Chapter Text
“Oh wow, who’s that??”
Mabel was holding up an old photograph she had unearthed from the box of old junk, which they were sorting through in hopes of finding one of Stan’s old counterfeit money plates.
Their grunkle looked over at the old and wrinkled photograph of a middle-aged woman with strawberry blonde hair and almond shaped eyes, happily snuggling a cat on the yard of a pretty little house. He got a complicated look on his face.
“Huh, haven’t seen any pictures that old in a while. That’s my mother.”
Mabel’s eyes widened, until you could almost see stars blinking in them. “THAT MEANS IT’S OUR GREAT-GRANDMA!”
“I guess.”
“Tell me everything!!”
“Chill out Mabel. How are you this excited about this?”
“Dipper!! That’s our family!” She looked at the picture again, now much more intently, whispering: “And she’s so pretty.”
Dipper scooted over and squinted at the picture. Guess she kind of was. She had certain European kind of charm in her, in the very old-timey way that Dipper mostly associated with old and boring movies that their parents sometimes liked to watch.
“Don’t really have much to say about her, it's-“ Stan sighed loudly, “she was- She tried- She wanted to- She made really good pasta.”
Both Mabel and Dipper got the feeling that ‘she made good pasta’ was not the thing their grunkle really had wanted to say.
“Oh come on!” Unsurprisingly, it was Mabel who decided to keep digging into the issue. “That can’t be all you have to say about your own mom!”
Shaking his head slightly, grunkle Stan snorted, and smiled in way that did not reach his eyes. “Aaaah, what can I say. She was an overprotective worrywart. Never really understood my free spirit and entrepreneur nature. Always calling after me to come back home after I left to pursue riches, and worrying over nothing. Like I couldn’t handle myself.”
“Aha.” Dipper looked at his grunkle sceptically. “And you’re sure that maybe she wasn’t just fed up with all this incredible amount of crime you seem to have been doing your entire life.”
“Whaaat? Psssh! Old Ma didn't care about little crime. Oh, but you’ll love this one-“ their grunkle straightened where he was sitting on the floor and a proud twinkle came to his eyes “There was a rumour that she ran away from the mafia.“
Both twins gasped
“They say that that’s how she ended up in New Jersey. We always believed it, because it sounded like the only reasonable explanation for why anyone would voluntarily end up in New Jersey.”
both twins looked at the photograph again, trying to imagine the sweetly smiling middle-aged lady cuddling a cat as part of the mafia.
“Wait a second, I think I have another picture-“ Stan walked to a closet and started rummaging around. The noises coming from it were suspicious and both kids were wondering if their great uncle was a hoarder or if there was another cache of illegal goods hidden in there. Eventually Stan emerged with an old photo album.
He quickly leafed through, and both twins noticed that almost half of the pictures seemed to be missing from the yellowed pages. Mabel frowned; how dare their grunkle take such lacklustre care of something as sacred as a photo-album. And there weren’t even any stickers or glitter in it!!
“Here. The only two pictures that ma had of her side of the family.”
An old black-and-white picture of the same woman, just younger, surrounded by a stern looking family, looked back at them. The unsmiling parents were looming behind three children, their great grandmother in the middle, two boys on either side. The older looking one was frowning even harder than their parents, and the other boy on her right looked like he wanted to be anywhere else. It did not present a happy family portrait. The other photograph was even older, wrinkled and water-stained. In it, two young teenagers were grinning at the camera, both with identical strawberry-blond hair and almond eyes, arms thrown around each other’s shoulders.
But beyond the sad atmosphere of the first photo, something else had caught Mabel’s attention.
“Wait, are they-“
“Twins?” Dipper finished his sister’s thought.
“Oh yeah-“ Stan muttered, rummaging the deep wells of his memories, “Uncle Anthony. Ma did mention him time or two…”
“You had an uncle too??” Mabel squealed.
“Well, never met the man, but I guess. The story goes that after uncle Anthony was kicked out of the house, mom decided to finally ditch the family business in New York too. She might have even originally left to search for her brother. Took nothing but a single bag with her, hopped on the next train, and disappeared from her old life completely. And then she met dad in New Jersey.”
“Oh…That’s sad.” Mabel frowned, suddenly confronted with the disturbing idea that your twin brother could disappear.
Sensing the mood plummeting, Stan put on his showman’s grin, and gently punched both his niblings. “And you know what it means? What runs in the family?”
“…Twins?” Dipper guessed.
“Losing your twin…?” Mabel said distraughtly.
Stan frowned minutely, before the grin snapped back. “No dummies. Crime! Crime runs through our blood! And making our own way. Independence! Vision! Running from the loan sharks that are trying to relentlessly pursue you! The family legacy!”
Dipper rolled his eyes, while Mabel was still enchanted by the photograph of the twins laughing at the camera. Something about the knowledge that Anthony and Molly had existed, that part of them was still alive in her own bloodstream, compelled her.
“Could I have this photo, grunkle Stan?” She asked, still staring at the grinning pair of long-dead twins.
“Huh, I guess, why?”
“For my scrapbook, obviously!”
Their grunkle pulled the photo from its crinkling plastic pocket and handed it to Mabel. “Sure, keep the family history alive, I guess.”
Mabel, eyes shining, accepted the old photo, and cradled it in her hands carefully. “Don’t worry, great- grandma Molly and great-grunkle Anthony, I will use only the best glitter for your page.”
“Do you think great grandma Molly would have liked me?” Mabel asked, laying on her bed, staring at the newly bedazzled page of her scrapbook, now dedicated to their ancestor-twins. They looked happy, smiling as they were, but at the same time like they belonged into a world so far removed from Mabel’s reality. The kind that was depicted in black-and-white art movies that her mom loved and she hated. The ones that were always very tragic and solemn.
Usually, Dipper would have rolled his eyes and said something sarcastic, but he had spent the last couple of hours reading through the journal he had recently discovered and was nowhere near losing the happy high of paranormal research.
“You know, maybe we could ask her!?” He rolled over and proudly showed the pages open on spirit-communication to Mabel.
“You mean- like they always do at slumber parties in movies!” Mabel gasped excitedly.
“Even better, because we could do it for real!”
“Yeah!! Let’s do it!”
About an hour later and about three hours past their bed-time, the Pines twins found themselves sitting across each other, between them a home-made, carboard approximation of a Ouija-board, with self-made planchette. Where Dipper had supplied paranormal knowledge, Mabel had supplied the glitter-glue for making the summoning circle.
“Mabel, I need you to take this seriously. Meddling with spirits is dangerous business. We have to make sure that whatever communicates with us, is actually our great grandma and not a demon trying to trick us.” Dipper waved his copy of the Lesser Key of Solomon, which he had consulted for security when they had been setting this thing up. As a paranormal investigator, he obviously had had a period of fixation on demonology. Who hadn’t?
Mabel snatched the book from his hands and flipped through, not taking Dipper’s words any more seriously than she ever did anything Dipper said.
“Oh, some of these are cute! Look Dipper, this one’s an owl!”
Dipper snatched the book back. “It’s a prince of hell, Mabel. It’s a malicious entity that feeds on human suffering and screams.”
“Ooo, a prince.”
“Mabel, I swear to- Argh. Just, follow my instructions, exactly, or I won’t do this with you.”
Mabel rolled her eyes, but stopped teasing his brother. “Fine, fine, I promise I’ll follow your lead.”
In the great metaphysical realm, a small ribbon of energy blibbed into existence. Normally, any attempt to authentically communicate through the veil would have demanded either a medium of extraordinary power or some artefacts not of the living world to strengthen the call. 99.9% times Ouija boards and summoning circles and other occult means were completely useless, unless you were aiming to scam people. (which most practitioners of the occult were, to be fair)
Expect when done in Gravity Falls.
In Gravity Falls, all weirdness was amplified and the impossible more often than not became possible. Like two tweens playing around with spirit summoning during a sleep-over and creating a call so strong that it shot through the aether, shooting up all the way to the pearly gates.
But even the weirdness of Gravity Falls wasn’t strong enough to pass through the defences of heaven. The intended soul residing inside did not hear the call.
Bouncing harmlessly away from the shining doors, the spell instead looked for the next best thing. It shot back down, and then even more down, until it arrived in Hell, uninterrupted. Human occult arts were not exactly appreciated by the rulers of the infernal realm, but Hell was no heaven, it had been created to keep things in, not out. It was the inverse of heaven: easy to reach, hard to get out.
Angel Dust was doing a photoshoot, when he felt something he had never felt before. A strange tugging sensation inside his navel. His first thought was: what the fuck, I’m not even hungover. His second thought was: fuck, what was laced in those drugs this time?
“uuuhh….You okay there man?” One of the photographers asked.
“I’m fine, pussyface!” Angel snapped, trying to will the feeling of something pulling him inside out away. ha glanced at Val, who was looming on the other side of the room, berating one of the new hires. Val was already on a bad mood and Angel didn’t want to draw that bad mood to unleash itself on him. Again.
Expect that the whatever was wrong with him was getting worse. Now the general feeling of nausea got mixed with a buzzing sound in his ears, like faulty earpiece gone haywire in the middle of a performance. He could hear snatches of voices that were not here.
Gritting his teeth, he tried to not flinch as the tinnitus inside his head got worse. He had never had a problem with migraines, and he was even relatively sober today. What the fuck was up.
“Oh, shit.” Said the cameraman, looking at Angel Dust with his eyes blown wide. Alarmed, Angel tried looking himself over, to see what was wrong.
Something was wrong, Angel just had no idea what. Because there were coils of demonic energy sparking all around him, strange runes flickering to life around him, circling him, like they wanted to get his attention.
“Oh shit!” Yelled Val from the other side of the room, and Angel could feel his insides twist and freeze at the same time.
“Someone’s trying to contact you, Angel cakes!” The overlord exclaimed and sounded positively excited. The knot of Angel’s insides loosened a little. Val didn’t sound angry at least.
“A what now?” Angel groaned, rubbing at his pounding forehead.
The tell-tale zap of electricity of Vox teleporting didn’t even register to Angel in midst of all the buzzing in his head, so the hand on his shoulder and a pixelated grin too close to his face came as an unpleasant surprise.
“Oh, this almost never happens to one of us sinners! Come on, come on, we have technology for this kind of thing now!”
And so, Angel was dragged from his familiarly boring modelling session to something completely different by alarmingly excited looking 2/3rd of the Vees.
Inside the shack, all the candles went out from the room where the Pines twins had been playing with forces beyond the veil.
“Ooohh!! It seems to be working!!”
“Are you fucking kidding me!?” Angel stared at the thing laying on the table in front of him. He had been taken to a small conference room in the Vee tower, with the three Vees all staring at him like unsettling vultures. Sitting on a Greed-manufactured, and therefore kinda shitty, spinning office chair, Angel stared at the fucking Ouija-board innocently sitting on the table in front of him.
“Is this a joke.”
“It is not.” Vox declared, where he finished pluggin in the big screen on the wall. “If they are using one on that side, then we need a matching connection down here. The connectivity will be better with matching conduits.”
“Yeah, well, are we ever going to get the stream working, or are you just going to talk jargon to us?” Val scoffed, tapping his heel impatiently.
“As if you knew anything about setting up any of this.” Vox grumbled.
“Do you know anything about this, like, actually? Have you ever done this before.” Velvette gave one of the blinking modems a good thump with her fist.
“Don’t TOUCH that!!” Vox screamed, voice glitching. “And I have done this before. For one of the Goetias, even!”
From context clues, Angel had gathered enough to know that he was being summoned. Or contacted. Or something. None of the Vees had actually bothered to explain anything to him, but their relentless need for squabbling had made the general shape of the situation clear.
Angel didn’t know what to feel or expect about any of this. He couldn’t fathom why anyone from the living world would try to contact him- and they must have been trying to reach him in particular. Thorough general osmosis, Angel was aware that the demon royalty dealt with summons and attempts to communicate from the living world with semi-regularity (which for the immortal Goetias rounded up to once or twice a century) but humans as a rule very rarely tried reaching sinners. Why would they? Personally, Angel couldn’t think of a single living human who would even know he had ever existed, never mind feel the need to try and communicate.
But the Vees were excited, so here Angel was. About to play with a fucking Ouija board.
The screen finally blinked to life, showing a dark, moonlit illuminated room, where two kids were sitting on either side of a Ouija board, just much less professional looking than the one Angel was still staring in some disgust.
What the fuck.
“Oh look! our targets!!” Val squealed delightedly at the image.
“Val, those are kids.” Angel had to turn to stare at his boss, who looked way too excited and creepy about the whole situation.
“So? That just means they’ll be easier to trick. Brain not fully formed and all that.”
Angel Dust had not been under any disillusionment about the nature of his boss/slash sometimes lover for a long time now. Valentino’s immediate reply still managed to punch him in the gut and leave him speechless.
“Gods Val, couldn’t you try to at least sound a little less like a creep.” Vox boredly drawled from where he stepped away from the wires and to stand next to his business partner/lover/situationship.
“Hmm, and still, you love me-“ Val purred and blew a ring of smoke towards his screen, grinning. Vox scoffed, still not looking at him. “Don’t oversell yourself.”
“Oh, I’m not charging you anything, now, am I?”
“I wouldn’t buy anything you had to offer anyway.” Vox threw back, but a small smile was pixelating on the corner of his screen.
“Keep telling yourself that, baby.”
Through the speakers, Angel could hear a childish girl’s voice talk.
“Spirits, we are trying to contact the soul of Molly Pines. Our great-grandmother! We don’t know what her maiden name was, but it was something Italian. Soooo…if anyone there on the other side knows her, could you please maybe ask her to pick up the line. Thank you!!”
Angel had to lace the other pair of his arms tightly over his stomach, fingers digging painfully into his biceps. There was no way- no way-
“Mabel, I told you, we have to open the session with a greeting.” The boy took hold of the planchette, and guided her sister’s (for they were clearly twins) fingers also on the flimsy thing. The shiny counterpart (and yes there was Voxtek logo on it) in front of Angel moved on its own, following the kids’ movements. It spelled out an H-E-L-L-O-A-R-E-Y-O-U-M-O-L-L-Y-P-I-N-E-S.
“What am I supposed to do?” Angel asked numbly, and his voice sounded strange to his own ears, like it was coming from far away.
“Well, answer, obviously, Angel-Cakes.”
“I’m not the one they’re looking for.”
“So?”
“So, what’s the point of any of this?”
“Ugh, you’re so lucky you’re cute, because clearly there is nothing inside that bimbo head of yours. If we can talk with them, we can trick them into a deal.”
Angel listened in stunned silence as Val explained that he wanted to trick children into contract with him.
“What would you want kids under contract for anyway.” Angel growled out, trying very hard not to think of the obvious answer.
“Living kids. In the living world.” Val purred back.” They’ll have an entire lifetime to do our bidding up there. Imagine the possibilities! And then when they finally die, they’ll have a job already set up. No need for those desperate first years everyone else goes through. Hmm, neat and nice, isn’t it?”
Angel was going to throw up. He was going to throw up right here.
“They might not even end up here.”
“With a deal already hooked in their souls? Of course they will.”
“I don’t know, has that ever been proven?” Vox interrupted again, allergic to not being the centre of attention any given moment.
“Please, everybody knows that.”
“What if they die right after making the deal? They don’t send kids down here, right?” Vox had taken an idly curious tone, like they were debating the weather.
“I swear I’ve seen few.”
“Your blind ass probably confused a hellborn for a sinner.”
“Shut up pixel-boy. as if you’re some authority on damnation.”
“Yeah? Why don’t you make me, blind-ass moth.”
“GUYS!!” Velvette stopped the two, before they could start making out. “And Angel, just say something back to them. Just say Hey, or whatever. Before they think there’s no one on the other side.”
Angel touched a reluctant finger to the planchette, and spelled out H-E-Y, feeling very scrummy as he did so.
On screen, he watched as the kids screamed a little, seeing the planchette move on its own, but not nearly as much as he would have expected. Maybe kids that young simply didn’t find the existence of supernatural to be as shocking as adults would have. Or maybe this wasn’t their first supernatural rodeo.
“Look Dipper!! We did contact someone!”
“Okay vow. Wowowow. I wasn’t sure this would actually work.”
“You should ask them if there is anything they want. Anything we could offer them.” Val leaned over Angel’s shoulder, looking at the image of the living world greedily.
Yeah, he wasn’t going to do that. No fucking way.
“They are your family aren’t they.” Velvette slid to his other side. “You had a sister, didn’t you?” She was also looking at the soft dark night of the living world and the kids who belonged in it, with the kind of demonic longing none of them usually would have allowed to be seen on their faces. It was just a little bit too raw, too desperate. “Tell them you’re her.” She hissed.
“What… just- lie. Isn’t that like- against the rules or something?”
“We’re demons, that’s what we do, we lie.”
Up in the living world, the twins were leaning over the board excitedly.
“Ohmigosh, ohmigosh, what should we ask?” Dipper carefully placed his finger back over the planchette.
“Ask if she knows who we are!” Mabel also added her own finger.
D-O-Y-O-U-K-N-O-W-W-H-O-W-E-A-R-E
They looked with baited breath, as the planchette hesitantly answered back.
N-O-T-E-L-L-M-E
Mabel’s eyes almost sparkled with stars, as she rushed to explain.
“Hey, we’re your great-grandchildren! You were the mother of our grunkle Stan. We are in his house right now, and he showed us a picture of you and your twin. We’re also twins! That’s Dipper and I’m Mabel. You were so pretty, and I heard you ran away from the mafia, which is so cool! Like in a movie!! I wish we could talk for real, so you could tell us all about it, I bet it was an adventure, with a lot of explosions and romance! At least there had to have been a romance because you met our great-grandpa. Our grunkle Stan says that you made great pasta, do you remember grunkle Stan? He gave us these pictures of you and great-grunkle Anthony. Look, I made a whole page in my scrapbook for you two. And I only used the really good glitter!”
“Mabel, I don’t even know if the spirits can hear us.”
“Oh.”
W-E-A-R-E-Y-O-U-R-F-A-M-I-L-Y they spelled out instead.
they had to wait a bit longer this time, the planchette vibrating and jerking around slightly, but not saying anything until an uncomfortably long moment had passed.
I-S-T-H-E-R-E-S-O-M-E-T-H-I-N-G-Y-O-U-W-O-U-L-D-W-A-N-T-O-R-N-E-E-D-H-E-L-P-W-I-T-H
“Huh.” Mabel rubbed her chin thoughtfully. “I guess it could be pretty helpful to have a ghost grandma to help us- I could ask for advice about how to flirt with boys!!”
“Mabel, I don’t know, it hasn’t actually identified as Molly Pines…” Dipper frowned, and started moving the planchette determinedly.
A-R-E-Y-O-U-A-D-E-M-O-N
Angel stared at the screen in front of him, at the kids pictured on it. Memories that had been shanked, cement-booted, and thrown in the ocean of booze and oblivion were crawling back into his mind. Of a childhood spent with a twin.
Molly, as a precocious little kid, nose always buried in a book, rare smiles usually only given to Ang- no- Anthony. Clinging to her brother’s hand during family parties, the light sparkling in her eyes as they would both crawl under the same blanket and Molly would eagerly explain some interesting new scientific fact she had learned. Anthony, helping with her makeup and hair as teenagers, as he had always had more interest in those than she had. How as kids they had joked how their personalities got somehow mixed-up during birth, the boy getting all the girly traits and the girl getting all educational ambitions.
How it had turned into a bitter curse, how they had helped each other hide their faults, and gave a leg up where the other needed it. How it had not been enough, how it never could have been enough. How silly, boy-crazy, Anthony could never be the kind of son their father wanted him to be and how awkward, nerdy, Molly could never be the type of woman their world needed her to be.
Anthony, face bruised and thrown on the streets without a penny, Molly on the window, looking down tears in her eyes but saying nothing.
There had been a world up there, dark and bleak, but with little moments of warmth in it too. And in that world had lived twins, who had died and been forgotten.
But a little bit of those twins was still up there, a little bit of Molly was in these kids. Anthony’s family.
Anthony’s family had not wanted him, had thrown him out like thrash, but that didn’t mean that Angel Dust was going to turn around and pass the torch of suffering back in the relay race of evil to these kids. His great-niblings.
feeling the hot exhale of Valentino on his neck, Angel slid the planchette to the painted yes on the corner of the board, quickly, before anyone could tell him no.
Dipper flinched and felt a spike of panic. Mabel just cocked her head. “Wait- a demon? but I thought-“
“Don’t talk to it Mabel!” Dipper choked out, still panicking. “We have to-“ what were you supposed to do in a situation like this? Suddenly he couldn’t remember.
“Well- maybe it’s nice demon.” Mabel continued, even if she did sound hesitant. “Maybe it just wants friends…”
The planchette jerked around a bit, like it was being pulled into two different directions, before jerking quickly to rest over the no on the other corner of the board.
“Okay, that’s enough of that!” Dipper exclaimed, grabbed the planchette and threw it out of the window. It wasn’t…what you were supposed to do, but in his defence, he had panicked.
“We are closing this session!” he declared and picked up the board on the floor, jamming it into a closet, to get buried in an avalanche of old clothes and other detritus.
Back in hell, the three overlords groaned as the screen in front of them went black.
The twins stayed silent for a long minute, Dipper standing up and Mabel sitting down, trying to listen for anything that would be out of the ordinary. nothing happened. Nothing demonic made itself known. It was just them, their heavy breathing, and the ambient sounds of an old shack settling around them.
“I- I think we’re good.”
“Yeah…Hey Dipper, if the demon wanted to trick us, why do you think it told us that it was a demon?”
“Who knows, maybe it’s bound by some infernal rules. Just- let’s not try that again. At least before I’ve studied more on demonology.”
“Yeah…shame we couldn’t contact grandma Molly.”
Dipper yawned, suddenly noticing just how exhausted he was. “I’m sure she would have liked you…everybody likes you Mabel.”
“I guess we should go to sleep. And I’m sure she would have liked you too, Dipper, even if you’re a nerd.”
“Shut up Mabel.”
“You shut up.”
The mystery twins crawled to their respective beds, the late hour claiming them almost immediately.
“FUCK Angel- How are you so fucking useless!!”
Angel watched Valentino throw one of the technical doo-das on the wall, where it shattered and made Vox suck in an outraged breath.
“They’re just kids Val, it felt creepy and weird.”
Deep inside his fluffy chest, Angel could still feel the connection pulsing lazily to the beat of his heart. Maybe the whole Ouija-thing didn’t have strict rules as so, but the kids had failed at something crucial. The connection was closed, but not fully and not permanently.
Not that Angel would ever indicate any of that to any of the Vees. His hope was that day or two and the overlords would forget the whole thing. They had the whole of hell to play around with, surely, they couldn’t want underlings in the living world that badly.
And even if they did- well- Angel would do his best to protect his family with his silence.