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Mabel heard the phone ring one sunny morning in Gravity Falls.
There was nothing quite so odd about that, because they'd had a phone installed precisely so people could call them (and so Stan could conduct his shady backroom artifact sales, but that was neither here nor there). What was odd was how it cut through the sleepy air in the Shack like a siren call.
From deep within the cushions of the living room armchair, Mabel lifted her head. “Phone’s ringing and I refuse to move!”
No response.
“Dipper? Grunkle Stan?”
Still no response.
Groaning, she picked herself out of the chair and slumped across the room. Looked like she had to do everrrrything by herself. Which wasn’t the worst. She’d made some close friends by chatting up telemarketers. She just hoped whatever they had to say would be good enough to justify having to stand up on a Saturday morning.
Somehow, hearing “Your parents have died” was not what she had in mind.
The next thing she knew, she was in Nevada, looking at the apartment building Mark and Anna had lived in after their house was destroyed in the California Incident.
Dipper was beside her, having teleported her there because she was too antsy to sit on a flight for hours. "Why do you even want to do this?" he asked. "They made things so hard on us."
"Yeah, but they were our parents.” She felt something weird bubble inside of her, some mixture of grief and anger that she couldn’t describe. “They still loved us. I feel like I at least owe them this much.”
"Love isn't enough," he replied, staring away from her into the distance.
There was a pause. "Yeah. Love isn't enough," she said quietly.
He turned back to look at her, and there was nothing recognizable in his face. "Call me when you want to go home," he muttered, and then vanished.
Mabel sniffed, and looked back at the building. She was sort of glad that it wasn’t the house she and Dipper had grown up in -- the memories they had there were… complicated, and would ruin the closure she was trying to get from this trip. It’d be harder for her to parse how she was feeling if she had to do it in a house haunted by the ghosts of her and Dipper’s past selves.
Her hand was shaking as she turned the key in the door. It swung open and revealed a cluttered apartment, a place that looked fresh like its inhabitants were still living there, instead of burnt to a crisp by an exploding jet engine. The room was unfamiliar to her -- she’d only been there once before, and she’d been yelling at them the whole time about the dreamcatchers coating the walls. They still hung there -- an uncomfortable reminder of why Dipper had elected not to join her.
She reached up, grabbed a dreamcatcher, and ripped it in half. That felt better.
She walked around the room, vaguely aware that she was supposed to be taking inventory of Mark and Anna’s earthly possessions, but she was too caught up in whatever storm was roiling in her head. It was hard to imagine them living in this place, because her mental image of them was always in California, but there were drips of memories splattered over all the things that belonged to them.
There were computers everywhere, of course. Mark had been collecting them since before she was born. There was a vintage Dell PC by the window -- she could see herself at nine years old tapping away at the keyboard while her father smiled and helped her research something for a school project. She could also see him sitting there himself, a wan look on his face as she screamed bloody murder that Dipper is real, he’s still alive, he’s right here!!!!
She pulled another dreamcatcher off the wall and punched right through the netting.
The next thing she noticed was the bottle of glitter glue on the kitchen table, sitting next to what Mabel immediately recognized was a scrapbook. Had her mom always been into scrapbooking, or was that something she'd picked up in her old age? Either way, Mabel approved, and felt a little connection.
How silly is that?, she thought. How silly is it that I have to search for ways to feel connected to my parents?
It may have been silly, but she wasn't smiling.
The scrapbook was flipped open to a collection of newspaper clippings. Tears welled up in her eyes as she realized they were mostly about her various adventures across the country.
“PRETERNATURAL RIGHTS ACTIVIST MABEL PINES ACCEPTS MEDAL OF HONOR”
“FAMED LECTURER MABEL PINES BANNED FROM DEMONOLOGY CONFERENCE AFTER STARTING RAVE”
“SUSPECT IN TORCHING OF DAVID E. LAWRENCE CONVENTION CENTER GOES MISSING FROM HOLDING CELL”
She couldn’t help but chuckle at all the memories of her wild exploits. The laughter caught in her throat though when she realized what it meant that her parents had been collecting these newspaper clippings in the first place. They may not have been willing or able to participate in their kids’ lives, but they were keeping watch from afar. Or at least, they were keeping watch over one of them.
She would’ve moved on from the book, but a clipping caught her eye that looked a bit different from the rest. It was longer, for one, and the adhesive was weak, as if it had been pasted and then moved around several times. She leaned in to read the small newsprint, and then gasped.
"Dipper?" she whispered.
In an instant, he was there. "Ready to go home?"
She grabbed the collar of his shirt without looking, and pulled him in to see the scrapbook. "Look at this."
His face fell. “It’s a scrapbook. Woo-hoo. Can we go now?”
She shook her head, squeezing her eyes shut to try and stop the tears. “No. Read it.”
Groaning loudly, he rubbed his hands on his temples. “Fine. Let me take a look.”
INFAMOUS DEMON SAVES ELEMENTARY SCHOOL FROM ARMED CULT?
Tragedy was narrowly avoided on Tuesday at an elementary school in the town of Hollis. Despite three men entering the school armed with guns, the incident ended safely with no casualties other than the gunmen themselves. Witnesses claim that this was through the interference of the infamous demon, Alcor the Dreambender.
"They rounded us up and led us into the gymnasium," says school principal Lex Emplace. "They had candles and were carving an intricate design into the wood. They started to chant something in a foreign language -- it sounded like Latin -- and then Alcor appeared."
Both staff and students claim that the demon killed the gunmen without making a deal with them. Some additionally claim that he seemed angry at the idea of being given humans as a sacrifice, which is consistent with most modern demonology texts on Alcor. Finally, those closest to the circle during the incident say that Alcor bowed and apologized to the frightened students before vanishing.
A miraculous ending to a horrible situation. Demonologists, however, aren't so sure this story adds up.
"It's very unlikely that Mr. Emplace’s account of the events is accurate," says expert demonologist Sashay Edwards. "Alcor is not known for acts of kindness or mercy. This is, after all, the demon responsible for the California Incident, the single greatest loss of American life in history."
"What do you believe happened instead?" our reporter asked.
"It is more likely that the cult performed the summoning incorrectly and called upon a benevolent being. In cases of extreme incompetence, mismanaged summonings have also been known to result in the summoning circle itself exploding. I believe one of these events tells the true story, and that Mr. Emplace and the other witnesses misinterpreted what happened in their panicked state.”
The clipping cut off there.
Dipper was quiet. He looked small when Mabel opened her eyes.
She exhaled. “I found all these clippings about me in here, and then I found this one about you, and…”
He turned away, face made of stone, and crossed his arms. “So they kept a news story about how maybe I’m not a monster but probably still am. Great. Is that all you wanted to show me?”
“I thought you’d want to see it.”
“Why? It means nothing.”
The room seemed to get a little colder, and Mabel shivered. “I just figured that, maybe they cared -”
“They didn’t care about me, okay?” he cut in, swiveling around. He had shrunk some more, and had to look up to meet her eyes, but that didn’t make the furious look on his face any less potent. “They cared about someone who didn’t exist, someone who died in 2012 and never came back. It’s easy for you to say they cared -- at least the person they thought you were actually exists.”
“You think they knew anything about me either?” Mabel put her hand on his shoulder -- almost recoiling because his clothes were hot to the touch. “They- they wanted me to just be a normal girl who didn’t hang out with fairies and burn down buildings all the time! And they definitely didn’t want me to be the kind of person who makes deals with a demon all the time, otherwise they wouldn’t have been constantly calling me up in a panic every time you were in the news, and they wouldn’t have been making little remarks to me about whether I was sure my children were safe around you every time they visited, and -”
“Then why are you here?” he cut in, little wisps of steam puffing from his ears. “Why are you so upset about them dying?”
Mabel felt something twist in her stomach, and for a moment, she didn’t know how to answer. “They were our parents,” she offered lamely. “Aren’t you upset?”
He somehow seemed to shrink even more. “No! I-I mean, maybe. I don’t know!” He threw his hands up and sat down in mid-air. “I don’t know how I’m supposed to feel about this. I don’t really want to feel anything at all!”
Mabel sank to the floor and sighed. Glancing up, she saw her brother, fixed inexplicably in space, unmoving, unbreathing, unblinking, legs crossed and chin balanced on his fist. An eternal snapshot of his 12-year-old self -- with a dreamcatcher stuck to the bottom of his shoe.
She ground her teeth at the sight of it. Why were her parents making this so difficult for her? Why couldn’t her feelings about them be simple? They were the people who had raised her for the first 15 years of her life -- she was supposed to mourn them with the weight of everything they’d done for her -- and yet...!
Mabel reached over and yanked the dreamcatcher off with all her strength, causing Dipper to topple over and yelp in surprise, spinning in midair until he ended up lying on his stomach a few feet off the ground. With an exaggerated roar of contempt, she raised the dreamcatcher high and snapped it across her knee.
“I don’t know why I came here,” she said, not looking him in the eye. “I don’t forgive them. Maybe I wanted to try, like maybe I came here hoping it’d be just like things were when we were 12. But this isn’t that house… and the people who lived here weren’t- couldn’t be parents to me.”
He grimaced, and pushed forward so that he’d float upright. “I’m sorry Mabes. I know it was hard for you too. I didn’t mean to minimize that.”
“‘Sokay,” she muttered.
“I know I’m acting like I don’t care,” Dipper continued, “but it’s just because it’s been so long. I don’t know if I can think of them as my parents if they couldn’t ever think of me as their son.”
Mabel sighed. “No, I know. I was perfectly fine not having them in my life and none of this changes that. When your family can’t support you the way they’re supposed to, you make new family. That’s what Grunkle Stan and Grunkle Ford showed us. And Wendy and Soos and Pacifica and- and Henry.”
Dipper smiled weakly, then looked around. “Why does any of this stuff matter, then?”
“I- I don’t know. Maybe it doesn’t. But it makes me wonder…”
“Wonder?”
Mabel had stood up, and was doing a slow sweep around the room again. She brushed her fingers past memories, old and new. A camcorder from the 90’s (Fiddleford would love to take this apart). Tickets to some unfamiliar musical (remember when we saw Robbie’s rock opera?). A diorama that she’d made in the first grade -- a second one, made by her brother (Henry and Wendy showed us the matching axes they’d gotten when they first met at a Corduroy family reunion).
So many computers, so many dreamcatchers. A house that was home only to that which was already dying. Nothing but a graveyard filled with regret. Nothing that resembled their family, anymore.
“I know we’re not going to forgive them,” she said, carefully. “But seeing all of this stuff gives me the feeling that they never forgave themselves either. I can’t believe that they didn’t love us, even after everything that happened. And I don’t know how that makes me feel.”
She stopped near the pile of books on the counter, and buried her face in her hands. Dipper floated over to her and wrapped his hands around her shoulders -- and there it was. There was the love and support she’d been looking for among the dirt in the graveyard. She nuzzled into his arms, and he sent back a burst of warmth through the link that bound their souls together.
For a moment it was like she was airborne.
“I think you’re right,” he said finally, letting go of her. She removed her hands from her face and watched the way the lines on his forehead seemed to tremble. “It’s easier to say they hated us, so we don’t have to deal with what really happened. But that’s not fair. To us or to them.”
“This -” (Mabel gestured to the scrapbook) “may have been their way of getting closure about all this. Maybe it was reassuring for them to know that we were doing alright without them. Maybe they were proud of me and my butt-kicking shenanigans.” She tore the clipping about Dipper out of the scrapbook and handed it to him. “They might’ve even been proud of you, if this means anything.”
He looked down. There was a long pause as he reread the clipping, and his voice was shaky when he spoke again: “It’s weird… I always felt like they just stopped thinking about us when we moved out, and they only called and came to visit us -- visit you -- out of pity. But you’re right. They kept all of this stuff. They collected other peoples’ stories about us. Maybe we did still mean something to them, even if they couldn’t take care of us.”
Mabel looked around the room, at all of the memories displaced from their too-short childhood. “I know we did. I know they really did love us.”
"Yeah," Dipper breathed. He snapped his fingers, and the news clipping about him burst into flame. "But love isn't enough."
Mabel nodded, tears starting to blur her vision, and she watched the paper fall to the floor as ash. "No. Love isn't enough."