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‘So this is it, huh…?’
It’s a cruel thought for any twelve-year-old to house, never mind one who’s already faced death far too many times this summer.
It wasn’t their choice, to end it this way.
The town’s color schemes of green and brown have all washed out in white, soundless and soulless as the snow that covered it. It’s over. The pine trees have long stopped burning, but the black patches they leave in the snow heaps are as jarring a reminder as the silence that’s come between them.
Bill’s realm of fire was a hell by its own right. If the blood red sky was only a glimpse of what was to come, this was the only choice. Riding on the panic that leads them to the hills, thumbing some faded and forgotten page of the journal. A flurry of rash decisions to save what they could.
The price to save it all is to give it all up, too. Bringing summer to an end on their own terms.
Even with the sight of carnage burned deep into his skull, Dipper doubts he’ll ever rid his mind of the last image they have of the Shack - some blurred, shaken photo, the sensation of Grunkle Stan’s violent yanking at the back of his vest. His last sounds of the forest aren’t its birds and branches in the wind, it’s Stan’s voice edging on the brink of protective rage.
He doubts he’ll ever forget the sensation the blooms in his chest when he breaks free of Stan’s grip, looking back. The devastation in his face when he realizes they’ve won.
This was the price to save it all. It meant giving it up all, too.
It meant overpowering Grunkle Stan from trying to stop them in their tracks. It meant clambering to the parts of Gravity Falls where the flames hadn’t touched yet.
It meant summoning a storm powerful enough to put out the devil himself.
It was quick and painless, in the moment.
It comes flooding back the moment consciousness does too. Everything aches.
Being blown back by the scale of the spell hurts more than he thinks. The moment he’s able to, Dipper tries in vain to lift his body from the ground. More aches, more pain. All too misleading from a flash of red, then white, then black.
Mabel’s hand clasps his in the snow, one of the few tethers still binding him to the world. Dipper’s too far gone to tell if her hands really are that hot because she’s Mabel, or if the hypothermia has already taken him. The latter, more likely, but that in itself is still too cold a thought to grasp.
Their hands went numb a long ago, but the ghost of the other’s touch is a fitting sort of peace in their empty white wasteland.
He can still feel her smile. It’s a comforting thought when there’s an awful lot he can’t feel anymore.
“What do you think they’re d-doing right now?” The police, he means, but the chattering in his teeth keeps him from saying too much now. He’s losing his voice.
Mabel appears to weigh on it seriously, a hum of something he can’t quite make out. It’s a wishful thought. There are sirens blaring in the distance, but heading farther and farther away from them. Less than a handful of names that could be looking for them, but Dipper knows that they didn’t hold priority in a town that wasn’t their home.
“Th-Their best.”
Had it been any other situation, he might have laughed.
But it’s the way Mabel says it. Some hollow hope from the voice of hope herself, it hits him with such an intensity that it almost hurts to breathe. There’s a feeling of dread building in his gut with each passing moment, the more he realizes he’s hearing her with a sort of despair he didn’t think she was capable of.
They’re too innocent for any of this. Two kids way in over their heads.
Out of the corner of his eye, Dipper finally forces himself to look at her. Heavy with guilt, he only stares at her, so helpless and vulnerable in a war she was never meant to be apart of. She’s pale, growing paler, her ashen skin bleeding in with the snow all around her. He scarcely doubts he looks any better.
Her sweaters weren’t doing too much for her now. His vest never did much to begin with.
“M-M-Maybe we can stay wa-arm still…” she says, smiling despite herself. Beneath the front, he can still detect the small hint of desperation in her voice. “Until they come.”
Building a fire was laughable. Finding shelter even more so. They’re too lost to even begin to navigate for a cave, assuming they haven’t been filled up too. Dipper wracks his brain seriously for an attempt to get them out of this one only to find himself miserably cornered. Too many dead ends, too many half-baked plans with holes wide enough to swallow them both.
He stops entirely when Mabel shifts in his peripheral.
To his surprise, she finds the energy to turn onto her side to meet him. The pain riddled in her face already tells him that it cost too much, with how little she was breathing now.
Mabel reaches his way, whatever possible to bridge the gap of space keeping the two of them apart. Her weak arms shake in the exertion, pleading eyes ready to break whatever’s left of his slow beating heart. She speaks so quietly, so exhausted that even the falling flakes seem to drown her out.
“Awkward s-sibling hug…?”
“…Awkward sibling hug.”
It’s the first time his voice has ever been steady.
Mabel’s already spent herself just trying to reach his way, but he closes the gap between them with an even greater effort. Like they had when this all began, Mabel’s arms wrap around him, his around hers. Snugly together like the two broken halves they always have been. Her poor body shakes with more than just the cold, and it takes everything in Dipper not lose himself when she sobs into his shoulder.
This is the price, he thinks.
Mabel cries with such grief that it nearly destroys what Bill couldn’t. There are few things in the world that can break him apart, and failing to keep her from her end may as well be the end of him too. She can’t bring herself to hug him quite as tightly as she has before, but it doesn’t stop Dipper from filling her role himself.
He hugs her with everything he’s got.
Arms wrapped tightly around her, the snow around them builds higher. This is the price. This is the price, silently begging for a miracle, for a lifeline, for something to hold on to. There was always an answer. Always a contraption to save them both, always a plan to get them home. Always some page in the journal to fix this.
Just once, he wishes love was enough.
Their bodies are beyond saving, but there’s a warmth in his heart burning enough for the both of them.
It’s days before they’re found.
Headed by Powers and Trigger, it takes a fleet of eight men sweeping the outskirts of town for them to be discovered. ‘More anomalies in that town, sir’ the call went out, ‘some type of freak storm, dozens hurt‘.
One by one, they march the grounds. Nameless and expendable, they scope the hills for anything of interest. Not for them. Cold and indifferent, doing their jobs.
But for as stone faced as they come, the discovery changes the tone of the mission. In the midst of his composure, quiet devastation pricks at the chest of the soldier burdened with finding them. He stills in his tracks, shackled by the sight of the two kids.
They’re smiling in their sleep.