Chapter Text
“I hate this. I hate this I hate this IhatethisIhatethis.”
Mabel was staring at the mirror in the school bathroom, leaning on the sink.
They were alone there. She had run out in the middle of class, after one too many comments, one too many sympathetic looks.
Dipper hardly remembered what had been said. That was irrelevant.
Mabel squeezed her eyes shut and kept the words going, flowing together into a single meaningless stream. Her emotions stood out to his eyes like wounds in the air. Painful flashes of panic growing rapidly, small bubbles of pitch, blue-sharp hurt rising and bursting with nasty pops, all accenting a thickening haze of muddled anger and sadness and pain.
Just a few months into high school. It was not supposed to be like this.
“I hate this I want it to stop I wish it would stop,” she continued.
He had no idea what to do, so he hugged her from behind, burying his face in her shoulder and holding her close with his arms around her chest and his wings around her waist. It was all he knew how to do.
“I wish I didn’t have to, I wish you could do it,” she said, and that…
That…
Tugged at him.
A wish like that?
This sincere?
Voiced out loud?
That
Felt
Like
Permission.
“Gaahhhh!”
TOUCH!
The next breath he drew burned like it was seared into his lungs. The sharp light from the ceiling lamp branded itself into his eyes, all sharp contrast and hard realness. The echoes of his own shout were too loud and not loud enough.
He was drowning in senses.
Everything was too much, and yet he wanted it so desperately he tried to take it all in at once, and was overwhelmed by the realness of it all, from the pain of his fingers being clenched against the sink to the comforting scratchy feeling of his sweater against his…
Wait a second.
He was hyperventilating. Adrenaline rushed through his veins.
He calmed that down in an instant. He just had to think about it, and his body obeyed. It was easy.
He took a couple deep breaths, and slowly adjusted to the world very abruptly being real again.
Eyes opened. Mirror in front of him.
Mabel stared back, eyes glowing yellow and slit-pupiled.
Oh fuck.
The real Mabel was floating up above his (her?) right shoulder, looking just as flabbergasted as he felt.
“Whoa,” she said.
“I had no idea I could do that,” he said, in a single, whooshing breath. “I didn’t mean to! I’m sorry, I think I can undo it…”
“No, wait,” Mabel said, reaching out to put an insubstantial hand on his (her?) shoulder. “Just wait a second, bro.”
Dipper grabbed her hand instinctually, and apparently he could do that, and he also knew that he could choose not to, could choose to pass straight through her like everything else would in this state, as it had with him when Bill had done the same to…
“Mabel?” he asked, voice wavering with more distraught confusion than he would have liked.
She put her other hand on top of his (hers?) again, and this was such a strange reversal of roles, her floating and insubstantial and him standing on the floor like a person…
“You don’t have to undo it right away, right?” she said. Then she looked away for a second, almost embarrassed, before she looked back. “I mean, you’re kinda, uh, possessing me now, right? And that’s actually perfect! ‘Cause I didn’t want to go back to class, and now I don’t have to, ‘cause I’m a ghost!”
“Mabel,” he said again, disbelief tinging the word. “Are you really okay with staying like that? It’s… I- I know it’s not… pleasant.”
“Pssh,” Mabel said, waving the sentiment away. “Hey, no more panic attack.”
“I… suppose that’s true.” Dipper almost smiled. It was. The colours of her emotions had followed her out of her body, and were now settled on a vague haze, still tinged towards negativity, but no longer boiling into painful bursts.
“Of course! It’s me!” Mabel said proudly, putting her hands on her hips and curling her floating legs up behind her like a proper little ghost. “I’m always right. But enough about me, for now, how are you doing, bro?”
(Things were real, he could feel things again, it was all real, it was all good, oh god this was just like Bill, it was real, he could touch things, he could feel things, touch was good, sound was good, sight was good, pain was good, no it wasn’t, yes it was.)
“I’m… okay. I’m doing okay,” he said. “Had some minor sensory overload. I’m good now.”
“You don’t mind being a girl for, like, half a school day?” she asked.
Dipper blinked, then blurted out, “That was literally the last thing on my mind.”
“Okay, great!” Mabel grinned, then she got very close to his (her?) face and furrowed her brows. “But if you’re gonna pretend to be me, you gotta do something about those glowing eyes. Think you could do that?”
The answer sprung to his mind like it had been waiting for the question. Small perception-based illusion centred on the face. Simple enough at full power, should be impossible in a form this limited, but limits no longer exist for you-
“Yeah, I can,” he said. “Shouldn’t be too hard. I’ll just…”
He stared into the glowing eyes in the mirror and bit (her? His, for now?) his lip, concentrating.
The immense power that had been at the back of his mind for months, constantly threatening to overwhelm him, was distant now. The solid realness of the world around him felt like a barrier between him and it, preventing him from reaching it as easily.
A trickle still came through when he pushed, tingling pleasantly through his body and leaving a wonderful burn on the inside of his skin.
Weaving it into the necessary shape around his eyes was easy, instinctive, and then his eyes looked normal again. Exactly like Mabel’s eyes usually did.
“Like that,” he said.
Mabel ooh-ed and clapped her hands. “Awesome,” she said. “Now no one is going to suspect anything, no matter how long we stay like this!”
Dipper’s objections died on his tongue as Mabel grinned at him. Instead, he nodded and tried to smile back.
He had no idea how to handle this.
Possession?
That was wrong. That was capital-b Bad, and Demonic, and Evil, and every horrible thing he ever remembered Bill doing, and it was too much like him in ways that turned Dipper’s stomach. (Metaphorically. Literally, this was not his body, and he had an iron grip on it. No one’s stomachs were being turned here.)
On the other hand, he was not about to stab himself (even if that would probably feel wonderful), and Mabel was okay with it (even if this had to be terrifying for her), and he would give her body back the second she wanted it (despite how much he wanted to keep it forever, and how easy it would be to keep it from her.)
The world around him was still too crisp, every miniscule crack in the tiling of the walls and speck of dust on the floor stood out too clearly. Even the sound of his own breath felt too loud, and the feeling of breathing was disturbingly unfamiliar.
And he loved every second of it.
If he was drowning now, that was only because he had been dying of thirst. The world was still too much, but he wanted it that way, he wanted the way it bordered on pain, filling needs in his mind he had not even been aware of.
He had not realized how much he missed such simple things as breathing, as feeling the air against his skin as he moved. There was a wonderful taste in his mouth.
Slowly, slowly, he settled into his own (Mabel’s) senses and could let go of the sink without the changing sensory input overwhelming him. Balancing was a little harder than he remembered it, but he got the hang of it quickly.
Then he heard approaching footsteps, stopping in front of the door.
“Mabel?” said the voice of Mabel’s teacher, whose name Dipper had never cared to remember. “Are you in there?”
His heart tried to start racing again, but he kept it down and quickly cleared his throat.
“Yeah,” he said. “Coming!”
He almost stumbled over his feet when he turned towards the door, but he caught himself before he fell, and then he opened it.
The teacher stood outside, bluish grey clouds of concern hanging around him. “Are you feeling all right?” he asked.
“Yeah,” Dipper said, a little louder than he had meant to, so he adjusted down. “Yeah, I’m fine. I just… I needed a bit of air. I’m good now.”
The teacher stepped back and studied his face for a second. “You’re bleeding,” he said.
“What?” Dipper said, lifting a hand to his lips, and yes, that was blood.
At least that explained the taste. It was a lot nicer than he remembered blood to be. He must have bitten through his lip earlier.
No, no, not his lip. Mabel’s lip. He had to keep that straight. He was borrowing. Only borrowing. None of this was his.
He ran her tongue quickly over the wound on her lip to check it out.
“Oh, right,” he said. “I don’t think it’s very deep. It’ll probably heal up in a few minutes. Um, I’m sorry about running off; should we go back to class now?”
The teacher’s concern roiled around his head as he glanced between Mabel’s red-rimmed eyes and bloody lip, and the classroom down the hall. Small bubbles of green-tinted pink worry shot through it, likely as he thought about the class he had left to their own devices.
Coming to a decision, he looked Dipper in the eyes. “You know you can always come to me if you want to talk about something, right?”
Dipper nodded, and tried to look as un-troubled as possible. He was not quite sure if it worked. He had never been a great actor, and he was not sure if wearing someone else’s body was helping or making it worse.
Either way, the teacher seemed to accept it, because he nodded and started walking back towards the classroom.
Dipper took a deep breath, revelling in the feeling of air filling his lungs, and glanced at Mabel, floating beside him. She gave an encouraging nod, and he smiled back and followed the teacher.
The sounds of the classroom ahead flowed through his ears in a wonderful buzz of voices, as strong and as strange as every other sense touching him, promising hours more of the most bizarre experience he had been through since, well, since that summer.
He could get used to this.