polyphonics | [ CLOSED: YU ] ❝ i spent my life trying to answer to the voice inside my head ❞

[ It's been five years. Not that he's been counting, or anything. Not that it's been on his mind every day since they returned. Not that he still has dreams - and nightmares - that if it weren't for Mabel sharing his memories, he would have thought he'd gone crazy.

He still kind of does, anyway.

They haven't gone back, or anywhere else, but not for a lack of trying. When they'd returned from Gravity Falls after that summer that was longer than they could have known, their parents could tell. They'd changed, they'd grown up, and the fact that Dipper and Mabel were so tight lipped about what had happened didn't sit well with mom and dad. So they weren't eager to have them return the next summer. Or the next. Or the next. Despite letters, invitations, and phone calls from their uncles. They were never flat-out refusals, but their parents kept their summers too busy doing other things to make time for even short trips back to Oregon. When they were sixteen and had a junker to drive, Dipper and Mabel attempted a daring road trip to the Falls, but their short stay was too preoccupied by catching up with their friends in this world to think about trying to visit their friends from other worlds.

Ford knew. Dipper and Mabel had had to write him so that when he inevitably found the portal, he wouldn't try to shut it down. When they were heading back home after that last trip, he squeezed their shoulders with a reassuring "Next time, kids," as they left.

But when would the next time be?

Dipper wasn't so consumed with going back that he forgot to live his own life. He kept his promise to Mabel - they were going to grow up and endure the pains of high school together, and they did. But he was always just a haired removed, one foot in this world and one in another, where he could go wherever he wanted in the cosmos, be whatever he wanted, see extraordinary things that even Gravity Falls couldn't offer him.

More than anything, he just had to know that it was really real, that Cerealia had happened and that his memories weren't lies, as painful as some of them might be. They'd made him who he is. What if his character was built on dreams? On choices that he'd never really made?

Yes, it's been five years, and Dipper and Mabel are high school graduates, college-bound in the fall. They're not attending the same school. It's the end of their childhood, for real this time. It might be their last chance for a good long while to try it, and Dipper urges them to go. They have to go.

And so they pack up the clunker once again, drive up the coast to Oregon, meet up with Ford in the woods, and head arm in arm through the portal. It's finally time, finally, to see his friends - his family again, to get back of piece of himself that has slowly drifted away over the last five years.

However, as often was the case with Cerealia, things don't quite go according to plan and when Dipper steps through to - an apartment? - and he's no longer got Mabel by his side. ]

Well, that's...not great.

[ Where is he, anyway? ]