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“You know what your problem is, Grunkle Ford?” Mabel asks.
Ford looks up in surprise. It’s an unprompted question, and a blunt one—with more than a hint of an accusation behind it—uncharacteristic of what Ford had come to expect of her in the weeks since he’d made her acquaintance.
But, when he considers it for a moment more, what basis has he to have any expectations about her at all? How many substantial interactions have they had? When he’d first returned to this dimension, he’d been overwhelmed, so focused on grounding himself to the reality that he was, in fact, home—or, if not, his tunnel vision had honed in on Stanley, the ghost of decades-old resentment had made him more-or-less myopic to anyone else, such that none of the other interactions he had had had been deep enough to leave a lasting impression. And, after that, he had hardly interacted with her at all—hardly interacted with anyone, save for Dipper—until the events of the last several days.
And if she is bitter, Ford certainly understands. Her associations with him must be…what? That he broke her beloved uncle’s heart as a child? That he attempted to replicate that mistake in her own life by pulling her twin brother away from her? That he had been the one to erase Stanley’s memories, and the one who had claimed, against her insistence, that it was an irreversible process?
Well, as it happened, she had turned out to be correct, and Ford is thankful, has never been happier to be proven wrong. (Has he ever been happy to be proven wrong, before now?) They had all—and Mabel in particular—spent the past several days dragging Stan’s memories back, one by one, and in fact, they are only together now, alone on the porch, because Dipper insisted that she needed a break. There were a few conversations—not many but a few—that he had shared with Stan privately anyway, he’d said, so perhaps it was best if she and Ford got some air.
“What’s that?” Ford finally asks in response to Mabel's question and steels himself for whatever she is about to say.
“You’re like Dipper,” Mabel replies. “All you wanna do is figure out the answer and solve the mystery. But, this is a magic town—”
“Not magic. Weirdness.”
“Okay, this is a weird town, so there’s lots of really awesome, amazing stuff here! But instead of appreciating it—instead of hanging out with the gnomes and the unicorns and finding out how great they all are—you just wanted to figure out how they helped answer your questions about the mystery. But, Grunkle Ford, some things—” Mabel lays her hand atop Ford’s six-fingered one. “don’t need to be solved!” A pause. “Right?”
(Six-fingered handshake, she’d exclaimed, giddy, gleeful when they’d first met. It's a full finger friendlier than normal!)
(What had he really been searching for, all those years?)
He looks at her, down at her hand resting on his, then turns his gaze outward. The gradients of color in the afternoon summer sky, the elaborate detail the bark of the trees, the smell of the pine, the trill of the birds—there was so much to experience here that he had never looked at, the natural as well as the supernatural. How much had he missed, and for how long? And surely not only in Gravity Falls, but everywhere—he wants to go, see, everywhere…
(And he doesn’t need to be…he’s not…he doesn’t have to do it alone.)
It’s a paradigm shift in a single instant, a fundamental un-grounding of everything he has worked for and why…and it’s absolutely elating.
“Perhaps,” Ford says, at last, grinning tentatively despite himself. “You’re right.”
When he returns his gaze to hers, when he sees Mabel beaming in response—perhaps she was never bitter after all—her eyes shining like the stars on her sweater or the sun with which he feels he has only now truly become reacquainted, Ford feels something swell in his chest, and he wonders if this is awe.