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“Prepare to be banished from this land FOREVER!”
Dipper fought back against the waffle guards holding him back. “Mabel, you have to listen to me! This world is wrong! Do you really want to stay in a prison bubble for the rest of your life?!”
“This isn’t a prison, bro bro!” Mabel insisted. The cheerful grin on her face would look more at home on a Barbie doll. “There’s even something that you’d like here!” Mabel clapped her hands, and the guards released Dipper. He glared at them.
“Mabel, I just want you to come home with us,” Dipper pleaded. “I know that growing up is scary, but-”
Suddenly, Mabel’s expression twisted into one of anger. “It’s not just about growing up, Dipper! It’s about you leaving me behind! You’re gonna leave me behind for some apprenticeship! Did you ever really care about me at all?!”
“Of course I cared, Mabel!” Dipper argued. “Is it too much to ask for something that I want for a change?! Do you have any idea how much I’ve sacrificed for you this summer?! And what’s worse? You didn’t even need me here. Oh no, you got it all sorted out with my replacement.”
Dippy Fresh skated up beside Mabel and threw an arm around her shoulders. “Hey, at least I support Mabel!”
“Are you kidding me?” Dipper hissed. “I have been nothing but supportive!”
“THAT’S ENOUGH!” Mabel screamed, startling Dipper into silence. “Go on! Grow up without me! I don’t even wanna go back to the real world! EVER! Just go, Dipper!”
Suddenly, Dipper was thrown out of an open rift out of Mabeland, and he landed hard on his back. He pushed himself up and stared up at Mabel’s bubble. “M-Mabel?”
Dipper dug around in his vest before he found the key. All he had to do was try again. That’s all.
But when he went to unlock it, Mabel’s bubble began to deteriorate, losing its glow, with more cracks appearing. “Oh no! MABEL! NO!” Dipper pounded on the bubble. “Let her out! Please!”
Then, all at once, the bubble turned grey. Dipper knew what that meant. “MABEL!”
Through his hysterics, he didn’t notice a hand curl around his arm, before a familiar voice sliced through them like a hot knife through butter. “Dipper, listen to me.”
Dipper looked up. There was Stan, looking just as worse for wear as he did. “Mabel’s okay, I promise.”
“No, she’s not!” Dipper snapped. “She’s…she’s…”
Stan shook his head. “No, your sister’s in the attic with you. Both of you are safe. This isn’t real. You’re having a nightmare.”
Dipper wildly looked back and forth from Stan to Mabel’s bubble. “It turned grey, Grunkle Stan. She’s…she’s gone.”
“Dipper, c’mon, this isn’t real. Wake up.”
“I can’t-”
“WAKE UP!” Stan suddenly screamed.
Dipper jolted awake. He felt a hand on his shoulder, and looked around wildly, until he found Stan sitting on the edge of his bed, worry etched across his face. Shakily, Dipper looked over at Mabel’s bed, where she was sleeping peacefully, alive and well.
“I-I couldn’t get her out,” Dipper murmured, tears spilling onto his cheeks. “Her- her prison bubble. She wouldn’t leave, a-and I got kicked out of it. T-then it turned grey. Grunkle Stan, Mabel…she had…had…”
He couldn’t finish. Dipper had thought that his nightmares would’ve gone away, or at the very least become less frequent given that it had been a whole year since the apocalypse.
He and Mabel had agreed not to tell their parents about Weirdmageddon, and they’d ultimately been able to spend their winter break in Gravity Falls, their home away from home. Something they wouldn’t have been allowed to do ever again if their parents knew that they’d almost gotten killed.
Stan pulled Dipper into a hug. The old sailor still smelled like the sea. “I know it’s hard, kid,” Stan murmured.
“It’s been a year, Grunkle Stan; shouldn’t I be over these nightmares by now?”
“Hey now,” Stan pulled away from him, but still held onto his shoulders, “What happened isn’t something you can move on from easily. And nobody expects you to.”
Dipper sighed and flopped back onto the mattress, his head landing on the cool pillow. “You know I actually wanted to take Latin when I start high school? Now I don’t, because whenever I hear so much as one phrase in Latin I flinch. What’s wrong with me?”
“You’ve been scarred, kid. That damn demon has left a mark on you. On all of us.”
Dipper sat up again. “B-but I thought you didn’t remember…”
“I don’t remember everything,” Stan emphasized. “Bits and pieces have been coming back to me. I know what he did to you and Mabel. I know the scars he’s left on you.”
“I just wanna move on from it,” Dipper whispered.
“And you will one day,” Stan assured him, wrapping his arms around him again. “I might be a conman, but trust me on this one.”
It had taken quite a while for Dipper to trust Stan again, and right now…right now he just knew that Stan was being completely honest. He could trust him on this one.
THE END