#( but if you poke at one of his touchy subjects things can spiral very quickly in a very ugly direction )

[erabundus]

never  let  yourself  love  anything!  (  never  let  yourself  be  loved!  )  violently  repress  the  inevitable  demise  of  what  slips  stubbornly  through  the  cracks!  who  said  coping  needed  to  be  HARD?

[gosecretscribbles]

Diptember2018 Week 4: Family

Mabel: Whenever I get cold, I steal someone’s jacket, but then I forget I have it. I have at least seven jackets in my room that aren’t mine, and the others are starting to complain.

Dipper: The other friends?

Mabel: The other jackets.

In which Mabel and Dipper care for a family of magical living jackets!

Dipper stopped typing and looked up.  He could've sworn he heard a faint scratching noise.  Then again, he'd been working on editing his latest Dipper's Guide to the Unexplained episode for hours and it was now 2 AM, so he might've just been hearing things.  He went back to typing.  

Scrit, scrit.

He looked up again, frowning.  That time there was definitely a noise.

He got up and stepped carefully over Waddles, who was asleep on the floor. Mabel was snoring in the top bunk.  He tip-toed over to the closet, turned the doorknob veeeery slowly, and then swung it open in one big rush.  

There was nothing there.

Dipper grabbed a camera stick and poked it into the clothes.  All he saw was the usual mess – his vests and orange shirts, plus all of Mabel's sweaters and a few jackets she'd borrowed from her friends.  He even checked the shelf above the clothes, but his paranormal paraphernalia was undisturbed.

He yawned, closed the closet door, and went back to bed.  Definitely time to actually go to sleep.  Maybe he'd just imagined it.  

The next two nights, though, Dipper heard the exact same weird noises coming from the closet.  And it was definitely coming from the closet, not the roof, which ruled out stuff like raccoons or rats from outside. Finally, Dipper set up nighttime recorders so he could catch whatever it was in the act.  

Saturday morning found him setting up his laptop to watch the feed while he ate his breakfast.  Mabel walked in just as he was pouring himself some cereal, with Waddles following close behind, oinking sleepily.

“M-m-moooorning, bro-brain,” she said, yawning hugely.  “What fantastic nerdery are you up to today?”

“There's something in the closet and I'm going to find out what it is.”

She grinned. “There are so many jokes for that I don't even know where to start!  Let's see, is there a wozzet in the closet?  Or perhaps a skeleton – figurative or literal?  Oh!  How 'bout a monster?  One with shaggy blue fur and purple polka dots!”

Dipper sat down at the table and pressed slow fast forward on the recordings. He took a spoonful of cereal and munched it, still listening to Mabel with half an ear.  A flicker of movement on the film caught his eye. He hit play –

“PHHFFFF!”

“Ew! Dipper!  Spit takes are much cooler without chunks of chewed Cheerios!”

“Mabel Mabel LOOK!”

He grabbed his sister's arm and pulled her close, jabbing a finger at the screen.  Mabel gasped.

One of the jackets she'd borrowed from her friends was moving!

And it wasn't like there was anything in the jacket, either.  As the jacket slowly raised its sleeve, the angle of the camera clearly showed that there was nothing at all moving around inside it.  The sleeves of the jacket, both totally empty, just raised up on their own, appeared to stretch on the hanger, then shook themselves out.  Then the left sleeve reached out and tapped the jacket in front of it.

And the other jacket moved, too!

Mabel squealed, grabbed Dipper's shoulder, and shook him vigorously.  “OH MY SWEATER SOCKS, ARE YOU SEEING THIS!?”

“I'm seeing it, I'm seeing it!”

They watched as all seven of Mabel's borrowed jackets come to life, stretching and yawning with their necklines as though they'd been asleep.  The first one, which had faded red roses stitched up both sleeves, hopped off its hanger and started swinging on it like it was an acrobat.  The jackets next to it, including a denim jacket covered in little round anime buttons, were pushed against the door, creating the scritch scritch noise that Dipper had been hearing.  A very puffy green jacket flapped its sleeve at Rose Jacket until it stopped, then checked to make sure Buttons and the other jacket were alright.

“Awww, it's like the mommy jacket!” Mabel whispered.

“Or the dad.  Do jackets have genders?”

“Probably not!  OOOH!”

The smallest jacket, which was black denim with bright aqua rhinestones stitched into its collar, had reached over and was shyly tugging on the sleeve of a heavy-looking pink jacket.  The pink jacket pretended to resist, but after a moment scooched closer on its hanger and hugged Rhinestones, the cuffs of their sleeves folding together.

“They're in love!” Mabel leaped away from the table and went bounding down the hall.

“Mabel, where –”

“I MUST MATCHMAKE MY JACKETS, DIPPER!”

“Shh, Mom and Dad are still asleep!”

Dipper caught up with Mabel in their room, but when she opened the door the jackets were perfectly still.

“Aw, c'mooon,” she whined.  “It's okay, we totally know you're secretly alive!”

No response.

“Very well, you leave me no choice!”  She began pulling everything out of the closet.

“Mabel, what are you –”

“Silence, mortal!”

Dipper knew better than to mess with her when she got like this.  Instead, he took out his camera and started filming.  

In about ten minutes, she'd made a huge pile of knitted sweaters in the middle of the carpet.  (It was actually taller than Dipper.)  She pulled a quilt off of her bed and folded it so it covered the closet floor, then got all the buttons out of her sewing kit and sprinkled them around.  Finally she went to get all the lint rollers they owned from the hall closet and threw them in a pile on one side of the closet.  

“There!”

“A...jacket nest, I'm assuming?” Dipper asked.  

“Exactly! Now for just one final touch...”  She took the sleeves of the jackets and started tying them in loose knots, pairing them up. Rhinestones went with Pink, Buttons went with Polka Dots, Bunny went with Rose.

“What about the puffy green one?”

“They're a strong, independent jacket, who don't need no jacket!”

“Riiiight. Aren't your friends going to ask for their jackets back, though?”

Mabel laughed.  “Are you kidding?  My friends have long since accepted that they will never rescue their clothes from the sweater vortex that is my closet!  Now set up your cameras, nerd-bro, and let the matchmaking commence!”

Dipper diligently sketched and recorded the jackets as their little handkerchief babies grew up.  First the handkerchiefs simply got bigger bigger.  Then, when they were about the size of dinner plates, they began spontaneously growing pockets, embroidery, even zippers and buttons.  Dipper's personal favorite was a baby jacket decorated with light pink rhinestones in an intriguing spiral pattern, while Mabel doted on a mini-jacket covered in rose-red bunnies in a field of golden grass.  

Then, after nearly a week of observations, Dipper and Mabel woke up one morning to find the Button jacket on the floor of their bedroom.  Waddles was absently chewing on one button.

Mabel gasped.  “No, Waddles, that's not a chew toy, that's a friend!” She practically flew down the ladder and rescued the jacket.

Dipper sat up, blinking himself awake.  “That's new.  Isn't this the first time a jacket ever left the closet?”

Mabel clutched it to her chest.  “What do you think happened?  Do you think it wanted to escape the suffocating confines of domestic life? Did it want to pursue its dream of adorning the greatest matchmaker in history?!”

“I doubt it was the last one,” Dipper said, but Mabel was already slipping it on over her nightgown.

“Fear not, Buttons Jacket!  I, Mabel Pines, shall grant your request!”

Dipper looked toward the closet with a frown.  “Well, I guess we'll have to wait to watch the tape after school.  But I would put it back in the closet if I were you, Mabel.  You don't want your friends to take it back, or let Waddles chew on it.”

Reluctantly, Mabel agreed.  

But when they got home from school that day, not only was Buttons Jacket back on the floor, it had a few small tears on its sleeves.  

Mabel gasped.  “I thought they were asleep during the day!  Waddles must have chewed it!”

“I don't think so, Mabel,” Dipper said, opening the closet.  There were similar tears on three other jackets.  “At least it looks like none on the babies got hurt.”

Mabel was practically in tears.  “What's happening?  Is some supernatural monster attacking the Jackets?!  We have to do something, Dipper!”

“Okay, hang on.”

He set up the video on the floor of their room.  Mabel took out her sewing kit and immediately started repairing Buttons.

“You guys are next, don't worry,” she told the other jackets.  

Dipper started the video at 10:00 PM and hit slow fast forward.  But the video had only gone through thirty minutes when they saw a flash of rapid movement.

Mabel grabbed his arm.  “Wait, go back, that was it!”

“I know, hang on...”  Dipper quickly manipulated the film until it was back to the beginning of the movement.  “Okay, starting.”

The two of them leaned forward intently.  But as they watched the screen, identical looks of horror and dismay dawned on their faces.  

It took about ten minutes.  Then it was over.  Dipper hit pause.

“Oh, no,” Mabel whispered.

Dipper glanced at her, worried.  “What do we do?”

“We can't do anything,” she said slowly.  “But I think I know who can.”  She gave him a meaningful look.

Dipper understood instantly what she was getting at and held up his hands. “Yeah, okay, no.  Seriously.  That's probably a reeeally touchie subject, and I don't think our grunkles –”

“Dipper, trust me on this.”

“But...”

“Look at Buttons, Dipper!”  Mabel held it up by the shoulders.  A button with a smiley face on it was hanging by its pin, upside-down. “Sewing needles can only help so much.  If we don't do something, the whole Jacket family could be torn apart!  Literally and figmentally!”

“Figuratively.”

She ignored him.  “Even if it's hard to ask, we really need their help.”

Reluctantly, he agreed.    

Dipper stayed up until 11:00 PM, the best time to catch their grunkles, if they were awake.  Mabel sat next to him, Button Jacket in her lap. She had repaired the seams of every jacket, but somehow even her nearly-invisible seams looked like faint scars on Button's sleeves.  

Dipper gathered his nerve, opened the Skybe app, and called their Grunkles.

It didn't take long for them to pick up.  Stan and Ford appeared on the screen after just a few rings, sitting at the table in the Stan O' War. Ford was wearing his usual navy jacket, but Stan was wearing a bright green sweater with an octopus on it, courtesy of Mabel.

“Hey, kids!” Stan greeted them, holding up a massive lobster shell. “Guess what?  We ran into a lobster that told riddles and I won so I got to eat him!”

“He was spouting limericks for the last hour, but I think it's wearing off,” Ford told them.  “What've you two been up to?”

“About that,” Dipper started, and he gave his Grunkles a quick run-down of the Jacket family saga (with comments from Mabel).  Stan was intrigued at the idea of turning the jackets into a traveling roadshow at $50 a head, while Ford asked several dozen questions about the jackets, right down to the kind of thread Mabel had used to fix them.

“Fascinating,” he said, scribbling furiously on something just out of sight.  “I wonder if the introduction of a foreign material will affect the jackets' ability to animate themselves.”

Mabel looked worried.  “I hadn't thought of that.  D'you think it'll be okay?”

“We'll know in about five minutes,” Dipper said, checking the time on his laptop.  “They usually come to life around 11:30, but never in front of us, so we might have to set up cameras and wait 'till tomorrow morning to know for sure.”

“We can't wait that long, it could happen again!” Mabel cried.

Ford looked up.  “You mean the sudden evidence of an attack?”

“Just lay down some rat traps or somethin',” Stan said with a shrug.  “The way Mabel packs all those weird snacks under her mattress, I'm surprised you guys haven't had an animal problem sooner.  Well, a rodent problem, anyway...”  He shot a dark look at Waddles, who was flopped behind Mabel, snoring loudly.

“It's not a rodent problem,” Dipper said.  He'd relaxed when telling Ford about the jackets, but now that they were coming to the problem, his gut was starting to tense up again.  “Um...I got a video of what happened last night, so you can see it.  Hang on.”

He clicked a few times and a video screen popped up in the bottom-right corner of both computers.  He hit play.

He'd placed it at the start of the event.  The jackets woke up like usual – and then Polka Dots and Buttons immediately started fighting.  The handkerchief babies around them fluttered in a panic, and Puffy Green one tried to stop the fight, but several of the pins on Buttons had come open and tore Puffy Green's sleeves with a loud rip.  Two other jackets tried to intervene with the same result, and finally Polka Dots wrestled Buttons to the door, shoved it open – and then threw Buttons out.  The closet door slammed shut, with Buttons outside on the ground.  Buttons flapped its sleeves angrily, started to pull itself away from the door, then stopped.  After a moment it flopped over on its back and slowly, soundlessly, collapsed.

The video ended.  

Ford's face had become perfectly still and emotionless.  Stan looked a little nauseous.

“So?” Dipper asked, not quite meeting his grunkles' eyes.  “I – I didn't really want to ask, but –”

“We have to help them!” Mabel cried, pressing Button to her chest.  “They just fought and then they threw Buttons out – twice!!  I don't speak jacket but I'm sure everyone's got a huge tear in their little fabric hearts!  Please, Grunkle Stan and Grunkle Ford, you guys have been through this before – you've gotta talk to them before they spend thirty years miserably pining for each other!”

“Well that wasn't an obvious reference at all,” Dipper muttered.  “Look,” he said to his grunkles, “I told Mabel this might be a little...sensitive...so if you guys don't want to –”

“No, no,” Ford said quickly.  “I don't mind helping you with your fieldwork, Dipper.  It's simply that Stan and I have never properly...er...”

“We don't do squishies,” Stan said flatly.

“But you guys have made up already!” Mabel protested.  “I mean, you have, right?”

Stan shrugged.  “If we haven't, we'd have killed each other by now.  I'd like to see you try bein' on a boat with only this guy for company for several weeks straight.”

“Hey!”

“Point is, we just never really talked about it.  I mean –”  Stan leaned back, gesturing to the small, warmly lit living quarters of the Stan O' War.  “We got the ocean, the boat, and I got my nerdbot back. Plus a few mermaid babes who may or may not want to date me.”

“If they ever forget that you stole their crown jewels,” Ford muttered.

Mabel sniffed and her eyes brimmed with tears.  “But...they're supposed to be a family...”

“Alright alright, geez!” Stan said quickly.  “Dipper, quit making your sister cry!”

“Wh – I didn't – !”

“So you'll help?” Mabel asked, sniffing.

“Yeah, sure, whatever.”

“We should look at this as an exciting opportunity!” Ford said, somewhat brightly.  “Unless I'm mistaken, which I never am –”

Stan coughed something that sounded like “Bill”.

“– which I rarely am, these jackets are actually sentient clothes from Dimension 212^, where a fashion faux pas could mean a life sentence as a cleaning rag!  I was practically de-vested of my trench coat upon my arrival, but this multigenerational mini-community presents a fascinating opportunity to study them at close range!”

“Great!” Stan got up.  “Welp, have fun nerding out, I'm gonna go –”

“Sit right back down,” Ford said loudly, grabbing the back of Stan's sweater and yanking him back.  “I can and will find another riddling lobster and see how you like listening to 'There once was a Nerdbot from Jersey.'”

“Well there was.”

Mabel smothered a laugh.

“Fine, then I get to go first,” Stan said.  “Alright you fashion wannabes, here's the deal: I don't care who started it, suck it up and make up or I'll take a pair of scissors to you the next time I visit the gremlins.  Capiche?”

Ford rolled his eyes.  “How characteristically mature of you, Stanley.  You can't just 'violence' a problem away.  ”

“What? I'd like to see you do better!”  

“Well – it would help if the button jacket admitted that he'd made a mistake. And,” he said, holding up a hand as Stan opened his mouth.  “It would also help if the polka dot jacket sorted out its priorities. However justified the polka dot jacket may feel, it appears to have had a very close familial relationship with the buttons jacket. There is very little in the world more important than family, and nothing worse than losing it.”

“Can't argue there,” Stan muttered, his voice hoarse.   “Alright, so the Button thingie may have made a mistake.  It might've just – not wanted the dot thing to know about it.  Or leave.  But it shoulda been thinkin' about the dot thing, since they're family, and how to fix it up so that they were both happy, instead of just one of 'em...”

Stan and Ford continued in that vein for a solid thirty minutes.  Then Mabel put Buttons back in the closet, Dipper checked to make sure his cameras were still set up, and they closed the closet door.  They had about half an hour more before the jackets usually became active, and even though it was late, all four of them wanted to stay up to see if their attempts at reconciliation had had any effect.

“I'm sure it did,” Mabel said confidently, hooking her chin over Dipper's shoulder (they were sitting on her bed).  “After hearing Grunkle Stan's story about the New Jersey Devil, there is literally nothing that could make me believe in family more!”

Stan grinned and wrapped an arm around Ford's shoulders.  “You shoulda seen this guy, kids!  It was like somethin' outta one of those detective comics.  He tracked it down like it was nothin' – and then gave it all up!”

“Gave it up for you,” Ford corrected, grinning back and nudging Stan in the ribs.  “Which, in retrospect, was probably a mercy to the NJD.  You probably would've tried to make money off of it as some carnie attraction!”

“Darn right I would!”

Scritch, scritch.

“Wait!” Dipper whispered.  “D'you guys hear that?”

“Do the thing with the video!” Mabel urged, and Dipper clicked on the camera icon at the bottom of the screen.  As before, when he'd shown their grunkles the video, a square popped up in the corner of their Skybe.  It showed a live feed of what was happening inside the closet.

Puffy Green Jacket was the first one to move.  It reached out and put one sleeve firmly on Polka Dot's shoulder, as if to hold it off from attacking Buttons.  Buttons, meanwhile, had re inflated itself – but hung on its hanger, stiff as if it had been badly starched.  The other jackets looked equally tense, waiting.  Handkerchiefs and baby T-shirts fluttered around the bottom of the closet, sensing the weight of the tension like a thunderstorm.  

Buttons' hanger started to rattle.  That's when they noticed it – the jacket's shoulders were shaking slightly.

“Oh, no,” Mabel whispered.  “Is it...crying?”

But before Dipper could answer, Polka Dot tore away from Puffy Green Jacket, launched itself at Buttons and began waving its sleeves forcefully, gesticulating so harshly Dipper could practically hear it yelling.  Buttons took it in silence at first, then started gesturing back, and Puffy Green Jacket moved in to stop them just as both jackets came flying at each other, sleeves extended –

– and then Polka Dots wrapped both sleeves around Buttons, squeezing it tightly.  Buttons froze, then hugged back just as fiercely.  Around them the other jackets breathed a collective sigh of relief.  

“It worked!” Mabel whispered.  She grabbed Dipper's shoulder and started shaking him. “It worked it worked it really hey what's that?”

A weird light was coming from nowhere and everywhere inside the closet. The baby handkerchiefs and T-shirts climbed up from the floor and the other jackets scooped the babies into pockets and inside their chests.  The jackets grouped themselves together, sleeves wrapped around each other in a giant group hug.  Then, slowly, Dipper realized he could see the back of the closet right through Pink Jacket.

“They're disappearing!” Dipper exclaimed.

Ford sighed.  “Your closet doesn't happen to run through a ley line, does it?”

“A ley – what?”

“Simply put, it's a line of interdimensional, magical energy.  212^s are nomadic, and they use ley lines to travel from dimension to dimension.  My guess is there was a surge planned for tonight, and this is when they're returning home.”

“Buttons would've been left out of the closet,” Dipper realized.  “They would've been separated from their family.  We got through to them just in time.”

The Jackets had nearly disappeared altogether by now.  Just before they faded out of sight, Buttons turned to Dipper's camera and waved one sleeve in farewell.  Polka Dot clutched Buttons all the more tightly, and together the pair of them vanished in a soundless flash of light.

Mabel immediately hopped off her bed and opened the door.  “They really are gone,” she said.

“Oh, Mabel,” Dipper said, but she turned around with a smile on her face.

“They left together,” she said, smiling wider and wider.  “They stayed a family.  Grunkle Stan, Grunkle Ford – you guys are the best, sweetest gross old men ever.”

“Er...thank you?” Ford said.

“No, no, she meant it as a compliment,” Dipper assured him.

Stan grinned.  “In that case, can I get thirty copies of all these videos you made?  I can sell 'em online at fifty bucks each!”