Chapter Text
Mabel lay on her bed reading a late Christmas card from Candy and Grenda. Since their family had moved from Piedmont to DC the year before, the mail from Gravity Falls took much longer to arrive than it used to. New Years Eve was tomorrow and the card, which had been mailed on the 18th, had only arrived that afternoon, along with a couple gifts for both her and Dipper from the girls (and Pacifica, although she had only signed her name at the end of the card without leaving a personalized message). Mabel didn’t hold it against her though. She knew Pacifica hated putting things in writing if she didn’t have to, and she was happy enough to use whatever cool new messaging service Pacifica wanted to keep up with her friend.
Their gifts from Stan and Ford, as well as Soos and Wendy, had arrived on time, bright and early Christmas morning, dropped on the doorstep by what their parents assumed must have been a very overworked delivery driver, but Mabel and Dipper knew was actually an alien tech drone that Fiddleford had been waiting for an excuse to test drive since he’d built it back in October. Grunkle Ford had told them all about it on their monthly video chat around Thanksgiving (a video chat made possible by more of Fiddleford’s alien tech creations) forewarning them both that if Fiddleford was wrong about how well the drone could evade the governments security measures, they might not get any Christmas gifts at all. The twins had agreed to it anyway, highly amused at the thought of the government shooting down a drone filled with cookies and novelty mugs from Alaska.
She smiled as she finished the note. Everything in Gravity Falls was normal. Or, well, as normal as it got out there anyway. Grenda was taking boxing lessons with the Manatours in her spare time and Candy was continuing on her crusade to convince Fiddleford to let her help him build a deathbot sometime soon. They were both looking forward to seeing her and Dipper over the summer and were already compiling lists of things they wanted to do: diving in the lake, going to the local music festival, a big Summerween party, and something about teaching the Multibear to play chess that Mabel assumed had to be for Dipper.
She glanced up at the clock on their bedroom wall. It sat directly in the center of the room above the doorway. One half of the clock was pink and coated in a thin sheen of iridescent glitter. Each of the numbers on this side was a different color of the rainbow, while the numbers on the other side were a bright silver color against a dark blue, non-glittery background. The clock had a few different sets of hands letting the twins set it for their timezone, as well as that of Gravity Falls and wherever their Grunkles were at the time – currently somewhere off the uppermost coast of Alaska. It had been a combined 16th birthday gift for them from Stan and Ford at the end of last summer, after Mabel had complained about how hard it was to keep track of everybody’s time zones now that they lived all the way across the country.
The hands of the clock that depicted their own time zone currently read 4:45pm, meaning Dipper should be home from the winter break tutoring session he was teaching in about fifteen minutes. Mabel sighed. She wanted him to be home now so that she could show him the letter and give him his gifts from their friends. She also wanted to open her gifts. She knew that Dipper would laugh at her and call her silly for waiting to open them until he got home, but they always opened their Christmas gifts at the same time! It was traditional. Even if it wasn’t technically Christmas anymore.
She sighed again, more dramatically than before and rolled off the bed, plopping down onto the rug beneath. Their entire room was split in half. Directly down the middle from the large windows at one end to the door on the other. A fluffy carpet, half pastel purple, half charcoal gray, adorned the floor, covering the worn wooden boards beneath it. Their desks sat, side-by-side under the windows, Dipper’s covered in computer tech and plants, Mabel’s covered in craft supplies and glitter. A trash can sat between the desks, split down the middle pink and blue just like the clock on the opposite wall.
The wall above Dipper’s bed was a simple mural of trees and mountains that Mabel had painted for him a month or two after they moved to DC. The wall above her own bed was much more abstract, pinks and purples and yellows faded together in a gentle ombre effect that made her side of the room feel like it was trapped in a constant dawn.
The only thing not split down the middle was the ceiling. This they had both agreed on. A deep blue covered in glow in the dark constellations, a mix of paint and kitschy little plastic stars. Mabel had wanted it all to be painted, but when Dipper had awkwardly asked if he could reuse the stars from his old bedroom and mumbled something about not understanding how paintbrushes worked, she had relented.
As she lay staring up at it, she had to admit that it looked better with the plastic stars. They added definition to the flat ceiling in a way that made it feel more like she was really looking up into space instead of into the ancient bumpy ceiling that sagged in places and had been missing so much paint in other places that she had had to fill the divots in with spackle before painting over it.
Not that she minded of course. Mabel didn’t mind anything at all. She didn’t mind the fact that nothing about their new house was actually new. She didn’t mind the peeling paint, and the leaking faucets and the broken heat and the lack of AC.
“The house has character!” She had told Dipper brightly the first month after they had moved, when everything was wrong, and Dipper had started getting nightmares again.
She didn’t mind that they had moved into the heart of a city that was too big and too loud and too bright all the time because it was an adventure. She didn’t mind that they no longer had a yard for Waddles, or a safe place to ride their bikes, or that she and Dipper had to share a room again instead of having their own spaces and their own secret passageway between their two closets like a Narnia portal, because only kids needed things like that. She didn’t mind that they had moved away from literally everything they’d ever known so that their mom could try, once again, to save the marriage that had been failing since before Dipper and Mabel had left elementary school; because it was great to be a family again and to have her dad back living with them again, and to hear the arguments seeping up between the floorboards beneath them almost every night.
She blinked and a tear slid down her cheek into the soft purple carpet. Mabel did care. She cared so much it tore her apart inside. She was so angry that their mom hadn’t even discussed it with them before announcing they were moving back in with their dad, whom they had only seen for the past four years for Chanukah and Thanksgiving. Their dad who had left Piedmont before they got back from Gravity Falls that first summer without even saying goodbye. Their dad who had left a birthday gift and a long letter behind for Mabel and nothing at all for Dipper except a note saying, “Be good Macie.” Which wasn’t even his name! Which was the whole reason –
Mabel took a deep breath and wiped at her eyes with the sleeves of her sweater. Which was the whole reason, she reminded herself angrily, that she had to pretend everything was fine. Because everything was decidedly not fine for Dipper, and she couldn’t protect him if he knew she was miserable too. Besides, she reminded herself as she heard the door open downstairs, she wasn’t miserable. She and Dipper had a wonderful family. They were just far away right now, but it didn’t mean that they were loved any less.
Wiping the last of her tears roughly off her face, she scooped up the card and hurried down the stairs, three at a time, before stopping short on the landing as she heard raised voices begin in the hallway.
“-how you could have done something like that to yourself!” Mabel winced, it was their dad, and he already sounded well on the way to a screaming match.
“It’s none of your damn business what I do with my body okay?!” Dipper’s voice cracked as his anger made him lose control of his chosen register a bit.
“It absolutely is young lady, I am your father—”
“And I’m not your fucking daughter, okay?”
“Macie, Language!”
“It’s Dipper. And I’m sixteen Mike! I can say what I want to you as far as I am concerned.”
“Don’t call your father Mike, Dipper!” Mabel gritted her teeth. Just like their mom to hop in on the wrong side of an argument, from another room no less, instead of ever having any spine to stand up to her husband anymore.
“As long he calls me Macie, I can call him whatever I’d like,” said Dipper cooly. “Now I’m going upstairs—”
“Oh no you’re not! No child of mine will be walking around with tattoos on them! The hair was already a step too far but this! Do you ever want to have a job? Do you ever want any man to find you attractive?” Their dad’s voice was shaking with anger. Mabel heard Dipper try to push past him out of the hall and the sharp cracking noise that followed. Dipper cried out in surprise and suddenly Mabel was between him and their dad.
She wasn’t entirely sure how she got there but it didn’t matter. What mattered was their dad had slapped Dipper, and his hand was raised to do it again, except now it was raised over her own face as she stood defiantly in front of her brother, the card from her friends forgotten on the floor.
“Mabel, no—” Dipper, panicking, tried to shove her out of the way, but she held firm and pulled off her sweater, revealing her upper arm, where her own tattoo sat. The shooting star from the Bill zodiac, and the design on first sweater she had ever made, shone brightly against her pale skin, mostly healed by now.
“I have one too! Are you planning to hit me as well Dad?”
The look of disappointment and anger on their dad’s face sharpened into something mean and twisted. “Macie, you convinced your sister to get one too? How could you?? You’re ruining her future by being the way you are.”
These last words burned the inside of Mabel's heart as they oozed out into the space between her and her dad. “The way you are” huh? She was done with this bullshit, and she had been for a long, long time.
“The way he is?? You mean fucking trans dad?? You mean the way he has been since he was old enough to say he didn’t want to wear dresses? Since he was old enough to pronounce Grandpa Shermie’s nickname for him? Since he came out to you at the age of eleven, and your response was to walk out on us after a year of pretending he didn’t exist?! And for your information,” her eyes flashed with proud malice “the tattoos were my idea. My early Christmas gift for us both. Back in November when you and Mom went to see your cousins for the weekend, and you left me in charge? I used fake IDs to get us into a tattoo parlor right under your fucking nose!”
Mabel stopped, chest heaving. Now that she wasn’t yelling, the hall was absolutely silent, and at some point, her mother had appeared from the kitchen. She now stared at her husband in frightened silence, as his face grew red and his hand, still raised above his head, began to shake slightly.
Mabel was expecting the slap when it came. It still hurt. It cracked against her jaw, and she felt her lip slice open a little on her tooth. Her mom cried out and made to grab at her husband’s arm, but he shook her off. For a moment Mabel was deafened, ear ringing in muted silence and stinging pain. She held her ground, looking her dad in the eyes with practiced calm.
“Mabel, you go to your room right now, and don’t come down until I come get you for dinner. Macie, you are no longer welcome in my household. You have ten minutes to say goodbye and get the hell out of my sight.”
Mabel ignored her mother’s gasp of horror and grabbed Dipper’s hand, shoving her way past her father and back up the stairs to their room. Dipper said nothing until the door had slammed behind them, hard enough to cause little bits of plaster to loosen around the door frame. He was shaking so badly he could barely stand, and tears were silently running down his face as he stuttered to speak.
“Mabel it’s—. I’m so sorry—that shouldn’t have—he should have hit me—you didn’t need to get in the way—its not like, like I haven’t been expecting it. I—” He broke off hands floundering in the air for a minute before dropping loosely to his sides, defeated. In a very small voice he said “Guess we’re doing a replay of Stan and Ford huh? And you always thought you’d get to be Stan in our version.” He tried to say it teasingly, but it came out flat and hard instead. He still hadn’t actually looked at her yet, he was staring at the floor like he was waiting for her to tell him to leave.
Her heart broke, and she ignored it. There was time to have this conversation later, when they were far away, and Dipper was safe, and they were on their way home. She pulled his suitcase out from under his bed and started haphazardly throwing clothes, journals, and personal items into it. Dipper was still standing in the middle of the floor staring at his feet when she zipped up the suitcase and shoved his backpack into his hands.
“Okay nerd, get whatever computer shit you need, I can’t pack that stuff for you, I don’t remember what most of it does.” She gave him a gentle shove and he began mechanically shoving cords and things into the bag while Mabel reached under her own bed and started filling her own suitcase and shoulder bag. Then she pulled back the carpet and pried up the loose floorboard directly in the center of the room. A floorboard she had definitely not loosened on purpose because it was more poetic for the hiding space to be in the center of the split room than directly in front of Dipper’s closet.
From inside it she pulled things too precious to lose if their dad decided to go through their stuff at any point. First, her Gravity Falls scrapbook from that first summer, returned to them after being photocopied by Ford prior to them setting off on the Stan O’ War II, next a bundle of letters and photos from their friends, and lastly, at the very bottom of the space in the floor, she pulled out a large piggy bank.
It had been given to them by their Grandpa Shermie when they were born. A piggy bank with no outlet so money that went in was sealed in there until you broke it open. The twins had never broken it open. Instead, they had dutifully put their birthday, Christmas, and Chanukah money into it every year. Recently Dipper had been adding in parts of his paychecks from tutoring and Mabel parts of hers from babysitting, it had to be almost full by now.
She threw it to the floor, and it shattered with a satisfying crack into two perfect halves. Dipper turned towards her, startled from his thoughts by the noise. He was still loosely holding his now full backpack, but he hadn’t zipped it up yet, instead staring blankly out the window as he waited for his ten minutes to be up.
“What…what are you doing?” he asked in vague confusion as he noticed her suitcase and bag for the first time.
Mabel scooped up the money off the floor and jammed it into her backpack. “What’s it look like I’m doing, dummy? I’m coming with you.”
“No! I mean. No— Mabel you can’t! This is my fault; I’m not letting you get dragged down with me!”
“Dipper.” She looked at him and he finally met her eyes. He hadn’t stopped crying and the slap from earlier was blossoming in a red hand shaped mark across the side of his face, a bruise beginning to bloom on his jawline. She realized vaguely that she probably had a matching one on her own face, but the adrenaline coursing through her meant it didn’t hurt, yet. “You’re my brother until the end of the world. That means wherever we go, we go together. And I’ve been ready to go for a long time now.”
The relief on his face broke her heart again. Had he really thought she wouldn’t go with him? Had he really thought she would watch him get tossed out into the street, close the curtains on him as he tried to say goodbye? Had he really thought she would play the Ford to his Stan? Repeat the mistakes their grunkles had been paying for their entire lives? She shook the thoughts from her head and grabbed her car keys from her desk. There was time to talk later. For now, they had to go. Ten minutes was up.
They left the room together, Mabel ahead, scooping up their unopened Christmas presents as she went, Dipper behind, grabbing the clock off the wall as he shut the door to their room behind him, for the last time.