Chapter Text
There’s something to be said about missing someone.
Mabel felt the ache of loneliness like a vice around her heart, squeezing at the organ with ice tipped claws digging in with every beat. There was terror in the dark but it didn’t permeate the fog around her brain. It caressed her skin gently, held her stationary in the void that was neither hot nor cold. It was justー
ーExistence, matter, corporealityー
Sometimes she felt coherent, could blink heavy eyelids open to see that the darkness was actually stained in shades of pink. Sometimes she could make out voices, could hear the cackle of laughter that used to send trickles of panic sparking through her veins like wildfire. Most of the time, however, she was held aloft in a blanket of blackness, waves of darkness lapping against her consciousness that wouldn’t let her rise above the surface for long.
There was something to be said about being wanted.
Mabel knew that she was a lot. Her mother had called her spirited, her father had called her rambunctiousー sometimes chuckled with affection but more often with exasperation in the recent months. She knew long before even they did that her parents were not a good match. They argued with subtlety, tension bleeding into words that seemed to be spoken with gentle, chiding affection. Mabel could hear it though, could feel the shifting of emotions in a way that no-one else in her family ever seemed to. Her mother had tried her best to smooth down Mabel’s concerns, advised that she was hearing things that weren’t there, but she knew. Could see it in the creases near her mother’s eyes and in the hard set of her father’s shoulders.
According to her Grandpa Shermie, Mabel shared the trait with his own mother. She could sense the shifts in emotions often before the recipients themselves. It was how she was such a good con artistー she was able to steer things in the direction she wanted in order to have a satisfied customer with lighter pockets. His brother, Stanford Pinesー the Authorー was abnormally dense with others’ emotions, he’d gone on to explain.
Mabel had been shocked when she’d met her Grunkleー Stanley, his name was Stanleyー because he’d also had that familiar ability to sense the underlying that she had yet to see in anyone else. He may not have been as sensitive as she was to it but he was nothing like how Grandpa Shermie had described him. It was what had made her so suspicious of his identity at the start of the Summer, but a timely shake of a Magic 8-ball was enough to keep her in place for the moment.
The Pines were on a spectrum, as she came to realise, once again before anyone else could. She could study their behaviour with her sharp gaze, could hide the despair she felt wafting through the house that tried to sink her with it. She knew when to smile and laugh off her brother’s paranoia, knew when to intervene when he and Ford got too into their heads and knew when to offer up her childish silliness to distract Stan from the dark cloud that tried to sink over him. She wasn’t perfectー she made mistakes, let herself get carried away with trying to fix everyone’s problems and got distracted by her recent fixations, but she was so sure at the end of the day that her family still loved and wanted her.
There was something to be said about being broken.
The wager with Bill sometimes came drifting through her mind during her moments of lucidity. She’d lost, fair and square. Bill hadn’t even cheated in the end, he had kept his word and the parameters of the deal had been obeyed. It was Mabel that had chosen to cheat, taking a page out of Bill’s book, and it still hadn’t been enough. Sometimes her shrieks of terror echoed in her head, making her skin crawl, and it was devastating to realise that her terror wasn’t even enough to have them come running. When the door had finally opened, they’d been slow and sluggish, paranoid about what was happening but not concerned for her until they physically saw her appearance.
Mabel could still see Ford’s hard face in her mind, could see the moment when his eyes wavered at the blood and filth clinging to her before hardening up to scold her for her recklessness. Was it so wrong to want softness? Ford was a hard man, forged in armour meant to keep the harm of the multiverse from sinking beneath his skin. Stan was much the same, crafted from a mismatch of hardened leather and gravel to hurt anyone that dared tried to hurt him. Yet he grew soft at the mere sight of her, his guard lowering with a warmth that had her poor damaged heart yearning for the safety of his embrace. She knew that being twins didn’t make them the same person, but she wished Ford would open up to her in the way he had with Dipper.
There was something to be said about changing.
Bill had pulled them back to the Nightmare Realm in a burst of blue flames. They had felt cool to the touch, not like the burning intensity that Dipper had described them to be. Bill had cackled when she’d commented as much, ruffling her hair with a brutal intensity that she had been too numb to flinch back from.
“It’s a sign,” he had cackled, eye tilting up in a gleeful smile as the world faded into darkness before bursting into a barrage of reds and yellows.
An immense pyramid floated in what could only be the sky, a collection of broken platforms making a series of jagged floating platforms. In the distance, large coloured bubbles floated, flickering with ripples of colour. There was the sound of screaming and fire coming from somewhere, a near-constant loop that never seemed to break, but she couldn’t detect where it was coming from. As Bill began to float through the space, his words snatched beneath the screams, creatures began to emerge, towering over her and crowding into her space with large fangs bared.
It wasn’t until Bill thundered that the creatures backed off, eyeing off the young human with curious and hungry gazes. Mabel had barely taken in the words that Bill spoke as he explained everything to them, his voice crackling with childish glee.
“She’s a new friend!” he’d cackled, squeezing at her shoulders as he presented her to the group. “A freak from earth! Cast aside by her wretched family, just like us!”
The words had made something ugly twist in her stomach but she hadn’t opened her mouth to refute them. Instead, she had stared sullenly down at her bare feetー right, she’d lost her shoes when she was runningー
“She’s a bit puny,” a tall woman said, large teeth showing through her grin. Despite the harshness of her words, there was almost a tinge of sympathy laced through her words, subtle but noticeable to Mabel’s sensitive hearing. She was made of layers of pink and white, flames nipping up her thighs with soft crackles. “She’s not going to last long out here.”
“Not to worry, Pyronica,” Bill chuckled, beginning to drift away again before waving his hands. Mabel could feel panic begin to seep through the previous numbness that had taken over her as the tumultuous floor below her began to glow sickly pink. “She just needs some quick evolvingー her species are great at it, they used to be fish!”
The world seemed to drop out from under her as her stomach swooped from the sudden feeling of weightlessness. Blackness sunk in around the edges of her vision as pink enclosed her body. She needed the sleep after all, she’d been running so much and she hadn’t even gotten any sleep… last…
Night.