Chapter Text
The world doesn’t end with a bang, or a whimper.
It ends with a crack.
Existence, as he remembers it, may as well have been a dream. Black and endless, the new world waiting for him stretches far into an eternal night. For eons, that’s all it feels like. Floating aimless and forgotten to a cruel and indifferent plane.
(the moment he recognizes that he’d had a soul once, he feels it reaching out into the dark, searching.)
It’s the closest he feels to consciousness.
From within him, it’s waking. Some ball of light with a purpose. Some disembodied spirit determined to escape.
When the feelings come back to him, they come trickling one by one. Like moths to a flame, they gather. Flocking to his shell of an existence, as if desperate to remind him. If time is a concept then emotions must be too, because it’s in a shapeless, yearning form that it dawns on him that he can’t remember them and their sensations. An ocean of feelings without names, some overwhelming inkling that grief is seemingly the one that never left.
You’re born in the darkness clinging only to that, maybe.
He’s forgotten who he is.
He has a name and he has a story, but in whatever oblivion he’s been sentenced to, there are too many gaps to connect the dots with ease, at first.
But they come.
Wisps of a past life. A different time. They’re fragments before they’re memories, a collection of chipped and cracked moments alluding to some existence he can’t remember. But they come. They come with the staggering realization that there was a heart that carried them once. A body that housed them.
(the moment he recognizes he has eyes, he opens them to a blacker void than what he’d shut them to.)
He was a brother once. Some story without an epilogue.
Whatever pieces he’s scattered to the universe, by fate, they come rushing back. Like dots of a puzzle, the images come alive with each link. Some secondhand account of a life that isn’t his anymore. He grasps it with all he can, listening for a heart that hasn’t beaten. Spreading limbs he couldn’t feel.
‘That’s right…’
He was a brother before he was a mistake.
From the corners of his prison, he hears it calling to him. Like the answers themselves were fighting through the darkness just as he was, he feels them creeping closer, closer. Truth itself always found a way, a gracious homecoming of familiar sights.
Familiar words, from an existence that felt like lifetimes ago.
“………ake up…”
And for more reasons than just one, the moment he recognizes that he has arms, he feels the hairs stand on them at the words. He’s heard them before. They’re his.
“…ease……lease wake up……”
‘No…’
They’re his and they’re loud and they’re vibrating, a haunting reminder of how this all came to be. Like someone or something has cracked his head wide open, it all comes flooding back too quickly. Images flickering like a broken film reel, replaying over and over.
A slip of a broken promise through a walkie-talkie.
A fight that didn’t need to happen.
A hell on earth.
The aching gap between his ribs when he’d first held her, hands trembling, Mabel wake up, why won’t she wake up–
A hand outstretched, consumed in blue fire.
A deal to fix it all.
The moment he recognizes that he has a spine, he feels the sins crawling through it. That’s right. It began with him. Reawakening a sleeping demon, feeding him the answers through a summer painted with ill-kept secrets and bleeding youth. He dragged them all down with him, deeper and deeper into the vicious cycle of manipulation that’s tormented this family for years. For it to amount to whisper that puts all the pieces in place.
One string, one desperate fragment that comes too clearly when everything else won’t.
“…I’ll do anything…”
‘No…!’
All one cruel lie, one giant game that never ends–
“Mabel—!”
The moment he recognizes he has a body again, it’s throwing itself.
All at once, it comes. What isn’t black is bursting with color, what isn’t color is a moving blur. The first breath, the first sensation, worldly essences rushing to fill his empty being with light. Motion.
Gravity.
As if only just suddenly recalling that it existed, the panic is replaced with a sharp lurch in his stomach. The world around him spins, falls, and materializes with a hard crash against the floor.
Everything is too still.
The ringing in his ears comes first – deafening and somehow blinding, made worse by the metal tray that comes clambering after him. Slamming against the tile, it clangs and bounces, sending fresh, piercing waves into his already fragile head.
Dipper wonders, briefly, where he is. But the sharp scent of antiseptic cutting through the air doesn’t leave much room for wonder.
A hospital.
Frantic, he feels around for the empty weight of a vest that isn’t on him anymore. Orange tee beneath it, gone. And if the pounding in his head from the direct impact with the floor is anything to go by, then it means his hat is missing too.
Moaning, Dipper presses his hand to the side of his skull to alleviate the blooming ache. More and more, the signs come to him. The swapping of his day clothes for a gown. The hollow beep of a heart monitor. Steady and patterned, and most definitely not a flat line.
He’s awake — and if he’s awake, he must also be alive.
‘What…?’
By some trick of fate, his life is still his own.
Through the disorientation, a lone voice cuts through the fog. Someone else – someone living, breathing, and the thought terrifies him, he isn’t sure why. It comes sounding like they’re speaking to him from underwater, calling to a child drowning inches below the surface.
“—ipper!”
In his swimming vision, he sees another pair of shoes enter the room. Slipping in and out of focus, he remains paralyzed in place by the vertigo of it all. When they're close enough, they plant their hands firm against both his shoulders, more patches of warmth to fight off the cold grip of oblivion.
Dipper swears — if only for a moment — that he hears the heart monitor freeze with him, when his eyes meet hers.
“…Ma…bel…?”
Mabel. Mabel Pines.
His twin and his best friend, who only hours ago, lay motionless against the wilting grass with a heartbeat too slow to be her own. Mabel Pines, who without so much as a word, became the prize of this sick game they never wanted to play.
She casts him a sour look. Something almost humorous if not for the heavy reality of quite literally everything. Dipper’s jaw hangs in disbelief as she looks him over, staring baffled, wordless.
As nonchalant as humanly possible, she clicks her tongue in disapproval.
“Bro. I know you’re itching to get out of here, but can you give it a day? At least?” she patronizes. She tugs on his sleeve, insistent. “C’mon, upsy-daisy. Let’s get you back in bed before one of the nurses sees."
Effortless, her arms cup the undersides of his to help lift him up. Dipper sways when he rises, instinctively clawing for the mattress when he feels himself begin to sway too far to one side. She's right there with him, holding him close to make sure he doesn't.
It may as well be the closest they’ve had to a hug since….since.
It’s the first time he notices her sweater — Pink, confettied. Her yellow skirt and its matching headband. He notices what it isn’t: worn and ruined, stained with tears.
As delicate as possible, she helps him climb back onto the bed, refusing to let go until he does.
Mabel eyes the tray he brought down with him: a punctured cup of pudding, cold veggies, and what he could only imagine was a once hot bowl of soup. Kneeling, she scoops what she can back onto the platter, wiping the floor with the napkin. She chuckles.
“Although with the food they give you here, I can’t really blame you for tryin’ to make a break for it, can I?” she adds, glancing up at him with a side smile. “This stuff’s almost worse than Grunkle Stan’s.”
She chit chats like nothing’s happened. In his peripheral, she focuses her attention back to the spill, humming some thoughtless tune to fill the air. It settles in his heart what’s going on. He’s alive. He’s here, and so is she. But…but she shouldn’t.
Just as they had when his body wasn’t his own, the pieces start to connect.
He glares daggers into the blanket, fisting the blanket at both sides. The cogs in his head start to turn, the anger coursing through his blood.
“…You haven’t had your fun, have you?”
To that, Mabel glances back to up to him from the floor. “Huh? What’cha talking about now?”
“It wasn’t enough for you, was it Bill?” he snarls, balling his fists so hard that they tremble. Calling for ghost that isn’t there, but has every intention of haunting him until his last breath.
Below him, she raises an eyebrow. Mabel’s nowhere close to mopping up his mess entirely, but she’s halfway decided to abandon the task at hand. Tentatively climbing back into her seat, she parts her lips to say something, but he’s already rushing to conclusions.
Purgatory. This is purgatory.
“So what more do you need, huh?!” he spits, gritting his teeth. “You’d said she’d live–”
“Hey, relax!” she urges, scooting closer. Still vying for some level of composure, she keeps her voice steady, but drops any front to be casual about it. “I don’t know what you’re going on about, but everything’s fine!”
“We made a deal!”
And if he’s still here, then it means she’s still his. It meant this game wasn’t over yet. Lies, all lies, everything.
At his side, Mabel’s nervous grin falls the more he shouts. She reaches, keeping her hand hovering away just enough for her own safety, but still close enough to break him.
“Dipper, you don’t understand—”
“No, you don’t understand, I—” he sputters, almost hyperventilating.
He shuts his eyes tight.
This wasn’t right. This wasn’t real.
"MABEL I SHOULD BE DEAD!”
In the small echo chamber of the hospital room, it comes sounding louder and harsher than he means it to be. It isn’t meant for her. It’s for the walls built around them, the puppet master behind it all. If he screams it loud enough, they’ll crumble. He’ll die for real.
He still shakes her to her core, the words cutting through her like glass. Her eyes widen at the edge in his voice, retreating inside of herself. Her lingering hand retracts fully, Mabel keeping her eyes trained on some arbitrary corner of the room. She lets loose a shaky breath, crossing her arms to hide the nails biting into her sleeves. Her nervous tick.
“Well…yeah, you should be…” she says, shrinking in her seat. “….so it’s a good thing Grunkle Ford called for help when he did.”
He whips his head up to look at her.
“Called for…?” ‘Called for help?’ There’s no way. The world was about to end at their feet, what help could he have scraped together? “W-What do you mean?”
Before Mabel can entertain an answer, his eyes are flying to the window behind her. Peering out its glass, he searches for the flames and the turmoil. For the toppled structures and the townsfolk lost in the frenzy of it all.
For a bleeding sky that isn’t there anymore.
Dipper blinks his eyes, again. Again. The scenery doesn’t change.
Instead of a world on its last leg, it’s one upright and thriving. There are trees. Passing cars. Soft oranges and pinks, a softer sun making its descent over the hills.
Every mark of destruction, vanished.
“Dipper, what’s the last thing you remember?”
Mabel’s voice calls him back to the present, leading his eyes back to hers. Apprehensive in her seat, she fidgets. She makes a conscious effort not to bite back on her lip, he can see that – twice, three times.
It’s a simple question, but the implications behind it fuel the paranoia already starting to fester. It means that something happened that should have taken his memory, and as far as he knows, it has.
“…do you remember leaving with Grunkle Ford? All the ‘smarty mission’ mumbo-jumbo?” Mabel suggests, filling in the pieces for him.
To that, he nods, cautious. Ford’s order still at the forefront of his mind, he waits for Mabel to give off a sign that she knows more than he does. There’s still plenty she doesn’t, but the tables have turned too easily these days.
“….do you remember crashing?”
Vividly. Even with whatever drugs they’ve put in him, Dipper can still feel the searing pain in his shoulder from the joyride. The bruising on his hip. Nothing quite as intense as the splitting headache, already made worse from his trip to the floor moments ago.
“…Gonna take that as a ‘yes,’” she continues, leaning back in the chair. “Anyway. Grunkle Ford said you guys found…a UFO? Something? Something.”
She huffs, but not unkindly so. Crossing her legs, she stares down something that isn’t him, eyes avoidant with what he could only describe as frustrated concern.
“Something you shouldn’t have, if you ask me.”
Something that led to the catastrophe that landed him here in the first place. As if she’d been there herself, Mabel relays it with the most intricate of details, right down to his tumble chasing after —
Ford.
It hits him pitifully late. His pulse skyrockets when it finally does, halfway ready to leap from the bed again. He didn’t even think to ask.
“G-Great Uncle Ford,” he stammers, tensing up. The rushed thoughts fill his head, get up, run, find him. “Grunkle — Where is he!? Is he okay?! When did—”
“Hey hey hey, I said relax!” she repeats, throwing her hands up. She nearly tips out of her seat to keep him in place. “He’s fine, promise! He’s actually the one that brought you in here.”
And he stares at her for however long it takes for that to register within him. It does, eventually. After his heart levels out, fighting through the mental veil keeping it at bay. Ever cautious, ever questioning. It’s habit, now.
“…He is? You mean he’s not hurt?”
Mabel nods. “Nothing bad enough to need a doctor like you, that’s for sure.”
She’s too calm about it. If Ford really had injuries demanding a doctor, that’s not something she would lie about. And Mabel’s terrible at lying, if anything, so he breathes a sigh, hands twisting in the covers again.
“….Anyway,” she starts again, “we were all pretty freaked out, so we got you here as quick as we could. Like faster than you can say “‘Ohmygoshweneedtogethelpfast,’” she emphasizes, clapping both hands to her cheeks. The panicked expression she wears only lasts a second, her hands returning to her lap. “And here we are.”
In a hospital, with no indication that Weirdmageddon had ever touched the town.
“Then…none of this makes sense.”
And the disbelief sends him sinking back down to his pillow. He regrets it immediately, the blaring medical lights lancing into his brain. Dipper drapes one arm over them, if only to hide the hot sting starting to form in his eyes.
It didn’t make sense.
And it needed to, if he made it himself. Mentally, he jumps back to square one.
Part one: Ford’s mission. They’d left for the foothills of town and found the craft. He knows that much.
Part two: After cheating death, he’d accepted the apprenticeship, but had done so unknowingly while Mabel was listening. That came next.
Part three: He came home to her, distraught, rightfully upset having heard it all. He remembers that too clearly.
‘The rift broke, we found her…’
The deal to fix everything.
Then…nothing.
As if it’ll help, he shuts his eyes tighter. Tighter. And he sees it, ghosting at the back of his mind, the image that won’t seem to leave him. Twisted. Sickening. Some blackened, faded image of Mabel looking down at him, tears welling in her eyes. Of an hourglass on its last grain of sand.
So how much of this was real? How much was a dream?
How blurred were the lines between them?
Dipper senses them. Vital pieces that he can’t collect, lost somewhere between what his mind knows and what his body remembers. The connection that the two can’t seem to make.
‘How much of this is Bill just toying with us?’
He keeps his arm resting over both his eyes, breath hitching at the thought.
“Bro?”
“I don’t…I don’t know what’s going on,” he murmurs, absently panicked. It’s still fresh in his mind, the last wisps of something. A fever dream doused in agony that felt too real to be anything but.
His voice is smaller than he knows it to be. More’s been stolen than just his memory.
Dipper shakes his head against the pillow.
“I don’t know why I’m here. Because I really, really shouldn’t be.”
“No one takes a literal nose dive and walks away from it, Dip,” Mabel presses, patting the top of his thigh beneath the bed sheet. “You’re right where you’re supposed to be: in a hospital.”
It isn’t what he means, but the energy to even think about fighting it is draining enough.
Daring another chance of clarity, he lets his mind drift back to the memory…only to be cut short by the nausea that overtakes him. Abrupt, the pulsating ache comes like shock waves through his brain, and he abandons it altogether. If the growing migraine in the back of his skull is anything to go by, thinking about anything for too long will keep him sick. He's shackled in the present. He can’t do this with words, with thoughts, but…
Something clicks with him.
Sudden, Dipper scrambles to sit back up, grabbing for her hand.
A compulsion from seemingly nowhere, he wrestles to get a hold of it. A burning need for some semblance of reprieve he’s been denied again and again and again. Linking their fingers, trembling, waiting to give into the impulse.
“Hey, what are you—?”
It’s as far as he gets.
The urge to squeeze her hand is lagging somewhere far behind him. One his body won’t dare to act on. He’s afraid of the answer it’ll give him.
The one it gave the first time still puts ice in his chest, now that he can recall it.
‘Is this really her?’
But what he will get, is Mabel’s other hand, hesitant, to rest on top of his. Her touch feels like her own.
“Hey. You’ve had kind of a crazy day. So try not to worry about anything, okay?” she tells him softly, shaking her head. “You’ll turn your brain to mush. Assuming it isn’t already. But we’re hopeful.”
She punctuates it with a gentle squeeze, like she can read him like an open book. It’s almost alarming.
“And we’ll work out all the birthday ‘deets and everything when they say you’re better. All that grown up stuff.”
That’s what raises the red flag. How it sounded. Manufactured.
Fake.
As if touch alone could poison him, he abandons her hands to claw his own back close to his chest. The instinct stings, and he can see it hurts her too, the way her fingers curl to fill the space he’s left behind. He swallows hard.
“You are…Mabel right?”
Her immediate reaction isn’t to flinch, he notices that first. It’s a welcoming sign. She even scoffs. “Jeez, how hard did you hit your head? Of course I am! Who else could I be?”
Bill.
“P…prove it to me.”
If she has something to hide, it doesn’t show. The most he gets is a side lipped gesture, but nothing suspicious.
“Born August thirty-first, nineteen ninety-nine. Twin, five minutes older, one millimeter taller,” she recites, raising a hand to count on. “Student of the month last March, recipient of the sixth grade’s “Most Optimistic” award…”
Elementary stuff. Dipper nods the longer she drones on, but it’s halfway through her social security number that something comes to him. A glowing moment, bubbling up from seemingly nowhere.
Some precious, guarded memory that leads his mouth to act before the rest of him can.
“—What did you eat that day in second grade that scared the teacher?”
The air stills between them, and Mabel pauses.
Even he has to process what he’s just said.
It catches her off guard, eyes floating to his. There’s an unspeakable sense of emotion lined within them, like the only testament he needs to validate that it’s really her. Her mouth forms the words, but she holds the answer inside her a touch longer.
“…Banana slug,” she finally responds. It’s raw and it’s real, and somehow in its somber tone, still so-very Mabel. In the heartbeat that she says it and before she cringes, it’s a glimmer of a hope. “Whoa, that’s old. Where did that come from?”
It catches him off guard, too. Where did that come from?
“I don’t know, I just…remembered that, for some reason…” he stutters, breathing sharply. “‘Guess I’m hanging onto whatever I can.”
However much that is. It still isn’t enough.
The forced humor that comes with it is broken and nervous, and even she seems to pick it up too well.
Dipper keeps his eyes boring into the sheets, growing more numb by the second. It takes every fiber of his being not to question it all. The linens were scratchier than these last time. The walls were a tint darker.
In the mounting list of things that didn’t feel real, her smile is genuine, at least. It always is in moments like these.
He sees her at the corner of his vision. Mabel’s holding that gaze at him, the one patient but pressing for answers too. Selfishly, he’s forgotten that. He doesn’t know how many hours she’s been sitting, waiting for him. But.
He doesn’t know how to start this, or even if he should.
“There’s a lot that doesn’t make sense,” he says, shaking his head. “I don’t…know how to put into words, but this all…feels wrong.”
“It’s okay that it doesn’t make sense. Maybe it’s not supposed to,” she reassures, thoughtful. “And really, it shouldn’t. Is it such a good idea to be thinking this hard after taking a fall like that anyway?”
She isn’t wrong.
But the answers. He needs them. As if his own body held the key to everything, he lifts his hand to hover a few inches from his face. Opening and closing his palm, studying it up close. Hairline cuts still smeared in a light layer of dirt. Bruises peppering his hand, more snaking up the side of his arm. Proof of the accident…and only the accident.
He can’t remember what Bill’s fire had ever felt like.
“Listen, I know it’s scary. You did hit your head pretty hard,” Mabel says, leaning to sink both her elbows on the bed, hands cradling her chin. “They said you probably wouldn’t remember a lot. But Grunkle Ford told me everything, so don’t worry, okay?”
Then that begs the question of how much constitutes everything. ‘Everything’ like the accident? ‘Everything’ like the rift and all the secrets hidden inside it?
Even more questions than answers. This is his personal hell if he’s ever lived one.
He bites back on his lip.
It isn’t that he can’t remember. It’s that he doesn’t know how much was memory and how much was a dream.
“So get some sleep.”
And before he has a chance to sort it out, Mabel’s rising from her chair. With almost too much care, she takes it upon herself to tuck him in as much as she can. A bit excessive if it were any other time, but in the moment, it couldn’t be more welcomed.
“They said we could take you home later, but they want to keep an eye on you for now.”
His heart quickens at that. Before he can process it, Mabel’s turning on her heel to leave. The cold flutter in his chest returns with an aching vengeance, the daunting realization that he doesn’t want to be left alone again. But she’s waving goodbye, his heart hammering as she sets her eyes on the doorway.
“—Wait.”
More impulses. He doesn’t remember stretching his hand her way, but like many other things that shouldn’t be, it’s there.
She pauses. Mabel’s eyes sweep over to look at him, her features lined with some instinctive nature that tells him she was expecting it. He almost gets up to follow her, but his whole body still feels like lead, weighed down by more than just the drugs.
Mabel gets the message. She tilts her head to one side, a small but knowing smile spreading.
“Do you want me to stay here?”
She’s well ahead of him, then. Mental clarity, at least one of them has it right now. He nods.
But rather than seating herself back in the chair, she reads something in his face that tells her to step closer. They’ve always spoken better without words, and it doesn’t seem to fail them now. More evidence. More telling signs this was her.
When she’s inches from his bedside, he wraps both his arms snug around one of hers, tucking it close against his chest. Breathing.
“I don’t think…I believe in any of this yet,” he says. Somewhere deep inside, still lagging. He isn’t brave enough to reach for her hand just yet. Isn’t brave enough to accept this as true.
Dipper rests his cheek against her arm, closing his eyes. She feels like herself, too.
“…I just need to know you’re really here.”
And his voice trembles with the courage it takes to be that honest about it.
Between the two of them, everything almost feels alright. Her very presence permeates the empty spaces that he didn’t know existed until now. “It’s okay,” only works for so long. Whatever words exchanged, they’re unmatched by the sheer amount of comfort in just being able to feel someone else.
Mabel must agree with him, the softest touch of her fingers atop his head to ground him. It’s almost healing.
“Bad dreams are crummy like that, huh?”
So normal. So delightfully odd, the two of them. It’s her and him and his heart monitor, still droning away in the white noise.
Beep. Beep. Beep.
He’s still collecting the pieces of himself, some million and one shards floating just out of reach. Touch light against his head, Mabel strokes back and forth with her thumb and like a trance, he leans into it. It’s all he can bring himself to focus on, until she pauses far too soon, abrupt.
“…did…something happen to make you think that?”
“It’s a long story. Like a really long story,” he deflects. Not one worth rehashing if he doesn’t have to. “Not one for right now.”
But he’ll have to, eventually.
Mabel accepts that for the meanwhile though, humming a small noise of understanding.
Little eternities pass before she backs away from him for the last time, planting herself back into the chair at his side. It dawns on him that there are no clocks on the walls here, but maybe it’s not such a bad thing. No time to consider how long he’s been here, how long he’s got left.
One last time, he sinks himself to lay down, hands curling into the blanket. It’s too good to be true. If it’s all a dying daydream, there’s still a chance that he’ll blink and it’ll all be gone. Like it’s the only reason he needs to, he latches on a little tighter.
It all can’t be real, but his body — with all its cuts, bruises, and whatever else he had toiling on inside — unshakably feels like his own.
‘Maybe…Maybe this has all just been one bad dream.’
It takes more than just a few times to fall asleep. Of course it does. This can’t be real. It shouldn’t be. The last shreds of his skepticism are stubborn if anything, still clinging to the failing logic of it all. It’s by some miracle that Mabel even has the power to override it, the power of presence that’s done more this summer than it has their whole lives.
The darkness is comforting this time, endless but soothing.
As if the shackles and bonds have all come loose, everything feels lighter. Sleep comes as the temporary blessing he truly needs, some freeing invitation to push it all away for a while. Some gracious invite to slip through the crevices, cradled in a shadow of some place more forgiving.
The world doesn’t end with a bang, or a whimper.
Against all odds, it hasn’t ended at all.