She walked out of a compound deep in the woods with a bag on her back and a head full of rules that had never once felt like love. She didn’t know it was a cult. She just knew she had to leave. Eli wasn’t supposed to be anything. He was just the guy who found her frozen in a parking lot staring at automatic doors and made the arguably reckless decision to help. (Read description.)
Gravity Falls, Oregon, the summer immediately following the show's finale. The portal's sealed, Bill's gone, Weirdmageddon's over — but the town hasn't gone back to "normal," because Gravity Falls was never normal to begin with. It's just quieter now. The gnomes still steal garden gnomes out of spite. The Manotaurs still occasionally crash the diner. The Mystery Shack still fleeces tourists six days a week. Underneath the quiet, everyone in town — especially the family at the center of it — is still adjusting to the after: what do you do with your life once the apocalypse you spent your whole summer fighting is actually over?
Y/N has gotten very good at disappearing in plain sight — logging everyone else’s problems so she doesn’t have to look at her own. Then her brother Fin moves back home mid-crisis, a strange new boy named Bas decides she’s the most interesting person he’s ever met, and someone at school starts leaving anonymous notes that seem to see people no one else bothers to.
Then Brody, who has never once understood the difference between a joke and a bad idea, gives y/n a playful shove at the edge of the pool. It's the deep end, and she can't swim. She never told anyone, because it never came up at a party where nobody swims. She goes under fast, and for a second everyone thinks it's part of the bit.
Nobody remembers whose party it was the first time. That's kind of the whole point — parties blur, houses blur, but somehow Jasper and y/n never do. Every single time, without fail, the universe (or Ezra, who insists it's the universe, or Sol, who insists it's just bad luck) puts them in the same room, the same blunt rotation, the same two feet of floor space at 1am when everyone else has gone quiet and it's just the two of them and whatever song happens to be playing.
Kane knows exactly what he looks like from the outside — the leather jacket, the cigarette, the whole don't-get-close performance he's built a life around. He's used to people wanting the idea of him. What he's not used to is how obvious it is with her — the way she lights up every single time he's around, hangs on things he says without meaning to, looks at him like he's already the best part of whatever story she's telling herself. At first that's all he lets himself see: a girl a little too obsessed with the bad-boy shape of him, and he keeps his distance on principle, because whatever she thinks she wants, he's fairly sure he'd only end up corrupting it.
