Chapter Text
They could seriously stand to give this place a makeover, Mabel thought grimly as she surveyed her new surrounds. She was standing in the reception area of Willowbend Residential—the elder care facility where, as of today, she now worked—as she waited for some admin person or something to come fetch her. Some nice lamps or something at the very least. Geez.
It felt just like any other bleak, nondescript healthcare center she’d ever been to. Even despite her mask, she felt like she could still smell the stale sterility ubiquitous to these kinds of places. A peppering of stock-image paintings and the occasional attempt at a potted plant were the only gestures towards anything like coziness. Strips of fluorescent light from above washed everything around her in a dull cast, and Mabel found herself itching to remedy that aspect, if nothing else.
Fiddling with the still-empty ID sleeve on her new lanyard, she wondered idly if her employers here would be open to feedback like that. Or, any feedback at all.
“Mabel Pines?”
Startled from her interior design reverie, she tried to not jump as she turned to face the professional-looking person who had addressed her. “Yes! That’s me. Mabel Pines. Yep.”
Without bothering to introduce themself, they rattled off in a rote monotone: “Ms. Pines, if you’ll follow me, I’ll get you set up with your paperwork. Your badge will be done printing by the time that your new employee orientation is complete.”
Mabel tried to school her expression into the mild neutrality that she’d practiced so hard in school, physically corralling her disappointment at this pantsuitted person’s demeanor.
Containing her feelings from showing was something that Mabel’s teachers had tried—at great length—to drill into her during her graduate studies. So far, it was one of the hardest things about the job for her. At least the mask made it a little easier now, she supposed.
One particularly cruel professor had once criticized her initial struggles with it as Mabel “pendulating between ‘cartoon character’ and ‘robot’”. Boy was she glad to be done with school.
She had hoped, perhaps idealistically, that graduation would herald the end of crap working environments. But so far, the receptionist’s pervasive exhaustion and this new person’s robotic bearing were not boding well for her relentless optimism.
“Yes, okay, thank you.”
When the admin-or-something had turned their back to Mabel and was walking her towards the admin-or-something area, she finally allowed herself a little facial expression as a treat. A small, defiant scowl puckered Mabel’s features as she filled herself with determination that it would be good here, even if—once again—she had to bring all of the rainbows and sparkles with her.
A good thing that she rarely ran out of those, she thought with pride.
The orientation hadn’t exactly filled her with any great sense of fresh optimism—instead, it had only sunk her hopes lower as she took in the attitudes of everyone around her. The person who had helped with her paperwork had been really nice, but everybody else seemed like they couldn’t be less thrilled to be working here. “Indifferent” was the most positive word that Mabel could use to describe any of the other staff she’d been around so far—towards either the work itself, or the elders they were here to care for.
But, after lunch and her first two clients of the day, Mabel was feeling a bit more herself again. Working with clients had always been grounding to her—especially when other circumstances of her work were proving frustrating, as had already begun to be the case here.
Mabel made sure to review the chart details on her clipboard out of the sightline of her final client of the day before approaching him.
In some small corner of her mind, she hoped that she didn’t look weird like this—as though she were hiding in the bushes, or something. (Though, she supposed it would hardly be the first time; she just didn’t want to appear to clients that way.)
“Mr. Vallore?”
The man slumped in the chair before her muttered something that she couldn’t hear.
“Sorry, I couldn’t catch that—could you say it a little louder, please?”
He sighed, a sort of long-since-defeated sound that Mabel felt like she could hear decades behind.
“E.”
“What’s that?”
“It’s…” he mumbled. Then, just shook his head a little and looked away.
“It’s E?” she tried. “Vallor…-ee?”
His head came back up, actually looking at her now. His eyes were much sharper in his face than Mabel had been half-expecting to see. (Briefly, she automatically scolded herself for it—no expectations, her brain’s auto-reminder system went.)
After a long pause, he just nodded. But Mabel thought she could see his back straighten up just a little more, his neck hunching a little less.
“Ah! Sorry—Val-lor-ree! I like it. But, how about Alistair? If that would be okay?”
He only raised an eyebrow at her—but not, Mabel thought, in a bad way. His expression was more interested than before, and he seemed to genuinely consider her for the first time.
She knew that some clients preferred the formality of surnames—as seemed to be the unspoken status quo here—especially with the age gap. But, she had the intuitive sense that others of the elders here would appreciate the familiarity of using first names, especially in a place so devoid of warmth. Alistair seemed to, anyways, but he was difficult to read.
After a long pause, he finally cut her some slack by nodding.
“Cool!” She bounced a little on the balls of her feet. “My name’s Mabel! ‘Miss Pines’ if you want, but I prefer just Mabel, myself.”
“They are big on the honorifics here, I’m afraid,” was the dry drawl she got in response. She was a little surprised by it—she hadn’t really been expecting him to. He’d given her the impression of being the type of client to stubbornly refuse interaction as much as possible.
And there she went again, slipping into assumptions. Mabel made a mental note to up her self-deprogramming game. She would not—would not—become one of those therapists, the kind she’d seen far too much of by now: the ones that immediately categorized others into neat, pre-arranged boxes because it was expedient.
The kind who saw another human being the way that an auto mechanic might see a car.
Bringing herself back to the present, she replied, “yeah, it sure seems that way from what I’ve seen. So! How are you feeling—up for some… crafty adventure??”
He snorted. “Haven’t worked too hard on polishing your intros yet, have you, kiddo?”
She blew a short raspberry at him through her mask—pink and purple, today. “Polish is for furniture and suckers. Come on! We’ll have fun.”
She ignored both skeptical look and grumbling alike as he grumpily raised himself from his seat. His gestures were slow and stiff as he reluctantly followed her to the space she’d set up.
Mabel had arranged the area to look as much like a fun studio space as she could manage under the circumstances; inviting and approachable. The folding-table that she had enlisted an aid into lugging out of storage for her was laden with as many enticing craft and art supplies as she’d been able to reasonably carry into the building. Some were from the facility’s supplies, but most of those had been sparse at best—as was typical of any place she’d ever worked before.
She hadn’t been designated an actual office—or even a separate room to work in—so the table was laid out in a corner of one of the shared spaces. Given half a chance, she would love to help stock up a whole art room here. She’d been given the run-around about it when she had first tried to bring it up, though.
Mabel would just have to be persistent.
It was what she was good at.
People were giving the art table space, if nothing else—but she felt a fresh wave of hot, angry frustration course over her all the same. Her clients deserved the privacy of a closed room—to say nothing of HIPAA. It hadn’t even been one full day yet, and so far the overall lacks of care she’d seen towards the residents had her steaming.
She allowed the feeling to flow through her and be stored away for later, so as not to cloud her concentration right now. She focused instead on Alistair, who was eyeing the table with interest.
“This is different,” she thought she could hear him mutter under his breath. Behind her colorful KN95 Mabel beamed with pride.
“See anything you like?”
Alistair hummed noncomittally, but moved closer towards her scrapbooking supplies.
Mabel’s grin grew more excited.
“Never worked with these kinds of things b’fore,” he mumbled, fingers nimble as they shuffled through the materials. “ ‘m used to diff’rnt stuff.”
Mindful of her occasional historic patterns of accidentally bowling clients over with her enthusiasm, she simply waited happily for Alistair to settle on a choice. “Take your time. Pick out whatever you think looks like fun to work with today.”
After puttering around the table, Alistair chose some colored pencils and markers, as well as glue, scissors, magazines, and papers. He settled down into his seat, and Mabel took the chair next to him.
She led Alistair through some warm-up exercises to help him loosen up and become more at ease. They doodled for a while with the markers and pencils, Mabel giving him gentle prompts for ideas when he seemed stuck.
When he seemed more comfortable with her and the materials, she introduced him to the project she had in mind.
His chart had listed memory issues and “delusions” about his recollections as some of his main presenting challenges. Some of the other chart details Mabel didn’t even want to begin to think about right now—most had been from the initial short-term facility from which Alistair had been referred, and she always took patient summaries from places like that with a grain of salt. She had read it, but would explore whatever mess came from there later.
For now, she decided to start with old reliable—scrapbook therapy. Perhaps predictably, it had been the incredible miracle of Grunkle Stan’s recovery from the memory gun that had sparked her enthusiasm for art therapy in general, and elder care in particular.
Mabel loved her work. As she elaborated on the project to Alistair, she barely even registered the way that it began to softly melt away all of the day’s irritations like a persistent sunlight.
“So! The general idea,” she explained, “is to create an overall picture of your life, by going through these magazines and picking out images that speak to you about your past in some way. It can be literal, like a carpenter at work to represent a job in carpentry at a certain age, or something more indirect—an image that brings out a certain feeling about a time period, for example, even if you can’t name it. Then, you’ll paste them into a timeline, in whatever way makes sense to you. You can decorate it however you want; there’s no rules to it. What do you think?”
It was a technique that Mabel had derived from one of Stan’s bad days a long time ago, and had adapted into a broader art therapy exercise. The objective was to create an anchor for the client’s sense of reality with something of their own creation. Often, in preparation for more difficult memory exploration later on.
She couldn’t quite parse Alistair’s expression, but he seemed interested, and agreed to it with a thoughtful nod.
Projects like this could become a little overwhelming for some clients, so she kept an eye on Alistair as he worked. But he seemed to take well to the exercise, humming absent-mindedly to himself as he fell into the steadying rhythm of flip, flip, cut, cut, paste, repeat, repeat.
Mabel had just started to ease her watchfulness when she detected a shift to his bearing. He’d finished childhood and was making his way through early adulthood, but as he went past the start of his 30s, he began to falter. Or, past the mid-1970s, as it would have been for him.
The effort seemed to grow strenuous as he tried to reach beyond that point: his searches through the magazines were less fluid now, and Mabel thought that she could see a small grimace flicker through his eyes.
Something about it all made alarm bells ring up in Mabel’s mind in a way that she couldn’t quite place. It felt like knowledge ingrained into her in some way—as though it were instinct from years in school and previous work, or some kind of repetitive understanding from her long-term memory.
She made the swift decision to end the exercise a little early. Making sure to not be too abrupt or startle Alistair, Mabel guided him out of the process to conclude with a brief reflection.
Whatever had disturbed Alistair’s previous peace, he seemed to come back out of it easily enough as they wrapped up. He put his supplies away and she thanked him for joining her in session today; but all the while, Mabel’s mind was a whirl of notes-to-self and feelings that she couldn’t quite pinpoint.
As she began to pack up for the day, the flurry coalesced into one primary thought:
I should talk to Grunkle Stan about this later.
Mabel felt like she didn’t so much come home and place the grocery bags on their table, as she did fall into the apartment with the last few footsteps she had left inside of her and then hurl the frustrations and exhaustion of the day all over the closest surface available in the form of potato-laden totes.
She tried to infuse something of her usual pep into her voice as she mechanically sang-songed, “I’m hoooome”—but she just couldn’t seem to manage it, today. What she could manage was to collapse into one of the chairs and flop the rest of herself onto the table.
The tousled head of her twin popped up from behind the back of the couch to her right. With an audible sound of effort—and with greater effort than was fair to be necessary of someone his age—he levered himself up to dangle his arms off its back, the better to see her.
The amount of exertion even a motion like that could sometimes cost him still sent a pang through her, despite several months of trying to become better accustomed now. She wasn’t sure she would ever get used to this being her brother’s new normal—she hated it so fucking much.
It obviously hadn’t been any easier for Dipper, for all that he liked to evade her concern with comments like “I’m used to this kind of thing by now” and “my body’s been a mess for years now, you know that, I’ll be fine.” It sometimes drove Mabel mad—though nothing more so than his initial recalcitrance about not overexerting himself. For weeks after moving back in together, they’d fought about the distribution of household responsibilities: Dipper accusing Mabel of acting like they were eighteen again, Mabel losing her temper about just letting her help him.
She was grateful that he’d finally agreed to hand responsibility for most of the physical chores to her—she knew it hadn’t been easy for him.
None of it had. She couldn’t imagine what it had been like; forfeiting autonomy time and time again, on top of everything else that the illness had dealt to him—everything it had taken away from him.
What it was still like.
It wasn’t fair.
It never had been.
So Mabel did her best to keep up her end of their bargain: Dipper’s insistence that, if he allowed her to support him in the ways she wanted to, then Mabel wasn't allowed to hide her own struggles. Her exhaustion, her difficult days, the days when things just became too much for her.
It was hard. Much of her impulse towards cheerfulness was still automatic, as today.
Still, he’d always been good at seeing right through her.
“I guess I already don’t need to ask how your first day with clients went, huh?”
“What, no, it wasn’t…”
He raised an eyebrow at her.
She scrubbed her face.
“Okay, yeah—it was… a lot.” She sighed. “My clients were great! The residents I’ve met and worked with so far have all been interesting people I like. I just…”
Mabel dragged herself around to the couch’s other side, and collapsed into the space not occupied by her brother’s sprawling form. “God, Dipper, the other people there—I just don’t understand!” She flopped dramatically onto his shins, burying her face into the fabric of the sweatpants that covered them.
“That bad?” He brought a comforting hand to her head, fluffing her hair.
She gave a muffled, grumbling groan in response.
Finally, she rolled onto her back and sighed. “I mean… not really. I don’t know. It could be worse, but—I’m just so frustrated, Dip-Dop. Of course, I understand why and how people can get to be the way they do in these kinds of places—the ones who went in with good intentions, anyways—of course I do. I just—at the same time! I just!! WhydoesnobodyCARE Dipper.”
She flung a forearm across her face. Mabel knew she wasn’t being coherent, at all—but she also knew that Dipper understood. Between his years of revolving-door experience with doctors’ offices and Mabel’s numerous rants throughout her school years and previous jobs, it was a kind of conversation they’d had so many times that she could make inarticulate noises of anger and he’d already know what she meant.
So, Mabel concluded the thought with a very eloquent growling sound, and felt like she could practically hear his nod of understanding.
She wasn’t really ready to talk about it much yet, anyways—that would make all of the crap of the day more real, and she still wanted to hold out hope for improvement.
Instead she rallied, forcing an optimism she was too tired to really feel again yet. “But! I’m sure it’ll get better there once I get settled into a routine, and get my own office, and people there get to know me, and stuff like that. The Power of Mabel! …and …everything,” she finished, collapsing back into an exhausted sigh.
Dipper ruffled her hair into a mess. She swatted his hand away before he could tangle it into snarls. “The Power of Mabel is undefeated,” he agreed. “You’ll turn that place on its head in no time.”
She gave him a tired, appreciative smile.
He smiled back. “So, what do you think—would pizza delivery and some Ducktective re-runs tonight help to conquer the callous apathy of the medical industrial complex?”
She grinned. “Worth a shot.”