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rampagingfanfictioner14 · 3 days ago

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relativity falls, but... (Part 2)

Right. So Mabel runs away from home, and Dipper, feeling betrayed and angry, doesn't go after her. At least for a bit. He cares too much to just let Mabel wander around the streets by herself. Still, it's long enough for Mabel to tire and run into her old "friends" and ask them if she could crash at their place. She can't find it in herself to blame them for the argument between her and her brother when it was technically "her fault" --- toxic relationships at their finest.

The teens agree. They're riding in a car. Mabel climbs in and they tell her that they're taking her to their house. Exhausted from her argument, Mabel foolishly trusts them, and falls asleep in the back. The teens find this the perfect opportunity to mess with her, driving far away from Piedmont and stranding her in the middle of practically nowhere.

Back in their hometown, Dipper searches for Mabel when it becomes clear that she doesn't intend to return. It's morning now and he's getting worried. Their parents, though initially showing some semblance of concern, shrug off his fears and tell him that the girl would show up eventually. Having spent most of their lives arguing with each other and basically absorbed in their own selves (or proving the other wrong), the parents don't actually know their own children very well. They assume that Mabel is throwing a tantrum and will eventually crawl back home.

Dipper knows otherwise. If Mabel was going to return, she'd have done it by now.

He runs out into the streets and ditches school entirely, looking around and calling Mabel's name until his throat is raw and he can't even walk. He searches high and low, through all their favourite spots on the fields and even hitches a ride to the beach, but it's like she's vanished off the face of the planet. He returns home dejected and hurting, thinking that she's abandoned him forever. Why else would she not answer his calls? Maybe she's more selfish than he'd imagined. (Remember, she'd admitted to breaking his project and said several things that stuck with Dipper even now. She offered no good explanation as to why she'd done this, not wanting to "snitch" on the teenagers, placing all the blame on herself even though she never intended for them to do something that drastic).

He slams the door shut in their shared room and is forced to deal with the realization that Mabel had ditched him. Somewhere, somehow, during their years in high school, she'd... just stopped caring for him. After all, she clearly hated him enough to trash their only chance at escaping from Piedmont.

His head hurts. He doesn't know what to do. He'd always thought of Dipper and Mabel as a pair, together forever, through thick and thin. Not as individuals. Now that he's been separated from his other half, he flounders, feeling alone, betrayed, and hopelessly lost.

On the other side of the coin, Mabel wakes up next to a highway and realizes she has no idea where she is. She's cold and shivering, the weather dreary and raining. She stands and realizes that she's completely alone. She's scared. She calls out for her "friends", saying that this wasn't funny, and that they could come out now. Nothing happens. Several cars thunder by and not once does anyone stop to ask if this soaked, stranded seventeen-year-old kid is okay.

Mabel initially doesn't want to believe that the teens would do something like this to her, though she eventually realizes that deep down, she's always known that they weren't good people. She'd just been too trusting; blindly ignored all their obvious red flags, and now she's stuck in the middle of nowhere with nothing but the clothes on her back. And even those are now gross and soggy from the rain.

She wants to cry and sob, but she needs to get somewhere dry first. She walks and walks for miles, shivering and on the verge of breaking down completely, while simultaneously trying to absorb her new reality.

Eventually she comes across a city. There's a motel there with a guy that looks friendly enough, so she trusts him when he says that she could stay there for the night --- free of charge.

Mistake.

Let's just say, the streets are the absolute worst place to be a naïve, optimistic girl. Mabel quickly learns that night that nothing is free of charge, and runs away just in time, stumbling into a dark, secluded alleyway. This is probably when she breaks down, crying and sobbing and feeling generally hopeless.

More importantly, she feels so immensely guilty. Mabel as a character prides herself on "being a good person", and without a summer in Gravity Falls, a Grunkle Stan or the unicorns to teach her that morality is relative, she cracks under the strain of her spiralling thoughts.

She knows that everything is her fault, that she's an idiot who placed her trust in the wrong people, but she vows to never make that mistake again. She vows to make it up to Dipper, feeling some twisted sense of moral obligation not to show her face to him until she's proven herself to be a good person. A worthy person.

How does she do this when she's stuck on the streets? Who knows. Maybe she tries knitting sweaters for other homeless people or stray animals with what spare yarn she has stuffed into her pockets. Maybe she entertains people on the street by like, juggling or something.

Whatever she decides to do, she quickly realizes that it isn't enough. People don't take sweaters as currency. Juggling doesn't buy food or pay for clothes. No, Mabel needs money. Money that she doesn't have.

At first she tries the honest means. Trying to get a job, volunteering, even begging at some point --- remember, no summer with Grunkle Stan means that she still harbours that naïve notion that "lying is bad." So it's not an instant Mabel the Scam Artist moment.

But eventually she has to learn that it's every man for themselves out on the streets. She has no documentation, no records, nothing. As far as anyone knows, she's doesn't exist. So, the honest means are a no-go. Nobodies don't get employed. How can they, when they don't legally exist? The same goes for volunteering.

Begging may work a bit better, but the meagre profits she receives are not worth the degradation.

That's when she realizes that has to lie and cheat, because that's the only way she's going to survive. She starts off small. Learning to pickpocket, scrounge up money from the floor, maybe trying a few sleight-of-the-hand tricks to distract potential victims. Of course, this comes with it's challenges: Mabel may be naturally loud and distracting, but she's not a natural-born thief. As with any skill, she has to fail first to succeed. And it just so happens that she may have stolen from the wrong people.

So she moves. She hitches a ride on the bus and runs off before she needed to pay, sneaking into trains, hiding before the ticket master catches her. She gets off at the next city and starts all over again --- knitting sweaters, entertaining people with her large range of skills, and pickpocketing to keep herself alive. She realizes that "Mabel Pines" is far too conspicuous, that all her enemies know her by that name, and does the logical thing and starts using another one. And then another. And another.

May Evergreen.

Mary Birch.

Meryl "Kit" Pinefield.

She sheds names like a snake sheds its skin. The switches become a part of her regular routine: go to a city, lie, cheat, make enemies, run, change names. And repeat.

She keeps adding to her list of skills, keeps practicing her lying and her cheating, keeps track of her enemies --- although she's had her fair share of close calls.

She loses hope that she'll ever be a good person on the way, unfortunately, and instead starts thinking that maybe she could buy her way back into Dipper's life. Money seemed to be the answer to everything in her world, after all. Why wouldn't it be the answer to her broken relationship with her twin brother?

But it's a far flung hope. She doesn't truly believe it. The street life's hardened this girl to the harsh realities of the world.

She's still Mabel, though, and she makes just as many friends as she makes enemies. Some people appreciate her skills and others like her sweaters. Though she may not think that she's a good person anymore, she definitely is. She's kind and caring to those she encounters (though never trusting, never letting her guard down completely --- not anymore) and likes to give anything she has on her to help them out. Maybe some spare change, food, even the occasional packets of glitter to keep them happy. She doesn't like to call them friends, per se, she's not naïve enough to fall in that trap again. But maybe they're... acquaintances. Helpers to each other. Fellow souls.

At some point she accidentally falls back into her old habits of trusting strangers far too much, perhaps out of a sense of cockiness or ego, thinking that she must've gotten over that by now; no one could trick her anymore.

Mistake.

Maybe she pulls a Stan and ends up jailed in Columbia for the better part of a year. Maybe she gets shot while trying to run from a particularly violent gang. Maybe she encounters a particularly sadistic group of people who throw her into the trunk of a car sinking in a lake and force her to chew her way out, losing most of her teeth (and braces) in the process. Heck, maybe it's just something else entirely.

After that particular instance (whichever one it was), she decides that it's too dangerous for her to look or act like a woman while on the run like this. She dresses in big hoodies, jeans, covers her face up with scarves or beanies, and cuts off her long hair to look as threatening as possible, trying to scare off potential attackers by looking like a man. Her name changes start becoming more vague in gender, or sometimes even downright masculine:

Mika Oak.

Alex "8-Ball" Carter.

Mason Penny.

She only uses the name Mason on a particularly depressing day, simply out of instinct. She only realizes her mistake when people start referring to her with her brother's name, and quickly hauls away to another city and drops the act entirely. It's far too painful to remember that name.

It's not an easy life. Mabel, once an optimistic, trusting person, has to learn the hard way that trust is a valuable thing to give.

Trust no one.

It only leads to pain.

On her darkest days, she comforts herself with the fact that everything she's doing, it's for Dipper. She knows that she's a bad person, that she's probably never going to be worthy of going back, that she's probably going to die alone and nameless, but hey, at least Dipper's gonna be okay. She tells herself that he was fine, that he's probably flourishing without her, because he'd always been smart and that was all that mattered, in the end. (Kinda similar to the justifications that Ford made when he thought about Stan on the streets, just the other way around).

Meanwhile Dipper... Well, he's definitely not okay. His emotional wounds from being betrayed so personally slowly fester into a deep, lingering resentment. He doesn't know why Mabel did what she did, but it's stranded him in Piedmont and straight between his arguing parents: who've gotten even more intense with each other, now that Dipper's told them that their only daughter ran away from home.

But he can't just wallow in loneliness and betrayal forever. He has to move on at some point, so Dipper picks himself up and reluctantly goes to Backupsmore University. Where else could he go? His chances at West Coast Tech were ruined --- and hey, sure, maybe the whole deal with the machine was an accident, but why wouldn't Mabel tell him? Why did she drop the bombshell that it was all her fault, then refuse to explain?

Dipper knows why now: she must've not cared. She must've wanted to hurt him.

He ignores the small part of his heart that protested against this notion --- protested against the rejection of his twin, because she's Mabel and she wouldn't do something like that.

Dipper drops the nickname. It's too painful for him to refer to himself with it, when the person who used it most is now gone.

Mason throws himself into his studies at university, and of course, he's brilliant academically. He shoves any and all thoughts of his family deep into the back of his mind, focusing entirely on his goal: studying weirdness. Or anomalous phenomena, as his more mature mind liked to say. With or without Mabel, as hard as it is for him to think of himself as a lone individual.

He meets his roommate, Soos Ramirez, and encounters a particularly bright girl from his engineering class named Candy Chiu. They regale Mason with tales from their hometown, Gravity Falls, and the sheer amount of strangeness in their stories is enough to convince Mason that after graduating, he simply must go there and find out what exactly is going on. He's initially very hesitant to open up and trust them, still stinging from the pain of Mabel's betrayal, but they do become good friends eventually.

(Sometimes during late night dorm talks or drunk confessions, Mason admits that he has a twin sister. He doesn't elaborate much, but it's enough for Soos and Candy to know not to prod).

(Other times, during holidays, Mason goes back to Piedmont. He tells himself he's only visiting his parents, but in reality he spends far more of his time outside the house, walking around their old childhood haunts, scouring the fields and the beach for anomalies Mabel. Not many show up, however).

(For some reason his brain just doesn't seem to accept the explanation he'd managed to come up with. It didn't want to believe Mabel was gone. Mason wanders his hometown for years during his breaks, trying to find his twin sister through some misguided sense of hope, but his efforts are fruitless).

Mason graduates with four PhDs and gets rewarded with a hefty grant to pursue his own research. He toys with the idea of indulging his childhood fantasy to find Atlantis, but as Soos and Candy prepare to leave for Oregon once more, he eventually just decides to follow them.

And it pays off.

Gravity Falls most certainly does not disappoint.

Mason's immediately enraptured by its charm and its anomalies, beginning his investigations at once. He's so caught up in the excitement that, for once, he doesn't get upset at the thought of studying them all by himself. For over four years, he catalogues each and every one of his findings in a series of journals, engraving his birthmark into the dark blue covers: it only seemed right for an anomaly like that to be present in a book about anomalies, after all. He feels a deep sense of sadness when he realizes that it's been a long time since he'd seen the one who'd made him feel so special about having a constellation etched on his forehead.

Where was Mabel, anyway? Mason wonders in his darkest moments. Why did she leave? How is she doing? Is she well? And more morbidly: Is she... dead? Is she happy without him?

Sometimes he feels deeply depressed and alone. He's felt that way ever since Mabel left, but his research eventually pulls him out of that state and keeps him going. At some point he starts wondering where all these anomalies even came from. Clearly not from Earth --- science itself seemed to contradict the mere existence of the creatures he'd seen so far.

He hits a roadblock in that particular case. How could he puzzle out this answer?

(Remember, Mason isn't driven by a need to prove his greatness to the world (like Ford, cough cough); he's pretty content with his research so far. And besides, he's learnt the hard way that reaching for greatness only led to tragedy and loss. Sure, he still pushes himself far too hard, but in short, Mason isn't a Ford. He doesn't have the inflated ego, the desperate urge to be something great, or the all-consuming (and somewhat selfish) urge to be seen as a world-renowned hero, or a pioneer, and earn great power).

(Sure, he has his moments. He's not perfect. Sometimes he rants about the "greater good" or acts all self-righteous with stuff like "the road to hell is paved with good intentions". Other times he tries to play hero and despite everyone escaping mostly unscathed, he still places people in danger).

(But Mason's not an Icarus. If Ford has an ego, this guy has the exact opposite. Mabel's loss hit him very hard. The man's an anxiety-ridden, self-doubting mess of a person without his sister to calm/reassure him).

Back to the whole "finding the source of weirdness". Mason's not driven by ego or desire for deep respect and power in the scientific community. Well... maybe a little, but it's more like he's genuinely interested in the source of the world's weirdness, and his burning curiosity wouldn't let him rest until he figured out the answer.

He wanders into a set of unfamiliar caves and discovers paintings from the Native peoples etched on the walls.

He reads about a demon --- a strange triangle-shaped creature able to solve any problem. He finds it cool. Interesting, even, that this legend differed so greatly to the other First Nations stories he'd read. Maybe it had an inkling of truth to it, like most legends did.

Wouldn't hurt to try, right?

(Famous last words, lol).

Like the curious, impulsive idiot he is, Mason ignores the warnings and reads the inscription aloud (cough, like in Scary-oke, cough). He waits in tense silence, gripping his lantern tightly, his eyes flicking back and forth in anticipation and a small tinge of excitement.

Nothing happens.

A huff, and a brief head shake. Of course it didn't work; why would it? He's seen some strange things during his time in Gravity Falls, but something such as an omniscient, all-powerful triangle was a bit much to believe, even for a cryptozoologist like himself. Disappointed, Mason leaves the caves and takes a nap...

...And the weirdest thing shows up.

(...Now, this is where I'm a little unsure. Some iterations of Relativity Falls have Bill Cipher replaced with one or both of his parents (Scalene and Euclid), and others just swap the human characters around and leave the triangle dude as is).

(Now, I'll be honest with you. I don't want to keep Bill as is in my version of this. I've had a vague idea of him in my head, and it goes kinda like this: Imagine a Bill Cipher who, while destroying his dimension, destroyed a little more with it. Imagine a Bill Cipher with a poisonous, toxic green skin instead of a bright yellow, and a black eye with a glowing green slitted pupil. Imagine a Bill Cipher that took a little more from his father than just his hat. Basically, imagine a Euclid, but he's not Euclid, he's his son, but he can't seem to accept his identity and what he did as "Bill", so he steals his dead father's name as a defence mechanism to try and shield himself from his crushing shame).

(Idk. Not fully convinced yet. This one's kinda inching into "headcanon/alternate AU" territory and I do want to keep the general gist of relativity falls in this).

(But that's all for today, though, peeps :) I'm really happy that people are liking this! I'll probably post a final Part 3 tomorrow to cover the events of post-college Mason and post-Columbia Mabel, as well as flesh out my ideas for Euclid/Bill a little more).

Again, I repeat, this is just what I think of Relativity Falls. I don't own the idea, nor do I own the characters. Just a rambling human being with far too much free time to theorize over the lives of fictional characters.

#relativity falls au #gravity falls #dipper pines #mabel pines #mystery twins #soos ramirez #pines family #me and my friend had an argument and this was the four hour fruit of my labours to prove her wrong #wordvomit #my take on relativity falls #might be a lil ooc #might not #idk

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