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‘M-12a. Please.’
It’s barely a few weeks that she’s held her new phone, but the urgency of his text has Mabel threatening to drop it the minute she sees it.
A thirteenth birthday gift from her parents, it’s filled with more anxious messages between her and her brother than it is pictures in the short time she’s had it. Wary of anything and everything, she’s fallen too hard into the habit of keeping it just within sight, and the moment the screen lights up, she knows it’s nothing good.
It never is.
The teacher at the front of the classroom must be new, she thinks, watching her fumble over her notes and reading from slides as if seeing them for the first time. Bracing herself, Mabel raises her hand, but speaks up before giving the chance to call on her.
“Can I please go to the bathroom? I think I’m going to be sick.”
It’s not entirely a lie.
As she expects, the remark catches her teacher off guard, lifting her gaze from disheveled papers to drift towards the back of the room. A few of her classmates do the same, curious, turning around in their chairs to find her cradling a stomach that she didn’t realize was genuinely starting to churn.
“O-oh,” she stammers, biting back on her lip. Reflexive, she reaches for her glasses, fidgeting them around atop her nose. In her eyes, Mabel swears she can read her as she recites some chapter of some teaching manual in her head. “Um…Maybe the nurse’s office might be a better idea?”
Good enough.
Nodding, she shoves the phone hidden discreetly behind her books into her sweater sleeve, swiping her bag and heading for the door.
Slipping out and into the hallway, Mabel walks through them as quietly as possible, knowing footsteps guiding an otherwise blanking mind. Be it the endless stupor she’s been living in since they’d come home, or more simply just how long they’ve been away from here, the school is more of a maze than she remembers it being.
She passes door after door, the fervor of her classmates bleeding through them. Weeks later, and they’re all still coming down from the vacation high. When it isn’t teachers fighting for control of their airwaves, it’s them, passionately recounting their summers in every spare breath.
One by one they sound off their stories with increasing determination, like a game of winner takes all. Who had it the most memorable, the most harrowing, the prize of envy just within reach.
She’s not one of them this year.
She’s…
She’s a walking brain fog still mentally mapping out this school. Pieces of it return to her with each room marker, the cafeteria as it passes by, the library, the gym, (‘the counselor’s office—’), the bathrooms, all leading the way.
The bright red glow of M-12a shouts at her from the end of the hall — some sort of forgotten custodial closet, but for them, a rendezvous point they’ve resorted to more than once. Sure enough, she sees him beneath it fumbling with his own birthday phone, unassuming to anyone else, but she’s never had to go digging deep for the cues.
Her chest sinks the longer she stares at him.
Dipper leans hunched against the wall, the brittle tension lining his shoulders visible from a mile away. She doesn’t need to see his eyes head on to know that they’re aching for a full night’s rest. He’s gotten better at hiding it when he can help it, but it’s the unguarded moments that cut her deeper than the facades. A single glance, and it vindicates everything.
Hissing to get his attention, his eyes dart up to meet hers, instinctively shoving his phone into his zip jacket’s pocket. He takes a step her way, and she moves to close the distance between them.
“You actually got out?” Dipper blurts aloud, clapping a hand over his mouth by impulse. He lowers it a second after, his volume with it. “What’d you say?”
“’Told her I was sick. Not a total lie, but forget about me,” she drops her tone too, pinching his sleeve, “what the heck happened? You never text me like that.”
He’s silent for a second, pondering. But just as he finds the words for her, the sharp click of high heels in the distance snaps him out of it. Dipper grabs at her wrist to duck them both around the corner, yanking open the door to the closet. The sharp scent of ammonia hits her like a wall when she slides to the floor, knees tucked to their chests as it slams shut behind them.
The steps grow louder and closer, but not close enough. The muffled halt of her footsteps comes with a light squeak against the tile, followed by the opening and closing of a door somewhere in the hall.
They sigh in unison.
“Sorry,” he whispers, staring blankly at shelves on the opposite wall. “’Probably could have been a little less cryptic.”
She frowns. “So what gives? Did something happen?”
Mabel’s half expecting him to murmur an answer she’s already prepared herself for. Dizziness. Daydreams. Sounds that aren’t there. A handful she’s experienced herself. He sinks his face into both his hands, breathing choppy.
“…I don’t know.”
“…You don’t know what?”
“…I just…don’t know.”
There’s a lot to take away from that. Maybe too much. She opts instead to let the silence hang, the hope that he’ll elaborate without her pressing him to. Her gaze settles on the clock ticking this endless day away, each second like a heartbeat giving life to things better left buried.
At long last, his hands fall from his face to his knees, but he doesn’t look away from them.
“I…I was fine? At the start,” he says, almost like he’s trying to convince himself. “Nothing set it off, but...”
She feels like she knows how this narrative goes.
“Something just…came over me,” he continues, one hand raising to splay against the base of his neck. Always reaching for a constraint that’s never there. She winces. “One minute I was fine, and the next — I wasn’t.”
‘I wasn’t’ can take a lot of forms. With how long of a gap he leaves her in, she can only assume that even he’s still searching for which one feels right. Too many to count and yet she understands them all. She’s endured a handful of them herself. But she’ll still listen like she’s clueless when he talks about how his chest feels tight, how he sweats bullets while shivering. He’ll talk headaches and tingling hands and nausea, more accustomed to all of them than she’s led him on to believe.
He’ll string together every word to imply a panic attack without saying them side by side.
“…I can’t focus,” he punctuates it all, and really, it’s the best they’ll ever chalk it up to. His head rolls against the wall to look at her. “Am I making any sense? Like — things should be fine? It’s all over — but it isn’t?”
She gets it. Mabel acknowledges him with a solemn nod, and he takes it as permission to go on. Dipper’s hands rise to comb through the sides of his head, grabbing fistfuls of hair in either one.
“It’s like it doesn’t matter how hard I try, I can’t get my mind to, just…stop. Turn off.”
“Took the words right out of my mouth,” she says, absently slipping the phone out of her sleeve again to open it to the photo gallery. There’s only one picture of Grunkle Stan and Grunkle Ford that she’s managed to save to her new phone, just for times like this.
For coping.
“Even in the classes I like so far, it feels like I’m having the brain freeze of the century,” she adds, deflated. “Bleven-Eleven Mega-Slush-Supreme.”
Mabel keeps her eyes trained on the screen, and finds that Dipper’s join her too. They sit in silence for what feels like eternity, just soaking in what little warmth the picture had to offer them. Her screen times out eventually, and Dipper releases the threatening hold on his hair when it does.
“Dipper, do you think…”
‘we need to talk to someone about this—
?’
“…it’ll be this way forever?”
By habit, something inside her recoils just as it’s on the tip of her tongue. That’s all she’s good at these days, it feels like. Banishing the hard questions somewhere deeper inward that she can’t bear to touch. Dipper’s first instinct is to shake his head ‘no,’ because of course it wouldn’t. Nothing lasted forever — this wouldn’t either.
Weeks later, and they’re still waiting for the dust to settle, but she wishes more than anything for some clue of when that might be. In the meantime, any words of solace are the most they’re getting by on.
“It’ll just take time, Mabel,” he answers. “That’s all we need.”
And for right now, that’s enough.
Mabel nudges his shoulder with her own. “Cool. So let’s call it a time out, okay? Twenty minutes and we’ll head back to class.”
He deadpans. “There’s only twenty minutes left of class.”
“Bingo.”
Mabel slides herself against the wall and to her feet, reaching her hand back down to help him to do the same. He’s much less at a threat of his knees buckling unannounced these days, but Mabel’s found that there’s seldom not an excuse to keep them joined at the hip when the opportunity presents itself. And given how he doesn’t resist it, she’s inclined to think he agrees.
Discreetly slipping back out into the hallway, the feeling is night and day. With her arm looped around his, she wears the brightest smile possible for the both of them. And it must do something — there’s the softest hint of one that he mirrors back to her, however slight.
‘Everything will be fine. We’re gonna be fine.’
(She still pulls them past the counselor’s office a little quicker than she means to.)
“Good evening Mr. and Ms. Pines, this is the front office of Piedmont Middle School. We have it noted that your son Dipper Pines was absent from third period today without a recorded excuse in our system. If you could please give us a call back to have that verified, that’d be great. Thank you and have a nice—”
Mabel flinches at the deafening beep that cuts the message short, and even more so at the poisonous tone following it.
“Three F’s and you’re barely a month into the school year.”
Their father’s voice doesn’t venture into the territory of furious often, but he’s decided tonight was the breaking point. For thirty excruciating minutes, she’s taken cover behind the stairwell to the war erupting in the kitchen. It’s everything she can’t see that paints the picture too clearly. Between the pacing of footsteps and the creaking of the wooden chair, Mabel doesn’t have to see Dipper to know the strain of it has him fidgeting in his seat.
“I’m still adjusting.”
“So why?” another voice — their mother’s — speaks up, stern. She’s nowhere near as intimidating as their dad’s, but no less frustrated. “Dipper, you’ve never ditched — not once in your life! Especially — math? Who are you trying to fool here?”
The bitterness is swift. It rushes through her, unforgiving, and it’s a true test of will that she doesn’t storm into the kitchen then and there. That’s what they take away, all the nights they’ve stayed up, all the silences at the dinner table and that’s all you pick up on?
“Look, I just…I couldn’t stay there, okay?” Dipper speaks up again, his confidence peppered with holes. He’ll never speak a word of what’s happened to both of them, but with day, he’s cracking a little more.
Patience thinning, their dad fires back, mocking. “Because clearly there are other places you have to be at instead of class.”
“Stop phrasing it like that! I didn’t— I couldn’t concentrate.”
“So what, you just up and left? Where did you go?”
Cracking.
“I…”
“Your mother asked you a question!”
“Tell us the truth, Dipper!”
“Mom, Dad, it’s not his fault!”
The faces of all three whip to the doorframe of the kitchen, Mabel standing defiantly within it. She has her fists balled at both sides, face hardened. “It’s mine. If you’re going to yell at someone, yell at me.”
Mabel finally takes in the sight of all of them, their parents towering over Dipper as he sits shrunken behind them in the chair they’ve cornered him in. They’re still dressed in their work clothes, but the cues of their mental brawl with her brother are what draw her eyes first. The balled-up cardigan thrown over counter. Her father’s sloppy tie loosened around his neck.
Arms crossed, their mother is cautiously hostile when she calls to her. “Mabel? What are you talking about?”
“I got sick,” Mabel begins, placing a hand over her weary chest. Beneath it, she can feel her own heart pounding. Already, she sees her father ready to cut in and stop her the minute he finds an opening to. “And you can even ask my teacher, okay? Dipper just wanted to make sure I didn’t puke all over the school. He wasn’t ditching.”
Sure enough, he’s on her in seconds. “Mabel, enough.”
“I texted him saying that I might have to go to the nurse, and he just got a little worried—”
“—Mabel.”
“—worried about me, so he wanted to make sure I was okay and—”
“—Mabel Pi—”
“—and I’m telling the truth!” she snaps, raising her voice over his. Dipper’s eyes widen when she does, darting fearfully to the back of their parents’ heads. “I didn’t feel good, I still don’t feel good, and why can’t you just trust us for once?!”
Her shriek bounces off the granite and tile, freezing them all in place.
Herself included — when it really dawns on her that she’s just screamed at her parents, for what may be the first time in her whole life.
Mabel has to fight the urge to clap her hand over her mouth in horror. Right behind it, the urge to stop the angry tears from brimming in her eyes, but finds that she’s failing at it fast. Aggressively, still, she wipes at them to feign some sense of a strong front, but feels her insides crumbling under the tension of it all.
There’s too much to not talk about. And standing with her eyes screwed shut and tears continuing to fall, she wishes nothing more than for them to say everything for her.
(‘I’m sick. We both are.’)
When the tense air finally stills, it’s their mother that dares the next move first. Raising her hand, she motions for her to come closer. Mabel sheepishly does as she’s asked, approaching with red-rimmed eyes glued to the floor. She isn’t sure what she was expecting. She just knows it wasn’t this — there’s a feather light touch atop both her shoulders that brings her to her senses, guiding her into a chair next to her brother.
As if a brand-new woman had slipped into the shoes of the one that had just been scolding them, she squats in front of both chairs to meet them at eye level. It’s from down here that she suddenly looks so much smaller than she is, swallowed whole by her skirt pooling all around her.
Even more so, when she finds the words to say.
“…What on earth has gotten into you two…?” she pleads, wispy. Unlike the tremble in her voice, her hands are far steadier when they reach to grab each one of theirs, squeezing. “You’ve both been acting so out of place since you came home. You honestly can’t think that we haven’t noticed that.”
It’s their turn to drop their weapons. Their stony expressions dissolve in sync, reverting to the children they often forget they still are. They could harden themselves through and through, and yet the softest, caring touch would amount it all to nothing. She could unravel them both in a heartbeat, if she knew how easy it was these days.
Averting her eyes, the twins stare off in separate corners. Anywhere but their mother’s awaiting gaze.
Dipper swallows the lump building in his throat. “We’re just different people now, Mom. We’re growing up.”
“…Growing up isn’t suddenly thinking that skipping class will get you to technical school any faster,” she admonishes softly, glancing her son. When he won’t look back, she turns to Mabel, “or raising your voice when you’ve never done it before.”
It does nothing to stir either of them. Not on the surface. The anger in their mom fizzles out as quickly as it had manifested, her gentle caresses making them question if she’d been angry at all. She mends the fallout the only way she knows how, like a delicate peace offering, and the first hopeful sign that they’re done for the evening. They’re begging for answers to questions they don’t know how to ask, and it doesn’t really hit Mabel until the silence among them gives her enough clarity to know.
They aren’t angry.
They’re scared.
“I’m only asking one more time…”
From camped out behind the stairwell, Mabel’s heard their dad repeat it all night, dreading the instant she’d be posed with the question herself. Dipper’s already braved it five times, six in just a moment. He’s far calmer this time, at least. More than her.
“…Did something happen this summer that we need to know about?”
“No,” Dipper answers, firm. “Nothing ha-appened.”
The crack in his voice says more than he has all night.
“…Mabel?”
And if she speaks her voice, it’ll break just like her brother’s.
From below her, her mother’s eyes are still piercing into hers. She nods her head in anticipation, a slow, knowing gesture as if that’s all it took to force the truth out.
If only it were that easy.
The most Mabel can manage is a shake of her head, of a denial so profound it’s a very miracle she doesn’t mess even that up.
“Nothing happened?”
She shakes her head.
He taps his fingers against the counter. “Nothing at all?”
Again and again.
The night ends there. It isn’t an explosion of curses as much as it is a sputtering plume of smoke, beginning and ending with their father. He mutters something harsh under his breath, enough edge in his voice to know he hasn’t quit, but enough strain in it to know he’s lost tonight.
She comes to when she feels the soft hands leaving her own, her mother’s grip weakening and slipping away, taking a piece of her heart with it. Mabel feels the consuming rush of guilt the moment they detach, the kind so sudden that it steals your breath. She knows this suffocation; she’s felt it too many times. The kind that rivals seeing the worst of your mistakes shatter against the earth, the kind that feels like a crushing hand around her waist, taunting—
She rises to stand before them. Offering a final pleading look to eyes that won’t look back at her, their mom shuffles back to the counter with her head lowered. Her rejected hands cup each other, dangling loosely in front. Mabel merely stares at them, the ones she wouldn’t take — only emerging from her numb daze when she sees their fathers’ pry them apart to take one of them into his own.
The way their parent’s eyes meet ignites the anxious fuse inside both of them. Without any words at all, they share a look that shoots the chill down their spines. What they both feared for most, all but imminent.
Their voices are low — almost enough to shut them out entirely — but just loud enough that it has their hearts racing all over again.
“…I’m calling Uncle Stan tomorrow,” he whispers to her, drained. She nods her head in solidarity. In defeat. “Something’s not being talked about here.”
“…So they’re really pressin’ about it, huh?”
Stan’s voice is oddly far more comforting at one o’clock in the morning.
Waddle’s snores from under the bed makes for a close second.
Dipper nods at him, partially forgetting in his sleepy state that they’re on the phone to begin with. He keeps his lidded eyes to the bed skirt, the hypnotic swaying of it to and fro from Waddle’s breathing only minutes away from taking him, too. They’ve chosen to retreat into Mabel’s room tonight, sitting on her bed with her phone perched in his hand. They’re giving ear buds a try too, one for each of them.
They only have a contact photo to stare at through the conversation — the one Mabel so lovingly gazed at earlier — and a presumably prettier picture than what the two probably looked like at this hour.
“They’ve been pretty relentless about it,” Dipper says, keeping his voice low. “The school keeps calling, Mom and Dad are wearing us down…Things just kind of feel like they’re spiraling out of control, you know?”
There’s a static brush of the phone being passed, and it’s Ford’s voice that takes over the sound waves. He gives a tired chuckle.
“Well, cutting class is probably more in your control than you’d think. I can’t say that’s something I’d expect out of you, Dipper.”
“Ehhh, don’t listen to Poindexter here. It ain’t school if you ain’t ditchin’.”
They bicker over the line as if they’re the only ones hearing each other, and even in the fatigue, it’s enough to pull a smile out of him.
Ford clears his voice at the other end of the line, taking over the phone. “Has Mabel nodded off? She’s been awfully quiet.”
“No, she’s still here,” he responds, angling the phone her way. “She’s just — Mabel?”
Dipper pauses mid-sentence when he looks her way, a flood of surprise that jolts him out of his sleepy daze. In the minutes he’s been talking away, Mabel’s gathered more than a few tears in her eyes, large wet trails shining in the glow of her phone screen.
He mouths something to her — a cross between “what’s wrong?” or “are you okay?” but she loses both of them between the teary blur and what little light she can see him through.
In a heartbeat, he’s scooting over to place the phone back in her trembling, waiting hands, his own lingering a second longer to keep it from shaking right out of her grasp. Dipper wraps his other arm around her back to pull her closer, but the knot in his chest doesn’t loosen. This isn’t the first time, and he doubts it’ll be the last. He’s helpless just staring at her, but she swears it’s always been enough even when it never felt like it.
Mabel raises the phone to her lips, quivering with all the words she’s struggling to say. The lump in her throat builds with each second she leaves them hanging, the panicked whispers on the other end finally breaking through to her.
“…G-Grunkle Stan?”
A pause.
On the other end, they hear the quiet sequence as it unfolds. A step, a whisper — (“Stanley.”) — the static of hands brushing hands, and Dipper imagines Ford’s just done the same thing he has.
The line crackles to life again with its former, gruff warmth.
“Hey sweetie…” Sweetie. He still remembers her. “Is everything okay?”
Mabel bites her lip harder, shutting her eyes tighter. So much isn’t. So, so much. Something inside her is so eager to crumble, the torrent of confessions all one hiccup from caving in. The loneliness, the sadness. The fear. The dreams. The nightmares. The chasm that only seems to fracture deeper between them and their parents, the counselor’s office that only seems to grow bigger each time she passes it.
There’s so much wrong with all of them. But for the moment that they’re here, together but still so far apart, the only words that come are the only ones that make sense.
“…I-I miss you…” she sobs, sniffling. Her hands curl tighter around the phone, bringing it up further to touch her forehead. If she closes her eyes hard enough, it’s like he’s right there with her. “I miss you so much...”
“I miss you too, pumpkin,” he soothes her. Stan may be the very embodiment of reassurance when he wants to be, but Mabel swears that she hears his voice waver when her’s does. “I wish I was there with you.”
“I-It’s been so hard, Grunkle Stan…”
She burns the minutes of the line through sobs and hiccups, some semblance of release she hasn’t let herself to feel since coming home. Mabel cries into the phone with what reservation she allows herself, the lingering fear that she’ll wake up their parents keeping her from getting too loud.
But one by one they spill, the thoughts she’s kept so tightly under wraps.
She cries over the bruises and cuts that haven’t healed yet, still fresh and hiding beneath the sweaters she refuses to take off. It’s having to lie to her mom about how it aches to get up in the morning that hurts most, the uncertainty of how much longer she can use gym class as an excuse.
Her tears fall faster at the mention of their parents, the icy prospect of ever confiding the complete truth in them, and consequently, the divide between them growing larger each day. They’d never understand. She cries for all the things she can’t tell them when she’s so used to pouring it all out through her letters.
Reduced to blubbering through her sleeves, the weight of it hits her wave after wave, of how agonizing it all is.
Of the days she can’t focus in school, because there’s simply too much that’s happened.
Of the nights she can’t sleep, because there are things waiting in the shadows to terrorize her.
Of the snide comments she hears some of her classmates make when they think she isn’t listening, those Pines twins and their freakish tendency to stick too close to each other.
Of how her heart breaks every night for her brother and the hell she put him through for three whole days.
Of how she can’t even bring herself to look at him when she says it, because it’s the first time he’s hearing it too.
Of the paralyzing reality of how truly close she came to dying, staring helpless into the blinding shooting star in Bill’s eye as if staring at the face of death itself…
…Of the moments in the day when the fear crushes her most, the thought that Stan can’t remember her if she isn’t there to remind him.
Little by little, the painful sting in her heart starts fading. It’s flooding with something that isn’t dread for once, even if it hurts just as badly. Maybe catharsis. Her courage to open up is rewarded with Stan’s patience, listening intently as she lays it all bare. She cries into the phone, sometimes into incoherence, but Dipper’s slow rhythm across her back never falters.
At near points of no return, Stan shushes her softly with a parental warmth that their own can’t provide — but must remind herself that however misguided their efforts are, they’re still trying. It aches more than it should.
“From what it sounds like,” Ford’s voice returns, a thin veil of somberness that wasn’t there before. He hasn’t said a word the whole time, but she doubts he hasn’t been listening, “the two of you haven’t really had any time to settle down.”
More static, then Stan again. “Which is why you two should work on just that. Settlin’ down. Okay?”
Another lapse of silence stretches over the line, a limbo of what more to say, if anything at all. It’s Ford who decides that this isn’t the note to leave on. Mabel hears him draw a breath of something different, letting it out slow. The pause between them tells her to steel herself, like whatever it is that follows this isn’t meant to fade with the night. Their wisdom rarely has, when it’s all they’ve clung to in the empty moments.
“…You two made it out and alive. You mustn’t forget that.”
It comes out sounding heavier than he probably means it to. But somewhere deep down, there’s the conviction that it’s needed. With the daily threat of their minds floating off somewhere else, Ford’s words may as well be the first anchor they’ve had to normalcy.
“This isn’t survival mode anymore. There’s nothing else that can hurt you,” he soothes, some melancholic tinge laced in every word. “You can let your guard down now. You have time to process it all.”
And then, solemnly—
“You have each other.”
Like Ford reached inside her and cradled all her fears, it comes feeling like it was waiting for this very moment. The sheer weight of the sentiment could send her into a fresh bout of tears all over again.
They have each other — they always have. It’s as profound as it is obvious, but above all else, it’s the most healing truth in any of this. She wonders then, how something so precious could go so lost these days since their journey back. In the endless fog, it’s floated aimlessly at the back of her head, always there, but still a degree removed from meaning. It’s taken until now for the haze to lift, for her to see it.
Something so plain in sight that she’s forgotten that it’s there — and yet it’s in hearing it through someone else’s voice that she finally feels it make a home inside her, somewhere.
Her vision is still swimming and burning, but when Ford says it, she slowly turns to look at Dipper, and by instinct, finds that he’s already waiting there for her. Roles reversed from only hours ago, he’s the one holding the faintest smile, as worn and tired as she’s ever seen it, but brave enough for both of them.
They have each other. And she’ll never take this for granted ever again.
“Get some rest, both of you,” Stan says, fighting back a yawn on the other end. “I’ll figure out what to say to your folks, so don’t go losin' sleep over it, you got it?”
“We’ll try. Thanks Grunkle Stan, Grunkle Ford,” Dipper forces out through a yawn himself, rubbing at his eyes. “We’ll talk soon.”
Their goodbyes are a mess of sleepy farewells, but with all the charm of the ones they exchanged the night they departed: overlapped, longer than necessary, and sincere as can be. Mabel blows a kiss through the receiver as their final sendoff for the evening, her room plummeting back into total darkness.
All is quiet, just briefly. Dipper hums an airy chuckle out of nowhere next to her. It’s starting to sound like his own again.
“…’Think we just got our first actual homework,” Dipper humors her, eying her clock on the opposite wall. “’Don’t even think I can pass this one.”
She chuckles at that.
“You got that right,” she teases, glancing it too. They have five hours before the day will call for them, but even for a moment, it sounds so blissfully far away. “Better catch your z’s while you can.”
Where their good-nights over the phone bubbled with life, it’s the ones that they exchange that comes wordless, but never insignificant. Like it’s second nature now, they’ll reach for each other in some practiced unison, arms and hands filling familiar places. Time, for as fleeting and as disorienting as it’s been lately, feels like it stops just for these moments.
They’re two puzzle pieces still missing the rest of the picture, but Mabel’s the farthest from feeling incomplete when they’re together like this.
“Hey,” Dipper murmurs, voice thick with fatigue. His hand stills across her back, curling against her sleep shirt. “We’re alive.”
“…We’re alive,” she repeats, nodding in his shoulder. She sniffles. “And we’re gonna make it out of this.”
Her throat tights when she says it. It’s only after it leaves her that her brain latches on to them, a fumble on Ford’s words that births its own meaning. This, she must remember, the long nights and empty silences still waiting for them. They’ve still got to survive this, too.
Mabel doesn’t miss it, and evidently, neither does Dipper when she feels him slowly nod into her shoulder too.
They have a million storms left to weather. The road beyond this is an ending-of-worlds by its own right, like there was still room to break from this. Because there is. If the anguish-ridden moments have taught her anything, she knows well that there’s more to it than holding a brave face.
The days to come are apprehensive if anything, and the pit in her stomach could swallow her whole if she remembers that it’s there. She knows this suffocation, too — it feels like facing the last stand all over again.
He hugs her a little tighter.
“…and we’re gonna make it out of this.”
At least they have each other the second time around.