I do not own the show GRAVITY FALLS or any of the characters; both are the property of the Walt Disney Company and of Alex Hirsch. I make no money from these stories but write just for fun and in the hope that other fans enjoy reading them. I will ask, please, do not copy my stories elsewhere on the Internet. I work hard on these, and they mean a lot to me. Thank you.

This is not in my normal Gravity Falls continuity, but is a story written for Wendip Week 2019 from Prompt 1: "This is fun, what you two have."

What We Have

By William Easley

Mabel and Dipper were eighteen that summer. Over the years since their twelfth birthday, the twins had come back to Gravity Falls about once every other year—this year was the first double-header, since they had been just the previous summer.

Things in the Shack were about the same as always: Little mysteries here and there. Grunkle Stan was now retired, but still living in town. Grunkle Ford was off Lord knew where, pursuing some other anomaly. And Dipper and Mabel, after taking a year off following high school, were going to head off to college in the fall.

"This is your very last chance, Dippo," Mabel had told Dipper as they drove up that evening in June. "Tell her or lose her!"

"There's nothing to lose!" Dipper insisted. "Wendy's made it clear—we're just friends. That's all we are. That's all we'll ever be."

"Doy! If you don't put a move on her, Dipdope! She's waiting for you to do that, you know. Why do you think she's twenty-one and still hanging out here in the summers, working for Soos in the Shack? It's 'cause of your visits!"

Dipper shook his head. "She always has boyfriends."

"Huh, yeah, losers."

"Think what you want," Dipper said as they pulled into the Shack parking lot. "I remember what she told me that night after we went to the bunker."

He parked. Mabel opened the passenger door and hopped out. "Take my suitcases in. I'm gonna go say hello to Waddles."

Dipper didn't say anything, but he hauled Mabel's two heavy suitcases to the Shack's gift-shop door. And it opened, and there stood a tall, beautiful, freckled, long-legged redhead. "Hi, dork!" she said cheerfully. "Took you long enough! Where's Mabes?"

"Around back. Thanks," Dipper said as Wendy hefted one of the two suitcases. "She went to say hi to Waddles."

"Oh," Wendy said, more seriously. "Sorry, man, I didn't know."

They got all four of the suitcases inside, and then Wendy and Dipper went out back. Mabel sat on the grass, chatting away: "And our parents let us take the whole year off, and now next fall we plan to head to college—Backupsmore West, Grunkle Ford got us in—so I won't be able to come and see you every single day, but I promise when we have a break, like Fall Break or Christmas, I'll drive up and bring you more of these." She put a spray of flowers—Dipper had no idea where she'd hidden them—on the mound of Waddles's grave.

"Sorry about your loss, Mabes," Wendy said quietly.

Mabel drew up her knees, hugged them, and sighed. "Yeah, it's kinda hard. But this is the one place where I still feel close to him, you know? Thanks for letting me know when he passed away."

Waddles had died peacefully—the vet said—in his sleep the week before the twins were due to return to the Falls. Wendy had broken the news as gently as anyone possibly could have done. Mabel had cried hard, but Soos and Wendy live-streamed the touching funeral service for her. "At least he didn't suffer," Dipper said.

"Yeah. Quiet in his sleep. I guess that's the way to go." Mabel rubbed her eyes, and then leaned forward to pat the grave. "Sleep tight, Waddles. Happy dreams."

Soos and Melody were up and about to greet them and give them great big hugs. Like Waddles, Abuelita had passed quietly away the year before, but it's the cycle of life: Melody and Soos had three kids of their own now to ease the heartbreak.

"You dawgs look so grown up!" Soos exclaimed. "Hey, picture! Everybody get together in front of the counter and let me, like, take a photo! Wendy in the middle! Mabel on the left—no, my left, I mean—Dipper on my right—good. Now say something stupid, dawgs!"

"Something stupid!" they all said.

Soos snapped two exposures. "I'll go and print these up!" he said. "Hey, Hambone, you and Dipper want to work in the Shack this summer? Pick up some money for that big move to college or whatever?"

"Sure," Mabel said, but without her usual verve.

It was up to Dipper to play her normal role: "You betcha!"

They had dinner with the Ramirezes and Wendy—Wendy had moved into Abuelita's old room and sort of served as Soos's chief assistant and also the kids' baby-sitter—and caught up on what had happened here and there. Tambry and Robbie were married and living in San Francisco. Thompson had joined the Army and was overseas, nobody knew where, because his letters home were always censored and no places were mentioned. Lee had a run-in with the CHP and was in jail for six months. Nate was bumming around the California beaches for the summer. Gideon, now sixteen, had finished his second year of high school as class president, Pacifica was in college and dating the son of a U.S. Senator, and so on and so forth.

Mabel still seemed down, and she turned in early. Dipper and Wendy went to sit on the porch and stare at the stars. "How's your love life?" Wendy asked.

Dipper chuckled. "This is the high point."

"Aw, dude!"

"I know, I know. Just friends. But a guy can dream."

The door behind them opened, throwing a rectangle of yellow light across the lawn. Soos stood there, holding something, and shifting from foot to foot. "Uh, sorry, dawgs, but since Stan's kinda out of the game and all, and Ford's off somewheres unknown, I kind of thought you might want to see this. Come on in. First, where's Mabel?"

"Up in the attic," Dipper said. "She's tired from the drive and visiting Waddles's grave—you know."

They went to the dining-room table, and Soos put the photo down. "It may just be, like, a glitch, but—well, you know. So much weird stuff happens here, you never know, you know?"

The air in the room dropped about twenty degrees. Anyway, Dipper got goose pimples.

There they were in the photo, Mabel and Wendy and Dipper, all lean, all nearly the same height, all mugging for the camera.

Except some trick of light and shadow looked like a cowled figure in black standing behind Mabel. And its skeletal hand held—

"A scythe?" Wendy asked. "Creepy as hell!"

Dipper bit his lip. "Grunkle Ford wrote about this in his Journal Five. I remember reading it. I wish I had it here—"

"Would a photocopy do?" Soos asked. "'Cause he keeps duplicates down in his lab."

"A photocopy would be great," Dipper said.

"It happened in the winter, three years back," Dipper said. "There were, I don't know, portents or something. He doesn't say who it was, but somebody was in danger of being taken by the Grim Reaper one night. Ford used an ancient ritual—yes, here it all is—to bargain with Death and discovered that if he humiliated himself, Death would postpone the visit. I think maybe it was Grunkle Stan or maybe Fiddleford McGucket, but he doesn't say."

"Doesn't matter," Wendy said. "What do we have to do, man?"

"We need floor space. The parlor would be good. And we have to have some chalk. And six candles. And no matter what, we have to be ready to bargain for Mabel's life."

"Let's do it," Wendy said.

"I love—uh, that about you," Dipper told her. "Are there candles in the Shack?"

"Yeah, we sell these phony séance candles in packs of three. No sweat."

"Chalk?"

"Soos's kids have a blackboard in the nursery. I'll go score a stick or two."

"What time is it? We have to finish this diagram before midnight."

"We got like an hour and ten minutes."

The ritual involved tracing a double circle on the floor—reminding both of them of the Zodiac and of Bill Cipher—but instead of oddball symbols like a pine tree and a bag of ice and so on, they had to scribe counterclockwise around the circumference of the outer circle a litany in Hebrew letters, and then, going in the opposite direction around the inner circle, the same phrase, only in Medieval Latin.

"I'm glad you can do this," Wendy said. "I'd screw it up for sure."

They lit the candles, placing them in the proper locations. Then they stood back to back in the center of the inner circle and performed an arcane chant, Wendy stumbling just a little over the unfamiliar syllables. At eleven fifty-five, the lights in the Shack went out, or went away, leaving them in darkness.

A voice as dry as desiccated oak leaves rasped quietly, "Well done. The last time I was summoned was—why, in this very house."

"I know the candles are still burning," Dipper said. "Let us see you."

"Can you stand the shock?"

"Try us," Wendy said.

Death snapped his fingerbones. The ruddy candlelight flooded back. The figure, in a black robe and with black wings outspread, grinned down at them.

"You're tall, dude," Wendy said. "Huh. I expected bat wings, if anything."

"Seven feet four," Death said. "Though I can fit through a keyhole if need be. And my feathered wings are appropriate. I am a sort of angel, after all."

"We're here about my sister, Mabel," Dipper said, his voice shaky.

The skull-faced apparition nodded. "Her time is up tomorrow. She is fated to walk into town but, distracted, to be struck by a logging truck. Nine-seventeen in the morning, by mortal reckoning."

"What do we do to prevent that?" Wendy asked.

"I could take someone else. Her great-uncle could see her and push her out of the way, but be struck by the truck himself."

"That's out," Dipper said. "If you want a substitute, take me—"

"Me!" Wendy said, overriding him.

"But you two have long lives ahead of you," Death said. "It hardly seems fair."

"You—you took Waddles," Dipper said. "Wasn't that enough?"

"A mere pig? For a human life?"

"If you can say that," Wendy told him, "you don't know Mabel well enough to take her! You broke her heart, man!"

"Grunkle Ford wrote that if the petitioner abased himself, you would relent. What about that?"

"I do get bored," Death said. "If the two of you could amuse me—I could see to it that Mabel is five minutes late and crosses the street after the truck has passed."

"No good unless she lives out a normal lifespan after," Wendy said. "No tricks. No letting her get across the street and then falling down a manhole or some biz!"

"I do like your attitude," Death said. "I promise. If you make me laugh, just once, I will see to it that her life-glass is refilled with sand and she will live to a serene and happy old age."

"So what do we do to make you laugh?" Dipper asked. "Tell jokes? Because I'll say up front, I'm not good at that."

"Hmm," Death said. "Well—I have to admit that one human pursuit has always pleased me. What do you know about horse races?"

Mabel woke up at half-past midnight, dimly aware of odd sounds coming from down below. She got up and, on a hunch, reached for her phone. Then in bare feet, she tiptoed down the splintery old stairs. The sounds, voices and gasps and the clomping of something on the wood floor, came from the parlor where Soos still threw parties and held dances.

She quietly peeked through the open door and choked back a giggle. Hoping there was enough light, she raised the camera and snapped a half-dozen photos.

Wendy, wearing only panties and bra, sat on Dipper's back. He wore only his undershorts and was on all fours. Wendy had to bend her knees and put her feet on his shoulders, but somehow she balanced. She was using his belt like a bridle, and she whapped his bottom from time to time with a ruler.

And she was announcing: "Annnnd coming into the home stretch, it's Dipper by a length! The crowd is going wild! The jockey, Corduroy, is wearing copper-red—"

"Bwah!" Mabel burst out, unable to contain herself. "You two! I knew you had something special going on! I knew it, I knew it, I knew it! I just didn't realize it would be so kinky! Ooh-la-la!"

She could not see the spectral figure hovering about four feet off the ground, in a sitting posture, knees crossed, in mid-air, though Wendy and Dipper could. Nor could Mabel hear what they could hear: his sepulchral—and yet delighted—"Ha!"

Dipper gasped, "Still gotta cross the finish line!" He crawled faster, and then collapsed, gasping, as he crossed a chalk mark.

"The winner!" Death said, and then he wasn't there any longer.

Dipper went down on his belly, the floor cool against his bare skin. Wendy was sitting on his butt. "Way to go, Dipper!" she said, ruffling his hair. "Woohoo! We make a great team!"

"Roll over, Brobro!" Mabel crowed.

Dipper, dazed and worn-out—they had circled the track for half an hour like that, and Wendy wasn't a lightweight girl—obeyed, and then Wendy was sitting atop him in quite a different place.

Mabel snapped a photo. She said, "I said it before, and I'll say it again: This is fun, what you two have! You guys! You are absolutely made for each other. Dip, I don't expect to see you until tomorrow at breakfast, understand?"

"Huh? Where am I supposed to sleep?" Dipper asked indignantly.

Wendy leaned forward, smiling, and put a finger against his lips. "Dude," she said, "the two of us can figure that one out!" She lay soft against him, kissed his cheek, and whispered into his ear: "Next it's your turn in the saddle."

The End