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After the first twenty-four hours of complete radio silence, his sanity starts to slip. Every hour afterward comes as another grate against his soul. The growing torment of not knowing. For once, his head and heart are in alignment.
In harmonious clarity, they’re both unwaveringly terrified.
It may as well be the first time in thirteen years that they’ve ever truly been separated. Fitting enough, Dipper thinks, that it takes an apocalypse to tear them apart — but even that’s a hard thought to swallow, for more reasons than just one.
Their argument and Bill’s reign are almost too perfectly timed, the promise of an apprenticeship that claws at his heart every time he thinks about it.
If the Rift breaking in her sprint is the catalyst to all of this, he’ll never forgive himself.
‘Mabel…’
He can barely breathe, but running for his life hardly feels like the reason why anymore.
In the distance, his eyes scan the horizon — and there, he sees it. A structure, dark and crumbling, but in right this moment, feeling like the beacon of hope he’s been searching for. The burn in his lungs is commanding him to charge for it—
But there’s a sharp snap of a twig that rips the air from them, and his blood runs cold.
Stopping hard in his tracks, he dives for the closest tree trunk, sinking to the ground. Waiting.
He holds his breath and hears it. Footsteps of someone — something — getting louder. They’re too heavy to be anything human, and with every inch it gets closer, the pounding in his chest is the only intuition he could ever need.
He curls in on himself tighter, smaller.
Whatever battle scars Bill’s minions don’t leave on him, he inflicts himself. His nails have bit into his arms more times than he can count, when it’s too much to bear. Some nearly drawing blood. Some are necessary for moments like these, to wrestle down the nerves before they surface.
Some are solely to snap him out of his own thoughts before they leech into him, their final moments replaying in his head like a broken film reel.
How could he be so stupid? What was he even thinking? Leaving Mabel?
It sounds more and more absurd the more he thinks about it. Because it is. But they’re far past the point of denying it. He believed in Ford’s vision — the one that left Mabel in the dust. The one he was prepared to drop everything and blindly chase the hills for, without any regard for what he was leaving behind.
(and that was the last domino to fall to get here, wasn’t it?)
It stings in some moments more than others. When his cheeks don’t burn in anger, they do from his own abuses. As if any amount of it could undo his role in this. As if any more of it will get him any closer to the answers. Instead he’s left in its fallout, exhausting every lead possible, following a trail that’s only getting colder…
He tries not to let his mind drift to the implications. He can’t afford to, not when he knows where it leads.
But with little else to distract him, it comes much easier these days.
Breathe. Just breathe.
Open your eyes.
Keep moving.
Huddled inside the decrepit building, he takes shelter beneath the most stable looking corner of them all. The window he can peek out of is a spiderweb of cracks, but intact enough to muffle his voice to anything lurking outside. These were his days, now. He’s still fighting the urge not to grab at the cut across his arm every time it pulsates. His side still screams in pain if he so much as kneels the wrong way.
Yet through it all, he still raises the walkie-talkie without restraint, determined to mask everything.
“I’m staying away from the Shack,” he relays into it, surveying the area. Clipped tones, all business. “East of town feels a little safer than the rest of it right now.”
Talking into it is the only thing keeping him grounded. The smallest hope that she’s listening.
“Let me know where you are, and I’ll come for you. But I’ll keep looking.”
They’re approaching thirty-three hours, and maybe that’s his limit. Because for as many times as it’s overwhelmed him before, the paranoia setting in this time settles deeper than he’s ever felt.
Maybe she doesn’t want him to know. Maybe she wants him to hurt from this, letting this eat at him until he breaks. To have him feel even a fraction of what he was about to put her through.
Maybe he’s inclined to agree. Deluded, half of him hopes that’s all this is. A wicked prank.
Mabel could be sitting by idle, hearing him mumble himself into madness the longer he goes without a response. It’s a rosy picture, the one where she’s deserted the walkie-talkie at her side, sitting in safety until he comes to his senses about all of this. It’s just like her.
Except that it isn’t like her at all.
Mabel didn’t have the heart to be this cruel. Never in her life, let alone in a crisis of this scale. He can’t fathom the mere thought of her even trying to while the world burns to the ground all around them.
It takes thirty-three hours before something inside him starts to crack.
He has moments when he feels like it could all come undone. They feel a lot like this, when one wrong thought could be enough to decimate whatever composure he’s been rationing this whole time. The sense of pride that Ford instilled in him feels like lifetimes ago. It’s a far cry from sitting here collapsed against the wall, trembling fistfuls of hair ready to rip out at any second.
A consolation prize. That’s all this is now, hollow glory that leaves him feeling less like himself and more of something he doesn’t want to be.
This is the independence you craved for. Your thirst for adventure came with a price, because this is what you always dreamed of, to stand tall in the face of adversity. To prove you could do it alone.
‘Isn’t it suffocating?’
No. He squeezes his eyes shut. Stop.
The tightness in his chest is back and it’s worse, but only this time, he’s reluctant to grab it. That’s giving in. The onset of panic that’s threatened to overtake him could swallow him whole if he lets it. It very well could right now. It’s all had him teetering on edge of a nervous breakdown, but it’s in the first true bout of silence since this all began when he reaches a breaking point. No more walls left to stop it.
Slowly, while the facts stack against him, his insides unravel more and more with each truth and he can’t.
He hasn’t heard anything from her for days. He’s scoured everywhere for her. Twin ESP, for as much as they rag on it, is all he’s counted on in the darkest moments. What he wouldn’t give for an ounce of it.
When it isn’t the world playing tricks on him, it’s his eyes, his heart, so desperate for anything but the growing dread. Every inkling is a false miracle, weary impulses that have him latching onto anything closely resembling her. A crackle through the radio. A flash of pink. Any shred of hope to erase what he knows for certain — that cursed object was loose in her backpack when it shattered.
She was the first victim of all of this.
And the mere possibility that something bad has happened to her seizes his insides whenever it finds the opening.
If Weirdmageddon is the closest they’ll ever get to hell, losing Mabel may as well already have him in its threshold.
“Please Mabel, I’m begging you…” he pleas, voice crumbling. His forehead falls to the receiver, breath hitching. “…pick up if you can hear me…”
She doesn’t this time. Or the next, or the time after that. It means one of two things — she can’t pick it up or she can’t hear him. And it must mean only one of two things, because if they’re even slightly overlapped, he’ll lose faith in everything.
His knuckles grow white around the radio.
“I can’t do this without you.”