Despite the whirlwind of sensation around him, all Dipper could think of at the moment were the choices that lead him to his current circumstance. The summer was almost spent; in celebration – or perhaps in mourning – Tambry was hosting one last party at her parents' house. He only went at Mabel's insistence, and only because she came along. The reasoning she offered was that she'd gotten at least a taste of her so heavily desired epic summer romance, but he hadn't come anywhere near that close with the still-single Wendy. She wanted to make sure he got one last try.

The party itself was the usual teenage affair: too loud, too boisterous, too much for the younger ones to take. Dipper couldn't make himself approach Wendy with so many strangers around to see. Mabel was, as usual, the first to realize her error, yelling an apology to him that he couldn't hear for the music's bone-rattling bass. As it turned out, the redhead was feeling similarly out-of-place; something about her expression bothered him, so he feigned being ill in hopes it would buy both of them a way out.

His plan worked. After several rounds of assurances by Wendy that yes, she could drive just fine – after all, she'd gotten her learner's permit on her sixteenth birthday, not one week ago – and, no, really, she'd been driving her father's truck in the logging area since she was Mabel's age, Tambry finally let her borrow her car.

For whatever reason, that also stood out to his adrenaline-addled mind. The red compact smelled like strawberries on the inside and was oddly neat. It also had a manual transmission, something Wendy was unfamiliar with. She needed some practice with the clutch before leaving the driveway, but Dipper had been too busy to worry, using that time trying to convince Mabel not to lick the dashboard because it smelled so good. Always the gentleman, he had volunteered to get into the back. It was a tight fit, but not intolerable for the short ride home.

It would not end up being so simple. The roads in the woods were still wet from the afternoon rain. Dainty puddles of standing water clung to the asphalt. A not-so-dainty puddle forced the car's front tires to shed their grip coming around a sharp corner, and Wendy could not counter-steer in time to keep them from flying off the road and into the trees.

Had he been sitting behind his sister, Dipper would be a bloodstain against the trunk of a tall Douglas fir right now. Instead, his insides were a jumbled mess – he for certain had at least a concussion – but the seat belt had done its job. He was alive.

Once his brain dispensed with the useless memories, he forced himself to focus on the task at hand: getting out of the car. "Wendy!" he coughed, pounding lightly on the back of her seat. "Move! I'm stuck!"

She wouldn't, and it took him ages to figure out why. "Oh, she must be dead," he muttered, as if he were watching the whole thing play out on a TV a million miles away. Logic dominated his brain as a means of keeping the pain from crushing his instinct; therefore, when he saw the empty passenger seat, all it registered as was a way out that wasn't obstructed by a corpse. The door beyond was even open for him, beckoning. With great effort, he crawled over the center console, past the wide-eyed, limp Wendy, and out into the humid night.

Stumbling across the slick grass, the next thing he registered was the sky. It was an ebony expanse full of glittering diamonds, more beautiful now than he'd ever remembered it being before. "Wow," he breathed, falling against the trunk of a nearby tree. Sufficiently away from danger, or so his mind decided, he began to run something of a self-check. Legs? Fine. Arms? Noodly, but still operating. Torso? Impossible to say, as it was sort of hard to feel much. Overall, however, he was functioning, if not dazed. "I'm glad that seat was empty," he said, rubbing at his hat-less head.

That's when his brain, engaged with reality once more, reminded him it shouldn't have been.

Whatever pain might have been creeping up his limbs was brushed aside by outright panic. He went stumbling again through the night, peering with blurry eyes into the washed out cone provided by the headlights for his sister. She wasn't in the bright part, so she had to be in the dark. The only reason he found her at all in his aimless wandering was the fact that he fell over her body.

"Mabel! Hey!" was the best he could come up with, scrambling back to her side. "Hey! Get up!" Every ounce of his strength went to cradling her in his arms. "Mabel?"

Once his eyes adjusted to the pall, he wished he were blind. A thin trail of red ran from her bluish lips, down her pale face, and out of sight. She was dead weight – a label that automatically came to him, and made him cry out loud. "M-Mabel come on, stop playing dead, this isn't...this isn't..."

It certainly wasn't. He couldn't even completely figure out what it was, but he was crushed. Mabel was gone now, and instead of trying uselessly to shake her back into consciousness, he let her slide off his legs to the ground. All he wanted then was to get away from the awful thing his reality had become.

"I didn't even want to go," he wailed, directing his grief at the stars above. "Now she's...and Wendy!" That thought was the miserable cherry on top of his anguish; the weight made him collapse to his knees. "I didn't...I didn't wanna go..."

He was the only survivor, but the more he thought on it, the more he realized that life – this life, the shattered remains of something that had once been full of joy – was a game he no longer wished to play. To this end, he drifted back to the road like a zombie, standing in it and waiting for some unsuspecting soul to run him down. Only after a minute's passage did he start to frown. "This is stupid," he said, looking back at the obliterated car. It was no longer stupid to him in a normal way, though; it was stupid in a way that meant he could not attain his goal quickly enough.

Fortune, or perhaps misfortune, or perhaps a twisted smear of both, smiled upon him. The car was smoking badly, and soon orange tongues of flame escaped from under the crumpled hood. His bloody lips curled into a smile. He went back over to the car, getting in the same way he'd escaped, and settled into the seat behind Wendy's body to await his sweet release.

Thoughts at random floated by while he watched the flames grow higher. "I wonder what they'll find when the sun comes up," he mumbled, almost laughing with the image. Abruptly, he frowned the noise away. "...sun." Another level of realization punched at his heart. Mabel was dead; for him, in the remaining minutes of his forever, there would be no sun. It was all the reason he needed to welcome the flames as they started to dance and twist through the compromised firewall. The increasing heat should have caused him fear. He only relaxed in its presence. The bright light should have made him try to run. Instead, it was like the glow at the end of a tunnel, where Mabel would be waiting for him. This was the image he clung to as the fire consumed the car.

The air got too dry, too hot, too fast. "I'm coming, sis," were the last words he could choke out before the searing pain was too much to breathe in. While he couldn't speak, he could still see and hear, barely, over the blinding orange and the roaring noise. Before he lost his eyes and ears to the conflagration, he took a final sight and sound with him to the grave.

It was Mabel, pounding on the window, spitting little flecks of blood as she screamed at him to get out. Screamed at him about the fire.

Screamed at him not to leave her.