Chapter Text
Mabel had never been particularly enthusiastic about sports, unless they were the kind that she invented herself. But even she knew that in baseball, and probably a few other games, too, a player got out after three strikes.
The first time it happened, she wasn’t sure exactly what broke the mirror. It was the first week of eighth grade and Mabel had been in the girl’s bathroom on the third floor when she’d noticed three of her classmates huddled in the corner, by the farthestmost mirror. She recognized them well enough – last year, they’d been the ones picking on Dipper for using the same bathroom as they did, before he got clearance from the administration to use the other one. Clearance that he never should have needed, but that was water under the bridge. At least, Dipper said it was, and it was hardly Mabel’s place to argue with him.
That day, though, it wasn’t Dipper that they were picking on. He was out of their way, no longer an easy target. Mabel, though, who’d insisted on wearing her new Honk if you love spaghetti sweater to the first day of her last day of middle school – not despite the fact that it would make her stand out but because of that fact – remained that easy target. And now that little group of girls, girls who’d been nice enough to her in pre-k before everything went wrong and everybody got mean, were snickering behind their hands, casting glances at Mabel. They were the kinds of glances that were maybe meant to seem sneaky, but that begged to be noticed nonetheless.
Mabel lacked a skill that most girls her age seemed to have. She wasn’t good at mind games. If she could figure out when someone had some kind of problem with her, it was only through years of practice. And she never quite knew how to strike back with the same shrewdness with which she was struck. Instead, she turned and looked them straight in the eyes.
“Excuse me,” Mabel said, trying to keep the tremble out of her voice, “Are you talking about me?”
One of them, Chloe, sneered, like Mabel was something gross stuck to the bottom of her shiny new shoes. “Of course not. Not everything is about you, you know.” She turned back to her friends and muttered, “Freak.”
The mirror in front of Chloe shattered. Not shattered, really. Exploded. It was a miracle that none of the glass nicked her in the blast. Or maybe it had. Mabel wasn’t really sure. As soon as it happened, Mabel, startled, let out a shout and ran from the bathroom. Ten minutes later, the girls appeared in her homeroom, all visibly shaken. They alternated between glaring at Mabel and trying not to look at her at all. But they seemed unharmed, and Mabel did her best not to think about it for the rest of the day.
On the bus home, she didn’t think about the blast itself, but about the fact that back in Gravity Falls, she hadn’t had to look over her shoulder every two minutes. That wasn’t true at all, not really, but somehow, looking over her shoulder for demons and monsters felt more manageable than being afraid of kids her age who just wouldn’t leave her alone.
“Good day?” Dipper asked her as he took the seat next to her on the bus. They had different schedules this year, which couldn’t possibly be helping with Mabel’s overall mental state. Their paths diverted midday and they didn’t see each other after lunch.
“Yeah,” Mabel lied, “It was fine.”
In hindsight, she wasn’t sure why she didn’t just tell him. Maybe it was because his nightmares were still keeping him awake most nights, and the last thing she wanted to do was make it worse by reintroducing magic and the forces of evil into their lives. Or maybe Mabel knew, instinctively, that she had been the one to bust the mirror, and she didn’t want to see the way Dipper would look at her when he found out.
The second time it happened, Mabel had been lying on the floor of her bedroom with Dipper lying antiparallel to her, her feet by his head. She’d been out of pink beads, which were necessary to finish the bracelet that she’d planned, when suddenly, all three of the green beads in her palm turned pink. Mabel barely suppressed a yelp, but Dipper must have heard something, a sharp intake of breath or he may have just noticed her tense beside him.
“You okay?” he asked, his green lanyard dangling unassumingly between his two fingers.
“Yeah, I’m good. Just… lost a few beads, that’s all.”
“You don’t happen to have any more green, do you?” he asked.
Mabel chuckled, but it was low, and bitter, not an amused kind of noise. “No, I don’t have green anymore.”
She could have tried to turn the beads back to green. They probably would have listened to her. But at that point, she was too afraid to try.
The third time was the worst. She’d been having a nightmare – that wasn’t the unusual part. It was pretty standard. Dream Mabel frolicked around a place that she loved – this time it was the beach that their parents used to drive them to for road trips when Dipper and Mabel were kids. Then, all at once, the sand beneath her toes turned to dark red yarn, and the waves started screaming at her. The sky split open, and all around her, she heard the echoing laughter of Bill.
Mabel woke up screaming. That wasn’t unusual, either. What was unusual was that when Dipper broke her door down to comfort her, she sent him flying back into the hallway.
He hit the wall hard, all that impact slamming into his back and breaking out of him with an oof as he fell to the carpet, catching himself on his hands and knees.
For a moment that could have been an hour or a year, there was nothing. Just the two of them, staring at each other. Mabel’s hand was still outstretched. She didn’t remember raising it, but there it was, shaking with fear and excitement and some terrifying energy that she’d never felt before. Her veins were dark pink and glittering like someone had injected dye into her bloodstream. With a sickening jolt, she realized where she recognized that color. The bubble that surrounded Mabeland had been the exact same shade.
She watched as Dipper processed, gulped. As he visibly fought the shock in his expression, and, to his credit, tamped it down much better than anyone else would have been able to.
“Mabel,” he said, taking a step back into her room.
“Don’t come near me!” she yelled.
Dipper’s expression faded to one of pure sadness. Mabel could practically hear his heart break from across the room, just from how sad he looked. “Okay. Look, I’m sorry. Whatever I did–”
“You didn’t do anything,” said Mabel, “I don’t want to hurt you.”
“You won’t,” said Dipper.
But Mabel wasn’t so sure. She still buzzed with that unfamiliar energy, and the only thought in her head was that as bad as it was to throw her brother backwards, it could have been much, much worse. Mabel, of course, had no way of knowing this except on instinct. But how else was she supposed to quantify… magic? A curse? Whatever this was?
“I have to go,” Mabel muttered. She forced her way past Dipper, with just a bump to the shoulder this time, and was out the front door before he even had the chance to yell after her.
It was officially autumn in Piedmont,
Despite the nightmare, and against all odds, Mabel had slept past nine, which meant that the library in their neighborhood was open. Mabel made a beeline for it on autopilot. She had four main haunts in Piedmont. School and home were both off the table, and the ice cream place didn’t open until noon in September, so the library was her option, by sheer process of elimination. It was only when she’d already decided to head there that she realized an essentially unlimited collection of books could be useful to her. She wasn’t a natural-born researcher like Dipper was, but she knew her way around the Dewey Decimal System, and she’d spent enough time around her brother to know that pretty much any information the human mind yearned for could be found in a good library.
The Piedmont Public Library was a good library. Catherine at the front desk, who’d already been a grandmother type when Mabel was six but somehow still worked here, greeted her with a smile. “Hello, Mabel. Just you today?”
“Uhh, yeah,” said Mabel, “Dipper is… at home.”
“Say hello to him for me,” said Catherine, “What can I help you with?”
“Um. Do you happen to have.” Mabel took a second to consider how not to make this suspicious, and then she remembered when Dipper marched in here in second grade and asked her for Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble and she’d just smiled mildly. “Do you happen to have any books about. I don’t know. Teenage girls who do magic?”
Catherine laughed. “A very important phase in a young girl’s life. What kinds of books are you looking for?”
Mabel shrugged. “Anything that you think would be helpful – I mean. That you think I’d like.”
Catherine frowned briefly, then nodded. “Give me five minutes.”
She ended up giving Mabel twelve books, and Mabel checked all of them out. Then, realizing that she wasn’t ready to go home yet, she cracked open the smallest of the books and started to read, curled up in one of the corners of the young adult lounge.
Dipper had told her a few things about Stephen King before, and right off the bat, Mabel decided that she liked the main character. Carrie, fundamentally, was just a girl who wanted to live as normal of a life as she could despite her horrible mother. Mabel liked Sue, too, and how she tried to apologize to Carrie for the bullying in a way that mattered, rather than just saying sorry and going about her life. Watching Carrie discover her telekinetic power and get ready for prom was almost empowering, but Mabel didn’t have the chance to unpack any of that before Carrie fell victim to the cruelest bout of bullying yet, snapped, and used her powers to murder her classmates and her mom.
Mabel wasn’t sure if this was the desired reaction, but Carrie’s meltdown broke Mabel’s heart. Those kids were awful to her, but they were kids. They could have gotten better, grown up, and now none of them would ever know. And the idea of killing one’s own mother, no matter how much she may have deserved it…
Mabel slammed the book shut. She felt nauseous. Having already checked out her books, she rushed past Catherine’s desk without saying goodbye and went straight home.
On the way back, she made a decision. As scary as this was, she had to deal with it. Face it head-on and beat it. She would not allow herself to become the new monster.
Dipper was sitting at the dining room table, having apples with peanut butter, his default after-school snack. Mabel had only skipped a day of school once in her life, when the zoo one county over had pandas for a day in fifth grade, but she knew that none of her teachers would bother to call her parents for a first time offense. Besides, that seemed to be the least of her concerns, all things considered.
“Mabel,” he said calmly, too calm, that kind of calm where Mabel knew that he was trying very, very hard not to jump up and down with excitement, “I looked for you at school.”
“I skipped,” she said.
“I called you on our matching walkie-talkies.”
“I… left mine at home.” Mabel cringed, remembering how post-Weirdmageddon, she’d promised Dipper that he would always have a way to reach her, even if he never felt the need to use it. She was doing a lot of things wrong today.
“I was worried about you,” Dipper said.
“I know,” said Mabel, “I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be sorry,” said Dipper, “Just… are you okay?”
Mabel sat across from him at the table with a deep sigh. Waddles waddled over, putting his snout in her lap, and that made things easier. Already, she could feel her heartbeat even out.
“I need to tell you something. Actually, a lot of things.”
“Okay,” said Dipper.
“And I think we should write a letter to Grunkle Stan and Grunkle Ford.”
Mabel told Dipper everything – about the mirror, the beads, her strange dreams, the energy that lived under her skin now, constantly out of reach, at once a threat and a promise. As soon as he knew everything, Mabel realized that it was insane to ever pretend like he couldn’t handle it, or that she could survive while keeping it from him. He was calm and collected in a way that couldn’t be faked. He didn’t even flit around the room, start theorizing, or make coffee, like he usually did when faced with a good mystery, which was good, because Mabel didn’t think she would have been able to deal with that.
“When did it start?” Dipper asked.
“I don’t know,” said Mabel, “After we left Gravity Falls.”
“So, after Weirdmageddon?” Dipper asked, and Mabel nodded, miserably. “And… there seems to be a sort of telekinetic aspect to it, but you can also alter reality, like you did with the beads.”
“Yeah,” said Mabel, “I guess I can.” It was weird to imagine it. Altering reality. Mabel wasn’t a demon or a god. She didn’t want to be, and she sure as hell didn’t trust herself to be.
“And I don’t have them,” Dipper muttered, more to himself than to her, “These… powers. Whatever they are. Bill possessed me and I don’t have them.”
“Consider yourself lucky,” Mabel grumbled.
He was quiet for a good long minute. Occasionally, he would squint, draw little shapes in the air with his fingertips, or mumble unintelligibly, but it was obvious to Mabel that he was in his zone. So deep in his zone, in fact, that when she slid his plate of apples and peanut butter towards her and began to crunch, he didn’t even react.
When he did speak, he sounded… different. It was like that point in a horror movie where a grizzled but surprisingly wise gas station employee told the main characters not to go into the haunted woods. He sounded like they were going to need a bigger boat.
“Mabel. What kinds of things could you do in Mabeland?”
“What do you mean?” asked Mabel, who knew exactly what he meant but desperately wanted to pretend like she didn’t.
“Mabeland listened to you. You summoned those pug sundaes. You made the waffle guards follow your orders. I could go on.”
“Yeah, yeah, I know,” said Mabel, who tried to think of Mabeland as little as possible, “I only had power over Mabeland up to a point, though. Bill was still in control.”
“Right,” said Dipper, “But there was a hierarchy. Bill. Then you. Then the rest of us.”
“What’s your point?” Mabel said, her voice snappier than she’d intended.
Dipper didn’t seem to mind. “You’re going to hate this,” he said softly, “But… maybe Bill didn’t give you power over Mabeland. Maybe he gave you powers… in general.”
That hung over their heads, heavy, like the blade of a guillotine.
Mabel cleared her throat. “We need to call Stan and Ford.”