Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

It’s three o’clock in the morning, which is the weirdest part of this to Dipper. 

Not that Grunkle Stan is cursing up a storm next to Dipper as he tries to find a lighter for his cigarette. Not that Mabel has somehow managed to sneak her polaroid in here and is taking pictures. Not that they’re sitting in a police station.

Well—no, alright. That’s a lie. The police station part is weird too, but Dipper’s come to expect These Sorts Of Things since he started living here. ‘These Sorts Of Things’ being what his great uncle Ford refers to his brother’s antics as. You can’t see letters when people speak, but Dipper thinks that if you could, those four words would always be capitalized when Ford says them.

Grunkle Stan is what some people would call ECCENTRIC. And what other people would call ABSOLUTELY INSANE. Dipper knows this because in the past thirty minutes he’s heard Grunkle Stan be called both of those things.

There are three chairs in here, and pretty much nothing else (there’s a plant if it counts, but it looks half-dead, so he doesn’t really think that it does). It’s a boring room. Originally there were only two chairs, but Mabel had curled up on one of them and Dipper had taken the other, and then eventually the cops must’ve gotten sick of Grunkle Stan’s complaining because they got him a chair too. He’d refused to let Dipper or Mabel give up their chair for him. It’s a matter of principle, he’d told Dipper. Dipper’s pretty sure Stan just wanted to stick it to the cops.

The dictionary that he keeps under his bed would define that as DEFIANCE. Or TEMERITY, which is an excessive boldness or confidence. In a rash or reckless sort of sense.

Grunkle Stan, Dipper decides, is definitely temerarious in a rash or reckless sort of sense. 

“Temerarious,” he mumbles under his breath.

“What?” Stan glances down at him.

Dipper bites his tongue. “Nothing.”

Back to the room. It’s boring, and it’s cold, and Dipper wants to go home already. He’s sitting on one side of Stan, his knees pulled up to his chest. He’s already read through all the weird magazines they gave him when he pestered one of the cops for something to do. The magazines were boring, but it’s not like he had anything else.

There was one article in the stack that interested him, which had a picture of Bigfoot on the front and an entire section about the symptoms of oncoming seizures and what to do in case of them. Dipper likes to know what to do in case of things. Mabel calls him Mr. Paranoid. Their parents call him overly prepared in the way that makes it sound like a bad thing. Which is dumb, because if anything were to happen, he would be perfectly prepared, and everybody else would be underprepared.

Prepared doesn’t sound like much of a word in his head anymore.

“Grunkle Stan,” he asks, “do you know the oncoming signs of a seizure?”

“What?” Stan repeats, looking up. His bushy brows knit together to make him look even more puzzled than before. Dipper bites his tongue again, a little bit harder this time. 

“Never mind.”

Stan rolls his eyes and mutters something about strange kids before he goes back to trying to find a lighter.

On the other side of their great uncle, Mabel still has her polaroid out and is taking pictures of the holding room. Dipper picks anxiously at the stray threads that are coming out of his hat. Does Mabel know what to do in the event of a seizure? What if Dipper has a seizure, and nobody else knows what to do but him? 

He’s about ready to pick up the magazine and shove it towards her to read, but Mabel kicks her feet and whirls her camera towards him instead.

“Say cheese!” she says. Before he has the time to protest, she’s snapped a picture of him. Here. In the police station. 

“Mabel!” Dipper hisses, leaning over a thoroughly uninterested Stan to try to swipe the camera from her hands. She leans away, holding the camera out of his reach as it churns out a bit of film. 

“It’s a good picture! It’s for the scrapbook, Dipper!”

Before Dipper has time to argue that they really do not need pictures of them sitting in a police station at three in the morning, he would say that incriminating evidence is actually the exact opposite of what they need, Mabel, give him the camera — Stan manages to light his cigarette.

The fire alarms go off. 

Dipper groans, burying his head in his hands, threading his hands through his messy hair.

Ford is going to kill them. 

Their great uncle Ford does not kill them. He does, however, look like he wishes he could.

Dipper sees his expression as the door opens to him standing outside in the cold. The first word that comes to mind is DISGRUNTLED. 

“What were you thinking?” Ford asks, staring at Stan as the police officer leads them out of the cell. He’s very composed and collected despite being disgruntled, because he is everything that Grunkle Stan isn’t. His arms are crossed, and his long coat has been thrown on over his pajamas. It would be funny, if he wasn’t looking at all three of them like they’re in Serious Trouble (which is another thing that seems capitalized when Ford says it).

Mabel bounces on the heels of her feet, and Dipper can feel the nervous energy radiating off of her. She doesn’t like it when the two of them fight. Kinda unfortunate, because they do it near constantly. They’re very good at it. If there was a place for fighting in the Guinness Book of Records, the older Pines twins would be in it. 

Dipper bumps Mabel’s shoulder with his own, and she stops bouncing. 

"You need to stop doing this sort of thing, Mr. Pines," the officer says, with the weariness of someone who has told a toddler repeatedly not to stick their fingers in an outlet and is watching said toddler head straight for the outlet again. Stan says something under his breath. Dipper makes a mental note to look it up later in his dictionary, because that’s one he hasn’t heard before. Ford rubs a hand over his face, and stares up at the ceiling for so long that Mabel tilts her head up too, like she’s trying to see what he’s looking at.

Dipper begins fiddling with the threads on his hat again. “Are you experiencing temporary confusion?” he blurts. 

Ford drops his eyes back down to stare at him, which means that Mabel does too. “What?”

“Temporary confusion,” Dipper repeats. Then he adds, “it’s a symptom of an oncoming seizure.”

The police officer looks weary. Ford gives Stan a confused frown. Stan shrugs. Mabel nudges Dipper with her elbow, and he pulls his hat on. 

“It’s more like perpetual confusion, with him around,” Ford grumbles, and jabs a finger at Stan. “Come on. Everyone into the car.”

The car ride back to great uncle Ford’s house is a quiet one. Too quiet. Dipper rests his head against the window, feeling the car bump along the roads and watching the tall buildings fly past them. Mabel’s tucked up in the seat next to him, her knees brought up to her chest as she stares out the window. The light that spills in through the car windows is a weird yellow color, and it casts an almost sickly light over everybody else in the car. 

In the front seat, Stan and Ford are silent. But it’s the tense kind of silence that Dipper’s come to expect from these two — the kind that screams ‘I am purposefully ignoring you so I don’t start an argument, but we are going to have a serious talk when the kids are asleep.’ He and Mabel know all about those kinds of silences. There were a lot of them back home.

“Have any of you eaten?” Ford asks from the front seat, drumming his twelve fingers on the steering wheel. He’s a lot more of a careful driver than Stan is —  hands at ten and five, never going more than five miles over the speed limit. Maybe it’s just because Dipper and Mabel are in the car.

“Yeah,” Dipper mumbles. 

Mabel adds, “We had popcorn that I kinda burnt. And then we got burgers at the diner.”

Ford nods his head absentmindedly. “Right. The diner.” His eyes, in the rearview mirror, flick up to look back at Mabel and Dipper. “Where even were you three this late at night?”

He does not say ‘not that you should have even been out this late at night.’ He does not say ‘you need to stop doing These Sorts Of Things.’ But in the rearview mirror his lips thin, and Dipper can tell he really, really wants to.

Dipper pulls at the threads in his hat. Mabel pokes the window button, and whispers a soft ‘boop!’ Nobody wants to answer his question, and the silence in the car is thick with obvious tension.

Finally Stan clears his throat, breaking the silence. “I took them out to the mini golf course,” he admits. In his defense, Dipper has to admit that both he and Mabel had been really enthusiastic about the whole ‘breaking and entering’ thing. MISCREANTS.

“In the middle of the night?” Ford says. He sounds exasperated. 

“They wouldn’t have caught us if you hadn’t called me halfway through!”  Stan argues. “And besides, it was to test a  — uhm, whaddya call it — a hypothesis. It was educational. The kids had fun.”

Dipper pulls harder at the threads in his hat. It hadn’t just been about them having fun or testing a hypothesis, he knows that. 

He’d woken up in the middle of the night from a nightmare and found Mabel awake too (twin-tuition, she’d said) and when they went out into the kitchen for water, Stan was already sitting at the island counter. So they’d done the natural thing when nobody in a house can sleep at midnight, which was make burnt popcorn and turn on the TV to a random channel that was loud enough to block out whatever noise was going through their heads. 

That channel happened to be something about golfing, and then all three of them had begun to argue about whether or not you had to concentrate that hard just to hit a ball with a golf club, what the rules really were for golfing, and if it would blind the other players if you covered your golf ball in glitter. Which had led to them piling into the car for an adventure, with a brief pit-stop for burgers, which had led to … all of this. 

Dipper rips a thread out, and wraps it so tight around his pinkie that it starts to go red. His pinkie, not the string. He’s twelve going on thirteen, so he’s not totally stupid. He knows why Stan had driven them out to the mini golf course in the middle of the night, when normally he’d complain about conserving gas money. Dipper’s gotta admit, the plan worked. He can hardly remember what his nightmare was about. Mabel had hit a hole-in-one and cheered so loud that when the cops eventually came and got them, Dipper thought she’d been the reason they’d been caught.

By the time the car pulls into the parking garage, Dipper’s beginning to drift off. He’s fallen asleep a few times already, always jerking awake at the soft bumps and sways from the car, but he’s finally letting his eyes fall closed when the car shudders to a stop outside the building. He lifts his head, rubbing the sleep out of his eyes. 

“Are we at Grunkle Ford’s house?” Mabel asks, gingerly lowering her knees from her chest.

“Yeah,” Stan says. His voice is gruff, like he’s not all too pleased about it. “We’re spending the night here. Everybody out of the car, c’mon.”

They all pile out, and Ford leads them through the lobby and towards the elevator. This place is cold too, just in a different way. The police station was a threatening kind of cold. Where Grunkle Ford lives is just cold like the heater is broken again. 

Mabel jabs a finger at the up button — then, when nothing happens, Dipper shuffles over and jabs at it too. Both of them look up at the light expectantly, taking turns poking the button like it’ll do something. 

“It’s broken again,” Ford says, in the weary tone of someone who’s had far too many things go wrong for three o’clock AM on a Saturday. Technically Sunday. Whatever. He turns to the stairs, gesturing for the other three to follow him. “I’ll call the repairman tomorrow and have him fix it.”

They trail behind him, and pause when they get to the base of the stairs. When it becomes apparent that neither Mabel nor Dipper wants to climb the seven flights up to where Ford lives, Stan huffs and scoops one twin up in each arm before he follows his brother.

The stairs are creaky and old, the ceiling spotted with strange stains that Dipper tries not to think too hard about. They don’t come to great uncle Ford’s house very often (when they’re with him for the day it’s usually spent out of the house; last time he’d taken them both hiking, which had ended with all three of them being covered in mud on the drive home), which is why being here still feels kind of weird. It’s a tall building in the middle of a bustling city. It’s kind of fitting for Ford, kind of … not. Part of Dipper assumed Ford would live in some hut in the middle of nowhere.

And it seems like he’d prefer it, sometimes. He hates the traffic here, hates all the people, tries to stay out of the city as much as he can. He takes them out of the city every time he can, bundling them up for the next big adventure the second he picks them up.

 But he lives here, in this tall apartment building, with its stained walls and creaky stairs and broken —

Well, broken everything. 

Part of it could be because of the university. Actually, now that Dipper’s thinking about it — two and a half flights up the stairs — that’s probably why. He has a nice job as a professor at the International Institute of Oddology, so maybe he stays in the city to be closer to work.

Dipper and Mabel were sent out here because their parents thought they could ‘use a change in scenery.’ That was their excuse, anyway. But Dipper’s twelve-almost-thirteen and he’s not totally stupid. He knows it’s because he’d been having a hard time at school and their parents had been fighting more often than not. Mabel hadn’t let on that she knew about it, but Dipper knew his sister, and she had definitely been getting antsy about it.

And so here they are.

They’re only three flights up the stairs. Grunkle Stan is huffing slightly, muttering about how of course Ford has to live at the top of the building. He starts to say something else, too, but reconsiders it and instead just shuts his mouth. Which is rare.

Dipper closes his eyes again.

They’ve been here for a month already. It doesn’t feel like it’s been that long. Most of their time has been filled up with adventuring — whether it’s breaking in places or exploring the woods just outside the city. Either way, they haven’t spent much time inside (the last time Dipper checked, he had thirty-something bug bites). 

Ford unlocks and pushes open the door to his apartment, letting them inside first. Stan plops Dipper and Mabel down on the couch, ruffles Mabel’s hair and pushes Dipper’s hat into his eyes. Dipper yelps, Mabel giggles, and Stan shucks off his thick coat that he’d worn into the mini golf course with them. He tosses it over the arm of the couch, which makes Ford’s jaw get tight again. That, at least, seems to make Stan a bit happier.

“Alright. It’s far past time for you two to go to bed,” Ford says, turning his attention to the two kids on the couch.

“It’s already three,” Mabel tries, giving their great uncle her biggest and brightest puppy eyes. 

“Four,” Dipper mumbles.

Mabel nods. She's bouncing again. Dipper nudges her with his elbow, and she stops. “Yeah! So it’s practically morning already, Grunkle Ford, can’t we just stay up?”

Dipper opens his mouth to back her up, but he’s interrupted by a yawn. He makes a half-hearted attempt to hide it behind his hand. 

It doesn’t work, and great uncle Ford’s eyes narrow at them. 

“Absolutely not,” he says curtly. Before either of them can try to push it any harder, he’s guiding them towards the guest room where the beds for them are set up. “You need sleep, both of you. Come on.”

“Night, kids,” Stan says, raising a hand as if to wave them off.

“Goodnight Grunkle Stan!” Mabel manages to call back (and Dipper makes a sleepy sound that could be a noise of agreement), before Ford is nudging them into the guest room. He gives them both a weary smile, mutters a ‘goodnight you two,’ before he shuts the door.

Silence falls over the room. The only light in here comes from the moonlight, pouring in through the blinds, bathing the gray walls (speckled with stains, despite how hard Ford had tried to scrub them) in that pale yellow light. Oh, and Dipper’s spaceship lamp. The lamp light is pretty dim and easy to miss, because Dipper brought it from home and he’s had it for three years.

Mabel bounces on the balls of her feet. Dipper yanks at the thread in his hat.

He should really change the light bulb in that lamp.

There isn’t much in this room. Dipper gets the feeling that great uncle Ford doesn’t have guests over often — doesn’t know enough people to have guests over. In fact, this room had originally been an office. He’s pretty sure that Ford had been just as surprised that Dipper and Mabel were there as they were, because the first day they were there he had them sleep out on the couch while he moved things out of the office. And then in the morning they had all piled into his car and gone shopping for things they wanted in their new room.

That hadn’t been much, because both Dipper and Mabel had still been reeling from the fact that they would be staying here for the foreseeable future. (He’d said those words exactly to Mom over the phone a few days ago, actually. And then she had said that Dipper was “exaggerating,” and then he had asked her — admittedly a bit crabby — when they would be coming back, then, and she’d changed the subject).

“The pictures turned out good,” Mabel says, breaking the silence that had settled over them. Her words come with a little echo off of the walls. They need to go get more stuff to fill up this room, Dipper thinks. Maybe he can ask Ford if he can have some of the old stuff that was in the office. The mushroom terrarium he spotted had looked cool.

“From the golf course,” Mabel continues, and startles Dipper out of his train of thought. “And the police station. And the car ride back.”

Dipper nods, and has the grace not to point out that maybe they shouldn’t keep the photographic evidence of them committing crimes. Even though he really, really wants to.

They go quiet for another minute or two, just standing there in the dim light of the room, before Dipper finds the strength to pull his feet up from where they’ve been glued to the floor. Neither of them have to say anything; Mabel just grabs her pillow and blanket and dozens of stuffed animals off her bed, Dipper pulls his space lamp down and plugs it in on the floor. 

They make a kind of pillow fort out of the pillows and blankets and stuffed animals. And by the time they’re done with it, Ford’s guest room feels a little less cold and dark.

It is four-seventeen in the morning. Two hours from when Ford is supposed to wake up. Or an hour and forty-three minutes, if you like to get into the specifics. Which he does, normally, but not after a trip to and from the local police station at four-seventeen in the morning.

God. He can already feel the incoming migraine.

“What were you thinking?” Ford demands again, whirling on his brother once he’s retreated back into the living room. He spent the entire car ride back preparing for this argument. Though he’s beginning to wonder if he should have even bothered, because Stan is just sitting at the counter, tapping his fingers on the granite and looking entirely too tired for an argument.

“We didn’t even get into that much trouble,” he says. As if that excuses it. Excuses any of this. For god’s sake, it’s — Ford’s eyes flit over to the clock on the microwave — four-nineteen in the morning. “And they wouldn’t have caught us if you hadn’t called me in the first place.”

Ford’s lips tighten into a thin line. There is a pressure building up behind his right eye. “Right.” 

“You’re making it a bigger deal than it needs to be, Sixer.”

He thinks he’s making a perfectly normal sized deal about this, actually. In fact, considering the circumstances, he would say he isn’t making this as big of a deal as it needs to be. He snuck into a golf course, for god’s sake. And that’s not even the worst part of it — Ford’s used to Stan doing these sorts of things, it’s Stanley Pines — but he brought the twins with him. Shermie’s grandchildren. 

Their parents had entrusted them to Ford specifically, trust being the key root word there. So he feels at least partially responsible for them. Even if more often than not he’s busy doing field work that’s too dangerous for them, or teaching at the university, or doing a million other things that end up with him passing the kids off to Stan for the day.  And, well — one day turns into two days, which turns into a week, which turns into more time spent with his brother than with him.

(Ford can only hope that they’re young enough not to hold it against him.)

Either way. That’s more time spent with his brother, who apparently thinks that taking them out on a breaking and entering excursion is an acceptable family bonding activity. 

He opens his mouth to give Stan a piece of his mind, but his brother holds up a hand to stop him. Ford pauses, a bit taken aback, and frowns. 

“Excuse me?”

“Shh,” Stan hisses. Ford goes quiet, straining his ears, but he can’t hear anything. 

Despite there apparently being nothing there, Stan rubs a hand over his face and calls out, “Get back in bed.”

There’s a long pause, and then a quiet squeak from the hallway. Ford can hear the scuffle of feet scampering back into their room before the door shuts with a quiet click. 

“Kids,” Stan grumbles, but there’s a fond sort of note in his voice. Ford has to admit that, while his brother might not be the best caretaker for those two, no one can deny that he cares about them.

He sighs, and presses his hands against his eyes as if that will be enough to stop the headache that’s beginning to form. It’s too early for any of this, he decides. They can debate over all of this tomorrow. Preferably out of earshot of Mabel and Dipper. 

“The couch is open,” he offers. He doesn’t know why he says it. Why he’s even trying. Maybe he just thinks that the twins would wake up feeling better if Stan’s nearby. Maybe it would be nice to wake up with what’s left of his family in one place. “If you want to stay here tonight.”

Stan grimaces, like Ford has just suggested he merrily traipse out into the street and get hit by a car. Ford just rolls his eyes and heaves a sigh. He should have known by now, because it’s the same thing every time he suggests it. Why would anything change with Stan? 

Stagnant. Stannant. There’s a pun there, Ford is just too tired to come up with it. 

“I’m fine,” Stan says curtly, standing up and grabbing his jacket from where he’d carelessly thrown it over the couch instead of hanging it up on the coat rack. It irritates Ford to no end, and he knows that’s the entire reason Stan does it. 

“It’s an hour drive back.”

“I know.”

“You know there are places available downstairs, too,” Ford points out. He’s been pointing this sort of thing out to Stan for years now. Not that he’d like to be closer to his brother, and he knows Stan would weasel his way out of paying any sort of rent, but it would be better than the place Stan’s staying now (sometimes the bills get sent to ‘Stanford Pines’ instead of ‘Stanley Pines’  on accident, and, well. He’s not a good enough person to not snoop through his brother’s mail). 

“I don’t need your charity,” his brother snaps, in the typical Stanley Pines fashion where he denies a good thing because he’s suspicious of it, or he thinks someone’s making fun of him, or he’s just too stubborn and proud. 

“It’s not,” Ford begins, but Stanley’s already cutting him off and talking over him. Loudly. Not loud enough to reach the room in the hallway behind them, thankfully, but loud enough that it shuts Ford up.

“And,” he says sharply, and jabs a finger in Ford’s direction. “And, I don’t want to stay here. With all the rest of your little screw-ups.” He spits the last few words, and it takes a second for them to really settle in. 

Ford blinks, opens his mouth to say something, and finds that for once he doesn’t have anything to say. 

Stan has to know that’s a dig that will hurt. Has to see the flash of actual injury in Ford’s eyes, because he turns away and shrugs on his jacket to avoid looking him in the eyes. 

Ford takes a moment to reach for words, trying to find something to say. “That’s not fair,” he manages, when he’s almost certain his voice won’t lose any of its composure. 

Stan just snorts, and shoves the front door open. For a brief moment, Ford considers fighting back. Arguing. Digging into old wounds and rehashing things they’ve fought about in the past to see how Stan likes it. Anything.

But it’s four twenty-six in the morning. Ford’s exhausted, Stan’s exhausted, and the twins are exhausted. The elevator needs to be fixed. The heater needs to be fixed. It’s four twenty-seven in the morning and he should probably head to bed soon. Work stops for no one. Even if Ford only gets an hour and thirty-three minutes of sleep. 

Arguing, he decides wearily, would be counterintuitive to this.

Anyway, by the time he’s decided on whether or not it would be worth it to continue the argument Stan is already out the door. So it’s a moot point.

The door slams shut with the sort of finality that makes Ford’s shoulders slump a little bit more. He stares at the spot where Stanley was for a minute, before he leans forward and clicks all four of the locks on the front door into place. Then he turns, rubs his eyes again, and ambles into his own room to collapse.

Chapter Text

Dipper wakes up to sunlight pouring through the window and blazing directly into his eyes. Eugh. 

He makes a noise of complaint, sitting up from where he’s sprawled out across the floor. His legs really hurt from running from the cops last night. Mabel isn’t faring much better, if the way she tries to kick him to get him to stop making noise is any indication.

He manages to stumble to his feet and trudge out of the guest room. In the morning (afternoon?) light, the apartment feels a lot less cold and blank. Ford is sitting at the table, a computer and a half-filled mug in front of him. From the smell of the place, he’s been eating straight coffee beans out of the cup.

“Good morning, Dipper,” he says, not lifting his eyes from where he’s typing on the computer. 

Dipper yawns, and pulls himself up onto a stool next to him. Not-so-subtly, he tries to look at what Ford’s typing. Equally as not-so-subtle, Ford turns his computer away from him. Dipper tries not to feel hurt about it, and it must be obvious that he’s doing a bad job of it because Ford relents and turns the computer back towards him.

It’s a bunch of junk about the city’s generator. Dipper scoots forward and tries to look at it intently anyway, because if it’s good enough for Ford it’s good enough for him, too.

“What time is it?” he asks. Ford pulls his computer away again, and Dipper scoots back off the stool to begin to rummage through the cabinets. Avocados. Granola. A bag of plain white rice. Absolutely no cereal or Poptarts of any kind in sight. Yeesh. How does Ford survive like this?

“Ten thirty-two,” Ford responds. He’s back to staring at the computer in front of him again. “You two slept in for a while, so I decided not to go to class today.”

Dipper blinks, swivels his head back around to stare at Ford. What? His great uncle, skipping work? The guy who, if Stan’s stories are to be believed, once ran across five lanes of traffic just to make it there before his students?

He narrows his eyes. On second thought, is this his great uncle? What if he’s been replaced by some brain-eating amoeba? Granted, Dipper doesn’t know much about brain-eating amoeba beyond what he’s seen in comics. But he’s pretty sure that taking over your workaholic great uncle and making him skip work is something they’re able to do.

“I didn’t want to leave you two alone,” Ford adds, when Dipper’s been staring at him suspiciously for too long. “It’s dangerous. It could be, I mean.” He looks a bit like he’s regretting his decision to stay home now.

There’s a small pause.

“Do you want breakfast?” Ford says, at the same time as Dipper blurts, “Have you seen any brain-eating amoeba lately?” 

Another pause. The two of them stare at each other, Ford peering over the tops of his glasses and Dipper with one arm still digging around in the pantry.

“Excuse me?” Ford asks, his brow furrowing. 

Dipper bites his tongue. “Nothing,” he says quickly. “Breakfast sounds great, Grunkle Ford.”

By the time Mabel gets up and shuffles into the kitchen, Dipper’s sitting at the table with a bowl of oatmeal in front of him. It’s plain oatmeal — no berries, no honey, no milk, no sugar in it at all. Ford made it with water. Dipper’s less so eating it, more so … poking at it with his spoon.

“Good morning, Mabel.” Ford says. He still doesn’t look up from where he’s bent over his computer. Mabel plops down at the table and rubs her eyes. 

“Ugh,” she grumbles, in a very un-Mabel-like way. “My legs hurt. My arms hurt. My everything hurts. Dipper, why did we ever think that was a good idea?”

“It wasn’t,” Ford says, glancing up from the screen and frowning. “And I would advise both of you to never do it again.”

Dipper and Mabel share a look across the table. Mabel cracks a wide, braces-filled smile, and Dipper has to duck his head a bit to keep from snickering.

It’s probably gonna happen again.

Ford gives both of them a suspicious look, and Dipper stuffs a bite of oatmeal into his mouth to try to look busy. 

“Community service isn’t a joke, you two.”

Dipper pauses with the spoon in his mouth, staring at the table. Community service? An image of him and Mabel in reflective vests in the dead of night, picking trash up off the road, flashes through his head. What if a car hits them? More importantly, what if Mothman finds them? He knows all about Mothman; he’s read The Mothman Prophecies (and then he watched the movies with Mabel, who threw popcorn at the screen while Dipper covered his face with his hands). What if they’re picking trash up off a bridge and Mothman appears and throws them off the bridge? And a car hits them?

MACABRE. He chokes on his oatmeal. 

Mabel leans over the table and thwacks him hard on the back. “We don’t think it is, Grunkle Ford!” she says, with her cheerful smile that usually puts adults at ease. Dipper coughs up the oatmeal into a napkin, and nods weakly.

“Right. Community service,” he echos. “Not a joke. Won’t happen again.”

Ford knits his brows at them but looks appeased. He takes a drink of his coffee beans, which sound very liquidy. So maybe Dipper was wrong and it’s not coffee beans. 

“Do you want breakfast, Mabel?” Ford asks. 

Mabel takes one look at Dipper's oatmeal, and grimaces. “Uhm … do you have anything else?” she asks, and sounds like she’s trying to be nice about it. It’s not working super well. 

Ford looks confused (that doesn’t feel like quite the right word for it. Dipper settles on PERPLEXED and nods a little bit to himself. Correction; Grunkle Ford looks PERPLEXED). 

“Is it that bad?” he asks, putting a hand on the top of his laptop as if to shut it.

“What? No! It’s not bad,” Dipper says hurriedly, even as he pushes his bowl of oatmeal away. “It’s just, uh. A bit bland?” He tries for a reassuring smile. 

Beside him, Mabel pokes at the oatmeal and wrinkles her nose in disgust.

And that’s how all three of them end up shuffling down seven flights of stairs to go to the diner for pancakes, Dipper and Mabel still in their pajamas and Grunkle Ford carrying his laptop under one arm. 

The lobby isn’t exactly bustling, Dipper notes as they step out of the stairwell. There’s a few people scattered around here or there, most of them the usual building residents that Dipper spots around here. A lot of them have a weird look to them, the kind that makes his hair stand on end. It’s not a look Dipper can quite put his finger on — just something about them. Maybe they’re zombies.

Maybe they’re zombies! 

Dipper narrows his eyes, watching the building’s other residents with this in mind. Yeah, that checks out. They’ve got that glassy-eyed stare, that vacant look. All that’s missing is the rotting flesh and hunger for brains. Maybe they’re hiding the rotting flesh beneath makeup, or something.

(A tiny part of his mind points out that he could maybe be exaggerating. Unfortunately, the voice sounds a lot like Mom, and Dipper’s still a bit mad at her for this entire situation. He shoves that thought to the side.) 

He shakes himself out of his thoughts, and tunes back into the conversation. Beside him, Mabel is skipping and talking simultaneously. She’s slightly out of breath, too, and it registers in Dipper’s mind that she’s been rambling the entire way down the stairs, and he’s only been half listening to all of it. 

Oops.

“-and I’m gonna get chocolate chip pancakes,” she says, pausing to suck in a breath before barreling on, “with whipped cream on them. And sprinkles. So many sprinkles. Do you think they’ll let me put sprinkles inside the pancake batter with the chocolate chips?”

She glances over at him expectantly. 

“Uhm,” Dipper says. “Probably.”

Mabel gives him a braces-filled smile, and pumps a fist in the air. “YES!”

“Yeah. Mabel, could makeup hide rotting skin?” He pulls at the thread in his hat. Mabel watches him curiously for a moment before her smile gets a bit more teasing. The kind of teasing that usually comes when Dipper’s being perfectly-reasonable-amount-of-prepared. He steels himself for the INEVITABLE SKEPTICISM. 

“I mean, yeah! You can do a lot with makeup. Not like you would know, because you never let me put it on you,” she pokes his shoulder. “Why? Are you finally coming around to it?”

“No,” he says quickly, ducking away from her reaching hands. “Definitely not.”

She catches him anyway and continues poking him. He squirms away, complaining loudly and trying to shove her off. The two of them are entirely caught up in their little catfight, and it takes Dipper a second to realize that Grunkle Ford has turned away from the double doors at the front of the beginning.

He catches Dipper looking up at him, and gives him a thin-lipped smile. “Slight detour.”

Dipper pauses in the middle of shoving Mabel away and looks up, actually taking in his surroundings. Grunkle Ford is walking quicker now, making a beeline directly for the elevators. 

Huh. Weird.

All three of them approach the broken elevators, and Dipper can see now what they’re heading towards. The doors have been pried open and are being held open with what looks like a carjack. There’s a man standing outside of them, fiddling with a piece of red duct tape that’s stuck to his fingers. 

“Soos,” Ford says cordially as he approaches, Dipper and Mabel trailing along behind him like lost puppies. 

The repair worker looks up and smiles at Ford. “Hey, Professor Pines,” he says, then glances down at Dipper and Mabel as they come up behind Ford. He waves a little bit at them, peeling the tape off his fingers and stuffing it into his toolbelt. It’s a cool toolbelt, Dipper notes. “Hey, other little dudes.”

“Dipper, Mabel, this is Soos.” Ford says, setting a hand on each of their shoulders. “Soos, these are my grand-niece and nephew. They’re going to be staying with me for a little bit.” He hesitates, then adds (in a tone like he isn’t too thrilled about it), “well, staying with me and Stanley.”

Soos brightens a bit. “Oh, sick. You two know Mr. Pines?”

“You know our Grunkle?” Mabel asks, her eyes widening. If they could be sparkling, they would be. Dipper reaches up to yank at the thread in his hat again. Of course they would be, Stan and her get along like a house on fire. They’re ACCOMPLICES. In more crimes than just last night’s breaking and entering. Like that time Mabel helped him steal a bunch of fish from a nearby pond to put in a pool in Stan's front yard because the HOA ‘never said they couldn’t!’ 

And Dipper’s not jealous about it at all. If anyone says otherwise, they’re lying.

“Of course I know him!” Soos says, his smile widening. “He was the one that got me this job with Professor Pines.”

“I needed another repairman,” Ford agrees. “And Stanley said he ‘knew a guy.’ I’ll admit I was skeptical at first, knowing the kinds of people Stanley likes to hang around—”

“Hey! What does that mean?” Mabel presses, putting her hands on her hips and narrowing her eyes up at Ford.

“—but Soos is very good.” Ford concludes hastily. Mabel swivels her head to try to look him in the eye, but he suddenly seems very interested in the ceiling above them. 

Soos’ chest swells a bit with pride. “Thank you, Professor Pines.”

“Of course, Soos.” Ford says, though his eyes flick back to the elevator, like he’s not really listening. Mabel and Soos turn the conversation to what Soos is doing with the red duct tape (and if there’s such a thing as pink duct tape), but Dipper can’t focus on it. He’s busy staring up at Ford, SCRUTINIZING him. 

Is it because they were talking about Grunkle Stan? Is he still mad at him? 

Dipper yanks at the threads coming out of his hat.

It’s the only reason he can think of that checks out. Of course he’s still mad at him. Grunkle Stan broke into a mini golf course with them last night  — which was, admittedly, a bit irresponsible to do with two almost-thirteen year olds now that Dipper’s thinking about it. What if Ford’s so mad that he keeps them from ever seeing Stan again? What if he bans Stan from his house and takes the twins? What if Dipper and Mabel have to spend the rest of their time here eating Ford’s oatmeal and getting bug bites? 

Ford speaks again, and the sound drags Dipper out of his thoughts.

“Ah, Soos. Question,” he says. He pulls his hands from the twins’ shoulders and readjusts the laptop under his arm. “Do you know if F is around here?”

“Hm?” Soos glances up. “Oh, yeah. He’s, uhm,” he shifts his weight between his feet, and jabs a thumb towards the elevator shaft. “Working down there. I didn’t understand half of what he was saying. Not that I didn’t understand the technical terms,” he clarifies quickly, with a shrug. “He just kept using words like ‘scrimble-scrobble’ and, uh. Something else like that, dude. I figured maybe I just leave him to it and hand him screwdrivers when he needs them.”

“Sounds like him.” Ford says, his lips twitching up into a slight smile. “When he surfaces, tell him I need to speak with him.”

“Right. Will do.” Soos does a little two-finger salute.

Ford nods and steps back, turning on his heel and gesturing for the twins to follow. “Thank you.”

As he begins to walk back towards the revolving door at the front of the building, Mabel glances at Dipper and gives him a Look. Did you see that?

Dipper frowns at the Look, and gives her one back. See what?

She rolls her eyes at him, which doesn’t clarify anything. Dipper sticks his tongue out at her.

“Dipper, Mabel!” Ford calls.

“Coming!” Dipper yells back, and then frowns deeper at Mabel. “What was that about?”

She pokes him in the arm. “I’ll tell you later, c’mon. We’re gonna miss the pancakes!”

So, with a wave at Soos, Dipper lets Mabel drag him off towards where Ford is waiting for them. 

Chapter Text

The diner is much busier than the lobby of the apartment building had been. It smells like eggs and melting cheese in here, far warmer than the apartment or the city outside. There’s noise all around them, people chattering and laughing as they squeeze their way into the building. It takes them a few minutes to even seat themselves, Dipper and Mabel both clinging to the edges of Ford’s coat so they don’t get caught up in the crowd of bustling people. 

Ford finds them a booth that’s tucked away into a corner of the diner and slides into it, wasting no time in flipping his computer back open and resuming his position. Mabel clambers in after him, using the back of the seat to support herself, then makes a gagging noise as she yanks her hand away. There’s gum sticking to her palm.

“Eugh,” she says, scooting away from that cushion in particular. “You can sit there, Dipper.”

“Why me?” he demands.

“Because your clothes already need to be washed, and this is a new sweater I just knitted!” Mabel says, looking BAFFLED that this is even a point of debate. She spreads her arms to show off the newly knitted sweater. 

It has a picture of a cat throwing up rainbows on it. UNCONVENTIONAL.

Dipper rolls his eyes, but doesn’t argue. He sits on the other side of Ford and takes advantage of his position to peer over Ford’s shoulder at his computer again. It’s more diagrams of the generator, same as earlier. Each piece is carefully labeled with Ford’s swooping cursive that makes it hard to read. 

Dipper tilts his head a bit, squinting. “Why are you doing research on the city’s generator?” he asks, glancing up at Grunkle Ford. “Isn’t it old and broken?”

“Because it’s the topic of the next lecture I’ll be speaking at.” Ford says, glancing over at Dipper. He spins a finger in the air before he looks back down at his computer. “And lately the city council’s been debating on what to do with it.”

Mabel pokes her head over Ford’s other arm, trying to see the computer screen as well. “LIke how they’ve been getting rid of a lot of the old buildings?” she asks. “To build new ones?”

Dipper frowns at her. “What? Where did you hear that?”

“I saw someone interviewing a rich weirdo about it on Grunkle Stan’s TV.” 

“When did you see that?”

“A week ago. And you were too busy playing nerd games to come make fun of his haircut with me whenever I called your name.”

“They’re not,” Dipper tries to bite his tongue. It doesn’t go so well. “They’re not nerdy, they’re—oh, whatever, shut up!”

“In any case, Mabel’s right,” Ford interrupts quickly, before this can escalate into the fight it usually does. He lifts up his arm so she’s able to see better. She scoots in and tucks herself against his side. “They’re fighting to get rid of a lot of the older buildings around the city, as well as the generator.”

Dipper wrinkles his nose. “What does the city’s demolition stuff have to do with you?”

Ford hems and haws a little bit, waving a hand in the air. 

“It usually doesn’t have anything to do with me, but I’m particularly passionate about keeping the generator. I want to try to persuade the city into seeing my point of view.”

“But wouldn’t it be better if we just got a new one?” Mabel asks. “You know, so the power doesn’t go out every other week! Out with the old, in with the new.”

Ford’s lips thin, in the way they do whenever he’s trying not to sigh. “Well, yes. And I’m largely for that. But the generator is a piece of our city’s history. I’m trying to convince them to donate it to the university, so me and others can study it.”

“What’s there to study?” Dipper reaches for the computer to draw it closer to himself so he can read the cursive. Ford makes a strangled noise, like a frog has quite suddenly found its way into his throat, and reaches to take it back. Before him and Dipper can wrestle over the computer, though, Mabel lets out a sharp little squeak of shock. 

Dipper snaps his head up to see that the waitress has materialized at their table without any warning. She’s just there, like she’s been waiting there for someone to notice her.

“Hello, folks!” she says, tilting her head to the side every so slightly. One of her eyes is closed. 

“Hello!” Mabel says once she’s recovered from the shock. She beams at the waitress, all sparkly eyes and a bright, braces-filled smile.

“Hi,” Dipper manages. How did he not notice her? Had she been spying on them? Had she been holding her breath so he didn’t notice her so she could spy on them? What if she was a zombie and that was how she could hold her breath for so long?

Ford clears his throat. “Good morning, Susan,” he says, and gives her a thin, tired smile. He reaches out and slowly pushes the lid of his laptop shut while Dipper is distracted staring at her with wide eyes. 

“What can I get for y’all today?” Susan flips open her notepad, and Mabel leans forward quickly. 

“Can I get chocolate chip pancakes? But with the chocolate chips can you also put sprinkles nside of them? And whipped cream on top with syrup. Lots of syrup,” She draws in a breath to continue talking. 

Ford gives her a doubtful look. “That’s a lot of sugar.”

“And I need a lot of energy.” Mabel counters. “How else do you expect me to keep up with Mr. Paranoid over here?” She leans over him and nudges Dipper slightly, which is enough to startle him out of his zombie-filled panic.

“Huh?” He blinks at her.

“Touché,” Ford murmurs. Dipper makes a mental note to look that one up in his dictionary. Ford’s used it enough times for him to get the general idea of what it means, but he’d like a proper definition. Mostly so he can use it without looking dumb. “Dipper, what do you want for breakfast?”

“Uhm.” Dipper glances up at Susan, and can’t keep himself from blurting out. “Do you guys offer brains?”

Both adults look bewildered. Under the table, Mabel kicks his shin. 

Dipper yelps out a quick, “just kidding!” and leans down to rub his shin, shooting Mabel an accusatory look. “Can I have french toast?”

Susan gives Grunkle Ford a look that Dipper can’t quite decipher. Ford rubs a hand over his face and just shrugs.

“Sure, sugar.” Susan says, shooting Dipper a smile and writing it down. “And for you?”

“Just a coffee, please.” Ford drags his hand away from his face, and gives her a tired smile. She nods and bustles away. 

Dipper slumps down in the booth with a sigh.

“You’ve been staying up watching too many zombie movies,” Mabel says, nudging him under the table with her foot again.

“No, And I mean—come on. They’re not even real, I know that.” Dipper avoids her eyes, rubbing the back of his neck. The way Mabel’s looking at him makes him kinda feel like a bit of an idiot.

“Not real in the way that the media portrays them, anyway.” Grunkle Ford murmurs, flipping his computer back open. “If zombies were real, the amount of muscle decomposition would render them almost completely harmless. Even if they did want to eat people.”

Dipper stares at him. “Really?”

Mabel groans. “Don’t get him started, Grunkle Ford. Dipper’s crazy over all that spooky stuff like that.” She nudges him with her foot again. 

Dipper frowns, then slumps down further in the booth so he can kick her under the table. She just kicks him back harder.

“Quit it!” he complains, pulling himself back up so he’s out of reach. 

“You kicked me first!” Mabel glares at him.

He raises his voice a bit, just to get his point across. Because it’s not true, she had been the one nudging him under the table the whole time, why is he getting blamed for it now? “No, I didn’t!”

“Yeah, you did!” She raises her voice too. 

“Both of you!” Ford says sharply, shutting his computer again. Both Dipper and Mabel snap their mouths shut, giving him wide-eyed looks. 

He runs a hand across his face again, taking a deep breath and sighing. He has the grace to look very guilty for losing his composure. “Why don’t you two go wait outside? There’s chalk,” he tries. “So I can get some work done in here. I’ll tell you when our food is out.”

Dipper hesitates, glancing across the table. A brief flicker of shame makes its way across Mabel’s face, before she’s nodding and slipping out of her seat. 

“Alright, Grunkle Ford! C’mon, Dipper.” 

And just like that, Dipper’s being dragged out to the front of the diner. 

Mabel wastes no time grabbing the chalk set out (probably for other kids getting on their parents' nerves) and crouching on the sidewalk. Dipper stands beside her, his hands shoved into his pants pockets and his shoulders hunched.

People are walking past; some quick, some ambling by like they have all the time in the world. Maybe they do. Dipper toys with the idea that one or two of them is a zombie and that’s why they’re walking so slowly. The muscle decomposition. But the idea doesn’t stick for long, not when he has bigger things on his mind. Bigger fish to fry. 

“Do you think Grunkle Ford regrets taking us in?” he blurts. Because he’s never really been good about keeping These Sorts Of Things to himself. And Mabel’s probably worrying about it too, anyway. 

It takes her a moment to respond. Dipper wants to believe that it’s just because her chalk broke and she had to readjust to use the bigger piece.

“Of course not.”

“But he barely bothers to spend time with us.” Dipper yanks at the threads in his hat. He can’t help but worry. “And I don’t think he had much warning that we were coming. And he doesn’t seem like the best guy to take care of kids. And —”

“He doesn’t.” Mabel says, in an uncharacteristically sharp way. A lot like Ford had, earlier. 

Dipper gets the message. 

He falls silent, and turns his gaze across the street instead. There are all sorts of weird shops over there, not to mention the people coming in and out of them. For a minute or two, he entertains himself by watching those people. Somebody with a huge purple mohawk. A girl with a purse that, on second glance, looks like it has a raccoon in it. A group of teenagers pushing each other around in a grocery cart. There’s a bus driving by that’s absolutely filled to the brim with what looks like those statue garden gnomes and nothing else. And there’s a guy in a suit talking to a group of people.

Dipper frowns at the last guy, and nudges Mabel.

“Hey,” he says, keeping his voice low. “Hey, Mabel. Is that the guy you were talking about earlier?”

“What?” She looks up. “Oh. The guy on TV? Yeah, that’s him. That’s definitely him. I’d recognize that awful mustache anywhere. If you ever grew a mustache like that, by the way, I would disown you as my brother.”

Dipper can feel his shoulders relax ever so slightly at her tone of voice. She’s teasing him, which means that they don’t have to both be sore for the rest of the day about snapping at each other. 

“I don’t think you can do that,” Dipper mutters, frowning as he stares over at the crowd. It looks like a mix of random passerby and reporters. “Like, legally. I don’t think that’s legal. I think you have to have a reason to disown people. What’s he doing?”

Neither of them have to say anything. It’s the sort of telepathic twin communication you hear about in movies — Mabel stands up and dusts the chalk off of her hands, Dipper glances back to make sure Ford isn’t watching them (which he isn’t), and both of them scamper across the street. 

It’s easy work, sneaking up on the man and the crowd he’s drawing and his crew of people with cameras. It’s a bit harder to pretend like Mabel and Dipper belong there.

“‘Scuse me,” Dipper mutters, pushing past someone. “Sorry. Gotta get through.”

Mabel stomps on someone’s foot and grabs Dipper’s hand to yank him further along when they stumble out of the way. “Come ON!”

They approach the front of the crowd, ducking and weaving through the people around them. They manage to secure a place close to the front and listen as best as they can.

The man flashes the crowd a smile that Dipper thinks is meant to be charming. It reminds him of the word SIMPERING. “We all hold these buildings very near to us. They are, after all, what remains of the city that my family founded.”

“What is he talking about?” Dipper whispers. Mabel shrugs.

“It’s time for a change!” The man continues. “Our city deserves more than these eyesores of buildings.” Which doesn’t make much sense,

The crowd around them shifts, murmurs running throughout it. Whatever. This guy’s full of hot air, and Dipper’s pretty sure they’re not getting any solid answers out of his rambling any time soon. He glances around for anyone who can explain things to them, and tugs Mabel’s sweater sleeve when he spots his target. It’s a girl who looks about their age, standing a little way off from the crowd and looking bored out of her mind.

“C’mon,” he hisses, and together he and Mabel slip out of the crowd.

The girl glances up as they approach her, and her lip curls like she’s just gotten a whiff of the dumpsters in the alley behind them. She has blonde hair and earrings so big that Dipper briefly wonders if she has superhuman ears, because those have to hurt.

“Hi!” Mabel says cheerfully, while Dipper is debating how superhuman ears would even work. Mabel’s a bit better at this whole making friends and charming people thing than Dipper is. “You seem like you've been here for a while.”

“I have been,” the girl says slowly, her eyes traveling over the two of them. They linger on Mabel’s handknit sweater, on Dipper’s hat and the threads he’s been yanking at for months now. She raises a hand and points at the man giving the speech. “That’s my dad.”

“Oohhh,” Mabel nods. “Right, cool! So you can explain what’s going on to us, right? Me and my brother Dipper — I’m Mabel, by the way,” she smiles very wide, and doesn’t falter when the girl doesn't smile back, “rolled in here a bit late! So we’re kinda confused.”

“Uhm.” The girl blinks at them. “Sure. My dad,” she points at the man again, “is going to buy those buildings,” she points at some buildings across the street, “and demolish them. And turn them into condominiums.”

Dipper’s eyes follow her hand to where it’s pointing, and then he suddenly has to try very hard not to feel sick. It doesn’t work too well.

She’s pointing at the row of buildings that Ford’s apartment is in. 

“Like, uhm,” he says quickly. “Like this year? Right now?”

“Well not right now.” She frowns at him. Obviously wondering if he’s going to puke all over her dress. He feels like he’s going to puke all over her dress. He probably looks like it, too. “Obviously. Business deals like this take time. But sometime in the next year, yeah.”

“What about all the people living there?” Dipper asks. “What are they gonna do?”

The girl shrugs, like she can’t be bothered to care about stupid things like that. Like Dipper’s stupid. “I don’t know. That’s their problem. They can get a place in the condos, I guess.” She wrinkles her nose. “But we’re really hoping they don’t. We don’t want people like that living there. It’ll draw down the market value.” She drawls out the word, then looks at Dipper and wrinkles her nose. “You do know what that means, don’t you? Market value?”

Dipper opens his mouth to say yes, he does, the dictionary he keeps under his bed defines it as the amount something can be bought or sold for. He wants to tell her that that’ll never happen, Ford’s building is priceless and shouldn’t be bought or sold because they’re living there. He opens his mouth to point out how stupid that is and maybe to insult her dress and shoes and hair because he feels sick and the whole world is gonna come crashing down on him again for the second-third-fourth-five time in two months.

Or maybe he just opens his mouth so that he can throw up Ford’s awful oatmeal all over her dress. 

But before he can say any of it, Mabel’s nudging him with her shoulder. “Thank you for explaining!” she says, and pulls Dipper away. Too quick. He can’t even get a word in before they’re already a few yards away. 

“Why’d you stop me?” he asks, once they’re out of earshot.

“Because, Dipper, she’s obviously rich! And rich people are famously hard to deal with, I don’t know if you’ve noticed. And I have chocolate-sprinkle pancakes waiting for me and I didn’t want to wait for a million hours for you to argue with some rich girl.”

“Pancakes?” Dipper splutters. INDIGNANT. “Mabel, that girl just said her family is gonna try to make Ford homeless!”

“Yeah, but she also said they’re gonna have to buy it first.” Mabel glances both ways down the street, then pulls Dipper across it with her. 

“What does that mean? How are you not freaking out right now?” 

Dipper yanks so hard at the threads in his hat that he hears a sharp tear from the fabric. Oops. The threads come away tangled around his fingers, green and white wrapped tightly around skin that’s quickly turning purple. 

“They’re gonna have to convince the owner to sell it.” Mabel snorts, reaching up and batting his hand away from his hat. “Dad said to stop pulling at that, y’know. You’re gonna tear a hole in it.”

“The owner’s gonna sell it!” Dipper says, his voice bordering on a panicked yell. He drops the threads on the ground, watches them blow away in the winter wind and feels his stomach go with them. “Are you kidding me? They’re gonna sell it, those guys are loaded and the building’s already falling apart, Mabel! They’re gonna sell it!”

Mabel drags him inside the diner again, looking around for Ford. “Not if we convince them not to.”

“That doesn’t–” Dipper cuts himself off as they get closer to Ford, who looks immensely relieved at the sight of them.

“There you two are,” he says, and Mabel scrambles up onto the seat. She doesn’t complain about the gum this time, just settles in next to Ford and picks up her fork. Their food is already on the table, hot and steaming and waiting for them. It smells wonderful, and despite how sick with fear he feels, Dipper can’t help but realize how hungry he is. “I was beginning to get worried. I looked back up and you two were gone.”

“Sorry, Grunkle Ford.” Dipper says, sliding into his seat. He tries not to sound too worked up. It must not work, because Ford frowns at him.

“Is something wrong, Dipper?”

Dipper fiddles with the tear in his hat. 

“No?” he tries. 

Ford’s eyes narrow behind his glasses. 

“Did something happen?”

Dipper hesitates. It would be easy to tell him. Really, really easy, actually. And it’d probably be the good thing to do, too.

But some selfish little part of him doesn’t want to ruin the moment. His shoulders are beginning to untense and he doesn’t want this to end; the chatter of the diner around them, Ford’s somewhat-relaxed posture, Mabel scarfing down as many pancakes as she can next to him. This feels nice. And he doesn’t want it to end because he couldn’t keep his big mouth shut.

So he just shakes his head, reaching for his silverware and pulling his plate closer to him. “Nah,” he says, and manages a smile at Ford. “Just hungry.”

Ford scrutinizes him for a moment or two, then cracks a thin smile back. “The oatmeal was pretty bad, wasn’t it?”

The two of them share a small chuckle, and Ford pats his back carefully before pulling away. Dipper glances down at the food in front of him.

Right. Like Mabel said, he’s being Mr. Paranoid again. The owner isn’t going to sell the building, and even if they were going to — if anyone can convince anyone of anything, it’s Mabel (actually it’s Grunkle Stan, but Mabel learned from the best).

They just have to find the owner, who probably (?) lives in their own building. And really, the building doesn’t have many tenants to sort through. Half the rooms are empty anyway. How hard can it be?