Dipper shrank in on himself slightly, because he'd made a few of that kind of mistake, too -- like keeping that stupid yellow ring. He was pretty sure he didn't kill anybody, but the time between the start of the attack, and Hiccup and Hal reaching him and causing him to break down, was all a yellow blur.

And it wouldn't have happened if he hadn't listened to that little, power-hungry, yellow whisper he'd known was wrong.

Then Dipper stopped thinking about himself, and tried to think about where Wash was coming from. Wash had told him about the thing that had happened to his brain, too. He was a soldier. Soldiers did bad things sometimes.

"Then it's okay to feel sad. I guess," he said thoughtfully, staring out at the lake. "But not forever. Not for a really long time. And not like in a way where it goes away and comes back if you make an entirely different mistake. If you're just sad you won't become something better. You'll...just be sad. That doesn't help anyone."

Grunkle Stan wasn't sad about most of his mistakes and had stopped being sad about the one that really hurt Great Uncle Ford by getting him lost in the multiverse. And Stan'd still saved the world. He'd saved everyone. He hadn't needed to be sad forever over what happened to be a good person or save people.

"Maybe the good things you do don't just erase the bad things, but the bad things don't erase the good ones, either. So you can sit here feeling all bad about yourself for making a risky mistake that didn't hurt anybody and feel like it's a big thing or whatever. Or you can think about how it's one small thing in a pile of a lot of things. And one of the other things in the pile -- just as big -- was how you really helped me. So that I was okay. Which means I can help a lot of other people be okay."

The stones his teke had kicked up were still floating around him and plucked them out of the air and put them in a pile. They were all similar sizes.

"Like that."