#now. fiddleford is a different story and YET not a single post about that….

[ispyspookymansion]

been scrolling the gravity falls tag enough lately i feel i can say its CRAZY how much billford stuff includes mabel supporting this or encouraging them to get back together. she would kill that triangle immediately she would NOT set him up with her grunkle

[nikxation]

If You Give a Mothman a Loan

Huge thank you to @birdgirlamp for commissioning me to write a fic by donating to WHO (if you want more information, see this post). Sorry it took so long to get this out, but here it is! Hope you enjoy!

Word count: 2359

Characters: Stanford Pines (pre- and post-portal), Fiddleford McGucket (pre-portal), Wendy Corduroy (post-portal... obviously)

~ ~ ~

It’s three months into Fiddleford’s stay in Gravity Falls, and the skeleton in the closet (or the portal in the basement) is slowly looking less and less like just a bundle of messy wires and half-finished structural supports and more like the behemoth of a machine it’s meant to be. The raw stock for the exterior plating should be here any day now, the first of the two power transfer beams is online, and every day is another day closer to their end-goal.

He’ll hand it to Stanford Pines, this is some of their best work yet.

He still remembers the day he arrived and Ford showed him the initial drafts. He’d thought the size was overkill, that the hollowed-out basement beneath the house would just become a room with decent acoustics for him to practice his banjo playing away from his old college roommate while the real machine was built somewhere less cold and damp.

Boy howdy was he wrong.

Now, every time he walks in the room, he feels the thing like the presence it is, towering stories tall, looming over him in a way that he would almost consider menacing if it weren’t for the fact that it’s just a machine.

He’s got blueprints and prototyped miniatures of literal death bots.

So why would the interdimensional portal in the basement put him on edge?

It shouldn’t.

So he shakes the thought away and gets back to work.

An unsuccessful system test led to the time-shift circuit on motherboard seven incinerating again. If he were the kind of man to actually keep count (which he certainly is), he’d know it’s the fourth time in the past week this same part has crapped out on them.

It’s also the reason he’s gonna finally stop out-sourcing these parts and just start making them in-house from now on. He’s about sick of replacing them every five minutes.

That’s what brings Fiddleford to where he is now, with his upper body shoved halfway inside the portal’s support structure and crammed between God knows how many electrical components. His arms have just started to cramp in their rather unnatural position as he pries at the burnt-out part to replace it with a newer one that will hopefully hold out against the power output better than its predecessor.

Ford’s sitting in the control room, supposedly running through some of the math again to double-check that they didn’t miss anything.

The “supposedly” is only because, for the past twenty minutes, the man has been prattling on like Fiddleford’s grandma at Sunday family brunch. He can only hear the occasional snippet from his position (quite literally) inside the portal, and as far as he can tell, he thinks he’s talking about either his most recent research outing, or something about preacher scouting. He wants to lean towards the former, but with the new stories he’s found about a so-called “velocipastor”, he can’t rule out the latter. Either way, the man hasn’t stopped talking long enough to breathe, let alone re-run equations that use relative space-time physics with integrated fourth dimensional calculus.

Fiddleford just doesn’t have the heart to tell him that he really can’t hear him.

He snaps the ribbon cable off the still-smoking component (after the first time it blew, he learned to bring heat-resistant gloves in here with him) and is rather glad to see it’s still intact. Rewiring is a day-long project he’s glad to not have to do again. He maneuvers his hand back out into open air and tosses the old piece somewhere into the room before getting to work mounting the new one.

Ford’s voice echoes from the next room over.

“… extra funds… exploring… investing for…”

Bolting the circuit down turns out to be easier the fifth time he has to do it, and he’s about to start running a simple, probably non-exploding test to make sure the new part is integrated correctly when he hears—

“… so I gave Mothman a thousand dollars…”

And that, of all things, stops Fiddleford in his tracks.

“Come again?” he yells. He had to have misheard because he swears he just heard the man say—

“I ran into Mothman in the woods yesterday,” Ford says, all too nonchalantly, “and they told me they were starting up a small business and needed an investment, so I gave them a thousand dollars from my excess funds with a verbal agreement that they would pay me back within the year.”

… So he didn’t mishear him, that’s for darn sure.

The fact that the Mothman is real is surely weird enough. But he’s lived in Gravity Falls (and known Stanford Pines) for long enough that it doesn’t really surprise him too much. No, that’s not the part that brings him to wiggle himself out of his position inside the portal’s underbelly just enough so that he can meet Ford’s eyes in the other room.

“You gave Mothman… a thousand dollars…” Fiddleford says slowly.

“To help kickstart their new business, yes.” It’s so casual, like he doesn’t even register the inherent absurdity in what he’s saying.

“And that business is?”

“Mothballs.”

“Stanford!”

“What?”

“That’s the stupidest scam I’ve ever heard.”

Ford sputters, his face aghast for a moment. “I did not get scammed by Mothman!”

“You did.”

“Did not.”

“Do you even know what mothballs are for?”

He pauses, his mouth snapping shut, his face turning the slightest shade of red. Fiddleford can see it from the next room over. “No. I always assumed they were some biproduct created by moths during reproduction or something.” Fiddleford lets his head fall back, bonking on a bar of the steel framework behind him.

“Stanford, they repel moths,” he says. “You just let a bunch of moths convince you they’re starting a business making the thing they hate. That’s stupider than the time my neighbor tried to convince me his cat could see God. And you have three PhDs!”

“Four now,” he says quietly, and Fiddleford levels him with a single raised eyebrow.

“You’re gonna go back, find that over-glorified insect, and get our money back. Or so help me, I will never do another grocery run for as long as I live here.”

“Oh come now, that’s hardly fair. You know I hate going into town.”

“Then you better hurry along and find him.”

“You honestly believe the actual Mothman is pulling a con.”

“People lie, Stanford,” he says, finally ducking himself back into the machine to finally run the diagnostic on the new circuit. “Even cryptids and aliens probably from another dimension.”

There’s a moment of silence, but it’s broken a few moments later by the sound of a chair scuffing on the floor and footsteps ascending the wooden stairs out of the basement.

Fiddleford snorts, shaking his head and getting back to work.

~ ~ ~

“So, like, the Mothman,” Wendy says, keeping pace next to him as they make their way back into the woods, the sun’s last rays just starting to slip behind the trees. “The actual Mothman. He’s real?”

“As real as any of the other anomalies in this town,” Ford says, adjusting the strap of the bag slung over his shoulder. He’d heard the cryptid had come back into town again shortly after Wierdmageddon, and after his first attempt at getting his money back a few weeks back (second if you count that time over three decades ago) went sour, he decided to bring back-up this time. But with Stan still out of commission and the kids rightly wanting to stay with him, he was hard-pressed for options. That is until the cashier girl piped up and said she’d do it for ten percent of whatever they recovered.

Ford negotiated her down to eight and a half. She drives a hard bargain; he can see why Stan hired her.

“Dude, that’s sick,” she says.

“I mean, I hardly think they’re ill or anything,” Ford says. “As fast as their moths die off, they re-introduce new ones to the population through some sort of reproductive mitosis—”

“Nah dude, it’s a phrase,” she cuts him off. “Means, like, ‘that’s awesome’.”

“Ah, alright.” Ford pauses to check the anomaly scanner on his watch, the little white blip flashing on the screen. “I’ve never been exceptionally ‘with it’ when it comes to slang, so you’ll have to pardon my misunderstanding.”

“You’re fine, Dr. Pines,” she says. She kicks a loose rock off into the brush. “I’m pretty sure Stan doesn’t understand half of what I say either.” Ford hums an affirmative, intently watching the small blip on his watch, confirming that it is, in fact, slowly moving in their direction. After a few seconds, he drops the bag he’s been carrying with a thwump, a bit of dust swirling up from the dirt.

“We’re going to set up the trap right here,” he says. “We have probably ten minutes until the Mothman comes through here, so we’ll need to act quickly.”

“You got it boss-man.”

It’s a fairly simple net trap, one that they make short work of assembling. Ford had already built the majority of it to bring out here, including a magic-imbued mosquito net that should contain the Mothman’s consciousness so long as they catch the majority of their moths.

He made that mistake last time, the Mothman managing to escape in the couple moths that his trap missed.

“So, you really were in, like, a different dimension for a bunch of years, right?” Wendy asks as she spreads some leaves and twigs over the net.

“Multiple dimensions,” he says as he carefully sets the trap’s trigger pole. “I travelled through thousands of them in my thirty years away from this one.”

“Dude, that’s nuts.”

“It was… pretty sick,” he says, shooting her a wry grin. Wendy groans.

“Well,” she says, “you just confirmed for me that I was right to never teach Stan slang, so thanks for that I guess.”

“Glad to help.” With the trap finally set and ready to go, he pulls the last item out of the bag: the bait, which he flicks on and gently sets down against the trigger.

“That’s a flashlight,” Wendy says, the statement almost a question.

“Indeed, it is.”

“Is it, like,” she says, waving her hands slightly, “I don’t know, magic or something?”

“Nope,” he says, backing off and giving the trap one last look-over. He has to hand it to the girl, she knew what she was doing.

“You’re serious?”

“Entirely,” he says. “It doesn’t take much to attract them. Back in the eighties, they used to hang around streetlamps and windows all the time. It’s a wonder they’re still considered a cryptid considering how blatantly out in the open they—”

He hears the tell-tale sound of fluttering insect wings, not too far off, but loud enough to make him pause. He glances in the direction and then down at his watch, the blip on the screen almost on top of them. Quickly, he motions to Wendy to hide and then does the same himself, crouching behind the nearest tree and peering around the side to watch.

It’s rather quiet for a few moments, the darkness starting to settle into the pines, the lit flashlight a lone beacon, just the sound of the pine needles whistling in the breeze and the far-off humming of the approaching cryptid. But that low hum gradually gets louder, turning to a white drone of hundreds of small wings beating in tandem.

A familiar dark shape emerges from the underbrush. Humanoid, but just barely. Ten-feet tall with two enormous wings sprouting from its back, two large yellow eyes reflecting the scattered light of the flashlight in the clearing. Their entire shape feels blurred at the edges, like someone drew a line of charcoal and smudged it, the hundreds of moths that make up their body shifting and moving amongst each other in a din of small beating wings.

The Mothman.

Ford hates to admit that the thought still sends an excited shiver up his spine.

They emerge into the clearing, glancing around and taking an immediate interest in the flashlight lying on the ground. They approach it slowly, cautiously, glancing around as if waiting for the ambush, eventually making it onto the net before moving to bend down to pick up the flashlight.

They stop.

Ford holds his breath.

“Stanford Pines,” a voice says, the sound a high whine broken up and mixed with soft clicking. The Mothman stands back upright, snapping its eyes right in his direction. Immediately, Ford’s mind starts swirling with potential fallback options to try to turn this in their favor. “Surprised you’re still alive after last week. Really think we’re stupid enough to fall for—”

“Suck mothballs, lamp licker!” Wendy screams from across the clearing, the Mothman whipping around just as a projectile of some sort (is that an axe?) flies out of the underbrush and hits the trap’s trigger dead-on, sending the net shooting upwards and capturing almost all of the moths above it. A shrill screech fills the air from the now-dangling mass of moths, but Ford is too busy gaping at the cashier girl as she emerges from her hiding spot.

“Nice shot, Wendy!” he beams, shaking off the shock and coming out to join her on either side of the now-enraged Mothman. She shrugs, retrieving the axe from off the ground and sliding it back into her belt loop behind her back.

“No biggie. My dad enters me into the annual axe-throwing competition every year. I’ve won the last 5 in a row.” Ford, having not known anything about this girl before today, is rather stunned. He certainly was not expecting that from the teen, let alone the nonchalance over it. “But anywho,” she says, turning her attention to the writhing mass in front of them. “About that money…”

~ ~ ~

About two hours after they left, Ford and Wendy arrive back at the Mystery Shack, Ford heading to the back of the house to find Stan and the kids, Wendy collecting her things and heading back out to go home, a crisp one-hundred dollar bill tucked into her pocket.