Work Text:
i.
Mabel's side of their sixteenth birthday party is a mess of frosting and pink and rainbow sprinkles, homemade sweets stuffed over every inch of her table. In the middle, positioned perfectly: a big bowl of Mabel Juice punch, the centerpiece of the kitten-themed table cloth.
Dipper's side of the shack is less interesting. He's chosen a space theme this year. It shines almost as brightly as he does, now that the world is safe - or at least safer. His table has cookies he decorated sloppily with Wendy to look like the International Space Station, pizza, and a spigot jar of cold brew at the end.
High school starts a little bit later in the year than middle school did, so they have a few more days in Gravity Falls, and of course Mabel is making the most of them. She's dragged Dipper around the town and back again. She has partied to her fullest extent, stuffed herself full of an unfathomable amount of nachos, and now she's jittery and invigorated from the amount of caffeine coursing through her veins. She's floating above the clouds--
Not like last time. Not like when she was asleep. Not like---
Even with the Mabel Juice, she's exhausted. It's been three years since the world was almost swallowed whole by the bizarre, and that kind of thing doesn't just go away. Mabel has tried to skin her fears right off, to extract them right out of her heart with a scalpel or with magic or with love, but nothing is permanent. They're band-aids over stab wounds. Every solution just creates another problem, like a vicious hydra.
Mabel is tired.
The impact of Bill Cipher is a permanent, atrophic scar. It dents the skin, dents the mind, slithers right in like a parasite to suck up all the comfort and all of the rainbows and all of the sprinkles. Oh, honey, you're fine. You just need to focus more on school. Ignore what the school psychologist tells you.
Despite it all, she's had a wonderful birthday. Being in Gravity Falls isn't quite as haunting if you have family to hold you when it hurts.
ii.
The rainbows start to come back when she dreams. Mabel becomes herself at night, reverts to the internal, a state of inner peace, like rocking back and forth with your arms wrapped over you in a hug. Tranquility.
Tranquility?
-ii.
She's having dinner with Stan and Ford in this one. Ford has prepared a massive feast -- turkey legs and mashed potatoes and macaroni and sugar cookies and chocolate cake and and and. And everything she loves, everything she wants to devour, everything she's hungry for. It feels like her own mind is reading itself, as if her own mind has split in two and her new imaginary mind friend is trying to nurse her back to health. To bring Mabel back to her real self. To rediscover that unity, that innocence of childhood.
iii.
"I'm so tired," she sighs, drawing out the word tired in the most obnoxious tone she can manage. "Why did we have to get up early for this, again?"
Stan grunts. "I told you, last day before you gotta leave, sixteenth birthday, we're doing something special."
"Does something special have to require an hour long car ride?" Dipper retorts from beside her.
"Yes, it does, now stop complaining. We're almost there, if that helps."
"Well, wake me up when we're there," Mabel groans, her words groggy and tired and weak. She turns, rests her head against the back seat window. "I'm going to sleep."
"In the car?" Dipper asks.
"No, on the road," Stan replies. She's missed his humor, his sarcasm, his affection. "I've been at sea for a year, kids. I missed land. You're just lucky Ford isn't feeling well. He's insufferable to do car rides with. Yeah, we've seen that specific species of tree twenty-seven times, no, I can't identify it in I Spy. Be less specific. Am I right? And then..."
Her consciousness fades as he continues on. Her mind stills as the scenery outside shifts from middle-of-nowhere green to a slightly-less-middle-of-nowhere town. Dreams of sparkles and bright lights and her celebrity crushes and nail polish and summer sweater shopping. Dreams of happy families and an uncursed Gravity Falls and that same unity again. Dreams, dreams.
Until her eyes open to a dark magenta sky -- then her heart begins to palpitate, butterfly fluttering her into yet another panic attack. She's getting too used to those.
"What---?"
She hears a high-pitched shriek of laughter, and then a nasal voice that makes her eardrums ache: "Miss me, cutie?"
She looks at the window glass, tries to shift her focus away -- to the book Dipper is reading next to her, to what the special surprise is going to be, to the dreams she should have been having -- but something pulls her gaze back to the window, almost as if she's being lured in, an eventual meal.
In the glass, she sees the unmistakable reflection of a demon. Bright pink, all rose, accented by a fire so hot it burns pure white. One of Bill's friends. It feels like more than a nightmare, but all of her nightmares these days feel vivid to the point of haunting. It isn't anything new.
"You don't know my name, do you?"
"Uh," Mabel says, her lips quivering, "you're... Veronica-something."
"Pyronica," the image corrects. "Surprised you don't remember me."
Mabel is silent. Her mouth closes tight, her stomach bubbling up with nausea.
"Or do you?" Another laugh. "I see I'm more memorable to you than I was to the people of my own dimension before I destr---"
"What do you want?"
Mabel knows what she wants. It's what they all want; a way out, a path to destruction and oddity and unrestrained chaos. She's older now, even stronger. She can fight this.
"I want you, silly," Pyronica replies, her singular eye blinking with intent, like she's trying to wink without the right anatomy.
She cannot fight this.