Chapter Text
It’s always a Thursday night when one of them is awakened by rustling sheets and padded footsteps.
They always play out the same. The clock chimes some ungodly hour, and as if on cue, the feather-light touches aren’t far behind. They’ve only ever been soft enough to rouse them from sleep — anything rougher would feel too much like an ambush.
Thursdays were cursed for them now, when the shadows became too much.
Maybe it was the phases of the moon. Maybe the creaks of the attic. It’s always a Thursday when the night is a little too overwhelming to handle alone. It’s expected now, being awakened by gentle prods, opening their eyes to a worn face only inches away from their own.
They never speak more than four words on Thursday nights.
“Bad dream?”
Nodding.
“…I’m sorry.”
The attic is always filled with silence, but none quite as still as the ones they make themselves. But like clockwork, they follow those four words, without fail. Deafening as they are, they come acquainted with bated breath that fills in all the gaps where spoken word seemingly failed. The nervous fidgeting says everything. So do the down casted eyes.
It’s these moments that they’ve come to dread. How vulnerable they felt.
They’re never more embarrassing than they are guilt-ridden. Stealing whatever little sleep their sibling was already fighting to have is a crime on countless fronts, but it’s seemingly in the dead hours when it’s the last thought to cross the other’s mind. Even if they’re the moments they hated most, it’s never selfish. It’s pleading.
But it never hangs for too long, before there’s a hand extended in the dark to grab hold of its trembling twin. Fighting through the thick haze of sleep, they tug upward, back. The invitation has always been this discreet.
Their beds have always felt a little small, but whenever one of them climbed in, they suddenly felt like more than enough.
They’ll fall asleep like that, buried in the other’s blankets with their twin at their side. Facing each other, back to back, or some variation in between, the peace settles in when they do too.
Most nights, it ends there.
Few and far between, there were bad ones. Agonizing ones. It’s on those nights that the inches between them are lost, when they’re so closely pressed together that on any other night, it might seem excessive.
Sleep isn’t a promise anymore. The weathered reassurances are.
(“There’s always tomorrow.”)
It isn’t every night that they drape their arms over one another, pulled in close. It isn’t every night that their voices fill the air, shushing and cooing that no one can hurt them, that “I’m here Mabel, it’s okay,” and “It’s just a dream Dipper, you’re safe.”
It hadn’t always been like this.
This, Dipper thinks, when they’d become so shaken that their only source of solace was each other. Mabel used to fix herself something hot to drink to sooth her traumas. He used to fill his head with stories, drifting to sleep with the innocent mysteries of his novels fading with his consciousness.
She used to knit, he used to write. They used to dream.
It hadn’t always been like this, when they were afraid to close their eyes.
They used to sleep at night, before the darkness began to scare them.
Mabel’s atrocity of a puppet show is only the second catalyst to his sleepless nights — the first is a contract so backwardly gone wrong, that it’s suddenly no wonder why summer’s unfolding the way it is now.
That’s all it ever takes in this town. A sleep-deprived error in his own logic that leaves him a ghost for an entire day, and maybe a ghost of himself entirely.
But ghosts, of all things, know what stares feel like. And that’s all he feels the week after her show.
Stan’s and Soos’ and Wendy’s all stab into his back without them meaning to, an assault often followed by hushed whispers. Because they’ve noticed how he’s fallen into the habit of scratching mindlessly at the bandages on his arms. They’ve noticed him falling into microsleeps at the strangest times of day.
What they haven’t noticed is how he falls apart.
It’s in the moments when they aren’t looking that it hits him hardest. Vertigo waits until he’s alone to strike him hard and fast. Merciless, it comes in waves that leaves him stumbling on his own footsteps and grabbing for any stable surface.
It hits him like a train.
His legs weaken without warning, both at the weight of quite literally everything that’s happened, but even more so from his very lack of one to begin with. There’s very little his overly sensitive stomach agrees with him on these days, and even less during these episodes. It needs a lifeline. Needs the physical proof, the true reality for when his vision blurs, whites out, remembers—
‘—here for you, ready to make a deeaal—!’
The threat of toppling over (falling unconscious, falling victim—) is as absurd as it is terrifying, a thought that has him clawing for anything to keep him steady. Because surely if he can grab the table without phasing through it — can do it and feel the splinters threatening to stick themselves in him — then he must be in his own body. He has to be.
In the sunlight, he’s never felt more exhausted.
When he lies down to sleep, it never comes.
The digits of his watch burn more at night, when he squints at it with worn eyes. Atop the dresser, the glaring red numbers felt far more taunting than they did telling. A quarter past three, it nags him, has come and gone without a blink of rest, even for all the hours he fought to keep his eyes open.
Bill doesn’t need to be a shadow in his head for Dipper to know he’s the one casting them.
‘Eenie, meenie, miney, Ý̱͇̦̭̊͗͆ͧ̐͡Ö̥͕͆ͪ̓ͤ̂̚͘ͅÙ̧͖͂͒͂͒͗͑̑!̨̬̹͗͟͝’
He flinches.
Across the room, Mabel snores in her unconscious bliss. Buried beneath blankets that can’t bring him the same comfort anymore, she dreams and dreams like the clouds are made of cotton candy and the world below it isn’t catching fire. His restless nights have miraculously done nothing to deter her.
The pang of jealousy is short-lived, but the sting of it lingers longer than the thought that precedes it. In a heartbeat, Dipper banishes it. He didn’t dare.
Mabel’s been spared from this. And that in itself is the smallest saving grace of it all.
It’s as he lays in the dark at three in the morning that Dipper makes a solemn pact with himself. No one else needed to know about this. Nightmares were a part of life. At twelve years old, he’s already had more than his fair share for one lifetime, but they’re carrying enough burdens right now as is.
He’d done this well so far, hiding it from Stan. From Mabel.
Not well enough, apparently.
After three consecutive nights of tossing and turning, Mabel asks (not so out of the blue) if he’s okay.
“What are you talking about? I’m fine,” Dipper counters, peering at her from over the cover of the book. The late nights, he knows, but she doesn’t specify. “You know I get carried away with these books. And it’s not like this is the first time they’ve kept me up, right?”
It’s almost the perfect cover. Almost. In the back of his mind, he reminisces through the nights before everything changed. When the most he had to be guilty of was keeping her up with the incessant pen clicking. For one blessed moment, he’s genuinely amused by the memory of it. He jokes like it’s a throwback to their lighter days of summer, but Mabel isn’t laughing.
Dipper knows he’s been found out when she comments how he’s woken her up more than a handful of times.
“…It’s Bill, isn’t it?”
The atmosphere shifts. It always does, when they say it out loud.
Dipper can’t hide the cringe when he hears her say it. His name always sounded far more sinister on her lips than it did his. There’s a different apprehension in her eyes. Maybe something else he mistakes for contempt. Mabel’s by no means a hateful person, but the summer has changed more than just their sleeping habits.
“…sort of,” he admits, tentative. The novel falls away from his grasp. “I mean — I haven’t seen him in my dreams. He hasn’t…you know, talked to me.”
But he’s there.
He must be. Dipper isn’t ignorant of the scars Bill’s left behind — inside his head and out of it, from both his excursions through his psyche and down a certain flight of stairs at the end of the hall. The recollection of it alone has him pressing a hand to alleviate the ache ghosting in the back of his skull.
“He hasn’t been in my dreams Mabel, but…that’s not to say he’s not there.”
Mabel nods. Deep in thought, her legs swing absently against her bed, a rhythmic creak with each thrust. He eyes her in anticipation, a bounce of his chin ushering her to speak up. There’s something resting on her tongue, but he watches as it fades in favor of something else.
She defaults to her comforts. It’s not an entirely bad substitute.
“It’s okay. We’ve both had some sleepless nights lately, right bro?” Mabel flashes him a patient smile, craning her head towards the puppetized version of herself, slipped over one of her bed posts. It’s her way of reassuring him, little as it seemed.
It’s still more than he’s had in days.
“There’s always tomorrow.”
Tomorrow doesn’t have a chance to come before the shadows come for him first.
In the weeks since they’d first come to town, he’s learned that darkness takes a lot of forms. Sometimes it’s comforting. Sometimes it’s unsettling.
Tonight it’s blinding and suffocating, and it’ll kill him if he lets it.
Like a snake that’s wrapped itself tight around his neck, shades darker than black start to fall over his eyes. He’s always lost pieces of himself between his bedsheets, robbed a little more every time he’s fallen into the depths of his head. The panic come in waves that make him feel like he’s drowning, trapped in some plane of some dimension of some personal hell. They’re the hardest to wake from.
He can’t see. Can’t breathe.
But he fights. He’ll fight and fight until some forgotten part of him registers on some level that it’s all a dream — and it speaks volumes to how many times he’s endured this, when to recognize it. A tug-of-war between his head and reality, (he’s nearly there—) it switches so fast between the two that it disorients him more than he already is.
Catwalks. Creaky bed frames. It’s puppet strings before it’s tangled sheets, it’s manic laughter and oh god is that blood, why is there blood—
“—per! Dipper, wake up!”
Something finally gives, and consciousness comes rushing back.
Dipper draws a ragged gasp that shatters the barrier between the two, shooting to sit up the second that his body is his own again. The waking world fills his being with the light, with air his lungs didn’t have moments ago. The relief is as sweet as it is momentary, until the shadowy figure looming beside his bed spikes his heartrate all over again.
But no. No demons. Only Mabel, he realizes, when she backpedals into the window’s path and the moon lights up her silhouette.
“G-Geez, you really had me freaked out for a sec there,” she stutters. She has her hand spread across her chest, as if to calm her own racing heart. “You okay bro-bro?”
He isn’t. He pants and he sweats, and he wonders if ever will be. Still lost in his own head, he spaces out to some arbitrary corner of the attic, cryptic images still flashing through his eyes.
It takes Dipper ten seconds too long to realize he hasn’t let go of her sleeve yet. Fifteen too late to realize he’s been shaking the whole time.
As if to cure him of it, Mabel rests her own hand atop his to quell the tremors. Her touch is delicate. Grounding. Her fingers rest just a few inches below his bandages, still frayed at the edges from his obsessive picking.
For someone so full of comforting words, Mabel’s jarringly speechless this time.
Dipper glances behind her, and the scene she’s left for him is a story all on its own. Hastily, her comforter’s been ripped clean from her bed — trailing halfway across their floor, all too telling of just how fast she’d abandoned it to reach him. Her prized stuff tiger lays forgotten in its midst, tangled in her sheets not terribly unlike how tangled he was in his own now.
Dipper’s eyes trail from the blankets back to her — to her hands, still atop his — watching the tremors subside the longer she runs her thumbs over them.
Even in the low light of the attic, it isn’t hard to see the scratches marring her hands from his thrashing.
He winces. “Sorry. I hope I didn’t…” (‘hurt you’) “…scare you too badly.”
Mabel reads his stutters better than she does his lies.
“You know, you used to just toss around, but…” she starts, face creasing with worry. “Dipper, you were screaming.”
It isn’t a total shock.
In his growing silence, Mabel deserts his bandaged arms to tease at his bed sheets. She untangles what she can of them, helping to free his trapped limbs and give him the room to breathe. He stares blankly in his lap all the while, only pulling himself out of it when she speaks.
“…’You want me to sleep over here tonight?”
It chases away the darkness, just a little.
Dipper looks at her, reluctant — and what he finds there puzzles him. An innocent suggestion that’s bubbled out of nowhere, it’s one that, at least for the first few seconds, he sincerely doesn’t know how to respond to. He’ll search right through her for some giveaway that she’s kidding, but the concern flooding her eyes is too genuine to be joking.
They hadn’t…done that in years.
But tonight felt far too tempting. To lighten the mood, but also challenge her proposal, Dipper answers her dryly.
“You don’t think we’re a little old for that?”
“Aww, c’mon,” she eggs him on, nudging his side with her elbow. “Maybe when we’re thirteen. Then we’ll stop.”
‘Will I even make it to thirteen?’ is an impulse he wishes he could say he had control over.
Their little routine is born then and there. Dipper lifts his hand to take hers, but finds that she’s already well ahead of him. She leaps onto the mattress as gracelessly as possible and makes herself right at home.
“’Kay Dippingsauce, scooch on over!” she says, her voice filled with its usual cheer, if a bit much for one in the morning. “Make room for Mabel!”
She nearly elbows his jaw and knees his hip in the process, but it’s the smallest price to pay for this. Mabel forces him to worm up against the wall as she makes herself comfortable, but what he imagines would be an awkward minute of fidgeting is no more than a moment of settling in.
An arm’s distance away, she rolls onto her stomach and he curls up on his side. It takes only a few seconds to find their places, and even fewer to fall asleep.
He doesn’t wake up again, but it won’t be the last time.
It’s Thursday night again, but it’s her turn this time.
Dipper’s genuinely reading when it happens. It’s one of those rare nights where he’s curled back and tucked in, awake out of wonder instead of fear. With the blacklight in hand, he scans the journal’s pages with revived interest, a new section he hasn’t had the chance to touch yet. Symbols and the secrets bound from its pages, fascination building with every diagram that crosses his eager eyes.
‘The forest by the mountains…a cave…’
He’s halfway through a cipher when, across the room, Mabel stirs and whimpers.
The journal falls away from his grasp when he hears it. Dipper’s eyes float to the opposite side of the room. Mabel’s been sleeping soundly for a few hours, but the way her face scrunches up tells him that might not be the case for much longer.
This could end one of two ways, and he’s not entirely up for a repeat of last Thursday’s episode.
Clicking off the light, Dipper deserts both it and the journal against the sheets, slipping down and onto the floor. Even in her inevitable awakening, he still crosses the floorboards in quiet strides. Up close, he sees her trembling and the sweat beading at her brow, and tentatively smoothes his hand across her back.
Maybe she hasn’t been as spared from this as he desperately wishes she’d been.
“Psst. Mabel wake up,” he whispers, shaking her lightly. She doesn’t stir beyond a twitch of her eyes, and shakes her a bit harder. “Come on sis…you’re having a bad dream…”
Her awakening is far less violent than his, thankfully — a gasp of air and a knee-jerk reaction that has her thrusting herself up onto her forearms, but she doesn’t pant like her lungs are going to collapse on her. She searches the dark for whatever may have been after her in her dreams, and Dipper’s hand never leaves her back.
“’You alright?”
When she comes to, and realizes, she turns to look up at him. Masking what she can, she wears that nervous grin he’s become far more acquainted with this summer.
“Pfft, yeah,” Mabel replies, flippant. “Just those movies that Grunkle Stan showed us. Guess I should have expected that, huh?”
Not…exactly what he was expecting either. Just the claymation. Just the claymation, and in the back of his mind, he finds himself hoping it’s only that. There’s no telling if Bill’s gotten to her too (‘yet’), but cautious optimism hasn’t done a whole lot for him lately.
Hand still in place, Dipper takes it a step further, patting it good-naturedly, if a tad awkward.
“Do you, uh…need me to stay over here tonight?”
It’s an echo of the same offer she’d given him only days before. Admittedly, it sounds a bit off coming from him given that it’s Mabel’s sentiment more so than his. But she couldn’t appear to care less, the way her face softens at the suggestion. They’re doing this again, but the idea in itself is becoming about as awkward as their sibling hugs.
Wordless, she extends her own hand his way, face up for him to take.
He does.
It’s a somber déjà vu when he climbs in to lie down on his back. When he lies his hands across his stomach, and when she curls against the wall. They’ve been here before.
“Ugh, I can’t believe I’m letting those dumb movies keep me up…” she moans, dragging her fingers down her face. “So much for beauty sleep.”
She’s looks as defeated as he had only last week. It’s a lot to shoulder, and Dipper detests that she’s having to learn that too. It takes more than just courage to fend off your ghosts.
“Hey,” Dipper says, nudging her with his elbow. “There’s always tomorrow, right?”
At least it doesn’t take a whole lot to make her smile.
In ways, it’s only in the hours where they barely speak that they learn more about each other.
The late nights have overtaken them both, but in some twisted sense, they get closer because of it. It isn’t every night that they resort to sharing beds, but it’s nearly all of them that they need to confide in one another.
Simple truths reveal themselves in the saddest of ways. Small ticks that would have otherwise gone unnoticed if it were any summer but this one.
Dipper’s known for years that his sister’s favorite ice cream flavor is strawberry — but it takes him nearly thirteen to find out she needs a hand between her shoulder blades to fall back asleep after the worst of her nightmares.
It happens by pure accident. There’s a night when she jolts awake, shaking more than she ever has before, and he doesn’t know what to do. It’s divine gut instinct that tells him to try it, and like magic, it puts her to sleep mere seconds after she stumbles over.
When Mabel falls asleep with her mouth a little closer to his ear than usual, it’s only then that he realizes it’s taken him nearly thirteen years to know that he needs to hear her breathing to truly feel at peace.
Minutes are all it ever took, in the beginning. A smile. A whisper. A promise it’d be okay in the morning. They lose sleep more than they lose hope, and it’s still enough for them to ride on that this was all a passing phase.
When they’re finally comfortable doing this, they lose that too.
One night, they wake in unison.
It’s Dipper who jolts awake first, but when his eyes instinctively flick her way, he finds Mabel pulling herself out of it right after him. She springs up to her headboard, kicking away viciously at the covers of her bed, as if to fight off the demons hiding in them. They cross glances like it was destined to be, finding the other hugging themselves close with frantic sheens coating their faces.
They barely get in a breath before they’re calling out to one another.
“—Can I sleep with you tonight?”
Barely another before they’re both stunned into silence at the synchrony of it.
Tonight’s already well half over, a hint of the moon setting over the hills, but nights like these feel like they never end. By habit, Mabel raises her hands to form a fist atop her open hand — a familiar gesture — but he brushes off her game of rock-paper-scissors before she has a chance to initiate it.
“No, don’t I’ll…” he starts, sliding to the floor, pillow tucked beneath his arm. “I’ll come over there.”
Dipper crosses the floor with numbed unease — how many times have they done this, how many times more — and Mabel’s already scooting herself backwards to the wall. At her bedside, he grabs for the covers she’s kicked to the foot of her mattress, bringing it up and over the both of them when he lies down next to her.
“Wanna talk about it?” he questions gently, voice hoarse. There’s no screaming tonight, at least, that he knows of, but the images still lingering in his head leave his throat shot.
Mabel’s quiet for the longest time. Patient as he is, he’ll watch her mouth as it opens and closes several times, retracting her words, weighing them. Dismissing them. He thinks he sees more of himself in her in moments like these, and he hates it. The way she builds up and falls apart just trying to make sense of what she’s just dreamed, it’s like a mirror image.
She draws a long breath before she speaks, her eyes half-lidded and voice drained.
“You were gone.”
Dippers eyes widen.
There are a lot of answers he was expecting. And that wasn’t one of them.
Mabel’s face darkens with her reply — and in the same turn, it fills his chest with ice by what she’s inevitably going to ask next. In the space between her revelation and when she poses the question his way, it hits him in some deluded sense how touching it is. He’s still needed.
“What about yours?” it comes, small and poignant. “What was yours about?”
Dipper answers her with the same exhaustion. The same empty terror.
“…You were gone.”
The air stills between them.
Her reaction is almost the same. He hears that hitch in her breath that he’d done a better job of hiding, but she doesn’t shudder the way he had. In the wake of what they’ve both admitted, there’s simultaneously too much to say and no way to say them. The world has chosen another night to dump the weight of it on both their shoulders, and the look they share says everything.
Separate beds weren’t an option tonight. Not when he knew for a fact he needed to hear her breathing this time.
Not on the nights where she dies in his head.
Something shifts in her eyes, but Mabel doesn’t look at him long enough to gather what it is. He’s almost convinced that she’s finally found the words she’s needed all these weeks, but like too many occasions before, they catch in her throat before she finds the voice to speak them.
It’s an unsettling trend. Mabel’s had more of her comforting words stolen than anything else, these days.
In the end, she does nothing more than scoot closer. Like two pieces of the same broken puzzle, her head finds that nook between his shoulders that’s always felt like it was meant for her. Mabel fumbles for his hand underneath the comforter to squeeze.
“I’m right here. And I’m not goin’ anywhere, okay?”
“Me too,” he replies, squeezing back. “Promise.”
Things would get better. They had to.
The weeks pass by so much slower when they’re wide awake for half of them.
Test-driving every remedy under the sun (or, moon) is Mabel’s attempt at helping. And for a while, he thinks it’s making a difference — the dreams get less intense. A touch less frequent.
It starts with a nightlight she sticks beside her bed. Dipper’s already well past the threshold of exhaustion where he could fall asleep in broad daylight, but even just the presence of it sends him drifting a little sooner.
Mabel starts to fix drinks far too hot for the summer months, and closes each night with some wild anecdote just to wind them both down. She’s been talking about pasting glow-in-the-dark stars on their ceiling.
(Dipper thinks they’re too old for stars and sharing beds the same way he thinks they’re too old for lullabies. But Mabel hums herself to sleep one night, and he doesn’t remember hearing the end of the melody.)
Little comforts. They’re fleeting.
There’s another bleaker one written in the journal. Some melancholy afterthought of how you died every night when you went to sleep. The disturbing notion jumps out to him one night when he’s the closest to sleepy he’s ever been, only to have it ripped from him the moment his eyes fall on the words.
The only thing that disturbs him more is how — for one cursed moment of weakness — it’s a sick comfort he’s almost inclined to agree with.
The release is sweet. Temporary. If the nightmares don’t find you first, the peace will. You can’t get too greedy. You’ll beg for anything and you’ll snatch at what you can and you’re not supposed to have these thoughts at two in the morning, you’re not supposed to have them at all—
Things would get better. Things would get better.
They had to.
They had to.
It’s a mantra Dipper starts to burn into his skull. He repeats it to himself — to the ceiling, to the journal, mentally, to Mabel — over and over until his body gives out. It’s a glimmer of hope before it’s a borderline obsession, but at the end of the day, it’s the only string of words they had left going for them.
It’s one he regrettably commits to memory, omitting the integral part of that phrase — that things always got worse before they got better.
Because when he steps out of the portal, Stanford Pines brings a whole new definition of the word ‘nightmare’ with him.