Chapter Text
Before the end of the world—before Gravity Falls and Grunkle Stan and the yawning, inescapable certainty of his own lack of humanity—Dipper Pines had night terrors.
He’d been too young to really explain them back then, when Mark and Anna sat him down at the kitchen table and asked him. He'd barely understood it himself. The way the darkness closed in on him, soft and comforting until the moment it wrapped around his throat. The way he choked and gasped in and out of consciousness, desperately grasping for something, anything to grab onto.
The way the blue fire etched its way into his peripheral vision and burnt in a way that felt right.
If Anna and Mark had been rather more psychic and rather less prone to requiring blow-by-blow explanations of the things their son experienced in order to understand them, they likely would have taken this description to a psychologist and received a rather tidy answer. Any psychologist worth her salt would have patiently adjusted her spectacles on the bridge of her nose—because all psychologists worth their salt wear spectacles, you understand—and she likely would have said that these night terrors were a manifestation of residual trauma.
Dipper Pines, you see, had been born with his umbilical cord wrapped round his neck. This is not an uncommon phenomenon, but it was also not exactly the optimal position for doing little things like breathing and maintaining a constant bloodflow to the brain. Clearly—and here, the psychologist would have done something empathetic and comforting, like a hand on the shoulder—clearly, some part of little baby Dipper had remembered this incident, and the repressed memories were reemerging through these dreams.
Nothing more to it, she would have said, clicking the end of her Psychologist Brand ballpoint pen. And Mark and Anna Pines would have gone home satisfied, possibly with a child-sized bottle of benzodiazepines in hand.
However, Mark and Anna Pines were not psychic, and Dipper Pines was rather incapable of sentences spanning more than two to three words at the moment. And so, instead of going to a psychologist, Mark had bundled little baby Dipper into a toddler-sized baby bjorn, kissed little baby Mabel on the cheek, and gone off to New Jersey to visit Mark’s grandmother.
Mark’s grandmother had gained a bit of a reputation in the family, ever since she’d attended Mark and Anna’s wedding and informed both Anna and her parents that Anna’s four-year-old sister was actually deaf, and not just extremely obstinate.
That wasn’t to say that Mark entirely trusted her though.
“Hmm,” Sheila said, adjusting her spectacles along the bridge of her nose. Sheila did not, as a rule, strictly need reading glasses, but as she’d gotten older, her clients had come to expect a certain level of gravitas that a bold red lip and a bit of drawn-on pencil liner just didn’t have the knack for.
Mark sniffed. This was not a disdainful sniff, nor even a distraught and put-upon one, as so many of Sheila’s clients seemed to be prone to. Rather this was the sniff of someone who’d had a cold for rather a while now and should probably just blow their nose at this point. Sheila handed him a tissue. On Mark’s lap, Dipper let out a similar, though slightly smaller sniff, and wiped a mess of snot across the palm of his hand. This was one of the pitfalls of being a toddler, so Sheila did not hold it against him.
Leaning back in her chair, Sheila pointed the tip of her cigarette—unlit for Dipper’s sake—in Mark’s direction. “The problem is,” she said conversationally, “he’s got too many eyes on ‘im.”
Mark squinted at her. “…What’s that now?”
Sheila daubed at a bit of lipstick at the corner of her mouth with the nail of her lilac-painted thumb. “Time’s like a beach ball,” she told Mark. “Any old ant can walk across it and s’never the wiser about what he’s walkin’ on. But if you stick a needle in that shit—BOOM!” She made a rather complicated gesture with her hands that utterly failed to illustrate the slow tragedy of a deflated beach ball. “Suddenly your ant’s on flat ground.”
“Fat g’ound,” said Dipper seriously from Mark’s lap.
Sheila pointed at him. “See? The kid gets it.” She ruffled his hair.
“Nana,” Mark said. Like most new parents, he’d averaged about three hours a night for the past two years, and right now he was trying to remember why he’d thought coming here had been a good idea in the first place.
“Yeah, yeah, I’m gettin’ there, keep your shirt on.” Sheila scratched her nose. “Where was I?”
“G’ound,” Dipper supplied helpfully.
Sheila snapped her fingers. “Right! Suddenly your ant’s on flat ground. But the beach ball’s never perfectly flat, is he?” She leaned forward in her chair, gesturing with her cigarette. “There’s lumps and shit. Wrinkles. Sometimes he runs into something he wasn’t supposed to and suddenly your ant’s havin’ a moral crisis ‘cause he saw his great granddaughter looking outta the bathroom mirror even though the most action he’s seen’s the sock at the back of his closet.”
Mark rubbed his forehead. “Sweet Moses, Nana. Can we not talk about hypothetical ant masturbation in front of my son?”
One mercilessly-plucked eyebrow quirked upwards. “I’m not the one who spelled it out for him, kiddo.”
“He’s a toddler,” Mark said flatly. “He doesn’t know what any of those words mean.”
“Massmation,” Dipper said happily.
Sheila snorted. Mark very carefully lowered his head to the table and did his best not to think about how he was going to explain that to Anna. “Just—tell me how to fix this?” he said, his voice muffled by all the wood mushed up against his face. “Surely Dad or Uncle Stanford dealt with something similar when they were kids.”
Crossing one leg over the other, Sheila stuck her unlit cigarette into her mouth and started patting herself down for a match. “Nothing to fix, sugar,” she said distractedly. “Give it six months. He’ll grow out of it. Aha!” Her pat-down stopped suddenly and she wiggled in her seat, scrabbling at the back pocket of her slacks for a second before she pulled out a pack of Diamond strike-anywheres. She fixed Mark with a glare. “Now, get out of my kitchen. It’s Nana’s smoke break. No blue fire here, thank you very much.”
“Blue fire?”
Sheila swiped the head of the match against the kitchen table, then frowned when it didn’t immediately flare to life. “I said get.”
Looking rather sullen, Mark hefted Dipper onto his hip and got.
Ultimately, it would take eight months for Dipper’s night terrors to disappear. It would be another three before Mark and Anna, consumed by the never-ending tirade of doctor’s visits, scraped knees, and babysitters inherent in raising a pair of toddlers, forgot about the matter entirely.
It wouldn’t be until over a decade later, staring out at his daughter as she sat in the living room and summoned a demon—a demon with blue fire in its fists and a third, glowing eye etched into its forehead and who looked exactly like his son —that Mark would remember.