legionworld | [closed] little Dipper what a dream / held his hand and made him scream

Entry tags:

[closed] little Dipper what a dream / held his hand and made him scream

Who| Closed to Mabel and Dipper
What| Dipper has nightmares and tells Mabel about being a Yellow Lantern
Where| Dipper and Mabel's Crew Quarters
When| After the ambush
Warnings/Notes| sad children in snow? mental health stuff, also maybe disturbing dream imagery

The setup in Mabel and Dipper's shared quarters was pretty great. They had a giant suite to run around in, which meant as soon as they collected enough future junk they'd be able to make an epic mini-golf course. They had their own kitchen, which was already an ice cream and candy-covered mess (although the floor was kept impeccably clean by Waddles eating off of it). They even had their own giant, wall-sized TV.

They also still shared a room, but all they had to do was push a button and a big divider rose up in the middle of the room, letting them each have their own half. Dipper planned on slamming the button with reckless abandon the next time Mabel threw a slumber party with whatever new girlfriends she inevitably made, but he liked that they could leave the divider down the rest of the time. Neither of them were entirely ready to give up sharing a room yet, and after Weirdmageddon, all the scary stuff they'd dealt with, and the thing with the yellow Lanterns, it just made Dipper feel more secure having his sister so close by when he slept.

The downside to that was if he wanted to hide the fact he was having bad dreams, he didn't stand a chance.

This was hardly the first time he'd had a nightmare -- he'd started having lots of bad dreams back in Gravity Falls, as things had gotten scarier and scarier, and Weirdmadegeddon had brought them to a fever pitch that only cooled down a little as the summer had drawn to an end. But what the yellow Lanterns had done to his brain made the nightmares worse than ever. The telepaths had warned him that after his treatments, his mind sorting everything out and processing it all would likely lead to strange and terrifying dreams, and they hadn't been lying.

Still, this was the first nightmare since Mabel had arrived in the Legion's universe that was bad enough that it got him talking in his sleep.

"No..."

In the dream, he was a doll -- a puppet, like Bill had made him into the one time -- pinned down by tentacles and clawed hands and other appendages, surrounded by the toothy, horrifying faces of the yellows. Romat-Ru was there, using his yellow ring to create a giant knife that was plucking at his stitches, making his stuffing fall out. It spilled out of him in wads of red yarn.

"Stop! Stop! Let go! Let me go!"

Then he realized that the Yellow Lantern wasn't just trying to pull him apart. His right hand was stitched to the hand of another doll.

"Dipper? Dipper, what's happening?" his sister called out in the dream, and Dipper craned his neck and caught sight of long, brown, yarn hair.

They were trying to rip them apart and Dipper inherently understood somehow that if they succeeded he'd never see Mabel again.

"Stop! You can't take her away!"

He tried to hold onto his sister's hand but the last of the stitches were ripped out and Mabel screamed as she was ripped away from him. The red yarn was still stuck to her, though, and as the yellows dragged her away, all of his stuffing was pulled out through his arm, leaving his insides empty, making his puppet body deflate and go flat.

"Mabel! Mabel! Let go of her!" The yellows hoisted him up but he couldn't see her anymore. "Where did you take her? Mabel!"

"It doesn't matter where she went," said Sinestro, floating before him. "The only thing that matters is that you. Belong. With us. You're deluded if you think you can escape the yellow light."

The yellows dragged his deflated body along the ground and underneath him, as they dragged him to the edge of a massive pit, he saw the twisted marker drawings he'd put on his Medbay walls when he was at his most broken. Down below, in the pit, was a giant yellow fire, bright and all-consuming. Tears dropped from his flat eyes like little pieces of clear glass and they turned yellow and shattered before they even hit the flames.

Hal stood next to the pit, arms crossed, his body wrapped in that gross yellow monster that he'd briefly made as a construct with his yellow ring.

"Hal, help me!"

"Sorry, kiddo," Hal said, with a hapless shrug. "Can't do anything without a plan. And you know how I feel about those."

Then the yellows threw Dipper into the pit of fire. As he fell, the fire started to lick at the edges of his cloth body, and he suddenly realized that the yellow fire had a form. It had a shape. He gasped as he saw the shape more clearly -- a triangle with burning edges and a bright circle, an eye, burning even brighter in its center. Familiar terrifying laughter echoed around him, growing louder and louder as he fell faster and faster. The air got hotter and hotter, and all Dipper could do in the face of it all was scream and hope the end would come quickly.

In the real world, Dipper had started muttering in his sleep, getting progressively louder and louder as the dream went on, until he was just outright screaming and thrashing in his bed.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Mabel's never been entirely good at waking up before she's ready, and this time is no different.

"Dipper?" She asks groggily, releasing her pig from her iron cuddle grasp. She then rolls over to face her brother's bed. She half expects to see him hunched over and writing furiously. That's usually how he'd wake her up, with his pen clicking and frenzied conversations with himself.

She realizes quickly though that this time is different. There's thrashing and screaming. He's not even awake! And as she quickly rolls herself from bed, the scene before her strikes a chord in her sleep-addled brain. He looks just like Gruncle Stan flailing around when Bill tried to help himself to his memories.

"Dipper!" She cries as she rushes to his bedside. Instinctively, she looks to where the bedside table would have been back in Gravity Falls. But she realizes that's not where they are. It's not summer. There's no journal full of magic words to save someone's brain from jerkfaced triangle. Hopefully there's no jerkfaced triangle either...

Instead, she grabs him by the shoulder and starts shaking him violently.

"DIPPER! WAKE UP!"

Dipper still had a thing about being grabbed that hadn't gone away, even after the telepaths had fixed up his brain. Aven had said that it wasn't leftover brainwashing.

It was just trauma, plain and simple.

That was why even after the telepathic sessions had stopped, Dr. Ry'kerr had scheduled a loooong string of appointments pretty much for the foreseeable future. Dipper wasn't sure what they were really supposed to accomplish -- all she ever did was ask him questions and give him art supplies to draw with -- but he'd been obediently going in secret, afraid that turning them down would mean he'd be kicked off the team.

He thought it was stupid, because it was pretty obvious why he twigged out whenever someone grabbed at him. He'd had to fight for his life during "training" with the yellows and the only reason he'd survived was because he'd dug down deep and found just enough viciousness to escape thrashing claws and strangling tentacles and too many teeth. He'd clawed and bit and kicked and punched and slapped his way to survival.

"Get away from me! Get away!"

In the half-light from out in the hall, he couldn't really see that it was his sister. All he caught was a glint of light off of braces -- which could easily be mistaken for a glint of light off razor sharp teeth. So, with his own expression nearly feral, he shoved and flailed and struggled to get away, rolling and ultimately falling off the bed because his legs were tangled in the blankets. Then he kept rolling, dragging himself under his hovering bed. He pressed himself back against the wall, his hand held to his chest, threaded into the cloth of his t-shirt.

He was hyperventilating and couldn't seem to get his breathing to slow down.

At first, she didn't want to let go. It was almost like, in her mind, she could just shake away whatever was causing this. But, she finally lost her grip on him in the struggle and was shoved away hard enough to make her stumble backward. Her feet caught some of the dirty clothes strewn about the floor, causing her to lose her balance and topple backward onto her rear.

Now, from her seat on the floor, she can barely make him out under the bed. In the dim light from the hall, she can tell his clutching his chest, and she can hear him at least. She can only assume that he's awake and that he's himself.

"Dipper... It's me." It's twinged with hurt. Though, more than anything she's scared. She has no idea what's happening. She's seen him come out of a nightmare before, but not like this.

And for him to push her away, to not want her to help? She isn't sure what she should do now.

Everything was blurry and vague and he felt like he was floating out of his own body, but then he heard Mabel's voice, and it was the hurt in it that helped bring him back down out of the floatiness. The way she sounded hurt made his heart twinge the way it always did when she was upset, and that little bit of sharpness made the world less fuzzy. Everything started to come into stronger focus again.

"Mabel?"

No yellows. There were no yellows and they hadn't taken her away forever. He wasn't burning up, burning yellow from inside out.

He was...under his bed? On Legion World?

A nightmare. It was just a nightmare.

Except he was still in a cold sweat and shaking, breathing so hard he could barely speak. He tried to say something, wanted to reassure her, wave it off like it was nothing, but when he opened his mouth to speak, the only thing that came out was a strange little sound, half-sob, half-whine. It came from a place of hurt, a little pit he'd struggled desperately to crawl his way out of and hadn't quite succeeded (not permanently anyway), and it was so pitiful it almost didn't sound human.

And then came the tears, welling up in his eyes, making everything even more blurry. He didn't sob and they mostly just blurred up his vision, but they were there.

Okay, that sound is not a normal Dipper sound in the absence of Wendy. It's definitely cause for alarm. And sure, maybe Mabel doesn't know how to fix this particular situation, but she's not going to sit idly by and let it happen. No matter how upset she is.

She untangles her feet, and begins to crawl closer to his bed.

"Dipper, you're scaring me!" She had intended an authoritative shout, but that really came out as more of a whine. "What is it? Is it Bill?"

"No," he gasped out. "Kind of. But also no. Yes? But no."

Yes, he'd dreamt about Bill, but it wasn't just Bill. It was the dream throwing the yellows in his face when he'd been trying to get over them.

He wiped at his eyes with his forearm, but they kept blurring, and he still couldn't calm his breathing down and he felt so squirmy that even screaming and breaking things probably wouldn't have been enough to make the squirminess go away.

"Okay, I'm calling it," he gasped out, with all the grimness and severity of a doctor calling a patient's time of death. "Blanket-town. This is a Blanket-town emergency. Code: chocolate chip."

Even with all the scariness of Gravity Falls, neither of them had called a Blanket-Town emergency in years. The closest had been when Mabel had gone to Sweater-town over the Gideon thing, but that hadn't been a full tilt Blanket-town, two-twin blanket fort, stuffed-animal-and-cookies emergency.

But right now he was having a panic attack without knowing that was what it was and he didn't know how to make it go away.

It's a relief that his mind wasn't... eaten? Or whatever. Still though, blanket-town call? And by Dipper? Worrying. Despite that though, she nods solemnly and climbs to her feet.

"I'm on it. Blanket-town is coming to you, Bro."

She sets to work shoving extra pillows under the bed, then artfully hangs blankets over the sides of it. She rolls her portable nightlight under them, to Dipper, then darts off into the kitchen.

There are a few loud noises. She's probably banging into a few things along the way. She drops a thing or two as well. But, it's not long before she's crawling under the bed, her arms loaded with snacks. She's got his cookies, some candy... Even a carton of what passes as milk. (Flashback to: Mabel picking up the carton of "soy happy" and cringing.)

By the time she got back, he was still breathing hard and hugging a small pillow so tightly that it was nearly popping its seams. But then there were cookies, so he started stuffing them in his mouth with one hand, making quiet nom nom nom sounds like he always did when he was eating while annoyed or upset.

Since chewing made it harder to keep gasping for air, and slowed his breathing down, it helped.

Still, it took him a little while of chewing and breathing and staring down at the rug before the cold, clawing feeling in his chest stopped. Even when he could breathe again, and his heart stopped feeling like it was juddering so hard it was going to pop out of his chest, he was still shivering, despite their room not being that cold.

He only let his eyes meet his sister's when they stopped blurring with tears. And then he wasn't quite sure what to do, because they were in Blanket-town and he was covered in crumbs, and he knew that being in that state meant that any words to the effect of "I'm fine" would sound like the lie they were.

"Bill wasn't in my head," he said, knowing that he could at least reassure her of that. "My subconscious just thought the dream I was having wasn't scary enough. So it worked him in, I guess."

He wiped crumbs off his hand on his shirt and rolled over, looking up at the bottom of his bed.

"Which means now you know I was dreaming of other horrifying stuff, and that also means you'll want to know why my nightmares are so bad, and I don't even know where to start."

A pause.

"Like I said when we were fighting the dinosaurs, there was this thing, and it was bad, but it's over."

But not so far gone that he didn't revisit it in his dreams, apparently.

Edited 2016-09-15 08:01 (UTC)

Of course, as he devoured cookies she'd sat and stared, waiting for the explanation. The sliver she gets so far? Underwhelming.

"Is it, Dipper? You don't push your favorite sister into your dirty laundry over something that's over!" Okay, maybe that's coming out a bit harsh. She makes a concentrated effort to soften her voice before she goes on. "Just start at the beginning."

Dipper winced, then shoved another cookie in his mouth and chewed, then swallowed.

There was a lot that happened during that mission. He didn't want to have to explain it all, but he knew he'd have to eventually. The last thing he wanted was to leave it hanging over her head where she'd worry about it, when it was something he was getting over.

Admittedly, he was getting over it slowly and having lots of bad dreams and panicky feelings in the process, but it was still better than it was.

"This superhero-in-the-future thing has been great so far. Mostly. Some of the missions were huge and intimidating --" like the one where he had to help release the literal wrath of God from its cage "--but they haven't really been any bigger or scarier than everything that happened in Gravity Falls."

His jaw set and his eyebrows furrowed.

"Except for one. There was this mission that happened not that long before you got here, and a lot of bad things happened all in a row. Like I didn't even have a chance to breathe, it was just horrible thing after horrible thing and I nearly died like ten times and --"

He kicked the underside of his bed, causing their whole fort to wobble.

"-- it wasn't like with Bill where we managed to help take him down."

Maybe it was Grunkle Stan's courage and selflessness that stopped Bill in the end, but it never would've happened if he and Mabel hadn't gotten everybody into the Fearamid in the first place.

"They just messed me up, and my friends had to rescue me, and everything was terrible for a while." He finally met her eyes and his voice hitched, going slightly higher pitched. "And there was this part of it I don't know if you'll even be able to forgive me for if I tell you."

Edited 2016-09-15 08:19 (UTC)

"Forgive you?" She frowns, trying to figure out what he could possibly be talking about.

"Was it some kind of mind control thing? Did they make you sing a karaoke duet without me?" She doesn't even bother trying to laugh. She just gives a half-hearted smile. She can tell it's serious enough that kidding around probably isn't going to help. But, she had to try.

"Just tell me what it is! I mean, if things were that bad, whatever it is probably isn't your fault." She inches closer, so she can actually see his face. And, y'know, to be there for support and all. She looks really hopeful, like she's doing a pretty good job of convincing herself that she's right. "Right?"

Dipper avoided her eyes, his fingers playing with the hem of the pillow.

"The problem was that it was. Kind of."

It was a little bit his fault.

He sighed.

"There was this fight. These bad guys came through the rift from another dimension and they all had these rings that were technology but they acted like magic. Good people -- heroes -- came through the rift, too. They were all called "Lanterns" and they were from another world, but it was really similar to this one. This world had Lanterns in its past. So the bad ones figured out this universe was similar and tried to find out if there were any of their allies still left 1000 years in the future of when they came from."

A pause.

"You would've thought the good ones were so cool. The rings were all different colors and each color was powered by a certain emotion. The yellows and reds were the bad guys and the Yellow Lanterns were led by this crazy guy that thought he could make the universe stronger by throwing bad guys at the police and the superheroes. So all the yellows were monsters and killers, and the yellow rings were powered by the fear they caused in others. The reds ran on rage, so whenever a red ring got someone, it made them into this...like rage zombie that could puke burning blood on people."

He stuffed another cookie into his mouth and talked around it.

"But the Green, Violet, Indigo, and Blue Lanterns were all good guys. Green rings were powered by willpower, indigo was compassion, violet was love, and blue was hope. All of us Legionnaires that joined in? We found the remnants of the good Lanterns in this universe and we were able to get picked by some of the rings to have extra power. So we teamed up with all the good Lanterns to face the yellows and reds before they did terrible things to people."

That explained the magical rainbow rings at least.

As he explains, her eyes glaze over a little. Not from the usual 'URGH BORING NERD SPEECH' reasons, but because this time it really does sound interesting.

"Emotional color powers..." She finally manages to utter as she brings her hands to her cheeks and squishes her own face. Now she's just imagining getting one of each color and having a rainbow of magical emotions to shoot out of her hands. And how a love ring could possibly aid in her matchmaking endeavors.

But, that's not what they're here for. She shakes her head to get rid of all the amazing mental imagery so she can hear the rest.

On the one hand, Dipper was almost glad she hadn't been there for all the bad stuff. On the other hand, it was a shame she missed it when she probably would've loved having one of the rings. And if she had been there, he probably would've ditched the yellow ring sooner. Maybe the whole mess would've been avoided.

"They made these constructs that you could shape into anything. I got one of the green rings."

The greens were all about willpower and overcoming fear so it was pretty understandable how a kid who had once jumped fifty feet off of a cliff into a giant robot had attracted a green.

"A lot of my constructs were monsters from Gravity Falls. Not...not him or the henchmaniacs, but the Multi-bear, the gnomes, the shapeshifter -- all the ones we beat or the ones that became our friends."

They were intimidating to others without being that intimidating to Dipper.

"But then everything started to go wrong. This crazy Yellow Lantern grabbed me and my friend Sam and dragged us away from the rest of the fight into the mining ship we were trying to protect. He was, like, this total psycho who bragged about killing kids and he --"

Now they were getting into darker territory. Dipper's voice hitched and went a little squeakier.

"He got our rings, and he trapped Sam. He had him wrapped in a construct so that if I didn't do what he wanted, he could kill him instantly, so I couldn't even fight back with my powers. Our comms were blocked, and even if everyone wasn't too far away, calling for help might've just made him kill him."

Dipper closed his eyes tightly. "He said that if I let him, like... torture me and kill me or whatever that he'd let Sam go. I didn't know any other way to save him, and agreed to it just to buy more time, hoping I could get Sam free before I was hurt too much, but as soon as he started to hurt me, Sam got so angry he attracted a red ring. So Sam saved us but he got all rage zombied and we lost him to the reds. And weren't sure at first if we'd ever be able to get him back or if he'd be stuck like that. We got him back in the end, but..."

He didn't mention Sam killing the yellow because he promised Sam he'd keep it secret. Maybe he'd break that promise eventually and make Mabel promise to not tell anyone herself, but there was only so much he could handle talking about once anyway, and he hadn't even gotten into being a Yellow Lantern yet.

"It was like the stuff in those crime shows mom and dad don't like us watching. And I have this -- this --" He hugged the pillow tightly with one arm and rolled over on his side, pulling up the cuff of his shorts to show Mabel a horizontal burn scar on his thigh, the one wound Romat-ru had managed to inflict before Sam had burned him to ash. "-- and that was just how it all started. It was all so messed up."

As she listens, Mabel draws her knees up so she can rest her crossed arms and chin on them. It really is a lot to take in, and she can't even imagine what it must have been like to go through.

Not to mention the element of reality it's bringing to the whole 'fun super hero adventure'. Bill had threatened their family and friends in similar ways, sure. But, mostly because he wanted something from them. Threatening to kill someone if Dipper didn't let himself be tortured and killed? It seems worse somehow.

And when he shows her the burn on his leg, Mabel lets out a gasp. "Dipper..."

Dipper let go of his shorts and covered his face with both hands.

"I was so mad. At what the yellows did and what happened to Sam. And all my constructs were, like, monsters, and it actually started scaring the yellows and --" This was the part that was hard to admit. "--and I liked that it scared them. I was just so tired of seeing these monsters that like making other people feel powerless and like hurting people. They were just like Bill; they thought it was okay to make other people people afraid. So...so I, like, lost it and I started liking making them afraid. And it meant I got a yellow ring, just like them, because they were so afraid of me. Like...like I was a monster, too, or something."

He pressed his palms to his eyes so hard that he could feel his eyeballs compressing.

"And my friend Hal had all the ring stuff going on back home and tried to show me the yellow ring was dangerous, and that they were bad for you, but I didn't listen in time, and Sinestro -- the yellow leader guy -- had this recall function on the yellow rings. So they caught us, me and Hal and a few other Legionnaires that picked up yellow rings during the fight."

His words started to get faster and rose in pitch.

"They kidnapped us and made us, like, fight for our lives in their 'training' and I had to just -- they were all monsters basically trying to eat me, and then there was 'conditioning' where they just --"

He couldn't stop it, tears streamed out between his fingers.

"They messed with my head because they -- they wanted to make me one of them but they couldn't do it if I was me, because I didn't want to hurt innocent people, so they made me stop being me. They messed up all my memories and made me remember everything wrong."

The only way to make him bitter enough and crazy enough to hurt others had been rewriting his whole life. They had to make him a different Dipper.

"They made it so I remembered that mom and dad hated me and ignored me and told me they didn't want me, and Grunkle Stan and Great Uncle Ford were these crazy kidnappers that held me hostage all summer, and everyone at school was mean to me all the time, even worse than they actually were, and -- and --"

He kicked the bottom of the bed again, trying to release the pent up anxiety he felt squeezing his chest.

"And they couldn't do that to my memories of you. They tried so hard but I kept seeing the real you coming through, so it didn't work like with mom and dad and everyone else -- so then they tried to convince me you were weak or something and that I should hate you, but that didn't work, either--"

All that was left was the unforgivable.

"--so then there was only one thing left that they could try." He drew his hand away from his face because she deserved this. She deserved him at least looking her in the eye as he told her what he did.

The words sounded like they were being squeezed out through broken glass as he said them.

"They...they made me an only child. They made me forget you."

Even despite the tears, he'd held it together up to this point, to a degree, but he dissolved now, tears streaming down his face, shoulders shaking uncontrollably.

"I'm sorry. I tried so, so hard to stop it, but I couldn't..."

Never mind that they'd done crazy things to his head, he still thought he should've been able to fight it somehow.

Edited 2016-09-18 05:21 (UTC)

Almost as soon as Dipper's tears start, so do Mabel's. Not only is it difficult to hear and imagine, but she can't see her brother looking so anguished and not feel it as well.

She tries to wipe her tears away so she can focus on listening. She even goes as far as shoving a lock of hair in her mouth.

When he gets to the very end though? She stares at him for a moment. No more tears, no more gnawing on her own hair. And she suddenly pulls him off the floor to wrap him in one of her famous death-grip hugs.

"Dipper, you don't have to say sorry. Don't you see? It's just like with Gruncle Stan! But you remembered me all by yourself!"

She'll finally releases him so she can wipe the back of her sleeve across her face again.

"You wouldn't think that I was a bad sister... That's the nicest thing you've done for me."

Sympathy crying. Neither of them had done that in a while, but the circumstances were definitely pretty extreme. They'd been together through most of the scariness in Gravity Falls. For Dipper, the scariest part had been those days apart, when he was talking into his walkie talkie, not sure if she could hear him. And everything was okay again after he and Wendy and Soos found her and got her out of the bubble.

But things hurt more when one of them had to deal with them alone and he'd be alone much longer this time.

The hug and her words were exactly what he needed, though, so after she let go, he wiped at his eyes with his sleeve, too.

"No, it was the other way around. That's what Hal and Hiccup used to help me fight the brainwashing. They reminded me of you. You don't remember it, but you were here on Legion World before, like months ago. Just for a day. Taken from almost the exact same time, from the bus ride. The Time Trapper does stuff like that, brings people and send them away, and sometimes makes them forget they were here."

Just like he messed with people's heads in the little pocket dimensions, like the one with the dinosaurs.

He pulled down his sock to show her the pink and purple friendship bracelet -- obviously not his -- tied to his ankle. He'd held onto it since the thing with the Lanterns, keeping it on a wrist or an ankle pretty much at all times. A good luck charm.

"Hiccup found this left in my stuff -- because I kept a few things of your stuff -- and he and Hal reminded me of you. It helped break the brainwashing."

He sniffled and wiped at his eyes again.

"That's what I meant when I said that you did help me even without being here." He smiled through his tears. "Yeah, we fight sometimes, but other than driving me nuts with being boy-crazy, the contact glitter contamination, and the intermittent high-pitched shrieking, you're like the best sibling in the entire world. I couldn't be sure of anything -- my whole life was this giant lie -- but I could be sure of that. And that's what I held onto when the telepaths were helping me put my memory together again."

He waved his hands, making a gesture like something small spreading outwards into something big.

"It was like this anchor --" That was the way Wash had put it "--and remembering one good thing helped me remember all the other good things. Like that mom and dad love us, and how great our grunkles are, and Wendy and Soos..."

A few more tears plip-plopped down his face, but they were slowing now. He wiped at them with his palm.

"Remembering one good thing, and being sure of that, made it easier to remember all the other good things."

Like the memory of her lit up all the shadows and passed a little flame to their parents, and their grunkles, and their friends and everything else -- one bright candle lighting another and then another, until the darkness had been chased away.

All of that is probably the best thing to hear for Mabel. And such a relief after the emotional rollercoaster that blanket-town has been so far. But, despite how thankful she is to have such great brother, there is one thing she can't let slide.

"WHAT?! I was here before, and you never told me?" She grabs his ankle, pulling it up so she can get a closer look at the bracelet. She may or may not also knock him back on the the floor in the process.

"Mmhm. Mmhm. Yep. This checks out. It's a Mabel original, alright." She releases him finally, then sits back, giving the bracelet a thoughtful stare.

"You know what? This is all good news, Dipper! I mean, all of that stuff sounded really really bad, but we weren't even together for it. I was only here in bracelet form and it turned out okay!" 'Okay' is relative here and not accounting for mental and emotional scarring, but still.

"Now that we're really together, things won't get that bad again!" She's confident enough in that statement that she's reaching for a cookie now.

"It was a weird thing to explain and there were also a million other things to explain, so I figured I'd get to it eventually. Which I did."

A pause.

"Like thirty seconds ago."

See? He got there.

He nodded at her assessment though.

"That's why I was so glad to see you in that dinosaur park -- and when you showed up in the Medbay. You probably would've yelled at me to take off the yellow ring because it was a bad guy ring, and I would've done it in like two seconds."

She would've been scared for him, and he would've taken it more seriously, and the whole thing would've been avoided.

"And you would've been there when that yellow Lantern attacked me and Sam so even though he surprised us, it would've been three on one instead of two on one."

Maybe she could've put him in her hamster bubble so his ring was cut off from Sam.

He shrugged one shoulder and took a cookie himself.

"Like I said, there was a thing, and it was bad, and now it's over. For any new things, neither of us will have to deal with them alone." He bit the cookie and gestured with it. "And it's not even just the two of us. There's these other people you need to meet -- other teenage superheroes like us. Like my friend Sam. And Superboy. And Pidge. And some of the grown ups are pretty cool, too."

Like Hiccup and Hal and Wash and Gwen -- and even Grif.

He was feeling better already.

"Ooooh! Tell me more about the teenagers!"

She wraps a blanket around her shoulders and pulls the snacks closer. Blanket-town was definitely a good idea. Just the two of them talking and eating way too much junk food in their own little world? It makes all the scary things seem even farther away.

"What kind of teenagers are we talking about here?" They had better be the boy kind.

Dipper rolled his eyes and threw the pillow at her, flopping backwards.

"Ugh, I just poured my heart out and we're in Blanket-town. I am not telling you about the guys on the team just so you can start preemptively crushing before you even meet them."

His tone was affectionate, though, and he started poking her with his foot.

"You'll have to meet them yourself. And then you can start taking their pictures and taping them to pillows so you can practice kissing -- mwuah mwuah mwuah." Each mwuah came with a poke of his toe.

"What? No! That's what you do!" She laughs, smacking his foot away. She drops her blanket, and starts poking him in the side.

"Oh, uh, um Wendy!" This is her best nerdy Dipper impression. She holds the pillow up, waving it back and forth. "You're so soft, like you're uh stuffed with feathers. You're a beautiful goose!"

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

[closed] little Dipper what a dream / held his hand and made him scream

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