#wndy

Chapter One: Steven arrives in Gravity Falls after being lost in Oregon for hours, only to find out that once he enters the town, he can’t leave.

They traveled mostly in silence for the next hour-- or at least what Mark thought had been an hour. It was difficult to keep track of how much time had passed in anything more specific than rough estimations. Mark had thought, hoped, that maybe Signe would have a watch of some sort, but he seemed to have thought wrong.

The only real speaking they’d done was Mark asking about directions and Signe telling him she had it under control. After he’d asked her about two or three times, he’d stopped asking. She did have it covered and the absolute last thing he wanted was for her to think that he thought she was incompetent or stupid.

If either of them could have been considered stupid, he was sure it was him.

“How long has he been this way?” Signe pulled him out of his thoughts with her question.

He had to think about it for a moment.

“About a year and some change.” He told her, looking over to where Jack was trailing along beside them. He looked straight ahead and Mark wondered for the hundredth time what exactly he saw from behind those murky eyes.

Signe just nodded.

They walked along in silence for a few more minutes.

“How much of what you said back there was bullshit? About having family up North?” He was the one to break the silence this time.

She didn’t answer for a moment and he was worried he’d upset her. Just as he was about to take back his question, she spoke.

“Some, but not all..” She looked down at the ground as she walked, kicking rocks as she went. “I’m not from California. I was going to college up North when it all started-- the outbreak, I mean. My girlfriend Erin and I lived together in a dorm room on campus. It had always been a dream of ours to go to college together in California..” Looking at her from the side, he could see a faint smile on her lips.

“When we both got our acceptance letters it was… It was the best day of my life. Two farm girls from a little town in the midwest going out to school in The Golden State? Incredible..” She chuckled softly, “We were about 2 years in when the outbreak started. I remember watching the news in our dorm building’s common room. Nobody knew what to say, or what to do. It was like something out of a Sci-fi novel. It didn’t seem like it could possibly be real.” She tucked some of her hair behind her ear and then shoved her hands in the pockets of her jacket.

Mark knew that feeling well. He remembered feeling the same way. He had gone to the bathroom and cried, only to have Jack coax him out so they could talk about a plan. It seemed silly at the time, to imagine that they could somehow figure out a reasonable way to handle the whole thing. But Jack was sure that if they sat down and talked it out, the two of them would be able to figure something out. He seemed too sure of it.

He looked over at his friend now, no longer able to form a complete thought, let alone any kind of plan. It made his heart ache.

“It wasn’t until we got back to our room that Erin broke down into hysterics. She was sobbing and shaking and for a minute I was scared she’d pass out. She wanted to go back home, to be with our families. But the infection had spread too much by then, it was too bad and too late. They’d shut all the airports down and they weren’t sending out flights.”

Mark fought the urge to look over at Jack again. He should’ve been home in Ireland when it happened. He knew well enough about the airport shutdowns and the worldwide travel ban. He knew about wanting to be with his family, about Jack wanting to be with his own as well. They’d spent many sleepless nights talking about it. It didn’t hurt Mark as much as he thought it would, knowing that Jack would rather be home than with Mark. He didn’t blame him.

“All we could do was sit and wait.. ‘We’re sitting ducks, Signe. Just waiting around until it gets us, one way or another.’.” Her voice sounded a bit uneven. She cleared her throat.

“I was a biology major, one of the top students in my class--”

“That’s pretty impressive,” Mark interrupted.

“I guess so,” She laughed quietly, “When the infection started to hit the campus pretty badly, they put a team together to help find a cure. They came knocking on my door one day..” She paused before continuing,

“This… This might sound selfish, but I didn’t agree right away. I was scared. I knew the risks of working so close to this terrifying “disease” that we knew almost nothing about at the time.. I didn’t want to leave Erin. I wanted to stay by her side. I knew she’d be alone for large chunks of time and I didn’t want to leave her like that.. She’d never quite gone back to her normal self after her breakdown on that first day.”

“I don’t blame her,” Mark said quietly.

Signe nodded.

“She begged me not to go. Said there were enough smart people in the world, that I should let them handle it. But I knew that they needed all the help they could get. They wouldn’t have asked me if they didn’t need me.. It would have been selfish if I didn’t help.. So I agreed.”

She let out a long, heavy sigh. Mark let the silence settle between them. He sensed that she wasn’t done.

“I worked 12 hour days for a month. No weekends, no sick days, no breaks. Most nights I didn’t sleep at all. I was either too busy being paranoid that I’d accidentally contaminate our whole dorm building, or was riddled with bad dreams whenever I did doze off,” She lifted her hands to rub her eyes, “Most of the time it was Erin’s crying that kept me up all night. Sometimes I think she tried to hide it from me, but I always knew.. It killed me knowing she was so scared, and in so much emotional pain, and there wasn’t a damn thing I could do about it.”

“I don’t know what she did all day when I was gone.. Anyone I asked about her said she hardly ever left the dorm. For awhile I thought maybe she slept, but the dark circles under her eyes suggested otherwise.. She hardly ate anything unless I forced her to, and she hardly ever spoke anymore…. She’d gone from this friendly, outgoing, loving girl to a reclusive, terrified shell of a person.” She shuddered.

“Honestly?” Signe looked over at him expectantly.

Mark turned his head to look at her.

“I think she just sat in there and went crazy.”

He held her gaze until she looked away. Then, she went silent. There was a feeling in the air like she was still expecting something from him. Like she was asking for something without speaking up. He ran a hand through his hair, feeling a bit stupid, and glanced over at Jack.

“What uh.. What happened to her?” He finally asked, hoping it was the right thing to say.

Signe let out a breath of air through her nose that made Mark unsure of how she felt about his question.

“I remember it like it was yesterday.. She was sitting near the small window in our room when it was time for me to go to the lab that morning. Something felt… off. When I went to kiss her goodbye, she wouldn’t look at me. She refused to make eye contact.. When she told me she loved me, it felt intensely different. I can’t explain it… It was just different.”

Her voice wavered a bit and she took a short pause.

“But I was running late and we’d lost a few team members the week before so I fought against my instinct to stay, to ask what was wrong.”

She pulled the hood on her jacket up over her head and he heard her sniffle.

She was crying, he thought.

“It was a long day and it was well past 11 PM by the time I’d gotten out of the lab and back to the dorm. You might not believe me… but I knew something was wrong before I even opened the door..”

His heart was pounding hard and there was an ache in his chest as he listened to her. He might have been able to guess what was coming next, but he didn’t want to.

“When I opened the door she was just hanging there.. I felt paralyzed. My feet were cemented to the ground. I just couldn’t believe my eyes… She’d lost so much weight that a rope tied to the fan on our ceiling easily support her-- at least enough for her to accomplish her goal.”

She sniffled again. Her voice was wavering and when she lifted her hands to wife her face, he saw that she was shaking. He didn’t blame her, and he certainly didn’t judge her.

“There was no note, no explanation, no goodbye. Nothing.” When she went to wipe her face again, her hood fell off her head. She had streams of tears flowing down her cheeks, one or two tears dropping off at her chin and falling onto the cement to be left behind them.

“I’ll never stop thinking about how she acted that morning. I’ll never forget the feeling I had in my stomach and I’ll never forgive myself for ignoring it. For leaving her.” She shook her head, “If I had stayed…. Maybe she’d still be here.” She took a shaky breath in.

“It’s not your fault, Signe,” He started, but she cut him off before he could go any father.

“Don’t,” She sniffled, “Save it. Please. Don’t waste your breath.”

He swallowed the rest of his words.

After a few more moments, he couldn’t stand the silence anymore.

“I think she’d be proud of you.”

Signe shook her head.

“She never wanted me to work on any of this in the first place.”

“Well..” He thought for a second, “I’m sure glad you did.”

She wiped the remaining tears off her face and looked over at him with an expression he couldn’t read. They held eye contact and he hoped that she could feel his sympathy for her.

Jack gurgled off to the side of them and it broke through the moment. She looked away quickly, casting her eyes down at the ground before running a hand through her hair and sniffling one last time.