Yet Another Summer

Vine and Fig Tree

The attic, their part of it at least, looks different from what Dipper remembered. It's weirdly clean, the walls aren't crowded in this odd feel like they were before. As if they were devoid of their spirit, though they never were actually alive. They aren't actively getting closer to their decay, as they once did. The floor isn't creaky, planks haven't had years to come apart creating wide gaps in between them where some of the playing cards and secret notes written in lemon juice might have slipped into to never be found. Dipper rubs his arm. He has a feeling of losing something or perhaps misplacing one other, while climbing the stairs.

Mabel runs past him with her back pack (still way too lightweight) and pushes him onto the side. He stumbles and almost falls down but catches onto a handrail the last moment. He gets a splinter embedded in his finger.

"Hey!" Rising his hand up to his face, he sees its point broke off and there is nothing he can hold by while pulling it out. "Oh, fuck."

"Made it!" Yells Mabel hurling herself onto the bed still with her backpack on. Dipper decides not to comment on his binoculars and injections hit which could not been crushed only by miracle.

"We weren't even racing."

Mabel scoffs.

"Maybe you weren't."

For a moment Dipper observes as Mabel outstretched on her mattress dirties the bedsheet someone has put there and probably washed beforehand with her shoes. He smiles at the thought that Mabel chose that bed without hesitation, like she did that summer. Something comforting about it.

He sits on the bed by his side of the room, the mattress squeaks. Leaning back, he puts weight on his hands behind his back and hisses, forgot about the splinter. There is a spiderweb under the ceiling in the corner. Mabel scratches her head and starts untying her shoelaces.

"You think I'll be able to find Candy an' Grenda?" she asks.

"Hm?"

He turns his gaze away form a window, sun sets behind it. Pointed tree tops seem black against sky almost red. When he glances at triangular window there is a definite change to the mood, suddenly he doesn't feel as relaxed.

"I wonder if grunkles would let me reshape it. If only I found a glazier, there would only be these pieces of wall needing cut away into a square and done."

"I asked" heavy emphasis on 'asked' "is it possible for me to find Grenda and Candy."

Dipper shrugs.

"How am I supposed to know?" Mabel pouts. "You don't have their cellphone numbers?"

"Ugh, I don't remember. May be. Even so the phone I had back there fell into that sewage pit."

He nods.

"How bout any-"

"-social media?" Mabel breaks in and shakes her head. "I tried to find them everywhere before we left but there's like- nothing. Anyways, there isn't much of an internet connection anyway in Gravity Falls."

"You don't know if they're still in Gravity Falls. I mean, not saying they aren't here, but you know. Time passed. They might have moved on. People do that. I guess."

People do all sort of things. Change – for example. He doesn't say it aloud.

"I don't know..." she trips off. "But it'd be so fitting. We come back after years and just reunite with everybody, meet old friends... and enemies. The whole shebang."

"Yeah, sure."

Dipper thinks how much stuff seems fitting yet doesn't happen. That one he also keeps shut.