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It starts with a headache, small but always present, pressing behind Phoebe’s forehead like there’s something trying to burst out. After the first couple weeks with it, she asks Dipper to check her brain in case there actually is something trying to burst out— hey, you never know. But he says there’s nothing, so she decides to just ignore it in the hopes that it’ll fade.
It doesn’t fade.
It gets worse, to the point that she can’t sleep, to the point that she’s squinting and covering her eyes every time she goes out because the light sends a searing pain straight to her skull. Mel’s starting to get worried by the amount of times per day Phoebe asks her for Tylenol.
Phoebe’s starting to get worried too, so one day she asks Dipper if she’s having migraines and if there’s any way to fix it.
“I’m not a doctor,” Dipper tells her. Then he snaps his fingers and suddenly he’s wearing a stupid little lab coat and stethoscope. “Now I am! Hang on, lemme take a look…”
“You’re not funny,” she says, laughing anyway. The laugh only makes her head hurt worse. “What’s the diagnosis, Doctor Dreambender?”
“Shush, I’m thinking.” Dipper puts his hand to his chin and closes his eyes. When he opens them again, a few seconds later, he looks almost scared.
“What is it?” Phoebe pauses, noticing his expression. “Oh stars, is it bad?”
Dipper takes a deep, slow breath. When he speaks again, it’s measured, stilted. “Good news. You’re not dying yet.”
“… okay. What’s the bad— wait, what do you mean yet?”
“I can’t just say you’re not gonna die! It’s not true! I just mean this isn’t gonna kill you.”
That is a concerningly small amount of information. “Okay,” she repeats. “Cool. So what is it?”
“Well, it’s not migraines. It’s this genetic thing, there’s this small mutation in your DNA— it’s actually really interesting, I knew mutations like this could happen, with the way magic’s become so commonplace these days, but I’ve never seen anything like it up close—”
She sighs and tries to tune out Dipper’s rambling. “Genetic, huh?”
“… yes. Your mother had it too. It was never a problem for her, but still...”
Phoebe thought she was past wishing she knew her parents. The idea that she could’ve had someone who understood, though, who had gone through everything she was going through, who might know how to fix it, was so nice that she couldn’t help it. “Oh.”
“Yeah.”
“Is there like, a cure or something?”
“Nope,” Dipper says, popping the P.
“Really?”
“I’m sorry.” He looks like he means it. “All you can do is wait for the headaches to pass.”
Phoebe sinks further into her chair. “Well, how long will that take?”
”Hopefully, at least a few more months.”
“Months?”
“And then even after that, things are gonna be different for the rest of your life.”
“Different how?”
“I don’t know.” She knows that Dipper doesn’t know a lot of things— I’m only omniscient-ish is a frequent refrain of his— but this time it doesn’t sound sincere. It sounds like he does know and he’s lying. Or like he does know and it scares him.
She collapses even further into her chair, letting herself groan. Mel always says a good groan makes everything feel a little better.
“You okay?”
Phoebe levels the best glare she can at him given her condition. “You just told me I have a rare incurable mutation that’s going to ruin my life. No, I’m not okay, genius.”
“I didn’t say it’s going to ruin your life.”
“Would you be able to, you know…” She does a little poof with her hands. “Fix it?”
“I… theoretically, yeah, but it’s not a good idea. It’d cost a lot.”
“Like a soul a lot?”
“I already have that, Bee.”
“Right, yeah.”
“I could try to get you something a bit stronger than Tylenol, though. Not too strong, but…”
“Yeah, that’d be nice.”
-
It doesn’t pass. It keeps getting worse. The pain seeps from her head down into her fingers, her toes. Her bones feel like they’ve been replaced with time bombs, like any second now they’ll explode and she’ll shatter. If she closes her eyes, she can almost hear them tick.
After a particularly bad day where she’s barely able to get out of bed, Mel carts her off to the ER and the doctors poke and prod at her before asking for a blood test. She complies, and after an hour, they tell her she has a genetic mutation, that it’s such a rare case they can’t tell what might happen to her, but it’s probably not terminal so it’s okay. She never thought Dipper would be lying, but it still feels strange to hear it from someone else.
They tell her, then, that this reaction could only be caused by prolonged exposure to a powerful source of magical energy, and ask if she’s had any exposure that she can think of. She says no.
-
Phoebe doesn’t know how to explain it. She’s just sitting on her bed a few months later, attempting her pre-algebra homework. One moment she is not burning. The next moment she is.
The next moment she’s squeezing her eyes shut, digging her fingers into the blanket, trying to feel something other than pain, pain, pain. She can’t. She can’t see anything other than red-golden at the backs of her eyelids, like when you close your eyes in the sun. She can’t even scream.
And then it winks out, and nothing hurts anymore.