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The sun still rises after Weirdmageddon.
It still sets too, but for the moment, Mabel’s only trying to focus on the infancy of things. After all that’s happened — the close calls, the closer calls — she wants nothing more than breath and sound. Feeling and sight.
Comfort comes in the most ordinary of things. It’s the thought of how the grass could grow under its glorious rays that brings the most peace, dismissing how easily it could wither in its heat, too. It’s how the flowers bloomed in the mornings, not how they closed their petals at night. Their beginnings, not their ends.
It’s all life. It’s all as beautiful as it was when she left it, and that’s perhaps the most mercy the world has chosen to show her.
There are still parts of her trying to convince her it was all just a bad dream.
The summer breeze sweeps through their part of the forest, a wave of gracious warmth that flows across her skin and through her hair. It’s been a while since she’s felt goosebumps, but and the more symptoms of her existence, the better. Triggering any kind of bodily response meant that she was alive, even if she couldn’t bring herself to believe it.
If there were ever a test to her optimism, it was now, when there’s simultaneously so much to be thankful for, yet not enough to be convinced of it.
Her fingers curl a little tighter around the glass sitting her lap — Mabel Juice, naturally. With how spacey it’s all been leaving her, she’s resorted to anything grounding enough to keep her planted in the present. A viable choice, given how much the concoction distracted her.
Because this happened. It did.
And she’d always heard those proverbs of loving life — treasuring today without being promised tomorrow. In children’s books and parental disposition, it’s a lesson best told through ink and word. It stayed shallow that way, the thoughts that made you think but weren’t supposed to hurt you.
This one...hurt.
A grimace comes over her, then a chill. Throwing back the remainder of the glass, Mabel washes down the thought with sugar, glitter, and a fleeting wish to put it all out of mind.
Tomorrow wasn’t promised as much as it was bartered.
Mabel remembers the darkness more than she does the light.
For what feels like a timeless lull, she’s floating — drifting in a vacuum, too similar to those few desolate seconds suspended in front of the portal. It’s the same airless realm, void of color, void of life. The only difference this time is the vague inkling that wallowing in this one is doing more harm than help.
She remembers the snap of Bill’s fingers more than she does the silence following it.
Her body is weightless when she tries to feel around for it. Like an astral projection of some dream within a dream, her body doesn’t feel like her own. It’s too light. As if someone’s scooped out all her insides and replaced them with question marks, her very being is buoyant and hollow, if only to remind her of the colossal gaps in her memories. Even the heaviest of her worries don’t feel like enough to anchor her back to reality.
Because there are gaps. That much is certain.
They’d been trapped. She remembers that much.
Heart pounding. Nearly suffocating beneath Bill’s grasp. Suspended too far in the air, but enough that closing the distance between them and the floor seemed like the lesser of two evils. The last wisp of thought to pass her mind is of terror, blood rushing to fill it at the sight of two symbols flickering back and forth in his eye.
Barely breathing, barely keeping it together.
Then nothing.
Because surely she’d blacked out from the adrenaline rush that Bill’s game of roulette had instilled in the both of them.
Surely so had Dipper.
It’s in the same heartbeat that she thinks of her brother that she’s calling out for him in the darkness. Futile, Mabel feels around for a hand that isn’t there, trembling fingers slipping through the air.
But then…what had happened? Where were they?
…Were they okay?
Did they win?
She doesn’t know. And some apprehensive part of her thinks maybe she’s better off not knowing.
But before she’s even conceiving the possibilities, she’s torn from them, a spark illuminating in the distance. Mabel perks her head up — or maybe down, or left, whichever way in this prison. But it doesn’t matter.
There’s sound and movement beyond her void. Some semblance of closure to give pause to her thoughts. There’s color...sensation...
Light…
When she breathes her first breath again, it’s more than just the air of the forest — it’s tears and regret.
It’s someone else’s sobs.
As if she’d been plucked her from one reality and hurled into this one, the feelings that return to her come feeling like one giant thud. Mabel’s far too dizzy for someone lying so still, disorientation tricking her, for an honest second, into thinking it’s the world spinning and not her head.
Her eyes are heavy when she tries to open them.
But the sounds of misery are enough to throw a lifeline into the darkness.
Through iron lids, the first thing to greet her is the sun on her skin. Underneath her, she feels the newborn greenery, more blades of grass poking out to brush against her face. They’re as ticklish as she remembers them being, a tap into warm nostalgia to help guide her back.
When the light filters through her, it isn’t a peaceful wakening as much as it is a desperate coming to. The sinking feeling in her chest is paradoxically the very thing trying to raise her up — prodding her, as if to say ‘wake up, you need to wake up. Now.’
It isn’t the ambience of the forest that brings her around as much as it is the anguished noises muddled within it. Because she knows those voice cracks anywhere.
They’re Dipper’s.
And the fragments of consciousness start to return a little faster at the sound of them, when she realizes.
There’s always a flurry of thoughts that rush her. They have all summer — he’s never known, but they have to, when he’s put himself in danger every other day: Is he hurt? Is he hurt badly? The nagging worry that something’s wrong is what finally beckons her to the waking world, taking in her surroundings as they find their way to her.
She flexes each finger as the feelings return to them, nails scraping into the earth.
(why is she so weak?)
When she opens her eyes for real, her vision is still swimming, but she can make out everything. There are trees again, towering and lush with green. She hears the birds perched within them, the breezes, a creek running somewhere deeper in the forest. It’s all as untouched as it was at the start of summer, when they’d came exploring through it armed with backpacks and journals and youthful invincibility.
The way it should be, like their lives were never in danger.
Like hell on earth never happened.
‘What…?’
The next sensations to return are two blooming within her, opposites of the other. The first is a cold inkling that not all is as it should be. The second is a warm, quivering weight pressing her deeper into the ground. It alleviates the chill, briefly.
She has a horrible hunch she already knows who it is.
Paralyzed where she lies, she shelves the root cause of why for a time that isn’t this one. Fighting through it, Mabel raises her head just enough — and true to instinct, it’s a bush of red-crusted brown slumped against her middle that’s keeping her down, twitching with every ragged breath he drew.
She’s paralyzed, but she’s feeling.
When it isn’t the chill and the weight, it’s the arm snaked around the top of her. Face down, Dipper has a fistful of her sweater bunched in one hand, and it takes until now to realize that he’s been murmuring — to her, to the trees, to whoever’ll listen. She isn’t sure. But it’s nothing coherent, only a mess of babbles and hiccups and…
And she can’t remember the last time — if ever — that he’s cried this hard in his life.
‘...Why is he crying…?’
Was there something wrong with their grunkles?
Mabel reaches up to grab for something — his head, a shoulder, but her frail state limits her to reaching only as far as his vest’s bottom edge. Her voice almost doesn’t sound like her own when she speaks it, a haunted sounding whisper just soft enough to break his silence.
“Dip…per…?”
The world collects itself a little more, and a little more.
He freezes. Time stills.
She can’t tell if it’s her brain still trying to catch up with her, or if he really is drawing himself back that slowly.
When Dipper’s face comes into view, her body immediately swells with something different — relief, however tattered, but relief nonetheless. Sitting here as he was, it’s the indisputable proof that her brother’s alive, that Bill hasn’t taken him.
That they won.
And it’s comforting, for a moment.
But then Dipper takes one look into hers before he falls apart all over again.
It happens in a blur. One second, they’re looking at each other, in the next, he’s lunging at her. Blessed blue and beautiful, the sky greets her when he lifts her up to hug close against his chest. More and more proof that the world’s been saved, that he’s here, that she’s here, that this isn’t a dream.
And when she leans into it, she can feel it. His heart. It’s still racing for reasons she’s not sure of yet, but the mantras he leaves in the crown of her head clue her into his hysteria.
It isn’t ‘Grunkle Stan’ is this, ‘Grunkle Ford’ is that.
It’s only a good sign until she makes out ‘You’re okay you’re okay you’reokayMabelyou’reokay—’
‘What’s wrong? Dipper what happened? Why are you crying? Where’s everyone, why are we here, are we safe?’ She wants to say it all, but nothing’s working as it should. Like she’s only just woken up for the first time in years, her head feels stuffed full of cotton, her tongue a dead weight in her mouth, numb as the rest of her.
Something’s being kept in the dark, if it isn’t her. Why are they in the forest, why can’t she remember, why won’t he say anything, why is she so weak—
His breathless follow-up of ‘you’re back’ is what sends the shock waves coursing through her system.
The way he says it, over and over, like he’s trying to convince himself.
Something in her starts to crack.
When it does, the memories break free with it. She falls back in time to the moment before everything cut to black, but nothing comes linear. Storming the Fearamid. The game of cat and mouse. Forming the Zodiac, abandoning it, a taunt, a cage, a red burning light.
The flash of the shooting star in Bill’s eye connects the dots too perfectly. Just before, the echo of a threat dripping with pure evil, pure insanity—
“I think I’m gonna kill one of ‘em now, just for the heck of it — !”
And it hits her, like the universe has had a vengeance saved solely for her.
It hits her hard.
‘No…’
The gravity of what’s just happened hits her. Crushes her. He’s breathing too fast and she can’t breathe at all, the dawning of the reality she’s just woken up to starting to set in.
She’s warm and alive cradled in her brother’s arms, but she can’t overcome the numbing truth that she doesn’t feel as whole as she used to.
‘No, no…’
Nothing is right. Nothing is real.
Except everything is real, and it really, really shouldn’t be.
And she’s finally forced to believe it: his desperate, manic whispers of how she’s alive.
Because there are pieces of her that died with Bill.
If she knew what heartbreak was before, nothing could have ever prepared her for the sight of Stan’s blank expression as he stared at her, unrecognizing.
Dipper doesn’t say it, but something is indeed wrong with their grunkles — the first being that Ford isn’t Ford at all, it’s Stan, swallowed whole by the tan coat and boots that have been thrusted on to him. It’s Ford who’s adorned the guise of Mr. Mystery, his reasons as to why as bewildering as the expression he’s wearing right now.
Dipper doesn’t say it, because for some reason he knows something she doesn’t. Ford and him exchange an unsettling look that she can’t comprehend, before they both turn to Stan.
He blinks at all of them.
And for a heartbeat, she’s fooled into thinking that even Stan might know more than she does, but he can’t. Not with how he looked at them all now, like some lost child in a world suddenly too big for him. ‘Maybe he’s hiding something,’ she thinks, but it’s a thought she downs just as quickly, the way he stares at her as if she held the answers to questions she should know.
The panic flares a little more.
And more and more, when they drag her clawing arms away from Stan.
“He can’t be gone!”
It’s the first coherent string to come from her daze, and it comes sounding as disbelieving as the rest of her. Because for some sick, twisted reason, Ford says that Stan’s gone, that something’s happened that's stolen her uncle and his memories.
She doesn’t have the time to dwell on her own identity crisis when Stan’s was on the brink of extinction.
Even with the house in shambles, it doesn’t stop her from flying through the living room to her scrapbook. Mabel plants herself next to him on the armchair, driven by pure outright refusal to believe this was anything beyond what she could fix. It couldn’t be. Nothing was.
She shows him sketches. Pictures. She recites him pages upon pages from her scrapbook, fervently retelling their summer until her voice is hoarse. It’s a good thing, maybe — it’s teaching her how to breathe again.
With every picture comes its story, saving brevity for a time less dire. She runs her mouth like her life depends on it. It’s feeding him answers and feeding her time, the distraction so dearly needed to pull them both out of their own heads for a while.
This had to get through to him. It had to.
When Stan laughs and points at the photos, he mumbles his own vague recollections, and it’s working. He pieces the days together with ease the more she talks about them, and it has her pulse racing with hope this time.
A good thing, she knows for a fact — it’s teaching her heart how to beat again.
When the sun retires over the hillside, Stan closes the scrapbook with a yawn. They end the day with names and faces he didn’t know about hours ago, and the urge to cry this time is with exhausted disbelief instead of agonizing doubt.
Once the door to Stan’s room closes, the relief is temporary. Because she knows there’s another storm she needs to weather, and she can feel it brewing right behind her. Courageous as she thinks she’ll ever be, she turns to face it.
Dipper’s expression is one she reads so easily, it’s like he’s not even trying to hide it.
He doesn’t need to ask for her to answer him.
Gently, as if doing so any other way could provoke him, Mabel rests her hands over her heart. Her smile, however fragile, feels like her own, for a moment.
“I’m okay. Everything’s fine.”
His demeanor isn’t, though.
“Mabel, you’re not fine, you just—!”
“—fainted! I fainted!” she cuts him off, surrendering her arms to keep him at bay. It’s not a sentence she needs to hear him finish, scrambling for her own makeshift reasons. “It was just— that bubble, I swear. It takes a lot out of you making a fantasy land, who would’ve guessed? Take my word for it.”
Where Dipper’s face is brimming with too many conflicting emotions, it’s Ford’s expression that’s…something else she can’t read entirely. But his tone tells her more than enough.
Before her twin has a chance at another rebuttal, Ford bypasses him to drop to his knee in front of her, both hands firm on her shoulders.
“Mabel, I need you to be honest with me…” he pleads, shaking her gently. If she listens hard enough, it sounds like his voice is shaking too. The question is simple enough, and it should be, but the way he says it frames it as something existential: “Are you okay?”
She brings her own hands on top of his, fighting the urge to pry them off. On any other day she’d be happy to be the center of attention, but this was too much too soon. “Grunkle Ford, I’m fine. Promise!”
It sounds even less convincing the second time. There’s an unspoken, knee-jerk quip of ‘Oooh, maybe I’m a ghost’ to break the tension, but she’s not about to fuel their paranoia any more than she already has her own.
Breaking gazes, Ford’s eyes leave hers to study the rest of her. Visibly dazed, he moves to take her face in both his hands, her cheeks and neck, and then some. He starts counting under his breath, very plausibly the number of cuts marring her skin.
“Okay, you got me. So maybe I’ve got a few bumps and bruises,” she says. She can’t tell if he’s even listening, but doesn’t stop. “But— that’s nothing a few band aids can’t fix!”
Or, as much as she might hate it, a hospital. She’d make that sacrifice. Because seriously, she was fine. This was fine. Just as they had before, Dipper and Ford exchange a look she doesn’t completely know the context behind, but buries the lingering nerves beneath a smile that could fool anyone.
She really was fine.
She was fine.
Dipper’s never been the type for tight hugs, but Mabel has a feeling that’s not the case anymore.
It’s only a thought that strikes her when she passes him in the hallway, halted by his sudden weight thrown onto hers.
Now more than ever, he’ll wrap his arms as tightly as he can around her, like he’s never going to see her again. It’s not exactly a possibility anymore, but this summer has taught them more than just to believe the unbelievable.
Bill has instilled a lot of fear in him that it had ever been a possibility to begin with.
Every grab of her hand, every means to protect her, to have a single snap of a finger amount it all to nothing.
He hugs her with everything he’s got.
In the beginning, she thinks she feels something. Because there’s always been something — a nova of warmth and safety, the innocent reminders that they were never alone so long as they had each other. When it isn’t, it’s some smaller tinge of light that passes through them in the quiet, sensitive moments, rare as they are.
Everything since has just been…an empty touch.
They start off suffocating — achy, but not to the point of her definition of ‘bone-crushing.’ Not as tight as hers have been, but tight enough to matter. They don’t hurt.
No, it’s hers that hurt the most: the loosest, saddest reciprocations that she’s ever given in her life.
The fact that she can’t understand why.
His attempts taper as the days pass, like he’s lost the will to try. The first time she feels him grab her with a little less fervor, something sinks in her chest before she realizes that there had been something hard there to begin with.
Soon, he stops giving them entirely.
He disappears into the forest from dawn until dusk, his cap pulled over his eyes. Dipper keeps his eyes glued to the doorways and handles, slipping through the house without so much as a word. He doesn’t tell anyone where he’s gone and why he’s gone there.
The closest she gets to an explanation is the glimpse she steals on the one occasion that he walks by their mirror. He’s chosen only today to face his reflection.
It puts knots in her stomach, what she sees.
Slouched shoulders. Bruises. Bags. Eyes that have seen too much and slept too little, the ones she hasn’t met for what’s felt like days. She wonders how a face could look so sunken and swollen at the same time.
Before she gathers too much, he turns to leave with his cap drawn down over his eyes again.
And maybe it’s the way he leaves their room, like a ghost across the floor without a single creak from the floorboards. It’s the skin two shades too light that spark a new fear altogether. Bill may have only used her as a bargaining chip, but…
Maybe she’s not the only one who’s died here.
Soda makes her stomach sick, but she doesn’t turn it down when Ford pops open a can for her.
Their midnight rendezvous is a quiet one. The living room offers an ambience safer than the hollow tension of the attic. With the other two asleep, they finally have the privacy for her to get the whole story. Next to Stan, she’s just as clueless.
On the edge of her seat, Mabel retreats into crossed arms as Ford relays it to her.
He tells her everything.
But as the story unravels, it forms more and more knots in her stomach. She fists her sweater out of his line of sight when it’s too much, but she won’t give him any indication to stop if she can help it. He won’t get as descriptive as she wishes he would, but she’s starting to think that maybe it’s a blessing in disguise.
Her imagination’s doing too well of a job of painting the picture for her.
Ford fills in the gaps, leaving no detail spared. He bridges the empty spaces she hadn’t realized were there, but with aching worry of everything she’d feared.
Stan had spoken up a second too late.
‘This can’t be happening...’
But it is. Stan’s missing his memories, and she was the price he paid. Dipper’s missing all sense of self, and she’s the reason why. All of this, and Ford’s the one left grappling with their broken reality — and it only clicks with her just sitting at the table, Ford’s disjointed method tending to her earlier. He wasn’t tallying up the cuts on her face.
He was counting for a pulse.
‘This…can’t be happening…’
She has so many questions, but no voice to ask them. They keep coming. They build with every new revelation, mountains to bury the most chilling one of all, confined to some pocket of her chest that she dares not to open.
Her body’s intact, so...
How did….he kill her…?
How did he bring her back?
She hides the grimace too well.
Ford talks at length, but it’s somehow her voice that sounds the most fatigued when she finally speaks it. When he draws a silence longer than the ones that came before, it’s her cue to a forlorn thought she breathes into the table and its scratches.
“…so that’s what happened, huh…?”
“…Stanley wouldn’t have had it any other way,” he says, reserved. He won’t peel his own eyes away from his can, and she hardly blames him. She can’t either. “It was your life, or it wasn’t worth it.”
The world. The whole world. It’s saying a lot for someone like her, who nearly ended it.
“…and he doesn’t remember, does he?”
A frown this time. Ford shakes his head, drumming his fingers lightly along the side of the can.
“I’m almost certain. And we’re trying to keep it that way. On top of the task of retrieving his memory, I don’t believe he…needs to know what really happened to you.”
She agrees to that, the smallest nod.
For as many questions as she might have, there are a lot of things she doesn’t want to know happened to her, too.
Another lapse of silence falls between them. Each time they do, she forces herself to focus what little attention she can on anything but this. The bubbling of the fish tank, the carbonation of her untouched soda — but it’s never enough. It’s an information overload in the worst way possible, the fact that this all feels like too much in one sitting, yet she can still somehow process each piece in clarity.
“You answered me before, but it wasn’t hard to tell that you were fibbing…”
In her peripheral, she can see he’s looking at her now, but she can’t bring herself to meet him. His voice drops even lower, like there’s a secret waiting within it.
“I know you didn’t want to say it in front of your brother, but I need you to tell me the truth now — are you okay?”
Her heart quickens at that. The amount of dread in his voice already tells her he’s afraid of the answer, but he’s their pillar now.
As if he’s only just chosen now to eavesdrop on them, Mabel steals a glance behind her to look for a pine tree hat she knows isn’t there. She swears she heard the creaking wood, but it may as well just be her mind still playing tricks on her. Still.
With unrelenting doubt, she sweeps her eyes back to look over Ford’s shoulder too, before sinking back into her arms.
She still won’t look at him.
“…I’m kinda shaken up,” she lets slip, staring blankly at the can. It’s the understatement of the century. She hasn’t been honest with herself yet, let alone anyone else. It’s an icky feeling. “I guess anyone who actually…died would be, too.”
And he tenses when she says that — died. It sounds like poison, the kind that ended you slowly. If Bill’s darkness couldn’t take her, the reality of dealing with its aftermath stood a better chance.
“…and Dipper?”
It’s a good question. She’d like to know herself.
“I don’t know. I really wish I did.”
“Has he been acting any different? Distant, even?”
A mix of both, and too much else.
There’s a lot wrong with her brother.
For as seasoned as she’s been in picking apart his feelings, it’s so much harder when he won’t look at her. The occasions are rare, and when he does, he masks what he can beyond what he’s ever tried to hide before. If the glance she had in the mirror was anything to go by, it’s more than he’s letting show.
They’re not like the sleepless faces he sports all too often, but it adds a layer of uneasiness that wasn’t there before.
He’s angry too. She feels that.
It probably accounts for the times she’s seen him disappear into the forest.
“He acts like he’s fine, but...do you ever get the feeling where something bothers you more than you want everyone else to know…? It feels a lot like that.”
He’s good at that, after all.
‘He looks at me like I’m still dead.’
The stretch of silence between them goes so long, it hurts this time. Like the last bit of betrayal that her body has against her, a sob erupts from her chest without warning. She’s too exhausted to cry, but cracking comes a lot easier, these days.
“…It’s all my fault, Grunkle Ford.”
The high whine of the aluminum can scraping the wood startles her more than it should.
“—It isn’t your fault,” Ford counters, sitting forward abruptly. She finally musters up enough courage to look at him, and his eyes just as despondent as she imagined they’d be. He shakes his head, insistent. “It isn’t anyone’s.”
She’s half expecting ‘It’s mine,’ but there’s comfort in his answer. It isn’t his either. They’ll hurt each other thinking that way.
“Then why does it...?”
“Because you won’t tell yourself otherwise.”
Her uncle’s voice takes on a firmness she’s never heard in it before, if only to snap her out of her mentality. Pushing his own can out of the way between them, Ford’s halfway decided to try and reach over to her, but his hands remain frozen at the middle of the table.
“Mabel Pines, this is not your burden to carry. What happened was out of our control. We didn’t have a choice — and still, we were able to fix it.”
“But at what cost, Grunkle Ford?” she begs, peering right through him for the answers. She’s aware her voice is elevating above the threshold of what she deemed quiet, but the willpower to fight it is dwindling. “Grunkle Stan lost his memory. We have to fix him.”
Another sob. Another shake. A hand clapping to her mouth, then another to suppress it, like the first wasn’t enough. Because he isn’t the only one that needs fixing.
“...and Dipper…”
No. No. She’s not letting herself go that far tonight.
She’s not about to venture into thinking about what it did to him for her to fall limp at his side.
How his mess of a state when she came around probably wasn’t even the worst of it.
Wiping at her eyes, the tears start to gather, shameful. This is all her fault. They’re trying to revive two separate ghosts at the same time, but this one had the burden of dying. It’s a heavy thought they all have to shoulder now. In a maelstrom of too many questions and not enough answers, the mere thought that she isn’t who she used to be could bring her to her knees, if she lets it.
They’re sitting at the kitchen table, but she’s never felt more lost in the world.
But at the end of the night, he finds her. Of course he does. Ford closes the distance between them, stretching both hands the rest of the way to cover hers, squeezing them in reassurance. Two fingers friendlier, two extra to keep her grounded in this. She meets his frayed eyes with her puffy ones.
“…Breathe. It will all be okay, Mabel,” he soothes, tone thinly veiled with regret. His smile is worn and tired, but of everything she’s seen since she first woke up, it reminds her the most of home. “You’re alive. And we need you.”
For more than Stan’s recovery, and she’ll allow herself to believe that much.
He curls his fingers a little tighter over hers, speaking words to start the journey home.
“We love you.”
Bartered or not, her life’s hers again.
The sun is well in the sky by the time she rises from the porch to her feet. Her glass is empty again, but even after three cups of Mabel Juice, she’s still parched. It leaves her feeling like there are firecrackers in her veins, jitters and all, and maybe that’s a sign to stop.
But it isn’t. Because she’s already standing in front of the fridge, a waiting pitcher on the middle shelf.
Without hesitation, she’s at the counter to pour her cup full again.
Standing still isn’t one of her favorite things — it’s wasted time, but she’s finding herself doing it more often. They’re golden opportunities for the rainclouds to come for her, and when they don’t, they just reinforce how much she sways in place.
She’s started fighting back the only way she knows how: admiring everything. The rainclouds can’t get her if she knows there’s a sun hiding behind it. There's something therapeutic in simply living in the moment, adoring birds and butterflies, a world restored to its former glory.
Life is precious, but it isn’t a proverb anymore. It’s a learned lesson.
“—You thirsty, kiddo?”
And before she slips too deeply, Mabel snaps back into herself at the sound of the other voice in the kitchen. Then, even more when she feels it trickle over the cup’s brim and down her hand. Onto the counter.
Stan. He’s slowly reverted back to the pet names — a welcoming sign of recovery, however small it could be.
By habit, she defaults to her playful grin.
“You got that right,” she says, wiping damp hands against her skirt. “It’s hot out there. ‘Feels like my face is gonna melt off.”
Mabel Juice probably isn’t the best choice then, but she doesn’t like the idea of being in any other state that isn’t the detached one it puts her in. A buffer for the sadness, for everything else after-the-fact. It keeps everything feeling like looking through foggy glass.
‘Or maybe I’m still trying to wake myself up from this dream...’
She slurps the edge of the cup loudly, watching the waterline shrink to a safe level for her to carry it. Before she has the chance to reach for the pitcher, Stan’s already well ahead of her, both hands wrapped around the container to put it away.
An act of politeness, or the last sign from the universe to tell her she’s really had enough.
Regardless, Mabel lets him take it, and she seats herself at the table.
Even after closing the fridge, he keeps himself hovering by it, reaching for the cupboards above his head. The stockpile of canned meat barely has a dent in it...she’s pretty sure they’re all the same kind too, but he still struggles picking one. Strange, considering there’s no need to ration anymore, but he still bounces between which can to open.
“Maybe you should stay inside then, kiddo. Wouldn’t want to send you home to your parents with a hospital bill.”
Stan laughs at his own wisecrack, but it’s not like his usual. It’s hesitant. Nervous.
“—‘Guess that’s an upgrade from a casket.”
Ah.
Of all the memories he’s recovered, she should have expected that her apparent demise would resurface, just as so many of them had.
She still shudders when he says it.
Part of her wants to run to his arms — or maybe Ford’s, if this was what had him pacing around last night. To try so hard and still have it come to this...She already feels it lighting another forest fire in her heart that she needs to put out. Because he can’t take the blame for this too.
Quietly (hesitantly) accepting it, she lets the comment slide.
There’s a comfort in the dark humor. It’s just like him. He’s trying to erase this all as one giant joke, and she couldn’t be more appreciative. She’s been waiting days for the punchline.
It’s just like him, except that it isn’t like him at all.
Stan would sooner joke about kicking his own bucket before he even breached territory into hers, but it isn’t his fault. He isn’t Stan yet, he doesn’t know his boundaries. He doesn’t remember himself completely, let alone anyone else.
He’s still trying to find himself.
Mabel offers him a strained smile, peering down into her cup.
“Heh-heh…yeah…”
Glitter settles at the bottom. Swishing it, Mabel keeps her eyes on the sparkling twister in her cup. It feels a lot like the churning in her stomach.
“…But I’m okay. Everything’s okay!” she reminds him, cheer forced. “And I’m glad it’s okay.”
The smart thing to do...is let this be. Let his joke disappear with this drink, down her cup and walk away from this. That’s the smart thing.
But…so much has stayed bottled up. She’s pushed it down, neglected it, the hope it would go away if she ignored it long enough. She’s stripped her life of its misfortunes to fill instead with distractions, but if her own sugary concoction has served to remind her of anything, it’s that living in perpetual respite isn’t living at all.
Her eyes stay in the cup. Stan’s still fumbling with the can opener.
She forgets who she’s talking to, for a moment, chuckling.
“...It’s...kinda funny, you know?” Another swish. “I...really thought it would hurt.”
Being ripped from this world. The one she loved so much. At this point, Stan knows well what she’s talking about, but the ‘d’ word is already one she’s said too many times for this life. Mabel smiles despite herself.
“It didn’t. Everything else did.”
The frantic heart trying to help him recover his memories. The upset stomach of a soda that wouldn’t agree with her. Every silence she’s ever held with Ford, every missed opportunity to return her brother’s affections.
Dipper’s been passing through her mind a lot, now.
“Yeah?”
From the counter, an acknowledgement that he’s still listening. Mabel barely registers that he’s said anything at all.
‘Sprinkles. It needs more sprinkles.’
The pink crystally ones. But Stan’s blocking the cupboard she needs to get to, and rather than ask him to move, she opts for emptying the sugar bowl. Taking to the counter on the opposite end of the kitchen from him, she pours spoon after spoon into her cup, losing count.
“Yeah…” she starts, downcasted. “Because...not knowing if everything’s gonna be okay is almost worse than...not being okay, you know?”
It almost sounds senseless. Had she said it with three less tons of sugar in her, it might’ve been.
And maybe it is, she reminds herself, because in all of this, she’s only ever speaking on Dipper and Ford’s behalf. They’re the ones that had to endure the trauma, not her. She blissfully slept through it. Being mindful is the least she can be right now.
“It’s hard.”
Stan must read it for face value. If he’s digesting anything she’s saying, she can’t see it facing this way. He doesn’t give any cue otherwise. Mabel pulls herself a little more inward.
How they lived with this dread — for even a minute — is beyond her.
‘How Dipper spent even a second like this…’
It won’t leave her alone. She grips the spoon a little harder, pausing.
“…and hurting your brother…hurts a lot more than I thought.”
Losing your other half. It feels a lot like dying, she understands that now.
Stan’s mourning of his wax twin has made a lot more sense recently.
The long stretch of silence that follows her is deafening. The crunch of the can opener stills, the grating of metal-on-metal stopping sharp. It triggers everything else.
The barely-there hum of the fridge, electing right now to shut off. The house groans with age at every step they take in it, but the floorboards have decided to be soundless just for them. As if the birds and all their friends have unanimously chosen just this moment to take an oath of silence, the summer goes quiet and Stan speaks for them all.
“Mabel…”
…But it’s too quiet. Too vulnerable. Too much, and she vaguely wonders where exactly she’d been planning to go with this.
“Mabel.”
‘Shut up, stop talking! Just go upstairs!’
She keeps her eyes locked on the staircase when she pivots on her heel to leave, beelining for the attic.
But she won’t get far. The softest, gentlest pinch on the back of her sweater halts her in place. Then, two hands cupping her shoulders from behind.
“Mabel…kiddo, look at me.”
She doesn’t have a choice. Stan turns her to face him, insistent.
He crouches almost to her level. Stan brings one hand to cup the bottom of her chin, angling just enough to catch the sunlight in her eyes. There aren’t tears yet, but if anything in this world is more certain than her love of it, it’s how easily the weight of that love could crush her.
They have moments where they truly think he’s back. They feel a lot like this, when his tone shifts just enough for them to notice. If she were blind to it before, it’s only now that Stan suddenly seems like he understands what’s going on, that maybe he knows more than he’s been leading on.
“That’s not your burden to carry.”
That maybe it wasn’t Dipper listening that night.
“But it’s yours?!” she snaps, abrupt. It isn’t angry — never angry, not to Stan, but with how little control she’s had over her body, she isn’t sure of a lot of things anymore.
Her hands start to tremble, a pool of her drink beginning to form at her feet.
“—And I’m supposed to let you believe that?!”
That’s not even the implication he made, but how he says it, it’s like…
Like he’s asking for it.
“You are, ‘cause it is,” he answers, blunt. “And I’ll carry it.”
A wiped mind, a warped memory, and now the weight of her life, like he hasn’t suffered enough.
“But it’s not fair, Grunkle Stan!”
Her outcry tears through the kitchen, scornful and unforgiving, but Stan doesn’t budge. And maybe she was expecting he would — because the sight of him steadfast to her shriek has her clawing at the fabric of her sweater. It burns the harder she digs her nails into the pattern, a surge short of breaking her own skin.
“It’s not!”
It isn’t. It isn’t.
They didn’t deserve this. They never asked for this, having the fibers of her life threads snapped in their face.
Having the thought that her life hanged precariously in their hands at all.
And all this time, they’re still there, gruesome images her brain’s conjured that she can’t blink away hard enough. Even now, she still finds her mind flashing straight to her brother, and no, no, she can’t do this right now, not here, she can’t think about every breath he took that she didn’t have. She can’t think about the gut-twisting sensation of falling limp at his side, where no amount of shaking could wake her up.
She knows him. She knows him too well.
“He isn’t...he won’t—"
‘forgive himself,’
“H-he…”
‘can’t move past this, won’t—’
Won’t forget this. Won’t let this go.
Won’t ever be the same again.
None of them will.
It’s heavy. It’s so heavy.
It’s all so heavy, enough that it sends her to the floor with a plastic cup following after.
At first, she doesn’t even feel herself hit it. The shockwaves through her knees are lost to the numbness that’s been crawling down from her scalp. It’s the feeling of aged wood before bruised bones — but she’s not even allowed to feel that, because there’s a voice inside her head still tormenting her that feeling anything at all is a gift.
Curled in on herself, Mabel claps a hand tight against her mouth to stop the sobs from coming out. Anyone else racing into the kitchen to find her will be too much. She’s laying against the floor ready to come undone any second now, the wish that she could fade away to nothing and take all the heartbreak with her. It’d be doing them a favor.
Ghosting at the back of her head, there’s more rationale to keeping it clapped against her lips, for fear that she’ll cry so hard that she’ll end up a shell just like Stan too.
This is her burden. She’s hurt so many of her loved ones, this is her burden, her’s alone. Nobody deserved to help her carry it.
For eons, he only stands there.
For eons, she waits for something to come take her — the sugar, the apathy, unconsciousness. Anything to snatch her while she’s struggling just to catch her breath, the morbid hope that she never will.
When the initial shock finally passes, Mabel hears Stan shuffling outside her field of vision. Without a single word, he seats himself in the sticky puddle her drink’s just made, tentatively reaching her way.
Piece by piece, he tries collecting her from the floor.
Either thirteen was still in his realm of “child” or he must really not care at this point, he extends both his hands to help bring her into his lap. And she fights it at first because no, there’s too much she doesn’t deserve right now. Tenderness is one of them. But Stan’s persistent hold of her leaves no room for exception.
The sturdier his grip of her, the more she realizes he isn’t letting go. Not again.
And like it’s the only permission she ever needed — all this time, this whole agonizing time — Mabel opens her heart and wails.
For minutes, it’s all she can do.
It all comes to seize her — maybe for the first time. It’s taken every shred of willpower to fight off the dark thoughts. Tucking them away in scraps of paper only works for so long. Pretending they didn’t exist only works a little longer. Diversion after diversion, day after day.
Like this is the only chance she’s been allowed to feel everything in its entirety, her true feelings manifest the only way they know how, as a string of broken notions that were never meant to be.
“H-He’s never going to forget what that f-felt like, Grunkle Stan…” she chokes, burying her eyes in his shoulder. Dipper. “Never ever....”
It comes sounding as heartbreaking as it did in her head, like she’s wasting away with every word.
Because it’s a sensation she personally put him through. The kind you never forget, no matter how hard you try. The kind that fractures you so cleanly that you can put yourself back together, but knowing that nothing can fill the cracks beneath the surface.
She’s weeping into the empty shell of her uncle, but if she weighs on that thought any more, she’ll break just like her brother.
“Dipper promised he’d never break my heart, and I did that—!”
She knows her brother. She knows there’s a piece of him that will never come back.
Because like Ford, she so desperately wants to ask him “are you okay?” but she sees the funerals swirling in his eyes if she gets too close. She’s already made him live a few torturous minutes of it. He’s already lived them in another lifetime, the ones she couldn’t stop. Keeping the distance is so much easier.
He promised not to break her heart, yet she’s all but shattered his in ways that can never be mended.
“He’s…never going to forget…”
But it takes her a painfully long time to realize he isn’t the only one.
Before another wave crashes over her, it’s stopped short by the breath Stan draws that’s a little shakier than the ones before. It shudders and it wavers, but he speaks the most blessed words she could ever hear:
“And neither will I, pumpkin…”
Just like that, and something gets through to her that hadn’t before.
In the midst of everything, she’d somehow lost sight of his sacrifice.
Her mouth hangs open out of his line of sight, still trying to process it. How could…she have ever seen past it? She’d never even think about holding this against him, but…
But it’s still Stan that spoke up a heartbeat too late. Stan, whose heart broke first before anyone else’s, whose broke so irreparably that it wasn’t just a fragmented memory he had to fix anymore.
The air around them changes in a way she can’t explain, but she’s happy not to.
Still trembling, Mabel pulls herself back to meet his gaze again. It feels like only just now that she’s looking and truly seeing, that Stan’s eyes are just as pained as hers. He’s walked with the same guilt she has, exponentially and twice as unforgiving. He’s understood her better than anyone.
Has he felt this way since the start? Has he told anyone?
Like everything that’s been scattered has only just returned to him, Stan looks at her with all the pieces that had been missing this whole time.
‘Is this him...?’
The words are the same, but the emotions behind them have taken on a life of their own.
“…Grunkle Stan…?”
She doesn’t get to find out. And when he reels her in to hug tight to his chest again, she doesn’t care to. Stan keeps her tucked close to him, soaking up more and more of her spilled drink the longer they sit in it, but not caring in the least bit. It speaks volumes.
She grabs a fistful of his jacket, babbles muffled in his shoulder.
“It...wasn’t supposed to happen like that...”
“I know, sweetie.”
“He wasn’t supposed to h-hurt us…” Bill. He knows.
Stan holds her a little closer, pained. “…I know.”
He knows.
He swears he’s recovered most of it. But she knows it can’t be true. On any other day, he’d sit here fidgeting with unease, not knowing what to say or do. The fact that he knows with perfect understanding should be enough to convince her this is still a bad dream.
But Stan’s hands feel too real when they slide down to rub circles into her back. They’re too genuine when they comb through her hair. He shushes and he rocks her, small comforts that put weight back in her body and take it off her lungs.
The words hanging on her lips won’t mean anything to anyone else. They’ll fall on deaf ears that won’t accept them, the saving graces who never placed the blame on her when this all began. But they’ll heal the gaping hole still burned in her heart, even if no one else but her needs to hear them.
They fall, and they fall for her alone.
“I’m sorry…I’m so, so sorry…”
She’s so tired.
She’s so, so tired.
The most Mabel can bring herself to do is slump against his shoulder, half lidded eyes staring blankly, unfocused.
Later — minutes, hours, however long they sit there — some blanket of peace drapes across this moment, her eyes floating up towards the afternoon light pouring in from the window. There’s a promise hidden in there, somewhere, that there are brighter things to come.
She’s so tired, but it finally feels like waking up.
It’s a little early in the season for hot chocolate, but Ford doesn’t bat an eye when she fixes a cup for both of them.
It’s midnight again, but the world is a little lighter this time.
Rather than melting into the table, Mabel keeps herself upright and bright-eyed as they chatter into the night. She talks yarn and glitter, rom-coms and karaoke. At some point hours later, they breach the topic of the coming school year, but it doesn’t frighten her for a change.
“Have you ever met a teenage boy?”
Ford’s smile isn’t worn this time. He even laughs. “I was one, dear.”
“They’re the grossest, aren’t they?”
“Very,” he agrees, a slight raise of his mug as if to cheers to that. “I would know. I lived with one of them.”
He talks college days and science projects. Research grants and internships. It’s stuff she can’t completely wrap her head around, but Mabel listens to it all in blissfully cluelessness. She’d rather struggle to grasp his fairy tale youth than everything else that’s happened.
They bounce off one another with bubbling thoughts and quips that feel right. For once since things started to return to normal, it doesn’t feel out of place to smile. The brittle tension lining her uncle’s shoulders has vanished, and it’s taken much of her own with it. Without it, there’s enough radiance in the both of them to wander off into stories with happier endings.
She doesn’t lose herself this time, but he still comes searching for her.
It isn’t a hand reaching across the table tonight — it’s an impulse decision to scoop her clean out of her chair and into his lap without warning. It’s sudden, but she’s laughing, and for just this instance, so filled with joy that she wonders what being lost had ever felt like. In her own therapeutic means, she’s started counting the seconds as they pass for moments like this, the ones that make her feel the most alive.
It’s a minute, until it isn’t.
It’s three.
Her smile wavers the longer he holds her. Ford isn’t one for prolonged contact, but no part of her would think about pushing away now. It’s too telling, the way her uncle’s hand spreads against the base of her neck, how adamant he is to keep it there. It says so much to her — but “protective” translates the clearest. He has every right to be, after all of this.
She reads him like an open book, but it isn’t through his journal entries this time.
It’s the lump in his throat that tells her more than the ink. Ford sounds like he’s been breathing steady for the first time in a long time recently, but she doesn’t miss the hitch in it when she tucks her head a little closer to him. They’re nowhere close to home yet, but she thinks the space between his shoulder is a good start.
‘I’m here, Grunkle Ford,’ she thinks, a somber smile forming his sweater. ‘I’m okay.’
His embrace is vaguely reminiscent of the kinds she used to give.
It reminds her of something she has left to do.
The next time she sees Dipper, she hugs him so tightly that she can hear it physically take his breath away.
The gesture catches him off-guard after so many days without touch. For all the space that’s gathered between them, it all seems to vanish when she steals him in the middle of his thoughts. She does it the only way she knows how, on some mindless impulse to tear down the façade without giving away how badly she’s needed the person behind it.
Because this had to be it. This would fix him.
Hundreds of scenarios ran through her head prior to this, all of them pristine and perfect — seeing that irritated smile again, feeling him shrink. Hearing “Mabel I can’t breathe,” and cheekily replying “too bad.”
What she isn’t expecting is for him to crumble.
For him to take her with him.
“…I’m sorry!”
Like someone or something has ripped open his chest at the seams, it bursts out painful and an octave far too high. He throws his own arms around her the way he always has, but the urgent desperation behind it this time could break her right in two. If her sweater were any thinner, he could just as easily leave nail marks in her back.
But for all that he doesn’t tell her, she hears it just as clearly. Clinging, like begging not to leave again. Not to let this be a dream. It isn’t the arms that crush her body as much as the strain in his voice does to her soul. Because he heaves just as hard as she had with Stan.
It’s the same grief, the kind that sinks so deeply in your bones, you can’t remember what it felt like walking without it.
It spells out everything he hasn’t been saying.
“I’m so, so sorry Mabel!”
And it's with five words that her rose-tinted dreams shatter, the hope she could patch up their broken pieces without tearing it all down to start from the beginning. But if this whole nightmare has taught her anything, it’s that beggars can’t be choosers.
But she’ll choose this, she’ll choose it over and over, because there’s some part of her that can’t help but think that she needs this.
The hot sting in her eyes may be the closest she’s ever felt to humanity. “Dipper—”
“It’s all my fault!”
It rings louder and deeper, raw with anguish. He cracks her heart a little more with each syllable, and she wonders just how much more of this she can take. Mabel shakes her head to it all, smoothing her hand across his back. She can’t bear to watch him lose himself to what she’s already spent all this week fighting — but she has to.
Her voice is softer than his, but no less pained. It takes too many tries just to form the words.
“It isn’t your fault,” she soothes. ‘It isn’t mine, either. Grunkle Ford said so.’ “It isn’t anyone’s.”
He hyperventilates beneath her arms. He shakes his head and she gets it, because no, it can’t be that easy. It never is. The universe is never that forgiving, but if she can give him one reason to have faith in it, it needs to be this.
And that must touch him somewhere — something buckles in him, and his forehead falls to her shoulder. The submission is reluctant. But she’ll cherish it for only a moment, being brave enough to pull it out of him.
Because in the next, she hears him whisper one last broken ‘I’m sorry’ into her, and that’s all it takes to destroy whatever’s left of the illusion she’d tried so hard to uphold for him.
The sun still sets after Weirdmageddon, and the first time they truly watch it, it’s through eyes blurred with tears.
She would’ve held the Rift a little tighter, the night before everything changed, if only she’d known.
They both cry as the sun goes down. The tears they never had the chance to shed flow free, because there’s an unspeakable sorrow in losing someone at all. Had Gravity Falls existed under any other circumstance, there was never a promise that she’d come back at.
The prospect alone is enough to put a lump in her throat, but any attempt to speak on it comes out better in sobs.
They mend each other’s broken hearts, touch by touch.
Dipper’s never been the type for tight hugs, but it takes a stolen life and mere minutes as an only child to change that. It isn’t a hug as much as it is a hold — and maybe even that is stretching it, because as tight as they are, his arms are still loose enough for her to know that he’s holding back.
In some corner of his mind, he’s convinced himself that if he squeezes too hard, she’ll slip through his fingers again.
Mabel’s never been the type for vulnerable moments like these, but it takes her brother’s tears to change that. It’s always world-shattering to see a side of someone after thinking you’ve seen them all. She doesn’t want to see this one ever again.
He comes undone just as she had, and there’s so little she can do.
It’s holding him while he does, the smallest means to make this better. It’s letting this happen. It’s lips pressed atop a head so clouded with guilt that grounds her here, because he needs this too.
There’s a gash there that she’s never noticed before, more marks of Bill’s damage beyond what he’s done to them invisibly.
What she wouldn’t give for them to heal as easily as the cuts.
Long after night falls, they’re still there, side by side. Hand in hand. It’s so much harder to read their faces in the dark, but they don’t need to to know what’s painted on them. They’re speaking the same sadness too fluently for it to matter, and maybe that’s the first step to moving on from this.
If it hurt this badly, she was alive to feel it. It’s a bittersweet blessing.
Crying’s never solved much before, but with the bleeding tension between them all, it’s the closest she feels they’ll ever get to physically expelling the poison in all of them. They could cry all through the night, on through morning, and this still wouldn’t be the end of it. There’s still so much they need to patch up.
Time would heal this, as much as waiting hurts.
Mabel settles her eyes on the clock ticking this endless night away, the lingering ache of knowing she’ll have to let go eventually.
Hugs don’t feel as intimidating after that.
On one of their last nights in Gravity Falls, they all spend it within arms reach of each other. The way they should.
It’s a night of light banter and lighter laughs, a solace long needed from the nightmare they’d been living for far too long. What they don’t fill with chuckles, they fill with ridicule — playful, of course, witnessing Ford’s botched attempt at making a s’more. Burnt marshmallows and wasted chocolate are the only way they end the summer, and deep down, she always had a feeling that it would.
When the embers of the campfire finally dim, they almost head into the house — almost.
Stan’s fascination with the nighttime sky keeps them hanging in the door’s threshold a heartbeat longer. His eyes light up at the constellations above them, his face bearing the expression of someone who may as well be seeing them for the first time.
For all he’s remembered, it’s almost too easy to forget that there are still gaps in his memory for the little wonders.
Stan seats himself in the couch on the porch, his eyes never leaving the stars. No one has the heart to leave him out here alone.
Ford is the farthest away from her when they join him, over on her brother’s opposite side. Even from a distance, she still feels his hand draping across her shoulder. His need for contact has only seemed to grow these days, some reassuring belief that if they were in reach, he could keep them safe. It feels like that, at least.
If he could touch them, they had to be there.
She feels the same way.
Like he has been all summer, Dipper’s right by her side. This is the first time she’s seen him at peace, maybe almost since they’d first stepped off the bus all those months ago. The weight of the journal isn’t in his hands anymore, much less his heart. If this and their moment last night are all it takes to clean the slate, she marvels at the thought of what he’s capable of with a clear head.
Stan pulls her from her thoughts, briefly.
“What’re you smilin’ about, pumpkin?”
So, so much.
She’s alive. Her family’s safe. The world outside this porch is upright and thriving, with life and color and promise. It manifests in crickets singing the night away, stars to carry them through it. Ordinary graces have never felt so sacred.
It’s dark all around them, but Mabel knows he can hear the glow in her voice. Reclaimed and brilliant, it comes sounding brighter than the stars and the moon studding the infant autumn sky.
“Nothing, Grunkle Stan.”
Her fingers tighten a little more around his.
‘Life is beautiful.’