Rough Road to Recovery

I decided to look through my old fanfiction folders to find stuff complete enough to post and decided to put this up. I describe why I had it but never posted it before below. Then, I got a review from a guest saying how they would like to see a continuation showing how the twins dealt with their trauma here on Fanfiction. So, thank you for your comment, it gave me the motivation to put this up.

Dipper woke up to the sound of meowing from the other side of the room, where Mabel was sharing her bed with Waddles and Fluffy, the family cat. He sighed, knowing darn well it wasn't the feline he was hearing. He threw his sheets off and walked over to Mabel's bed. "Another nightmare, huh?" The part of the question he didn't state aloud was 'about weirdmageddon' but she knew.

Mabel sat up, forcing the cat curled up around her waist to get up and move further down the bed. "Yeah."

Dipper looked at her again for a moment, assessing how badly off she was. He could see the tracks of tears reflecting the moonlight coming through the window off of her face as she looked up at him. It didn't take him long to decide what to do... "Scoot over."

She obliged, allowing him to crawl into bed with her as Waddles and Fluffy rearranged themselves to take advantage of the space between their legs. Dipper embraced his sister and she cuddled in between his arms and hugged him back as waddles and fluffy made themselves comfortable. The twins hugged each other like they were five again and suffering from a really scary dream or had awoken in the middle of a particularly bad thunderstorm, rather than thirteen years old.

This was the third time of the week since they came home that Dipper had found himself cuddling with his twin so that she could sleep. After the last time, he'd set aside a specific set of clothes for bed and started washing up before he went to sleep so that when it happened again, Mabel wouldn't have to deal with his usual standards of hygiene, which he was well aware were very different from hers.

Dipper was so understanding of Mabel's behavior because he was right there with her, his own reactions to their trauma were just different. When his own terrors overcame him, usually during the day, he tended to just curl up into a ball in the corner or stare off into the distance to suffer in silence. Mabel would find him like that and either take his hand and sit with him quietly or distract him from his own thoughts by making him help her with her arts and crafts, depending on how bad he was at the time.

Then, there was the time he'd flipped out and shattered the bathroom cabinet mirror. It had swung sideways, warping his appearance in a way that reminded him of how his copies had looked as they started melting into puddles of ink. He missed Tyrone so much. How stupid was he, giving him a Pitt Cola like that? He felt tears well up in his eyes at the mere thought.

To be honest, he probably didn't have much in the way of nightmares because he barely slept. Unlike Mabel, Bill hadn't only haunted him in his waking hours but in his dreams as well.

On the one night he had slept a proper amount, it was because he'd stolen a sleeping pill from the bathroom cabinet and reading that they induced a sleep that was too deep for dreams. And then he'd failed to wake up when Mabel needed him in the middle of the night, and she had skipped sleep altogether because of it. Dipper hadn't done it again since.

The only other times he'd slept normally were when they shared the bed like they were doing now.

Weirdmageddon had left an open wound across both of their souls that had gone unnoticed while they were in the heat of the action, much like physical wounds sometimes did when a person was under the effects of adrenaline. The few days afterward, they had slowly started to feel the effects and now the full force of the damage done seemed to have sunk in.

As the meowing tapered off and, Mabel closed her eyes to slip back into sleep, Dipper looked at her. In the bright moonlight, he could see the bags starting to form under her eyes. Sleep was supposed to be his problem, not hers. Unless he was keeping her up or she was having a sleepover, that was. She'd always been the one who slept better, deeper. And now, this. It wasn't fair.

At least it wasn't always doom and gloom, though, he thought to himself. For all the time they spent dealing with these problems, they also had moments where they were at their happiest, just because they were still here, and their world was still intact.

He couldn't help but think of their first night home, where they'd dealt with both emotional extremes but ultimately ending the night with huge smiles on their faces as they fell asleep.

It was like they were drawn experience the extremes of their emotions to the point where everything between was easily interrupted by them. One moment, they were reliving the horror of Wierdmaggedon. The next, they were happy to be alive in a world of normalcy, knowing everyone was okay because of them. Then they were lost and confused, separated from Gravity Falls, which had become home to them, despite having only spent one summer there.

But at night, it seemed like the darker side of their thoughts won out much more often, marked by dreams filled with bubbles of madness, eye bats with 'stony stares', demons roaming the land and an evil one eyed triangle laughing maniacally from his floating pyramid palace.

Dipper sighed and stared at his sister. Hopefully, the nightmares were done for the night, now. At least they would sleep easier in each other's company and if the nightmares did come again, they'd wake up to find their other twin right there with them.

Finally, Dipper closed his own eyes and drifted off to sleep.

Mabel woke up to the feeling of a sweaty palm clasped in her own on the pillow next to her head as well as the weight of the pets pressed up against her leg.

She opened her eyes to the sight of the birthmark of the Big Dipper that was on her brother's forehead. The long bangs that usually concealed it were tucked away from view, along with the half of his face that was pressed against the pillow on the other side of their clasped hands.

At some point in the night, he'd balled himself up, tucking his head downward. For a moment, Mabel wondered which one of them had clasped the other's hand in their sleep. Then she smiled and decided it didn't really matter.

Dipper's arm exposed since he had worn a short-sleeved shirt to bed, was covered in multicolored bruises which had begun to fade as his body healed from the whole ordeal they had gone through at the end of the summer. It reminded her of what she saw across most of her body when she bathed last night. She knew he had to look similar, considering how Bill had held them when he caught them.

Mabel sighed, thinking to herself; She knew that this would have to stop soon…her sharing beds with her Bro Bro every time she was seized by a nightmare. Not only were they too old to be doing this but she had also heard talk from their parents about giving them separate rooms. They were going to give the guest bedroom downstairs to one of them, probably Dipper, as he had a little bit less stuff to move compared to her. She didn't know when that would happen, just that it would be soon.

She sighed, thinking about the whole fiasco as they fought over the secret room in the Mystery Shack that it turned out neither of them really wanted. They had ultimately wanted each other's company more than their own space; despite the stuff they often did to get on each other's nerves.

Of course, a few weeks ago, they had thought the days when they would crawl into bed with each other for comfort and safety seemed years behind them…then Weirdmageddon happened. It was like they'd been emotionally set back half their lives. She was sure that their parents had noticed something was wrong but thankfully they hadn't seen this part of it yet.

Dipper stirred on his side of the bed, releasing her hand as if even in sleep he was aware of his sister's own state of wakefulness and was helping make it easier for her to get up. He let out a heavy sigh as he settled into his new position.

Mabel carefully squirmed out from her space between Dipper, Fluffy and Waddles and wriggled out of the covers before crawling through the space where she'd slept and the wall. She was careful to shift the bed as little as possible as she liberated herself. At the foot of the bed, she used her chest of arts and craft supplies as a step to get out.

Mabel looked back the pig and the cat watching her. She gave each a quick scrub behind their ears at the same time with one hand each and whispered, "you can go back to sleep if you want." At her statement, the pig lowered his head again and shifted his weight, so he leaned against Dipper as he had against her for most of the night as he lay between them. Fluffy on the other hand, hopped out of bed and stretched, quietly yawning and revealing her claws for a moment as she did so. Then she trotted out of the room as Mabel quietly opened the door.

Mabel quietly picked out her clothes for the day from some drawers and slipped out the door and into the bathroom to change.

Their parents had already left for their respective jobs, so Mabel had the house to herself for the moment. She went downstairs and into the kitchen to make a fresh batch of Mabel Juice, using orange soda in place of Pitt Cola. She poured herself a cup and tucked the rest in the refrigerator for anyone else who might want some (mainly Dipper for the nostalgia kick) and made herself a bowl of cereal.

She brought her breakfast into the dining room. Sometime later, she found herself twirling her spoon in the now soggy, uneaten cereal as she stared at the Ivy creeping up the far corner of the room from its pot and across the ceiling.

Finally, Mabel got up, scraped the uneaten cereal out of the bowl into the trash can before dumping the milk down the sink, closely followed with a Mabel Juice chaser. The girl wondered if the sink would have liked the drinks, had it been alive like a lot of the stuff had been in the Oddpocalypse.

And that thought was just too much. Mabel screamed in fury and threw her glass into the sink so hard that it shattered into a thousand shards which slid into the sink or bounced back into the air as she sat down on the floor, her back leaning against the opposite counter directly behind her, pulled her head into her sweater and sobbed.

Somewhere in the back of her mind as she noted that she heard a sudden thud through the ceiling soon followed by a rumble on the stairs and knew she'd scared Dipper. She heard his bare feet skid on the polished wooden floor of the hallway that ran parallel to the kitchen, almost missing the opening that connected them.

"There's broken glass," Mabel stated before sniffling, even in her current state thinking of her brother and wanting to make sure he didn't hurt himself on her account.

As Mabel cried out her warning, Dipper stopped at the entryway to the kitchen, sock's skidding slightly as he came to a stop. "Do you have shoes on?"

"No," Mabel's voice called out, muffled voice indicating she was in Sweater Town.

"Don't move," he ordered her before rushing back the way he came, into the living room. He ran up to the door way, slipped into his shoes barefoot, not even bothering with the laces. He then snatched up Mabel's and returned with them in hand.

As he entered, he out of…Nightshirt Town, rather than Sweater Town, he guessed. He knelt down and held out her own pair to her. "Here, put these on."

Once Mabel slipped them on, Dipper offered her his hand which she took so he could help pull her up and they walked out of the kitchen. "What about the glass?"

"We can deal with it later," Dipper immediately replied, "It'll still be there when we get back and Dad and Mom won't be home until this evening." He studied the glass shining on the tile floor for a moment before asking, "What happened?"

Rather than immediately respond, she just stood there, trembling.

Dipper took her hands in his and, said, "hey, it's okay, Mabes."

Tears started to roll down Mabel's face as she shook her head, "It was my fault."

"What are you talking about?" Dipper asked

"I gave Bill the that little snow globe thing. He tricked me. He came in Blendin's body and said if I gave it to him, he could give me more summer. I just handed it over to him and…and" she trailed off and started sobbing as Dipper pulled her into a hug. Not the sibling hug where they both contributed but a one-way type where he was comforting her.

"Don't say that," he said.

"It's true, though."

"I know you're probably not going to believe this now, at least not completely, but it's not your fault." Dipper replied. You know, I can't help but think that if I had just told you about the rift, or maybe if I had waited to talk to you before saying yes to that apprenticeship or if I'd even dropped my backpack further from yours…" He sighed. "I think that Bill would have probably gotten through eventually, even if Grunkle Ford and I used the alien glue we'd found. We just happened to give him the quickest, easiest way to do it. And he used us, just like he always did people. Me, Giddeon, Grunkle Ford and who knows how many others."

"But…"

"No, Mabes. I know it feels like it's your fault because that's how it feels for me too. It was his." He realized that the hurt and anger was creeping into his voice only when Mabel pulled away slightly. He tried to steady it as he added, "Besides, what would have happened if he hadn't have tricked you then?" He'd had some nightmares about that. "Maybe nothing would have happened then, and Bill would be waiting for us next summer, tormenting everyone else while he waited." He grit his teeth and his voice trembled as he continued, "Or maybe the barrier can't hold his consciousness and he would have followed us home, where there would be no shield for us or mom and dad. There're certainly enough images of him everywhere that it seems likely. Wow do you think his face ended up on the dollar b…note. We just don't know."

"I can still hear his laugh," Mabel said.

"He's there in my nightmares…even though I know it's not really him."

"What if it is, one day…I know he should be dead but sometimes I think…"

Dipper shuddered because he'd had the same fear. Then he looked at Mabel and he suddenly felt frustrated. He was so tired of being scared, of seeing Mabel scared. Staring at her, he suddenly had an epiphany. "Come on," he walked her through the living room and into the small hallway beneath the stairs.

"Where are we going?" She asked.

"Dad's office. I've got an idea for our problem."

"I don't think you'll have an easy time finding anything about a weirdmageddon support group on the internet."

"Probably not, but there are some other things that might help. Although unnatural terrors are not considered a serious topic by most people, the human mind as a whole and mental health specifically are. I'm sick of taking turns having break downs, how about you?" He drew himself tall and tried to look confident.

Mabel bit her lip and looked at the floor thoughtfully before nodding. "Yeah."

"And I'm not planning on leaving my mind vulnerable, either. Before we move forward, we have to take control back, starting here," He double tapped the side of his head stress his point as he added, "where Bill hit us the hardest. Are you with me?"

Mabel looked at her brother as he asked, squeezing her hand.

She could see that he was sinking into his element. Her emotionally driven behavior had always been handy in seeing through a mess when logic just didn't apply as well and they just had to trust their hearts, like with Grunkle Stan and the portal but right now it was working against her.

Dipper had the capacity to be a little more thoughtful for a time when need be to get his work done and let the emotions catch up later, once everything settled down. That was working to his advantage right now. Mabel was willing to trust the geeky analyst side of her brother take the wheel and steer them through this storm of negativity and into better waters.

She felt a smile cross her features as she said, "Of course I am. We're in this together, always."

Dipper smiled back for a moment, but was only half there, his mind already focusing on where to begin with the websites and search engine as they walked into the office.

Mabel left Dipper alone just long enough to grab her knitting kit. Then she went back downstairs and pulled up a chair next to her brother as his hands skittered between the mouse and the keys. She sat next to him and knitted as he began his search for information, planning the beginning of their path to recovery.

So, I tried to start a larger story for Gravity Falls years ago that would have come after "Pulling into the Station."

This would have been the first chapter, but I feel like it can stand on its own, too. I was going through a stage where I was trying to complete large portions of my stories before posting anything from them. It didn't work out and just led to me losing interest before I was done.

I can post my completed material if you're interested in seeing it but it's very likely that I won't come back to complete it. So, with that in mind, if you're interested in seeing what I've got done, anyway, please let me know. This is also sort of a test run because I have a lot of material that I did this with and if it goes well here, I might put more partial stories out.

At the very least, if I don't place more up, this'll at least make a nice one-shot sequel to 'Pulling into the Station," as I have marked it.