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It still hurt. The constant squirming and pulling from the creature fused to her tummy cursed her with unimaginable pain, and she wished more than anything that it she could just rip it off of herself.
“Please, Grunkle Ford! Take me to the hospital! It’s hurting me! Please!”
“There’s nothing the doctors can do for you, Mabel,” Ford told her for the umpteenth time.
“That’s not true! They can help me! I know they can! Just take me to-” that’s when her uncle snapped.
“Enough, Mabel! The Cycloptopus is a part of you now, and it always will be. You need to start accepting that.”
“Why won’t you tell me how this even happened?” Mabel asked desperately. Not for the first time, Ford dismissed the question.
“I don’t have time for this, Mabel.”
It was hopeless. Tears ran down Mabel’s cheeks from the emotional and physical pain as she trudged back upstairs.
…
Nobody would tell her how it got there. Nobody would tell her how this happened. Not Stan, not Wendy, not Soos, not even Dipper. Whenever she mentioned it, their eyes would shift nervously from side to side, as though they knew something she didn’t. A shared secret, and one that they were afraid to share with her. But why? Why were they so afraid to tell her?
One day, Mabel couldn’t take it anymore. She locked herself in the bathroom, and began pulling at the tentacled anomaly fused to her, ignoring the pain, grinding her teeth.
“Mabel?!” There was a frantic pounding on the door as her twin called, “Mabel, open the door!”
“Go away!” Mabel snapped. “I’m in the middle of something.”
“I know what you’re doing, Mabel. You have to stop! You’re gonna hurt yourself! Great Uncle Ford said-”
Suddenly, Dipper stopped, as though he realized he shouldn’t have said that. Mabel stopped pulling, and walked over to the door. She unlocked it and swung it open. “What did you just say?” She asked him, taking a step closer to him. He backed away, stammering, “N-nothing! It’s nothing!”
“What did you mean? What did Grunkle Ford say to you?”
“H-he didn’t say anything!” Dipper insisted. Mabel glared at him.
“I told you not to tell her, Dipper.” The young twins looked over to find their uncle with the same look he had the night he came home. So much anger was radiating off of him.
“You did this to me?” Mabel asked, beyond hurt and confused.
Dipper bit his lip and looked away. “You…you both did?” Mabel continued. “Why?”
“We…we thought it would make you happy,” Dipper told her.
“Happy?” Mabel echoed, bewildered. “Why would I be happy about this?!” She demanded, pointing to the creature and yanking her hand back before it could bite her. Clearly it wasn’t happy about the whole situation either. She couldn’t blame it.
Confusion turned to anger, and she lashed out. “HOW COULD YOU DO THIS TO ME?! YOU RUINED MY LIFE! HOW AM I SUPPOSED TO GO HOME LIKE THIS? HOW AM I SUPPOSED TO GO TO SCHOOL LIKE THIS?! IT WON’T EVEN LET ME WEAR MY SWEATERS!” Mabel stomped over to a pile of clothes in the corner and snatched up one of her sweaters. It was ruined. A jagged hole was torn through it by the anomaly’s teeth. Out of fear that the same thing would happen to the rest of her sweaters, she stopped wearing them.
Dipper flinched. “I knew this would be a bad idea.” He looked up at Ford, finally seeing what Mabel saw that fateful day. The day he’d helped perform the gruesome operation on his own sister. He saw the monster Ford had become.
“What happened to you, Great Uncle Ford?” Dipper asked, taking a step back. He didn’t know that he was backing up to Mabel, where a mass of tentacles and teeth waited.
“Dipper, wait!” Mabel shouted, but it was too late. The second her brother’s back touched her stomach, the Cycloptopus attacked. It sank its teeth into his skin, and he screamed. Ford moved on instinct to assist the boy, but one of the monster’s tentacles grew in size and sent Ford flying with one swipe. His back hit the wall with a sickening crack. “GRUNKLE FORD!” Mabel screamed in horror. Mabel’s body lurched forward as the anomaly continued its attack on Dipper. “Stop it! You’re hurting him!”
Mabel ran her hands through her hair as she frantically looked around for something to stop it. At last, her eyes landed on her uncle’s ray gun.
“Mabel, don’t!” Ford shouted. She didn’t answer him. Using all her strength, she pried its teeth off of Dipper. The boy fell facedown as his blood soaked through his shirt.
The Cycloptopus was still in a frenzy, writhing like a nest of serpents. Mabel picked up Ford’s gun, ignored her family’s pleas for her to stop, pressed the weapon right in the center of her parasitic twin, and fired-
“AAAAHHHH!” Mabel screamed as she jolted awake.
“Mabel?” Mabel jumped and looked up. Dipper was standing in the doorway of their attic bedroom, worry written all over his face. “Are you okay?”
Mabel shook her head, pulling her blanket around her shoulders.
“Another nightmare?” Dipper guessed. “Grunkle Ford told me about your last one. The one with the Cycloptopus.”
Just hearing about it made Mabel shiver. “Mabel, you don’t have to worry about us doing something like that to you.”
“I know, But I’m still scared, Dipper,” Mabel whispered shakily.
“Maybe talking about it will help.”
Mabel scooted over and patted the spot next to her. Dipper walked over to Mabel’s bed and sat down next to her. She leaned her head on his shoulder, and he wrapped an arm around her.
“I-it was like it just…picked up where my other nightmare left off,” Mabel said, needing to tell Dipper about the horrible dream the way a person stranded in a desert needs water. “The Cycloptopus was stuck to my stomach, but I had no idea how it got there, and nobody would tell me.”
“But why?” Dipper asked, confused.
“I think you were all too scared to tell me. Every time I asked somebody about it, they would get all nervous. Eventually I just…had enough of it. So I locked myself in the bathroom and tried to pull it off of me. It hurt, but I didn’t care. I just wanted it gone.”
Dipper turned and pulled his sister into a hug, rubbing her back as she continued, “You were outside, trying to get me to stop, but I wouldn’t listen to you. Then, you accidentally told me that it was you and Grunkle Ford who did it to me. Grunkle Ford was furious at you for telling me. You started to back away from him, and as soon as you got close to me, the Cycloptopus just…just…”
Dipper pulled back to look Mabel in the eyes. “Just what?”
“It attacked you! It attacked you and Grunkle Ford! And I couldn’t stop it!”
Dipper could understand why. He knew all about alien parasites, and their natural instinct to protect their hosts from everything and everyone.
Mabel rubbed her abdomen as a dull ache began to form. “I…I had to stop it before it could kill you, so I got Grunkle Ford’s gun, and I shot it. I killed the Cycloptopus, but…but I had to die with it. I didn’t want to die, I just wanted to get rid of it! I couldn’t take it anymore!” Just thinking about her self-sacrifice made another torrent of tears spill over.
Dipper pulled her into another hug. “Shh, it’s okay, sis. It’s okay. None of that will come true. I promise.”
Mabel wiped at her eyes and glanced out the window. The sun was shining brilliantly, and there was the sound of birds happily chirping.
“Why don’t we go get some breakfast?” Dipper suggested. Mabel hummed lightly, thinking it over.
“And Mabel juice?”
Dipper smiled. “Yeah, and Mabel juice.”
…
Both her family and her sugary six-hour-energy-like pink concoction made the memory of her nightmare fade away.
THE END