Dipper Pines (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
captainbuzzkill) wrote in ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
legionworld2016-09-14 10:53 pm
captainbuzzkill) wrote in legionworld2016-09-14 10:53 pm
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.
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.
no subject
"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.
no subject
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."
no subject
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.
no subject
"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.
no subject
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.
no subject
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.
no subject
"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.
no subject
"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!"