#multibear would be so nice and kind to stan

[sarcasticamaleont]

Me writing my werewolf!Stan fic, brainstorming: So yeah then he could spend some time in the forest around Ford's cabin because he's a coward and doesn't want to speak to him but at the same time he doesn't wanna leave.

My brain, out of nowhere: Make him befriends the Multibear.

Me, completely caught off guard: what.

My brain: Make. Him. and Multibear. Friends, best friends even.

Me: That's hysterical. Let's do this

[flying-guinea-pig]

A friend like this (complete)

A/N: finally finished that Avarice AU ficlet! You know, that one where Stan became a demon instead of Dipper, and how that would influence the demonology gang’s story? I’ve started clearing out my draft folder. This one was closest to finished, but expect other drabbles to appear soon...

On AO3: A friend like this chapter 3

A friend like this

Poker Night had become a regular occurrence, pretty much since the first day of classes, when Lee spotted them at lunchtime.

"What are you playing for?" he'd asked.

Maria had shrugged. "Just points. Brad doesn't want to play for money."

"Not against you, you witch. Hi, I'm Brad by the way. I've seen you in class, I think?"

"Yep, he's the guy who slept all through Demonology 101," Maria had said. "Evergreen, isn't it? Deal you in?"

"Call me Lee. And yes." He'd taken a seat and turned to the table behind him, where another student had been sitting all by himself. "Hey, wanna be our fourth?"

The other kid had looked up. "Really? I mean - sure!"

He'd hurriedly changed seats and beamed at them. "My name is Eduardo. How does this game go?"

"I'll explain," Brad had promised. "Nice to meet you Eduardo."

"Such a mouthful," Maria had teased. "Can I call you Eddy instead?"

"Er, sure."

Lee had grinned and given him a playful punch to his shoulder. It was clearly meant as playful - it also left a slight bruise.

"Nah," he'd said. "I think you look more like a Soos."

It was the start of a beautiful friendship.

---

Of course Lee was odd. No one could deny that.

It was a lot of things, but one of them was how he never seemed to study. Often he didn't even show up for class, coming back the next day - or next week - in the grumpiest mood ever. And yet his marks were the highest of their year, whenever he bothered to go. Higher even than those of the resident nerds, Adams and Strange.

"How do you do it, dude?" Eddy had asked once, struggling with an essay about low-level binding wards. "Are you some kind of genius or something?"

Lee had paused at that, a weird look crossing his face for a second. Then the smile returned. "I'm no genius, buddy. I just know some stuff. Do you need help with that essay?"

"Does a Multibear poop in the woods?"

"Let's see it then."

---

Lee spent so much time with the three of them, that all those oddities really started to stack up. Eventually even they had to figure it out.

"Let's play for something other than points or candy tonight," Maria said, shuffling the cards one Poker Night.

"Oh?" Lee asked. He sipped his beer and burped. "We're finally playing for money then? Your funeral! Hey Brad, how rich did you say your parents were again?"

"You're a real hoot," Brad said. "But no. We're playing for answers today."

"Answers? Ugh."

"Yep," Maria said. "Whoever loses has to answer a question truthfully from the winner. No evasions, no lies. Like playing truth-or-dare!"

"Last time we played truth or dare Eddy got stuck in a skylight for three hours."

"Yeah, we're not doing that again," Eddy added. "Please. It was so cold..."

"Well, how about it?" Maria said, her poker face already in place, a slight smile curling her lips. "Are you in or not, Lee?"

"What the hell, sure," Lee said, and met her eyes with a poker face of his own. "Bring it on."

Eddy was decent at poker - Brad was a disaster, either raising too much and scaring everyone off, or trying to bluff with a lousy hand. Usually the winnings went to either Lee or Maria, depending on which one of them got caught cheating the most.

Not tonight. Tonight Eddy and Brad flanked Maria, blatantly sitting close enough for her to peak at their cards before they folded. The first time could have been coincidence. The other times, not so much.

Lee cocked an eyebrow. "Are you three ganging up on me?"

"This isn't cheating," Maria said. "It's cooperative play."

"Don't bother, I've got a bad hand anyway. You win." He threw down his cards on the table and sat back, arms folded in front of him. "What's your question? Is it how many girls I've dated? What my most embarrassing memory is? It's something like that, right?"

"While I do wonder about some of those things..." She shook her head and met his eyes. "Are you the demon Mercuriat?"

Lee blinked. If they hadn't been watching so closely, they would have missed the momentary expression that slid over his face before being replaced by 'honest' surprise.

"What?" he said, sounding flabbergasted. "No, of course not. Heh, why would you even think such a thing! It's ridiculous. Why would a demon - a handsome, clever and powerful demon he is, sure - waste his time like this? Makes no sense. None at all. Heh, I won't even count this one as a question, ask another. Go on, ask another question."

"Not before I get a truthful answer to my first one," Maria said. "Nice try though. And why we think you're Mercuriat, well..."

"Your disappearances tend to coincide with news about Mercuriat destroying some evil cult," Brad said. "It, eh, was Eddy who pointed that out first, I'll admit. I first thought you just made a deal for knowledge with Mercuriat, which would be a lot less terrifying."

"You sometimes talk about the past as if you were there," Maria said. "Things that happened centuries ago. And you know things. Like that time you mentioned how demons have a bar in the Mindscape? How the hell would a human know that?"

"Also, your eyes glow a bit when Maria beats you at poker," Eddy added. "So... that was a big hint, dude. Might want to watch out for that."

Lee - Mercuriat - stared at them.

"I... may have let down my guard a bit," he admitted. "This doesn't bother you?"

"We study demonology, bro," Brad said. "Bit dumb if we were scared of demons. And you're alright. But I'd just like to know one thing..."

Lee sighed, and snapped his fingers. Another beer popped into existence in his hand. "I was bored. That's why I pretend to be a student."

"We figured that, you're known for stuff like that - but not what I was going to ask. I just want to know... why a mullet?"

"Hey now!" Lee sputtered. "Mullets come back into style every few centuries. I figured it was time for them again. Someone has to set the trend."

Eddy patted his shoulder. "You tried."

"It's time to give up. Let it go," Brad said.

Maria got up. "I'll get the scissors!"

---

 Thomas liked the small library in the demonology building. Access was restricted to second years and up, so even on its busy days there weren't more than a handful of students there. It was a good place to go and study in peace.

Usually.

Not today, though. Dewitt and her friends were doing some assignment at the other end of the room. He could see their reflection in the big silver mirror that hung between the bookshelves. They were talking quietly enough but occassionally erupted into laughter, which didn't really help Thomas' concentration.

Elisabeth had given up in disgust already and gone home. Maybe he should follow her example...

He idly tapped his pen on the table, still deep in thought, when he noticed Evergreen coming over. His arms were full of books, which he put on the return tray. Oh, good. Looked like he and his friends were leaving.

Evergreen paused in front of the mirror, probably to admire himself. Thomas made a face. It's not that he actively disliked Evergreen, it was just... high school had instilled a natural distrust towards sporty types who looked like they could break him in half with one hand.

But Evergreen wasn't preening and flexing his muscles, like Thomas had expected him to do. No - he seemed to freeze at his own reflection.

Thomas couldn't find anything odd about it. It was just a mirror after all, not even an enchanted one. Good for trapping ghosts but not anything special. And Evergreen looked normal. His hair was still poofy, but anything was better than that mullet he used to have.

"Heh," Evergreen muttered. He put his hands against the mirror. His reflection's smile was bitter. "Don't know what all the fuss was about. This college thing is easy."

Then he licked his fingers and the weird, tense moment was broken as Evergreen used his spit to style his hair into short spikes. Thomas cringed. Yeargh.

---

A gloomy basement, plastic zip ties around their wrists, a group of cold-faced kidnappers with guns trained on them...

Thomas would have like to spend his Friday night a bit differently. Watching a movie, maybe. Or visiting the boardgame club, they usually met in the Mangy Dog on Fridays. Stars, even a dentist appointment would have been fine - anything was better than being kidnapped and forced to summon a demon.

At least he wasn't alone. Did that make it better? Not if they were going to die, of course - though dying all alone would suck - but maybe together they would come up with some idea to survive this thing. Elisabeth had a gift for banishing circles and Thomas was pretty good with figuring out loopholes, so together they maybe had a chance...

He wasn't sure what Evergreen could add to their escape attempt though. Really, he didn't seem inclined to help much. He'd taken a look at the crate with summoning supplies their kidnappers had left them with, shrugged, and sat back against the wall.

"Evergreen, you look up the regular summoning they want," Elisabeth whispered, as she and Thomas put their heads together. "Then the two of us can focus on getting out of here alive. We should be able to sneak something into the wording of the deal -"

"Nah," Evergreen said. "I'm going to take a nap for a while. Just relax, kid - things will be fine."

"Don't call me kid, we're the same age," Elisabeth said.

Evergreen snickered. "Sure we are, kid. But seriously, take a seat and relax. I've got this."

"Excuse me if I'm not eager to put my trust in you," she said. "Why are you even here, Evergreen? I can understand why they kidnapped Thomas and me. But you? You spend all class playing cards with Dewitt instead of paying attention."

"Odd how Hicks never says anything about that," Thomas mused. It wasn't like Evergreen and Dewitt were subtle about it. Not to mention the armpit concerts they held during last Contract Negotiation class.

"Suit yourself," Evergreen shrugged, sliding the hood of his jacket back over his head. "Wake me up if something happens."

"If something happens? We're going to get killed and you don't care! What is wrong with you?"

"Hey, you there!" One of their guards called out. He gestured at Elisabeth with the hand that still held his gun. "Stop shouting and get to work!"

"Come on," Thomas muttered to Elisabeth, who looked ready to explode. "Time is ticking."

---

"Alright," Thomas said. "What do we know?"

"We made the preparations correctly," Elisabeth said. She tapped her fingers on the table, deep in thought. In the background her aquarium made soothing bubbling sounds. "I'm sure of it. That circle should have summoned Gubal the Thousand-Eyed."

"But it wasn't Gubal who showed up," Thomas pointed out.

"You don't have to remind me." Elisabeth shuddered. He couldn't blame her - he had nightmares too, about everything that happened in that basement. Being threathened with guns had been bad enough, but when the sacrifice had been dragged out and their kidnappers started the summoning...

The wording had been tricky. They'd worked really hard on it, and Thomas still wasn't sure it would have been enough to save them.

In the end it hadn't been necessary. It wasn't Gubal who answered the summons. Instead, of all things, a three feet tall, winged, fire-breathing goat showed up. In the smoke and confusion it must have escaped the binding circle somehow, because through stinging eyes Thomas saw it make a beeline for their kidnappers and then... then...

Crunch.

Goats eat everything, after all.

When the smoke cleared their kidnappers were reduced to bloody smears on the floor. The demon goat had disappeared again. And Lee Evergreen was cutting through the plastic strips binding the other captive with a knife he'd pulled out of nowhere. He'd paused long enough to give them both a shit-eating grin.

"We have to face the facts," Elisabeth said. "He must be some kind of supernatural entity. My money is on demon."

They looked at the list Thomas had been working on, detailing all the strange occurrences and weird habits they'd noticed in the past three years. They had only really started to pay attention after the kidnapping, but the list was still pretty long. Long enough for Thomas to wonder how the hell he'd ever missed this.

Well. He knew why. He'd been too busy with the whole university experience. Studying, the boardgaming club, homework sessions with Elisabeth... He'd ignored the, let's say, less academically inclined part of their class. They weren clever enough - he couldn't remember Evergreen ever getting a question wrong, in fact - but they didn't seem to take things seriously. Evergreen and his buddies were always goofing off, especially Dewitt. Sometimes loud enough to disturb the entire class, which was more than annoying.

"Do you think they know?" Thomas said. "They spend a lot of time with him."

"His friends? Probably. Maybe he's starting a cult, who knows." Elisabeth took a deep breath. "We have to tell Hicks."

Let the professional handle it. That seemed like a good idea. On the other hand...

Getting Hicks involved could have big consequences. And maybe it wasn't necessery? Evergreen - whatever else he was -hadn't done anything wrong, as far as they knew... On the contrary. They probably would be dead if not for him.

Elisabeth with a mission was difficult to reason with, though. Especially since Thomas wasn't quite sure about his own arguments to let 'Evergreen' be. It would be smart to tell Hicks, it would, but...

But he remembered a mirror, reflecting eyes that seemed too old and too human in their loneliness.

He needed to think. And derail Elisabeth, at least for a while. "Maybe we should wait until we have some kind of proof."

"Thomas, really? Are we going to waste time with - don't give me that look, fine. But if he eats our souls I'm blaming you."

He smiled. "I can live with that."

Stars, he really hoped he wasn't making a big mistake.

---

"You think too much," Lee said, baring his teeth in a grin. "You need to act, not think."

"That's easy for you to say." Brad massaged his fist. Lee was teaching him to box, which was harder than it seemed. Of course Lee had freakishly good reflexes, being a demon and all, but still. He'd toned it down for their little brawl and Brad still couldn't manage to land a punch.

Well, he'd managed to hit the wall. Unfortunately. He just wasn't cut out for this stuff.

"Are you calling me stupid?" Lee teased. "Come on, punch me! As hard as you can. Don't be a sissy."

"Why do you even want to learn this?" Eddy asked, from his cosy corner of the couch, where he was playing a videogame with Maria.

"Just in case I ever need to defend myself," Brad said.

"There are easier ways to defend yourself," Maria said, idly killing Eddy's character when he was distracted. "Like a gun."

"I was thinking about something less lethal and more close-range," Brad said.

"Or there's magic. Not everyone has Mercuriat on speed-dial, you know. That's quite an ace in the hole."

"Less lethal, Maria. I think calling a demon on some poor robbers is a bit much."

"Yeah, and I'm not your bodyguard," Lee said. "So, are you punching me or not?"

-------

It had taken a while to track them down. Evergreen didn't have an adress Thomas could find, but apparently he hung around Dewitt's apartment a lot.

He knew who Evergreen was, now. And sure, technically he could just summon him and tell him that way, but...

But it was still freaking Mercuriat, biggest and baddest demon around, and if he had to face him, he preferred to do it when Mercuriat was surrounded by people he probably didn't want to physically or mentally scar.

Probably being the key word there.

This was all such a huge mistake.

Still, he steeled himself and rang the doorbell, before he could chicken out. Maybe he was lucky. Maybe only Dewitt was here - she could give 'Lee Evergreen' the message and with a bit of luck he'd never need to see Evergreen again.

Damn it. The door was opened by Hallman, which didn't bode well on the odds of Dewitts other friends being absent. The smell of pizza wasn’t promising either.

"Strange?" Hallman said, clearly confused. "Hello."

"Good evening," Thomas said. He took a deep breath. How to say this...? "Listen. I need to talk to you - and your friends. I know Evergreen is actually Mercuriat -"

There was a gasp and then a burst of pain as Hallmans fist made contact with his face.

Through the haze of pain and watery eyes he could hear voices.

"Whoa! Is that Strange?"

"Did you punch him?"

"I'm sorry! He said he knew about Lee - I reacted by instinct, really, I didn't mean too!"

"You punched Strange!" The voice sounded way too amused about it. Thomas blinked away the tears and recognised Dewitt, flanked by both Evergreen and Noguerra. "That's kind of impressive, Brad."

"Yoo bwoke my noze," Thomas groaned. "Whad de hell!"

"I'm sorry, you startled me!" Hallman protested.

Evergreen gave Hallman a pat on the back. "Looks like those boxing lessons weren't a waste of time after all, heh?"

"Let's clean up your mess, Brad," Dewitt said. She took out a knife, and Thomas hurriedly backed away until his back touched the wood of the door. Someone must have closed it behind him.

"Whad?" he said, pronunciation still mangled by his swollen nose. "Yoo goin' do kill me now?"

"Don't be a baby," Dewitt said, and cut into her own finger. "Hey Lee, wanna make a deal?"

"Shh, we have company," Noguerra said.

Dewitt made a face. "Don't give me that look, he knows already. So, Lee - what about it?"

Thomas stared in horror as Dewitt and Evergreen high-fived, and blue flames covered their hands for a second.

His nose healed itself in the blink of an eye, leaving him free to sputter: "That isn't even close to how you make a safe deal! No laying down the terms? And we have nice, sterile needles for a blood sacrifice - why the hell would you use a knife like that!?"

"Because it's cooler," Dewitt shrugged.

"She's right," Evergreen added. "So, smart guy. Why exactly are you here again?"

Right. He was here for a reason. He wanted to help these crazy people.

"We know who you are," he said, focusing on Evergreen. "Or, well. What you are, actually. You're Mercuriat."

Evergreen seemed to freeze, just staring at him. It didn't escape Thomas' notice that Dewitt, Noguerra and Hallman all seemed to draw closer to him in some kind of protective move.

"You seem really sure of yourself," Dewitt said. "Why?"

"Does it matter? Listen, I'm here to warn you. Elisabeth and I, we figured it out after... what happened in that basement. I tried to stop her but she still went to Hicks, and apparently he'd figured it out himself already. He's been calling some experts. Don't know for sure when they'll arrive, but I thought... I should warn you." He avoided their eyes and shrugged. "I kind of owe my life to you, so... There."

There was a long silence.

"Alright," Evergreen said. "Seems like I have some cleaning up to do."

"Uh," Thomas said. "You're not going to hurt Elisabeth or Hicks, are you?"

"A word of advice, Strange," Dewitt said, not really unfriendly. "If a high-level demon says he's going to do some cleaning up, it's better to not ask too many questions."

"I can't let you hurt anyone."

"I'm not going to hurt them, kid," Evergreen said, sounding exasperated. "I'll probably trick them into loosing their memories about this. It wouldn't be the first time."

"Wait, what?"

"What did you expect me to do?"

"Well, I don't know... I kinda thought you would just... leave? I mean, why would you stay? You've been found out."

Evergreen paused. "So you came to warn me... just to throw me out?"

“Er. Well…” He flinched when Evergreen threw an arm around his shoulders and squeezed. Sofly, but with a definite hint of a threat.

“I’m not going a̡̜̰͎̭̗n̲̣̤̯͙͓y͔w͉̦̠͉he̬r̭̲͈̝͘e͖̦̮̲͍̙͜,” the demon said.

“Not until graduation, at least,” Dewitt added, with a rather unsettling grin. “It’s going to be epic.”

“Great,” Thomas said, weakly. “So this is a cult then.”

“No, dude, it’s so much better.” Noguerra waved his slice of pizza around in a grand gesture. “It’s friendship.”

“Oh boy.”

He glanced around the room, hoping to glean some sign of whatever nefarious thing they were planning. The room was a nightmare. It looked like an arts and crafts room and a library melded together and exploded. The table was covered in sheets of paper, pictures, empty pizza boxes and, for some reason, underwear.

Thomas almost didn’t dare to ask. But his curiosity got the better of him. One day that would get him killed, for sure… “Why do you have piles of men’s underwear lying around?”

“Right, that,” Hallman said, sheepishly. “We can explain that.”

Evergreen moved to the table and showed Thomas one of the pictures with a dramatic flourish.

It looked like the cover for a book.

��Mercuriat, Gentleman Demon’ the title proclaimed, with a picture underneath of Mercuriat in full demon shape, his face turned away but the pose rather provocative.

Thomas took another picture from the pile. It was even worse. ‘Mercuriat and the Quest for Gold’. Sheesh.

"Alright. So this isn't a cult," he said. He leafed through the pages, reading. "This is worse."

"This is making money!" Dewitt grinned. She high-fived Evergreen again, who seemed entirely too pleased with himself. "Mercuriat? More like Mercuri-HOT!"

Thomas cringed. Hallman did too. “We’re not using that as a slogan, Maria.”

“We’ll see.”

“But why?” Thomas had to ask. He waved at the table with the pictures, the lopsided stacks of what he now realised were supposed to be freshly-written novels. “Just… why?”

Evergreen shrugged. “You know that movie that’s supposedly based on me?”

“Er…” He’d come across it in the past, when looking up demons in pop culture. It was a cult classic, wasn’t it? Rather old though. “Might have heard of it.”

“We’re cashing in,” Dewitt grinned. “Turns out, writing a bestseller isn’t that hard when you have some demonic assistance. We’re going to be filthy rich!”

“Mystery! Adventure! Romance! Gentleman Demon has got it all,” Noguerra added. “Maria writes, and Brad and me are working on merchandise.”

Hallman seemed less enthusiastic. “I still don’t think autographed underwear is ever going to sell.”

Thomas stared. At them. At the room, with the ridiculous pictures and everything. And at Mercuriat, the literal demon, who just stood there with a sly smile.

“What?” Evergreen shrugged. “It’s free advertising.”

Silence.

“So… you mentioned something about losing memories? Because I would be fine if I never heard about this.”

Evergreen laughed, and surprised him with another one-armed hug. “You remind me of someone I used to know, kid. Get that stick out of your ass and we’ll get along fine, you’ll see.”

[marypsue]

Hive [2 / 2]

Warnings for mind control (sort...of), body horror (it gets serious this chapter), and slight gore/animal death (don’t worry, it’s still not the pig). Thanks to @seiya234 and @dubsdeedubs for their services as beta readers and guinea pigs!

Suggested listening for this chapter: "Spread Your Love" by Black Rebel Motorcycle Club.

Part One // Part Two

on AO3

...

When Mabel wakes up, Dipper is gone.

That's the first thought she has, and it's the one that sticks, even after she wakes all the way up. There’s this - hollow place where he ought to be, like the hole left behind by a lost tooth, wrong and weird and empty. It takes her only a moment to realise that if there’s a hole, then there must be something to make a hole in.

She looks up, pushing herself up out of bed, and her Grunkle Ford meets her smile with one of his own.

“Good morning!” he says. “Welcome to the hive.”

It's hard to describe what it feels like, even to herself. She finally settles on 'an enormous group hug for the brain'. It’s close, but it doesn’t totally cover it. How's she supposed to describe feeling like she's...multiplied, somehow, lots and lots of Mabels repeating over and over like when she stands in between two mirrors and watches her reflections curving away into infinity? It’s enough to make her dizzy, but the hug is there to gather her up, hold her steady, set her back on her feet, safe and sound and all bundled up in warmth. 

Somehow she knows, from the top of her head down to her littlest toe, that it would never hurt her. That it never could.

Feeling a little bolder, she dives further in. 

...

There’s sun on the top of the cliffs, shining in the waving grass.

The arcade is dark and overheated, the electronic music and sound effects that fill the cavernous space almost deafening.

Everything is dark and smells of exhaust and mothballs, and the hard leather seat she’s lying on bounces and jolts as she speeds along.

The pool is warm in the summer sun, but it’s still cool in comparison to the scorching air.

Under the earth, surrounded by concrete and steel, the air is cold and damp and still.

...

Mabel surfaces, with a huge deep breath, like she’s coming up from underwater. Grunkle Ford is there, like an anchor, radiating calm and confidence, and she flops forward to wrap her arms around his waist before she realises he’s not actually sitting on the edge of her bed anymore. She’s alone in the attic. 

Mabel sucks in another huge breath. If she concentrates, she can tell that the strength and reassurance she can feel is coming from down in the kitchen, can smell pancakes and hear the faint sizzle of a frying pan. If she really focuses, she can feel the weight of the pan in her hand, the flex of her arm as she flips the pancake.

She pulls herself together again, takes a moment to remember which limbs are hers and how they all work. Mabel trips over her own covers as she stumbles out of bed, catching herself with both arms outstretched and wobbling to a stand in the middle of the room. “Whoa! Haha, weird.”

The smell of pancakes grows stronger as she picks her way carefully down the stairs, feeling like she’s learning how to walk all over again. By the time she makes it to the bottom of the stairs, though, she’s steady on her feet again. And she’s starving.

“Some of those flapjacks better be for me,” she says, as she skids through the kitchen door in her sock feet. Ford looks up, and smiles, and it’s like standing in a sunbeam. Mabel can’t help but smile back. Not that she wouldn’t have anyway, or anything, but - it’s just all so strange and new and good -

- and there’s still a hole in the middle of it where Dipper should be.

Ford’s smile fades in time with Mabel’s plummeting mood, and he holds out an arm, beckoning her over for a one-armed hug even as he deftly flips the pancake in the pan onto the growing stack beside him with his other hand. “They’re all for you, I’m sure you’re ravenous,” he says, putting the frying pan back on the stove and one-handedly ladling batter into it as Mabel presses her face against his side and wraps both arms around his waist. He’s taken off his overcoat, and the wool of his sweater scratches at her nose, but it smells nice, warm and homey and soft and just a little bit sheep-y. “We’ll find you something with some protein once you’ve got a few pancakes in you to keep your energy up. It’s a big change your body’s going through, it needs fuel. And rest. I noticed you took another nap.” He beams down at Mabel, but there’s a little corkscrew of worry in the warmth that wraps around her.

“Is Dipper -” Mabel starts, and this time she can feel it, like the drop at the very top of a roller coaster yanking her stomach out from under her, and she squeezes Grunkle Ford around the waist as tight as she can. “What’s wrong? Did something happen to Dipper? Is - where’s Grunkle Stan? What’s going on?”

Ford doesn’t answer for a long moment, his expression just getting darker and darker, until Mabel feels less like she’s hugging him and more like she’s clinging to his waist for dear life to keep from falling into the chasm that’s opening up under her.

“I attempted to bring your brother into the hive as well, but was...interrupted,” Ford says, finally, shortly. “I don’t know what’s happened to Dipper. My brother -” He bites the words off, giving Mabel a smile that would have been obviously fake even if she wasn’t feeling the anger and the creeping sadness coming off of him in waves. “Trust Stanley to choose the absolute worst time to suddenly decide to become stubbornly independent.”

“I thought you and Grunkle Stan weren’t fighting anymore,” Mabel mumbles into the fuzz of Ford’s sweater, and he gives her a soft pat on the back, the anger wearing slowly away. Mabel’s glad. She could’ve happily lived her whole entire life without ever feeling like she wanted to punch Grunkle Stan as hard as she could. Well. Except for that time when he’d let Waddles get stolen by a - “Wait. Where’s Waddles?” 

“Your pig?” Ford looks thoughtful for a moment, glancing up to look out the window. “I’m not certain. Animals don’t tend to linger around us, I’ve noticed. Companion animals are no exception. Though if you can find the pig, I’m sure it would only take a little desensitization training to get him used to us as we are now.” He gives a half-laugh. “The greater difficulty might be making sure you don’t eat him.”

“Eat Waddles? No way!”

“Which is why we need to make sure to feed you up now, when you need it most,” Ford says triumphantly, flipping the pancake out of the frying pan and onto the stack. “These are done, go to town. I would have made you sausage or eggs, but the town’s running a little short on both."

“That’s okay,” Mabel says, ducking around Ford to grab the platter of pancakes. The smell hits her in the face, hot and sweet and delicious, and her stomach does an entire backflip inside her, letting out a growl that could’ve come from the Multibear. “Um. Or maybe not. I’ll work on these and let you know.”

“Eat as much as you want, and if you're still hungry once you’re done with those, we’ll take you hunting,” Ford says, scooping up the empty bowl of pancake batter and the frying pan and carrying them both over to the sink.

Mabel’s got half the first pancake crammed into her mouth before he’s even finished his sentence.

...

When Dipper wakes up, Mabel is gone.

It takes him a moment to work his way out of the sticky cobwebs of sleep, to work out that the stink of leather and decades-old sweat and cigarette smoke and mothballs and engine grease is real, that the rough weave of the blanket that he’s curled up in and the cold leather of the seat he’s lying on are real, that the light streaming in the yellowed back window and catching in the dust hanging in the air is real, that the rattle and roar of the engine and the jolts and bumps of the road underneath him are real. It all seems very warm and hazy and distant, the thin, scratchy blanket somehow the best covers he’s ever slept under, the bench seat he’s lying on, so overstuffed that it’s like lying on a particularly slippery rock, the most comfortable bed. He could fall right back asleep like this, in this quiet, warm backseat -

“Kid? You still awake back there?”

“Mhmmhmnh,” Dipper manages. It’s better than he expected from himself. Mabel’s absence nags at him like a toothache.

(how exactly does he know Mabel’s missing, again?)

“Don’t go back to sleep,” Stan says, from the front seat, and his voice is serious enough that Dipper actually listens, even though the only thing he wants to do is press his cheek back against the cool leather and shut his eyes and drift. “We’re gettin’ outta here, okay? Everything’s gonna be fine if you just keep your eyes open.”

“Um, no offense, Mr. Pines, but how do you know that?” Soos asks, in what’s clearly meant to be a quiet voice, and Stan makes a little frustrated noise in the back of his throat.

“It’s gonna be fine, Soos. We got to him in time. Okay?” The words sound reassuring, but Stan’s tone is almost a threat. 

“Okay, Mr. Pines, but I’m just saying, we don’t really know how this thing works, and his one eye looks kind of -”

“We got to him in time, Soos,” Stan growls, in a tone of voice that brooks no further argument.

There’s this horrible yawning empty feeling just under Dipper’s ribcage, like his insides have all been scooped out and his spine left to flap in the open air. Mabel’s absence is like a lost tooth or a broken bone, like a missing stair on a darkened staircase. Dipper can’t stop mentally prodding at it, like she’s going to suddenly appear out of thin air if he thinks long and hard enough. But all there is is emptiness, is absence, is the widening hollow between his ribs.

From where he’s lying, Dipper can see just a sliver of Soos’ ear and the back of Soos’ neck around the back of the passenger seat. If he sat up, Dipper could reach out and put a hand on Soos’ shoulder. 

It doesn’t make him feel any less impossibly, hopelessly isolated. Even stranded on a desert island - on a desert planet - he doesn’t think he could feel any more crushingly alone.

Dipper takes a deep breath, trying to quiet the rising fluttery shivers of panic tapping at the inside of his ribcage. The back of his nose stings as he inhales a lungful of dust, a pale echo of the way the silver-green dust had burned. Dipper sneezes so hard he thinks the top of his head’s going to be blasted off.

Soos glances back over his shoulder at Dipper, with his familiar goofy grin. It should be comforting, but somehow it only makes the hollow in Dipper ache. “Hah, guess you’re right, Mr. Pines. Only Dipper and kittens have sneezes that adorable.”

“Thanks,” Dipper grumbles, pushing himself up to sit upright in the backseat. His sneeze has stirred up all kinds of dust and dirt down under Stan’s seat, and his nose and throat are still sensitive, still stinging.

Stan’s eyes flick up to meet Dipper’s in the rearview mirror, and just as quickly look away, fixing back onto the road. Dipper sucks in another deep breath, coughing as he gets another mouthful of dust, and looks out the window instead of trying to interpret the expression on Stan’s face.

Trees fly by them, packed thick along the winding roadside, dark green branches meshing together like jagged teeth. Through a break in the woods, Dipper can see down into the valley, see the enormous cloud-shadows drift lazily over the town below. They’re climbing the cliffs.

They’re leaving.

“Stop!” Dipper yells, and Stan slams on the brakes so hard and fast that they let out an unearthly scream and the back end of the Stanleymobile fishtails wildly in the gravel. Both Stan and Soos whip around to stare at Dipper, who tries very hard not to see fear in the way they’re looking at him.

“Mabel,” he manages, and sees Soos heave a sigh, sees Stan’s shoulders slump. “We can’t leave her -”

“Kid,” Stan says, and his voice is heavy, a block of concrete sinking slowly towards the riverbed. “I barely got us outta there. Your sister was -” He clears his throat, as though that will erase the crack in his voice. "Even if we turned around right now, by the time we got back, Mabel'd already be -"

“No -”

Dipper and Stan both stop, eyes locked. Stan looks away first, clearing his throat into his hand like Robbie backing out of some talked-up feat of bravery.

"We gotta keep moving," he says, but the bite has gone out of his voice. He turns his back on Dipper and yanks the key in the ignition with more force than strictly necessary, growling under his breath when the engine sputters and whines.

...

When a larger-than-usual pothole jolts him awake, it takes Dipper a moment to realise he'd even been asleep. He has no idea how long he's been out - the light's a little lower, a little rosier, but Soos is still nervously fidgeting and looking out the passenger-side window, Stan's still gripping the steering wheel with white knuckles and staring grimly at the road ahead, the trees are still flying darkly by them on both sides as they speed towards -

"Stop!" Dipper yells, for the second time this car ride. He almost expects to be ignored, this time, but Stan slams on the brakes just as fast as he had the first time, the Stanleymobile squealing to a halt in a cloud of choking dust.

Stan spins to look over his shoulder at Dipper, and Dipper sees his expression slip for a moment before hardening. "This better not be about Mabel again."

"We can't go this way," Dipper babbles. "There's a roadblock - we can't get out of town."

“Crashed my fair share of roadblocks in the day, kid,” Stan says, turning back to the wheel.

“Not like this one!” Dipper yells, seized by a sudden, frantic frustration. Why can’t Stan just listen? How can he not see how bad an idea this is? How can he not tell how serious Dipper is? How does he not just know?

“Dood, how do you even know that?” Soos asks, and the waver in his voice pulls Dipper up short.

“I - I don’t know.”

Stan glances up at Dipper in the rearview mirror again, a quick, darting look that’s almost unreadable. “Soos, keep Dipper talking. Don’t let him fall asleep again, got it?”

Soos looks at Stan like he might protest, or possibly throw up, but he doesn’t say anything. Instead, he turns around so he can meet Dipper’s eyes with only the barest of flinches, shoots Dipper a huge smile and raises a hand in a short wave. “You heard Mr. Pines, dood. I’m now the Dipper-Doesn’t-Sleep Patrol.” He falls silent, his big smile slowly fading. “Sooo....” he starts, and then, finally, just when Dipper is starting to worry the silence is going to go on forever, “Didja get the new Monstermon game?”

“Not yet,” Dipper sighs, aware he’s talking too fast and too loud but unable to wind down. “I was gonna pick it up before we got on the bus, but then Mabel had a syrup emergency.”

“Oh, dawg, I so get that,” Soos says. “For something that tastes so good on almost everything, there sure are a lot of ways syrup can go horribly wrong.”

“Just about - Soos, hate to break it to you, but syrup is a breakfast-only condiment.”

“That’s what the unenlightened want you to think,” Soos says, solemnly.

It sounds like he says something more, but his voice is drowned out in the crunch of gravel and squeal of the tires as Stan throws the Stanleymobile back into gear and starts to U-turn across the narrow road, nearly slamming into a tree before he reverses and peels out.

The farther they get from the roadblock Dipper’s somehow sure is behind them, the more the hollow in his chest aches.

...

Wendy turns up just as Ford is finishing his mug of coffee (black, with so much sugar the spoon can almost stand up in it; Mabel approves) and Mabel’s licking the last of the syrup off of her plate. The pancakes vanished like popcorn, but Mabel’s stomach is still twisting and churning, demanding something more substantial.

She recognises Wendy coming up the walk, sun warm on her back, the cozy contentment that Mabel’s starting to recognise as the hive in the back of her head decorated with boredom, a little good-natured resentment - at having to come in to work, probably - and a sick sunburst of worry. The worry seems to swirl around the emptiness where Dipper ought to be, like the plastic dinosaurs in a pitcher of Mabel Juice while it’s being stirred.

Wendy walks in without knocking - it’s not like she needs to anymore, anyway. “I’d apologise for being late, but it doesn’t look like the Shack’s even open,” she says, leaning against the kitchen doorframe. “What happened to Soos? And Stan? Are they -” She presses the palms of both hands together, mimes using them as a pillow.

“I wish,” Mabel sighs. “I dunno know what happened, but Grunkle Ford said -”

“Stanley made it clear that he doesn’t want any part of the hive,” Ford says, shortly. “And he took Dipper with him.”

“So that’s why,” Wendy says, and Mabel knows they all know she’s talking about the black hole where Dipper should be. “Is there anything we can -”

“There’s no need to worry,” Ford says, and Mabel feels a wind off the mountains ruffling her hair, patience and anticipation, the smell of pine. “They won’t make it out of town.”

Wendy nods. Her expression’s distant for a moment, and Mabel knows she’s there, too, waiting in the woods and watching the road for the familiar nose of the old red El Diablo. “Okay,” she says, and that sunburst of worry Mabel’s been feeling eases a little. “So I’m guessing I’m off the hook for today, huh? Unless you’re feeling like trying on the Mr. Mystery hat?”

Ford laughs, sounding surprised. “No. I don’t believe that’s a role I could satisfactorily fill. Deliberately spreading misinformation about anomalies? I wouldn’t make it past the first exhibit.”

“I’ll do it!” Mabel volunteers, but her stomach interrupts, with a huge, roaring gurgle that she’s amazed to hear coming out of her own body. “Uh, can we have lunch early?”

“Oh, man, is all you’ve had to eat since you woke up pancakes?” Wendy asks, sounding like she’s just heard that somebody’s never seen Dream Boy High. “Okay, kiddo, we’re taking you hunting.”

“Like, for adorable forest animals?” Mabel asks. She’s upset about it, sure, but not as upset about it as she thinks she would usually be. She’s really hungry. 

“Yup,” Wendy says, with a grin, patting the axe at her hip. “Delicious adorable forest animals. Trust me,” she says, clearly noticing that Mabel’s still a little uneasy, “it’s waaayyy easier than punching unicorns. Cute fluffy bunnies and squirrels? Usually don’t fight back.”

“Okaaayyyy,” Mabel says, drawing the word out. “Do they have to be cute and fluffy, though?”

“Eh, it kinda comes with the territory, but sure, whatever,” Wendy says. “Who knows, maybe we can find you an alligator. You coming, Dr. Pines?” she asks, turning to Ford, and he nods.

“Mabel, whenever you’re ready,” he says.

Mabel’s stomach answers for her, with another enormous growl. “All right, I guess we’re doing this,” she says. “Bring on the fluffy bunnies.”

...

It isn’t a bunny, as it turns out. It’s a kind of mangy-looking raccoon, frozen with its little black paws in the trash can and its little beady eyes wide open when Wendy slams the back door open.

“Oh, nice,” Wendy says. “Fast food.”

Then, before Mabel can say anything, her whole face splits open down the middle and unfolds with a sticky sound into four things that almost look like petals, all red and wet and lined with rows and rows of little sharp teeth. Something long and pink and snakey shoots out from the very centre, wraps around the raccoon as it tries to run away, and whips it back into the very centre of Wendy’s face, which snaps shut again.

She burps.

Mabel stares.

“Cool!” she finally says, bouncing on the balls of her feet. “Can I do that?”

Wendy gives her a lazy smile, crossing her arms over her chest. “You bet, squirt. Just shut your eyes and stick your tongue out as far as it’ll go.”

Mabel squeezes her eyes shut, sticks out her tongue. “Ith noth working.”

Ford chuckles. “No, you have to -” He stops, stroking his chin. “Hm. You know, I thought I’d seen the last of things that could be truly said to defy description when Stanley sent Bill packing, but -”

“Just get into my head when I do it this time,” Wendy suggests to Mabel.

Ford blinks. “I can’t believe I didn’t think of that.”

“Eh, you’re still new,” Wendy says, nudging him in the arm with her elbow. “Okay, Mabel, ready?”

Mabel squeezes her eyes shut again, and looks out at the yard through Wendy’s. She’s pretty sure she’d get dizzy if she tried this with her own eyes open. She’s gonna need some practice.

“Fire away!” she says, with Wendy’s mouth, and feels her head bob as Wendy nods. They look up, and then Wendy shuts their eyes and -

“Oh, so that’s how you do it,” Mabel says, when she’s sure she’s using her own mouth to say it with. “Hey, I bet I can catch more birds than you!”

“You’re on, pipsqueak,” Wendy says, grabbing one of the poles holding the sagging porch roof up and swinging herself down onto the ground. Mabel charges down the stairs after her.

...

“When we get Dipper back, we gotta get Grunkle Stan too,” Mabel says. The trees are swaying gently overhead, their tops like sharp teeth taking a bite out of the pure blue sky. Okay, so maybe she’s got teeth on the brain. But she totally beat Wendy at that bird-catching competition (thanks, year of grappling hook practice!) and now she’s so full that all she wants to do is lie here with her head propped against a fallen log and watch the occasional cloud drift by overhead.

“Yeah?” Wendy says. She’s lying with her head beside Mabel’s, on the other side of the log. If Mabel concentrates and uses Wendy’s eyes too, she can see all the way around the clearing at once, which is super cool and also makes her feel a little dizzy. She wonders if she’ll be able to express this emotion in macaroni. Maybe she’ll have to bust out the big guns. She’s not sure she still has any modelling clay, though.

“Yeah. Grunkle Ford’s so sad about him running away,” Mabel says. “If we get Grunkle Stan to join the hive, then he’ll see how great it is and he’ll have to come back and he and Grunkle Ford will make up and hug and everything will be awesome!”

Wendy’s laugh fills Mabel with sunny ripples. “You’ve really got a plan, huh?”

“Dipper’s not the only one who can make plans,” Mabel says decisively.

“Gotcha,” Wendy says. “You just about ready to head back?”

Mabel hums in thought. “Just a little longer?”

“Sure thing, dude. This totally beats working cash,” Wendy sighs. Dimly, Mabel feels her folding her arms behind her head. “Though the literal apocalypse beat working cash, so I guess that’s not really saying much.”

Mabel giggles. 

“I’m gonna practice - what’d you call it? Putting myself in people’s heads?” she asks. Wendy gives an affirmative grunt. Everything coming from her is already going a little hazy, and Mabel thinks she might be starting to doze.

Mabel shuts her eyes and lets herself drift. 

This time, she has a little better idea of what she’s doing, where she’s going. She walks herself all around town, from head to head. It makes her a little dizzy, jumping straight from looking out of the diner windows to looking down from the lifeguard’s chair to searching through the woods to watching down the road out of town to gazing out of a car window as it bumps away down that road -

Mabel’s gasp as she sits bolt upright startles Wendy awake. “Whuh? Where’s the fire?”

Mabel spins around to grab Wendy’s shoulders, shaking her the rest of the way awake. “I found him! He was there!”

“Who was where what?”

“Dipper!”

That gets Wendy’s attention. She spins around, sitting up so she faces Mabel. “Wait, seriously?”

“Seriously seriously! It was just for a second but he was there! I could see what he was seeing, I could feel -” Mabel presses a hand against the front of her sweater, right at the centre of the appliqué rainbow. “He’s so lonely.”

“Oh man. We gotta get him back,” Wendy says, bringing a hand up to brush her hair out of her face and back behind her ear. “Wait. Mabel, you said you could see what he was seeing?”

“Yeah!” Mabel starts, excited for a moment, then, realising, “But it was just trees.” 

Wendy bites her lower lip. “But you know where you were looking last.”

“Hey, yeah!” Mabel shuts one eye. It doesn’t really help, but it makes her look like she’s thinking really hard. “They were a little bit, uh, east? East of the roadblock on the cliff.”

“So they’ll be there any minute now.” Wendy shrugs. She leans back down on her elbow, turning back over onto her back. “We’ll catch them at the roadblock.”

“I dunno,” Mabel says. There’s something about Wendy’s nonchalance that makes her uneasy, and Wendy pushes herself back up to sit up, sighing as she climbs to her feet.

“I think we oughtta head back now.” She reaches out, casually, slings an arm around Mabel’s shoulders and tugs her in to bump against her hip. Mabel’s almost smothered by a wave of - the only word for it is chill. “Hey. Chin up. It’s gonna be fine.”

“Yeahhhhh,” Mabel says, and hops over the log they’d been resting against, lets Wendy guide her back towards the path they took to get here.

She can’t figure out why it’s still bugging her until she remembers that, during the split second she’d been in the car with Dipper, she’d been able to feel the roadblock getting farther away.

...

Soos is explaining the new game mechanics that've been added for Monstermon Mars and Venus when they pass the turning for town. Dipper's surprised when they keep driving, past the turning. "Wait, doesn't the road end here?"

Stan grunts from the driver's seat. "Old logging road, kid. Trust me, I know every possible way out of this sh- town. Never know when you're gonna need to make a quick getaway."

Dipper stares out the window as the corner vanishes behind a curtain of trees. His insides ache.

"Soos," he says, and Soos perks up.

"Yeah, dawg?"

"How's - how's Melody doing?"

Soos beams, even his voice lighting up. "Oh dood, Melody's the best. She's been sending me all these chapsnats from Portland and it looks like she's having a blast down there. Her puns are so solid, dood. And the pictures she's been sending me of her sister's new baby? He's just the cutest. He looks like a little wrinkled jellybean."

Dipper can't help but grin at that. "Sounds pretty cute."

"Seriously, that baby's some kinda genius," Soos says, with the utmost seriousness. "Melody says he's already learning how to touch his toes. I can't even do that, dawg."

Dipper laughs. It makes the empty place in his chest hurt.

Soos keeps talking, but Dipper can’t seem to focus on the words. The emptiness fills his chest with a constant, distracting throb. It’s so quiet in his head.

He’s never in his life felt so alone. Not any time in elementary school when he’d sat down for lunch beside Mabel and all her friends had got up and left, not when their parents had first put them on a bus for Gravity Falls and they’d waved until they were out of sight, not even during the Oddpocalypse when he’d lost track of everyone and his only connection to Mabel had been a walkie-talkie he hadn’t even been sure she’d been able to hear him through - though that had come close. And hearing Soos talk about Melody and how much he misses her - it’d been a good idea to get Soos talking, but it just makes Dipper feel more alone. 

He and Mabel have never really been without each other, Dipper realises. Even when things looked bad, even when they were separated, Dipper’s always known he had Mabel. And Mabel’s always had him.

If he’s feeling like this, how must she be feeling right now?

It’s a little easier for Mabel, Dipper realises, slowly; she’s got Ford and Wendy and everyone else in that comforting warmth in the back of her mind. But there’s still a gap where he ought to be, just like the hole in him where she and the others ought to be, and it sucks away her attention and nags and worries at her just like it does at him and it leaves them both feeling hollow -

“Dipper?”

Dipper looks up. Soos is twisted around the seat to stare at him, concern and confusion mingled on his face. “You okay, dawg? You kinda spaced out for a minute there.”

“No, I’m not okay, Soos,” Dipper says, through clenched teeth. “You took me away from my sister.”

“Dood, Mr. Pines was telling the truth,” Soos says, defensively, and Dipper could just spit in his eye. “Mabel was way too far gone, we couldn’t wake her up -”

“I don’t care about your excuses! You both took me away from my hive before I could get properly bonded and now they’re all hurting - Mabel’s -”

It slips away like a rush of blood from his head from standing too fast, the town and Mabel and the comforting, contented presence at the back of Dipper’s thoughts all bleeding away all at once, leaving him staring at Soos’ frozen expression and feeling like he’d just been thrown with no warning into Lake Gravity Falls.

“Did I just -” he starts, and falters, his mind helpfully reeling back over everything he’d just said and thought and felt. It doesn’t seem quite real, now, like it was someone else speaking with his mouth, someone else moving the gears in his brain, someone else wearing his skin and moving him around like a puppet - “Oh, no. Ohhhh no no no no.”

“Dood, your one eye is...like, really green now,” Soos says, uncertainly.

“Not helping, Soos!”

“Head between your knees, kid,” Stan says, without looking around, gruff and matter-of-fact as always, and Dipper grabs onto the sound of his voice like a life preserver. “Deep breaths. Panicking ain’t gonna help either.”

Dipper shoots a glare at the back of Stan’s head, but he sucks in a long breath. Then another. And another.

The back of his throat still stings.

“You gotta let me out,” he says, too fast. The floating dust motes that fill the backseat and the constant jolting over the rutted remnants of the road are making his vision blur. “You should - you have to leave me behind.”

“No way, dood. Pterodactyl bros ‘til the end!” Soos hoots, and Dipper shakes his head, leaning forward to rest his elbows on his knees and his head in his hands.

“Do you remember being a zombie, Soos?”

Soos is very quiet, after that.

“Kid, if I wasted any time rubbing Soos down with cinnamon and whatever else was in that weirdo gunk while he alternated between trying to eat my brains and making weird comments about his ‘fanfiction’, do you really think I’d kick you out on the side of the road at the first little outburst?” Stan says, shortly, cranking the Stanleymobile’s wheel hard to the left. The El Diablo groans in protest, but it thumps over the pitted road just the same, setting all of Dipper’s bones rattling. “Besides, that was nothing. You shoulda heard Ford go on when we busted you outta there. Hive this, community that, we were making the biggest mistake of our lives, yadda yadda. Told ‘im he should just marry it if he loves it that much.” He cracks a grin, finally, looking up to catch Dipper’s eye in the rearview mirror. “Then again, legally he’s still married to Goldie, so dunno how that’d work.”

Despite himself, Dipper manages a small, weak smile of his own.

“There ya go,” Stan says, his own smile softening a little. “We’ll figure this out, kiddo. I - I know I ain’t exactly Ford, but - don’t go givin’ up on me just yet.”

...

“They should have been there by now,” Wendy complains. She’s got her head tipped back over the kitchen chair and her feet propped up on the table, balancing the chair on its two back legs. Mabel can feel the rush of blood to her head, the tension in her back as she tries to keep her balance. It’s really, really true what she said back in the museum basement - she’s stressed out and tense, like, all the time. Mabel hadn’t really got it until she got underneath Wendy’s skin. If it weren’t for the hive, maybe she never would’ve. And if it weren’t for the hive, Wendy’d still be worrying about what everybody thought of her, instead of knowing for sure how cool they all think she is and how much they like her. Mabel can’t stand knowing Dipper and Grunkle Stan are missing out on this.

“Yeah, but we haven’t even seen anything!” she says. “We have to go and find them.”

Ford hums thoughtfully. He’s leaning against the counter watching coffee slowly drip into the coffeepot. Mabel can’t imagine anything more boring, but she also gets the gentle ripples of calm coming off him every time the coffee drips and thinks that maybe sometimes boring could be all right. 

“There’s really no need,” Ford says, after a moment’s silence, collecting his thoughts. “Dipper may not have been fully assimilated, but he’s been seeded. He won’t stay away for too long. This must be hurting him as badly as it hurts us.”

“That’s why we gotta find them!” Mabel protests. “Are we really just gonna sit around here while Dipper -”

She stops. Wendy flips her head back up over the chair, dropping down to plant all four chair legs firmly on the floor, and Ford looks away from the coffee drip, up at Mabel. 

“I don’t know if you guys felt it,” she says, suddenly uncertain. 

Wendy shakes her head. “Nah, dude, when you said you’d found Dipper I was totally surprised. I believe you! I just didn’t get anything from him, like, at all.”

“I wonder,” Ford says, still looking at Mabel, “whether it has anything to do with the fact that you’re twins.”

“Noooo,” Mabel says. “Maybe? I dunno, the only ‘twin’ thing we really have is when our allergies act up at the same time.”

“There you go. Special twin bond,” Wendy says, with a lazy smile, and Mabel smiles back. “So, what? Did you feel Dipper sneeze?”

Mabel shook her head. “We just have a Dipper-shaped hole in the hive. Dipper - he doesn’t have anybody. He’s all alone out there.”

“Wait, you mean -” Wendy starts, and Ford’s face falls, realisation clearly sinking in.

“He can’t even connect to the queen?”

“Like I said,” Mabel says. “We gotta find them.”

Ford’s face darkens, and Mabel feels her hands ball into fists. “When I see Stanley -” he starts, and then bites off the rest of his own sentence, shaking his head. “Of all the reckless, irresponsible, selfish stunts he’s pulled, this really takes the cake.”

The last word isn't quite out of his mouth yet when Mabel hears the knock. It’s a quick, heavy pounding on the front door, and, unlike Wendy’s earlier unannounced appearance, it takes her - and everyone else in the room - totally by surprise.

“That could be them!” Mabel gasps, slamming both palms down flat on the table in front of her and pushing herself up out of her seat. “Maybe that’s why they didn’t get to the roadblock! Maybe Grunkle Stan figured out what was going on with Dipper and realised that he was being a big meanypants and brought him back -”

She’s off running, out of the kitchen and down the hall, before Ford and Wendy and their worry and disbelief can catch up with her.

When she throws the door open, though, it isn’t her twin on the other side, or her grunkle, or even Soos. Pacifica Northwest nearly slams her fist into Mabel’s nose, before she stops herself mid-knock, looking back over her shoulder and all around her instead of at Mabel, like she’s expecting something to pop out at her. She looks terrible - well, terrible for Pacifica, anyway, her hair’s a tangled mess and her eyes are big and frightened. “Mabel! Please, please tell me your brother or your weird genius relative is around, something’s wrong with everybody and my - my parents -”

She meets Mabel’s eyes, stops, and takes a step back.

“It’s okay, Pacifica,” Mabel says, and steps back herself, out of the doorway. She leans around the door, so she can still see the other girl, but so Pacifica could get by her. “Do you wanna come in?”

“No,” Pacifica snaps, taking another step back before whirling halfway around to look behind her, like she’s scared she’s about to walk into something. “No, I don’t want - you’re just like them!”

Mabel reaches out, and finds two dark spots of worry moving through the trees towards them. Mabel doesn’t like to say she doesn’t like people - strangers are just friends you haven’t met yet! - but the Northwests...aren’t the first people she’d pick for hivemates. But there they are, and for an instant Mabel’s furious with Pacifica for running, for not listening, for not knowing what’s best for her -

“It’s okay,” she says, as Pacifica takes another step back and nearly trips down the stairs. She meets Pacifica’s wild eyes again and stomps down hard on the two angry spots in her head, tries to fill them up with hugs and rainbows instead. “You don’t have to be scared! We’re not gonna hurt you.”

“No, you’re just going to turn me into some kind of freak like you!” Pacifica moans. With one last look over her shoulder, she turns and starts down the stairs, only to freeze in place when the Northwests’ limo screeches around the turn and skids to a halt where the gravel of the parking lot starts to turn into the grass of the lawn. The back doors are thrown open, and Preston and Priscilla Northwest fly out, both bearing down on Pacifica as she shrinks back towards the porch.

“Pacifica! We were worried sick!” Pacifica’s mother starts, and Pacifica backs up the stairs, turning a pleading glance in Mabel’s direction. 

“Get back here right now, young lady, and accept your assimilation!” her father demands, and Mabel frowns at him. Pacifica’s already scared, there’s no way that’s going to help.

“Mabel, please,” Pacifica starts, as her parents reach the foot of the steps. “Don’t let them - help me!” She starts towards the Shack door, but skids to a stop, shrinking back. Mabel doesn’t have to turn to know Ford’s come up behind her, Wendy following him with a hand rested on her axe.

Pacifica’s face falls faster than a pug doing a cannonball off a diving board. “They got all of you?” 

“You’re gonna be fine,” Mabel says, as Pacifica’s father gives a heavy, exasperated sigh and starts up the three porch steps. “Hey, you were scared about sharing at first, too, remember! This is just like...next-level sharing!”

Pacifica shakes her head, lunges forward and grabs Mabel’s shoulders. Mabel only manages to push away the shock that bursts from both Ford and Wendy, the instant, instinctive grab for weapons, when she realises that Pacifica isn’t hurting her, just staring desperately into her eyes. “Whoa! Haha, watch the sweater -”

“Is there even anything left of you in there?” Pacifica demands, shaking Mabel’s shoulders. “Mabel, you wouldn’t let them do this to me! You wouldn’t -”

Whatever she’d been about to say is cut off in a shriek as her father’s hand lands on her shoulder. The relief that floods over Mabel is almost enough to smother the uneasiness that Pacifica’s words filled her with.

“No!” Pacifica howls, as her mother grabs her other shoulder. Her fingers dig into Mabel’s arms as they pull her away, and Mabel reaches out almost unconsciously as Pacifica’s grip slips. “No no no no -”

Her screaming turns sharp, high and wordless for a split second as her father leans over and blows a cloud of silver-green spores into her face. Pacifica’s shrieks peter out, slowly, dying into quiet whimpers and then into nothing as her head lolls, her eyes slipping shut as she collapses back into her mother’s arms.

“We’ll take it from here,” Preston Northwest says, cool and collected, with a nod in Mabel’s direction, and Priscilla beams an enormous smile as she lifts Pacifica up like Pacifica was just a sleeping baby, holding her close. Their relief and joy are light, like bubbles drifting up through the rosy contentment the hive lays over everything, but Mabel still feels something sick sitting in the pit of her stomach.

“Be nice to her when she wakes up, okay?” she blurts, and doesn’t know why. “You shouldn’t’ve done that. She was really scared.”

Pacifica’s father gives Mabel a blank look, and his confusion curls around behind her eyes. “We’re her parents. We decide what’s best for her. Would you rather we’d left her separate?”

“Nooooo,” Mabel admits. 

Pacifica’s mother beams at the gathered Pines family again, but it’s not as sincere as the last time. Mabel watches them carry Pacifica down off the porch, watches as they all get back into the limo and slam the doors, as the long black car peels out of the parking lot, taking the unpleasant feeling of the Northwests in her head with it.

“I just think you could’ve been waaayyy nicer about it,” she mutters, to herself. 

When she turns around, both Ford and Wendy are giving her weird looks. Their concern falls over her like a blanket, and Mabel tries to shrug it off. “I’m fine.”

“Yeah, that one kinda doesn’t work so well when we’re all connected to your emotions,” Wendy says, raising one eyebrow.

“You shouldn’t have had to see that,” Ford says, deep and serious. He’s still staring at the place where the limo had parked, and there’s something about the way he’s feeling that makes Mabel ask.

“That - that wasn’t anything like what happened with Dipper, was it?”

Ford doesn’t answer, but that chasm feels like it’s opening up under Mabel again.

“I could have been more reassuring,” he says, at last. “I was - worried. That I might lose my window of opportunity. That I might lose both of you.” He clears his throat. “Unfortunately, the fear proved founded.” 

Mabel looks down at her shoes, and then off to her right, towards the trees. She wonders where Waddles is now, whether he’d freak out and do that piggy scream he does if she tried to give him a hug.

Probably, she decides, with a sinking feeling.

Ford clears his throat again. “Luckily for Pacifica, she has no resentful relatives to spoil her assimilation. She’ll be fine. And once she wakes up, she’ll be as happy as you were to be part of our hive.” 

There’s something warm nudging at Mabel, and she glances up, without raising her head, to see her great-uncle with that apologetic smile he gets sometimes and both arms held open. Mabel trudges forward and lets him gather her up in a hug, lets his love and warmth wrap around her until the sick feeling in her stomach is so quiet she almost forgets it’s there.

...

The Stanleymobile bumps along, over what’s starting to look less and less like an old, abandoned logging road and more and more like an old, abandoned hiking trail.

Nobody’s spoken for what feels like an hour.

Dipper keeps catching himself nodding off, his head bobbing heavily until another jolt startles him out of his doze. He’s starting to wonder if Stan isn’t aiming for the potholes in a bid to keep him awake. If he is, it’s failing. Dipper’s gonna be practically comatose in a couple more minutes, and he knows it.

Oh, and he’s starving. And Dipper’s seen too many horror movies to write this off as a simple side-effect of having skipped lunch.

It takes him a little while to realise that he’s not dreaming, Stan really is humming a little tuneless ditty about ‘...drivin’ through the woods, away from certain doom, doo doodly doo...’. Dipper shakes his head, trying to clear away some of the thick fog that seems to have settled around his thoughts. Everything’s a little warm and dreamlike, and he’s probably micronapping every time he blinks. He knows he has to stay awake, but the knowing is pleasantly distant and easy to ignore. Honestly, he’s not even sure why. Isn't Mabel always getting on his case to get more sleep?

“You still awake back there, kid?” Stan rumbles, glancing up in the rearview mirror, meeting Dipper’s eyes. Dipper nods, and Stan gives him a look that, while not a smile, at least isn’t totally grim. “Shouldn’t be long now. This joins back up with a real road in about a mile, if my memory ain’t wrong.”

Dipper nods again, and leans back against the leather seat, gathering the rough blanket close around him. His stomach grumbles quietly to itself, and he can feel it turning over, slowly, gnawing at his insides. 

“Can we get some food when we stop?” he asks. The words come out a little mumbly, a little slurred, but at least they sound coherent. “I could eat an entire sack of hamburgers. No, wait - the whole cow.”

"Yeah, I could eat too, Mr. Pines," Soos agrees.

"Soos, how many times -"

"It's just too weird, dood!"

Stan sighs, before glancing back up at the rearview mirror and at Dipper. “Whatever. We’ll stop and getcha a burger somewhere.”

“Three burgers. No, wait, six,” Dipper corrects him, and scowls when Stan laughs. “I mean it.”

“Hittin’ that growth spurt already?” Stan teases, gently, and Dipper manages a sarcastic smile towards the rearview mirror before he leans his head back against the cool leather behind him, stares up at the greyish fuzz of the carpet covering the ceiling. Almost automatically, he reaches out to prod at the emptiness where Mabel ought to be, like maybe this time it'll be different. Maybe this time she'll be there, a warm and solid presence, all her energy and enthusiasm and -

Sadness.

Dipper blinks a few times, but the feeling doesn’t leave. There’s an indefinable but definite melancholy slowly bleeding from the severed end of the connection he ought to have with Mabel. He wishes he could be right there with her, wherever she is, right now, and give her the biggest of hugs. Whatever’s wrong, she needs to know she’s not alone. 

“We should go back and get Mabel,” Dipper says, and is a little surprised when neither Stan nor Soos says anything in response. “We really shouldn’t’ve left her behind in the first place.”

“How many times do I gotta tell you, kid,” Stan grumbles, and Soos puts a hand on his arm.

“Dipper. Dood. The freaky alien hive-mind thingy got Mabel, remember?”

“Yeah, I know,” Dipper says. “Still not sure why that meant we had to leave her. Like, I get that putting too much distance between you and the queen can cause problems, but if we’re only going for burgers -”

“Queen, huh?” Stan says, interrupting something Soos had been about to say. “What’s this ‘queen’ about?”

Dipper looks from Soos’ face, his eyebrows drawn together over his nose, to the back of Stan’s head. “Is something...wrong?” he starts, a slow suspicion starting to rustle in the back of his mind. 

“Nope. Nothin’ wrong with me. Whaddabout you, Soos?” Stan says, and Dipper narrows his eyes.

“Hah, totally normal, dood,” Soos agrees, but his smile is too big and the look he shoots in Dipper’s direction is too worried and his head is sweating too much. “One hundred per cent guaranteed normalino.”

“Okay, but you’re both acting weird,” Dipper says, pressing himself back against the leather of the backseat. His stomach chooses this moment to interject with an enormous growl, which everyone in the car ignores. “Everybody’s been acting weird,” Dipper adds, to himself, mostly. Without his notes and with the cloud of sleepiness still hovering around his head, he can’t quite remember exactly how they’d been weird, but he definitely remembers they had been. And he’d been worried. And so had - oh man, so had Ford. And these two have just taken him away from Ford, and Mabel, and the hive, and with every second that passes they’re taking him farther away from Gravity Falls -

Dipper squeezes his eyes shut, and reaches out, searching. Apart from the slow leak of sadness from Mabel, all he’s really getting is a low-level, constant hum of contentment from the rest of the hive, distant and a little detached, like it’s always been, like he’s somehow sure it shouldn’t be. He tries to bite down the wave of panic, of urgency, that demands he get out of this car now, get back to his hive and his family now now now. He needs to keep his head clear, needs to think. He needs a plan. He needs - 

There’s a faint buzz against the backdrop up ahead, a little cluster of minds like a sun behind a grey sky. Dipper gets a feeling of physical strength and strain, exhilaration and adrenaline and, yep, testosterone. Well, it is an old logging road.

They don’t hear him at first (wrong wrong wrong) but when they do, it only takes a taste of his panic to set them off running. For a moment, Dipper’s dizzy with the sense of being in two places at once as he bumps along in the backseat of the Stanleymobile and crashes through the underbrush at top speed all at once. 

Then the person whose mind Dipper’d been riding along in bursts out onto the road, Stan stomps on the brakes, and Dipper sees right through the Stanleymobile’s windshield, to Stan’s scowl and Soos’ nailbiting and Dipper’s own face, pale and shocked with both eyes wide, one brown, one poison green -

Dipper gasps as he slams back into himself like he’s been hit by a freight train, like he’s just dropped out of the mindscape back into his own body. The fog that had settled over him melts like cotton candy under rain, and he has his own mind back, silent and empty. 

He doesn’t have any time to be relieved or scared or much of anything, though, because Manly Dan Corduroy, standing in the road in front of them and glaring acid-green daggers from under a thicket of red eyebrow, reaches out and grabs the front bumper of the Stanleymobile with both hands. 

Then he starts to lift.

Soos lets out a whimper that reminds Dipper of their cat at home when Mabel scoops it up around the middle, and Stan gives a growl of frustration, jerking his foot off the brake and revving the engine as Dan heaves the front of the El Diablo off the ground. “Come on, come on,” Stan mutters, as the engine whines and whirrs, the wheels spinning uselessly against the loose debris of the forest floor. 

Dipper leans forward over Stan’s seat, watching in mute horror as more redheads spill out of the trees to circle the car. More than one of Wendy’s brothers have axes, and, just judging by the way Dan’s apparently trying to flip the Stanleymobile lengthwise, they’re no longer bound by the limitations of human strength either. (Or maybe that’s just Dan being Dan. That might just be Dan being Dan. Dipper’s wondered for a while whether there might not be some manotaur blood in that family.)

Dipper shuts his eyes. He called them here, there has to be some way he can get them to leave him and Stan and Soos alone. There has to be some silver lining to this hive stuff, doesn’t there? 

But there’s none of the quiet, peaceful hum in the back of his head now, just the hollowness he’d felt before, when he just woke up, and even reaching out to try to find Dan’s mind yields only more emptiness. Dipper mutters a word he’s pretty sure he’s not supposed to use in public under his breath, and leans back against the back of the rapidly-tilting seat. If he could just get back in that same frame of mind, if he could just -

“Soos!” Stan yells, and Soos shakes his head.

“No way, Mr. Pines, that’s Wendy’s dad!”

“Soos, I ain’t asking!”

Soos’ lower lip juts out in something that would be called a pout if he were a little (okay, a lot) younger, but his eyes narrow with determination. He leans down, fishing under his own seat, and comes up with something that can only be one of the ten guns Stan’s always bragged about keeping in the Shack. It’s a rifle, and it must be loaded, based on how Soos immediately hefts it onto his shoulder before reaching over to crank down the Stanleymobile’s window by hand. 

“Just for the record, I don’t agree with this,” Soos says, half-turning in Dipper’s direction. Then he turns and aims out the window, straight at Manly Dan’s beanie. His hands - and the nose of the rifle - are shaking, but Dipper knows that doesn’t mean he won’t fire. Soos’ voice warbles slightly as he yells, too, but it’s thick with determination. “But if you wanna get at the Pines family, you gotta go through me!”

Dan shoots a glare at the rifle aimed in his direction, but he stops raising the front of the car. Dipper’s not sure if he imagines that Dan’s eyes flick in his direction. 

Then Dan’s face splits open straight down the middle and peels back in four almost petals of flesh lined with rows of sharp teeth, something long and pinkish whipping out of the dead centre to wrap around the rifle’s nose and rip it right out of Soos’ hands. It snaps back into the centre of what had, seconds ago, been Dan’s face, and the petals close over it, Dan’s face bulging strangely for an instant as it settles back into place.

Dipper can’t move. By the looks of things, neither can Stan or Soos. They all sit frozen, staring.

There’s a horrible crunching, grinding sound, and then Dan lets out an enormous burp.

Dipper claps both hands over his mouth as his stomach does a sickening empty churn. 

“Welp, that’s gonna haunt my nightmares,” Stan says matter-of-factly. “Soos, where’d we put the rest of the guns?”

“No way, dood! I’m not trying that again!”

“Come on,” Dipper mutters, to himself, pressing both hands against his eyes as he tries desperately to get back the feeling of his mind brushing up against Dan Corduroy’s. “Come on, come on...”

It’s not working. All he can do is keep picturing, over and over, the way Dan’s face had split, feel it like a phantom pain under his own skin.

There’s a creak of protesting metal, and Dipper looks up to see the door to his left pulled open. One of Wendy’s brothers, the one whose hair is perpetually in his eyes (Braedon? Brandon? Brendan? Something like that, Dipper can’t keep all of their wildly similar names straight in his head) smiles at him, holding out a hand. Dipper pulls away, scooting along the seat towards the other side of the car, only to hear the other door swing open behind him and feel a pair of hands land on his shoulders, pulling him backwards out of the car.

His strangled scream makes Stan whip around, fear written across his face as he yells, “Kid!”, but Dipper’s already being dragged out of the Stanleymobile. He scrabbles to hang onto the doorframe for a moment, but the grip holding him is inexorable. The doorframe warps with a metallic scream and Dipper shoots out of the car like a cork from a bottle, slamming into the hard and knobbly ground with a thump that knocks all the wind out of him.

Another of Wendy’s brothers, one of the littler ones, leans over to grin down at Dipper. “Don’t worry. We gotcha now, dude,” he says happily, and Dipper tries to crab-scuttle backwards on his elbows, trying to get away. “You’re gonna be okay.”

There’s something about the way the kid stands, something about the way he’s moving and the words and the tone he uses and the smile on his face. Even though it’s kind of crazy, Dipper can still remember looking through the windshield of the car and seeing his own face in the backseat when Manly Dan had charged out into the road. He takes a deep breath, and asks, “...Wendy?”

The kid smiles again, a lazy half-smirk that Dipper recognises too well, and winks. “Hi, Dip. Mabel says to send you a great big hug, but I told her she can hug you herself when we get you back to the Shack.”

“No!” Dipper blurts, pushing himself back on his butt. A stray twig or something scrapes along the bottom of his leg, and he freezes. The kid - Wendy-in-the-kid’s-body - whoever is staring at him like he’s just pulled out a hand grenade, and even Dan and the other boys pause in the middle of - whatever they’re doing to the car, it looks like they’re getting ready to throw it into the trees - to stare in Dipper’s direction as well.

“Dude, why not?” the kid whose body Wendy’s currently occupying asks, sounding hurt, and Dipper’s brain curls into a little hedgehog-ball inside his skull, refusing to think. “C’mon, man, I thought you were finally starting to be cool with the hive thing.”

“Oh, I - I definitely am,” Dipper says, darting a quick look at the car and at Soos’ face, at Stan who looks like he’d vaulted into the backseat, standing with an arm raised to punch the kid who stood between him and Dipper. “But, uh, Stan and Soos aren’t!” he babbles, with a sudden burst of inspiration. “I’m just trying to, uh, convince them?”

Wendy-in-her-brother’s-body shrugs. “It’s fine, dude, we can just assimilate them -”

“No!” Dipper shouts again. “No, I mean, uh...”

Everyone’s still staring at him, but Dipper has no more bright ideas. He’s out of ideas, out of options, out of time. 

“Sorry,” Dipper says, and launches himself to his feet. 

Wendy or the kid or whoever is in control of the body standing in front of Dipper doesn’t see the punch coming. Dipper’s fist collides with the side of their head, and they go down like a sack of bricks. Dipper doesn’t wait to see if they get up again, bolting for the car instead. He dodges around two of Wendy’s brothers, and throws himself under the raised front end of the car, sliding along the scrabbly gravel to tackle Manly Dan’s legs.

It’s gotta be the element of surprise that does it. Dan tries to kick Dipper off without dropping the car, overbalances, and topples backwards with a crash that Dipper’s pretty sure knocks over a few trees somewhere in the depths of the woods. Dipper scrambles to his feet, flinging himself onto the hood as Stan slams the back two doors and Soos scrambles over into the driver’s seat, ramming the gas pedal to the floor and swerving sharply to get around Dan. The Stanleymobile’s tires screech against the gravel for a moment before it shoots forward like a bullet from a gun, nearly plastering Dipper against the windshield. 

Behind them, Dipper can see Wendy’s brothers and her father picking themselves up, two of the boys starting to run after the car before falling back. He heaves a sigh, and falls back himself against the hood of the Stanleymobile, staring up at the sky as the tops of the trees flash by.

...

Mabel can tell the moment Wendy drops back into her own body, because she pulls in a deep, gasping breath and sits upright with a jerk. Mabel had dropped out of riding along in Wendy’s brother’s head after the guns had come out, but she hadn’t been able to just walk away while her brother and her grunkle and Soos were so close.

“What happened?” she demands, as soon as Wendy’s eyes refocus. “Are they bringing Dipper back? What about Grunkle Stan and Soos?” Mabel swallows hard, and asks, “Is everybody okay?”

“Yeah, everybody’s fine,” Wendy grumbles. 

“You doesn’t sound nearly excited enough! What happened to Dipper?”

Wendy blows out a long breath over her top lip. “I don’t think he’s ready to come back just yet,” she says.

“Whaaaaaaaaat?!”

“Yeah, the left hook to the face kinda gave it away.” Wendy rubs her jaw, like the injury came back into her own body with her. 

“Dipper punched you?”

“Hey, I’m tough, I can take it.” Wendy shrugs, but her discomfort and worry crawls under Mabel’s skin. “Just give him a little more time, Mabel. He’s coming around. It’s just taking him a while.”

“Yeah, but what -” Mabel’s nearly choking on both their worry. This is the bad part of the hive - when one person’s sad, everybody else can make them happy again, but if everybody in the room is sad... “What if they take him away and he never comes back again? What if he’s just all on his own forever? What if - what if I never see him again?” She pauses. “You at least gave him that hug I told you to give him, right?”

Wendy’s sudden attack of guilt tells Mabel everything she needs to know.

Mabel lets out a long, low moan as she slumps forward over the table. 

“I’m gonna need some orange juice to deal with this,” she says, into the wood grain.

“Heyyyy,” Wendy says, in that voice that’s trying to be comforting, but just makes Mabel feel that miserable hollow achey spot at the back of her mind even worse. “It’s gonna be fine. They can’t take Dipper away. We all felt him connect this time, it’s just a matter of time before it’s permanent.”

It takes a huge effort, but Mabel manages to lift her head enough to nod. “I guess -” she starts, but anything else she might’ve been saying or thinking falls right out of her head. Somewhere in the forest, somewhere close, there’s a group of their hivemates - Mabel hasn’t been paying much attention to them, because she’s been busy following the Dipper disaster, but she’s sure paying attention now.

Because one of them’s looking directly at Grenda as she draws a golf club back up over her shoulder to take a swing.

“Whoa whoa whoa, hang on,” Mabel says, reaching out and grabbing Wendy’s wrist even though she knows Wendy can feel the sudden pulse of excitement and interest, knows Wendy knows as well as she does about the group out in the woods. “That’s Candy and Grenda! What’re they doing out by Grunkle Ford’s bunker? How’d they even know about it, anyway?”

There’s a thump from somewhere in the hall, and Mabel’s grunkle pops his head around the doorframe. “We’ve found Fiddleford!” he says, breathlessly, pulling on his overcoat while he speaks like he’s an instant away from running straight out the door. “It looks like he took the last few holdouts to our old bunker - we might need backup, maybe I can reason with him -”

“I’m coming too,” Mabel declares, jumping down from her chair. “Candy and Grenda are there! It’s just not a hive without them. No offense or anything,” she adds, and Wendy rolls her eyes, but she’s smiling and she doesn’t feel upset.

Ford grins too, holding out an arm. “Then let’s go make sure we don’t have a repeat of what happened with Dipper.”

...

They pull up short for only long enough for Dipper to get back inside the car and for Stan to take over the wheel again. This means the car ride gets about 75% more terrifying, but Dipper can live with that. It’s not like his heart rate or adrenaline level can get much higher, anyway.

The silence is just starting to get uncomfortable when Soos says, “Okay, I’m just gonna say this ‘cause I know we’re all thinking it, doods. That thing Manly Dan did with his face? Kind of...kind of attractive. Yanno. In a...weird, horrifying-abomination-against-nature kind of way.”

“Yeah, yeah, Soos, we all know you’re a gigantic weirdo,” Stan says. “I’m more worried about how they knew where to find us.”

Dipper turns away. There’s a dead fly stuck by its wing in the rubber lining along the bottom of the window to his left, and every time the Stanleymobile bounces over a rut or a pothole or a root, it flaps pathetically against the glass.

“It was my fault,” he admits, finally, heavily. “I - I don’t know what I was thinking, you guys just said we weren’t going back for Mabel and I -” He bites the rest of the sentence down, swallows the excuses before he can make them. “I connected with them. I let them know where we were.”

There’s a rattle in the quiet rumble of the Stanleymobile’s engine that Dipper hadn’t heard before, and he hopes Dan hadn’t broken anything when he’d scooped the car up off the road. The trees that flash past are starting to thin, just a little, just enough that he thinks he can catch the occasional glimpse of a road beyond.

Stan heaves a sigh. It sounds tired, resigned. “It’s getting worse, huh?” His voice is surprisingly gentle, and Dipper, with a combination of shock and horror, feels his eyes start to sting.

“I - I didn’t want to - I didn’t mean -”

The Stanleymobile swerves sharply to the right, and then slams to a halt. Dipper wraps both arms around himself, curling his knees up close to his chest and staring at the pale gooseflesh that covers them. There’s a tightness in his chest that has nothing to do with the sucking hollow in the back of his mind, and he has to force himself to take deep breaths, not to sniffle. The front door opens, then slams closed, and footsteps crunch on the gravel outside.

The back door opens with a groan of protest, and a warm, heavy hand lands on Dipper’s shoulder. He doesn’t look up from his knees. This is how it’s going to end, with him dragged out of the car again and left on the side of the road, left behind all alone for whatever’s infected him to slowly overtake his mind and his body and erase anything that’s left of him and the worst part is that he’ll never even realise that anything is wrong, he’ll never be able to get Mabel out, they’ll just be trapped as happy, contented, mindless puppets for the rest of their miserable -

“Kid,” Stan’s voice says, deep and gruff, “look at me.”

Dipper doesn’t look up from his knees.

“Mr. Pines,” Soos says warningly, but Stan just repeats the command, a little softer this time.

“Hey. C’mon. Chin up, look at me.”

Dipper bites his lower lip, struggles to keep down a welling sob that threatens to tear out of his throat. Slowly, cautiously, he raises his head.

Stan give Dipper’s shoulder a squeeze. His expression is soft, sorrow or sympathy or something related to both, but his eyes are like steel. Stan meets Dipper’s gaze eye to eye, and doesn’t even flinch at the sight of the one iris Dipper knows is that telltale acidic green.

“I’m gonna fix this,” Stan says, without taking his eyes off of Dipper’s, his voice level and even, less like a promise and more like a statement of fact. “Okay? We’re gonna fix this. Because we’re the Pines, and apparently that’s what we do.”

Despite himself, Dipper can’t help the smallest of chuckles. It tries to transmute into a sob halfway through, and he presses the knuckles of his left hand against his mouth, trying to keep it in.

“Hey, hey,” Stan says, and the hand on Dipper’s shoulder pulls him forward, gathering him close against his great-uncle’s chest like he’s not a big grown-up thirteen-going-on-fourteen-year-old, but just a scared kid who needs to be comforted. “Hey, shhh. You’re all right. It’s gonna be all right.”

Dipper presses his face against his grunkle’s shirt and tries to take deep breaths, tries not to let the floodgates burst. Stan’s arms wrap around him, warm and strong, and he slowly realises he’s shaking. 

“It’s okay,” Stan mutters, giving Dipper a gentle but absent pat on the back. “No way I’m lettin’ some creepy mind-sucking monster have my two best niblings.”

“Grunkle Stan,” Dipper manages, and then has to stop and take a deep breath before he can say, “we’re your only niblings.”

“Yeah? Well, all the more reason not to let some creepy mind-sucking monster getcha.” Stan straightens up, but not so much that he has to pull away from Dipper. “Soos? We’re goin’ back.”

Dipper draws in another rattling breath, lets it out slowly.

“If you wanna take the car,” Stan goes on, “get outta here, go find that Melody -”

“No way, Mr. Pines,” Soos says gravely. “If you’re going back, then so’m I.”

“Great. Take the wheel,” Stan says. He straightens up a little further and climbs up into the backseat beside Dipper, shutting the door behind him. 

Dipper tries not to cling pathetically to his grunkle, but he’s aware it’s a losing battle. He’s still shaking, just a little, and just having another person close enough to touch makes the hollow in the back of his head retreat, just a little.

Soos hesitates, eyeing the steering wheel. “Are you sure, Mr. Pines? I mean, this car is like your baby -”

“You did just fine back there with the Corduroys. There ain’t anybody I’d trust more to get us back into town in one piece.”

Soos puffs up like a pigeon, a proud smile blooming across his face. “You got it, Mr. Pines!”

“You can turn right onto the road up ahead, there’s a turning that takes you into town a few miles from here,” Stan says, and Soos nods solemnly, clambering out the passenger side door.

“Okay, kid.” Stan looks down at Dipper, who’s still latched to his waist like a limpet, and puts an arm around Dipper’s shoulders. “You can’t go to pieces on me just yet, I need your brains if we’re gonna stop this thing and get both our twins back.”

Dipper swallows hard, throat scraping drily, and manages a nod. He lets go of Stan’s waist as Soos climbs back in the driver’s seat and kicks the engine into gear, feeling a little silly about clinging to Stan like he’s about to plummet off a cliff if he lets go. Stan lets Dipper pull back, but he doesn’t move the arm he’s draped across Dipper’s shoulders, and Dipper doesn’t try to shrug it off. “Okay. Let’s start with what we know.”

...

As it turns out, what they know isn’t all that much. Dipper wishes he had his notebook, but the backs of the old scratch tickets Stan dug out from under the seats, though disgusting, work well enough. 

“What I don’t get is how it started,” Dipper says, starting to gnaw on the pen he’d found in the ashtray and quickly realising his mistake. "Like, okay, we’ve got a quasi-hivemind that takes people into itself by infecting them with spores and gives them super-strength and freaky mouths straight out of The Thingy and the ability to borrow each other’s bodies, and it’s trying to assimilate everybody in town - but why? Where did it come from? Who was the first person it took over? How did it get them?”

“Eh,” Stan says. “We can worry about that kinda stuff after we wipe it off the map. All I wanna know is how we kill it.”

“What I wanna know,” Soos says, glancing back over his shoulder, “is how it got Dr. Pines.”

Dipper and Stan both look up, and Soos shrugs, sheepishly.

“I just don’t get it, doods. You said it gets passed around by infected people making spores, which is super unsettling but makes sense, but Dipper also said he got knocked out as soon as Dr. Pines blew spores in his face. Right?”

“Yeah,” Dipper mutters.

“But Dr. Pines was in the basement, right, when he got infected. And Dipper said he walked in there and locked himself in. And that vending machine’s always locked, right? And only you guys know the code to get in, right? So, like, how would somebody have got down there to get at Dr. Pines?”

Dipper opens his mouth, then shuts it again, biting his lower lip as he turns the question over in his head.

“Soos,” he says, slowly, but picking up speed as he gets more excited, “I think you just found our missing piece.”

“I did?” Soos asks. “Great! Uh, where is it?”

“Great-uncle Ford found something when we were out looking for what we thought was a wendigo,” Dipper says, leaning over the small drift of scratch tickets that are taking the place of a corkboard and string. “He thought he could use it to make a cure. He took it down to the lab with him! That’s gotta be how he got infected!”

“So, wait, you’re thinkin’ it’s some kinda - what?” Stan asks. “This ‘queen’ thing you were talkin’ about?”

Dipper taps his pen against his bottom lip, then snatches it away before he can absentmindedly put it in his mouth again. “I think so! And if this hive works anything like a beehive, the queen would have to be sort of like its central brain. Maybe if we can kill it -”

He’s not quite sure what happens next, but there’s a slice of time missing and suddenly Stan’s shaking his shoulders, yelling his name. When Dipper blinks both eyes, trying to make sense of what just happened, Stan huffs out a wary sigh of relief, his vise-grip on Dipper’s shoulders loosening slightly. His tone is joking, but his voice is a little too tight and too sharp to be a joke when he says, “Think you’re gonna have to sit this one out, kiddo.”

“What? No! That thing’s still got Mabel -”

“And we’ll get her back,” Stan promises. “But - I don’t think this hive business is gonna let you even think about hurting that queen.”

Dipper opens his mouth to protest, but thinks better of it at the sight of Stan’s face. Instead, he asks, “What happened?”

“It was super scary, dawg!” Soos says from the front seat, over Stan’s stone-faced silence. “Your eyes, like, rolled back and then you just turned off. Like somebody’d flipped a switch, dood! We couldn’t even tell if you were breathing!”

“Oh, man,” Dipper mutters under his breath, pressing the palms of both hands against his eyes.

“Oh man is right,” Stan agrees. “Look, why don’t you - why don’tcha take a nap? You’re still pretty wore out, right?”

“Actually, mostly I’m just hungry now. And I thought sleeping was gonna turn me into one of them?” Dipper starts, and then his brain catches up to his mouth. “Oh - oh! Okay, yeah, I could try to get some sleep.”

He pulls the blanket back up over his legs, and goes to lie down on the back seat again. Just before he shuts his eyes, though, he adds, “But if I wake up with some kind of monster-mouth hidden behind my face, I’m blaming you guys.”

Stan barks out a laugh, and ruffles Dipper’s hair. “Go to sleep, kid.”

...

- like a dream, at first, like watching from underwater, on a television set that keeps dropping the signal, garbled images, feelings, snippets of sound -

- panicked shouting and wordless yells cutting in and out like a video pausing every few seconds to load -

- bright bursts of colour and motion against black -

- the smell of pine and petrichor mixed with metal and engine grease -

- furious frustrated anger, fear, helplessness - 

- the old man’s face falling slack, his eyes sinking closed over his long beard in a cloud of silvery green - 

- a wordless yell and a friend’s face twisted in anger as she raises a golf club to swing -

...

Stan and Soos stop talking with suspicious speed when Dipper jerks awake with a gasp. They both stare as he sucks in a deep breath, blowing it out slowly. The car’s pulled to a halt outside the Shack, he notices, the quiet of the forest bleeding in through the window glass instead of the rumble and whine of the engine. Outside, the blue sky and the pines are almost eerily still. It’d be a beautiful day if it weren’t for everything. 

There’s an insidious tendril of comfort, of calm, threading through the back of his thoughts, and Dipper’s stomach churns.

“I think we’re - you’re the only ones left,” Dipper says, and Stan and Soos share a glance that Dipper can’t read. He hurries to add, “I think I just watched a swarm of - well, of us take down Mr. McGucket. And it looked like Candy and Grenda weren’t far behind.”

“ ‘Us’?” Stan asks, and Dipper shuts his eyes. 

“You know what I mean.” He hates himself for how small and pathetic his voice goes. “Don’t make me say it.”

“That reminds me, dood, what’re we supposed to call people who’re part of this...hive thingy?” Soos asks, from the front seat. “Like, is there a name for you guys?”

“Soos, what...” Dipper starts, and Soos shrugs, holding out his hands palms-up.

“Hey, serious question!” He starts ticking off names with his fingers. “ ‘The infected’ sounds like something out of a zombie game... Are you like...hosts, or something? Hang on, wait, I think that’s taken. Hmm. Coming up with a catchy monster name is harder than I thought, doods.”

Dipper presses a hand to his forehead, unable to resist a small smile despite himself. 

“Me, I like the sound of ‘history’,” Stan says, reaching over to swing the door open. “Dipper -”

Dipper lifts his head, manages a tight-lipped smile that’s closer to a grimace. The thread weaving itself through his thoughts tugs, just a little, and he pinches the inside of his arm.

“Sitting this one out, I know, I know.” 

Stan nods, once, with an expression that makes Dipper’s heart kick once, painfully, in his chest, and then turns to Soos. “Hey Soos, keep an eye on the kid for me, willya?”

“...’hiver’ just sounds kinda silly, and anything they use to talk about, like, bees just doesn’t sound all that intimidating.” Soos looks up just long enough to flash a huge smile in Stan’s direction. “Sure thing, Mr. Pines!”

The door slams behind Stan, and Soos turns to Dipper with that same smile. “You wanna help me out with this naming thing, dood?”

Dipper sighs. “Sure. Why not.”

After all, he might as well have some say in what he’s becoming.

...

Grunkle Ford finds Mabel where she sat down, her back against the fake tree that hides the bunker her friends had been trying to get into. Her cheek’s still throbbing where Grenda had hit her with the golf club, and she’s just grateful it hadn’t been Candy who hit her - the golf club probably would’ve exploded on contact. 

“I believe that’s everyone,” Ford says brightly, gently laying the sleeping figure of Old Man McGucket down against the tree beside Mabel. “Now only my twin and yours - and the new Mr. Mystery - are still unaccounted for, and with how well Dipper’s coming along, I wouldn’t be surprised if the next time we see them he’s assimilated them himself.”

Mabel tugs her knees a little farther inside her sweater. “I guess,” she mumbles, into the soft wool of her collar. “I hope it’s soon.”

“You’re still upset about your friends,” Ford says, sympathetically, and Mabel looks down at her toes, giving them a wiggle.  The dead pine needles that cover the rough ground in a nice-smelling reddish carpet dig uncomfortably into her butt, but she doesn’t move. “Mabel, they’ll be fine. Better than fine, even! They’ll be so much happier when they’re fully part of the hive. And they won’t be able to stay mad once they understand.”

“They weren’t really mad,” Mabel hears herself saying, to her feet. “They were just scared. But - when everybody swarmed, for a second, I thought -”

She cuts herself off, buries her face a little farther into the collar of her sweater, like a turtle. A bright purple turtle. With a rainbow on the front.

“Why’s it so important to get everybody right now, anyway?” she asks, and Ford’s brow furrows. “Why can’t we talk to them? Give them some time to think about it? If being part of the hive is so great - and it totally is! - then why do we have to make them join instead of just telling them about how good it is and letting them come to us?”

“Unfortunately, people don’t always know what’s best for them,” Ford sighs. “As you’ve no doubt noticed.”

Mabel bites down on her bottom lip. “Yeahhhhhhh, but -” The image of a spritz bottle full of black liquid, of a jangling bell, flicker through her memory, but she can’t seem to figure out how they fit into anything. “When they’re so scared, it just seems kinda mean.”

“Sometimes, we have to be a little cruel to be kind.” Ford glances down at Mr. McGucket’s slumbering face, and Mabel realises how calm and peaceful he looks, like all his worries just got wiped away - and not by a memory gun. “Your friends will understand when they wake up.”

Mabel turns back to looking at her feet. 

It’s automatic, by now. She’s always reached for Dipper when she’s scared or upset, and he’s always done the same thing. She’s just starting to get used to doing it in her head, instead of with her arms. Just like she’s starting to get used to there being nothing there to grab hold of when she does.

She’s not expecting to feel a trickle of emotion in response.

Mabel sits straight up, nearly banging her head against the fake tree. Ford starts, staring blankly at her as she flaps the sleeves of her sweater in excitement. “Dipper’s back!”

“Dipper’s what?”

“They came back! They’re at the Shack!” Mabel can’t contain herself, she leans over Mr. McGucket to grab Ford’s face in both hands, squishing his cheeks a little as she bonks their foreheads together. “See? Feel that? He’s connecting again! And he’s here!”

She scrambles to her feet, holding out a hand to help Ford, who takes longer to push himself up on one knee and then stand. “C’mon! They were right by the Shack, they - they’re still there! Dipper hasn’t dropped out again - maybe it’s working! Maybe he’s finally actually bonding! Grunkle Ford, you don’t seem excited enough about this!”

“Of course I’m excited,” Ford protests. “This just seems - strange. Mabel, perhaps we should -”

“Whatever you were gonna say, save it,” Mabel interrupts. “I’ve got a brother to hug.”

She starts running before Grunkle Ford can stop her. It’s not far to the Mystery Shack.

...

Dipper knows Mabel’s coming before he sees her. It takes him a long time, too long, to realise just what it is he’s feeling.

It doesn’t take any time at all to figure out what it means.

Dipper throws the blanket aside and lunges for the door. He’s pulled up short, though, and glances back over his shoulder to see that Soos has grabbed him by the collar of his vest. “Soos, let go of me!”

“No can do,” Soos says apologetically, yanking Dipper back into the backseat. “Mr. Pines said to keep an eye on you, and I’m just gonna guess that probably includes making sure you don’t go all zombified and try to stop him. Sorry, dawg.”

“What?” Dipper stops trying to pull out of Soos’ grip, starts trying to twist around to look at him instead. “No, Soos, it’s Mabel! She’s headed this way, and if she gets into the Shack and finds Stan before -”

“Your mouth is saying that,” Soos says, rubbing his chin and squinting thoughtfully at Dipper, “but that big green starburst in your other eye’s saying, ‘Lock me in the car, Soos, or get ready to find out what alien mind-control feels like’.”

“What?” Dipper repeats, his train of thought derailing with a violent lurch. He cranes his neck to try to get a look at himself in the rearview mirror.

The reflection that looks back, sure enough, has one violently green eye and one brown eye with a jagged ring of green around the pupil. Dipper’s not sure if it’s just his imagination, but he thinks he can see it growing, just slightly.

The contented warmth pooled at the back of his mind swells, and for a moment, it’s not disgust or horror that gnaws at Dipper’s ribs at the sight of his own corrupted eyes, but a wash of relief.

Dipper shakes his head sharply, trying to shake the feeling off. “Sorry, Soos,” he says, and then, in one quick motion, unzips his vest and shucks it off, diving for the door.

He gets to the door before Soos can stop him, throwing it open and falling out onto the grass. Dipper scrambles to his feet and slams the door just as Soos dives after him. Soos smacks up against the window, his cheek pressed up against the glass as he fumbles with the handle. Dipper turns and runs for the Shack’s front door, but he’s pretty sure he hears, from behind him, a disappointed cry of, “Curse you, child lock!”

Mabel sees Dipper before he sees her. Dipper’s halfway to the porch when the burst of excited recognition pops in the back of his head. Despite everything, Dipper feels an answering kick of throat-clogging joy. 

That’s when the bright purple blur comes flying out of the trees and slams into Dipper, tackling him to the ground.

“Dipper!” Mabel shouts, throwing both arms around his neck and squeezing like she’s trying to choke him out. “DipperDipperDipperDipperDipper!”

“Ack - Mabel, I gotta breathe,” Dipper manages, but he hugs her back, as tight as he can.

“You’re back!” Mabel sits up, letting go of Dipper enough to get a good look at him, but it still somehow feels like she’s got him all wrapped up in an enormous hug. “We missed you so much! Did you figure out how to do the face thing? Wendy said you’d team up with her and beat me at catching birds but -”

“Whoa, Mabel, slow down!” Dipper laughs, propping himself up on his elbows. He can’t stop just looking at his twin, feeling her excitement and relief twining through his until he can’t tell who’s feeling what. It doesn’t really matter, anyway. They’re back together and the ragged hollow under his ribs is welling full of joy and love and the sky is so blue it hurts to look at.

Mabel shoots an enormous grin at Dipper and launches herself at him again. This time, she doesn’t knock him over, but it’s a near thing. The smell of her strawberry shampoo is almost overpowering, and the wool of her sweater is almost too warm under the blinding sun, but Dipper doesn’t pull away, leaning into Mabel’s shoulder and feeling like his whole body is just one huge sigh of relief.

For the first time since he woke up in the backseat of the Stanleymobile, everything is all right.

Mabel gives an agreeing hum and pats Dipper on the back in a way that’s probably supposed to be reassuring, though it feels a little more like she’s trying to get him to burp. She waits a full five seconds before blurting out, “How’d you convince Grunkle Stan to bring you back? Did you get him? How about Soos? Are they here too?”

“Oh, yeah. Soos is just back in the car and Stan went ahead into the Shack -” Dipper stops. He’d forgotten, for a moment, in the rush of finally seeing Mabel again, but he remembers now what Stan had gone in planning to do, and the knowledge trickles cold down his spine. 

He scrambles to his feet, and Mabel follows automatically before she even asks, “What’s wrong?”

“Stan’s going to try to destroy the hive,” Dipper says, over his shoulder, already starting up the porch stairs. The flash of Mabel’s shock and horror nearly bowls him over, but he doesn’t stop. There isn’t time.

“No way! Grunkle Stan would never -” Mabel starts, but her voice falters.

“Mabel, he tried to take me away, remember?”

Mabel bites her lower lip, looking down at her feet, and something churns uneasy in the pit of Dipper’s stomach. It doesn’t stop when she looks up, but her face is determined. “Wait up. If anybody can talk Grunkle Stan out of doing something stupid, it’s me.”

“Okay, but most of the time you’re the one who convinced him to do the stupid thing in the first place.”

“Exactly!” Mabel marches up the steps past Dipper, and sweeps through the door into the Shack. 

Dipper shakes his head, and follows her.

...

“Grunkle Stan! Don’t touch that elevator button!”

Stan stops at the bottom of the stairs, and turns, slowly, looking up. The expression on his face when his gaze falls on the twins almost makes Dipper’s anger ebb away. 

“Kids,” he says, and doesn’t say anything more. His voice is impossibly heavy.

“Don’t do this, Grunkle Stan,” Mabel says, darting down the steps to the lower landing. Dipper, following at a slower pace, sees Stan freeze up, pressing back against the elevator doors as Mabel skids to a halt in front of him. “It’s okay! Everybody’s fine, and happy - happier than they were, anyway - it’s - it’s a good thing! Please don’t take it away.”

If Stan notices the little wobble of uncertainty in her voice, he doesn’t mention it. Neither does Dipper, as he steps off the last stair to stand beside Mabel, arms crossed over his chest.

There’s a chill in the clammy air, a smell of wet metal and earth. Somewhere in the depths of the elevator shaft, something mechanical groans, its echoes drifting up to fill the stairwell.

“What’d you do to Soos,” Stan says, at last, like a ton of lead dropping on Dipper’s head. Dipper shrugs one shoulder, resenting the implication.

“Last I saw him he was trapped in the backseat of your car by the child lock. I’m pretty sure he’s still there.”

Stan’s brow furrows. “The Stanleymobile doesn’t have a child lock, kid. They didn’t invent that ‘til the eighties.”

“Okay, then Soos is just stuck in the car for some other - look, he’s fine, and he hasn’t been assimilated, which is what you’re really worried about, right?” Dipper has to bite down on everything he really wants to spit; it pools like venom in his mouth, tasting bitter, and Mabel reaches out and tangles her fingers in his even as she wraps slightly worried fluff around his thoughts. “Because you’re just too scared of anything new or strange or weird to stop and think that maybe this could be a good thing.”

“Feels like we’ve already had this conversation once or twice,” Stan says, absentmindedly scratching the back of his neck, and it sounds like he’s starting to get his voice back under control. He actually sounds almost nonchalant now. “And I think you’re forgetting who sobbed in my arms for fifteen solid minutes just thinkin’ about becomin’ what you are.”

Mabel sucks in a horrified breath, and Dipper feels his cheeks go hot. “Dipper -”

“It was only because it all reminded me too much of - of Bill,” he mutters, sharply. “And I’m fine now.” Mabel’s fluff just grows more worried, so he repeats, “I’m fine.”

Stan cocks an eyebrow at that, levelling a clearly skeptical look in Dipper’s direction, and suddenly Dipper is done with this conversation. Arguing with the old man isn’t going to work, anyway. Dipper himself is living proof of that. They’ll just have to show him, by force if they have to.

For some reason, though, he can feel Mabel’s reluctance bleeding over into his own thoughts.

“We can’t let you hurt the queen,” Dipper says, as much to remind Mabel as to warn Stan.

“Well, that’s too bad,” Stan says, and his voice is is almost jaunty now. “Because if that’s what I gotta do to get you kids back, then that’s what I’m gonna do.”

The bare bulb of the light buzzes and sputters overhead, its dim light lending a greenish, underwater cast to the stairwell.

“You could join us,” Mabel blurts, and Stan gives her a sad smile.

“Sorry, pumpkin. I don’t think a hivemind’s really for me.”

“But you’d love it so much!” There’s an edge of frenzy pushing at the back of Dipper’s thoughts now, and he’s not sure if it’s coming from Mabel or just bleeding into the desperation in her voice. “I mean it! You’ve always got friends, you always feel how much everybody loves you - you’d never be lonely ever again, and - and there’s this neat thing we can do with our faces that I bet would really scare the pants off of Summerween trick-or-treaters -”

“Yeah, think I’ve seen it,” Stan says, with an exaggerated shudder, cutting off Mabel’s voice before it can rise into a register only dogs can hear. 

Dipper realises his hands are clenched into fists. Why are they still standing around talking? There’s a press against his throat that he realises dazedly must be spores itching to be released. What’s holding him back?

He glances over at Mabel, and is shocked to see she’s shaking.

“We’re gonna turn you anyway,” she says, quietly, and Dipper feels her reluctance in his own mind, slowly blooming into frozen horror. “We can’t let you do anything to the queen - Grunkle Stan, I don’t wanna hurt you!”

Stan’s voice is gentler than Dipper had ever expected to hear, like somebody talking to a scared animal. “Mabel, sweetie, if you don’t want to, then don’t.”

Mabel shakes her head. 

Dipper’s fists are itching to move. The muscles under his face are just plain itching. He’s shivering with energy, with this compulsive urge to move and do something and keep the hive safe, but Mabel’s reluctance - and her growing fear - hold him pinned in place. Mabel’s upset, and that means something here is wrong.

“It’ll be better,” Mabel says, to herself, more like she’s trying to convince herself than Stan. “Everything will be better.”

Stan’s jaw clenches, and then relaxes. He takes one cautious step forward, reaching out to rest a hand on Mabel’s shoulder, and it takes everything in Dipper not to lash out and rip Stan’s arm from its socket. 

The thought makes Dipper stop, take a mental step back. Where’s all this anger even coming from?

“Mabel,” Stan says, low and as soft as somebody with a voice like Stan’s can manage. “Sweetie, you’ve always trusted me. I never coulda thanked you enough for that.”

Dipper wants to scream at Mabel to get Stan now, while he’s close, while he’s vulnerable, but something keeps his jaw locked. He only watches, feeling wave after wave of terrified fury crash against him like he’s a rock they’re slowly wearing away into the sea.

“So this time,” Stan goes on, pulling away and stepping back towards the elevator just as the doors slide open with a cheerful ding!, “I’m trusting you.”

He steps into the elevator, the one that’s going to take him down into the lab where the queen is hidden, helpless and defenseless. The queen who connects them all. The queen he’s planning to kill.

The last resistance that had been holding Dipper back crumbles. 

He lunges for the elevator doors as they start to slide shut again, grabbing one with each hand and forcing them back open. Stan stares back, startled but not, as far as Dipper can tell, afraid. “Kid,” he starts, “you don’t wanna do this.”

“Oh yeah I do,” Dipper says, and opens his mouth -

Something grabs him around the waist, pulls him backwards out of the elevator doors, and spins him around to fling him onto the stairs. All the air is forced out of Dipper’s lungs in one long burst, and he struggles to suck in another breath.

Mabel is standing in front of the elevator, the light behind her casting a sinister shadow over her face in which only the glow of her eyes is clearly visible.She’s breathing hard, knees bent and arms outstretched in a stance that makes Dipper think of sumo wrestlers. 

“I won’t,” she says, loud and vehement and clear, and the miasma at the back of Dipper’s mind seethes. “I won’t hurt Grunkle Stan, and I won’t make him join, and I won’t let you either, I don’t care what you do -”

She stops, abruptly. Dipper just has time to see her eyes dim, to feel the horrible emptiness radiate from where just a moment ago there was all her fear and anger and love and doubt, before, unceremoniously, she collapses to the floor.

The furious compulsion is still battering at the back of Dipper’s brain, but it couldn’t make him move even if he’d wanted to. He’s stuck, transfixed, staring at the little dark heap that is Mabel.

The elevator doors start to slide shut, and Stan rams his hand against a button on the inside, making them rattle open again. Dipper somehow manages to pick himself up and cross the two strides between him and his twin, kneeling beside her without looking up at Stan. Mabel’s chest is rising and falling, oh so very shallowly, but she’s so still.

“Kid...” Stan says, trailing off in the middle of his own sentence.

“I might not be able to harm the queen,” Dipper says, hearing his own voice like it’s coming out of somebody else’s mouth. He feels strangely numb, like he’s just been dipped in icewater and dropped back into the basement frozen. “But nothing’s gonna stop me from making sure Mabel’s all right.”

The elevator doors stand open, spilling grimy fluorescent light over the purple of Mabel’s sweater. Dipper slams a fist against the rough concrete floor, trying to concentrate on the pain and not the rising tide of fury and fear that wants to drive him to his feet. “Go! Before it gets me again!”

It seems like an eternity, but the elevator doors finally slide closed again, swallowing the light. The mechanical sounds start up again, deep in the bowels of the basement, as the elevator sinks, leaving Dipper alone in the artificial twilight with Mabel’s - he doesn’t want to think ‘body’.

The storm of crashing, whirling, churning emotion is making it hard to concentrate, to focus. Dipper reaches out to turn Mabel over, onto her back, but stops himself before he even touches her. If she’s hurt herself, won’t moving her cause more damage?

He settles, at last, for tucking two fingers against her neck just under her chin, looking for a pulse. Dipper can’t seem to find one, but that might have more to do with the panic squeezing his ribs closed and the way the world is starting to swim around him than whether or not Mabel actually has a pulse.

He can’t tell what’s his own fear and anger, what’s coming from what had been a comforting warmth at the back of his mind. Now it’s just screaming, and Dipper can’t tell if he’s more furiously, murderously angry at Stan or the hive or himself.

It feels like his brain is on fire. Like it’s burning, crackling and withering within his peeling, melting skull.

His vision blurs, dims.

...

...

“Whoa, I just had the craziest dream,” Mabel says. 

Dipper tries to open his eyes, but it feels like his eyelids are stuck together. He raises a hand to rub them off, lets it flop across his face. Everything feels like it’s been pumped full of lead.

He groans.

“Wait, why are we in the basement?” Mabel asks, somewhere to Dipper’s left. “Whoa, ew!”

Dipper tries rubbing at his eyes again. Something flakes off against his hand, and he manages to pry his eyes open.

Mabel’s starting to sit up, leaning on her elbows and staring down at a puddle of something green and goopy on the cold concrete where her head must’ve been lying a moment before. There’s trails of something the same colour streaking her face, leading across her cheek from one nostril and the corner of her eye, like - like it had leaked out of her head while she was lying down.

As Dipper watches, Mabel reaches out and pokes it with one finger. “Gross!” she exclaims, sounding anything but grossed out. She looks over at Dipper, her eyes big and brown and thankfully normal. “Wait, that wasn’t a dream, was it?”

Dipper lets out a long sigh of relief and lets his eyes sink closed again.

...

“I found it in the buried spaceship,” Ford says. “I think we may have woken it up last summer when we accidentally armed the security bots. I believe it must have been dormant through the winter, and then worked its way out with the thaw.” 

“Well, whatever it was, it sure didn’t like your acetylene torch,” Stan says, with a cackle that sounds just a little too proud. “Shoulda seen that sucker flame!”

Ford clears his throat, looking down at his mug of Mabel-made hot chocolate with extra whipped cream and glitter. “I should have -”

“Yeah, yeah, you shoulda torched it as soon as you got it downstairs, you shoulda squished it back in the spaceship, we’ve all heard it. You thought you were helping, poindexter. We all came out fine, so just quit beatin’ yourself up about it.” Stan crosses his arms, leans back in the armchair. “You’re makin’ me miss Trev’s confession to Nicola.”

Ford huffs out a sound that’s almost a laugh. “Of course.” His voice is tinged with teasing amusement. “Don’t let me keep you from your incredibly important episode of Resignation Street.”

“Hey, I just saved the world for the second time,” Stan says. “I think I’m owed a little downtime.”

“Dipper?” Mabel says, drawing Dipper’s attention back to the game board spread out across the floor between them. “It’s your roll, sleepyhead.”

“Oh, yeah. Sorry,” Dipper says, scooping up the dice and shaking them in one hand. “Wait, was I the pink or the purple?”

“Dipper,” Mabel sighs, exasperated, but she’s smiling. “You’re the blue guy. See? The one alllll the way back at the start?”

“Stan’s rubbing off on you way too much,” Wendy says. She doesn’t even look up from her magazine, kicking her legs over the arm of the couch absentmindedly as she flips a page. “You totally moved Dipper’s token while he was distracted by Ford’s story.”

“What? Would I, Mabel Pines, loving sister and undisputed champion of all things board game, ever cheat my dear, sweet brother out of a win at Parcheezwhiz?” Mabel beams hugely, twisting back and forth to look at the others gathered around the TV.

“Yeah, you definitely would,” Wendy says, from behind her magazine, and Soos nods in agreement. 

Mabel shrugs, then reaches over the board and moves Dipper’s token up several squares.

There’s a sound just on the edge of hearing, and Dipper turns to see what it is. Mabel leans around him, following his line of sight, and her whole face lights up from inside, an enormous grin spreading across her face.

“Waddles!” she shouts, and scrambles to her feet, knocking over the game board as she dashes out of the living room.

“Mabel -” Dipper calls after her, looking at the ruined game, and then shrugs himself.

Mabel’s out on the porch, kneeling with both arms draped around her pig’s neck and her face buried in Waddles’ shoulder when Dipper opens the front door. At first, Dipper thinks she’s sobbing, but then she looks up and he can see her shoulders are shaking from laughter. Waddles looks up too, and, seeing Dipper, gives a delighted hwoinch! 

“He came back!” Mabel crows, pulling her pig closer to her and giving him a squeeze that draws a startled grunt out of him. “Waddles came back!”

The pig in question leans forwards to snuffle his nose against Mabel’s cheek, and she bursts into laughter all over again.

Dipper’s smiling as he sits down beside her, reaching up to give Waddles a scratch on the top of his head. He doesn’t turn around at the sound of footsteps behind him, just smiles a little wider at the succession of pops and creaks and complaints as Grunkle Stan crouches down to stare at the pig as well.

“Place isn’t the same without this little guy rooting around,” he declares, finally, which is hilarious because Waddles hasn’t been a ‘little guy’ since Mabel used the size-changing crystals to sneak him onto the bus. “Glad to see his pink porky face around again.”

He straightens up with a grunt, but not before clapping both Dipper and Mabel on the shoulder, one hand each. It’s just a moment of pressure, of warmth. It’s nothing like the constant hum of loving presence that had filled Dipper’s head.

Somehow, it seems all the better for it.

Dipper scoots over to lean against Mabel’s shoulder, within range of Waddles’ piggy kisses. The sun is sinking through the trees, rosy pink and amber, its warmth slowly fading as the fingerling shadows of trees stretch towards the Shack. Dipper lets out a sigh, feeling the tension drain from his back and shoulders as he lets the cool evening breeze ruffle his hair, carrying faint birdcall from the trees. There’s more shuffling and stomping behind them, Wendy’s calm assessment of “oh man, that’s a nice sunset,” Ford’s quiet agreement, and Soos’ assertion that the only thing that could improve on it would be if, like, a tiger was holding it in its mouth, doods, and the tiger was also on fire, signalling that the rest of the family have spilled out onto the porch.

Dipper leans over, and gently knocks his head against Mabel’s. She leans her head on his in turn, and he doesn’t need an alien mental link to know she’s just as content as he is. Their family are all safe and gathered close around them, and there’s plenty of summer still ahead.

The stillness is only broken when Mabel says, “I wonder if we can still do the face thing.”