Gravity Rises (S2)

OCE: Part Seven

Ford watched Mabel walk up the stairs, his jaw set. How dare she — she couldn't just — did she have any idea how important this was?

"Don't you dare go after her."

Dipper suddenly stood between Ford and the stairs. That boy moved fast. "Who said I was going to?"

"You were three steps into it." Dipper folded his arms. "And after what you just said, she's going to need a lot of time without you butting in to ruin everything. Again."

Ford folded his arms right back. "You dare talk to your guardian that way?"

"You dare talk to my sister that way?" Dipper shot back. "She was right. You are obsessive. She can see it, I can see it, Melody can see it. Stan doesn't want this, Ford! He doesn't want this attempt to get him back to come between you and the rest of your family!"

"Don't." Ford lowered his voice to a dangerous pitch, but Dipper didn't flinch. "Don't you even attempt to decide what Stan does or doesn't want. You don't know him."

"I bet I'm right, though."

He is, said a little voice in the back of Ford's mind. Stan wouldn't want this. Ford's anger shoved the voice down. "No," he said tightly to Dipper, "Stan wants to come back to this dimension. And he can't do that unless we have all three Journals. One Journal left, Dipper! One more, and we know where it is, and Mabel is refusing to come help retrieve it!"

Dipper looked astonished. "You're forgetting who even got your other two Journals. Who found the third one out in the woods? Oh, right. Mabel. Who managed to convince Gideon Northwest — who, by the way, lied to us and said he didn't have one — to give up his Journal for the cause? How she did it, I'll never know, but news flash: It was Mabel."

"You kids found the third one on accident and hid it from me for who knows how long," Ford said. He was tired of the twins making Mabel out to be some kind of saint.

"And once you remembered Stan, Mabel put everything she had into getting the other two back. And guess what, she found them! Not you, not me, her."

"Sure, she found them, but I don't have all of them yet. I need her to get this last one back!" She was being selfish. She'd decided that it was too hard, that she could just blow it off as if it was just some regular family outing. It wasn't. It was a mission to retrieve the last thing he needed to restart the portal!

"Funny way to treat someone you need," Dipper said.

Ford opened his mouth to retort, but his body was faster than his brain, and, too late, he realized he couldn't actually think of anything to say. His logic cleared its throat and pointed out that Dipper was, in fact, correct, and Ford was handling this all wrong. His anger attempted to throttle it.

A look of triumph came into Dipper's eyes. "Exactly," he said. And he walked over to the stairs.

"I thought you said not to go after her," Ford said in annoyance.

Dipper stopped, his hand on the banister. "I'm not going to talk to her," he said, as if this were obvious. "Not yet, anyway. I'm going to guard her."

Ford didn't miss the subtext: I'm going to guard her from you. He curled his hands into fists as he watched Dipper ascend the stairs, glaring at the boy's retreating figure.

And then Ford was alone.

He stood there, solitary in the center of the living room. His entire body was tense, trembling a bit with anger. But he had no one to yell at, no outlet for his rage. Oh, he could always kick something. That was Stanley's method of expressing his anger: punch the nearest object and revel in the destruction. But that had never worked for Ford; he preferred to use his quick wits to intellectually out-maneuver anyone who stood in his way.