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Emma-May Dixon wakes up alone in her queen size bed in California, and the realization that her husband is never coming back home settles fully over her heart.
She's known it for a long time. Since Christmas, really.
But that doesn't stop the crushing pain that comes with the realization. There's something final about waking up alone and saying the words aloud, and it fucking hurts.
She has to see him. One more time. She has to look him in the eye and tell him if you're not coming back, I'm not going to give you a second thought.
She has to know if he's even alive up there in Gravity Falls. He doesn't pick up the phone he gave her the number for. He could be in jail. He could be cheating on her with another woman. Hell, he could be cheating on her with another man. He could be drinking himself to death and she wouldn't know, because they haven't spoken since Christmas, since they fought and he jumped on the next flight back to Oregon.
So she drops Tate off at her mother's house, and her heart crumbles a little more when she hugs him and tells him I'll be back in a week, because that's what Fiddleford said to her back in July. I'll be back in six months. Home just after new year's.
But she will come back. With or without Fiddleford.
The drive is long. Mountains turn to forests. She stops twice for gas, and pulls into the Gravity Falls motel at two in the morning. A few feet down the hall from her room, one of the doors is covered with graffiti. She doesn't pay attention to it.
Tomorrow, she has to find her husband.
Emma-May Dixon wakes up alone in her motel room in Oregon, and has to scold herself into getting up to look for her husband.
She starts with the police station. She shows them a photo she always carries in her wallet, a photo from their wedding. It's objectively a bad photo, it's blurry and angled funny, because they let Stanford try to take a photo and he dropped the camera, and they're both sneezing, but she carries it with her anyway because she likes to think about him.
The police have seen him. They don't say he's in jail, they say nothing about a woman. They say he used to come into town regularly, sometimes with a Stanford fellow. They tell her he hasn't been seen at any bars at all, when she asks.
Mostly he hangs around the museum, they say. The museum and the library.
She starts with the library. She gets there at the same time as the librarian, who's still yawning and holding a full cup of coffee. She shows him the picture and he shakes his head.
She waits inside the library for an hour, showing the picture to any patrons she sees. Most people shake their head, sympathetic smiles, sad smiles. A few tell her he looks familiar, but they haven't seen him recently.
One woman comments that he used to come to the diner with another man frequently, but they haven't been seen together in months.
Those words echo around her mind. It's been a few months. How long ago did Fiddleford leave Stanford? Had he been kicked out? Did he walk out of his own volition? Had something happened?
It's quickly becoming clear that she won't get more answers here in the library.
So. To the museum it is.
It's not a terribly long walk to the museum, but she's breathless when she reaches it, because he's there, he's sitting on the steps, breathing the warm spring air, his eyes are closed, and he looks so peaceful, like it's just another Thursday, and to him it probably is.
She storms up the steps, and he jumps when he sees her, he scrambles away from her apologizing for being in the way.
He doesn't talk like a man caught cheating on his wife. He doesnt talk like a man who chose to abandon his wife and son. He talks like he doesn't know her.
She drags him back to her motel room, and he comments out loud that their rooms are right next to each other. She looks up, and the room he's gesturing to is the one with the graffiti. She can see now that the paint covering the door is red, eyes with big X's crossed through the pupils. She raises an eyebrow at the vandalism, but unlocks her door and lets him into her room.
She sit him down on the bed and tries to pry an explanation out of him, a confession, a reassurance, anything really, anything to explain why he's been gone eight months, and hasn't called.
His answers are vague, leaving her with more questions than she started with. She changes tack, trying to convince him to come back home to California with her, but he's adamant that he stay here, he has work, he has to stay for work, they need him here.
When she asks who They are, he looks away, and she can see a large scar on his temple - no, a cluster of smaller scars, some of them healed and silvery, but most of them still red and angry, a bouquet of painful lilies blooming on his face. She reaches out to brush the hair away from his temple, and he flinches away from her touch, bolting to the other side of the room. He cowers in the corner, hands up around his head, shielding it with his arms, his eyes wide and wild like an animal, and he's terrified, and he tries to curl into himself further when she approaches.
And he only shakes harder when she asks what's wrong, asks if he got the scars from whatever he was building with Stanford, and he's scared, he's afraid of her, he's afraid of whatever happened with Stanford, why is he so scared, what could have possibly happened in that cabin?
Okay, she says. Okay, I won't ask.
And she lets him leave, watches him scurry out the door like a spooked rabbit, and she thinks it's going to prove nearly impossible to get him back.
That evening, she sees him again. He's sitting in the back of the diner, his head down, hiding, looking, searching for something.
So she slides into his booth. Looks him dead in the eye. Dares him to speak first.
He does, but it's a simple good evening, not anything she was looking for.
She wants to hear I'm sorry, she wants I love you, she wants will you take me back?
and she gets a fucking good evening.
He's polite as they eat their food, seeming careful to avoid the topic she's here to discuss. He says her name, once, and it lacks the warmth he said it with last. It sounds like he's testing it, trying it on for size, unsure if it's the right sound to fit her.
Finally, she's sick and tired of his bullshit. She asks him if he's happier here in Oregon, asks if their marriage was nothing, if he's already moved on so easily.
He looks at her sadly, his eyes flat and lifeless. He asks if her memories of them are painful.
She tells him she's fucking shattered. she tells him her heart fell apart bit by bit when she realized he wasn't coming home. she tells him she cries at night for Tate, because he has to grow up without his father.
He nods sadly. And now that she's said it all, now that she's told him everything, she realizes there's nothing else. That's it. She's played her cards, and she has no ace.
Fiddleford asks her to come to the museum with him. There's an exhibit he wants her to see. And she agrees, because what the hell. His request brings back the tiniest spark of hope that they might fix it.
It's eyes. The exhibit is eyes. Why the fuck is this room full of eyes. And why is this his favorite exhibit?
Oh. The eyes room opens into a secret tunnel. And Fiddleford is walking down that tunnel like he's not afraid of anything. His head is up high, and he's pulling on a red robe, and the air is stale and the tunnel keeps going down and down
She can't help but think of an old story her mother told her when she was small. A story about a man who traveled through hell and back to see his wife again. And then, two steps from the end of the cave, he doubted himself. He doubted his wife. He doubted the world. He looked back, just to check, to make sure she was truly there. And his wife was so disgusted by his lack of faith that she turned and walked back into hell on her own.
Emma-May realizes she's the man in this story. Fiddleford may be walking in front, leading her down and down and down, but she has to trust that he'll still be there when they reach the end of the tunnel. She has to nurture that one spark he lit, trust that maybe, just maybe there'll be a happy ending at the end of this tunnel.
The tunnel ends in a wide cellar, crates stacked around the edges, the center clear but for a simple wooden chair and a table with a shoebox and one of her husband's experimental computers.
He gestures to the chair, inviting her to sit. She does, apprehensively. She watches him open the shoebox. Watches him pull out a gun. Not a normal one, a clunky thing cobbled together from bits of wire and a light bulb and copper scraps. Something she knows only her husband would think to create.
But surely her husband hasn't brought her here to shoot her, has he?
He plugs the gun into the computer, tap-tap-tapping on the keyboard.
He says he's sorry she had to see him like this, the way he is, he apologizes for making her so upset. Then he picks the gun up, carefully pointing it at
her.
Good Lord, her husband is a serial killer.
She's panicking now, she stands up out of the chair, trying to put as much distance between them as possible, because her husband is holding a fucking gun, and he's clearly out of his mind, who knows what he might do in this state, and -
Please sit back down, he says. Calm as anything. I know you're upset, but it'll all be over soon. You won't have to be sad any longer.
Her eyes are still trained on the gun, and he finally notices.
Oh, he says. It won't hurt, I promise.
He returns to the computer, tap-tapping something new into it. He holds the gun up to his own head.
Emma-May realizes too late what exactly he's doing, and can only watch as he pulls the trigger.
It doesn't blow his brains out. His head doesn't explode. His eyes squeeze shut, and a muscle in his cheek jumps, but then he opens his eyes, smiling at her.
Painless, he says.
She realizes where all the scars on his temple came from.
She asks him how much he's been shooting himself with that gun. She asks what kind of fucked up drug it is, she asks if he's been using it every time he's upset, she asks is he needs help, she asks what happened to Stanford Pines -
Nothing happened! he shrieks. Nothing happened, Stanford Pines is just a bad dream, the portal is just a nightmare, the monster isn't real, this machine is the only thing that stops the nightmares, none of it was real and it doesn't hurt anymore because I can forget it!
She's terrified now. Because her husband is screaming like a madman, because he's waving a gun around, he's not himself, she should have looked back in the tunnel, because then she would have realized this isn't her husband, something happened to her husband, something replaced him with this -
There are hands on her arms, someone roughly shoving her back into the chair, and when she looks up, it's someone in a red robe like Fiddleford's, only the hood is up, shadows blocking his face,
and Fiddleford is close to her again, the gun still in his hand, something new typed into the gun (his name why is his name in the gun), he puts his hand on her shoulder, and his eyes are sad and dark and flat and he raises the gun, putting the point of the bulb against her forehead (it's still hot)
and he says
nothing.
Emma-May Dixon wakes up in her motel room in Gravity Falls. Oregon, and she doesn't remember who she was looking for. She had to find him. It was important. But its dissipating like a dream, a fine mist evaporating in the sunlight.
She can't remember his name.
She should drive back home. Her son is waiting for her.
A photo falls out of her wallet when she picks it up. It's blurry and angled weirdly, like the photographer dropped the camera when he was shooting.
She doesn't recognize the couple in the picture.
So she drops it in the trash can on her way out of the room.
When she returns her key in the lobby, there's a blonde man standing near the door, looking at her sadly. He looks so familiar, his name is on the tip of her tongue. He's gross and scruffy and haunted, but he's still the same silly old -
she still can't recall his name.
She nods curtly to him, then checks out of the motel.
When she gets into her pickup, he's there again, he walks up next to the driver's side window, and says good morning softly.
She squints at him. She knows she's seen his face, she should remember him -
Oh. He was in the photo she threw away.
Good morning, she replies.
His eyes are sad, and there's no light dancing in them like there should be, like she knows there used to be.
Emma-May is suddenly afraid her eyes look like that as well.
So she rolls up the window, and pulls out of the parking lot, leaving the man standing by himself. And she drives back home to California
alone.