Chapter Text
“Mabel!”
He did it. He has ten minutes. Ten whole minutes, and he’s found her.
The trees and shadows at the edge of his vision blur and blend and fade, because for once, there’s enough light to drown them all out. For all the horrors he’s encountered, they mean nothing faced with the one thing he’d be looking for all along. Mabel’s a beacon of hope in her dark Dreamscape, some ethereal sort of glow he didn’t think possible in such a torturous place.
When her name leaves his tongue, her head perks up. She isn’t fading this time.
Dipper’s footsteps are all but weightless when he runs to her, an incline that has his legs burning again, but it doesn’t matter. She’s here and she’s alive and she’s Mabel, and everything’s going to be fine. Atop the small knoll tucked away in her woods, Mabel’s hands come undone from around herself, and more and more, he finds pieces of his heart collecting themselves back to its former serenity.
But when she turns back to look at him, there’s no happiness. No relief. It’s a prelude to the same emptiness he’d first felt when he found her lifeless in the forest, when pieces of him were fleeting with every moment she didn’t respond.
Because when she looks at him the way she does, frantic and afraid, it’s like having his heart broken all over again.
“S-stay back!” she yells, blindly retreating. “Stay away from me!”
Mabel’s outcry infiltrates more than just the empty pockets of the forest – it invades every hole her memories have burned into his being. In the face of her delirium, Dipper stalls himself where he stands, halfway between the woods and the tree she’s taken shelter under. The sight of her is an appalling one to take in, someone so at the end of her rope that calling her a victim of her own mind is hardly an understatement.
The brief mental clarity grants him more than just direction. It connects the dots, how this all came to be. The realization clicks with him far too late.
“The memory…”
‘She wasn’t running away from me. She was leading me to you.’
The parts of her that couldn’t stand to be here anymore. The parts he resonated with all too well.
Mabel close to stumbles with every backwards step she takes, a futile effort to escape him. It isn’t long before she’s forced up against the lone tree she’d been standing under. No different from the ghost in her memory, Mabel’s as lost in her own head as he is eager to guide her home.
Cautious, he holds his arms up in surrender when he calls back to her. “Hey, hey! Mabel, it’s okay!”
“Why are you doing this to me?!” she shrieks, her voice shrill and breaking, sliding down the bark and sinking to the ground. “Now they can follow me?! How much more do you want me to suffer?!”
Bill. He grits his teeth when the thought crosses him, but it’s gone in a blink. Losing his cool wouldn’t solve this. Wouldn’t get her any closer to home. Dipper wrestles down the anger burning beneath the surface, bringing his focus entirely on her. Not that he has a choice — her manic state leaves him little else to focus on.
She’s hysteric. Horrifically. Mabel grabs at her hair like she’s tempted to rip it all out, as if doing so would tear all the memories along with it. She has that frenzied sheen in her eyes again that he’d seen in the attic, but with tenfold the panic fueling it. It sends chills down his spine, watching her — spewing mantras only she can hear, rocking in place. Quivering.
It reminds him too much of some of the journal entries he’s read.
It reminds him too much of Ford.
When it isn’t a scream, it’s a cough, a culmination of emotions that have her reeling into her sleeves.
Dipper’s tentative when he approaches her, closing the distance between them with every cautious step. She’s stopped trying to fight him off. Trapped in place, Mabel whimpers and shrinks in on herself as if bracing an attack, and the thought lurches something in his gut.
As gently as possible, his hands cup the tops of her shoulders. He even thinks he sees her loosen up, just noticeably.
“No Mabel, it’s really me…” he says, still frozen in place, but farthest from the literal sense. She really is as warm as he remembers her. “It’s really Dipper. I’m here.”
It’s the softest his voice has been since this all began. It reaches a part of her somehow, Mabel raising her head to meet his eyes. For several seconds she only stares, eyes flicking across his face and upward a bit, presumably for the birthmark he can no longer hide without his hat.
He sees her mouth his name, but never hears her say it. It’s still enough.
The relief that sweeps through him is instantaneous, but now isn’t the time for a heartwarming reunion. Without another thought, he grabs at her hand to pull her to her feet, but never lets go of her.
Not again.
He tugs her the way he came, head nodding in the direction too. “Come on, we need to get out of here.”
Faith renewed, he turns to faces the woods again with a new-found confidence that’s already made the world of difference. The fear of running out of time, is fleeting for once so engrossed with the mission at hand that he nearly forgets that he’s wearing the watch at all.
“Maybe we can try where I first came here…” he muses, glancing their surroundings. Stan had woken up all on his own the first time, but he wasn’t about to chance waiting for the timer to end to find out. “Maybe there’s a part of your Dreamscape that has some way to get back. Or if we can figure out a way to wake you up—”
The lengthy list of options is cut short when Mabel suddenly breaks their hold of each other, stepping back and away from his touch. The absence of her hand from his stops him in his tracks, turning to look back at her. Wordless, she cradles the hand he was holding close to her chest.
“Huh? Mabel, what’s wrong?”
She’s silent, for a moment. Even she seems completely at odds of what to say, but Dipper’s pressing eyes force out of her what they can. Mabel lets out a murmur so soft spoken he nearly misses it the first time, if not for the startling resolve beneath it.
“I…I’m not going back.”
“…What?”
“…I’m not going back Dipper,” she repeats, a little more defensive.
Her response registers him, somewhere. His jaw hangs open as he stares her down, baffled.
“What do you mean ‘you’re not going back?’ We have to!” he retaliates, puzzled. “We need to help Grunkle Stan and Great Uncle Ford and stop Bill-”
Dipper reaches to grab for her shoulder instead, a quick swipe that has her backing away. She dodges his hand as it comes for her, as if doing so would reduce her to stardust the same way her memory had. Momentary shock leaves his hand hanging in the air, stunned, but he comes to his senses when his eyes zero in on the face of his watch.
He has seven whole minutes before all of it will be for nothing.
It’s the first mistake he makes, losing his composure.
“Mabel, you’re coming back!”
It comes out sounding harsher than he means it to be, but he wasn’t about to entertain the thought of leaving her behind to fester in the ill thoughts he’d just fought through to get to her. “I know that you’re scared, but you can’t just stay here for the rest of your life!”
It doesn’t sound cruel until after the fact, when she adopts the expression she does. His words bite into her far deeper than he intends them to, and it has her shedding any sign of weakness. With a face completely unlike her own, Mabel’s bares her teeth at him, her temper flaring.
“Watch me!”
Snap. As if by command, Dipper hears and feels it, a tremor below his feet that has him scanning the grounds around her forest haven. At its edges, the earth quivers and cracks, deep splits dividing into fragments among shards. From the hellish crevices, more and more of the crooked trees rise, her woods growing thicker and darker with each one.
His eyes flick back her way again. “Mabel, c’mon! Snap out of it!”
“No!”
“You have to! You’re in danger here!”
“I’m never, ever going back, ever!”
He’s losing the fire in his own voice, feeling it trampled beneath her inability to come to terms with it all. Teetering onto desperation, he abandons all attempts to be stern with her.
“Mabel, please—”
Dipper reaches for her once more, voice cracking at the edges. He can really feel it now, his heart racing – no longer beating in time with his watch’s rhythm. The alarm bells in his head are gravely aware of just how much time he has left, how his composure was fleeting with every second that she didn’t budge.
“We can’t stay here! Mabel, we have to go or else I’ll-! Ugh!”
His plea is cut sharp by the flare-up in his shoulder, a sweltering ache that keeps him from saying too much. It shoots through him with an intensity that brings him to one knee, hand fumbling to alleviate the pain in his back. Dipper bites back on his lip to stomach the pain, but it’s in taking in the circumstances that it clicks with him. It wasn’t just any spontaneous flare up. I didn’t choose just now to agitate him.
(“And before we find any loopholes here, you can’t tell her why. That’d spoil the fun, don’t you think?”)
A breach on their pact. An electric collar to keep him quiet.
Even in her anger, he sees Mabel’s temper waver just slightly when he collapses in front of her. Masking her concern with annoyance, hissing at him the second she knows his pain isn’t grave.
“Or else you’ll what?” she snaps, glaring him down. “You’ll leave me again? Was once not enough for you?”
It stings when she says that. Only more so by the cold expression she wears when she says it. Even as he inched dangerously closer to curling up on the ground, Mabel does nothing to rush and help him. It’s only a cruel thought until he zeroes in on the way she indecisively bounces in place, that it isn’t a conscious choice to stay put.
Taking a deep breath, he calms himself. This wasn’t the way to do this.
Dipper speaks up again, far gentler this time. “…Is this about Ford’s apprenticeship? Is that it?”
It strikes a nerve in her somewhere. For no more than a heartbeat after hearing her uncle’s name, her hands are back to clenching against her ears, closing her eyes tight. Doing whatever possible to drown him out. He grunts, rising from the ground, still clutching his shoulder.
“Mabel, don’t even think about it. It isn’t happening.”
“You’re just saying that…” she whimpers, shaking her own head from side to side. Her eyes are still shutting him out, bulging veins in her face the evidence of how hard. The ground’s shaking as violently as she is. “You’re only saying that to get us out of here…”
It isn’t working. It isn’t working.
Panic offsetting composure, Dipper scours his thoughts for some sort of justification, Something. Anything at all, but nothing comes to mind. “No I’m serious, I-!”
‘Why won’t you believe me?’
Five minutes, thirty-two seconds. Five minutes, twenty-seven.
“Mabel, look at me!”
In the midst of her frenzied breakdown, she does just that. Mabel looks at him, and it’s all she can do. When her eyes are wide and searching, it’s so much easier to find the fears in them. The hurt. She’s got those lines under her eyes now, the ones he can never seem to erase from his own, hanging as a testament to just how taxing this has all been. Her face twists between too many different emotions, warring with herself with feelings she’s kept under wraps for so long. Even she doesn’t know what to feel.
“We have to go back. We have to.”
Mabel shakes her head. Again. Again. “I can’t.”
“Yes, you can. I know you can.”
“How do you know that?”
“Because I believe in you,” Dipper says, wincing. The flare in his shoulder is still burning, but he can’t let it keep him quiet any longer. “I know you, Mabel. I know you don’t really want to be here. And I know that if you had a chance to leave, you would.”
She hiccups, stepping backwards. “…s-stop it…”
“And you do,” he presses, daring another step forward. “I’m here for you. I’ll make sure you get back there – that we’ll get back there together. But you have to trust me.”
Mabel smothers her hands harder against her ears, blocking what she can of the crumbling world around her. “…you don’t…”
She isn’t listening.
Dipper sputters out what he can, a jumble of words he can’t form into rational thought. They’re muddled with all the questions left unanswered, all the emotions he hasn’t acknowledged. A mess of feelings snowballing into desperation.
“So why? Why can’t I help you?” he asks, looking up to her. Asking the hard questions the only way he knows how, with a raw plea that has to reach her somehow. Her eyes only hint at the answer, but it isn’t enough. Tear prick at the very back of his eyes, burning with frustration, doubt. “Why can’t you come back!?”
His voice gets weaker with each word, muffled among the crumbling earth and cracking roots. But Mabel hears him with perfectly clarity, the way it strains her face more and more. In the next heartbeat, she screams out for him and all the trees and all the birds to hear.
“I can’t go back, because THERE’S NOTHING LEFT FOR ME!”
In one moment, everything stops.
When she bellows it, the trees halt at their roots. Sickly cracks and pops ceasing in their growth. All is quiet, a deafening silence heard for miles on, so much so that Dipper even thinks he can hear the voices of her memories if he listens hard enough. It makes him painfully aware of the thundering in his own chest, the way her scream manages to freeze him deathly still, paralyzed by her shriek. By the meaning of it.
Because by the way she proclaims it, she sounds like she’s already consigned herself to death.
For eons, Mabel’s sobs are the only things filling the air. Choked, sputtered– a painful reminder of this whole nightmare, how it’s left more than just its marks on her. The tears stream down her cheeks, shaking her head in disbelief.
Halfway through her meltdown, she’s at it again, breaking into a violent fit of coughs. Trembling, her hands raise to cover her mouth, cupping over and muffling her cries.
“I c-can’t go back– if there’s nothing there…”
(four thirty-eight. four thirty-one)
Silence.
“What…what are you…?”
Dipper trails off without even meaning to, his train of thought so brutally derailed by her words that he can’t even bring himself to finish the thought. He doesn’t have to, thankfully, for a beat later, instinct has her reverting back to clapping her hands over her ears, listing her grievances.
“High school isn’t how it is in the movies, my friends are leaving me behind….” she murmurs. Mabel keeps her eyes locked on something that isn’t him, and it’s only another symptom of how bad it’s really gotten. “This is all wrong, all so, so wrong…”
(four eleven. four ten)
Mabel almost mumbles so low he can’t hear her, but he doesn’t need them to see right through her. Her eyes are raw with a sadness he didn’t think she was capable of, piercing right through him every time she musters up enough courage to face him with them.
It makes him wonders, how different this all could have been if he’d saw past the disguise.
“…I never should have let you leave this morning,” she laments, more to herself than to Dipper. “I never should have given you that walkie-talkie…I never should have found that snow globe…”
It makes him wonders how things could ever get his bad.
“….What…?”
As if she’d only just forgotten his presence until now, a hybrid of shock and fear flashes across Mabel’s face when he speaks up. Her eyes are wide with apprehension, but she offers no words to fill in the gaps.
“Mabel, what-?” he takes a step closer— and by consequence, she’s taking even more steps back, and it holds him in place. He wasn’t about to lead this into an interrogation, but he wonders how to even begin to frame it like anything but given her fragile mental state. “-what did you just say?”
The answer’s resting on her tongue. He sees it. But she hesitates. Mabel’s hand bunches up some of her sweater’s loose fabric at her stomach, a crutch for her following words.
She sniffles. “The snow globe. The one in your back pack.”
The backpack he’d let consume him with terror, as he faced the forest with all his fears coming true. He slaps a hand light to the side of his head, all of it dawning. That’s right.
“Oh man, I forgot all about that…Are you okay?” Dipper asks, concern genuine. “I never told you how dangerous that thing really was.”
Mabel disregards it for something fake, the fist at her stomach growing tighter. The awaiting answer has her ready to lose herself, hyperventilating at the mere thought of it that for a moment, he fears that she’ll pass out.
But she regulates it in time, grappling down her anxieties just long enough to respond.
“I-I didn’t mean to…I just…”
“—I know that that it broke,” he cuts her off, and that small revelation seems to do more harm than good. Mabel looks as if she unravels even more when he says it, but Dipper brushes her off, shaking his head. “Don’t worry about that. It’s my fault. I should have told you.”
It does nothing. The fear is still wild in her eyes. He offers her a patient smile.
“Mabel really, I promise I’m not mad. I’m just glad you’re safe.”
“You don’t understand…” she protests, “…I did something bad, Dipper…”
His reassuring smile falls away the minute her hands do too, releasing the worn fabric to wrap her arms around herself.
“…it didn’t break. Not in the back-”
Mabel coughs again out of nowhere, but it’s different. Heavier. She’s doing that more often now, but his mind is rushing past just the possibility of her upset state doing this to her.
No, it rushes to the vague recollections he had of the surface – the forest she lay stranded real world, of the faint taste of ash in the distance. The smoke from the fires…was it building in her lungs?
Had it traveled that fast?
“-in the back pack.”
Dipper shelves the thought, reluctant. Mabel still sits with her hands twisting in her sweater. It says too much. All while she holds her silence, he’s left weighing the crumbs she’s giving him. The hesitation lining every word she speaks. It’s almost enough.
No.
No, please, no.
(“She did me a favor, and I returned it. Since she made it too easy, I thought the least I could do was partially fulfill her wish.”)
The tone of it all darkens so quickly that Mabel surrenders the answer before she lets it destroy her from the inside out.
“…Blendin promised me that if I gave it to him, he could give us more time. So I-I-I handed it to him, but it wasn’t Blendin! It was Bill!”
(“What wish?”
“For summer to last forever! Sheesh kid, were you even trying to pay attention?”)
No, no, no, no, no, no.
(“Summer can’t end if she’s not awake to see it!”)
“I-I just handed it over, just like that…!” she bawls, throwing her hands out in front of her. Mimicking the moment she gave it up, the moment it all went to hell- “I don’t know what I was thinking! I wasn’t ready to be alone yet! Dipper, I’m so sorry!”
She breaks down all over again.
It’s as she stands flush against her dreary world that he realizes that there’s nothing angry in her anymore – there never was. All a façade to mask this constant state of wanting to let go. The one he’s managed to overlook since its first conception.
The revelation is as tragic as he anticipates, but he’s nowhere close to beginning to fathom the guilt Mabel’s let herself drown in.
“The world is gone…and it’s all my fault…”
Mabel collapses against the tree, sliding to the ground beneath it. She throws her head back against it, an audible crack loud enough that Dipper winces when he hears her head slam against the bark. He doesn’t have to imagine how much it hurt by the sound alone, but Mabel doesn’t even acknowledge that she’s felt it.
She’s already too numb to care.
Defeated, she shakes her head slowly, eyes closed. “I…I can’t go back…because there’s really nothing left for me…”
They’re turning thirteen in a few days, but she cries and cries like the child she isn’t going to be anymore. Like she’s clinging to the last shreds of her childhood, like it’s him who’s the one that’s been dragging her farther and farther away from it.
Mabel weeps like something lost and needing to be found, and he thanks all the fake stars at the edges of her skies that he’s found her just in time. Even in all of this, he’s never truly lost her. Not entirely.
For once, Dipper can’t bring himself to distract it with the timer. He’s too fixated on the way she self-destructs, watching her as she folds in on herself, crumples, collapses. There’s been something sleeping in her, an awful lot like how she was sleeping now, hiding away from the world, whatever was left of it. Only now was he truly seeing the face of it, when the damage has already been done.
This wasn’t his sister, but she was. She’s a shell of the one he’d been begging to wake up.
Then again, maybe so is he.
Dipper’s silent through it all, watching as she breaks again and again, speaking in babbles and tongues only she seems to understand. She never once looks his way, so caught up in her own emotional turmoil that she lays waste to everything around her.
He wants nothing more than to make her stop feeling whatever it is that’s hurting her so badly. The cause of it was lost to him, and maybe even to her to. Whatever sparked this all, it’s too deep for even her to recover. Lost among a hundred reasons, a thousand ill feelings, a million questions why.
Dipper outstretches his fingers towards her. Suspended her way, they reach but never touch her.
“Mabel…”
When he does, the watch on his wrist peeks into the corner of his vision, its bright display coming into focus as everything else blurs. The fierce, blaring red that’s been driving this all, marking every moment as Mabel lets it all go.
He has three whole minutes and he’s never felt number in his life.
Mabel’s radiance couldn’t save her from the darkness she’s shrouded herself in.
It didn’t happen today. It wasn’t yesterday or last week, this way she’s been suffering. Her Dreamscape is all but a testament to that, for every moment she’s felt less than what she really was, only just now coming as one giant cry for help.
He can’t undo the suffering of so long in the matter of minutes he had left. He scarcely believes he could do it in an hour.
He can’t punish her any more than he has been. Bringing her back to a world where the thought of consciousness alone was too overwhelming for her to bear. He really did let it get that bad. She really is no different than ghost he’d been chasing after.
With every tear that falls from her eyes, Dipper’s reminded of just how isolated and scared she must have been this entire last half of summer. The distressed voices from her memories replay with resounding clarity now, resurrecting the hollow feelings he’s carried this entire time. There’s enough evidence to go off it now, grimly completing the picture he was so afraid of.
It takes a heavy heart for him to finally recognize that she’s too far gone to be saved.
That they both are.
Dipper sees her Dreamscape dying all around. Knows it’s taking him with it. Mabel’s momentary carnage breaks more than just her spirit — it’s already started to sever the vibrant shades of green from her haven, ugly browns overtaking the grasses beneath their feet.
He may never find the answer, but he’s not about to leave without at least trying to make it all right. Forcing down the lurking fear, it’s all he can do.
“Hey…it’s okay…”
Lie.
Even cloaked in uncertainty, his voice carries strongly through her withering meadow. His drastic change in tone has her lifting her eyes back up to meet his as he continued to approach her. “You don’t have to come back right now. Come back when you can, okay…?”
This was breaking his heart.
But even as it did, it was beginning to mend hers back together.
“But, I know I probably won’t see you for a wh-ile…”
Dipper stutters without meaning to, a slip on his words that leave him wiping at his eye with the inside of his wrist.
Not now. Not this close to her, not while she can still see him.
“So, can we maybe, just…?”
‘Awkward sibling hug?’ never makes it to the surface, so caught in his throat by the thought of it alone. Voicing it out loud would break him wide open, and he can’t afford to let himself slip that far just yet.
But the sentiment carries the same, with or without the words to say it. Dipper doesn’t have to say any more when he raises his arms for her.
Mabel’s eyes soften at the gesture. It touches her, somewhere. His heart lightens when he sees her start to rise to her feet again, wiping her face of its lingering tears. Her anxious cues die down the longer he holds his stance, enough that it pushes her to meet him halfway.
Her sleeves are dirty with her own tears and snot, but he doesn’t even pay them a thought when she closes the distance between them.
In his darkest hour, comfort is a small one, so bittersweet in the grand scheme of things.
At least next time they see each other, they’ll both truly be at peace.
When Mabel wraps her arms around him, Dipper reciprocates it in a heartbeat, hugging her as close as humanely possible. The moment he feels her entwined around him, he drops the defenses he’d so painstakingly erected. It can’t be more than a second that they’re holding he each other that he starts to tremble, the cold truth setting in. It’s as his own tears release that Mabel reaches around his back to wipe her own.
“Dipper?” she croaks, voice hoarse from her wails. “Why are you…” (Crying? I can’t tell you, sis.) “…Why are you shaking?”
“I don’t know.” Lies. More and more lies, enough to bury him where he was about to fall in a matter of minutes. “I’m just…scared…”
Of what comes after this. Of how dark the realm of death really is, of whether or not you truly belong there at twelve years old.
His voice drops even lower, a whisper lost in the locks of her hair. “I hope dying doesn’t hurt…”
Maybe not as lost as it seems. Mabel tenses the moment he says it, a precursor to her attempts at tearing them apart so she can look at him.
He won’t let her.
“What are you talking about…?” she prods, restless. He hears the apprehension build in her voice, the one begging for an explanation she’s too afraid of to ask for directly. “What do you mean…?”
He ignores her, burrowing himself in her shoulder. Mabel is a different feeling entirely when he knows that it’s for last time. Dipper spends it trying to savor it, but can’t fight off the fleeting thoughts of just how many times he’d passed this up. All the times he’d shrugged this off as something childish, something saved and something forgotten in their younger years of life.
‘I don’t hate you.’
“I love you…” he chokes up, sobs seizing his body. The words sound crooked and misplaced coming from him, a thought that brings a whole torrent of others entirely. How many times has he told her that? How many times had she gone without believing it? “You…you know that right…?”
Not enough and too many, he realizes. Mabel’s at a loss for words.
“Dipper…”
“Right?”
He grips her tighter. He’s shaking and so is she, but the ground isn’t trembling with her this time.
Mabel’s silent for more than he can afford time for. He senses the breath caught her throat. The doubt keeping her from saying anything.
He feels it killing him faster than the watch on his wrist.
“-I need you to know that,” he insists, eyeing his watch. He has two minutes to pour it all out, and starts it with pulling himself away to look her in the eyes, hands firm on both her shoulders. “I need you to know that the journal and everything going on in this town has never ever meant more to me than you have.”
Words spill out faster than he can process them, but this is it. If there’s anything worth saving left, it’s the bond he’s about to sever between them.
“I need you to know that you are my best friend,” Dipper continues, recalling her memory. Those horrid things, challenging what he knew for absolute truth, “-that Great Uncle Ford could never replace you, that that bridge hasn’t burned, that you’re lying to yourself…”
So many words, so little time. He empties what he can to her, a train of thought that comes so late that there’s suddenly too much to say and no genuine way to say them. Even as she watches him lay it bare, Mabel does nothing but stare at him through it all. Mild distress in her expression, and it’s the only thing keeping him from the closure he desperately needs.
With mere seconds left, the idea of slipping away without ever reaching her is more a plausibility than a passing thought – and the reality of it is tearing him apart. It leaves the numbness flooding through his veins, however much of his heart was beating anymore.
This is all his fault.
All of it.
Just shy of a minute, the weight of seemingly everything has him falling to his knees, clawing at her sweater as he collapses altogether. Mabel follows him to the ground, a surprised yelp that has her grabbing at the back of her brother’s vest, but her strength is no match for the dead weight he’s become.
She can’t hold him up anymore. No amount of pride or smarts or forgiveness will ever let him stand again, when he’s caused so much and hurt her so badly.
This is all his fault.
Dipper grabs her not terribly unlike she has to him so many times before, with both his arms wrapped so tightly around her middle. Like she’d slip right through his fingers if he held her any less. He’s so close to breaking that the tears flow fast down his cheeks before he can stop them.
Crying isn’t something he’s used to, but he’s forgotten how much it hurts. How much it needed to hurt to feel the tears roll down his cheeks to begin with. The sobs threaten to burst out of his chest, but Dipper keeps them as quiet and restrained as his body allows. This isn’t about him.
This wasn’t about how sorry he was. It wasn’t about how crippling the fear of death was and how it reduced him to something so pitiful. It’s every memory of hers he’s relived, every regret of every time he’s fostered this dark place she’s been living in.
Mabel’s stopped asking the question. He’s stopped looking for the answers.
He only needs the forgiveness now.
“I’m sorry, Mabel. I’m so, so sorry…”
‘-for everything, oh god, I’m sorry-’
“Please believe that…” he begs, burying his face in her chest. From just below his ear, he hears her heart beating the way it should – the way his won’t anymore, but it means next to nothing without knowing if she will ever start living again after this.
His tone climbs a touch higher, arms curling tighter around her. “Please don’t let that be a lie…”
‘Please don’t let me die without knowing.’
Her silence stretches so far it hurts, like pieces of his soul are being strained along with it. Tested to see just how long he could go before it tears him apart altogether.
But then he hears it.
One blessed word. One small, breathless little whisper that manages to piece his world back together as it continued to fall apart: “Okay.”
It was okay.
Like the miracle he’d been searching for, he feels it all at once. His chest swells with the recognition, processing again and again and again, okay, it’s okay, she’s okay. It’s valid and it’s worth it; she’s alive and she believes him.
“It’s okay.”
She reaffirms it, but gives more than just the words alone. Mabel has a feather light touch on his back, her hand resting just between his shoulder blades. The moment she does, it’s a tender sensation that has him wishing for all the time in the world, just even a few more seconds to feel at peace. “I forgive you, bro-bro.”
It really was okay.
Her reprieve from it all washes over him, erasing the emptiness with feeling and meaning. Mabel brings both her arms up to wrap around both of him, secure. They aren’t her suffocating trademarks, but she lifts him up slightly higher to hug against her chest. If he never feels one again, this is the closest he’ll come to it, and that’s enough too.
“Thank you…so much,” she says, sniffling. “…I love you too.”
Even with a depleting time limit, Dipper swears that Mabel stops the clock when she says that. He feels it patch up the wounded spaces between them, with a warmth that could rival the star specks her memory left for him to follow. So still, she keeps him tucked against her close with her chin resting atop his head, doing nothing but reaffirming how it’s all been worth it.
It’s a short-lived sanctuary, fading as the tunnel vision encroaches in from the edges of his vision.
He has ten whole seconds and he can’t breathe.
“It’s okay…” he echoes her, eyes slipping closed. “It’s…okay…”
It was okay. It all would be eventually.
From the edges of his fleeting consciousness, he hears it. The faintest laughter. The one he’s heard in his dreams, the one that provoked him into extending his hand in the first place. It’s grows louder with each cackle, but the beauty comes in knowing Mabel can’t hear it. He’s triumphant and ready to collect his prize, but he won’t give him the gratification of laying himself down defeated entirely.
He’d found her. He promised himself that much
Mabel would awake to a world he no longer existed in, but the belief that she would wake up at all had always been enough. Even in the looming fear of death, everything is peaceful. The last wisps of life leave him cold but not alone, a fact he’s warmly reminded of for every moment he can still feel her radiating against him.
‘It’s going to be okay Mabel…’
His parting gift is a gracious one, when he hears her breathe in one last time, like she’s breathing for the first time again.
‘…everything…I promise…’
Like she’s taking his last one.
‘….I’m….sorry…’
Dipper’s always been a weight against her chest, but never one she needed lifting from.
Now seated on her knees in the middle of the forest, he’s become a weight for more than just one reason now. Dipper holds his silence the same way she has for this whole summer, an observation that disturbs her in ways she can’t quite explain.
Without another word, he loosens his arms from around her torso, slumping against her with all the grace of a rag doll. It’s an awkward position for both of them, but the unsettling silence creeping over both of them keeps her from cracking the jokes to pass the air. Briefly.
In twelve years of sleepovers and awkward sibling hugs, she knows what her brother feels like. He’s home. He’s a bundle of sweaty and stubborn that’s never once felt unpleasant, a mix of many things that have never felt like anything but home.
But seated the way they were now, with him motionless after saying what he’s said, home suddenly felt so much farther away.
For a hard moment, the unnerving silence encompasses them both. A barrier so delicate that the quiet beeps from Dipper’s watch are all it takes to shatter it.
Something wasn’t right.
Only seconds before, he’d seemed so frantic. Practically begging on his knees for forgiveness she had no hesitations giving. For all the ill thoughts she’s been feeling these past weeks, it’s a glimpse at Dipper’s true remorse that negates every last one of them. He was sorry. He must be, if the mere thought of forgiveness alone is enough to render him limp with relief.
It’s. Too simple sounding.
Because for the lack of a better explanation, Dipper’s cold, in ways that the forest isn’t. Ways it never has been, in the eternity she’s been here.
“Dipper?” she says, chuckling quietly. Doing whatever possible to temper her building panic. Mabel defaults to her humorous façade, and can’t help the nervous bubbles rising from her stomach. She pats his back good-naturedly. “Have you been watching The Duchess Approves reruns with Grunkle Stan? This is a little dramatic for you.”
Her forced laughter fills the air, but her jokes don’t suspend in it for more than a second before she realizes it’s fallen on deaf ears. It doesn’t pull a shrug out of him the way it has every time before.
Dreaded thoughts plague her. Why there was a timer beeping, what was it he wasn’t telling her and Dipper, why aren’t you moving? What are you hiding from me?
He’s sleeping. He’s run through this whole place looking for her.
He has to be sleeping.
“…Dip…per…?” she says, shaking him. What starts as gentle turns into something absently panicked, an intensity that mounts with each passing second. “Come on Dip, you’re really starting to hurt my knees…”
He doesn’t move.
She scarcely thinks she can hear him breathing, but she zaps that thought from her mind before it has the chance to fester.
Dipper wouldn’t deliberately hurt her. He wouldn’t willingly hang on to her and let the rocks and gravel continue to dig themselves into her skin, even if it was supposed to be a joke. She knows him too well.
When she releases her hold of him, she finds that he has too, that he slides further and further into her lap without the support. It has her rushing back to his words, how he whispered them so softly, so fearfully-
“-hope dying doesn’t-“
“Dipper, this isn’t funny!”
Mabel knows her brother, and he would never break her heart.
He said so himself.
“Dipper—!”
He’s made her laugh so hard the she’s cried, and it’s no different this time. Whatever joke he’s playing, it has her crying to the heavens above her. The world growing darker and darker with each passing second. Either her time of waking was fast approaching her or the hyperventilation, one of them had to prove this was all just a bad dream. Because it dawns of what’s just happened.
He isn’t breathing.
He isn’t sleeping.
When she finally does realize why he isn’t, the shock has her so far gone that the numbness steals whatever feelings she has left that aren’t physical touch. She has her brother cradled so close to her, riding off some demented idea that surely if he can hear her heartbeat, it’ll revive his too, to beat in time with hers.
Because surely that’s why he’d done that, crawling higher just to listen to it, and surely dream mechanics couldn’t quit on her now.
Something ignites the world around her, she isn’t quite sure what – the crippling fear of loneliness, the love she’s already exhausted to try and bring him back – one of them sparks the flames that lick at the dead greenery all around her.
Mabel screams as everything falls to ruin, to pieces, to ash.
shooting stars sure sure are pretty when they fall
(what a light show s̼͚̘̩͡h̠͉̖̜̥ͅe̶̬’͚s̱̝̦ͅ ̥̫b̨̟͎̗͇ͅr͇͡o̪̺̬͓͙u͙̩̞̝̠̖g͎h̢t̯ͅ ͙̭̥̝̰̤w̘̩͝i̗̱t̖̞̪͝ͅh͓̬͈̱ ͓h͙̝͇͈ͅe̢̥r͔͍͔͇̗͓͟)͕̘͔͙̠̗̫
from green to brown to red, her forest glows just like she does, with all the light of a spectacle that’s crashed and burned.
so bright, so terrible.
so beautifully destructive.
Mabel cries and cries and begs for the darkness to come and steal her too, because shooting stars weren’t made to touch the earth, because pine trees burned so much easier when they’re dead—
all around her, the flames inch closer and closer. closer. everything in its path, erased. the embers consume the grounds as they come for her. thriving off the trees she’s let erupt from the earth, the grasses wilted beneath them. all a twisted sort of lantern for the hellish carnival she’s let her world become.
Mabel weeps for the world as it crumbles and cracks and fades.
“…Wake up…” she begs, fingers threaded through his hair. He doesn’t. He can’t. “…wake up…please…”
as it flashes, as it turns
“…I’ll do anything…”
as it brightens
as it burns