Even in its heyday, the Mystery Shack had been a derelict building. The exterior hadn't changed – the roof had accumulated more moss, perhaps – but the fact that it had been sitting in the quietest corner of town, untouched for years, gave it a haunting quality. The dirt parking lot had been largely reclaimed by grass, tickling Dipper's ankles, and he walked up the creaky steps of the porch and set his trash bag down on the weathered wooden planks. He rapped on the door, waited a minute, then plucked his old key out of his wallet. It slid into the lock with ease.

The sun was setting, angled perfectly to beam through the windows in the entryway and highlight every speck of dust he was disturbing. "Hello?" he called out. "Uncle Ford?"

Truthfully, Dipper was glad that he heard no reply, no movement. He didn't know what he would say to his uncle – it would be an awkward dance around the topic of murder, he supposed, and then another awkward few days of bumping into each other in the kitchen.

The living room looked exactly the same. He swept his hand over the table at the far end of the room, leaving a streak in the dust. It was like walking onto an abandoned TV set, the furniture all part of a world he could never re-enter, even by physically being there. The characters weren't around to complete it.

He climbed the stairs to the attic and, after some hesitation, opened the door to his old bedroom. With the sunlight pouring in through the single window, the room looked so much like it did on those lazy summer afternoons that he could see himself on the bed, Wendy curled up at his side.

It was all here. Undisturbed. There was dust on every surface and cobwebs in every corner but it was all still here. The unmade bed, a bundle of clothes at the foot of it. The chest of drawers and the stereo on top, his CD collection and the band posters lining the wall. In his nightstand, his old leather-bound notebooks, the one at the bottom crumpled from the day he left it out in the rain. A bottle of lithium tablets. And in his wardrobe, hanging among the few shirts he had bothered to hang up, was one of her red flannels and a pair of jeans. He resisted the temptation to lean in and smell them, because he wasn't going to do that. He wasn't going to deliberately fill his mind with destructive thoughts of what could have been, a long, long time ago.

That day, after calling his sister, he cleaned more than he had ever cleaned in his life – vacuumed, dusted, changed the bedsheets, emptied the laundry basket. He could have slept downstairs on the couch, but he didn't know where in the house Stan had died – if it was the couch, he preferred to sleep in his old room, even if a violent monster once slept here. When the sun had gone down, Dipper roamed the house, searching Stan's office in particular for a note he might have left, a journal, a letter never sent, anything that may have hinted that in his last few years he didn't harbor resentment for Dipper over their final conversation. But he found nothing, and he went to bed, the guilt keeping him up until the exhaustion from traveling took over.

On New Year's Day, he stepped out on the snow-dusted porch in his t-shirt and his boxer shorts and sipped his coffee while gazing off into the trees, as he did every morning. Usually, it was the only fresh air he got all day, apart from on Saturdays when he walked to the store to stock up on food.

Today, though, he decided to make a change. He showered, got dressed, put on the old pair of boots in the bottom of his wardrobe and trudged through the snow to Greasy's diner for breakfast. It was warm there, much warmer than the Shack – the heating system was on the brink and he hadn't called anybody to come and fix it. He sat in a booth and dumped his coat and sweater in a bundle on the seat next to him. After a minute of hiding behind the menu, he glanced up to survey the other patrons. A middle-aged couple at the other end of the diner averted their eyes; Dipper didn't know if they had recognized him – in a town where nothing ever happened, an enormous news story eight years ago was still pretty big today – or if they were merely curious as to who had walked into their small-town breakfast spot. The owner, Lazy Susan, was still here, had been since the first time he had stepped foot in the diner sixteen years ago, and she recognized him. It was evident in the pause after good morning, when she looked up from her notepad.

Regardless, breakfast was uneventful enough that he felt comfortable making it a daily occurrence. He would stuff himself full and mosey on home, eat lunch at around three, and head out into the woods for a walk. The only words he spoke all day were to order food at the diner, except for the odd occasion that Mabel called him to check how he was doing. And he was doing okay, he thought – a little sheltered, but he had always been a hermit to some degree. He spent a lot of his time rewriting his untitled fantasy trilogy, changing up major elements of the original storyline, partly by choice, partly because he couldn't remember massive chunks of the story that now resided under a prison bunk – if Mitch hadn't already torn up the pages and used them as toilet paper, at least.

One morning, Lazy Susan came over to his table and he pushed his empty coffee cup aside, thinking she would take it, but instead she sat down opposite him in the booth. She folded her wrinkly hands on the table, one eye closed as always, appearing to struggle with what to say.

"I can leave if you want me to," Dipper said, his voice low. He hated to think that he had upset her other customers by being here.

"Oh, no, dear, I'm not going to kick you out. I just have something to say and I'm trying to think how best to say it."

Dipper waited. He folded up his newspaper and pushed it to the far end of the table, out of the way. "Seriously, I can leave if I'm making people uncomfortable. It's no problem."

She chuckled. "No, nobody has complained, if that's what you're thinking. Though I'm sure you must feel it. The staring. The quiet when you walk in a room."

His voice dropped to a near-whisper. "Yeah, sometimes."

"Most people in this town don't know how to mind their own business, and neither do I, which is why I'm sittin' here now. But you can relax. I'm not out to getcha, or anything." She fiddled with a ring on her finger. "My parents died when I was very young," she said. "I had an uncle, Uncle Frank, who took custody of me and my older sister, Betsy, God rest her soul. He had a tiny house in Charleston, Maine, and me and Betsy had to share a bedroom, which we didn't mind, we were the best of friends. She was eleven and I was... six, I think. Anyway, for a while it wasn't so bad, we cried over our parents a lot in the night. Most nights I'd end up in her bed because one of us or the other needed comforting. We went to school, and Uncle Frank worked at the Mobil gas station two blocks over. He used to come home stinking of gasoline, but he took care of us well, always cooked us a healthy dinner."

She paused, and Dipper glanced down at the ring. She was twisting it around her finger mechanically, over and over. "Then one night," she said, "he came into our bedroom. I was awake, but he went over to Betsy's bed and woke her up. He started to... touch her. Afterwards he came over and did the same thing to me, and we were both silent. I don't think either of us knew what was happening. He started doing it every night, we started to cry and scream, but he never stopped. We were being abused, of course, but we didn't know that that was the word to describe it.

"Anyway, one night we were eating dinner, steak and mashed potatoes. It was silent at the table – Betsy and I didn't talk much anymore – and Frank, he starts coughing. He coughs once and we ignore it, but then he keeps coughing and we look up. He reached for his glass of water and drank the whole thing, and then he isn't coughing anymore, he has his hands around his throat, and his face is going red. Veins on his neck poking out. I looked over at Betsy, because I didn't know what to do, and she looked a little shocked at first, but then her face hardened. She just kept watching him, so so did I. Now Betsy, she was eleven years old, she knew what to do to save a man from choking. She knew, at least, that as soon as he hit the floor we should have called an ambulance. But when it fell silent again we just stared across the table at one another, I remember it so vividly. She jumped down from her chair and gave me a hug, then she stooped down and put two fingers on Uncle Frank's neck. She waited about five minutes, then she called the ambulance. He was already dead, of course."

Dipper's mouth had gone dry; he reached for the coffee cup but it was empty, and he didn't think to ask for a glass of water, because Susan was gazing in his eyes, her expression unwavering.

She said, "Dipper, there are people in this world who don't deserve to breathe the same air as the rest of us. Do you understand what I'm saying?"

He swallowed, the dryness almost painful in his throat, and nodded slowly, transfixed.

"Far as I'm concerned, it was a favor to all of us, what you did." With that, she got up from the booth and went to the next table over, before Dipper had a chance to thank her, or to respond in any way whatsoever. Dipper listened as Susan greeted the new customers with a cheerful lilt in her voice, but then he filtered out their exchange, turned to gaze out the window, letting Susan's story truly sink in.

He left behind on the table more than enough cash to cover the check, and walked back to the Mystery Shack. Upstairs in his nightstand, one of the notebooks contained a rewrite of Book One, in which Willow spared the king instead of killing him, after storming his castle. Dipper withdrew the notebook from the drawer, went outside, and walked all the way through the woods to the lake, where he tossed the book into the water.

He felt a lot safer in the diner, after Susan's confession. It was not uncommon, when he sat in his booth at the far end of the restaurant, for his mind to conjure up an image of the townspeople swarming in and dragging him over to Main Street, to have him hanged for killing one of their own. It was certainly a fear that had stemmed from reading one too many fantasy novels in prison, but it was nice to think that if such a thing did happen, Lazy Susan would have intervened in his defense.

As the days went by, and the people that frequented the diner were not hostile towards him but polite, and friendly, he began to feel less like he was playing with fire by returning to the town he was once infamous in. He was still unsure whether anybody recognized him, though he had a feeling nobody did. He didn't think so many people could be so indifferent in the presence of a murderer, and it was even more unlikely that they were all hiding quiet respect for him, as Susan was. Maybe one day they would find out, and begin to avoid him, but for now, he was happy to peacefully exist in the small community of misfits that was Gravity Falls.

Then one day, the little golden bell above the door chimed, and by force of habit, Dipper looked up, and it was her. She stepped up to the counter, a lazy smile on her face, and said something to Susan, but Susan leaned in, concern in her eyes, and whispered something back. Wendy Corduroy turned her head and looked directly at him.

He fixed his attention on the road outside. A nerve below his left eye was twitching, his fingers were trembling, and he thought he might have to run to the bathroom and be sick, but moving was not physically possible. He was waiting for the piercing scream that would surely come, or at least heavy footfalls of her boots as she fled the diner, but he heard neither of those things. Instead, after ten agonizing seconds, she was standing beside the table, speaking.

"Is anyone sitting here?" she asked. Her hair was the same vibrant red, but shorter – it hung just below her shoulders instead of halfway down her back. It was tucked behind her right ear, which had a feather earring in its lobe and two rings further up. She was wearing a black blouse with pink and red and yellow flowers, puffy sleeves, and light blue jeans. She still wore that easy smile; she had always been patient with Dipper and his tendency to lock up whenever he was asked the simplest of questions.

Recalling that he was not in fact frozen in time, Dipper cast his eyes down at his newspaper, and shook his head. He did not look up as she slipped into the booth on the opposite side and sat down, an unfamiliar hint of perfume drifting across the table. Dipper read the same word on the page twenty times over – speculating. Was that a word? It sure didn't look like a word.

"Somebody told me they saw you over at Trader Joe's. I told them they must have been mistaken because you wouldn't be out for another few years. Looks like I was wrong."

He looked up for long enough to notice the thin layer of mascara on her lashes, but decided he would not hold eye contact for too long, otherwise he would fall in love with her all over again. "Good behavior," he mumbled.

"I'm a little offended you haven't stopped by to see me," she said, a playful smirk on her lips.

"I didn't know you were here," Dipper said. "I thought you were in Denver."

"I know, I'm teasing. No, I moved back here right after I graduated. About three years ago."

Dipper wanted to ask what she had studied, but thought it best to let Wendy steer the conversation, though he could never have anticipated the civil tone it seemed to have taken. It was sort of like breaking into somebody's house and the homeowner offering you a cup of tea.

"How long have you been here?" she asked.

"A month."

"Are you staying at the Shack?"

"Yeah."

"I'm really sorry about Stan."

Her head was cocked to the side, her eyebrows arched. She was sorry. Which meant that she cared, about him, and any iota of care that she gave him was too much. Dipper scratched the back of his neck and grabbed his coat. "I'm sorry, I can't do this."

She didn't protest, and Dipper pushed open the door and made it halfway across the parking lot before he stopped in his tracks. He had forgotten to pay. He cursed up at the cloudy sky, spun around, and charged back towards the diner, but the bell rung above the door and Wendy was standing there, in his way.

"I forgot to pay," he said.

"I paid for you."

"Why?"

She clucked her tongue. "I don't want you to go back to jail right away? You just got here."

Utterly speechless, Dipper stayed in the weird standoff until he noticed the diner's customers turning in their seats, disgruntled that the pleasant warmth the diner had to offer was escaping through the wide-open door. Again, Dipper swiveled on his heels, and walked over to the road, but he heard steps in the gravel behind him.

"Where are you going?" she asked.

"Home."

"Can I come?"

He stopped in the grass by the side of the road and turned to look at her, trailing along behind him like a curious child. He noticed that she didn't have a coat, and the blouse was thin, but she didn't seem to care. "Aren't you cold?"

"Don't deflect the question."

"Wendy, why on earth would you want to come home with me?"

She glowered at him. "I don't know, because I haven't seen you in fucking ages?"

"It's not like I went away to summer camp, Wendy, I..."

"You what? Killed my dad? Yeah, I remember." She took a step forward, her green eyes boring into him. "But what did you want me to do? Did you want me to turn around and walk right out of the diner? Just ignore that you were sitting there?"

"Yes! Yes, exactly that. And I would have gone home, and packed up my bags, and gotten the fuck out of town before– before this had a chance to happen." He started walking again, hands stuffed in his pockets, and she continued to follow him.

"Is that what you're doing right now?" she said.

"Yep."

"You would have left before you had a chance to talk to me? You would have left knowing we'd probably never see each other again?"

"That's right."

"So our friendship meant nothing to you, then? Our relationship meant nothing to you."

"It doesn't matter how much it meant to me! It's a part of history, now, it's something we could never go back to."

For a couple hundred paces, she didn't say anything. She was still behind him; he could hear the occasional snap of a twig or a bush rustling as she brushed past it. He turned onto the winding dirt road leading up to the Shack, his eye still twitching periodically, his head beginning to hurt. In his mind, he was sifting through things he could say to make her turn around and leave – one final punch to her gut, and she would know, once and for all, that Dipper Pines was not worth a minute of her time. Except at the same time, he wanted her to keep following him, of course he did, because she was Wendy Corduroy, the most captivating woman on the planet. The fact that she had visibly changed only supplemented his interest. Why the haircut? The makeup, the perfume? The blouse? What had happened in the eight years he had missed?

"Aren't there things you want to say to me?" she said, just behind his shoulder, now. "Didn't you think about me at all while you were gone?"

He thought back to his prison bed, scribbling in his notebook – Willow said, Willow asked, Willow yelled, Wendy's imagein his mind with every line that he wrote. There was a chink in his armor. His face fell, and he had to channel his energy to fight away the urge to break down sobbing. "Every day," he croaked. "But this isn't about what I want, it's about what you need. And like I told you before, you need a life that does not involve me whatsoever."

"Yeah, there you go again, thinking you know what I needbetter than I do."

Dipper stopped at the front door, the keys hanging on his finger. Wendy had walked up to the bottom step of the porch but not come any further. "Okay, so maybe it isn't about you, either. Maybe it's just common sense. We both remind each other of something awful that happened, something we would rather forget. Right?"

"Yes, but–"

"So then we shouldn't even be talking."

"Things are more complicated than that, Dipper."

"Everyone keeps saying that! I don't see how they can be."

She put her hands in her pockets, thumbs jutting out, and shrugged. "If you let me inside, maybe you'll find out."

Dipper was incredulous. It reminded him of the fall he had first moved here, the days spent following one another around town, talking on their doorsteps, flirting, neither of them confident enough to make a move on the other. The fact that she could still behave like that baffled him. He sighed, and held open the door for her. He would listen to whatever she had to say while packing his suitcase. Besides, if he didn't let her in, she would only climb up on the roof and come in through the hatch, like she used to when she wanted to scare him.

Wendy grinned and hurried up the steps. Dipper followed her into the living room but stayed a few feet away. "Man," Wendy said, turning in circles, regarding the furniture, the peeling wallpaper. "So many memories."

"Yeah."

She wandered over to the table at the far end of the room. Its entire surface was a collage of US states, aerial photos of specific towns, Post-it notes and sheets of paper attached to each one – pros and cons lists. "What's this?" she asked.

"Places I might move to," he said.

She chuckled and shook her head. "Such a Dipper thing to do."

He walked over and joined her, gazed down at the month of work spread out before him. It had outgrown the table; some of the paper draped over the edge.

"Aww," Wendy said. She pointed to a photo of Mabel and her family, which was the only thing sitting in the pros column for California. Wendy leaned forward, inspecting the photo. "Oh, she has two girls now? They're adorable. Have you spoken to her?"

"Yeah," he said. "I went to see her as soon as I was released."

"How is she?"

"She's doing good." He smiled to himself. "It was kinda crazy, seeing her living the life she always dreamed about. She always said she was going to have two daughters and a son. I guess the son is next."

"And you know her husband's on TV, right?"

"Yeah. Yeah, he's really cool, too."

They stood in silence for a moment. Dipper became aware that it was equally possible that Wendy's life had progressed as far as Mabel's had, and that she had a family of her own. And while that was what Dipper had wanted for her since his incarceration, he knew at the same time that it would stab him in the heart, because once upon a time, he could have been her family.

"So what's the verdict?" Wendy said. "Where are you moving to?"

"I don't know yet."

"How long are you going to stay here?"

"That shouldn't be any of your concern."

Wendy set her jaw. "Why not?"

"I already told you why." He turned away, wandered over to the stairs, thinking he might just pack his bags in front of her to drive his point home, but Wendy was on his heels.

"Right, because now that you're here I'm supposed to avoid you like the fucking plague. Why did you even come back here if you didn't want me to see you?"

"I didn't know you would be here. I thought you were still in Denver."

"Yeah, bullshit. Out of all the places in the world you could have gone to, and–" she gestured to the table – "you've clearly thought about a lot of them, I was most likely to be right here, and you knew that."

"Are you saying I came here looking for you?"

She folded her arms. "Yeah."

"Even though I've spent the last half hour trying to get you to leave me alone?"

"Yep. You wanted to see me, then something clicked in your head when you finally did, and now you're acting like– like this."

It wasn't implausible. Gravity Falls was supposed to be a temporary stop – his initial plan was to gather up his old belongings and go live in a motel further north until he had decided on a proper destination to begin a new life. But he had become idle, as he often did, and lingered here for too long. Had he – subconsciously – been waiting for her to appear? "That's ridiculous," he said, but the more he thought about it, the more she seemed right. Even as she pinched the bridge of her nose, and scowled up at him, she was the most beautiful woman he had ever laid eyes on. It was very possible that, eight years later, he was still blindly addicted to her, and that addiction had evidently led to some selfish decisions in the past.

Which, he remembered, was the exact reason he was trying to put distance between them. Dipper jogged up the two flights of stairs to his bedroom.

"Where are you going?" Wendy called up to him, and as he was tearing clothes out of his wardrobe and slinging them on the bed, she appeared in the doorway. "Dipper–"

"No, you're right," he said. "You are right. I came back here because I wanted to see you, because I've always been in love with you and that clearly isn't ever going to go away. So I need to go away."

"Well, there you go! That was my point. You said that– that we both remind each other of something horrible that happened, and that's true. You're always going to remind me of that night. But there's so much more than that when I look at you, Dipper. I remember when we used to be friends, watching terrible movies in my room, I remember hanging out with you at the pool, I remember sitting on the roof in the dark, holding hands, I remember sleeping in your bed, and the way you held me, and– and kissing you... all of it. All the happy things." She swallowed, her eyes searching his. "I've been with two other guys since then, and they didn't... they never took my mind off you. They never understood me like you did. They were never patient with me, like you were. I mean, I treated you like shit, I– I hit you in the face, and all you cared about was whether I was okay. I've always been in love with you, Dipper. I still am."

Dipper shook his head, his vision obscured by tears. "I ruined your life," he said.

Wendy's voice became a whimper. "Is that what you thought, this whole time? He ruined my life, Dipper. You saved it."

He turned away, towards the window. "No, don't do that. You can't justify it like that."

"Listen to me," she said, grabbing his arm and spinning him around. "Most of the time I was afraid of being in my own house. When he came into my room, a lot of the time I was too paralyzed to do anything. And when I was lying there, and he was– when it was happening, I wanted to die. I don't know how many more times it could have happened before I started to hurt myself, and maybe I would have hurt myself enough to– to..." She brought her hands to her eyes and frantically wiped away tears. "You have no idea what it was like, Dipper, it was like having the life drained out of me. He was draining life out of me and you were the one thing giving it back. After he was gone, after the funeral, I came home and I sat down on my bed, and I could breathe easily again. Things were pretty rough for the first month, I was conflicted, but my brothers found out what had been happening and they were so supportive to me. I'm closer with all of them now than I ever was before."

Dipper sat down on the bed, buried his head in his hands. That night, the thought that had impelled him to slam his foot on the accelerator was that he would be making the world a safer place, making Wendy's home a safer place. But that thought had been a product of a crazed, dangerous mind, a worm in his brain that had spawned from hatred and rage. To hear Wendy justify her father's death out loud made Dipper's head spin; he hoped that she was merely lying to make him feel better.

Through the gaps between his fingers, he saw Wendy crouch down in front of him. "I don't resent you for what you did," she said. "I never hated you, or blamed you."

"It doesn't matter," he said. "If I'm capable of killing someone then I'm not in control of my own body. And that means it's only a matter of time before I hurt you."

"You won't hurt me," she said softly.

"How can you know that?"

"Because all you've ever wanted to do is protect me."

And now he was trying to protect her from himself. But her green eyes were gazing up at him, brimming with as much love as they ever had before, and it was enough to make him give up. Exhausted, he let his head fall and rest on her shoulder, squeezed his eyes shut, his hands limp in his lap. She lifted her arms and wrapped them around his neck, and pressed their heads together. Her hair tickled his chin.

The next thing he knew, he was waking up, facing the wall of the attic. He sat up, fast – a habit that hadn't subsided since the day he had woken up to find his notebooks had been stolen from his cell. His heart lurched in his chest – Wendy had been here, just a moment ago, but in the haze of sleep he could not determine if he'd dreamed it, until he plucked a lock of long red hair off his shirt.

It was darker outside, he thought. He got out of bed and looked out the window, but the other side of it was too dirty to see through properly. When he was halfway down the stairs, he could hear muted voices from the living room – the television. He rounded the corner and found Wendy lying on the couch, asleep, a blanket draped over her. It was the blue patchwork blanket that they used to cuddle up under. He still didn't know what time it was, but there wasn't a lot of daylight creeping into the living room, the old TV screen bright by comparison.

As if sensing him there, she stirred and sat up.

"You're still here," Dipper said.

She hugged her knees, a hint of a smirk playing on her lips. "You fell asleep on my shoulder. Thought I'd put you to bed instead of waking you up."

Dipper wandered into the room and sat on the other end of the couch. He gazed at the TV, not really watching it, and periodically he noticed Wendy glance over at him, much like Mabel had done in the first couple weeks of his return. He didn't really understand why.

An hour must have passed. Neither of them moved, other than to reposition their legs. A warm, nostalgic feeling washed over Dipper; he had not felt so relaxed in the company of others since before prison. For the first time since sitting down, he looked over at Wendy, expecting to find her sleeping, but her eyes flicked to his.

"I was going to make chili for dinner," he said. "Do you want some?"

She nodded, and smiled, so he spent an hour in the kitchen cooking, and when it was finished he took two plates back out to the living room and passed one to her. They ate without talking, a seemingly endless marathon of Family Feud reruns playing on the TV. She didn't ask him how he learned to cook, which was good, because he couldn't cook, really. He could recreate chili con carne following the very precise instructions that Andrew had written down for him.

A while after they'd finished eating, empty plates set down on the floor, Dipper said, "this guy's a dick."

It made Wendy jump. He hadn't meant to say anything out loud, but he was so relaxed that he had virtually traveled back in time to when they used to laze around, providing mindless commentary over the TV.

"Who, Steve Harvey?" Wendy said.

"Yeah, he's an asshole. They set the questions up so it's impossible not to give a dirty answer, then he gets all outraged because that woman said 'penis' on television. There's literally no other answer to that question."

"I mean... I can think of a few."

"You can think of a few 'meat products that are shaped like a cylinder?' Go ahead, I'd love to hear them."

"Okay, sausages, salami–"

"Salami is a sausage."

"No it's not, it's salami."

Dipper frowned. "Salami is a type of sausage. How do you not know that?"

"Okay, whatever, salami doesn't count, then. There are others. Um..."

"Don't look at the TV, you'll steal their answers."

"It's a commercial break!"

"Well, still, don't look! There might be a commercial for... meat, or something."

She grinned and narrowed her eyes in thought. "Okay, yeah, you're right. I cannot think of any cylindrical meats other than sausages."

"And penis."

"I would not have thought of penis as an answer."

"Yes you would. That was the only thing I could think of."

Wendy laughed. "You think about penises a lot, then?"

"Yeah, okay, very funny. I worded that poorly."

They both smiled, their argument from hours before receding to the back of Dipper's mind. It was a testament to their chemistry, he supposed, that they could so quickly transform eight years of distance back into their old, relaxed routine.

Maybe it doesn't matter, Dipper thought. Maybe it didn't matter how much he disagreed with Wendy, and with Mabel. Maybe it didn't matter how much he hated himself, sometimes, when he walked along the dirt road from the Shack towards the diner, replaying scenes in his head of his car careening around the corners, on his way to the Corduroy cabin on that fateful evening. Maybe all that mattered was that she was here, sharing a couch with him. She was here and she had stayed here, all day. She wanted to start again.

A fresh start. Was he really going to deny both of them that, when he didn't have much else to live for?

It was a cold, sunny afternoon that he next saw her. He walked along Main Street, one of the many parts of town he had not re-explored since his return. The bowling alley was now a movie theater; the shop that he had once bought Wendy flowers from was closed, the windows boarded up; and a multi-story glass building with blackout windows loomed over the church, as out of place as a building could possibly be.

Corduroy's General Storesat halfway along the street between the bank and a sandwich shop. The name had been painted along the top of the storefront, and behind the display window was a row of wooden statuettes in various sizes – women and children in old-time clothes, an owl, a gnome. Lots of cats. The most impressive was an intricate model of the Eiffel Tower, the crisscross pattern of its metalwork meticulously carved out of wood. Dipper walked to the door and peered in through the glass; there was a counter in the back corner of the shop, and Wendy was sitting behind it, fur boots up on the desk. She was solving a crossword, the end of a pencil between her teeth. He smiled to himself and pushed open the door.

Wendy looked up as the door creaked closed, and her face flashed with wonder as if Jesus himself had just walked in. "Hey," she said, standing, slinging the crossword book across the desk.

"Hey."

"You came."

"Of course," Dipper said. "I had to see for myself how the Corduroy General Store has accrued four and a half stars on Yelp."

She smiled, her hands clasped together, shy as a kid on the first day of school. "Okay, well, feel free to look around. I'll be over here if you need anything." She sat down in her chair again.

The walls were lined with generic souvenirs, reminiscent of the gift shop he spent many a day tending to up at the Mystery Shack – t-shirts, postcards, calendars, sporting designs specific to Oregon or Gravity Falls itself. Another wall was a shelf stacked with candy bars and a refrigerator full of soda. But the focal point of the store was the display in the center, several three-story shelves clustered together, holding what must have been hundreds of the wooden figurines like the ones in the window. Some were painted, but most were simply smooth, dark wood. Animals made up most of the collection – foxes, birds, dolphins, chickens, ducks, goats – but there were larger, more complex designs too, with no apparent running theme; a tree and a treehouse, two mountains with a rope bridge between, a dragon in flight. Dipper's eyes lingered on a carving of a young boy wearing a cap, a book tucked under his arm. He smiled and picked it up in his palm. He had to buy that, he decided. It looked just like him.

Then he noticed the subtle shape of a palm tree carved into the hat, and the tiny handprint on the cover of the book. His mouth dropped open. That was him! "Wait, wait, wait," he said, spinning around and inspecting the sculptures facing the window. "Did you make all of these?"

"Yeah," Wendy said, from the corner. "I thought I told you that?"

"You told me you sold wooden sculptures, not that you made them." Suddenly it made sense why she seemed nervous. She was opening up her creative world to someone whose opinion clearly mattered to her. "Wendy, I don't even know what to say. These are incredible." He wandered over to her and leaned on the counter, still entranced by his younger self. "This is exactly what I used to look like."

She chuckled. "I know, I remember."

"How much?"

"What? Oh, you can have it for free. It wouldn't exist if not for you, right?"

"I want to pay for it. How much?"

"For those ones... I'd usually charge ten bucks."

He fished out his wallet and handed her a ten. "When did you start making these?"

She closed the cash register and shrugged. "Pretty much as soon as I moved back here. Marcus was still living in the cabin and we had a bunch of logs in the backyard that he'd never moved. I went out there one day and sat down on the tree stump, just started whittling. The first one I ever made loosely resembled a fish. It was terrible. I burned it."

Dipper grinned. "That sounds like something you would do."

"Yeah. I got better at it though, and then one day I was sitting in the diner, carving a little cat standing up on its back legs. Lazy Susan was fascinated by it. When it was finished she bought it from me."

"Lazy Susan was your first customer?"

"Lazy Susan was my first customer." She smiled. "In fact, she was the one who convinced me I could make a business out of them. I might not have this place if it wasn't for her."

"That's awesome." He glanced around again at the merchandise, all so neatly arranged, so aesthetically pleasing. Wendy wasn't a neat freak – she probably never could have dated Dipper if she was – but she clearly took pride in the store. "Do you love it here?"

"I do. I mean, I probably shouldn't be telling you this, but the store doesn't turn a profit. My money from selling the cabin is, like, slowly getting drained out of my bank account. But I make enough that I could stay here for another ten years if I wanted to." Wendy had sold the Corduroy cabin with her brothers two years back, splitting the money four ways. Straight after, she began renting this building, and lived in the apartment upstairs. Another family entirely now lived in the secluded spot; Dipper wondered if they were aware of what had happened in the driveway. "Anyway, the sculptures make more money than anything else in here and that's enough reason to keep making them. I actually get a lot of customers that used to go to the Mystery Shack. A lot of people miss it."

"Maybe I could help out," Dipper said, without really thinking about it. "I mean, if you want me to. I have a lot of experience running crappy little gift shops."

Wendy frowned.

"Not crappy. God, no– I meant the Mystery Shack was crappy. This place is great. It's beautiful."

She cocked her head to the side and laughed. "And what services could you lend to my crappy gift shop?"

"I could... do some marketing. Try to get you some exposure. Do you have a website?"

She shook her head.

"Right, okay, that's one thing that ought to change. We're not in the seventies anymore. You could use a Facebook page, too. Most businesses have them these days."

"You don't even use Facebook."

"That's because I have no friends. That doesn't mean Corduroy's General Store can't have friends."

"You have friends," she said quietly.

"Like who?"

"Um, there's one standing in front of you?"

"Ah." He pointed at her. "We're not friends, we're business partners."

A grin crept up on her face.

"But seriously, you can tell me to hit the road if you want."

"No," she said. "I would love to work with you."

"Yeah?"

"Yes."

"Cool. And I'm not– I'm not talking about taking your money, or anything. I just want to help out."

She frowned again. "What, for free?"

"It wouldn't really be for free. You'd be giving me a sense of purpose again."

She smiled, and turned to open the door behind her. "Come on," she said. "If you like my crappy gift shop, you'll love my crappy apartment."

They saw each other every day, after that. Dipper made a website for the store, which saw no traffic at all until he created the Facebook page, and gradually the townsfolk started to leave comments – always positive. Mabel went nuts and directed an army of her seven-hundred Facebook friends to 'like' the page, and the fifty-or-so Californians that did do that helped the page gain exposure across the whole country, even though most of the people supporting it probably had no intention of traveling interstate to visit the store. He regularly uploaded pictures of Wendy's sculptures, and they garnered a lot of attention – again, that was mostly people around the world simply admiring the craftsmanship, and he didn't think it would lead to an increase in sales. He kept doing it because whenever he showed Wendy one of the posts, she sat in silence with a huge smile on her face, reading and rereading the comments on his laptop.

He printed a stack of flyers and left some in the information center on the outskirts of town, others on the counter of Greasy's diner. Wendy always asked customers how they had heard about the store, and the answer was always that they had stumbled upon it walking down the street or that a friend had referred them. If Dipper happened to be in the shop at the time, Wendy would look over and shrug, sympathetic. Maybe next time, her smile said. He expected they would get to the end of the month and his work would not have gained them any new customers, but it didn't seem to matter to Wendy. Her face lit up whenever he walked in, and became even brighter when he brought her lunch, even though he only had to walk next door to get it. Dipper remembered what Wendy's dad had once told him, a truth among lies – she's always had trouble fitting in. It was possible that on the many occasions Dipper had sat at the top of the bleachers, looking out on the bay, Wendy had been sat behind the counter in her store, alone.

Dipper thought about it a lot. Why did he keep coming back every day, and why was she always so happy to see him? It was a pattern they had lived in for an eternity; before the shop, he had visited the bowling alley; before the bowling alley, he had wandered through the woods to her cabin. Were they simply two lonely people craving company, or was there an unbreakable connection between them?

It was the latter, he thought. They were in love – they had confessed as much to one another the day she had found him in the diner. But since the moment he had fallen asleep on her shoulder, they had not touched, save for the occasional mistake, like reaching for a door handle at the same time. That felt normal to him, though. Responsible. The unclear status of their relationship would once have irked him to no end, but now, he didn't mind. He considered himself lucky to be in the same room as her, and the dreamlike state that had come over him since her return to his life overshadowed everything.

That didn't mean that his mind was at peace. Some nights, when sleep refused to come, he traipsed downstairs and sat at the table in the living room, poring over his map of new beginnings. He had not added to it at all, but he did glance at certain towns and entertain the idea of moving there.

Driving away from Gravity Falls, away from her, again, would crush both of them. He knew that. Since his first day as a prisoner, Dipper had taken his medication every morning, he had never lost his temper, he had not once felt the slightest gravitation toward violence, and yet, he saw himself as a time bomb. It was difficult not to. Would he hurt her more if he left, or would he hurt her more if he stayed?

On a Sunday in early March, they took a walk around the lake and retired to the Shack to watch TV. Dipper fell asleep on the couch and woke up in the dark, Separate Ways – Andrew's sitcom – playing at a low volume. The light from the television guided him out of the room; he flicked on the light in the hall, then the kitchen. The clock on the microwave read eight-thirty P.M. Wendy must have left and not woken him up. Dipper turned off the TV and the lights downstairs, traipsed up to his bedroom, but stopped halfway up the stairs. He could hear a repetitive, dull thump coming from the roof. He thought it must be some kind of animal, at first, but as he climbed the ladder up to the roof he realized what he was going to see. He pushed up on the hatch, and Wendy – sitting with her legs dangling off the ledge – turned and smiled at him. "Hey," she said.

Dipper shut the hatch behind him and sat beside her. Above the immeasurable sprawl of pine trees, the sky was clear, the stars bright. It was warm enough to sit outside without jackets, and all around them, the woods were silent. Wendy started to swing her legs, the heel of her boots tapping against the roof.

"Do you think," she said, "that in sixteen years' time, we'll still come up here?"

"Why sixteen years?" He wasn't even thinking ahead sixteen minutes.

"Because sixteen years ago was when I first showed you this spot."

He widened his eyes. "Jesus Christ."

"Yeah, right?" She was quiet for a moment, then sighed. "I don't know what it is about this place. This town. I mean, it's hardly exciting. I can't see any lights, it's like everybody's gone to bed already. But man, I love it. My apartment in Denver was on a really busy street, there'd be cars driving back and forth all night long. It was kinda cool, like, being in the middle of everything. But I was meant for a quiet life, I think."

Dipper smiled to himself. "Yeah, me too." Something popped into his mind that he had been contemplating for a while. "It's good to get away every now and again, though, right?"

Wendy stopped kicking her legs, and frowned at him. He supposed that, with his history of disappearing, that had sounded more sinister than intended.

"I'm going to Mabel's next weekend," he said. "I would love it if you came with me."

There was a flash of a smile on her face, but she shook her head. "They don't want me there."

"They do. Mabel is constantly asking when I'm going to bring you with me."

"They're your family, though. I don't want to intrude."

Dipper exhaled through his nose. "Close your eyes."

"What?"

"Close your eyes."

She raised a brow at him, but shut her eyes anyway.

"Imagine you're on the beach. Warm sand between your toes. The ocean whispering to your ears. Oh, and, what's this? I'm bringing you a piña colada."

"You don't know how to make a piña colada."

"Yeah I do. You just... pour rum in a coconut."

"And they have coconuts on the beaches of San Francisco, do they?"

"No, I'll buy one in the supermarket. You don't have to harvest your own food, you idiot. It's the twenty-first century."

"Yeah, yeah, okay. You're ruining my immersion. What else was happening on the beach?"

"There's a seagull, shitting on your foot."

She opened her eyes and slapped his arm. "Dipper! Well, that's ruined."

"Seriously, though. Come with me. They love having guests." He could picture the girls, shy at first but then running around after her, elated that there was someone new to show off to.

"We could bring them something from the shop," Wendy said. "To repay them."

"Yeah. You could give them one of your many cats, Mabel always likes seeing those on Facebook."

"Or I could make something new. I could make them. All four of them."

"Even better."

"Okay," she said. "Yeah, I'll come with you."

They smiled and turned back to the stars. Dipper hadn't answered her question – did he think they would still be here, gazing up at this same patch of sky, in sixteen years' time? It seemed unlikely. But his relationship with Wendy thus far had been a string of unlikely events, ending here, as her friend, a friendship that, he thought, must have been among the most intimate of friendships on Earth. Maybe life would continue to throw the harshest obstacles their way, and they would overcome them, alone, but always gravitate back towards one another. Nothing had managed to separate them just yet.

And as Wendy's fingers glided over the cold tiled roof and intertwined with Dipper's, the future remained uncertain. Uncertain, but brighter than ever.

A/N: That's the end of that. I think I'll look back on this story as an experiment, an attempt at something a little darker than what I would usually write. I'm glad a small group of you seem to have enjoyed it! Thank you to everyone that favorited, followed, and reviewed, and a special thank-you to johnnycatalina for reviewing every- wait, hold on, you didn't review chapter 6! Consider my special thank-you immediately revoked.

Just kidding. Thank you for your consistently positive reviews, dude, it means a lot.

I will be back very soon with a short-ish Mabifica story, if you're into that kind of thing. More Wendip in the future is also a possibility, though I don't have anything planned right now. Cheers, everyone!