Work Text:
Area Name/Title: Gravity Falls
Description: Small lumber town and surrounding wooded area. Uninhabited by humans since August 2012
Reason(s) for quarantine:
Mabel gripped the copy of the document tightly, staring in distaste at the black ink. Radiation from a nuclear accident, the report said.
Mabel scoffed at the bullshit federal cover-up. After the chaos of Weirdmageddon, the government had swooped in once again upon Gravity Falls, although this time without arresting Stan. While it had been hard to pretend that she didn’t know agents Powers and Trigger, nobody had thought much of the mentally scarred 13-year-old’s behavior was particularly unusual. She had, after all, just survived the apocalypse. Being scared of “strangers” in black suits wasn’t exactly suspicious behavior. Now, Mabel stood on the hill overlooking the town of Gravity Falls, a ghost town that hadn’t been touched in almost a decade.
The now-crumpled report fell from limp hands. Mabel didn’t bother to pick it back up, she’d read the damn thing more than enough times in the past few years. She returned to her car and climbed into the driver’s seat, starting it up and driving down the road to the town she’d once loved.
For eight years, Mabel had buried these memories deep within her mind. Now, at age 21, she had decided that it was time to come back and come to terms with her worst nightmare.
Mabel drove down the achingly familiar road to the Mystery Shack. After having been used as a giant battle robot against Bill and then left alone for eight years, the Shack was in an even worse state of disrepair than she had ever seen it. Mabel was struck with the realization of just how critical Soos had been to keeping the Shack from completely falling down back when it had still hosted gullible tourists and hyperactive pre-teens.
Mabel immediately regretted thinking of Soos as a painful memory bubbled to the surface…
Mabel tripped and fell as she ran, and stayed down. Their plan to enact the zodiac had failed and she, Dipper, and Soos had fled down one of the Fearamid’s long, winding passages.
Mabel didn’t want to get up. She wanted to curl up right here, give in to despair, and never have to see Bill again. She’d seen Bill trap the Stans in a magic cage as she’d fled. She’d seen him flick Robbie aside out of the hole in the Fearamid’s wall, heard his scream as he fell to what was sure to be his death. She’d seen him swat Wendy and Pacifica aside and had seen them hit a wall and fall to the floor, unresponsive. She hadn’t known if they were dead or just unconscious. Bill hadn’t seemed to care.
Mabel felt large arms wrap around her and lift her off the ground. Soos cradled her as he and Dipper continued to run, fleeing the abomination causing them so much pain.
They ran through the twisting halls, Mabel clinging to Soos’s shirt and crying. They ran and ran, until they heard a crashing noise behind them. Mabel peeked over Soos’s shirt to see a sight that she would never be able to get out of her mind: Bill, now a three-dimensional pyramid with three segments, glowing teeth, and lolling tongues, had broken through a wall a great distance behind them and was clambering toward them on six grotesque legs. Soos glanced back, then set Mabel down on her feet. He turned toward Bill and turned his hat backwards, glaring down the corridor with a fierce look in his eye.
“Soos, what are you doing?” Dipper asked, panicked. “We need to keep moving!”
Soos didn’t look at him. “You dudes go ahead.” he said, staring at the approaching demon. “I’ll slow him down while you escape.”
The twins’ eyes widened as they realized what Soos was saying. “Soos are you crazy?” he demanded. “This is Bill We’re talking about! He’ll destroy you!”
Soos turned back around and knelt by the twins, putting a hand on their shoulders. “Look, dudes, the two of you have done more for me in just one summer than I can ever begin to thank you for in a lifetime.” He stopped to wipe a tear from his eye. “Now, I need you dudes to run. No matter what, I’ll always be happy as long as you two are safe.” Her pulled them into a hug. “I love you dudes.”
“We love you, too, Soos.” Mabel said, tears falling freely down her face.
“Yeah, dude.” Dipper said, trying and failing to hold back tears of his own. “We’ll never forget you.”
They embraced tightly for a moment, before Soos pushed them down the corridor. “Now, go, dudes!”
Feeling like a coward, Mabel ran and didn’t look back. She heard Soos’s determined yell as he charged toward Bill, heard when it turned into a scream of pain. She heard when that scream cut off.
She didn’t know if Soos had even succeeded in slowing Bill down. Judging by how long it was before Bill caught them, she really didn’t think so.
The memory faded, leaving Mabel leaning against a tree, whimpering and blinking back anguished tears. Even after eight years, thoughts of Soos still brought such sadness it was like losing him all over again. Losing Soos had been like losing a brother, a father, and a son all at the same time. She had seen what was left of Soos’s body after the ultimate defeat of Bill. If there had ever been any hope that he had survived, it was quashed in that moment.
Mabel took one more look at the Mystery Shack before getting back in her car. She didn’t feel emotionally stable enough to enter the Shack. She told herself that the Shack was probably structurally unsound and that going in was a terrible idea, but she knew in her heart that she just didn’t want to face the memories that she knew would resurface.
Before the government had swept in, the few survivors of Weirdmageddon had turned the area under where the Fearamid once floated into a mass memorial cemetery. The idea for the memorial cemetery had initially been Mr. Valentino’s. Mabel could still see the pained expression on the normally optimistic man’s face, his unusually lighthearted attitude toward death long since run dry. Apparently, burying bodies was considerably less funny when those bodies belonged to your wife and son.
Mabel found herself wandering through the cemetery, thinking about all those whom Bill had killed without a second thought. As she walked, Mabel forced herself to remember all those whose graves she passed. She thought of Lazy Susan, such a kind woman, who had always smelled of pancakes and pie. The ovens in Greasy’s Diner would never be lit again. Toby Determined, while always so weird, had brought color to any occasion. He now slept forever, and the world felt grayer for it. Preston and Priscilla Northwest had a larger and fancier tombstone than anyone else in the cemetery, but that was all that their money could do for them. All the money in the world couldn’t save them from a demon who cared little about paper money (but surprisingly, an awful lot about gold). Tad Strange, for all his normalcy, had fallen victim to the weirdness. His voice had always been calm, ever-soothing, and perhaps in another world, it could have belonged to the host of a community radio show. But this was this world, no other, and that voice had been silenced forever.
Mabel stopped at a large headstone, one as great in size as the family it stood in memory of. The shared headstone of Manly Dan and the Corduroy brothers, who had been killed as thoughtlessly as any others by the rampaging dream demon. Wendy, the only member of her family to survive, had insisted on chopping down trees for the wood for their caskets herself.
“It’s what they would have wanted.” she’d said, her face set in determination and grief. Even having lost her mother at a young age, and been raised in a family of boys, Wendy had never looked so alone.
Mabel fell to her knees at the graves of Candy and Grenda. Her best friends, her people, and she didn’t even know how they died. She knew that they had stayed in the Shack to battle Bill with the others, but she didn’t know if it had been him or one of his demon underlings who’d finished them.
Mabel cast a forlorn look at the grave of Bud Gleeful. She hadn’t seen the man during Weirdmageddon at all, but she did know of his son’s contribution. She hadn’t been personally present for the moment that Gideon had turned against Bill, but she had certainly seen the results of it. She had visited Gideon in the hospital after it was all over, and had continued to do so regularly in the years since. Apparently, magical dancing curses had a detrimental effect on the human muscles and nervous system. Two days after Weirdmageddon had ended, Gideon had fully lost the use of his legs, and the paralysis was slowly creeping up his body. The doctors expected him to lose use of his arms around age 30. At least he had his prison friends to take care of him. Or at least, the ones who’d survived, Mabel thought bitterly, glancing at the graves of Killbone and Ghost-Eyes.
Mabel got up and somberly walked back to her car. There was one more place she needed to visit, one more place she needed to come to terms with. The spot at the very head of the cemetery, where the grave of the worst marked the graves of the best.
Her heart filled with grief and dread, Mabel set out for Bill’s statue.
Mabel and Dipper struggled against Bill’s grasp as the demon took them back to his throne room. They could see the carnage and death that Bill had wreaked since they had last been in there, and Mabel turned away in disgust. So many dead…
Her eyes fell on the pyramidal cage containing the Stans. Bill held out the twins for Stan and Ford to see.
“I’ve got the kiddos, Sixer!” Bill said gleefully. “You know, I think I’ll kill one of ‘em now, just for the heck of it! Eenie,” a shooting star flashed over his eye. “Meenie,” the shooting star was replaced with a pine tree. “Minee…” the shooting star was back, and, “YOU!” Bill said, the pine tree glaring down at Dipper.
“Wait! Don’t hurt him! Please, listen to me!” Ford cried. Bill’s eye turned to Ford.
“You ready to hand over that equation, then?” Bill demanded.
“No, I can’t, I…” Ford tried to say, but Bill cut him off.
“WRONG ANSWER!” the demon shrieked, his body turning red. The cage opened for just long enough for Bill to throw Mabel in before snapping shut. Mabel sprang to her feet and dashed to the cage wall.
“DIPPER, NO!” she screamed, as Bill raised Dipper’s struggling form to his eye.
“Say goodbye, Pine Tree!” Bill cackled. A bolt of white light shot from Bill’s pupil, and the room was filled with the sound of screaming. Mabel would never be sure who it was.
Maybe it was all of them.
Dipper’s charred, limp body fell to the floor, smoking. Mabel collapsed in on herself, tears streaming down her face. Dipper, her twin brother, her near-literal other half, was gone. It felt as though a part of her was gone, too.
“Are you ready to give up that equation yet, Sixer, or do I need to fry the other runt?” Bill asked, floating closer to the cage and returning to his normal shade of yellow.
Stanford had fallen to his knees and was leaning against the cage wall, grasping it weakly. “I was trying to tell you before, I can’t! I physically cannot!” he said, his voice heavy with despair. “Even if I made a deal and let you in, I’ve got a metal plate installed in my head! You can’t get in! At all!”
Bill drew nearer, his eye widening. The cage opened again and Stanford was enveloped in a shell of blue light. He was lifted into the air, eye level with Bill, as the cage snapped shut again.
Bill regarded Stanford carefully for a moment before saying, “You aren’t lying, huh, IQ?” He drifted to the side, leaving Stanford floating in place. “You know, I really should have expected this. You never seem to get tired of being irritating, do you?” He turned his back to Ford, facing Stan and Mabel and leaving Ford floating over where his shoulder might have been, if he hadn’t been just a triangle. “Well, whatever. If I can’t get the equation from you, well.” he said, closing his eye and shrugging. “That just means that you’re no longer useful.”
There was a sickening crunch as Ford’s neck twisted to an unnatural angle. The blue light that had been keeping him aloft faded, and the body of Stanford Pines fell to the floor with a resounding thump. Mabel screamed.
“Well, that’s that.” Bill said simply. "Now, if I know Sixer, and I do, he’s meticulous. If he found an big, important equation early on in his career like the one I’m looking for, there’s no way he’d have just ignored it. He would have written it down. And the only place he would have done that is in one of those little journals of his. Which, of course, I destroyed. So that’s out.” He grew even larger and approached the cage. Stan and Mabel scrambled backward, in a vain attempt to get away from the monster. “Now, if only I knew someone who had spent thirty or so years devoting his very existence to studying the things that ol’ Fordsie wrote early on in his career. Oh, wait.” the cage dropped, and Bill’s hand swooped down and grabbed Stanley. “ I DO. ”
“Grunkle Stan!” Mabel screamed. Bill glared down at Stanley.
“So, Stanley, I’m willing to bet my all-seeing eye that sometime over the past thirty years, you stumbled across the equation to drop the barrier around Gravity Falls. It didn’t have much to do with the portal, so you probably ignored it, but it is still in there somewhere. If you let me into your mind to retrieve it, I’ll promise to let your niece here walk away free. Your mind will probably be destroyed in my search, but hey! At least your niece survives! And if not, then I’ll just torture her until you give in anyway. What do you say?”
Stanley stared at Mabel, tears glistening in his eyes. “If I let you in, you promise that she stays safe?”
“Terms of the deal, Stanley! I can’t break them!” Bill said gleefully. If he had a mouth, he would probably have been grinning.
“Don’t do it, Grunkle Stan!” Mabel whispered. Her voice had all but given out from the screaming it had been doing.
Stanley gazed at Mabel, then sighed. “Fine, I’ll do it. Just… Let me say goodbye to Mabel first."
Bill’s eye narrowed. “Smart choice.” he said. “You have one minute.”
His eye turned into a giant clock, which started ticking down.
He set Stanley down next to Mabel. Mabel threw herself into her Grunkle’s arms, and Stanley gripped her tightly.
“Mabel,” Stan whispered in her ear, “We don’t have much time so I need you to listen. When Ford and I were alone in here, he told me that if he could get Bill into his mind, we could use the memory gun on him and erase Bill straight out of his mind. He would lose his memory in the process, but he said it would have been worth it to defeat Bill.”
Mabel stared up at him. “Are you saying what I think you’re saying?” she whimpered.
Stan nodded somberly. “I need you to erase my mind, sweetie.”
Fresh tears sprang to Mabel’s eyes. With all the crying she’d done in the past few hours, she thought she’d have run dry, but new things kept surprising more out of her.
“Grunkle Stan…” Mabel tried to protest, but Stanley cut her off.
“Sweetie, we’re running out of time. Set the gun for ‘Stanley Pines,’ if that’s not a big enough wipe then I don’t know what is.” Stanley said. “I know it’s not fair to have to ask you to wipe my memory, god, it’s the hardest thing I’ve ever asked you to do, but please, promise me you’ll do this.”
“I-I promise.” Mabel said. “ I love you, Grunkle Stan.”
“I love you, too, Mabel.” Stan said, and hugged her one last time.
“Time’s up!” Bill said giddily. “Come on, now, Stanley! I’m getting impatient here!”
“Alright, you one-eyed freak.” Stanley said. “I’m ready.” Bill held out one flaming blue hand, and Mabel watched with dread as Grunkle Stan reached out and shook it.
The world turned monochrome, and Mabel was reminded of that first time in the forest, when Gideon had first summoned Bill. Bill’s body turned to stone and fell to the floor, leaving a golden outline of the demon floating in the air above Stanley. Bill rubbed his hands together like a child about to reach for a shiny new toy and dove into Stanley. The world regained its color.
Now alone in the massive room, Mabel shook with sobs. She crawled toward Stanford’s body, still resting on the floor a few yards from where the cage had been. His eyes were closed. If it were not for the fact that his neck was still twisted awkwardly, he might have been sleeping.
The memory gun was still holstered, clipped to his belt. With trembling hands, Mabel picked it up and brought it to where Stanley sat on his knees, his eyes closed and face pointed to the sky. It took her almost a full minute to set the dial with her trembling hands, but when it eventually read “Stanley Pines,” she grasped it with both hands and pointed it at her Grunkle.
“I’m so sorry, Grunkle Stan.” Mabel whispered.” Goodbye.”
For the first time since she’d returned to Gravity Falls, Mabel broke down and let the tears fall. She had never forgiven herself for wiping her Grunkle’s mind, something that he had never recovered from. She knew, deep down, that he had told her to do it, that if she hadn’t done it, then Bill would have destroyed the world, but she couldn’t bring herself to care. Every day, she felt the guilt of having failed her entire family. Stanley now resided in a home for “confused” seniors, and Mabel visited him almost daily.
Each time she visited him, it broke her heart all over again that he had no idea who she was.
“I-I’m s-sorry… Grunkle St-Stan, Grunkle Ford, D-Dipper… I couldn’t help you… I couldn’t save you…”
Mabel fell to the ground in front of Bill’s statute, which showed no signs of wear despite the years that had passed. Mabel was unsure as to whose idea it was, exactly, but she could not think of a more fitting tombstone for the two who had done the most to fight against Bill than the body of Bill himself. Carved into the stone face of Bill Cipher were the names of Dipper and Stanford Pines, and their birth and death dates. Bill Cipher himself stood as a memorial to the two who had fought so hard to keep him from starting Weirdmageddon, and who had fought the hardest to take back the Falls.
Mabel lay curled up in front of the graves of her brother and Grunkle, crying and shaking. She felt just like the helpless little girl that she had been eight years previously, who had saved the world only through the sacrifices of others.
A pair of arms encircled her waist and she froze in panic, until a familiar voice spoke in her ear.
“I thought I’d find you here.” Pacifica murmured, pulling Mabel off the ground and into her lap. “Your note wasn’t very specific. ‘I’m going back.,’ that could have meant anything.”
“I‘m sorry.” Mabel mumbled, burying her face in her girlfriend’s shoulder.
Pacifica shrugged the shoulder not occupied with being Mabel’s tissue. “It’s fine.” she said. “You lost just as much as anyone else that day. Maybe even more.”
She didn’t have to explain what she meant by that. Mabel had only ever told Pacifica all of what had happened when she and Stan were alone with Bill, and she’d only done so years afterward. After Weirdmageddon had ended, the few remaining townsfolk had clamored to learn what had caused Bill’s defeat. It had quickly become clear that the only direct witnesses were a traumatized 13-year-old and a catatonic old man, and Mabel found herself swarmed with questioning townsfolk until Wendy and Pacifica, seeing her distress, had shepherded the small crowd away until she could talk. And when she did tell her tale, she had downplayed her own role in Bill’s defeat, crediting Dipper and Ford, before saying that Stanley had let Bill into his mind and defeated him there, but it had cost him his memories and identity.
She completely omitted her own part in the events. She knew that if she told them that it had been she who pulled the trigger on the gun that had wiped Bill from Stan’s mind, then they would hail her as a hero. But she didn’t want that, a hero wouldn’t have effectively killed the man she once knew as Grunkle Stan.
She didn’t want to be a hero. She just wanted her family back.
Curled up in Pacifica’s lap, Mabel could shut her eyes tightly and pretend. She could pretend that Bill had never come. She could pretend that her family was still together.
Mabel could pretend that Dipper was still there, carrying that nervous excitement he always had when they were on a mystery hunt. She could pretend that they were back at the Mystery Shack, Grunkle Ford telling Dipper about some magical creature from his journals, Grunkle Stan telling them not to go after it but knowing that they would anyway.
She could pretend that they were setting out for the woods, Soos as a trusted companion with a heart of pure gold, cameras in hand and ready for adventure. She could pretend that they had a fun adventure and were now back in the town, enjoying a lunch at Greasy’s Diner and laughing about the latest nonsensical article Toby had published in the Gossiper. She could pretend that maybe, she could meet up with Candy and Grenda later, and have a sleepover that night. She could pretend that Gravity Falls still held all the people that made it what it was. Unique. Special.
Home.
And if she closed her eyes, she could almost pretend that nothing had changed at all.