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When god’s pyre would retire and hand the mantle of light to the moon, Pacifica would occasionally hear the illusory soundings of Dipper’s biting remark from a now distant summer. Even with having tied the knot a decade after that odd summer, even after sealing the deal, even after raising their children, even as they lay in bed locked into one another like train cabs bound by the link and pin coupler system, she could never prevent the ghostly reverberations in her ears of the words or the phantasmagoric visage of his scowl when Dipper had said:
“I was right about you all along. You’re just as bad as your parents. Another link in the world’s worst chain.”
She would eventually heal, but even in her augustine days these words would re-emerge like weeds. By then their sting had dulled to something imperceptible and she would shrug it off with her moribund shoulders, but when Dipper had first begun to court her—to everyone’s surprise, mind you!—she would run off, thinking about what he said, her heart in a frenzy at the way with which he had so casually daggered her. It mattered little how much she had grown, especially given the inevitable arguments the two would have where Dipper would once again brandish his vituperative tongue.
Mabel herself possessed this ability, and for years Pacifica would ask herself how the two had sharpened their tongues so. For a long time the two would seem like enigmas, until one day in their late 20s Dipper had enlisted the three of them into therapy and dealt with head-on for the first time what had prompted them to whet their verbal knives.
What surprised her most was how little you saw this in media. We’re all raised with saturated images of idyllic, in truth illusory, depictions of relationships, but the reality was much messier. There had come a point where she tried to limit herself to pre-existing bonds, but fate had other things in mind. And even as she approached the precipice of darkness awaiting us at the end of the road she, Dipper, Mabel, everyone would fall and falter. The elders we often venerate, they would all come to realize, were just as messy and sloppy as they were. Yet somehow, many bonds survived past first excursions. Many died at the scene of the crime, but just as many marched on when apologies followed by true action to realize those empty words into substantive matter were made. In spite of how much hatred grew between parties after falling-outs, there was still some indefatigable love between them all, a segmented ring of the binding water of life.
Her first time with this process was with Dipper, and in some strange way she was grateful for those scalding words on that haunting and haunted night. Dipper had shortly apologized as he would do many times after and as she herself would also do. In the beginning she was amazed by Dipper’s dichotomy: he was so loving and yet, especially when backed into a wall, especially when having suffered much, he would maul the offender’s heart. It was a strangely constant theme throughout his life how people would integrate his vociferous words as genuine criticisms in spite of his apologies. The agreement, as she had first seen, tended to be: “They really hurt, but I was selfish.”
In a strange way, she was grateful to have seen that for herself that distant summer. She was grateful to find someone who accepted her flaws and all, and so she accepted in return.