their midst, weren’t the only ones trying desperately to crack it open.

Waves and eddies of – power, force, intent, something – swirled through the air ominous as a tropical storm growing into a hurricane, circling around the clearing even as the storm did, licking out tongues to try to breach the seemingly impenetrable dome. But it wasn’t just the sky of Gravity Falls that seemed to have had enough. When Ian looked down, he could see branching roots, crackling gold and blue, spearing out from the dome and the gnarled apple tree at its centre to the very edges of the clearing, digging their twisting paths out into the opposing wall of green roots of the forest beyond.

It took Ian a moment to realise what else he was seeing, outlined in magic through the solid ground, but when he did, he almost laughed. Chicken feet, magnified until a single toe was as long as he was tall, outlined in shimmering purple, tore at the apple tree’s twisting roots with spurs as long as his arm. The roots, in turn, were shifting slowly toward the chicken’s feet, trying to tangle up the tree-trunk legs those feet were attached to. The ground heaved and strange symbols, shapes Ian felt he was on the edge of understanding, flashed across the purple shimmer wherever it and the blue and gold glow of the roots met. There was a magical war raging furiously beneath his feet.

Then a rim of gold flared around the irises of Alcor’s eyes, he balled his little hands into stubborn fists at his sides and marched forward, and there was also a magical war raging furiously before Ian’s eyes – well, right eye.

It wasn’t like it had been the time before, when Alcor had flared too bright to look at directly and gold light and blue fire had fireworked throughout the clearing. Alcor didn’t burst the edges of his unassuming human guise, didn’t blaze across the stormy sky. Actually, it was almost exactly the opposite of that.

The tiny shape of Alcor’s depowered form was a pinpoint of almost aggressive mundanity against the brilliance and madness of the clearing, like the black hole forming at the heart of a supernova, an irresistible well of gravity pulling all the sound and light and fury in toward him. On the edges of the clearing, but drawing fast toward the little shorts-clad shape marching towards its centre, blue flames banked to embers; traceries of golden light folded fractally in on themselves into simple lines that folded themselves inwards in turn; fires that redheaded dryads were desperately trying to beat out smouldered away into nothing.

Below the ground, the shimmering purple chicken’s feet dug their claws into what were presumably ordinary roots, as the blue and gold light that had traced them out under Ian’s artificial Sight retreated fast toward the trunk of the tree those roots supported. The Woodsman was gathering all of its strength in toward itself, shoring up its defenses. Pouring everything it had into the golden bubble sealing it and Mira away from the chaos outside. Making the bubble expand so fast that it knocked Rosa and several of her crusading dryads off their feet, lurching skyward with a billowing burst of outthrust force and flaring so brightly that Ian had to brace himself and throw up an arm to shield his eyes.

It wasn’t enough.

The tiny shape of Alcor kept walking inexorably forward, a small dull point cutting effortlessly through the chaos and brilliance, as though nothing were happening at all. He stopped, just before the edge of the golden bubble, a flyspeck of darkness against the massive glowing dome. Against its roiling, shimmering surface, all Ian could see was a silhouette: short, scrawny, padded artificially around the middle with the puff of his ridiculous vest, adjusting the shadow of a beaked cap on his head.

All Ian could see was a kid.

Afterward, Ian wouldn’t be sure if there was actually a momentary pause in the tooth-rattling thunder and the howl of the wind and the dryads’ furious screaming. Wouldn’t be sure if the world had actually spun down on its axis for a single, hushed second. Or if it had only been Gravity Falls.

What Ian did know, then and afterward, was that somehow, even through the cacophony, he clearly heard a young, quiet voice crack halfway through the word, “Mabel?”

And then, Alcor reached out and pressed a hand to the surface of the bubble.

It was almost anticlimactic. There was a burst of blue-gold light at the point of contact so bright it burned, so bright Ian could feel a flash of the heat of it against his face.

And then the entire bubble whipped away into Alcor’s palm so fast that Ian’s ears popped.

While Ian was still trying to blink his right eye into rebooting faster after that flash, Alcor closed his hand, and the light winked out entirely.

In the space where the bubble had been, in a circle of perfectly calm, blue sky around the apple tree, where the grass and green leaves and white blossoms were untouched by so much as a breath of wind, in the eye of the storm, the Woodsman knelt at the base of the apple tree. Its antlers mingled with the branches, knocking at the glossy red fruit that somehow hung from the same limbs that were bursting with blossoms. Some of those fruit – Ian blinked, again, three times, in case his false eye hadn’t completely finished its reboot – appeared to be dripping blood.

Across the Woodsman’s folded knees, across the gnarl of ancient roots, lying surrounded by a spill of white petals as though she’d fallen and landed in a pile of apple blossoms, sending them scattering –

Mira blinked her eyes open, raised her head – Ian’s breath snagged in his chest – caught sight of the kid who was Alcor, and burst into a beaming smile.

That wasn’t hers.

“Dipper?”

The breath caught in Ian’s chest inflated there, squeezing his heart into stillness and pressing against his ribs until it hurt.

But the pure, uncomplicated happiness in that voice that was and wasn’t Mira’s soured before Alcor even had a chance to respond. “Oh, no you don’t, mister! I just talked her into coming back, you do not get to undermine all my hard work by clinging onto somebody who’s already dead -”

“I know, Mabel,” Alcor interrupted, before the woman who looked like Mira but wasn’t could really get into her groove. His words were thick, that youthful voice cracking like a vinyl diner seat in a sunny window, but Ian couldn’t hear even a hint of insincerity under the heartbreak. “I know. I – I’m here to get her back.”

Mira’s big dark eyes blinked, once, twice. Somehow, Ian got the feeling that ‘speechless’ was as infrequent an expression on whatever Mabel’s own face had looked like as it was on Mira’s.

He wondered how much Mabel’s own face had looked like the one Alcor was currently wearing.

“…oh,” the voice that was Mira’s and not Mira’s said, after a moment, quickly gathering strength. Ian didn’t miss how small and wounded it had started out, though. Couldn’t have missed it even if he’d wanted to. And he’d wanted to. “Well, good! Sounds like you finally did some growing up. Even if you don’t look like it!”

She laughed, a little too hard, at her own joke, pointing at Alcor. Ian felt a little twinge that he wasn’t ever going to get to know her even before he saw the look on Alcor’s face. It was half heartbreak, half happiness, like – well, exactly like someone looking at someone they’d thought they’d never see again, and were just going to have to give up again for good.

“Mabel,” Alcor said, flat and exasperated and fond, like he’d said it a thousand thousand times and had expected to say it a thousand thousand more. And – somehow, seeing that half-heartbreak, half-happiness look on Mira’s face was even worse than it had been on Alcor’s.

The exasperation gentled its way out or Alcor’s voice, his face, entirely as he said, “She’s my best friend. But that doesn’t mean I don’t miss you, you know.”

The face that should belong to Mira twisted in something that was a little too sad to call a smile. “Yeah?”

Alcor held his noodle arms out at his sides, like he didn’t know what more he could say. Like he was inviting the woman who wasn’t Mira in for a hug. “Yeah. All the time.”

“Dork,” the woman who wasn’t Mira sniffled, with all the exasperated fondness that Alcor had used to say her name a few moments before. Above her, the apple blossoms rustled.

Alcor’s face crumpled up like a used tissue.

“Say hi to Stan for me,” he managed, on what sounded like the third or fourth try.

“Okay, I know you know that’s not how it works -”

“Don’t care.” And then suddenly Alcor was running, stumbling forward out under the almost-too-blue sky and across the almost-too-green grass to throw himself bodily into his twin sister’s arms. The apple tree gave one huge, lurching shudder, but Alcor just flung his arms around Mabel’s borrowed back and buried his face in her shoulder, so that his next words came out muffled. “Goodbye, Mabel.”

“Aw, Dippin’ Dots,” Mabel said, and if her borrowed voice also cracked like a boy’s on the cusp of teenagerhood, well, who was Ian going to tell.

Mabel wrapped Mira’s arms around Alcor and squeezed so hard his puffy vest let out an astonished-sounding squeak of escaping air, pressing her cheek hard into his wild tangle of brown curls as she said, with something halfway to a smile, “See you later.”

…

And somewhere, a sea of stars became a sandbar underfoot, growing shallower and shallower as weary feet stumbled, at last, to shore.

…

There was no real warning. Mira’s body just went suddenly limp in Alcor’s arms. If she hadn’t been kneeling in the grass to hug him, she would have pulled him right over onto the grass with her when she collapsed.

If the apple tree had lurched when Alcor had stepped across the threshold between storm and calm, it started outright shaking when Ian’s foot hit the lush green grass. Over his head, the grumbling, swirling stormclouds peeled off a questing tendril, grey cloud snaking sinuously across the bright, sunny blue.

Ian didn’t stop to look.

The figure at the base of the apple tree gave itself a shake, its antlers setting the branches of the tree rustling. Its eyes flared hot in its bark face as it rose ponderously to its feet, twin jets of blue flame, burning so bright and fierce they were almost white.

Ian stumbled back a step when it roared, the very force of the sound sandblasting against the exposed skin of his face. Then he kept pushing relentlessly toward the apple tree and Mira.

Golden lightning cracked, lashing through the clearing from the Woodsman’s outstretched arm toward Ian. The flash dazzled his eyes so that it took him a moment to see why he hadn’t been obliterated on the spot – the jagged halo of gold light had looped back on itself, falling into a rough orbit around Alcor’s head.

“You’re up,” Alcor said to Ian, in a voice that was somehow simultaneously loud and soft, young and ancient, all at once. With all the gentleness a demon seemed to be capable of, he lowered Mira’s unconscious form to the grass, displacing white petals in tiny drifts.

Then, gold light still dancing around the crown of his head and between his fingertips, he rose to his feet.

The Woodsman paid him no attention. Its baleful blue-flame eyes were fixed on Ian, and the next bolt of crackling golden light that split the darkening calm of the clearing came racing straight in Ian’s direction. It splintered before it could hit him, though, shattering away in a cascade of tiny forks that zipped back to Alcor like exuberant puppies circling their master.

“Woodsman,” Alcor said, in a voice like thunder, like fate, like a twelve-year-old boy with an electronic voice changer. “Here and now, I lay claim to what is mine.”

Ian didn’t pay him much more attention after that. The ground under Mira was shuddering, sending white petals fluttering into the air. Before Ian’s eyes, wizened black roots hunched themselves up out of the ground in crooked arches, wrapping around Mira’s motionless form in an elaborate cage.

She didn’t so much as stir when Ian shouted her name. But the Woodsman did. Its massive head jerked around to face him, its jagged bark-mouth splintering open to roar as another bolt of gold light snapped out at Ian – and, again, swerved away before it even came near him, bouncing over to join the halo Alcor was collecting.

The way the Woodsman’s mouth twisted in apparent confused annoyance would have been comical, under almost any other circumstances.

Ian took full advantage of its moment of distraction to scramble closer to Mira. He only stopped when the Woodsman, seemingly coming to a conclusion, lashed out at Ian – not with gold lightning, but with a whip-thin branch that cracked across his chest like a line of fire. It took Ian a moment to realise it had torn the front of his shirt. That he was actually bleeding.

Luckily, he realised in time to dodge the branch, thick around as his neck, that shot straight for his head.

“Mira!” he yelled again, barely managing not to faceplant directly into the grass as he desperately skidded sideways into a run, weaving away from lashing, lengthening branches. Overhead, the sky grumbled like an old man roused from a deep sleep, the clouds coiling in to make the patch of blue sky above smaller and smaller, the clearing below darker and darker. “Can you hear me?”

Mira’s motionless form didn’t stir.

It was probably the best Ian was going to get. He took a deep breath, and a chance.

“I was going to save this – for the ceremony -” Ian panted out, as he dove under a vicious swing from a whipping bough. “But maybe if I don’t say it now, there won’t be a ceremony, so -”

An enormous boom of thunder swallowed the rest of his sentence.

Ian ducked another whip-fast branch, and yelled louder, over the growing storm.

“You know, as somebody who tells stories for a living, it’s ironic how much I struggled with trying to write my own vows!”

Another fork of golden lightning flared, whirling away into Alcor’s gravitational pull almost before Ian’s eyes could reflexively flinch shut.

Mira didn’t shift so much as an inch.

“I think maybe it’s because I tell stories for a living. I thought I should be able to find the perfect words. That it should be easy to come up with something beautiful, artistic, eloquent, a lasting poetic testament to love that would be inserted into the anals of history.” Ian had to pause to gasp in a breath, throwing himself flat to the grass to keep from having the top of his head taken off by a trunklike limb. Overhead, the Woodsman roared, and thunder roared back. “I thought it had to be like in a story. One grand, romantic, perfect moment, and then it’d all be happily every after.”

The sky above had gone nearly completely black, now. Only a tiny blue eye winked from directly above the apple tree, letting in a single brave shaft of sunlight. It caught in glittering motes of pollen as it shone down to illuminate the gloss of Mira’s spilled hair.

Ian had to clear his throat before he could continue.

“But this isn’t a story. And life’s not like that. Love’s not like that. There’s no one huge grand romantic gesture or choice or moment that guarantees everything afterwards will be easy forever. There can be a huge grand romantic gesture, but then, afterwards, somebody still has to do the dishes.”

Overhead, the blue eye blinked shut. The shaft of sunlight vanished.

Ian had to fling himself out of the way – again – as the entire top of the apple tree swung back and then crashed down into the grass where he’d been lying just a moment before. The very tips of branches stung his arms, his shoulders, his face.

He spat out a mouthful of grass and dirt and stubbornly kept shouting, over the war-cry he recognised as Rosa’s voice and the rabble of rattling-leaf shouts that rose in chorus after it.

“Life is work. Love is work.” Ian took the moment it took him to scramble back to his feet and then duck another flailing limb to reflect on what had just come out of his mouth. “That sounds bad! Terrible, actually! This is why I should’ve written this down ahead of time instead of just trying to make it make sense off the top of my head! Like you told me to!”

The next branch that came at him was blocked by a greenish arm and a flash of red hair. Ian took a moment to nod his thanks at the dryad, who had grappled the apple tree’s limb closer to its base and seemed to be trying to wrestle it into submission. Before him, there was a scream as another dryad, attempting the same move on a different branch, was wrenched off her feet and tossed flying into the woods.

“I think what I’m trying to get at is just that…love means trying. Every day. Waking up and trying again no matter what happened the day before. Love means trying to be the best version of yourself, to give the best version of yourself to the person you love, over and over and over again, for as long as you can. As long as it takes. As long as you both shall live.”

Dodging the apple tree’s fury had pulled Ian away from where Mira still lay motionless at its base. It took him a frantic second to find her, a frantic second that made his heart drop down through his ribcage to slosh heavily into his lower intestine. The pure relief that washed over him at the sight of her hair lying coiled against the bright grass was only slightly punctured by the apple that hit him, hard, in the shoulder, knocking him stumbling back and leaving a damp red smear as it dropped to the grass.

“Because you want to. They – just being there, just being themselves, not asking you to do anything but just be there too – they make you want to. They make it so easy that you almost don’t even realise it’s happening until it’s too late!” Ian had to yell to be heard over the sounds of battle, the rising howl of the storm. There was a long, drawn-out sort of rumble he could more feel than hear, too, a rumble that had started so low he’d wondered if he was imagining it. He still wasn’t entirely sure.

Another apple – apple? – whizzed out of the thick of the apple tree and clocked him a glancing blow on the side of the head, leaving something warmish and wet dribbling down the side of his face. It was only because Ian’s right eye fritzed out in a spectacular shower of kaleidoscopic psychedelica for a second after the impact and made him take an instinctive step back that he missed being skewered by a stabbing tree-limb.

“And love means that person sees it when you fail, when you fall down, when you disappoint even yourself – and they’re still there to help you back up again. Because they don’t just love you for the best version of you, the version everybody wants you to be.”

This wasn’t working. Mira was still lying there, not moving, doing nothing. There was no way she could even hear Ian over all of this, and he wasn’t getting closer, wasn’t getting anywhere near close enough, they just kept getting pulled farther apart –

“They love every version of you. Both the one you want to be the most, and the ones who don’t quite make it there. They want to see you succeed, help you succeed, because they want everything for you that you want for yourself.”

A crackling net of golden electricity suddenly split the air all around, and for a second, all Ian could see was light. A few faint screams echoed from around the clearing, but when he blinked again, his right eye rebooting and recalibrating, only two dryads were off their feet and Alcor was glowing like a small sun. The light faded quickly but not completely, jagged traces leaping out from his puffy vest now and again to trace the outline of batwings, the shape of a top hat, in thin air.

Sun-mi, Ian noticed, was crouched beside one of the fallen dryads, using her scarf to bandage a long, blackened crack in the dryad’s side.

She must have felt Ian’s gaze on her, because she looked up and met his eye. And then gave a quick nod, and an impatient toss of her head toward the tree.

Toward where Mira was still lying.

Ian swallowed around a dry throat, ducked another projectile apple (apple?), and looked around to see where the dryads had started their assault.

“And love means that, when the person you love fails, when they fall down, you get to be that person for them, too. Because you can’t imagine doing anything else. Because you can’t imagine wanting to do anything else. Because you love every single possible version of them, too!” The dryads had massed on the apple tree’s west flank, and were drawing the Woodsman’s attention there. Ian turned toward the east, and threw himself into a flat-out run. “Because you want them to have everything they want for themselves, too! And you want to do everything you can to help them get there!”

He wasn’t expecting the roots that bubbled suddenly up from underground. All Ian was aware of was a tap at his ankle before suddenly his foot was wrenched and his chin was smashing into the dirt, his teeth clamping shut on his tongue. He tasted iron.

As he tried to yank his ankle free, another root shot up, spraying dirt and chunks of native grass, and clamped down over his wrist, wrapping itself through the earth and around his arm up to the shoulder like it was stitching him into the ground. Ian tried and failed to rip his arm free, struggling as the root binding his ankle started to coil up his calf as well, as more roots burst up from the soil –

The Valkyrieish yodel that rent the air was sweeter than any song Ian had ever heard that voice sing. A moment later, Rosa Darling and an entourage of dryads were on him, tearing roots apart in such a savage frenzy that Ian was almost tempted to call them maenads instead. In moments, he was free again, and one of the dryads with a truly impressive pitching arm was catching and firing projectile apples(?) back at the tree’s trunk with unerring and almost uncanny accuracy.

Ian took the hand Rosa offered to help him to his feet with a grateful smile. She returned it with a twinkle, spinning him on his feet and giving him a two-handed shove in the back toward Mira.

Ian had to think for a moment, before he could pick up the thread again. Still, he didn’t dare stop speaking, not now. Just in case some portion of what he was saying was getting through. Just in case. “I really should have written this all down ahead of time, I’m losing my train of thought. But, see, that’s what I’m talking about, Mira!”

Had she just moved? Had her head shifted, just a miniscule amount? Ian’s heart throbbed painfully in his throat, and not because of the twin boughs that whipped past at head and heart height, going in two opposite directions. Ian had to drop to his knees or risk being cut messily into three parts.

“I didn’t tell you I hadn’t written my vows. You didn’t tell me you were so overwhelmed with wedding planning. Or any of the other stuff. We were both making ourselves miserable, keeping things from each other, trying to make sure we didn’t let each other find out that anything wasn’t perfect or easy. Like you had to be perfect for me to love you, or – or I had to be, for you to love me.” Ian’s heart lodged itself squarely across his airway. Mira’s head had moved, and he knew, because it had just moved again, turning ever so slightly toward him.

It took him a long moment to find the breath to keep speaking, and not just because of how winded he was from all the running and dodging. “Like knowing how hard it was for you would’ve made me love you less. Like we had to get it just right, that the wedding had to be just right, that everything had to be just right, on the first try, otherwise our lives together would be ruined forever, right from the start.”

That long, low rumble Ian had heard before was building to a roar. Building with it was a tension, a hair-raising anticipation, in the air. Ian was reminded uncomfortably of a cresting wave, as he shuffle-crawled as quickly as he could towards where Mira was lying, as the battle between the dryads and the Woodsman raged overhead. An oncoming tsunami, distant right now but ready to come raging in faster than anyone could outrun.

“But nothing’s ruined just because it isn’t perfect and effortless. Nothing’s going to be ruined. Getting married isn’t going to change anything but our tax benefits. Because none of it could possibly change the way I feel about you. I would be happy to just live together as a couple of weird roommates who’re also in love with each other forever, so long as it was with you. And even dishes don’t suck too much when we do them together.”

Mira was almost close enough, now, that Ian could reach out and give her shoulder a shake. This close, he could see the steady, calm rise and fall of her chest, the dark stripes of shadow the cage of roots cast over her face, the fan of her lashes against the curve of her cheek, the single dark curl awkwardly stuck to that cheek with sweat. For an instant, he loved her so much he thought his whole heart would just melt right out of his chest.

His voice dropped to a hush even as the distant roar grew louder, almost without Ian’s noticing it. “So long as you’re with me, I don’t care what happens. What goes wrong, or how hard it is to handle. We can handle it. Together. Because I can’t imagine doing anything else. I can’t imagine wanting to do anything else.”

He could just barely squeeze his hand between the roots caging Mira in, scraping his knuckles against the bark. He could just barely brush her shoulder with his fingertips.

“Because it’s not going to be perfect.”

Mira made a soft little noise in the back of her throat. And turned her head, eyes still closed, to face Ian.

“But it doesn’t have to be!”

Before Ian could finish, the roots that caged Mira in whipped around his wrist, too fast and firm for him to pull his hand back. He struggled and tugged, but it was no use. The roots were like iron.

He couldn’t brush Mira’s shoulder with his fingertips, anymore.

Ian raised his voice.

“Love is work, and life is work!”

That nameless tension in the air all swung suddenly loose, a strange hanging hush falling over the clearing as the roots snapped away from Mira into loops around Ian’s arm up to his elbow, yanking him roughly down to the ground.

Even with his cheek pressed into the grass, Ian managed to choke out, “But it doesn’t feel like work when I get to do it with you.”

Without any warning, the rising rumble cracked into shattering noise, a sound so loud Ian felt it all through his bones. The world exploded in searing blue-white as a single massive bolt of lighting, which must have been gathering and humming and biding its charge for one final, fatal blow, hammered down into the centre of the clearing.

It was met by an answering flash, as bright but absolutely silent – or maybe that was Ian’s broken eardrums – and golden.

Ian blinked a few times, but even as his right eye recalibrated, his vision stayed resolutely blank, washed out entirely in a flood of light.

He flexed his fingers, noticing as he did that the roots had vanished, and reached out blindly.

The warmth of Mira’s skin under his fingertips was the only real thing in the world.

“I guess what I’m trying to say is just…Mira Rachel Ramachandran, I love you. And I literally put my eye out for you. I’m in this for the long haul.”

In the blinding glow, he could just hear Mira’s voice breathe, “Ian?”

The world came crashing back in.

Afterwards, Ian wouldn’t be able to reconstruct the exact sequence of events. He was barely aware of what was happening while it was happening, barely realised anything was happening until it was already over.

In the sound and fury of the finally-released lightning strike meeting the full protective force of Alcor’s just-reclaimed power, Ian must have missed one last, frustrated, desperate outlash by the Woodsman. All he heard was Mira’s voice shouting out a short, panicked, “No!”. All he saw was her sitting up straight in front of him, throwing a hand out.

There was no force of nature or demonic power, though, that could have made him miss the way she cried out in pain.

Everything froze.

The vicious light drained out of the clearing as quickly as it had come. The boiling clouds overhead lowered to a simmer, reversing their ponderous, churning whirl into something that grumbled occasionally but no longer shouted.

The Woodsman stood in the centre of the clearing, vine-limb whip lying trailing on the grass a few inches from Mira’s feet, like the limp torn branch of a willow after a furious storm. It – he – was as still as the apple tree he stood beside, the apple tree that was part of him or perhaps the other way around. Ian couldn’t be sure, the Woodsman’s expression was always so…wooden, but he thought the Woodsman somehow looked downright shocked.

And Mira brought her hand down from in front of her face, turning it to see the sharp, thin red line rising, angry and already bruising, across her palm.

She looked up.

The Woodsman’s balefire eyes looked back.

And then dimmed.

Those eyes flicked from Mira’s face, to her palm and what he’d done to it, to Ian, and back. And then, without really moving, the Woodsman seemed to somehow slump. To crumple in on himself, to stoop and crook, until he was, once again, indistinguishable from the tree at the centre of the clearing. Until he was, once again, so intertwined with that tree that it was impossible to tell where it ended and he began.

His eyes flared briefly gold, before winking dimly out.

Some tension that Ian had barely noticed, some fine spiderweb of anticipation that had hung over the whole clearing, gently tore away. Down through the ground, Ian’s right eye could see the purple outlines of chicken’s feet fading out as they tucked back up under the ramshackle shack they seemed to belong to, no tracery of golden roots in sight. The clouds started to unspool overhead, like a crowd slowly realising the band wasn’t going to come back out for one last encore, unwinding enough to reveal sunlight shining through the cracks. It caught, sparkling, in the soft, steady rain that started to fall, hissing wetly down onto the fires still smouldering in the trees and filling the clearing with damp smoke and the smell of ash.

Alcor gave himself a shake like a wet dog, strange puffy vest and little shorts blurring off of him like water in little golden droplets until the Alcor Ian recognised better hovered in front of them again. “Mira?”

Mira offered him a wan smile. “Me.”

Ian’s eyes sank shut in relief, and he wrapped his arms tight around her, burying his face in the sleek strawberry-scented fall of her hair.

A moment later, he was nearly knocked over backwards into the grass when Alcor hug-tackled them both. Only the impact of Rosa colliding with him from behind kept Ian upright.

“I don’t generally do group hugs,” Sun-mi said, and Ian looked up to see her hovering – less literally than Alcor had – uncertainly a few feet away, eyeing Alcor with something Ian thought was as much rabid curiosity as it was a healthy dose of fear.

“Oh, don’t be a goober,” Mira said, slightly muffled from under three hugs. Somehow, she managed to extract a hand enough to gesture at Sun-mi. “Get in here.”

Ian was only just beginning to feel smothered when they all started to break apart. As soon as she got free, Mira twisted around to face him. Even soaked as they were all getting in the steady rain, her smile was more brilliant than the sunlight starting to creep through the clouds.

“Ian Thomas Beale,” she said, “I do.”

Mira threw her arms up around his neck, and Ian leaned down and kissed her with everything he had. She squeaked, grabbed him a little tighter – almost too tight – and kissed him back.

And neither of them even noticed the shack hunching itself up on its chicken legs and lurching over to settle itself down, squat, right overtop of the apple tree.