Chapter Text
The idea lodges itself into Wirt’s head at the funeral, burrows under the surface and lurks like a pile of bare-white bones.
He doesn’t say it aloud for days, weeks, a month, but the sheer hit-you-over-the-head, wallop-you-with-a-tire-iron-and-drag-you-into-the-bushes emptiness of his house echoes it back to him whenever he thinks he’s buried it down for good. The words slip out easily one day, casually, as if they hadn’t been choking him for weeks and weeks and weeks.
“Kids,” says Wirt, “what do you think about moving?”
Dipper’s head darts up from his journal. “Moving?” he asks. “Like, houses?”
Wirt’s kids haven't been the same since the diagnosis, since the treatment failed, since the funeral. They hide it from him, or try to at least, but Wirt sees. They roam around their own home like ghosts. There are so many ghosts in this house.
“Towns,” he corrects. “States.”
Mabel’s brow furrows. “You want to move?”
“There’s not much for us in Piedmont, is there? I can write anywhere, and you kids don’t seem that attached to the high school here. Most of your friends are in Gravity Falls anyway, and the change of pace would do us all some good--”
His twins, his kids, his pair-of-retail-clones, his Two Terribles--
“Why would you call my children bluebirds, Wirt?” says Beatrice, wrinkling her nose as she tweaks theirs. “That’s terrible”
-- bolt upright.
“You mean we’re moving to--” says Mabel.
“--Gravity Falls?” finishes Dipper.
“If you want to. I just thought that the change would do us all some good. The small town would probably be good for my writing, anyway, and their school can’t be any worse than the one here.”
Mabel beams. She has her mother’s smile.
“I have to call our grunkles,” she babbles, practically radiating joy off her--nope, that’s light. How did she get glitter in her teeth? Does Wirt even want to know? “Everyone is going to be so excited. Dipper, c’mon! ”
“Wait,” Wirt says to an empty room, the hammering of his kids’ footsteps rattling in the air, “Grunkles?”
…
“Grunkle Stan!”
Mabel throws the door wide with all the force of a war-hardened soldier, God bless her. There’s no hope for Wirt’s security deposit. There has never been hope for Wirt’s security deposit. Wirt’s dreams of a security deposit went up in a cloud of ash and glitter when the twins were still cherubic toddlers with the Devil alive in their hearts.
“Oof,” says Uncle Stan, catching her cleanly. “Hey there, pumpkin.”
Mabel sniffles slightly. “We missed you,” she says. “Dipper and me both.”
“I missed you kids too, munchkin,” he says, and he ruffles her hair. “I’m sorry we weren’t here for the funeral. We were out of range for months, and by the time we got the message, well--” He scratches the back of his head.
“It’s alright,” Dipper says, shuffling his feet. He crams his hands in his pockets and looks at ground. “You couldn’t have helped it.”
Stan looks at him, at Wirt’s fifteen-year-old son with scabby knees and a tired bent to a head eternally shrouded in a fur-lined cap, and he rolls his eyes.
“Come ‘ere, kid,” he says, grabbing him by the collar.
Dipper’s eyes widen.
“Aw,” Mabel cooes, practically glowing at the sight of--nope, no, that’s glitter again, Wirt reevaluates the necessity of an intervention--her brother swamped in his great uncle’s arms. She yanks her phone from her pocket. “Photo op!”
“Mabel,” complains Dipper, making absolutely no effort to squirm his way out. “Dad.”
“I absolutely approve of your sister’s actions.” He turns to Mabel. “Get extra copies for my album.”
Mabel squeals.
Waddles, for his part, squeals with her. This is less surprising in no small part due to the fact that he is a pig, but Wirt feels this fact is still of note. Because that pig is always squealing.
Always. At all hours. In his once-pigless home.
Stan releases Dipper, grumbling in a creaky, ancient-old-man-with-a-reputation way. “That’s enough from me, kid,” he says, and cuffs him around the ear. “Go do your nerd things with my brother. He has some new doll or whatever to show you.”
A comedy, in three parts:
Wirt furrows his brow.
Stanford Pines’s eyes widen. He begins to cough extremely hard, extremely loud.
And another Stanford Pines rounds the back of the car.
“Doll?” one Stanford Pines says to the other. “We find an ancient relic from a civilization thought to be mythical, and you call it a doll?”
“You gotta call a spade a spade, is what I say.”
“Grunkle Ford,” Dipper greets, utterly oblivious to his father’s mounting confusion. “We missed you.”
“Dipper m’boy,” the other, second Stanford Pines says, slinging an arm around Wirt’s son and pulling him close. “It’s good to see you again.”
Dipper says something then, mutters it into his great uncle’s coat where Wirt can’t hear, something low and fraught and containing more emotion than Wirt’s been able to pry from his son in months.
Other-Stanford’s grip tightens.
“I know,” he says. “I know.”
Dipper shudders then, and Wirt thinks that, for one moment, he may finally cry.
Pulling back, Dipper says, “Thanks for coming to help move us. It means a lot.”
“We’re just happy to have you in Gravity Falls year-round,” says the other-Stanford. “It’ll be good to spend more time with you kids, now that Stan and I are retiring.”
“Why is that, anyway?” Dipper asks. “You love treasure hunting.”
“Eh, the beaches in the Arctic are cold and there’s no babes in Siberia, anyway,” says the first-Stanford. “Besides, we miss that crummy old town. You kids are just a bonus.”
“Aw, Grunkle Stan, you love us,” says Mabel.
“Are you kiddin’ me? Nothing but a pair of nuisances, the lot of you.”
Wirt opens his mouth. Wirt closes his mouth again.
He had, in fact, been doing this for several minutes. He thinks a bug flew in his mouth in that time, or maybe some glitter.
He knew it was a mistake to let Greg buy Mabel an industrial-sized bucket of glitter for her birthday this year. Wirt had to sign a damn liability form for anyone to let it come into his house, and a waiver stating he alone was responsible for any irreversible damage to respiratory tracts or the environment. The delivery man had been sweating in the middle of January when he dropped it off. Wirt’s pretty certain it’s only previous use had been for environmental warfare and Build-A-Bear workshops.
“Stanford,” he says, looking at one Stanford, and then the other. “Ford. Stanford,” he says, looking at Stanford #2. He looks at Stanford #1. “Stanford. Stan. Stan ley. I. I. You’re dead. ”
Mabel’s jaw drops. “We didn’t tell you.”
Dipper shifts uncomfortably. “Um.”
“Why am I the one that’s dead?” Stanley Pines, a man who is literally certified as dead, complains. “Maybe he’s the dead one.”
“I was never dead, Stan.”
“Well neither was I.”
“Not according to the state of Oregon.”
“Like that’s important.”
“I went to your funeral,” says Wirt. “When I was like, 9. Everyone was there. You were there.”
He turns to the actual Stanford Pines. “You weren’t.”
Uncle Stan shrugs. “So my brother disappeared on a research expedition for a while and I borrowed his identity in the meantime. It’s all among family.” He hammers Wirt on his back. “Now get in there and give your long-lost Uncle Ford a big hug.”
“I,” says Wirt, and closes his mouth. He opens it again. “I have so many problems with what you just said.”
“Yeesh,” says Uncle Stan. “You know, you’re hardly one to talk, kid. You had me making an entire fake identity, what, the second time we ever spoke? A good one, too. You should be careful where you toss that rock in this great big glass house.”
“Dad, you had a fake ID?” asks Dipper.
“Can we get fake IDs?” says Mabel.
“Definitely not,” Wirt says quickly. “That--that was different.” He coughs.
Everyone very carefully studies the grass on the off-chance that, perhaps, a hole would conveniently open up beneath them and swallow them all into the yawning earth. Or something.
“So,” says Wirt, still coughing, “is there anything else you forgot to tell me about Gravity Falls?”
Everyone very studiously does not make eye contact.
“Um. No. Definitely not,” says Dipper, also coughing.
…
The truth lifts Wirt up and drags him down again. It hangs around his neck like an albatross, whispers in his ear they don’t know they don’t know they don’t know what’s out there and you know you remember and you can’t forget, never never never and you’re the pilgrim, you’re of the forest, you belong to it, you can’t leave, come back, come back, come back.
It whispers:
Do you remember the woods, Wirt?
Do you remember the trees?
The Unknown stays with him, lives in him, follows him from the shadows at the edges of his vision. Wirt is the pilgrim and there is no pilgrim without a holy land of which to wander in dogged pursuit. The truth rails at him in a persistent act of flagellation, self-inflicted only in the sense that he hadn’t been able to shed it with the water of the lake.
It’s like this:
He hadn’t been able to forget, which means he’s stuck remembering. He is the pilgrim and an identity is not a thing that can be sloughed off.
What’s a pilgrim without faith?
What’s a faithful without preaching?
He has the truth, he carries it in his arms, and he thinks it might be a little bit easier to step the path if there were more to carry it. He tells the world the truth. He does it in a way that ensures no one would believe him.
Wirt Pines turns nineteen the day his first poem is published.
It is titled “The Bluebird.”
…
“There’s a lot of traffic,” Wirt says, peering out the window curiously. “I thought this was supposed to be one of those walk-everywhere, we-still-use-a-horse-and-buggy-on-special-occasions small towns.”
Stan lurches in his seat. “Is it Pioneer Days already? Kids! Get the pepper spray! They’re not gonna take me alive!”
“Calm down, Stanley,” scolds Stanford. “I haven’t seen a single covered wagon since coming here.” He frowns. “Is that a parade?”
Dipper, strewn across the backseat, his head plopped unceremoniously in Mabel’s lap, jerks up. “Parade?”
They’ve seemed paranoid lately, more so than usual. Their move to Gravity Falls had sent them into an ecstatic frenzy the night it had been decided, but rapidly crashed into a nervous fear by the next morning. Nothing he’s done has managed to pry their troubles out of them, and Wirt finds himself rapidly approaching a state of panic.
There’s something wrong with them. There has been since they were twelve, but it’s worse than ever lately. Wirt feels like something’s about to burst, but he’s not quite sure what.
“There’s a marching band,” says Wirt. “And floats. And big balloons of people.”
Leaning forward in his seat, he cranes his neck, trying to get a better glimpse. There are balloons tied to the cars further down, bobbing, haphazard things, with patchwork spots and distorted features. They flap madly in the wind as the cars veer around corners, up and down, and up and down. He can’t quite seem to make them out.
“There can’t be a parade,” says Dipper, his voice oddly worried. “There’s no celebration going on today. I know all the festivals of Gravity Falls, and there isn’t supposed to be one today.”
“Well, maybe they came up with a new one.”
“Someone would have told me if they did, Dad. Wendy or Soos or--”
Dipper stops.
“Mabel,” he says, his voice utterly level, “How many people did you call to tell we were moving back today?”
“Um, not that many,” says Mabel, her eyebrows pinched and her head tilting down. “Just Grenda and Candy and Pacifica and Soos and Wendy and Robbie and Tambry and Thompson and Lee and Nate and Lazy Susan and Sheriff Blubs and Deputy Durland and Mayor Tate and Old Man McGucket and--”
“Everyone. You told everyone.”
“Pretty much, yeah.”
“Hey, Grunkle Ford,” says Dipper, leaning forward in his seat. “This traffic is pretty slow. Maybe you should practice that fancy driving you learned while you were living in the, uh, Amazon for, uh, your research. Yeah. The Amazon.”
“That’s a good idea Dipper,” says apparently-not-dead Uncle Ford. He sounds worried, Wirt thinks. “It may be best to speed things up a little, for the moment.”
“No, let’s stay and watch for a little while,” says Wirt, craning his neck to look. “There’s no rush. It’s even kind of a nice coincidence, for our first day here. Like a welcome party.”
“You have no idea,” mutters Mabel.
“Oh look,” says Dipper, despairing. “The balloons are getting closer.”
Wirt squints. “What are they even of? Kids, have you seen my glasses?”
“Nope,” says Mabel, popping the ‘p.’ “They must be gone forever. No point watching a parade you can’t even see. Grunkle Ford, take us to the eye doctor instead.”
“Optometrist.”
“That too.”
“I’m certain I packed them. The floats are almost in front of us anyway.”
Behind him, Wirt’s kids make eye contact.
Dipper nods.
Mabel nods back.
Launching herself forward, Mabel surges between Ford and Wirt, a puff of glitter sparkling in her wake.
“Hey Dad! Dad, look over there! It must be important because I’m pointing and shouting really loud!”
“Mabel, sit back and buckle up this instant,” scolds Wirt. “You could get hurt.”
He glances back.
Dipper mutters something, low and distant.
And Wirt’s ears pop.
“What was that, Dipper?” he asks after a moment, blinking slowly. “I didn’t quite catch that.”
“I, uh, didn’t say anything. Nothing important from over here. Um. Yeah.”
“You’re laughing nervously.”
“I’m not laughing,” Dipper protests. “And nervously? Pssh. Why would I be nervous?”
Uncle Stan buries his face in his hands.
“Allllllrrrrriiiigggghhhhttt. Mabel, what is it that you wanted to show me?”
“I…. thought I saw the badger and the snake that are madly in love. They wander the town scaring small children and medium-sized adults. But, uh, it was just a, uh, stick.”
Wirt nods slowly.
“Right. Well then. Um. Let me know if you see them again.”
“Will do, Dad.”
Distantly, Wirt notices that Stan and Ford seem to be vibrating on either side of him. He rapidly gains an intimate awareness of just how tightly packed their rental truck is.
He shrugs, and turns back to the parade.
Faintly, he thinks he can still see the neon pink and dark blue of the balloons, nothing but fading pinpricks of color in a pale grey sky. The townsfolk scratch their heads around a suddenly-empty parade float.
“What happened to the balloons?”
“A, uh, big gust of wind tore them free and blew them away,” says Uncle Stan. “Very suddenly. All while your back was turned. Well, these things happen all the time. Nothing suspicious about that.”
“That’s… an oddly specific way of wording it.”
“Well, we should hurry,” says Uncle Ford, wrenching the car onto a sideroad, and also the sidewalk. “We want to beat the movers, don’t we?”
Wirt’s fingernails dig into the linoleum seat, and he thinks he sees his life pass before his eyes. And also maybe a few pedestrians.
“Maybe you should slow-- lookout!”
“You, uh, might want to close your eyes for this part, Dad,” says Dipper. “The, uh, Amazon had very different rules for driving.”
“Oh relax, Dipper. They had perfectly safe motor regulations there,” says Uncle Ford, careening through the narrow streets at 90 miles per hour.
He glances back. “In fact--”
“Road,” Wirt chokes out. “Road, road, road--”
Uncle Stan grins. “Welcome to Gravity Falls.”
…
Two weeks after the twins arrive back from their first summer at Gravity Falls, Wirt stuffs himself into the coat closet and calls Greg.
There had been… discrepancies.
Odd things. Things that shouldn’t bother him. Nightmares. What kid doesn’t have nightmares, right? All kids have nightmares. Nightmares are a normal thing. And jumpiness. Kids can be jumpy normally, right? Little shits like his twins, their default should probably be jumpy. They’re always up to some new scam or another. After spending the summer with his uncle of all people, those scams have probably graduated from an underground sticker-and-glitter-pen black market to like, tax evasion and rigging mayoral elections.
And wouldn’t that be a lovely problem to have? Tax evasion? Wirt is rooting for tax evasion.
But he can’t shake it. His twins step out the bus circle, they meet his and Beatrice’s eyes from across the car park, and Wirt thinks, My kids just walked out of hell.
Beatrice knows it, too. She goes stiff as a board at his side, and her hand grasps at Wirt’s, and she pastes on a blinding smile that’s a better lie than Wirt ever told. They give them kisses and bundle them into the car, and Wirt spends a solid five minutes gaping at the squealing pink behemoth he’s supposed to feed and house now.
Beatrice pats him on the arm, tells him it’s his own fault for nixing the dog idea, and orders him to shut his trap before he catches flies. And they’re off. Driving home like there’s nothing wrong in the world.
Wirt opens his mouth and asks, “How was your summer, bluebirds?”
The look Beatrice gives him suggests that Wirt has already irreparably ravaged whatever plan she had formulated to get the truth out of them.
“It was fine,” says Dipper, and that’s all they ever say.
It was fine. They had a nice time. Mabel got a pig, and a grappling hook, and Dipper got a new passion for dead languages and a massive crush on a girl named Wendy. Mabel got a punch to the arm for the last bit.
It’s the most illicit information Beatrice and Wirt can wheedle out of them.
They try the twins together. They try them apart. They try asking them casually and they try begging them to tell them anything, anything at all.
It was fine. It was fine. Why are they being so weird about this? Everything’s fine. They’re not jumpy. They’re acting how they always do. Mom and Dad are the weird ones, why are they always hovering now?
Yes, keep the light on when we sleep. Just. Just keep the light on.
Whatever happened, they can’t get a rise out of them. They’re locked down, strictly secret, and they don’t want Beatrice and Wirt to know a damn thing about the summer past a couple of boat trips and free pancakes they got one time.
One time, Wirt kneels before their spot on the couch and says, “Mabel, Dipper, I swear to God, whatever happened, we’ll help you. Just talk to us, and we’ll handle it, okay? You won’t ever have to go back to Gravity Falls again.”
It takes them three days to calm the kids down from the hysteria that unleashes, and even then, Wirt sees a new caution in their eyes. If they were locked down before, they’re at Fort Knox levels of security now.
Beatrice finds the highest-rated child trauma specialist in the city. She books the earliest available appointment and doesn’t tell the kids where they’re going until they’re already in the parking lot.
The therapist gets as far as, “Dipper, Mabel, it’s so nice to meet you. You can call me Bill--” before the twins simultaneously excuse themselves to the bathroom and then launch themselves out of a window.
When Wirt calls Uncle Stan, he gets a voicemail that says, “Hi, you’ve reached Stan Pines. I can’t come to the phone right now because I’m off chasing a lifetime of crushed dreams suddenly given new life. I will be out of cell service for the next three to eight business months. Don’t leave a message, because I won’t care. Sixer, if you don’t stop touching my pack, you’re gonna suddenly find yourself with a normal number of finge--”
Beep.
He’s at the end of his rope. He doesn’t have a rope. He never had a rope. He is not a person who handles high stress scenarios with any measure of grace or pose.
So he does what he does whenever he gets particularly overwhelmed, and he calls Greg.
The entire thing comes spilling out in a flood, the odd looks on their faces, the nightmares, the jumpiness that never calms and the persistent sense that something happened that changed his twins on a fundamental level. There’s a wall, now. If Wirt could just get over it, then maybe…
Things happened on the other sides of walls. You understood in a way you couldn’t once you glimpsed the other end.
Greg listens to it all, silent, patient, calm. Greg had grown up to be as reliable as a rock and as patient as can be, and never once lost his odd little flare. You wanted to tell Greg everything. He had an honest spirit.
“Wirt, that sounds familiar,” Greg tells him, gently. “After what happened when we were kids, the way we were…”
“No,” says Wirt, firm as he can. “No, they couldn’t have--no. It’s not that.”
“It’s something weird though, and they won’t talk about it. We did the exact same thing to Mom and Dad, after. Maybe they--”
“I’d know if my kids died, Greg,” snaps Wirt, and he slams the phone shut.
…
People do not live in the forest of Gravity Falls. The forest is treated as a homegrown demarcation, a boundary line more efficient than any fence. Neighborhoods stop where the trees begin.
The only one who lives beyond is the Pines family. The Pines belong in the woods.
“We gave Soos the Mystery Shack,” explains Uncle Stan, and he tears a dusty white sheet from the windowpane. “He’s moved in, set up shop with that gal of his. Ford and I built this place before that second summer the kids came down.”
“You built this place?”
The log cabin sits soundly in the forest, stout and secure in a glade not far from the Mystery Shack itself. It’s sturdy, the base ground solidly in stone and every last window reinforced with steel.
Briefly, Wirt worries about the animals in the area. There had been scratches in the stone, gouges in the wood, like something with curving scythes for claws had tried to tear their way in. And if it tried to get in the house, then it could still be in the woods, waiting.
And Wirt knows his kids. If there’s trouble in the woods, they’ll find it, usually at the most inconvenient moment while committing the most property damage possible.
But that’s impossible, Wirt decides. There’s no animal in the world with claws that big, and certainly none in the Pacific Northwest. Australia, maybe. Probably in Australia.
But not here.
“Better than dealing with the real estate office,” Uncle Stan grunts, sneezing into the dusty light.
Wirt clears his throat. “Uh. Yeah. They’re not that good here, are they?”
Uncle Stan peers at him curiously. “They give you some kind of trouble?”
“It’s more that they were weird,” Wirt explains, folding a sheet neatly into squares. “I thought that we’d be able to find some listings, maybe have some tours of the neighborhood scheduled, but they kept trying to redirect me to a construction company and then only sent me a list of weird old abandoned cabins in the woods when I insisted I wanted to buy, not build.” He tilts his head. “Maybe that was because of you and Uncle Ford.”
Turning, Uncle Stan shuffles to the couch, yanking the covering off with an uneasy flourish. “How so?”
“They said that the Pines family always lived in the woods, away from town. Refused to consider anything else the second they heard my name. Said it was best for everyone if the Pines kept their space.”
Uncle Stan launches into another fit of coughs, but Wirt doesn’t think it’s from the dust. “Well, you know Ford--”
“--I don’t, actually--”
“--crazy experiments, wacky light shows, mad scientist type stuff. Better off in the woods than in the town.”
“But I’m not a scientist; I’m a poet. There’s a bit of a difference.”
“Eh, the kids love the woods more than the town, anyway. Besides, the area may be good for your work. Commune with nature and all that. You wrote a bunch about that kind of thing in your early stuff, didn’t you?”
“Yeah, maybe,” Wirt says, staring out the window. He looks at the woods, at the trees, all awash red and green and gold in the setting sun, and he thinks of claws, of teeth, of eyes that glow and songs that echo in your ears no matter how far you flee, and he says, “I don’t like the forest, much.”
…
Wirt writes “The Woodsman,” “The Bell,” “The Schoolhouse” and “The Mill.” He writes “The Gnome and the Elephant,” “The Edelwood Tree,” “The Dark Lantern.” He writes of wolves, of witches, of iridescent eyes that stalk the night and of stolen horses that want to steal. He fills his journals with frantic, scrabbling words in hopes that they’ll stop ricocheting in his ears, pours out truth disguised as a fable, a lie, and he thinks that maybe, if enough people think it, it’ll become true.
At the bottom of each poem there is a signature, a farewell and a warning and a truth all in one.
It reads:
beware the beast
…
Out of all of Gravity Falls’ inhabitants, Wirt has only met one apart from his own uncle. Soos Ramirez finds his way to their house the Christmas following the twins’ first summer. In the weeks leading up to the holiday season, Dipper and Mabel had come to them both with more genuine excitement than they’d wrought from either of them in months.
“Please,” Mabel begs, and that damn pig is in his lap, that pig that chewed up every one of his ties and is the only thing left to make Mabel laugh. “Soos’s abuelita won a cruise and Melody can’t take him with her because her parents are terrible and he’s going to be all alone for Christmas. He needs to be with family! We have to invite him.”
“Please,” Dipper adds. “He can sleep in my bed.”
“And Dipper can sleep in my bed.”
“And we’ll take care of everything. Please?”
And then they smile. Really, genuinely smile, for the first time since Gravity Falls. Because of Gravity Falls.
They cave. They can’t help doing anything else. Besides, they figure, maybe now that they have an actual inhabitant of Gravity Falls, they might get some answers.
The first night, Beatrice and him corner him when he’s already happily lodged on their futon.
“Mr. and Mrs. Pines. I am so honored that you invited me for your Christmas.” He makes an uncomfortable amount of eye contact. “So. Honored.”
“We’re honored to have you with us, Soos,” Beatrice says, and the look settles on her face, the one that makes men hang themselves with their own words in courtrooms and still tricks Wirt into losing arguments after almost fifteen years of marriage. “But we were hoping to talk to you about last summer.”
Soos’s eyes shift uneasily. “Um. Okay.”
And he proceeds to tell them absolutely nothing.
Oh, he tells them of the Mystery Shack, of a grunkle that loves them more than anything and a day on a lake. He tells them of a small town that loves his kids and a small town his kids love. But it’s not what they want.
“That’s wonderful,” says Wirt, impatiently, and Beatrice glowers at him. Wirt glowers back. For some reason, Beatrice counts him as a liability to her evil plans, or whatever. Apparently, he lacks “sense” and “people skills.”
“We need to know what really happened to them, though,” insists Wirt. “They haven’t been sleeping properly since they came back, and they’ve been having trouble in school. We know something happened, and we want to know what.”
Soos straightens.
“The little dudes have been having trouble?” he demands. “They didn’t tell anyone that.”
“We can’t help them without knowing what’s wrong,” says Beatrice. “We were hoping you could help us with that.”
Soos nods. “You got it, Mrs. Pines. I won’t let you down.”
“That’s not what we meant--”
Soos tells them nothing, but he talks to the twins the next day, and then the day after that, and then the day after that. Wirt and Beatrice never find out what they discuss, but everyone involved cries. Including Soos.
Mostly Soos.
The twins go back to the therapist after the holidays. They call him William. And, slowly but surely, they start to get a little better. They’re not the same after Gravity Falls. Never the same. But they aren’t as bad, and for that, Wirt has a special place in his heart for Soos Ramirez.
“SOOS!”
But he would love it if he were absolutely anywhere else at the moment.
It’s nothing against Soos. It’s against the sound coming out of his daughter’s mouth, which has reached a pitch that should only be audible to dogs and small, shifty-eyed animals, but is rather one that God deigned humans to suffer as well.
“--omigosh omigosh it’s so pretty I can’t believe it when did this happen omigosh omigosh omigosh--”
Wirt turns.
His twins have attached themselves soundly to Soos, each one tucked securely into either side. Dipper punches Soos companionably on the arm, madly grinning, and then plugs his ears with a wince. Mabel, for her part, has already captured a victim in her glitter-crusted hands, and does not seem to be keen on letting go any time soon.
Wirt limps his way over.
“Soos,” he greets, smiling. “And this must be Melody. It’s been awhile.”
“Mr. Pines sir!” Soos says, eagerly shaking both his hands. “We are all like, so excited that you have decided to move these little dudes to Gravity Falls permanently.” He leans forward until he’s uncomfortably close. “So. Excited.”
“I’m excited,” Wirt says, carefully extracting his hands with a wince. “I can’t wait to see more of the town my kids love so much.”
Ah, awkward silence his old friend.
Wirt clears his throat, “So what’s all the excitement about?”
Mabel shrieks.
“Soos and Melody are getting married,” Mabel screams, and a puff of glitter explodes from each sleeve. God bless her, Wirt should have never okay’d that theatre effects course. “This is the best day of my life.”
Dipper tilts his head. “What about that day where you won an entire ice cream cake at that crafts fair, ate it in under four minutes, and turned your entire mouth pink and purple?”
“You did what?” says Wirt.
“So. Much. Better,” replies Mabel.
Shaking his head slightly, Wirt says, “Congratulations, you two. I’m so happy for you.”
“Thank you, Mr. Pines. It means a lot coming from you. You and Mrs. Pines are like, relationship goals.”
Tension begins to wrap around Wirt’s smile like tree roots. He nods amiably. Dipper coughs.
Wincing, Soos says, “I’m sorry for your loss, Mr. Pines, little Pines. Mrs. Pines was a good lady.”
Wirt smiles, and he says, “She really was.”
…
When Wirt is nineteen years old, he meets his wife for the second first time.
He’s wearing a suit, grey and wool with gold buttons that gleamy dully in the sun. It belonged Wirt’s grandfather and it shows, and Wirt hates it with everything in him. His mother had insisted, though, begged him to dress up for meeting his publisher earlier in the day, and Wirt had acquiesced just to make the fighting stop. He regrets it every time he looks in the mirror.
He looks like he belongs in the Unknown. It worries him, because a part of him still suspects it’s true
He walks by the lake’s edge, the check for his first poem in his pocket and his journal in his hand, looks at the dark, languid waves, the light of the quarter-moon glinting dangerously off the knife-edged crests, and he hears, come back, come back, come back.
I will, he thinks. but not yet.
The grass beneath his feet is bright and green, lush in a way that nothing in the Unknown ever was. The colors had almost been overly-saturated there, everything dark and mossy like fertile black earth.
Sometimes, when Wirt closes his eyes for too long, when he opens them again and can’t remember if he ever left, he looks for the bright. He looks for the sun.
Then he knows. Only then.
He breaks his gaze away from the water, his eyes skipping back to the shore, and there’s something red in between.
Wirt’s journal drops to the grass.
“Hey!” he calls, his feet already skidding down the muddy bank. “Are you okay?”
The girl more marches than swims, stumbling through the water with a stubborn grit Wirt has only seen once before. Her hair, long and sunset-red, plasters across her face like an octopus, and her sky-blue dress tries to drag her back beneath like said octopus’s bigger, meaner cousin.
Wirt pauses before plunging into the water.
(comebackcomebackcomeback)
His shoes enter the muddy lake bed with a squelch.
It’s not winter but the water still chills him to the bone, and his ridiculous suit retains water like a sponge. He swims through the lake, to the girl, and he very carefully keeps his head above the waves.
comebackcomebackcomeback, sings the lake beneath. come back, back to the Unknown, you’re of it, from it, you don’t belong anywhere else.
Gritting his teeth, Wirt plunges his arms through the water, and he spits, not yet.
He reaches the girl when she’s halfway to shore.
“Let me help you,” he chokes out, spray lashing at his mouth.
“I’m fine,” she says, still trying to stomp through a solid twenty feet of water.
“Oh, I can see that.” Wirt rolls his eyes. “Just let me help. Drowning is not fun, I can tell you that.”
“You’re going to drown us both if you don’t— hey!”
Grabbing her by the waist, Wirt begins to drag her back to shore.
“I don’t need your help!”
“And I don’t need you to drag us both underwater! Do you even know how to swim?”
“You’re the one who’s going to drag us both under! Why don’t you just take your help and shove it up your— gurrrpke.”
Wirt begins to drown. The girl goes down with him.
They push back up towards the moonlight together, the water dancing in their eyes farther and farther away. They break the surface gasping, coughing, and they shake their heads as one.
“Swim now,” says the girl, and she sounds so familiar. “Fight later.”
“Agreed.”
They tumble onto semi-solid mud in a pile, choking and gasping all the while. Wirt’s fingers squelch deeper into the mud, and he thinks he feels something swim around his ankle. He shudders.
He hates the water. He hates the woods.
“Well, let’s never do that again,” says Wirt, spluttering.
“Agreed,” says the girl, wiping her tangled hair, all splayed across her face like a spiderweb, out of her eyes with a muddy hand.
Taking her hand in his, Wirt begins to yank them both to their feet.
She looks at him. She freezes.
She says: “Wirt?”
“Do I know you?” he asks, and then he stops as well.
He says: “Beatrice?”
Beatrice nods.
Wirt drops her.
“Wirt.”
“Sorry!” Wirt exclaims, jumping forward. He moves to grab her again, but Beatrice simply glares at him. He immediately retreats. “Sorry, I, uh, just didn’t expect to see you. Here. And not a bluebird. I mean, I guess you wouldn’t be a bluebird anymore, what with the scissors and all, but, um. How are you here again?”
Blinking slowly, Beatrice says, “I don’t know. I don’t remember how I got in the water.”
“That makes sense,” Wirt says. “At least, I think it does. I didn’t remember entering the Unknown; I was just suddenly in the woods, and lost, and I didn’t realize it until after. I guess it would work the same way, you know. Backwards.”
She peers around him. “Where is ‘backwards,’ exactly?”
“What? Oh, uh, Piedmont. Piedmont, California.”
“What’s ‘California?’”
“That... is a much harder question to answer. But don’t worry, because Greg and I will help you find a way back home. It’s only fair, after all you did for us. Minus the, uh, whole, ‘trying to enslave us to a witch’ thing. That part kind of sucked.”
Beatrice gives him a tired look. Wirt squirms.
“Greg?” she says after a moment. “He’s okay?”
“Oh, yeah, definitely. He’s doing really great.”
“Does he… remember me?”
Ducking his head, Wirt nods. “He remembers you. Misses you. We talk about it, sometimes. About the Unknown.”
Beatrice nods as well. “That’s, uh, good. That he remembers.”
Clearing his throat, Wirt says, “Well, let’s get out of this lake. My parents live up the road from here; you can borrow some of my mom’s clothes for now, and you can stay at my apartment until we figure out how to get you home.”
He holds out his hand.
She takes it.
…
Wendy comes next.
Wirt has heard plenty of Wendy before. She was, apparently, the coolest person on the face of planet earth, and if there was a chance to be anyone other than yourself, you should pick Wendy Corduroy. For a solid month after coming back, Dipper had a stutter and a blush whenever she came up, and it was a fun, brutal family game to tease him over it, because no family is complete without noticing a weakness and targeting it like a violent predator. He grew out of it before the next summer came to pass, much to Mabel’s dismay. Still, Wirt gets a fair load of gushing praise for Wendy every time Gravity Falls comes up.
The fact that she decides to come in through the window instead of the door throws him for a moment, however.
“Hey, little dudes,” she says, casually sliding the window closed behind her like it’s the most natural thing in the world. “Welcome back!”
Wirt stares for a moment, decides that if this was a home invasion there’d be more screaming involved, and he sets his box on the kitchen table.
“Wendy!” Dipper says, beaming, and he looks happier in that moment than he’s been in weeks. “How’s it going?”
Wendy pulls him into a half-hug, then snatches his cap from his head before settling her own down in its place.
“Pretty good,” she says. “Kinda sad I’ll be losing that hat for good now.”
Dipper pulls the pine tree hat lower over his face. “It is pretty cool.”
“Eh, I’m happier to have you guys back.” She shifts awkwardly, rubbing the back of her neck. “The circumstances could be better, though. I’m sorry for your loss, Dipper.”
Dipper ducks his head. “Thanks, Wendy.”
Someone coughs.
“Well,” says Mabel, “if my dorky little brother is done hugging you, that means it’s my turn.”
“Hey, Mabel!” says Wendy, and she wraps her in a hug. Then, she releases her, and turns to the others. “Mr. Pines,” she says, nodding to Uncle Stanley. “Mr. Pines Part Two,” she says, nodding to Uncle Stanford. She looks at Wirt, then scratches the back of her head before holding out a hand. “I don’t believe we’ve met.”
“Wirt Pines,” says Wirt, taking her hand with a smile. “And you’re the famous Wendy.”
“Famous, huh?”
Wendy bumps Dipper’s shoulder with hers, smiling smugly.
Dipper splutters. “Wha--I--Mabel’s the one always talking about our friends here--I--don’t--”
Wendy laughs.
“What’s this about the hats?” asks Wirt after a moment. “You know, I think that’s the first time I’ve seen Dipper without his fur-skin in three years.”
Everyone freezes.
“... Was it something I said?”
“Oh my gosh, Mr. Pines,” says Wendy, utterly thrown, “you don’t know.”
“... I don’t know what?”
“The hat,” says Mabel, her voice carrying the reverence usually reserved for craft conventions and industrial-sized buckets of sprinkles. “Dipper’s hat. His pine tree hat.”
“I have literally never seen that hat before in my life, sweetheart.”
“Dipper’s kinda famous for his pine tree hat around here,” says Wendy, and Dipper’s cheeks flush scarlet. “It’s like his symbol or something. You know, like the Superman ‘S’ or the Bat Signal, only, you know, less cool.”
Dipper clears his throat awkwardly. “I’m always wearing it when I’m here. I guess I never thought about the fact that you never saw it.”
“Ah.” Wirt nods, and for a moment, he feels oddly bereft. “Well, I’m glad I get to see it now.”
He’s starting to expect awkward silences now.
“You kids seem popular around here,” he tries. “Iconic hats, lots of friends--it’s nice.”
Wendy’s eyes widen.
“Um,” she says. “About that.”
She eyes Wirt nervously.
“Everyone’s really excited to see you guys,” she says with all the transparency of a melted car tire. “Um. They’re really--happy--you two are finally moving down here.”
“Uh, yeah.” Dipper coughs nervously. “We noticed.”
“Just brace yourselves,” she warns. “We told everyone to restrain themselves, but you know how Gravity Falls can be. Remember how they used to get about Little Gideon? Just. Expect a lot of visitors.”
Huh, Wirt thinks, watching as both Stanford and Stanley excuse themselves, sweating profusely. That’s not suspicious at all.
“I think it’s nice that your friends want to visit,” says Wirt. “I can’t wait to get to know this place.”
“So,” says Wendy. “How much did the little dudes tell you about their summers here?”
“Oh, I don’t know. They told me about the friends they made, some of the things they did. Why?”
“Right.” Wendy nods. “Um. I have to leave immediately.”
“Immediately?”
“Yep,” she says, jerking the window open and climbing out. “I, um, I just remembered, I left my stove on. Bye, guys. It was nice to meet you, Mr. Pines.”
Well, that isn’t suspicious at all.
“She was nice,” says Wirt, after a moment.
Dipper jerks violently. “Um, yeah! She’s really nice.”
“It’s a shame about her stove, though.”
Dipper laughs nervously. “Right. Total shame. That.”
It’s embarrassing, Wirt decides. He was way better at hiding things when he was their age.
“You know,” Wirt says, making eye contact with Mabel over his son’s head and winking, “she looks a bit like your mother.”
Dipper squints at them. “This stopped being funny when I was thirteen.”
“No, Dad is right, I think so too,” says Mabel. “I think so too.”
“I’m going to live in the woods and you’ll never see me again.”
“Same hair,” lists Wirt. “She carries herself the same way, too. Like you don’t want to mess with her.”
“Well, you don’t want to mess with Wendy,” says Dipper. “She’s scary.”
“So was your mother,” says Wirt, and he shrugs.
Dipper buries his face in his hands. “I hate you both.”
“I can live with that,” says Wirt, glancing at Mabel.
“Yeah, me too.”
“Just. Ugh. Stop.”
“All right, all right,” Wirt says. “We’ll stop.”
“For now,” adds Mabel.
Dipper groans.
“So, about these people that are coming. How much is a lot?”
“Um,” says Mabel.
…
The thing about Beatrice and Wirt was that putting them together was like tying two stubborn old goats together, pointing them in opposite directions, and lighting a firecracker between them.
They did not cooperate.
In Greg’s opinion, whatever Creator there ever was made Wirt, looked at him slightly askance, checked their notes again, and decided that something went terribly wrong and they should probably do precisely the opposite in the next try.
And thus came Beatrice. Gloriously disturbed in the exact opposite manner.
Wirt waffles; Beatrice likes action. By the time Wirt has made a decision, Beatrice has already created four problems and fixed three. Beatrice was cunning and made hard decisions and Wirt more liked to sit in the grass and ponder for a moment.
They balanced each other. They were both so terrible at the world, is the thing. Beatrice, in her defence, spent much less time in it than Wirt. Wirt just never got the hang of things. Beatrice, meanwhile, had gotten a fairly good grasp on it by the end. She just thought it was dumb as hell and she’d be doing things her way.
God, Wirt misses her. She’d have burnt this damn town to the ground for giving her trouble. It would have made a terrible mess but between the two of them, they always found a middle ground.
She was always ready for things sooner than he was. She was always able to find an answer to things sooner, even if it was the wrong one. They made terrible messes between the two of them, but they were always good at cleaning the other’s up.
He wishes she were here. He thinks she could fix this better than he ever could.
But she’s already home. She did that first too.
…
Wirt has never seen this much food in his life.
They’re stacked on every available surface, casserole dishes and pie tins. They had arrived with a quick succession of knocks on the door not long after the moving truck left, along with a veritable parade of people, some of whom had still been in their actual parade outfits.
At this rate, Wirt thinks, they’ll have received the entire town by nightfall.
“You kids sure are popular, aren’t you?” Wirt says, slipping up next to his twins. “Everyone wants to come say hello.”
Dipper and Mabel jump in unison.
Frowning, Wirt tilts his head.
He’ll call Greg tonight, Wirt decides. If there’s anyone who can find out what’s wrong with his kids, it’s him.
“Well, you know small towns,” Dipper says quickly.”Everyone’s really neighborly.”
“And Grunkles Ford and Stan are old,” Mabel adds. “Really, really old. Ancient. If the neighborhood doesn’t feed them, they’ll starve.”
Wirt stares at his kids.
His kids stare back.
“.... Okay,” Wirt says. “It’s nice of them, anyway.”
He’d sent his kids to live with a con-man for three summers straight, Wirt thinks. The least his kids could have done was learn how to lie convincingly.
But what were they lying about?
…
“I’ll telling you Greg,” says Wirt, shouldering his bedroom door closed. “Something’s off about this place. Almost everyone in the town came to welcome us today, and they all started clamming up halfway into a conversation as if they said too much. And the woods.” Wirt shudders. “I always feel as if I’m being watched in the woods.”
“You already knew something was off about Gravity Falls,” Greg points out. “And you always feel that way in the woods.”
“This is different. With other woods, it’s just paranoia. Here it feels like…”
“The Beast,” Greg finishes, hushed. “But the Beast is gone; we both heard the Huntsman kill him. And--and it can’t be the Unknown there. It’s not possible.”
“It feels like the Unknown. I can’t explain it, but it does.”
“You don’t have a house yet, right?”
“Right,” says Wirt. “I’m going down to the realtor’s office tomorrow to see if we can sort something out, but for now we’re staying with Uncle Ford and Uncle Stan.”
“... we have an Uncle Ford and an Uncle Stan?”
“Right.” Wirt sighs. He explains.
Greg huffs. “No one told me that Uncle Stanley was still alive.”
“He’s not your Uncle Stanley. And it wasn’t your kids who were living with him.”
“Did Dipper and Mabel really not tell you?”
“Nope,” Wirt pinches his nose. “This is all tied back to that summer when they were twelve, I can feel it.”
“They were never the same after that,” agrees Greg. “But you never found out what happened. What makes you think you’ll find it now?”
“I don’t see what my other options are. I’ve got two kids downstairs watching Ducktective with a man who’s supposed to be dead, and another man who’s supposed to be the other man.”
“You don’t have to stay there, you know,” says Greg. “You could leave Gravity Falls.”
“But we just moved up here.”
“You don’t have a house yet. You can work from anywhere, and it’s summer, so you have a good amount of time to find a new school for the kids. Why did you even go there in the first place? You hate the woods.”
Wirt bites his lip.
It’s an incredibly attractive idea, he’s not going to lie. He could take his kids away from Gravity Falls, where everyone knows them but no one will say why, from the not-dead Grunkles and the forest that watches its occupants. He could leave, maybe go stay with Greg for a while.
There’s a clatter of footsteps behind him, a hammering up the stairs that bubbles with shouts, and then the door slams open behind him.
Wirt is immediately tackled from both sides.
“I got him first!” says Mabel, latching onto his left side with all the force of a small army. “Mabel for the win!”
“What? No way!” says Dipper, snaking his arm under Wirt’s right. “I got Dad first. Right, Dad?”
“Um,” says Wirt, cradling the phone precariously in his hands. “Why do you have me?”
“Dad, you have to come downstairs,” Dipper says, his face somber. “We’re playing Dungeons, Dungeons, and more Dungeons, and you have to be on my team.”
“No, you have to be on the cool team, with me and Grunkle Stan,” says Mabel. “Team Rainbow Kitten Sparkles for the win!”
“Grunkle Ford has been planning a campaign for us since last summer,” says Dipper, tugging him out the door. “We’re two rival questing groups battling it out for the same bounty. It’s Grunkle Ford and me against Mabel and Grunkle Stan, and you have to join my team.”
“Dad’s gonna join my team,” says Mabel. “And we’ll lead our forces to victory!”
“Mabel, for the last time, you don’t get forces. You’re a bard. You get a lute.”
“Eh, I can work with that.”
“Dipper,” Uncle Ford calls, appearing at the bottom of the stairs. “Come down and talk strategy. It’s time to crush--I mean, have a friendly game amongst family.”
“Sweetheart,” says Uncle Stan, walking up beside him. “Come down here and help your Grunkle Stan grind these nerds into the dust. We got a point to make.”
“Coming!”
His twins turn to him expectantly.
“Are you coming, Dad?” Dipper asks hopefully.
Wirt smiles. “I’ll be right down,” he promises. “I just have to say goodbye to Greg.”
“Oh, hi, Uncle Greg!” Mabel calls, staring at the phone. “I can’t talk right now, I have to go utterly destroy Dipper’s will to live. Love you!”
“Hi, Uncle Greg! Mabel’s going to lose and I’m going to laugh when I beat her. Love you!”
Wirt waits until they thunder back down the stairs, laughing all the while, before he raises the phone to his ear once more.
“I have to make this work, Greg,” he says. “I have to.”
…
Wirt grunts as he drags himself up the roof access. He got old, somewhere along the time. It was a terrible crime he’s still looking for the perpetrator of. One day he was walking along, young and agile, and the next--bang. Old. His knee clicks when he bends it and he once got excited about a good coupon.
Devastating.
Dipper blinks at him. “Dad? What are you doing up here?”
“I wanted to see where you got off to. May I?”
Dipper blinks again, then nods to the spot next to him. “Sure.”
His knee pops again when he lowers himself into seated position, the traitor. Might as well make a deposit on the retirement home now.
“You got a nice little place, huh?” says Wirt, glancing around with interest.
Dipper has a telescope set up to the side, and a nice little area with a lawn chair and a cooler. There’s a chest with blankets and spare pens, and on Dipper’s lap, he already has his journal open.
When he sees Wirt looking, he immediately shuts it.
The journals came to be not long after the first summer. Dipper went out one day and put three weeks worth of allowance towards a sturdy leather one, dyed a dark, deep blue. He stenciled the Big Dipper on the front himself with Mabel’s gold paints and proceeded to scribble all sorts of odd things in it that he never saw fit to explain to either of them. Dead languages, sections of old manuscripts penned by raving lunatics in ages where they thought leeches were a thing you should put on your body, that sort of thing.
It got worse when Beatrice got sick. He drew into himself entirely in a way Mabel never did. He locked himself away with his journal and spent hours and hours writing in it with a frantic, nigh-religious fervor.
When she died, he just. Stopped. Everything. He shut down in a way Wirt has never seen before, and he’d give anything to stop from happening again. This is the first time he’s seen him with his journal since the hospital.
“What are you writing?”
“Uh, constellation stuff.” There’s a couple old looking books open at Dipper’s side. He knocks those closed too. “It’s boring.”
“I like constellations,” lies Wirt. He hates the outdoors. He hates anything tangentially related to the outdoors. He hates being reminded the outside is a thing that exists. “Tell me about it.”
“Uh, okay.” He nods to the sky. “There’s, uh, some unique constellation formations this summer. People used to think that was important.”
“Important how?”
“Magical?” Dipper scratches the back of his head. “Things happen when the sun, moon, or stars act differently. It affects a lot--babies being born, crops, waves, that sort of thing. People used to think the moon looking a certain way or the stars being in a certain arrangement could even open portals between worlds.”
The woods of Gravity Falls are so dark this time of night. They shudder in the space beyond the house, rustling in the warm summer breeze. When Wirt looks at them, he can almost see the glow of the Beast’s eyes.
“What do you think?”
Dipper looks startled, suddenly. “About what?”
“Stars. The moon. Can it do all that?”
He doesn’t meet Wirt’s eyes. “You’re asking me if I think the stars are going to open a magical portal to another world in Gravity Falls?”
“Well, no,” says Wirt. “I didn’t ask that.”
“Good. Because that’d be ridiculous.”
“Huh.”
It was always night, in the Unknown, except when it wasn’t. It never made any sense, the shift of the day. Wirt never remembered the sun rising. He never remembered the sun set. It followed no predictable pattern, no rule, and Wirt hadn’t realized how odd that was until he was out of it.
Like waking up from a dream. You suddenly realize how little sense it had made.
“You know you can tell me anything, Dip. Right?”
Dipper smiles at him, pained, thin. He doesn’t reply.