Me, Myself and Him (a gravity falls fanfiction)

Eight Months Later: The return to Gravity Falls

The lonely bus made its way through Oregon, driving through the unnaturally shaped twin cliffs that served as the gate into Gravity Falls.

The bus was almost completely empty. Aside from the driver there was just one thirteen year old girl in the back. She had long brown hair that was held back by a black Alice band. She wore a dark purple sweater with a blue raindrop design on it and a dark blue skirt. Her pet Pig, adorned with a pink collar sat with his head on her lab, and she stroked him absentmindedly. On the seat next to her was her luggage. A huge suitcase filled with sweaters and a mystery book on top of it. In her hand was a blue and white hat with a pine tree symbol on it. She stared at the hat. Her eyes sad.

"Arrival at Gravity Falls in Ten minutes." The Bus driver announced, "are you alright there sweetheart?"

The girl nodded. She zipped open her suitcase, displaying her hundreds of sweaters in shades ranging from dark blue and purple and grey to black and dark red and white. But there were no pinks. No yellows or light blues at all.

The girl tucked away the blue cap and the book into the suitcase and zipped it up. The bus pulled into the stop and the girl took her suitcase down and pulled it on its wheels. Her pig following her.

At the bus stop, waiting for her were two elderly men who looked extremely similar, a girl with red hair, a fat man with a green shirt, a little boy in a blue dress suit and with gelled white hair that was bigger than his head, and two girls who looked her age, an Asian-American with glasses and a muscular girl with her brown hair in a ponytail and a monobrow.

They all rushed to her and welcomed her back for the summer. Telling her their stories, asking about California. They surrounded her with friends and family. The girl smiled and laughed with them, but it never reached her eyes. She told them stories, but they had no light. She was with more people than she had all year, but she seemed so lonely.

***

They're all being so nice to me. Everyone was there from that day. They kept laughing. They seemed so happy. Why? How could they be so happy?

Grunkle Ford took my suitcase for me. He hasn't changed one bit. Neither has Grunkle Stan. They seem to get on well enough. But not perfectly.

Everyone seems exactly the same. They all look the same. They all act the same. Has the past year not done anything to them? Or is it just the thing Gravity Falls that makes it seem as though no time has passed?

My parents had a huge argument over letting me come back. Mom didn't want to let me come back. She said I had finally been making progress with my psychiatrist. It took me a few months, but I stopped talking about our supernatural adventures in Gravity Falls.

After I did that I was allowed to stop taking most of my pills. But he said I still needed the antidepressants. I didn't know why. I wasn't depressed. I was lonely.

Eventually she had agreed to let me come after Dad put his foot down. I overheard them from my room, even though I wasn't supposed to be listening. He said that then maybe I'd finally accept my brother's death. That had had been what finally convinced mom.

They had a Party at the Shack to celebrate me coming back. There would have been a time when I would have partied the hardiest. But I didn't feel like it. I sat in the corner with Waddles, watching the others have fun.

Eventually Candy and Grenda came and swooped me up, and I had to dance. I put on a happy face as I tried to enjoy myself.

And then, unbelievably, as I watched Soos mix up the song requests, and then when the slow dance came on he got distracted by the dots thrown by the disco ball and when the song ended it played a recording he'd made of him singing in the shower. As I laughed with my friends as we watched Stan Dance, and when Ford had to call the party to a close early because an experiment had exploded downstairs and released a gas that may or may not either cause your heart to explode or make you madly fall in love with an inanimate object. And then Robbie started kissing a plastic bowl filled with marshmallows.

My parents were right, maybe. Maybe this could be good.

But then after the party I went upstairs to my room. And I saw the empty bed. It's sheets stripped off of it. But it was still all there. The conspiracy boards, the mind maps. The pterodactyl tooth hanging above the bed. I just stood there and looked. It was almost as if, if I imagined really hard. He might just walk through that door, that gleam in his eye whenever he discovered something new to explore. "Mabel! You'll never guess what I found!"

I felt tears prick my eyes and I pulled the suitcase up on my bed. I dug around for my antidepressants. I found them and fished out three of the circular white pills.

And then I looked back at my brother's bed. I looked back at the pills and dropped them back into their case. And then I opened the window and threw the plastic bottle out of it.