Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

The game had gone on for hours.

It had been a friendly thing, something to do on the second-to-last day of summer break – the kids of the neighborhood had gathered together and had started a game of hide-and-seek. The Pines twins, recently returned from wherever they had gone during the summer, had been asked to play.

That had been at the start of the game, six hours ago.

One kid, his name was Jacob, had been chosen as ‘it’ and had found the others pretty quickly. With inside of houses set to off-limits and hiding further than the edges of the neighborhood a thing they had agreed was not happening, he had found the first seven kids easily. Some were in trees, some were in bushes, one of them had been hiding underneath a picnic table.

But the Pines twins were still missing.

“Alright guys!” Jacob cupped his hands around his mouth, calling out as loud as he could. “We give up! Game’s over!”

Nothing happened for a second.

And then, somewhat faintly, he heard the words, “Look up!”

Jacob tilted his head back, eyes going wide as he looked up. Both Dipper and Mabel were sitting on a rooftop, leaning over the edge just enough to be able to be seen if he had bothered to look up. “…What?”

“Dunno, seemed like a good hiding place.”  Dipper shrugged one shoulder. “I mean…We didn’t go inside and we stayed in the neighborhood. We also made sure we were visible if you looked. We watched you go past us about…Eight times?”

“Yeah,” Mabel nodded. “Eight.”

“Eight times,” Dipper looked back at Jacob. “Game over, then?”

Slowly, not quite sure what was happening, Jacob nodded. “Yeah,” he turned to go back to the others. “Wait, how’d you get up there if you didn’t go inside?”

Silently, Mabel held up her grappling hook.

Chapter Text

Mabel stared down the principal.

He stared firmly back at her. “Miss Pines, you cannot bring a farm animal into this school. It is against the rules and, frankly, it will cause distractions and—”

“First of all, his name is Waddles.” Mabel put her hands on her hips. “Second of all, Waddles is one of my best friends and he goes where I go.” Her brother, standing just behind her, tucked his hands into his pockets. “Waddles is also potty-trained, so that’s not a problem either.”

“You cannot possibly think that having a pig in school is alright!”

“He’s my best friend!” Mabel patted the pig’s head and it snorted happily at her. “If it’s about leaving marks on the floor, that’s not a problem either.” She reached down and casually, as if she did it every day, picked up the pig that had to weigh at least sixty pounds.

Dipper watched his sister leave the room, an impassive look on his face. “The pig goes where she goes,” he shrugged. “You get used to it.”

With that, he walked out of the room, leaving the principal stuttering over whatever he had been trying to say.

Chapter Text

Nothing was ever proven, nothing was ever outright said, but seeing a bully run away from her locker screaming had made everyone absolutely certain that the Pines twins could get into any locked door.

The school year had started and Mabel and Dipper had returned from wherever they had spent their summer. The kids who had bullied them before had started up with the same behaviors as before, teasing them and throwing stuff at them. Dipper’s backpack had disappeared for an hour before the first locker had been opened to reveal a shrieking creature with sharp teeth and eyes that looked just a little too human.

His backpack had promptly been returned to him, anonymously.

A girl had stolen Mabel’s clothes while she was in gym and, somehow, some way, Mabel Pines had continued her day with a handmade dress, knitted out of mismatched bits of yarns and threads. No one knew quite where she had gotten the materials to make it, but she had passed by the girl who had stolen everything but her shoes.

Mabel had smiled and waved at her.

And then her locker had been opened, allowing a wave of water that had somehow been kept within the metal to rain down upon her head.

Two hours later, Mabel had cheerily accepted her skirt, sweater, and shirt back.

No one pranked the twins anymore.

Chapter Text

“Don’t touch it,” one girl muttered, yanking her friend around it. “If it’s not meant for you, Mabel might get angry.”

Her friend nodded, clasping their hands together. “I wonder who it’s meant for, though. She always has a reason in leaving things behind.” She tugged her friend towards the wall and they leaned against it, waiting.

Around them, the mall continued on like nothing was different.

The two girls, named Anette and Layla, sat with a stillness only matched by statues. Recently, Mabel Pines had been making little bits of sculpture and small pieces of jewelry and leaving them in random places. The shapes ranged from simple to the most complicated knotwork they had ever seen. Sometimes they were knitted, sometimes they were made of wire, sometimes it was a mixture.

Sometimes it was something else.

Whatever it was made out of, however it was made, it always seemed to be made for someone in particular.

And somehow, Mabel had gotten very good at making sure it got to that person, even when her method of delivery was dropping it on the floor of the mall and walking away. Anette and Layla watched as people passed by it, as if they didn’t see it. They held their breath when a boy who looked about their age paused and looked at it for a few seconds before he continued walking.

Finally, a young woman wearing clothes that were neat and clean but old and patched a couple of times showed up.

Unlike everyone else, she knelt down and picked it up, rubbing at her face as she tried to calm the tears streaming down her cheeks. Layla caught Anette’s gaze and frowned.

The woman looked like she had been crying for some time.

With the small sculptured necklace in her hands, she stood back up and continued walking. A few steps later, she looked at it and put it on, almost like she wasn’t aware that she was doing so.

Anette watched closely, her eyes narrowed.

The woman continued walking until she turned a corner and was out of sight.

“Her name’s Terri,” Mabel’s voice made both Anette and Layla jump nearly out of their skin. “Her dad lost his job, which makes a lot of things in her future look…Bad.” Mabel leaned against the wall next to them, her hands pressed together behind her back. “The necklace is a good-luck charm. I’m hoping it helps, even if it’s just a little.”

She pushed off the wall and went to rejoin the flow of people. “Oh,” she turned back to them. “Thanks for not picking it up.”

Anette and Layla watched as she disappeared into the crowd. “I could have sworn she was just outside.” Anette whispered. “Or maybe on the second floor? I thought I saw her in both of those places.”

“Yeah,” Layla whispered back. “We should go now.”

Both of them speed-walked towards the entrance of the mall, their bags of shopping hanging off their wrists.

Chapter Text

Someone notices it first when they go to pay Dipper back for something.

They’d been short on lunch money and Dipper had offered up a dollar to help them. He hadn’t asked for it to be paid back, but they had decided to do it anyway. The Pines twins inspired a sort of fear-and-awe in the way they existed, enough for people to decide that slighting them was a very bad idea.

But they’d brought a dollar to pay Dipper back with and had tried to hand it to him.

He hadn’t taken it.

Instead, he’d only stared at the pyramid on the back, at the eye on it, and seemed to zone out. Repeatedly calling his name had done nothing; it had only been when they’d flipped the dollar over and offered it again that he’d seemed to reset and take it. With a smile, Dipper nodded and walked off.

News spread quickly.

Someone had owed Mabel a couple of dollars for something and had done nearly the same thing: pyramid up, eye in sight, a Pines sibling staring at it like it was the end of the world.

A new rule was very quickly established.

If you owed the twins money and it involved dollar bills, keep the triangle out of sight. If and when possible, scribble over the eye so that it couldn’t look at them.

No one broke that rule.

Chapter Text

There was another rule really quickly established about the Pines twins.

In particular, about Dipper.

He knew a lot of things – sometimes, it was like he knew what a teacher had planned for the day before even the teacher did. He was smart, he taught classes in his free time to help students actually know things when the way the teachers taught it wasn’t working. Dipper was probably the most intelligent student in the entire school, if not the entire state.

But you needed to never call him on it.

The words, “It’s like you see everything!” had been said once and only once and they had never been repeated. Dipper had dropped his pen and his face had gone blank and no one could shift him back into a functioning person until someone had run off and retrieved Mabel.

She sat with her brother, a careful hand on his shoulder like she was anchoring him.

It took twenty minutes for Dipper to shake his head and return to normal.

After that, the rule was quickly put into effect: Don’t tell Dipper that he saw everything.

Don’t call him “Pine Tree”.

Don’t call Mabel, “Shooting Star”.

Any of those three things would result in a frozen Pines twin, the other needed to restart their minds. One particularly eagle-eyed student managed to liken it to how her uncle was after returning from a tour in the military.

It was, she said quietly to someone who wanted to know more, a symptom of PTSD.

Chapter Text

It had started with a book.

The girl, named Jenna, had been reading after a test and the teacher had decided that it was distracting and ‘Disheartening to the students who haven’t finished yet’ and took her book away from her.

Jenna had gone, nearly in tears, to talk to the Pines twins.

They could do things, could they at all get her book back? It was a birthday gift from her grandmother, the last thing she had received from her before her grandmother had passed away last year. The teacher had been unfair, she told them, she’d had the book in her lap, under her desk. Out of sight and she’d been turning the pages quietly, reading absolutely silently.

Dipper and Mabel had only looked at each other before nodding, just once.

The book was back in Jenna’s hands before the day was out.

Then it had been a music player, confiscated from someone who had been using it in the hallway. His name was Aiden and he couldn’t stand silence. It had always sounded like a ringing noise to him, even before he’d had a music player of any kind. He wouldn’t ask, he didn’t want to bother them, but his older cousin Jenna had said they’d been so nice and gotten her book back for her.

Could they get it back?

Dipper had laughed and nodded, smiling at his sister.

Mabel had approached Aiden in the hallway an hour later and handed it to him. “Put the headphones in your ears and make the wires go down the back of your shirt,” she told him. “Player in your pocket. It’ll make it harder for teachers to see it.”

With a grateful sob, Aiden had hugged her before making trembling hands steady just a little, enough to pick the device up and hug it to his chest.

After that, word spread around the students of the school that Mabel and Dipper could get anything back from teachers who had unfairly confiscated things. They wouldn’t get things that had been confiscated for being dangerous – firecrackers and anything that might be classified as a weapon – but they would retrieve just about anything else.

Dipper and Mabel would almost always say yes.

Chapter Text

His name was Henry.

He had been born with a birth defect – a couple of his fingers hadn’t formed properly, leaving short nubs instead of fingers. He had only been in the school a couple of days, hadn’t made any friends yet, and a boy named Ian had approached him and started making fun of him.

“You’re just a little freak, aren’t you?” Ian laughed.

Henry shrunk down in his seat, hiding the hand Ian was talking about. Of course it would bring bullies down upon him – it always had. People were awful about things like that, especially teenagers.

Out of the corners of his eyes, Henry saw two people step up in front of him, one to each side.

Great, he thought. More bullies.

When he looked up at them, however, they weren’t looking at him. The girl, one hand on his desk, stared at Ian with a gaze that freaked Henry out a little. “Take it back.” She said quietly. The boy, on Henry’s right, put a hand on his desk as well.

“Take it back,” he said as well. He had the same look about him, the one that freaked Henry out a little.

Despite how much it creeped him out, it also seemed reassuring in a way.

Ian looked between them, his face a violently paling white as he backed away from them, hands raised in surrender. “I- I take it back!”

“Good.” The girl looked at the boy, then nodded. They both turned back to Ian in the same movement. “Now,”

“Apologize,” the boy said through gritted teeth.

Ian whined, a quiet noise of what had to be terror. “I’m sorry, okay?” he looked at Henry, eyes wide. “I’m sorry!”

“Okay,” Henry leaned forward in his seat, between the boy and girl’s arms. “Just don’t do it again.” He watched, confused, as Ian nodded before turning on his heel and running to get away from them. “So…Who are you two?”

The moment he spoke to them, it was like the air had cleared and a weight that had been pressing into them lifted. “I’m Mabel!” the girl grinned, the lights flashing off of her braces. “This is my brother, Dipper!” she pointed down at the ground. “And this is Waddles!”

Henry looked down and saw the pig standing there, then raised both eyebrows. “Cool. He seems like a good pig. I’m Henry,” he held out his right hand without even thinking about it.

Mabel took it without hesitation, giggling as she shook it. “Friendly handshakes!” she looked serious again for a moment. “Be careful with handshakes. Shaking hands with the wrong person could end badly.”

Dipper took Henry’s hand after his sister had let it go, with just a second of hesitation. “Handshakes can lead to deals being made and there are some things you don’t want to make deals with.” He told him, glancing at the trigonometry poster handing on the wall. “Make sure you know whose hand you’re shaking.”

“…I’ll keep that in mind,” Henry laughed. “Do you guys want to see some of my drawings?”

“Yeah!” Mabel bounced on her toes for a second, then kneeled next to her pig so that she could see Henry’s desk.

Chapter Text

The first time anyone saw the bracelet, Mabel had just joined the boxing team.

It had been after practice, the first one with her actually on the team and not just trying out, and she had been pulling off her padding and gloves. The small circlet of rainbow strands had glimmered in the light of the gym and one of her teammates, a boy named Raymond, had asked her about it.

“I made it,” she told him, holding out her arm for him to see. “When I went to see my grunkles for the summer.”

“Grunkles?”

“Great-uncles,” she nodded, dropping her tapes, gloves, and padding into her bag. “They helped me make it, actually.” She turned to her left a fraction and smiled. “My brother’s here, have you met him? He could probably tell you more than I could.”

Sure enough, a minute or so after she said that, Dipper Pines walked into the gym and came to stand next to his sister. “Hey,” he jerked his chin up in a greeting, eyeing Raymond for a second. “Mabel, you almost ready to go? Mom and dad are waiting outside. They want to take us out to dinner tonight – to celebrate you getting on the team. Well,” he shrugged. “Teams.”

“Almost,” Mabel nodded. “It’s unicorn hair, by the way.”

She shouldered her bag and walked into the locker room, leaving Dipper standing next to Raymond. “…What?”

Dipper laughed. “Her bracelet. Unicorn hair.” He reached a hand into the collar of his shirt and hooked a finger around the necklace he wore, pulling it into view. It was made of the same rainbow strands, shimmering in the light. “We made them at the end of the summer, when we were preparing to come home. She’s actually the one who got the materials to make them,” he snorted out a laugh. “Mom and dad weren’t happy about the chip in her tooth. Apparently, it made the price for her dental work go up.”

“She wears braces,” Raymond felt like he had been left behind, somewhere. At some point in the conversation, Dipper had taken a turn on a road he didn’t know about and had just kept on trucking. “I don’t—”

Mabel chose that moment to return, a knitted dress pulled on over her shorts and tanktop. “Ready, Dipper?”

“Ready,” he nodded. “Nice talking to you, Raymond.”

Raymond watched both of them leave, feeling as if something important had just happened without really knowing what. It wasn’t until the door had closed behind them that he realized neither he nor Mabel had told Dipper his name.

He shivered and packed up his things as fast as he could.

Chapter Text

They found her down by the river, feet bare and her shoes sitting on a rock nearby.

Mabel Pines had a bottle in her hand, stuffing a piece of paper with what looked like a letter written in Spanish on it into the glass. She corked it up tightly before she tossed it carefully into the water, aiming for where it was deepest. “Mabel?” one of the girls asked. “What’re you doing?”

“Sending a letter,” Mabel said, distracted as she watched the bottle float downstream.

The three girls who had found her there watched with her, until the bottle disappeared from sight. “…Why does the letter need to be sent by the river?” one of them managed to get up the courage to ask. After they twins had returned from summer vacation, neither of them had acted normal. It was like something had happened to them, something big, and no one really wanted to ask what.

They had decided, as an entire student body, that they were better off not knowing.

“Because the sea port isn’t a place I can get to on a school night,” Mabel turned to look at them. “Not easily, anyway.” She looked down at the ever-present pig, sitting by her feet. “C’mon Waddles, time to go home. We need to get there in time for dinner,” she said, looking up again to see the girls still standing there. “If you’ll just excuse us.”

“Sure,” a different one spoke up this time. “Do you need a hand to get back up?”

Mabel had somehow climbed down past the rockiest parts of the shore barefoot, followed by a pig. They knew better than to question it. The only thing they could do was offer help.

“Nah,” Mabel shook her head, the thick braid of her hair bouncing off of her shoulders. “Thanks, though!”

She clambered back up onto shore, followed by her pig, and sat down on a boulder to put her shoes back on. “I’ll see you guys at school, tomorrow,” she smiled at them and wandered off into the woods, away from the path they had been walking down. Off in the distance, they heard her greet her brother.

No one knew quite what had happened to the Pines twins over the summer, but they definitely agreed that something had changed them on a fundamental level.

Chapter Text

Mabel quickly became the wrestling queen.

She was the best on the team, could pin anyone on the mat with just a few moves, and could keep them there no matter what. Everyone in her weight class both loved and feared her and soon opposing teams learned to do the same.

But they all feared a Bad Day.

They feared what would happen if she were in a bad mood during practice. In a good mood, she was a champion, fearless and frightening in her prowess.

In a Bad Mood?

In a Bad Mood, Mabel Pines was a force of nature, a creature to be feared above all else. Her moves were sharp and quick, matches ended in seconds as opposed to minutes. One second it would be go-time and the next, you would be on the mat with almost no memory of anything other than the look on her face. The only proof of what had happened would be whatever bruises were left behind.

If Mabel were in a Bad Mood, on a Bad Day, her moves could be nearly fatal, like she was fighting for her life.

Once, someone from an opposing team had taunted her on a Bad Day.

He had gotten a broken finger by accident, from where he’d managed to get it in the way as she took him down. All of her moves were legal, by the rulebook, but she could execute any of them flawlessly, with a precision that made even the coaches jealous.

And made everyone else just a little afraid of her.

Walking on eggshells around her wasn’t necessary, but her teammates had learned to recognize the Bad Moods and the Bad Days and had figured out how to work around them.

And life went on.

Chapter Text

There are rumors that say they were kidnapped that summer.

There are stories told about what might have happened, things that could have caused the changes in the twins. Mabel suddenly gaining a bunch of strength and physical power was possibly and definitely likely. Even her randomly joining the boxing team was understandable.

But Dipper?

Dipper could suddenly throw a punch like nobody’s business – the only person who could do better than him was Mabel. It makes people wonder what happened to the two of them. Did they get sent to a camp that made them into professional fighters?

Had they been tortured and had to fight their way out?

No one knew.

But Mabel had come back and joined the boxing team and the wrestling team and the rock-climbing club. Dipper had come back and formed a study group for people who needed help with their math, trained alongside his sister in most things, and made a name for himself in the scientific community.

The way their homework would sometimes be turned in with backwards writing and ciphers with keys next to them made everyone just a little bit nervous.

Especially the teachers.

Some of the whispered stories were about how they had been replaced by something from a fairy tale, like the myths and legends they had learned about in history, once. Mabel and Dipper had actually heard that one and had laughed out loud about it. When they had finished, both of them had turned to the person they’re heard it from and sighed. “We’re still us, man.” Dipper smiled.

“Definitely,” Mabel grinned, her braces glinting. “We just had an interesting summer.”

“That’s all.” Dipper continued.

No one knew whether or not to believe them.

Chapter Text

Finding Dipper Pines up on top of the shelves in the library became a common things.

It was like when Mabel handed you a gift: You accepted it, didn’t make a big deal of it, and you moved on.

The entire school had gotten used to it.

To both of the twins being not-quite-normal.

It was a survival tactic, in some ways. You accept the weird and you keep going because that was the only way the world might make sense again. In their Junior year, Mabel and Dipper had gotten decidedly stranger, especially when a rumor came up that Mabel was making a sweater for everyone in their class. Everyone who was going to graduate at the same time as them was going to get a sweater that Mabel had made and a letter from Dipper.

No one was going to refuse it.

Ian, the boy who had once been a bully to Henry, had chosen to become nicer to everyone. These days, he was a lot quieter. In Senior year, when Mabel approached him and handed him a sweater, she smiled at him. The sweater had a thumbs-up giving hand embroidered on the front of it. When he looked at it, Ian nodded once and smiled at her.

Layla and Anette were given sweaters with different smiley faces on them.

Jenna got a sweater with a book on it, Aiden got a sweater with his music player on it. The music player was embroidered on the front of a small pocket, sized exactly for the real thing. Mabel smiled when she handed it over. “There’s a flap on the inside,” she explained. “So you can have your device go into the pocket from underneath the sweater.”

Aiden had sniffed back a few tears and hugged her again.

Raymond, for reasons very few people could understand, got a sweater with a unicorn on it. The mane was the same shimmering rainbow material as the bracelet and necklace the twins wore.

Henry got a sweater with an array of pens and pencils embroidered on it.

They, and all of the others, wore their sweaters to graduation. Some were tied around waists, some were worn with whatever outfits had gone under their gowns, some were tied around shoulders, but all of them were worn.

Mabel and Dipper were not excluded from the sweater-wearing: Dipper wore a dark blue sweater with a ghost on it, Mabel wore a dark pink sweater with a magic wand and a top hat with a bunny inside of it.

When they were asked about the sweaters, no one mentioned that Mabel had been the one to make all of them.

That was one of the rules, after all: Don’t make a big deal about what either of the Pines twins gives to you.

Chapter Text

After graduation, Mabel set up a small shop in town.

Inside of it, she sold odds and ends, charms and jewelry making supplies and cute little creatures she’d knitted. She sold blank journals and sketchbooks that she’d made, so obviously creative from childhood onward that it made sense to anyone who had known her. The front half of the shop was all things she’d made – and they sold extremely well.

The back half of the shop was odder, more like something out of a fairy tale.

Charms, jewelry like the stuff she’d been leaving in random places for years, little bottles of potions, sculptures…

Her brother Dipper would sometimes sell small booklets of coded text in her shop, DVDs of the shows he made and produced and starred in. Sometimes Mabel would bundle her charms with the DVDs, offering only a smile and a few words to those who asked. “This week’s episode requires a little extra protection,” was all she would ever say.

Within three years of her shop being open, Mabel Pines had earned a reputation as a witch.

The walls of her shop were covered with eyes that had been crossed out, as well as symbols drawn directly on the wallpaper. She and Dipper had spent an entire week before the store opened drawing all of them. With her memory of dates, names, people, interests and stories, Mabel was someone to have a healthy amount of respect and fear for.

The people who walked into her shop without any sort of fear, with curiosity and wonder, would walk out with something to get them through whatever times they were going through. Good luck charms, safety sigils, packs of incense and pages of hand-drawn symbols – all of them were common in Mabel’s shop.

Sometimes, if a person was lucky enough, she’d be on a video call with one or both of her grunkles – although some said that the screen mounted on the wall was really a large, squared mirror.

If they asked, she would talk about visiting a small town called Gravity Falls, every summer since she was twelve.

The fact that no one knew where that was – or even what it was – was what earned Mabel the title of Local Witch. Dipper, when he visited, was whispered about as a mystery, a magical being in his own right, the Local Sorcerer.

Mabel outright laughed at anyone who brought either of those titles up.

And her store was almost always open.