Another day, another ficlet. They all build into a story that would require another 100K words to write to my satisfaction, so have fun with your snapshots.



Title: Journal in the Woods

Fandom: Gravity Falls

Rating: G

Characters: Wendy Corduroy, Dipper Pines, and Mabel Pines.

Description: Wendy shows the kids where the teenagers like to hang out. (AU.)

Word Count: 1549

“Yeah, man, the best spot in the woods is just this way.” Wendy waded through the overgrowth like she was born in it, breaking a path for Dipper and Mabel to follow. Dipper couldn’t tear his eyes away from Wendy’s hair (bright red, like fire in the sun), but Mabel was looking at everything, at the little frogs in the grass and at the birds in the trees (and did she just see a tiny deer run past her shoe?)

“Do you think faeries live there? I bet faeries live there,” Mabel said, bending the grass under her feet. Clearly, this had once been a road, one that wound deeper and deeper in the forest.

“I’d totally believe it, seeing this place,” Wendy said with a laugh. “That’d be pretty cool, wouldn’t it?”

“Yeah, faeries, cool!” Dipper said much too quickly before shutting his mouth and flushing.

“And here we are!” They reached a curve in the road, and out of the forest emerged a great triangular shack. All the windows were broken or dusted over like cataracts, the porch sagged like a twisted mouth, and some rotted floorboards stuck up like teeth.

But unlike the road leading up to it, nature was avoiding the house. Some daring moss grew on the porch, but no vines or flowers dared to twist onto its walls and under its shingles. Everything about it was jagged, a scar on the landscape that the forest wasn’t ready to heal.

“Oh, uh—” Dipper gulped. “This is, this is super cool! Yeah!”

“It’s a haunted house!” Mabel sprinted through the grass and jumped to the porch, narrowly avoiding the gaping holes into the foundation. “Let’s go explore!”

“That’s the spirit,” Wendy laughed, trailing after her.

“I-I have spirit too! Wait up for me, Mabel!” Dipper ran after his sister, and he nearly crashed into a wall when he glanced back to make sure Wendy was watching.

He stopped dead as soon as he got inside.

The shack was something out of nightmares. Brown stains (blood?!) spattered the ground and the walls. Someone had scratched the wood full of eyes and triangles. All the eyes seemed to be staring at Dipper as he crept further inside, all his hairs standing on end. There was a hole in the wall, maybe from a fist. There was a metal crossbow bolt stuck in the floor, too deep for anyone to get it out. Broken glass glittered on the ground. The smell of alcohol stuck to the walls and ground like it was part of the building’s essence.

Teenagers had painted the walls with graffiti full of swear words and pictures that made Dipper blush, but it wasn’t really sticking. The paint faded, with some parts of the walls not looking like they had ever been painted at all. How would that happen?

“Yep, this is some pretty prime hang out space,” Wendy said, trailing in with her hands in her pockets and an easy smile on her face, as if they weren’t in some hellscape that was surely going to spit out a ton of ghosts to eat them. “We like to throw parties in here sometimes.”

“Hey, I found a squirrel!” Mabel called from another room. “A whole nest of squirrels!”

“The woods around here are pretty cool, too,” Wendy said, leaning against a window sill without any glass shards. “The parties out there are wild.”

“Wild parties in the forest! That’s cool too,” Dipper said, wiping his sweaty palms on his pants.

“The squirrels are friendly!” Mabel called.

“Why don’t I, uh, explore the woods while Mabel has the shack? We can trade later!”

“Sure, whatever you want, dude.” Wendy wandered deeper in the shack, broken glass crunching under her feet. “Sounds like your sister’s having fun.”



Commotion broke out deep in the bowels of the building. “THE SQUIRRELS ARE NOT FRIENDLY!”

Dipper shuffled out as quickly as he possibly could without looking like he was running away. He didn’t like that building. He didn’t like anything about it, and who could blame him? With all that broken glass and dried blood, he would probably get horribly sick if he tripped on the floor. And with how decrepit it looked, it should have a building inspector check it out and make sure it wasn’t going to collapse. Really, it was just a safety hazard, and Dipper was being smart to avoid it, not a childish scaredy-cat.

But Wendy might watch him from the windows, and he didn’t want to look like he was just running away from the house, or like he was trying to catch frogs or something like a little kid. What was a cool thing he could do?

Violence was probably cool, but it was never fun if someone was actually hurt, so he picked up bundles of rocks on the ground and lobbed them at trees, like he was honing his rock-throwing aim for such a time when he needed to do a cool trick, like shatter a glass bottle from far away. Yeah, he looked cool.

He glanced back at the house every now and then to check if Wendy was watching. The few times he saw her in the broken windows, she was just lounging there, looking beautiful and awesome and not looking at him. Should he go back to hang out with her? Did he look like a little kid for not being in there? What if this was his big chance to spend time alone with her?

“BACK FOUL SQUIRRELS!” his sister screeched from the house, and Dipper remembered there was no casual alone time with anyone as long as Mabel was around.

Dipper kept fretting over it as he wandered deeper into the woods, lobbing rocks at trees and doing little more than stripping some bark and startling woodland creatures.

“Ugh, I’m such an idiot,” Dipper muttered to himself after he couldn’t see the house anymore. “Why do I have to be so scared? It’s just a house. No big deal. I could be hanging out with Wendy and I’m just such a mess!”

He threw a rock as hard as he could at a pine tree. It bounced off the trunk with a clang and hit his forehead.

“OW!” Dipper fell on the ground, rubbing his forehead as a big bruise bloomed over his brow. What was that?

He pulled himself to his feet again, frowning at the tree before rapping it with his knuckle. CLANG CLANG CLANG. It wasn’t even covered with bark. It was metal painted to look like bark.

Dipper pried it open with his fingernails. Must flew out from the hollowed portion of the tree to reveal what looked like a weird old radio, covered in dust and dead insects. Dipper’s nose wrinkled as he wiped off the debris and fiddled with the knobs and buttons.

The ground behind him gasped, making him jump, then opened up into a gaping, musty maw.

Dipper peered inside just as the bugs crawled quickly out of the light. A journal sat in the dirt, smelling of rotting paper and mold. On the cover was a gleaming gold hand with a number three written on it.

A six-fingered hand.

Dipper frowned as he pulled the book to his face. He knew a six-fingered man, but he had no idea what Great Uncle Ford would be doing burying books in the woods.

Leafing through the pages, it became clearer and clearer that his great uncle had written it. The neat cursive was the same that all his DD&D notes were written with. The carefully detailed pictures were the same sort that he drew with Mabel. Pages were torn out or eaten by insects, but there was still enough of the book to tell Dipper plainly who the author was.

That was to say nothing about the contents that spilled from the pages. Fantastical creatures, heart-pounding adventure, and then fear, paranoia, something going terribly wrong but too many pages were missing. Who knew that his great uncle had such an adventure? And why did he try to hide it? Why was he still in Gravity Falls if someone was watching him?

What if it was all nonsense? Their parents said that Ford had a brain injury thirty years ago. They said he was lucky to get out just with some retrograde amnesia, and he was otherwise fine. What if part of that injury had been going crazy and writing a weird book before burying it in the woods?

TRUST NO ONE!

I fear my time is running out. So tired…

The contents of the book did nothing to help the unsettling feeling in the forest. Dipper shuddered and tucked it into his vest for safekeeping. He didn’t know if he should tell Ford about this. What if it really was part of his old brain injury? What if it triggered a relapse? (Could thirty-year-old, long-healed brain injuries even get relapses?)

He could show the book to Mabel later and they could read it more closely. Then they could decide what to do.

“THE SQUIRRELS ARE LOOSE! I REPEAT, THE SQUIRRELS ARE LOOSE!”

The sound of hundreds of galloping squirrels overlapped his sister’s voice and rattled the forest. Dipper froze.

They were coming towards him.

“Oh boy.”