HAPPY 30 FOLLOWERS! Honestly, I never expected my little writing fan blog to get more than one or two followers, and I’m so happy you all are following and interested in what I have to say.



To celebrate (and also because this has been in the works for a while), here is a ficlet for Myosotis, which is what I’m calling the AU ficlet series. For those who haven’t read the others, here they are: Welcome to Gravity Falls, Journal in the Woods, A Tale of Two Stans, and Hello to Widdle Ol’ Me.

Title: Secrets in the Mind

Fandom: Gravity Falls

Rating: T

Characters: Stanford Pines, Dipper Pines, Mabel Pines, Soos Ramirez, Wendy Corduroy, Bill Cipher.

Description: Gideon launched a psychic attack. (AU.)

Word Count: 4555

Gideon’s behavior was continually escalating. He was forbidden from the house after Dipper told Ford how he bullied Mabel into dates and attacked them both (though Dipper didn’t bring up the whole ‘he had an amulet thing that let him throw us with his mind’ thing). After that, Gideon kept on catching them when they were alone. He was begging Mabel to come back to him, threatening Dipper, and harassing Ford.

It would be scary if it weren’t so ridiculous coming from a ten-year-old boy. They ignored it… and now he had sent a teeth-stealing triangle after Ford.

“Grunkle Ford! Grunkle Ford!” Mabel and Dipper tore through the street and slammed through the front door (as fast as they could with unlocking way too many locks). They almost fell on top of each other stumbling into the den, just to find Ford smeared with machine grease, curled on the couch, groaning as he drove his fingers into his hair.

He was asleep. And under his closed lashes, blue light leaked out, like he had a lightbulb in his head, and his limbs were twitching, all the muscles under his skin spasming at once.

“Grunkle Ford? Grunkle Ford, wake up!” Mabel shook his shoulder while Dipper squawked, almost falling again in a sprint to their room.

“Don’t panic! Don’t panic! I’ll get the journal!”

“Whoa, what’s going on out here?” The door to the workshop swung open, belching the smell of hot metal and grease, for Wendy to poke her head out. “I’m hearing something that sounds suspiciously like panic.”

“No panic! No panic!” Dipper streaked back into the den, clutching the journal to his chest. “But Gideon sent a demon into Ford’s head to get government secrets or something!”

Wendy’s face scrunched up. “Wait, what?”

“Is there something wrong with Dr. Pines?” Soos asked, lingering at the doorway as he wiped grease from his hands.

“There’s a demon in his brain and he’s not waking up!” Mabel yanked her great uncle’s arm, scratching her nails into his skin, but he didn’t even stir. “Dipper, hurry! What does the journal say?”

“Okay, okay, give me a second, okay—” Dipper leafed through the pages until he stopped by smacking his hand on one of them. “Oh no. It’s one of the bad pages.”

The ‘bad pages.’ The ones where it became clear the Author—Ford—had been going crazy when he wrote them. The ones covered in dried brown spatters and strange designs and paranoid ravings.

“Whoa, whoa, are you sure you want to use anything from that book on him?” Wendy asked, but as Ford twitched and groaned on the couch, she faltered. “If he wrote it when he was sick…”

“But was he sick?” Dipper shook his head. “Actually, yeah, he totally, definitely was, but it doesn’t look like he was in the beginning! I’ve seen so many things from this book in the woods! They’re real, even if he doesn’t remember them. We need to get the demon out!”

“Dr. Pines looks really sick, Wendy.” Soos tossed his grease rag aside before kneeling next to Mabel and pressing the back of his hand against Ford’s head. “He’s running a fever.”

“Oh boy.” Wendy rubbed her temples, staring down at Ford. “I so deserve a raise for this.”

“Everyone put your hands on his head!” Dipper said, crawling on the couch so he could lean over his great uncle and unthread the man’s fingers from his hair. “Then I’ll chant what I have to.”

Everyone put their palm over Ford’s hair just as his forehead started to bead sweat. Wendy’s mouth twisted into a determined grimace, and Dipper’s chanting filled up the room. Their eyes glowed, Ford’s rolled back into his skull, the room shook, and then they were in a field.

Corn brushed up against Dipper and Mabel’s chins. A broken swing creaked. A large, rotted boat stuck at an angle, spearing the sky from its permanent mooring. The air smelled like salt, ozone, and cigarette smoke (which was weird, because Great Uncle Ford never smoked ever).

Great Uncle Ford’s house towered over them, every window dark and covered in locks like eyelashes. Spindly shadows creeped up the porch to the door to finger the knob, staining the wood.

“You know, this is way more intimate information than I ever needed about my boss.” Wendy waded through the corn, breaking a path for Soos and the kids.

“I dunno. I think I was expecting more sciency things?” said Soos as he stepped onto the porch. “This seems kind of dark, dude.”

“If we end up finding anything about Ford’s dating history in here, I’m out,” said Wendy, trying to peek through the windows as spidery shadow fingers reached for her. “I can’t see anything.”

“Shoo! Shoo!” Mabel jumped onto the porch and started waving her arms at the shadows. “Get out of here!”

In the gloom of the porch, Mabel’s skin glowed, and the shadows cowered, zipping to corners and hissing. “Wait, that actually works?” Dipper said as he stepped onto the porch, his own skin softly illuminated.

“Shoo!” Mabel chased after the shadows. “Dipper, help me corner them!”

“Yeah, you do that while I get this door open.” Wendy crouched by the door, pulling a lock pick from under her hat. Dipper pounced on the shadows trying to slide away from Mabel, and they hissed, slithering over the sagging floorboards.

“Chase it into the corn, dudes!” Soos body-slammed the shadows, shaking the whole porch, and they wiggled under him, thrashing to get free, shriveling as Mabel and Dipper tackled their edges. Finally, they tore themselves from under Soos’s weight and skittered over the porch steps and into the corn.

“Success!” Soos said from his spot on the ground.

“Come on, old man. Don’t get stubborn with me,” Wendy muttered to the lock. As if in answer, the lock snapped open. “Okay, we’re in.”

The door swung open without further provocation, and warmth furled out, like an invitation. But instead of leading to the inside of the house they had all become familiar with, it led to a spider web of corridors and doors.

Stepping inside was not like stepping home. The heat hovered near oppressive, the shadows leapt from door to door at the edge of their vision, and the doors softly rattled on their hinges. It was the subliminal space between welcome and intrusion, like the house itself was straining between wanting them out and embracing them.

Different corridors were labeled in Ford’s neat script. Memories. Ideas. Desires.

Feelings had a reinforced steel door and a padlock. The floor of Dreams was paved in white oblong pills, cloaked as shadows reached from the wood and hid them from view.

The walls trembled, the locks on the doors slamming against the wood and the floorboards creaking like they were fighting to stand.

“It’s about time you showed up!” A familiar cackling voice rang, and the house groaned on its foundation, like it was trying to pull itself out of the ground to get away. “It’s no fun wandering through Sixer’s head all alone!”

“It’s the triangle guy!” Mabel sprung forward, which didn’t do much because the voice came from all around them. “Get out of our Great Uncle’s head, Triangle Guy!”

“Yeah!” Dipper ran up to be next to Mabel, which still didn’t do much, but he felt better when he puffed out his chest. “You’re messing with the wrong family!”

“The name’s Bill Cipher, and you have no idea what you’re dealing with!” A triangular shadow peeled off the floor, and a single eye opened, crimped in a smile. “Catch me if you can!”

His laugh shook the house, shuddering every wall and board and lightbulb until plaster sprinkled the floor and the windows cracked and fought the locks lining them all, struggling to open and let the poison out but completely helpless. The shadow sailed down the hall of dreams, cackling as the locks on all the doors snapped off their knobs, splintering wood all over the pill-paved floor, and it shot into the dark.

“After him!” They stumbled into the hall, but the house twisted like a snake, the corridor stretching and twirling and warping until the doors were rolling on the walls and trading places before it all stopped, and they were in an endless web of just dream doors and pill pavement.

“Oh no. Where’d he go? Where’d he go?” Dipper said, grabbing his hair as he stared down all the unlocked doors with symbols plastered on them, symbols like waves and boats and clawed hands and swing sets.

“Don’t let him get to you, man,” Wendy said, rubbing her hands together. “He couldn’t have gotten far. Let’s check the doors.”

“Snooping in Dr. Pines’ dreams. This sounds like a great bonding experience!” Soos hummed as he swung open the closest door. “Oh look, a falling dream.”

“Oh, wait, wait, Dipper—” Wendy grabbed Dipper’s shoulder as he reached for a different door. Dipper frowned in confusion, then followed her meaningful look towards the symbol painted on the door. A bright pink Venus symbol.

“Uh…” Dipper squinted as Wendy pressed her ear to the door, leaving it closed for now. Her cheeks flushed red and she recoiled almost immediately, grimacing like she contemplated tearing out her eardrums.

“And now I need to bleach my brain. If the triangle is inside, then he’s earned his hiding spot.” Wendy walked as far away from the door as she could. “I don’t recommend going in there, dude!”

“Yep, not going in there, got it,” Dipper said as he quickly retreated as well and resolved to keep a careful eye on any symbols from then on. There were just some things he did not want to know about his Great Uncle, after all.

Mabel giggled as she left doors hanging open and continually stuck her head in them. “This is fun!” She shoved her hands in her pockets and threw a handful of glitter into a dream of a ship on a stormy sea.

“It’s in my eyes!” cried someone in the dream before Mabel slammed the door.

“You’re welcome!” she chirped before skipping further down the corridor and humming.

Dipper skipped any doors with the pink Venus symbol, but otherwise checked everything. Boats kept showing up. So did the ocean. There weren’t many happy dreams—some were calm, but many were stormy, with giant six-fingered hands crushing teenagers and kids laughing while they pointed and boats cracking open like eggs on shores.

No triangle, no triangle, no triangle—until there was one that broke the pattern.

Behind a door with a wave and stylized fish pattern, they were just beneath the waterfall of Gravity Falls, and a grown man was holding a little boy’s head under the water.

“Hey!”

Dipper ran through the door onto the grass, forgetting momentarily that nothing around him was real—and then he was someone else. He was the grown man, holding a boy’s head under water. He was Ford.

The boy thrashed in his grip, but a child couldn’t fight an adult. Bubbles rose from the depths, foaming on the surface of the water. Dipper wasn’t paying attention to that, though. For some reason, he was focusing on other things. The water spray speckling his cheek from the waterfall. The pebbles digging into his knees as he kneeled. The sun warming his face.

Distantly, the boy was slowing down. The bubbles stopped.

What am I doing? Dipper thought in the Ford construct’s head.

Abruptly, he seized control of the body. He pulled the boy back onto the shore, and the entire dream shuddered as he took a sudden, gasping breath.

Dipper squinted at the boy. Wet, striped shirt. White, bloodless lips. Gapped teeth. The boy’s brown eyes rolled to look at him. Dipper recognized them.

“Stanley?” Dipper said.

His dead great uncle grabbed his shirt and yanked him down with the strength of a grown man, pulling their faces within a breath’s width. Stanley’s hand was cold. He skin looked like clay.

The child Stanley opened his mouth, water dribbling out from his lips. “Something is in the basement.”

Dipper tore out of the dream, flying back into the corridor just to watch the dream restart with Ford drowning Stanley. He slammed the door.

His hands shook. His stomach shuddered. Could he throw up in someone else’s mind?

“Dipper!” Mabel ran from throwing glitter into more dreams and knelt next to him. She didn’t ask if he was okay. He wasn’t.

“Whoa, did something happen?” Wendy paused in her searching to frown at them, and Dipper struggled to pull himself together. Wendy was watching!

“I just… there was…” Dipper’s head kicked into overdrive. Had he just seen what he thought he saw? Did his Great Uncle Ford dream about ruthlessly murdering his dead twin brother? That wasn’t normal, was it? Dipper had never dreamed about killing Mabel, or anyone else for that matter. Ford had a lot of guilt over how he dealt with Stanley—Dipper knew that because Ford told them Stanley’s story without prompting. For goodness sake, he had Stanley’s picture on his desk! He wrote a ton of letters! Ford loved his brother! “There was…”

Mabel and Wendy were both staring at him. He had to gather his thoughts. He had to think faster.

It had to be symbolic somehow. Maybe it was representative of Ford’s guilt about not talking to Stanley before he died. Yeah! Surely, that was it!

There was no way that his weird and paranoid great uncle murdered his brother and hid the body in a basement. Ha ha. That would be ridiculous.

Wouldn’t it?

“I’ll talk to you later. It doesn’t matter right now.” Dipper let Mabel pull him up, and while her expression remained concerned, she thankfully accepted the deferment. Wendy didn’t press either, but she looked skeptical. “I think we should…”

A shadow flickered ahead of them. Dipper wasn’t sure if he was the only one who could see it, or if Mabel and Wendy were just too distracted looking at him to see what was happening. The shadow flickered with form—a boy with a striped shirt running ahead and disappearing around a corner.

“I think we should find the basement.” Dipper took Mabel’s hand tightly, mostly to calm his own shaking. “Wendy, Soos, we’re going ahead!”

Wendy’s skepticism etched deep between her brows, but she slowly nodded. “Sure thing, man. We’ll cover more ground that way. Holler if you see a triangle that needs its butt kicked,” Wendy poked her head into another door. “Soos, I got your back.”

“Right back at you, dude!” Soos called from his spot inside one of the dreams, where he seemed to be caught up in a real life game of DD&MD and battling with some math-based monsters. Dipper pulled Mabel and they ran after Stanley’s shadow, but Dipper didn’t see him again. There was only a vague feeling of what path he had to take.

“Do brains have basements?” Mabel wondered aloud.

“I don’t know, but we’re going to find one anyway!” The doors they passed became darker and darker, and noises came from behind them, terrible noises that Dipper could only assign terrible things too, like the whimpers of someone dying and the sharpening of knives.

“Sounds like a party in there!” Mabel said as they passed a door shaking with what Dipper could only call demonic chanting. “You think they’re getting ready for a game?”

“Cheer chants don’t sound like that, Mabel.”

“Maybe not at your school.”

“We go to the same school.”

It was really hard to pay attention to the splintering and groaning doors when Mabel started poking his face. “That’s what you think!”

“Mabel, that doesn’t even make sense!” Dipper batted her hand away. “Ow, stop, this is serious!”

“Bap bap bap—” she kept poking him. Even as the halls got darker and darker, some source-less light hung above them and guided them deeper into the coils of their uncle’s mind.

Then the pill pavement gave way to soft grass itching their feet. The corridor had ended. The stars were over their heads. Trees rustled all around them. They were outside.

Staring down the shack in the woods.

“What?” Dipper frowned at its familiar foreboding silhouette. Mabel stopped poking him.

In the dark of Ford’s mind, there was something infinitely more wrong about this place than in real life. The floorboards still splintered like teeth, the windows cracked and clouded like rotting eyeballs, but something was humming. It hummed in the grass, in the trees, and it most definitely hummed at the very foundations of the house. It hummed with some horrible stain that set Dipper’s teeth on edge.

“Something terrible happened here.” He didn’t know how he knew. It was like the very concept of the house was a blight on Ford’s brain, secluded in the darkest recesses of mind so he could escape its rot as long as possible. It was like an infected abscess, cut open and spilling disease to fill up the head until it suffocated.

The windows were staring at them. Dark, reddish tar leaked from one, dripping down the shack’s face.

“I didn’t even know Great Uncle Ford knew about this place.” Mabel swung her arms at her sides and skipped to the front door. “Well, better go inside!”

“Mabel, wait!”

Dipper ran after his sister, but she smoothed her hands over the shack’s wooden skin before gently nudging the door open.

The inside of the shack was nothing like it was in real life. It was just a dark room.

A dark room with an elevator that only went down.

“I found the way to your basement!” Mabel said.

Dipper hesitated at the threshold. There was something wrong here. This was a dark part of his Great Uncle’s mind that he’d only glimpsed between the pages of his forgotten journal.

Did he want to know what was in the basement?

“Dipper, he needs us,” his sister said.

Dipper took a deep breath and tried to swallow the lump in his throat. “Right.”

He took Mabel’s hand and they walked into the elevator.

Its doors rattled shut without prompting. The machinery above and below them wheezed before starting to descend.

“I think we should make Great Uncle Ford hot cocoa with marshmallows and sprinkles when this is over,” Mabel said with false cheer as the elevator trembled.

Dipper thought to the dreams. The dreams of violence, of fear, or disaster. He thought of pill pavement and scary houses in the woods. “Yeah. Plus ice cream. We can have one of those family nights.”

“Yeah, that’s a good idea.”

Dipper wondered if perhaps they would have to talk to Ford about the things they’d seen. The journal, the monsters, the dark dreams hidden in his head. Would they find out what happened all those years ago? Or would they just make their great uncle sick?

Ford always got sick when they started getting near the topic of journals or adventures in the woods. Wendy and Soos told them it was just a residual effect of the brain trauma, and Dipper hadn’t wanted to push it.

He didn’t know if he could just stay silent now. It seemed awfully convenient that Ford only got sick when Dipper wanted to talk about something mysterious.

“Do you think Great Uncle Ford has lied to us about something important?” Dipper said, daring a glance at Mabel as the elevator creaked further and further into the black of Ford’s deepest mind. He couldn’t see her face in the darkness.

“He loves us,” Mabel said.

“I know that.” One thing he had no doubt about, no matter what he discovered, was that Ford loved them. “But that doesn’t answer my question.”

“It answers the important question.” Mabel squeezed his hand. “No matter what’s going on, we’re family, and he loves us. We’ll figure this out together.”

Dipper didn’t have anything to say to that, so he squeezed Mabel’s hand back.

And then the elevator stopped.

“Oh boy. What now?” Dipper asked, squinting into the darkness.

The floor of the elevator glowed red. The walls were swelling and contracting, like they were breathing—oh God, they were breathing. They were breathing, and eyes with X’s through them carved themselves in the fleshy surface, fresh blood leaking from every cut, and then it was words from the journal being carved (TRUST NO ONE), and the walls shuddered and screamed as they were cut more and more and blood was dripping on the floor and Dipper and Mabel grabbed each other and shrieked.

“DESTROY IT BEFORE IT DESTROYS US ALL!” With a screeching voice they didn’t recognize, blue fire burst over the elevator walls, and the elevator plunged in free fall.

The kids clutched each other and screamed, even as inertia pulled them into the air and blue fire swept closer and Dipper could only feverishly wonder if it was possible to die in someone else’s brain—and then they hit the ground, the elevator stopping so abruptly that Dipper and Mabel bounced off the floor and out the newly opened door just before the blue fire consumed it, destroying every last trace of the elevator.

They hit the ground with a bang, cracking their heads together.

“Kids?”

Dipper huddled on the floor with Mabel, but the voice made him perk. “Great Uncle Ford?”

The room was something out of a nightmare. The walls and floor and ceiling were made out of scorched flesh, so scarred and puffy that the one giant door was swollen shut, and everything smelled like ozone. Their great uncle Ford was right there, clear-eyed and awake, just standing and waiting as if in a dream. He rushed to them, like he was waking up for the first time, and checked them over frenetically.

“What are you doing here? Are you hurt?”

“We’re okay. I think.” Mabel sat up first. Any scuffs she had looked superficial, like she had smeared dirt on her cheeks for effect instead of popped out of a falling, burning elevator. Thus was the benefit of being in a mind, Dipper guessed. “What about you?”

“What about…” Ford frowned at the floor, his hands stilling just as he was pushing up Dipper’s sleeve to check his arm. “I… don’t know how I got here. But it’s not safe. What are you doing here?”

“An evil triangle is in your brain!” Mabel cried, throwing up her hands.

“Gideon sent it to get your secrets,” Dipper said without nearly the energy of his sister. How could she recover so quickly?

“An evil triangle?” The lines on Ford’s brow deepened. “That sounds…”

“Familiar?”

The whole room shook with Bill Cipher’s voice. The shut door cracked and splintered. The burnt skin of the walls started cracking and oozing. Everyone whipped their heads around to search for him, but he was nowhere to be seen.

“No. No, no, no…” Ford grabbed Mabel and Dipper. His hands were suddenly sticky and red but it didn’t rub off on them. “Kids, get behind me.”

“You should know that won’t save them.” Cipher laughed and the ground shook, triangular patterns emerging in the floor, the cracking walls, the ceiling, carving into the flesh as more flakes of burnt and scarred skin peeled off. “Man, you really forgot everything, didn’t you?”

The cracks in the door were deafening. Fissures spiderwebbed from knob to threshold.

“Stanford? What’s happening?”

The scared, gravelly voice came from behind the door, squeezed shut by scar tissue all around it, black and foul with necrotic infection. Stanford snapped straight like someone pulled all his strings to attention and looked at the door, his mouth hanging open.

“This isn’t happening,” he said.

“Stanford!” The gravelly voice was getting higher and higher with panic. “Stanford, HELP ME!”

Oh God. Oh God oh God oh God. Dipper wanted to cover his ears, but he was frozen.

The room shook. There was no way out. Ford plucked the kids off the cracking floor and hugged them close. Dipper had a sudden urge to squirm away, to run from Ford and everything in his head.

“Close your eyes and imagine something better,” Ford murmured. “It’s okay. We’ll be okay.”

Instead of running, Dipper clung to Ford’s shoulder, staring at the door in horror as blue light shined out from every one of its seams, the smell of ozone overwhelming. Mabel buried her face in Ford’s neck and hummed pop tunes to herself, futilely trying to drown out the chaos of her great uncle’s besieged mind.

“Don’t tell me you forgot about this too,” said Cipher with barely contained glee.

The gravelly voice turned into a scream that tore apart eardrums. Mabel hummed louder and louder until Dipper squeezed his eyes shut and joined in. Ford bowed, like he could shield them from the noise with his body.

“It’s not real. It’s not real,” Ford whispered into their ears, like maybe he was reassuring them and not himself.

“I gotta say, I was impressed. I didn’t think you’d go full Cain and Abel like that. It seemed a little hardcore for you.”

“He’s dead, he’s dead, he’s dead,” Ford mumbled faster, like the words had to come out, like they could make reality alone.

“Not yet, Sixer! There’s still time to save him.” The disembodied laughter rocked the shattering room. “But time is running out.”

The world dissolved around them. No more screaming, no more scars, no more laughing triangles—just a floor made entirely of purring kittens and a sky made of rainbows. This wasn’t Ford’s brain at all. This looked like something that Mabel made—and after a moment, Dipper realized she had.

Ford collapsed into a fold of kittens, but he didn’t let go of the kids and they didn’t let go of him.

“Good job, honey,” Ford mumbled into a pile of fur.

“What was that, Great Uncle Ford?” The question forced itself out of Dipper, even if he wasn’t sure he wanted to know the answer. He thought back to drowning Stanley in a dream. He thought back to all the awful things that were in Ford’s head.

(I didn’t think you’d go full Cain and Abel like that.)

“I don’t remember,” Ford said softly. “I really don’t.”

Silence settled, broken only by purring. Dipper and Mabel didn’t try to crawl away from their Great Uncle, but they exchanged looks. There had always been something mysterious going on with their great uncle and the journal, but whatever this was, it was beyond what they knew how to deal with. For once, Ford didn’t have any easy answers for them.

Or maybe he did, but he was keeping them to himself.

Dipper wondered if they should run, if they should hide away until they figured out exactly what was going on, but Ford let them go before he decided. A rogue kitten lounged on Ford’s head, batting at his glasses. He carefully placed it back on the ground with all the others.

“We have bigger problems right now. If Gideon is resorting to psychic attacks, then a physical one is imminent.” He frowned at the rainbow sky, looking far too serious for a man in a pile of kittens. “It’s time to wake up.”