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Dipper stared at the Rubik's Cube. The cube stared back, in a way that only an inanimate object can.
He furrowed his brow and concentrated on the toy in front of him, picturing it wholly with his mind. After a moment, he reached out to grab it, and, as expected, it passed right through his fingers.
Darn it.
He'd been sitting there for quite some time, in the part of the Mindscape corresponding with his and Mabel's bedroom. Stan was out back chiseling a bear face into the back of the Rock That Looks Like A Face, and Mabel was downstairs, knitting in the TV room. There was no work for him to do around the house, and no one had summoned him all day. It was the perfect time to do some self-improvement.
It had been two years since the Transcendence, and while Dipper was steadily getting stronger, it was still very difficult for him to affect the physical world without a sacrifice or a deal. He knew that such a limitation was normal for demons, and he was, after all, a demon. But he was also definitely not a normal demon. And, if he only tried hard enough, he knew he'd eventually be able to reach out and pluck that cube right out of reality...
Nope.
He groaned, and rubbed his hand on his face. There had to be something he was missing. He was supposed to be the smart guy, why couldn't he figure this out already?
Maybe he could ask Mabel for help. But then she'd just say that he was being a big ol' smarty-pants nerd dummy, and he'd say that that was a contradiction, and she'd stick her tongue out and bap him on the nose. Dipper loved his sister, but there was a reason why he was doing this up in their room instead of around her. He needed to concentrate.
He lay spread-eagled on the floor and rubbed his temples. He knew that when Mabel handed him something, he gained the ability to touch it like he was physical. So why couldn't he do that by himself? Maybe it wasn't enough just to picture the cube. Maybe he needed to do something else to it, to convince it to let him handle it.
Again, he envisioned the Rubik's Cube. This time, he felt the mesh of atoms that comprised it, and one-by-one he brought those atoms into his mind. He held them there, attaching a thought to each one so that they'd know to come when he called. Finally, he reached out again, and grabbed the toy in his hand.
Dipper's jaw dropped. He held the cube up to his face and ran his fingers over it, feeling the valleys in between the pieces, the bumps at the edges of the stickers, the way it responded to being rotated in certain directions. He even stuck his tongue out to give it a lick -- it tasted like nothing, but he couldn’t remember if that was normal or not. Either way, the result of his hard work was undeniable: he was holding a physical object!
He giggled with glee, and quickly solved the puzzle, rotating pieces back and forth with the speed and precision only demonic hands could grant. Some part of him in the back of his mind lamented that this wasn’t as fun as it used to be -- that if he knew the exact sequence of turns needed to solve the puzzle, it almost wasn’t worth playing it in the first place -- but he swatted that thought away because it didn’t matter if it was fun or not, it just mattered that he was touching it. He had to tell Mabel about this.
The toy clattered to the ground, left behind by the boy scrambling down the stairs. Halfway down, he remembered that he was a demon, and tessered into the TV room. He appeared next to Mabel on the couch, who didn't even flinch at his sudden appearance.
"Maaaaaaabel!" he screeched, a bit louder than intended.
Mabel waved her hands around dramatically. "Help! There's a demon in the house!" She giggled and booped him on the nose. "Just kidding, bro-bro, what's up?"
"Mabel, there's something really exciting I have to show you upstairs right now!"
She raised an eyebrow. "Whoa there Dipper, your eye is twitching like there's a new Star Voyage movie."
He bounced up and down excitedly, his wings flapping hard enough that they threatened to start knocking pictures off the wall. "Come on, I'll show you!"
Mabel smiled and put down her knitting. "Alright, let's see what the big-", but before she could finish, Dipper grabbed her hand and tessered them upstairs.
"-deal is," she finished, panting. "Whoo ah geez Dipdops, you gotta warn me before you do that!"
"Sorry Mabes. Anyway, check this out!" He picked up the Rubik's Cube and presented it to her, beaming with pride. "Isn't it great?"
Mabel stared at him. "Isn't what great?"
Dipper's smile drooped. "What, can't you see what I'm doing?"
His sister leaned in and squinted. "Sorry bro-bro, I don't know what I'm supposed to be lookin' at here! Did your wash your hands or something?"
Dipper spluttered. "You know I don't need to do that anymore! The blood comes right off!" He looked at the cube and scrunched his face up. "I wonder why you can't see it…"
He visualized the cube again, examined all of its constituent parts, and juggled them in his mind, trying to find some sort of clue as to what was going on. As the cube in his mind changed, so did the actual cube in his hand -- plastic deforming and bubbling away into a colorful stickery mess. It took him a moment to notice this, so busy was he observing the cube in his mind, but by the time he returned his focus to the room, he was holding little more than a glob of plastic. He gasped and flapped his hand to dislodge what used to be the cube, prompting Mabel to flinch.
"What? What happened?" she asked nervously, but Dipper didn’t really hear her because his mind was busy drawing conclusions everywhere.
Of course. It was so obvious. He hadn’t been physically interacting with the cube. He'd actually brought it from the real world into the Mindscape. He sighed, disappointed that he was actually nowhere nearer to his goal of free corporeality.
Mabel noticed his dismay and scooted over to her floating brother. "Hey, it's okay, I think, I actually have no idea what's going on, but, -"
"Wait, that's it!" Dipper interrupted, returning his focus to the room. He looked at his sister and a big, toothy grin spread across his face. "Mabel, take my hand."
She frowned. "Uh oh, Dippingsauce, what's going on now?"
He bounced excitedly. "Come on, Mabes, this is gonna be great. Don’t you trust me?"
She paused, just for a second, but it was a second too long and his grin faltered because of course she couldn't trust him, what a stupid thing to ask --
"Yeah, duh silly," she replied, breaking into Dipper's self-deprecating despair spiral. She grabbed his hand and offered a smile of her own. "Show me the super awesome thing that's got you so excited you can't even sit still."
Dipper beamed at her, and nodded. He felt her hand in his, felt the cells and molecules making it up, pictured them and all their siblings which comprised his sister's body. Just like before, he focused on that network of particles, picking each off one-by-one to join him in the Mindscape, and it was easy now that he knew what he was doing.
A human being was so much more complex than a simple toy, though, and as Dipper worked he began to panic over whether this was such a good idea after all, because what if he did something wrong and hurt Mabel? What if this wasn't safe to do on humans? Was it so different from the effortless way in which he could tesser Mabel all around the physical world? Would this eventually become effortless too, or was it something he was never meant to do?
All these thoughts zoomed by while he plucked and tweaked, and in his anxiety it seemed to stretch on forever, but in reality -- hah, as if reality mattered to him anymore -- it was only a fraction of a second before he was done and Mabel was standing beside him in the Mindscape, safe and sound.
He blinked, and then jumped into the air, hooting in joy. "This is awesome, I really did it! Welcome to the Mindscape, Mabel!"
Grinning ecstatically, he tessered them to a serene meadow where he often went to unwind. He left Mabel on the ground, and flew around in circles for a bit, thinking about all of the possibilities now that Mabel could visit him in the Mindscape.
"This is so great, Mabes, we can hang out now without needing a sacrifice! It's been so hard dealing with not getting to be corporeal all the time but that's okay now because until I get better at that, we can hang out here, and I could bring others too! Oh, and it'll be so fun, I can do anything in here and it doesn't cost me anything! Ask me for anything, you can have anything you want!"
Dipper laughed giddily at the thought of playing with his friends again. He turned around, expecting to see his sister looking excitedly back at him. Instead, she was white as a sheet and shaking uncontrollably. He froze.
"Mabel? Mabel, are you okay?"
Mabel mouthed some words, but didn't actually respond. She then dropped to her knees and started clawing at the back of her head with both hands.
Panicked, Dipper ran over and squatted. "Mabel! What's wrong?"
She looked up at him, and he didn't see his happy-go-lucky sister looking back at him. Her eyes were dark and wobbly, filled with some unknown fear that he knew was directed at him. She gasped and shot backwards, tumbling over and scrambling to her feet.
Alarm bells screamed in Dipper’s head -- had something gone wrong with bringing her to the Mindscape after all? Was Mabel somehow stuck halfway between reality and the Mindscape? He tried to react but could barely move -- petrified with the fear that, in a moment of naive excitement, he may have seriously harmed his sister.
"Y- You-," she stammered, the words visibly catching in her throat and being pummeled into submission. "N-not, no ahh hnnngg-"
Tears started streaming out of her eyes as she continued to babble, determined to speak but seemingly unable to.
Dipper struggled to take a step forward. "M-Mabel, Mabel, it's me, Dipper, please, what's wrong?"
"Fake!" she screamed, jumping a foot into the air. Dipper's eyes grew wide and he gurgled weakly, trying to figure out what was going on and what to do. Mabel, it turned out, didn't want to wait for him to connect the dots, as she then turned around and started sprinting away.
A soft breeze fluttered through the meadow, and Dipper found himself alone.
Dipper wandered around the Mindscape for an hour looking for his sister. He could usually sense her presence regardless of where she was because of their bond, and the fact that he couldn’t -- especially in his own realm, the Mindscape -- was driving him crazy.
He eventually plopped himself down on a rock and groaned as loudly and overdramatically as possible. Mabel was hurt, and it was almost definitely his fault given how she had run away from him, but he still wanted to be there for her, like they promised they always would be. It’d been a while since her last panic attack -- they’d steadily been getting better in the couple of years since the Transcendence happened -- but still every once in a while she’d be set off by something like trig homework, sock puppets, or (for some reason he didn’t quite understand) Peter Pan. He grappled with the fact that he wasn’t there to help for this one, because he had probably caused it, and he had to fight his annoying little demon brain congratulating him on a job well done.
He sat there, head buried in his hands, thinking about how much less comfortable this was now that he was running claws through his hair instead of fingers. Something wet slid across his hand, and he sprung into action -- but it was just a Nightmare, one of his Flock. There was a disappointed look in its eyes, strange to see on something that was supposed to be subservient to him. It baa’d, nodding for him to follow, so he lifted himself off the rock and onto its back.
Mabel was lying on her side, clinging to another Nightmare and rubbing her face in its wool. She didn't look up when Dipper approached. He could hear her muttering something, less frantically than before, but about what he couldn't tell. The Nightmare that led him to his sister nuzzled at his hand, and he nodded.
“Mabel?” he asked, as gently as he could so as to not startle her.
Mabel stopped muttering, but didn't look up. “Di-Dipper? Is that you?” Her voice sounded strained, like she’d been crying for a while.
“Yeah, it's me Mabel, I'm here.” He floated to the ground and sat there in front of her. “Are you okay?”
Mabel shook her head, which was still buried in the Nightmare’s wool.
“Do you wanna talk about it?”
She just shrugged. Dipper sighed, and started to idly pet the Nightmare’s snout.
“Well, I'll be here when you're ready to talk.” He paused, and thought about the nights Mabel had stayed up late holding his hand because he no longer slept, comforting him as he rambled through tears about how he was a monster, how he was just going to end up hurting her. He cringed at the thought that his fear had come true. “Y-you know I’m always gonna be here for you.”
Mabel let go of the Nightmare and looked up. She wasn’t crying anymore, but her face was red and blotchy, covered in stray bits of what looked like wool but which he knew was actually pure thought.
“I-” she started, and then the Nightmare she had been clinging to walked out of her reach.
“No!” she yelped, clawing in the space where it had been sitting. “Where’d the sheep go? Dipper? Dipper what's going on?”
Dipper looked at the Nightmare, which was now sitting next to him, fully in Mabel’s line of sight. He looked back at his sister and saw that there was something weird about her eyes -- like they were covered in clouds.
“We’re right here, Mabel.” He scooted beside her and started patting her back soothingly. “Can you tell me what's up? I think I did something wrong but I don't know what it is.”
She whimpered, and Dipper flinched, thinking she was about to start crying again. He was getting really worried, because Mabel’s panic attacks didn’t usually last this long. It's almost as if the thing that was making her panic hadn't gone away yet--
"It's the bubble," she moaned.
Dipper froze, and took his hands off her back. "What?"
"B-Bill's bubble," she whispered. Dipper caught his breath -- realized the pointlessness of the action, but did it anyway because it was starting to dawn on him just how much he had messed up. Mabel ignored him and started to rock back and forth. "Anything I want. Anything I want…"
Dipper didn’t think about Mabeland much. He figured losing himself in imaginary realms just wasn’t something he was prone to -- a thought that was so disingenuous he had to stop himself from gagging at the taste. He didn’t want to think about how the Mindscape was like Mabeland, he didn’t want to think about how they were both places where thoughts were tangible, and he definitely didn’t want to think about how he had teleported his sister directly inside of one of her biggest triggers.
"Mabel, I'm so sorry," he blurted, interrupting her mumbling. "I didn't think, I wasn't thinking, I just wanted to-"
"Dippershutup." She sounded like it hurt her to speak, like she was doing all she could not to throw up right now. Dipper froze again, and licked his lips nervously, another pointless action he'd never be able to unlearn.
"It was so bright," she breathed, and he had to strain to hear her, but didn't dare interrupt or touch her again. "I was in the shack, a-and then I was right there all over, I was so happy but the world was ending, and I knew it was my fault, it was all my fault!"
She started sobbing again, and Dipper fluttered gently over again to pat her on the back. He hung his head and tried to sort out the thoughts racing through his mind. There was something burning inside of him. Some kind of primal… glee. He trapped this mortal in his realm, tortured her until she lost her mind, and now she was his to devour and- no! Those weren't his thoughts, those weren't his intentions, even if they felt so good , that wasn't him and he'd rebuke it all because his sister mattered more than his awful demon instincts.
She gulped down a strangled sob, and started talking again, faster than before as if this was her only chance to let it out. "I can't do it, I can't pretend anymore, I never wanted that, it was never anything I wanted, it was anything that would keep me shut up, so I looked past the lies like I did back then and then, and then…"
Her stream died out, and for a moment, the Mindscape was perfectly silent. Dipper opened his mouth, about to try to comfort her again, but then-
"It's so dark in here."
Dipper's head snapped up. "What?"
Mabel turned around to face him. She looked up, and how had he not noticed before how her eyes flitted around, unable to meet his gaze?
"I turned off the pretend, like, I taught myself how to make my head ignore all the pretty imaginary stuff that's just supposed to make me feel better, and Dipper it's so dark in here. I can't see anything, I can't even see you and if- if I can't see you, that means you're fake too and if you're fake…"
She trailed off, and started clawing at the back of her head again. Dipper twitched, feeling instinctively that he should stop her before she hurt herself, but her words rang in his head to the point of being overwhelming. She called him fake, but he wasn’t fake like the people in the bubble, he had to be real, because he could leave the Mindscape. Even as he thought that, though, a part of him chortled and reminded him that he couldn’t just leave whenever he wanted -- after all, if he could, then he wouldn’t have brought Mabel here in the first place.
His lip quivered and he bit down on it hard. He remembered the Rubik’s Cube, how it peeled and warped in his hand as he twisted the thought of it in his mind, because that’s all it was at that point, a thought. That’s all that Mabel was, now, since he had brought her here. He gulped as he reached the conclusion of this chain of thought: that’s all he was…
“M-Mabel?” He had to pause to spit out the blood that had collected in his mouth after his lip was pierced by serrated teeth. “Mabel, if it’ll help us talk about this, can you bring the pretend back? It’d just be for a little bit -- w-we don’t have to stay there.”
She looked up in his general direction and hiccuped. “I’m scared,” she whimpered.
He grabbed her hand, remembering to dull his claws so as to not hurt her. “I’m here for you, Mabel. I want you to see that I’m here.”
She didn’t respond for a minute, instead tracing the outline of his fingers with her other hand. He gave her hand a squeeze, and she squeezed back. “Okay,” she said finally. “O...kay.”
Mabel blinked, and the clouds around her eyes parted. A wave washed over the gentle meadow they were sitting in, and Dipper found himself in the oversaturated world of his sister's dreams from two years ago. The 80s music, the giggling trees filled with stuffed animals, the fairytale creatures having tea parties -- it was all there.
Something snapped inside him, and he shot to his feet, wings flared, a snarl forming behind his lips. He was distantly aware of his sister yelping as his hand left hers, but he was too overcome with anger at the memory that had hurt his twin. He readied himself to shoot it down, to tear into it with his teeth which had been so useless back in 2012 but which he now instinctively knew were sharp enough to cut into a memory and render it to shreds. He wanted to suck the tangy pain from this fantasy, to devour it so his sister could be free and finally move on, but before he could, he felt Mabel grab him from behind and wrap him in a hug.
She was still weak, this he knew because in her clutches he could breathe -- still such a pointless maneuver -- while usually her bear hugs were enough to take down a pro wrestler. Regardless, it was unmistakably Mabel, and the contact pulled his soaring spirit closer to the ground. In her embrace he felt that anger burning inside of him shrink down to a wisp. Little tears, no longer big galloping sobs, trickled onto the back of his suitcoat, and stuck in her embrace, he felt his eyes start to water up to join them.
"It hurts so much, Dipper," she spoke up after a while. "It hurts because I know it's all my fault. The- the Transcendence…" (at this she gagged, and Dipper tried to shift from her embrace so he could comfort her, but she shook her head in his neck and kept talking) "It was my fault. If I hadn't given the dimensional rift to Bill... Which means it's my fault that you're a demon, it's my fault that you're fake, and it's my fault that you're stuck here in the dark and I can't stand it, Dipper, I can't stand thinking about you being trapped in the bubble and I can't get you out like you got me out back then!"
Oh.
Dipper blinked, and his vision turned yellow. He felt his stomach lurch violently, and he bit his lip again to stop himself from succumbing to the implications of what Mabel was saying, letting physical pain override the emotional pain. Mabel's grasp on him weakened, and his legs turned to jelly. He slid down to sit on the ground, this time intent on concealing his own head from view.
He felt Mabel sit down and pat him gently between the shoulder blades. He jerked his head up to boldly announce that no, he was not crying, but he was betrayed by the sobs that came out of his lips instead. Mabel hugged him again, and he fought the tears as hard as he could, fought to swallow the pit in his stomach that was trying to come out, because this was not about him, it was about Mabel and her pain, and it wasn't fair it wasn't fair .
"Mabes," he finally choked out. She weakened his grasp on him. "Mabel, this… this isn't your fault. Bill tricked you. He tricked all of us. I… I don't blame you at all."
She sniffed, and buried her head in his neck. "But I wanted to escape so badly. I wanted to freeze time so I wouldn't have to lose you, and then I lost you anyway," (he bristled at this, but she kept talking) "and every time I think about it, it feels like my fault, and it isn't just gonna go away."
Dipper remembered his instinct from earlier, to rip this dream world to shreds and gorge himself on it. "I could-"
"Dipper, I don't want the pain to just go away, because then I might as well be back in that bubble! No!"
She tousled his hair and he growled, a knee-jerk reaction fueled by the idea that he shouldn't be letting a human talk back at him like that. He shoved that feeling down, like he always did, like he hoped he always would.
Mabel seemed to have interpreted it as a playful growl, because he felt her nose press into his neck and her arms wrap back around him. "I can't do that, Dipper... When I think about escapism, I get scared that I'm somehow still in that bubble, still messing things up in the real world."
She grabbed Dipper's shoulders and twisted him so that he was facing her -- and how on earth did she have the strength to exert force on a dream demon in his own domain? She looked into his eyes, for real this time, and he noticed that her tears had stopped flowing, leaving behind the red-faced makeup-smeared mess of a sister he loved so much.
"I just... don't want things to be perfect. I want them to be real." She took a deep breath. "And I want you to be real."
"I'm…” His lip quivered again, and on reflex he bit down. He winced, worried about baring bloodstained teeth at his sister again, but the jolt of knives piercing thoughtform flesh never came. Confused, he ran his tongue along his teeth, and realized that they were dull like human teeth. It was temporary, just like all of his disguises, but in the moment it felt reassuring. “I’m real, Mabes, I'm right here."
Mabel shook her head, the significance of the moment lost on her. "We're nowhere, Dipper, we're in the bubble, and, and, I know you're gonna let me out, but…" She looked about to start crying again, but she pinched the bridge of her nose and kept going. "I'm not gonna stop working until I can get you out of the bubble too."
"Th-thanks Mabel." He thought about how hard he’d been working on being corporeal, how convinced he was that it was a journey he had to take by himself, and then he too had to hold his nose lest his emotions betray him. It seemed so ridiculous now that he hadn’t wanted to involve Mabel before, even after all the impossible things they’d accomplished together. “If there’s anyone who can do it, it’s you.”
They sat there in silence for a moment, both siblings trying to spare the other from another fit of crying. Dipper thought about how silly the two of them must have looked, and a smile flickered onto his face. "Hey. Awkward sibling hug?"
She giggled, an honest-to-goodness actual giggle. "We already did that, loser." He pouted in response, and she stuck out her tongue. "I'll hug you again later Dipdops, just first… can we please go back to the shack now?"
He tensed up. "Oh… yeah, of course, I'm sorry."
In the blink of an eye, they were standing back in their room in the Mystery Shack. Mabel smiled weakly at her brother, and then ran over to the trash can so she could empty her stomach. Dipper floated over to her and held her hair up so that it wouldn't get messy.
After a few minutes, Mabel stopped heaving, so Dipper let go of her hair and floated over to his bed. He felt his legs go weak -- such a funny thing to happen when he truly was, as Mabel said, fake -- and so he dropped onto the bed. He watched Mabel, still sitting by the trash, rocking slowly back and forth, and taking in big deep breaths of the air she was lucky to breathe.
He wanted to keep watching her, to support her when she got up, to help her to her bed so she could rest, but he felt so weak himself, like it was taking all he had to stay physical. It took him a moment to realize he actually was corporeal, even though no deal had been made. It was only for a few minutes, but he was there, he was real, and despite all that had just happened, he smiled.
Then the moment passed, and he vanished into the dark.