Symbols ~A Gravity Falls Fanfic~

I Believe - GAH!

Dipper POV

She said... Eliza... She loves me.

I couldn't even find the words to respond to that. After she said that, everything else around me, around us, seemed distant and just nonexistent. All I could hear was my heart pounding in my ears and the sweat crawling down my face. Eliza's eyes stared at me, her blue irises pleading for me to say something.

"Wow, being twelve has much more drama to it than I remember," Stephen muttered under his breath. He shifted uncomfortably behind me, his boots softly crunching the leaves and twigs on the ground.

I want to believe Eliza and...I do, but I just can't grasp why she hadn't said anything before. "Why...didn't you tell me before?" I asked.

"Like I said, I've been denying it with all the teasing, and I guess that suppressed some stuff and brought stuff up and - -"

"No, no, I mean," I gestured to her ears, "that."

"Oh. Well, we couldn't risk getting found out. I mean, we were chased out of so many places for being 'witches' and being 'living embodiments of evil,' so why make matters worse? Who knows what would happen if someone - - if the government knew about us," she explained. Her tail lifted up as she wagged it for a second. "I trust you, Stephen, and Mabel like crazy but being paranoid is nothing more than family tradition by now."

I laughed a little. "I hear you. And...I believe you." I put my arms out, her cell phone still in my hand. "Awkward romantic hug?" I asked, awkwardly (of course) as my voice cracked. Eliza laughed and ran into my arms and tightly squeezed me. I hugged back, taking in her body heat. Suddenly, my eyes began to droop and I yawned.

Eliza began to pull away from the hug. "Dude, you okay?" That's the last thing I remember before I fell asleep for roughly ten hours. I didn't even get to eat my squirrel-bat. I was sort of looking forward to that.

___

I woke up slowly under a blanket with my head resting on what felt like a thin pillow on top of a hardback book. It wasn't very comfortable, but who can complain about comfort when a dream demon is plotting world destruction.

I sat up and rubbed my eyes. The room was fairly dark with only glowing lights from an opposing room reflecting at me. It took me a moment, but I realized I was in the portal room, shut off from that extensive hall of machines and whoever was in the hall. Honestly, I was surprised to be where I was; it made me question if everything had previously been a dream.

That ten hour nap left me feeling groggy. I wasn't really sure what year it was when I woke up. It almost felt it was some far-off year like 2016 but I knew it was 2012. Weird, right?

The room's door slid open and a tall figure stood in the light of the other room. "Hey, you're awake!" Soos. "Little dude, we've all been worried about you. I mean, Stephen told us you were gonna be out for a while but ah, ya know."

"Where...where's everyone?"

Soos leaned against the doorframe and scratched his chin. "Mmm... Stanford and Stanley -er, Stephen are, like, out evacuating the town. I think Eliza's parents went to look for Wendy," he said.

I stand up and dust off my clothes. "What about Eliza and Mabel?" I asked.

"Uh, well, ya see... Eliza isn't quite herself right now, and Mabel's trying to help with that spell book but nothing has worked yet."

I pat my vest: no book. This is crazy suspicious. "Where are they?"

"Uhh..." I rushed past him into the hallway. It was empty. "D-dude, it'd be best if you didn't see your girlfriend right now." I didn't listen. Instead, I sprinted down the hall and into the elevator. I slammed the button to head upstairs. "DIPPER, STOP!" The doors closed before he could get to me.

The elevator was cold yet suffocating. The doors opened stopped on the second floor. I had almost went to the first floor, but I remembered the Shack's remnants were blocking that way out.

Mabel had her back pressed against some cardboard boxes with the spell book in her lap, open to a random page. She spotted me and jumped. A pair of ears came out of the shadow on the other side of the box but disappeared as quickly as they had come.

The elevator doors began to close but became stuck. The lift tried to go down, but mimicked the doors and became stuck. From below, we heard Soos shout at the elevator and that was the last we heard of it for a while.

"Shouldn't you be asleep?" Eliza asked. Snippy, as I had expected, but that sounded a little different than her regular sassing. The way her voice faltered, it sounded like she was scared.

"What's wrong?" I replied. Mabel closed the book and looked around the corner of the box. "Is everything okay?" 

Mabel turned back to me. "Weeeeellllllll, I guess Bill cursed Eliza." She made a small space with her thumb and index finer. "A little."

"And that means?" I questioned. To answer me, Eliza stood up and walked out of the box's shadow. The whites of her eyes were tinted yellow and her pupils were no longer circles but slivers in her eyes' centers. To add to that, her irises were green. Her tail was thinner, no longer as fluffy as it had originally been, and had an orange puff on its tip. It was like a lion's tail

Her hands sported long black talons, and sharp canine teeth protruded from the sides of her mouth. Eliza's hair was much thicker than before and her ears were larger than before. Her eyebrows were also wild...and extremely...pronounced.

"Whoa... I... Whoa."

Mabel stood up. "Yeah, it's a lot to take in." A pair of orangey-red, feathered wings spread out from Eliza's back. She crossed her arms, which were hairier than before. "But that's the best part!" Mabel pointed to her wings. "She's a griffin!" She reached out to touch the wing closest to her, but Eliza retracted it before she could.

"Whoa..."

Eliza drew her wings in and I was at a lost for words. "There's nothing in that book that'll fix this. I'm stuck like this." She huffed and slapped her hands to her thighs. "I'm more of a freak now than I ever was." She exhaled. "There's no hiding this mess."

My heart skipped a beat suddenly. "Why hide? You're the most amazing thing I've ever seen," I said.

"You're kidding, right?"

Mabel nudged Eliza's shoulder. "C'mon, he never gets cheesy like this with just anyone. Besides, you're a mythical creature now! How many people can say that?" She thought for a moment. "Mermaids are mythical creatures aren't they? That means...there's actually a lot of people who can say that. Mm...did I have a point?"

"Somewhere, I think." Eliza patted her shoulder. She let out a breath and looked at me."Thanks," she said with a small smile.