Between the Lines [open]

[captainbuzzkill]

Who| Dipper and YOU
What| Visiting time in Medbay
Where| Medbay
When| After "In Brightest Day"
Warnings/Notes| Dipper is seriously out of it from brainwashing and may say creepy things or show signs of mental illness. Also there is creepy scribbling on the walls

Dipper had a special room all his own in the Medbay now. Normally injured people were on the main Medbay floor, but when displacees were waking up for the first time in the 31st century, or when someone was judged as needing their own room due to their condition, they got a private room.

They had decided he was to be under observation for the first day or two after each of his telepathic treatments, which meant he'd have to stay in his Medbay room or be chaperoned by a nurse, medtech, or fellow Legionnaire if he wanted to go around Legion World. After the brief periods of observation for each treatment he'd have more freedom, but telepathic restructuring wasn't something to take lightly, and could have negative effects in the immediate time after sessions.

Since he'd shown some regressive behavior and since he'd have to keep coming back to it, the nurses and medtechs had changed Dipper's room to be a little more kid-friendly. The room could easily be restructured with a few simple commands, so the wall sconces had been changed to look like colorful seashells and the HD mural wall had been changed to a cheerful underwater view filled with colorful and beautiful alien fish darting around, making it look as if the wall was really a glass wall in the side of an aquarium.

But the other walls were blank.

Well, they had been blank originally. They'd given him a tablet and stylus to draw with but after they'd taken it away for the pictures to be examined at times, he'd decided he needed to draw and write on something that was harder for anyone to confiscate. In his current state, only the walls had seemed like something that had enough permanence, so he'd rummaged through the belongings they'd let him have in his Medbay room and found markers.

The doctors and telepaths started debating over whether erasing what was on the walls and/or taking his markers away would help him or just cause more trauma, but Aven and Dr. Ry'kerr had ultimately told them that this was their purview, as a telepathic master and psychiatrist, and that the drawings had to stay. Now that the telepaths had started fixing the damage that was done, he had false memories to sort through and throw away so the real ones could resurface and be sorted out.

So far he had filled two walls with drawings and scribbled notes. They stopped halfway up because that was the highest he could reach without a chair, but below that line it looked like someone's darkest nightmares had exploded out of someone's head and splattered directly on the walls. There were pictures of horrible monsters, both in Sinestro Corps uniforms and without them. A repeating one-eyed triangle pattern showed up everywhere, sometimes in the eyes of the monsters that wore Sinestro uniforms, as if the triangle-thing was looking out from them. There were also partly-nonsensical notes that said things like:

Kidnapping by great-uncle? Summer vacation in small town in Oregon wilderness, see: Stancakes, breaking into golf course, zombie defense/karoake

Child labor? False True Technically true but not that bad

Parents locking us in a closet = time outs in the corner, annoying but harmless

Blood murals Mom gave us normal finger paint, walls were Mabel's idea

Demonic triangle not real real. Very real. See: Bill Cipher, body theft, Weirdmageddon

Gravity Falls weirdness = mostly real. Piedmont = normal. Parents /= mean. Parents = nice

DON'T FORGET: Mystery Twins! Mabel is real, Mabel is real, Mabel is real

While most of it was the horrible brainspew of a child trying to figure out which horrifying memories were real and which horrifying memories weren't, one wall wasn't as scary as the others. On that wall there were the crude drawings of a little girl that looked just like Dipper, except with braces and long hair, and all of them were positive. In one, there were gemstones on her face, colored dots made by his markers. In another, she was hefting up a scribbled red water balloon. In yet one more, she was younger, braces-less and with pigtails, covered in mud.

In all of them, she was laughing or smiling.

In the one where she was youngest, she was clearly just a toddler surrounded by stuffed animals. That one could've easily been mistaken as a random memory from when they were still 2 or 3, but it was much more important than that: it was the first memory. The very first thing he remembered, the exact moment that he was aware of existing -- aware enough to realize that he was really a them, that I was really we.

A name was written over and over and over around the pictures, in thick, awkward handwriting:



It wasn't his handwriting. He was trying to imitate hers, as if copying the way she wrote her name would suddenly make her real, make one of the drawings come to life so that she could hop out of the wall.

If anyone came to see him, they'd find him in patient scrubs, his hands covered in multicolored ink from accidentally touching it in places where it was still wet. He was wearing a friendship bracelet made with bright pink and purple thread on his right wrist -- something left behind by his sister after the brief time she'd showed up in the Legion's universe.

"Talking is fine," he told whoever it was that came in, because people who came in liked to talk to him apparently, even though he was clearly busy. "You can talk, I can talk, it's fine if you talk but don't. Touch. The walls. The doctors kept wanting to touch them, nobody's allowed to touch them, don't touch them."

Comments

[unrecovered]

Well, this looks like a horror movie.

Wash had been keeping an eye on the omnicom network - partially because it was the best way to gather information on the rest of the Legion without tracking everyone down individually, and partially because it was a fairly entertaining distraction - when Dipper had caught his eye and kept it, and not in a good way. There was enough chatter about brainwashing for him to have a vague idea of what happened, and the way Dipper was talking was...familiar, in a very ugly way.

Dipper sounded for all the world like he was trying to sort out his memories - figure out what belonged to him and what was warped or missing or Not His, shoved in his head by someone else. He sounded the way Wash felt years ago, trying to piece himself together in the aftermath of Epsilon.

So Wash makes his way back to the infirmary and asks after the kid, only to be shown into a room with some pretty horrifying murals inked on the walls and Dipper, covered in ink, still hard at work drawing. He's pretty sure he's seen this movie before. If the kid's head turns around 180 degrees, he's leaving.

...except that's not going to happen. Dipper's obviously still working through a lot, and if Wash can help him, then he damn well will.

"Walls are off limits," Wash replies. "Got it." The pictures were hell in marker, but he finds himself paying more attention to the notes. Those are the important part, and obviously Mabel is the most important of all. Dipper had mentioned on the network that she was his sister - his twin, if the note on the wall can be trusted. That might be a good place to start.

"Do you want to talk?"

[ringslinging]

Hal didn't bat an eyelash at the walls, or at being told not to touch them. He just walked in like he owned the place, grabbed a chair, and dragged it backwards near where Dipper was working on the wall, then straddled it and said nothing for a moment, looking over the writing and the drawings.

As weird as it all looked, it did fit with what Dipper should be trying to get back to - that kid who missed his sister and was determined to put together all the pieces of everything. So that, in itself, meant there was less to worry about now, as far as Hal was concerned.

Or maybe it was just that since he'd been there for what put Dipper in this state in the first place, he was just intensely relieved that the kid was away from it, even if he clearly had a lot to work through.

"Hey. How're you holding up?" He held up a few bags - the same selection of weird alien snack foods he'd brought Dipper during his first stay in medbay, back when he'd first arrived. "Special delivery, by the way."

[fragileandsoft]

Over the years Greg's seen some pretty crazy stuff, and turned them into album covers. In a moment absorbing the scene from the doorway, he can figure this kid's seen a lot crazier. He takes a breath, and steps in further. "You got it. Hands to myself."

Their conversation over the comms had concerned Greg enough to ask after Dipper. He'd gotten the broad strokes of the last mission, and more importantly how the kid was holding up as a result. It's one thing to be attacked physically, but Greg can't imagine how to hold up well against getting attacked mentally like that. He doesn't immediately start talking upon entering the room, instead taking a seat and observing the walls so he can try and pick out how Dipper's faring against the damage, but... well, he's no psychiatrist. But there's one good wall, so that.... that's good.

Greg puts down the chips and cookies he gathered (he's pretty sure that's what he got--there's a lot of really unfamiliar and strange food around here, and he is slow to figuring it all out) on the bedside table, and scratches at his beard.

"Top half's hard to get to, huh... you try using poster paper, or something?"

[captainbuzzkill]

Dipper turned to look at Wash, his head tilted at an odd angle (though not 180 degrees, thankfully). His movements were still sharp and furtive and strange. The false life the yellows had put in his head was an ugly one, the kind of life that led to traumatized children not being socialized correctly, and that was reflected in his body language.

"I'm guessing pity," he finally said, after some consideration. "That's why you're here."

He closed his eyes tight and knocked his head lightly against the wall, fighting through the conflict in his head over that, the dueling feelings of disgust over Wash's weakness in caring about others (instilled by the yellow), sadness that he was broken enough to inspire pity in strangers (partly his real feelings? maybe?), and gratitude that someone was reaching out to him when he felt so lost, adrift in an alien world without an anchor.

This was the future in another dimension and even if he'd (mostly) adjusted before all this, one of the things that had given him the ability to adapt so well was his past. Knowing he was loved by his family, and knowing he could be capable and clever and brave, that was a tether that had kept him grounded. His past meant he had the reserves of resilience, composure, wisdom, and hope that came from having survived -- and overcome -- horrible things before he'd even been pulled to this universe.

Now that was all murky. The present was a tumultuous sea of expectations, monstrous threats (apocalyptic and local), and trauma, and he was torn in two. He had two pasts, one where he was a perennial victim, hurt so much and so often that he'd wanted to want to inflict pain on the rest of the world, and the other where he was a hero, strong enough to transform his hardships into strength.

So it took him a moment to steady himself, to tread water on that sea of uncertainty until he sorted out which reaction was right. Gratitude won out. The past Dipper that had helped save the world understood kindness and saw the value in it. And even if that Dipper'd had trouble floating up to the top, he had his memories of her as a guide. He looked over at the wall with the drawings of his sister and nodded to himself. Mabel was the kind of person that hated when other people were sad, that would've sought out a stranger to help them if they were struggling and hurting and confused.

That meant Wash doing it was a good thing, not weakness. An admirable thing. He was Mabel-ing right now.

"Not really. But everyone keeps saying I should. The doctors and the telepaths. They say it might help make things less..." He looked at the wall, his expression briefly overwhelmed, as if he was horrified by his own life. He searched for a word and settled on a brutally honest one. "...bananas. Because this is -- "

He gestured to the wall "--a whole banana plantation." He raised an ink-stained finger. "In an equatorial region where banana production is at its height."

[unrecovered]

Wash stays silent for a few moments, letting Dipper work through his thoughts. It was one of the harder parts of this - finding words when your memories were broken and screaming over one another to be heard. At least Dipper doesn't have to try to protect himself like Wash did. Dipper has help.

At one point in his life, Wash would have been jealous. Now...well, if he can be part of that help, he's going to do it.

He blinks when Dipper finally speaks. It's not the weirdest thing he's ever heard - he's on a team with Caboose, and that's hard to beat - but that doesn't mean he was expecting it. "That's one way to put it."

After a moment of quiet struggle, he keeps going. "And honestly, it's not pity so much as it is sympathy." He doesn't want to talk about this - he hates telling people what happened, dragging his damage to the surface for the world to inspect - but here Dipper is, going through some version of what he lived through, and he can't leave the kid adrift. Not when he's been there. Not when he can do something about it.

"I don't like talking about it, but...I've been where you are. Not the same circumstances - what happened to me was an accident - but it had the same effect, or close to it." That wasn't entirely true - the less said about the Director, the better - but Epsilon hadn't known and couldn't hold himself together. He was just as much a victim as Wash had been, though it had taken years for Wash to accept that fact. "I spent a lot of time inside my head, trying to sort out which memories belonged to me and which ones had been put in by an outside force. When everything wants to be remembered at once, it's not easy." To say the least.

"What I'm getting at is, I have a few tricks that helped get me through it, and I thought you might want to learn them."

[deafleppard]

"Yeah... sure. Won't such a thing."

Even all the weirdness that had happened between the two of them, Gwen still thought of Dipper as a friend. Someone to look out for and check in on when they'd gotten hurt. She'd heard of what happened to him but... it wasn't until she was actually in the room that Gwen realized just how bad it was.

Literally the stuff of nightmares. The scariest part was that this had all come from Dipper. She couldn't even begin to imagine what it must've felt like. The sort of... trauma he'd gone through. What the recovery was even like.

Was this recovery, though? Yeah he was getting a lot of attention from a lot good people. Talented and skilled people, she was sure. It was just a lot for her to take in. And Gwen had to think that he had been getting better.

Slowly but surely.

"I, uh, just wanted to say hi. See how you were doing and all that."

[captainbuzzkill]

"Ooh, you got me the kind that tastes like feet!"

It didn't taste all that great, but he enjoyed having the little culinary adventure all the same. He popped open the bag and started shoving crispy things into his mouth.

Then he stared up at Hal, working through how he was supposed to feel about him in his head. One the one hand, he was the enemy. On the other hand, he was the enemy that was supposed to be brought into the fold, the one that Sinestro had wanted as a yellow. On the other other hand, he was the one that had stayed with him through it all, trying to escape with him at every opportunity he could. Just because the mind control on Hal had failed, that didn't make it any less horrible that they'd tried it at all.

He'd also helped him remember his sister.

On the other other other hand, Dipper was smart enough to understand that the yellows hadn't had some burning desire to add a barely-a-teenager into their forces, whether he was terrifying them on the battlefield or not. Oh sure, they probably felt he was a solid addition, but he knew what most of that had been about.

He'd been bait. He'd been grabbed and brainwashed as a way of manipulating Hal, making it harder for him to cut and run.

Dipper wasn't sure how he felt about that, about being used. He was angry over it but he was too mixed up to figure out if Hal was one of the people he should be angry at. He ultimately decided to table it for now, to figure things out when he had a clearer head.

"Less crazy. Still crazy. One of the telepaths that was going through my memories threw up." Not Aven. Aven was one of the great Titanian telepath masters, but one of his assistants had lost it a bit. "I think he was going through my memories of Bill trying to give me a head that was always screaming and stripping the skin off of it."

Something he'd flinched at a bit but was one of those bits of weirdness he'd just quietly accepted. (It was funny, the things others found horrifying that he didn't.)

"They seem to be able to handle the fake yellow stuff just fine, but they keep getting really squeamish about the real stuff that was already there."

[ringslinging]

Hal was getting pretty good at not blinking an eyelash when Dipper described another bit of crazy stuff from home, thankfully. Because he knew perfectly well how much the kid hated when people got weird about it.

"Nothing's as bad when you know it's fake. They don't want to think that you went through any of that for real. Kind of like - you might get some people disapproving if you watched a slasher flick, but they'd be a lot more upset if you were actually being chased by a serial killer."

Hal wasn't really one to get scared by fake anything - hell, he wasn't fazed by those kinds of horror movie things happening to him in real life - but he had to give Sinestro credit for knowing exactly how his mind worked. Nothing threatened against Hal himself would bring out the fear in him.

Other people, though?

Not so much.

[captainbuzzkill]

Dipper shook his head.

"If I use paper or touchpads they'll take it away. The doctors like looking at it. If it's on the walls, they can't take it."

He needed them to not be able to take it. These were his notes and they were as important as any of the monster-hunting notes in the Journal. More important, maybe. This was his life spread out on the walls. His memories were a bit more important than notes on the supernatural.

"I'm trying to remember what's real. Having doctors taking it away to look at it doesn't help me."

Nothing they could say about it helped as much as him actually sorting out what was real and what wasn't. He knew they were trying, really they were, but he was going to have to fight most of this battle on his own.

[captainbuzzkill]

"I'm..." Dipper looked at the walls. "...figuring some things out."

He turned to look at her, his expression furtive. Awkward.

He knew what this had to look like. There was something about how vulnerable he was to everyone that stung a bit. He needed to do this, needed to work through all the confusion and chaos, but it meant that anyone who checked in on him saw all of his craziness scrawled out where anyone could see.

"I'm not crazy." He winced. "I mean I am crazy. For right now. But all these things that probably seem made up or like they're the ramblings of a totally crazy person? They're real."

He gestured to some of the more monstrous drawings.

"The monsters are real. That's why this has been so hard. The yellow Lanterns put in fake memories and my real ones are so weird and sometimes-horrible that they almost seem fake. Telling them apart and figuring what's real and what's fake is -- it's hard when what's real is so...weird."

He pressed his ink-stained hands against the wall, against a picture of a town up in flames, under a sky that had been cut open, revealing a terrible terrible place outside of time and space beyond the gash.

"And wrong."

[captainbuzzkill]

That was...sad. That was really sad, the idea that something like this had happened to someone else. Dipper could understand how it might drive someone else to want to help a person struggling with it. If he ever saw someone else with a cracked brain like this, he'd probably always want to help them, too.

It was just that terrible, just that confusing.

Just that lonely.

(How was he supposed to reach out to people when he wasn't even sure his friends were his friends, and when he didn't even know who he was?)

He decided he liked the sound of learning some tricks to get through it.

"Mason," he said quietly. "My name is Mason."

He didn't use his real name that often but he still felt like saying it, reminding himself who he was. The yellows had wanted him to throw away his real name and his nickname. Neither really sounded all that fearsome, after all. So right now, it felt right to reclaim the names they tried to take away.

("Glubzor the Mighty" really didn't suit him. Neither did "Ripper," "The Ripper," "Blue Claw," or any of the other suggestions of the yellows.)

"But I usually go by Dipper." It was a silly nickname but silly was a good thing. And 'Dipper' was far more familiar. "You probably know my name already but I like to pretend the doctors and everyone aren't talking about me with people."

It felt better to pretend all those hushed conversations about what he was dealing with and how to fix it weren't going on behind his back.

"What's your name?"

[captainbuzzkill]

"I guess that makes sense." A pause. "I still hate it anyway."

He jammed more snacks into his mouth and chewed for a little while, thinking before he said anything next.

"It just makes it even more clear that I'm a total weirdo." It felt stupid to not be honest right now so he said what he thought. "But that's what started all this, right?"

He dusted the crumbs off his hands and gestured at the wall in a grandiose fashion. "I was enough of a weirdo that it attracted a yellow ring! And I'm still enough of a weirdo that the people looking at my actual real life get disturbed and barf over it. Or take my drawings full of crazy away because they want to write about me in psychology journals."

He picked up his markers and got back to work.

"Dr Ry'kerr and Aven, the telepathic master guy, told the one doctor-telepath to basically shut up about it, and that he wasn't even allowed to ask me if he could do it -- but none of them knew I was only pretending to sleep when they were talking about it in my room."

That was why he'd started drawing on the walls. Nobody could take those away. Even if it meant everyone could see.

He stopped and suddenly banged his head against the wall, as if he was frustrated that the contents of said noggin wouldn't just splash out of his head in perfect order the way he needed them to.

"But it's still like everyone thinks there was always something wrong with me. Like... like --" He broke off into inarticulate angry noises and scribbled over the picture he was working on, one filled with eyes and darkness. Then he knocked his head against the wall again and left it to rest there. "I didn't want it to be this way. Despite how bad it all was, I didn't want to see myself as some...victim or something. Even with Weirdmageddon, even with all the monsters, even with everything Bill did to me and my family. But they keep treating it as if everything that's wrong now isn't the only thing that's wrong with me. They keep wanting me to talk about before, too."

As he sorted it out and figured out what the before even was they wanted to talk to him about Bill and the end of the world. They asked uncomfortable questions about why he'd accepted the yellow ring, knowing what it fed off of, what he'd been thinking at the time. They asked questions about times in the past that he felt powerless and if he thought that maybe, just possibly, that might have affected some of his decisions with picking up the yellow ring.

[wherenoonegoes]

"I wasn't going to," Hiccup replied. Five years of Toothless growling at him every time he accidentally touched the dragon's attempts at drawing had taught him to know better.

The Viking pushed in a cart with a game system, followed by Toothless who crawled inti the bed and collapsed there like he owned the place.

"Figured you might want to do something fun, and they're not letting me take you on a ride on Toothless yet," he explained. Hiccup wasn't going to make Dipper talk, or ask how he was doing. He figured the boy was probably sick of that by this point. If he volunteered anything, that was fine, but he didn't want to force anything.

[ringslinging]

"Your life's weird. Doesn't make you weird. Other people aren't used to that stuff because they were never in a position where they had to be."

Hal was not exactly a shining beacon of well-adjusted mental states himself, and possibly he shouldn't be encouraging a still impressionable kid to blow off the psych staff, but - "I was shot down in Chechnya a couple years ago. A few of us were - spent a few months as POWs before we got out and got home. But once we did..." He shook his head. "They wanted to run us through a lot of therapy before we could go back on duty. We blew off most of it, because there's a difference between talking to someone who's going to put a nice academic name on whatever your problem is, and talking to someone who's been where you are and knows what you're going through from experience, not from reading case studies."

One was helpful to him. And one, not at all.

[unrecovered]

Jeez, this kid has no illusions about anything, does he. Part of Wash thinks that might be why the Time Trapper grabbed Dipper; the other part of him buries that thought pretty quickly, because dragging a kid into a war is beyond the pale, regardless of the kid's competence.

"I'm Washington," he says, "but I usually go by Wash. It's good to meet you, Dipper." He doesn't bother to try faking a smile; it's the one lie he's never been very good at, and he has the feeling Dipper would see right through it regardless. "For what it's worth, I haven't been talking to the doctors - I saw you introduce yourself to Greg on the omnicom." The benefits of an open network.

He takes another moment to look at the walls, though there's a pretty obvious place to start. He nods to the wall covered in pictures of Mabel. "She's pretty important to you, isn't she."

[captainbuzzkill]

Mentioning his sister was a sure way to get Dipper suddenly monofocused in a positive way, so he crawled on the floor over towards the Mabel wall, kneeling in front of it.

"She's my twin sister. Mabel." He had an inscrutable expression on his face, one filled with several emotions all jumbled together. He looked like he felt lost and found all at once. "They messed everything else up. My family, when I was little, my time with the team here in the Legion's universe. But they couldn't mess up my memory of her."

They could put an alternate history in, but it had to layer over the real one. Trying to put fake bad memories over her didn't work when the real Mabel shined right through them, and trying rip her out of his life altogether had been impossible. She was too ingrained in, too much a part of it.

"They even tried to erase her but there were all these holes and they were too big. And too Mabel-shaped."

He smiled, even though it was a pained one. It was the kind of smile that came of hurting and having some soothing balm applied to the wound in a way that made the pain of that wound more noticeable even as it stopped.

Dipper looked down at his wrist, where he was wearing the pink and purple friendship bracelet Mabel had left behind after her brief time in the Legion's universe -- the same bracelet that had been used to distract him long enough for Hal and Hiccup to bring him in. His fingers brushed against it.

"If you're not a twin, you can't really understand what it's like being one. You have this person who's like your best friend in the whole world, and you're lucky enough that you have them from the day you were born."

He'd been especially lucky he'd had her from that moment onward, given what happened the day they were born.

"I even remembered one thing right and it's this story our parents used to tell us a lot about the day we were born. Mabel was born first and she was fine, but they said I was all blue. The umbilical cord got wrapped around my neck or something."

He briefly mimed being choked around the neck by something.

"Everyone was really scared for me and they were getting ready to send me to the baby icu but the nurse put me in the same bassinet as Mabel for just a minute. And she wiggled her arm out of the blankets and put it around me."

His eyes watered slightly and he wiped at them with a balled up little fist.

"And then I was okay. They said I started breathing okay and my skin stopped being blue and I was fine. That's what it's always been like. As long as we're together, it's like we can do anything, and somehow everything will always be okay. It was even that way with the both of us facing the end of the world."

[leverageintceo]

Parker stood in the doorway, contemplating the walls and the child who'd drawn on them with a faintly bemused look on her face.

The Yellow Lanterns hadn't had her as long as they'd had Dipper, but they'd had her long enough that things had gotten weird and twisty and she'd sought refuge in an Orange ring instead. It wasn't the same as what Dipper was going through -- she, for example, had mostly been able to dodge Dr. Ry'kerr's attentions -- but she wasn't without empathy, and the right thing to do was to make sure he didn't feel like he was dealing with this alone.

She stepped further into the room and let the door shut behind her.

"I can give you a boost" she said. "That way, you can write things that you know are true up high so that it's harder to change them later if you get confused again. And then you'll have space at the bottom to work out the other things."

[whyarewehere]

"It's cool, I'm not gonna touch 'em."

Grif stood back to assess Dipper's impressively crazy-looking wall scrawl, like an art critic examining a gallery.

"You need some colored string and thumbtacks to really start putting the whole conspiracy genius image together, or nah?"

That was Grif. That was how Grif dealt with anything that was uncomfortable or strange or unsettling (and this was definitely all of those). He'd joke about it, make it smaller than them through put-downs and resentment. It wasn't the best answer, maybe, but it was the one he had that sometimes worked.

[captainbuzzkill]

"You're going to take me for a ride on Toothless?" asked Dipper excitedly. Then he balled his hands into fists and let out an excited little shriek, which was just a little too high-pitched.

He froze in place and cleared his throat.

"I didn't do that. You didn't hear that."

He got up and went over to the bed, then climbed up into it with the dragon in the very small space Toothless wasn't taking up. He started petting the dragon's head with an ink-stained hand and laid his head down on Toothless' head and rubbed his cheek against his scaly skin.

One thing nobody had considered was giving Dipper some kind of therapy animal, possibly because of the odd violent outbursts he'd had, but it was immediately clear that having something to cuddle was doing him some good.

"I spent the summer before last reading the entire 25-book 'Dragon-wranglers of the Mountains of Earth, Ice, and Flames' series instead of going outside and trying to make friends? And I've wanted to ride a dragon ever since."

[captainbuzzkill]

"I like that idea. I can't fly right now. They took all my equipment except for my omnicom. And they said I have to wear a power suppressor when I'm like this."

He flashed her the bracelet on his hand, which had a light on it.

If he forgot who he was or got confused, they didn't want him to be able to run off and get hurt. So he wasn't able to fly right now.

"I know some things are true now. A few of them. Like all that."

He pointed to the Mabel wall.

[captainbuzzkill]

"They said I can't have anything pointy until I'm out of each post-therapy critical period," said Dipper. "Besides, the walls are made of some kind of hard stuff that I don't think you can stick things in. I bet wall stickies would work though."

There were wall stickies similar to stickytack that they could use on hard walls.

"And it isn't a real conspiracy wall without colored string."

[captainbuzzkill]

"I really doubt there are many psychiatrists or telepaths that personally know what it's like to face unholy abominations from outside of time and space," Dipper said thoughtfully. "Dr Ry'kerr is at least good about not trying to pretend she understands, though."

In some ways it helped, in some ways it didn't.

"But if it's the kind of thing where it's better to talk to someone who's been there--" Dipper shrugged and shook his head. "Nobody has. Nobody here."

Nobody had been in circumstances that were that similar.

"I know some of you have faced the end of the world -- sometimes more than once. And all kinds of scary things. And had all kinds of bad experiences. But most of you at least had powers. Or did it as grown ups. Or both."

He looked over at the Mabel wall. "Back home I had my sister. She was there with me through most of it. She even saved me from some of it. And she didn't pretend she knew what it was like during the times I was all alone."

When he was scared and miserable and hungry and exhausted and had to dodge eyebats and monsters trying to eat him.

"I guess you're right, that it's not me that's weird. That it's just that my life is. And maybe the doctors are right that it affected me more than I thought. But I don't know what to do from here, not when they don't know what it's like, and when nobody else will really get it. Hiccup was right that he's faced things while small and powerless before, but not the end of the world."

He surprised himself by being honest.

"I mean, if it was only a few days, but I had to pick through garbage to find food."

He quickly shut his mouth.

"What the yellows did was terrible but the worst part of it is making me have to sort through all the bad things that already happened to figure out which are real and which ones they made up."

[unrecovered]

When Dipper scoots across the floor, Wash heads over and takes a seat next to him. For the next few minutes, he just listens. Dipper is right - he doesn't understand what having a twin is like - but it sounds like Mabel means the world to Dipper, and that's the best thing he could have right now, even if she's not currently here.

He does glance over his shoulder at the far wall as Dipper finishes, at a drawing of what looks like the sky itself torn open and monsters pouring out of the rip. Yeah, that looks pretty apocalyptic, all right. Evidently this isn't the first hell Dipper's been through, though it sounds like he didn't go through that one alone.

He looks down at Dipper and puts a hand on Dipper's shoulder - lightly, ready to pull it away if Dipper doesn't want to be touched. "She sounds pretty great." He doesn't have adequate words, but he doesn't think he needs them for that - from the look of it, Dipper already knows. Instead, he lets the silence settle for a few moments before starting again. "When I said I had coping tricks you might want to try - the biggest one is to find an anchor, something that you know is absolutely, beyond a shadow of a doubt true, because that's what you cling to when things get rough. When everything gets too loud, when you don't know what's real and what isn't - that's when you need your anchor. That's when you remind yourself what's true and you let things unfold from there." He looks back up at the wall covered in pictures of Mabel. "It sounds like you already have your anchor."

[whyarewehere]

Grif considered.

"...I could probably hook you up," he said. This was true. Grif was confident he could find string and stickies, legitimately or less so. "But you'd have to trade me."

Because Grif never did things out of kindness and generosity and all that crap. That would just be bad for his image!

[ringslinging]

"That's true," Hal admitted. He'd blown off therapy, but he'd had his fellow pilots to talk to - and even if doing that usually stirred up all kinds of guilt about how he could've gotten them out of it, if he'd been wearing the damned ring, Cowgirl never let him take that train of thought very far before she shot it down. "But nobody's ever going to get everything. You wind up going to people with the parts they'll get, and taking the other ones somewhere else. I have friends who get the POW stuff, but not the superhero stuff. Friends who get the superhero stuff, but not the dying and coming back to life part. Friends who've also walked back through death's door, but who haven't been homeless and unemployed. You break it down far enough, you'll get people who understand pieces of it. It's not perfect, but it's better than nothing."