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Mabel was the first one to love his birthmark.
She has a strange fixation with naming each point, and counting them two-by-two. It’s a bizarre fascination on the surface, but the act in itself is far more touching than Dipper will ever admit. On the nights he can't sleep, she tells each star a story until his eyes are heavy. It's only after they're tucked into their own beds that she wishes each one good night, calling them all by name.
When kids bully him at school, she's the first to his aid, with a rage so foreign to her happy exterior that she sends them scrambling away before she has a chance to open her mouth. Her brother has dirt on his face and tears threatening to fall, but he buries his forehead in his hat again, keeping his eyes to the ground for the remainder of recess. He hates the constellation more than he hates the kids that ridicule him for it.
But Mabel will never stop loving his birthmark, no matter how hard he tries to hide it.
On one of their first nights in Gravity Falls, Mabel's the first to grab his hand and point to its replica in the sky. It's far bigger and more brilliant than his tiny excuse of a look-alike, but there's no competition, not to her. The North Star has nothing on her brother, not when his Big Dipper glows brighter under the moon than its counterpart and all its starry friends.
It's a comparison she's more than fond of making, the more summer wears on. It’s a trip inside their uncle's head that changes them all, an encounter from a triangle with a hat. Because just like that, he isn’t Dipper, he’s Pine Tree, like the ones they’d lay under when the twilight set over the hills.
Like the ones that burned so easily with a spark of something cruel.
He makes titles of all of them, and her’s rings in her ears with an unsettling mix of pride and reluctance.
She is the embodiment of a shooting star, if there was ever one to walk the earth.
It’s in the tender moments that they all speak too fondly of her spreading joy and hope wherever she went, not terribly unlike her sisters in the sky. In the rays of her light, it was too easy to lose sight of her insecurities. Of the uncertainty that plagued her mind from the moment Bill had bestowed that title on her.
Pine trees and constellations had a place to belong. Shooting stars were born to lose their way.
There's too much summer left for the both of them. Too many chances for them to be to be torn apart. Either unintentionally or by design, it's a thought that invades her head far more than it needs to.
But when Dipper smiles at her and grabs her hand the same way she had their first night, it's like having direction. When he calls her by name and leads her to safety, it's like having her worries burned away.
She was a shooting star, destined to be lost in the sky.
But no matter how misplaced, no matter how far, she still had Dipper to guide her home.