Being a tree sucked.

Well, okay, being a tree wasn't the worst thing that could've happened to him, considering what had happened to Grunkle Ford and Grunkle Stan – at least he could still talk to the others whenever they dropped by – but still. Him, a tree. It sucked.

He couldn't move (save for those creepy hand-branch things sprouting for his body, which moved like ordinary arms and hands, sometimes on their own.) He was rooted to the ground, without legs to carry him indoors when chilly nightfall came, and he felt so, so sluggish then, too, and on days when the sun was hidden behind clouds or when Wendy came to visit. He could only imagine how bad this would get during the winter.

And one guy with an axe would be all it took to kill him. After all he'd gone through, after shape-shifters and infinity dice and Multi-Bear and Weirdmageddon, it could be a sharp piece of metal on a stick that killed him.

If Bill could still see him from wherever he'd ended up, he was probably laughing his triangular butt off.

So, here he was. A tree. A really creepy tree, covered in faces and glowing lichen, that could make other trees grow.

Mabel could fly, McGucket could teleport, Gideon could see into the future, Wendy could create mini-snowstorms, Soos could shape-shift – heck, even Robbie had some useful power, even if he couldn't really control it! And here he was, staring at a tree off to one side of the clearing he stood in, and concentrating on growing moss.

He felt so useless.

Dipper glared at the tree with his new hollow sockets, then sighed, and turned his gaze skyward. It was almost nighttime again – a couple dozen nights out here in the wilderness, unable to go anywhere. Mabel would be coming by again – she always came to visit him after her now-daily flight around the town – and would try to cheer him up again.

And again, it probably wouldn't help. It would just make him feel more useless.

Reacting to his frustration, a small sapling burst from the ground with a pfft of displaced dirt. There was already a small scattering of them all over the clearing, tiny and disturbing.

"Stop it already!" he yelled at it hoarsely.

It didn't answer. Of course it didn't.

"Wow, you look really frustrated today."

Dipper turned his gaze away from the darkening forest floor – where several new saplings had sprouted in the last hour – and up to the tiny glowing figure that was his sister, hovering just above him.

"Hey Mabel."

"Come on, bro-bro, cheer up a little!" She reached out with the ribbons growing from her head, moving them as if to pinch his wooden cheeks. "It's not so bad!"

"Not so bad? Mabel, I'm a tree!"

"A tree that can grow other trees!"

"And that's all I can do! I can't make trees move, or talk to animals, or –"

She patted his cheeks again. "Shhh. It's fine! And you might be able to talk to trees! Have you tried that?"

Dipper stared at his little sister. Then he stared at the trees. Then at Mabel again.

"Mabel, trees can't talk."

She pointed at the largest of the saplings growing from the ground, which was already almost half Dipper's height after a brief few weeks.

"Try it!" She ordered, pink glowing eyes scrunched up in her new equivalent of an impish grin. "Be the Lorax, Dipper!"

"Are you ever going to let that go?"

"Nope!"

With a huff – and a stifled grin, because there was no way he was going to let Mabel see him smile at a joke like that – he stared at the sapling.

"Uh, hi?" he said.

The tree didn't answer.

"See? It doesn't work."

"Try harder!" she insisted.

Dipper sighed, and tried again. "Hello, uh, little tree? I'm Dipper. Who're you?"

No answer.

Man he felt dumb.

"Again!"

"Mabel, it's not gonna –"

"Try again!" she insisted.

"Mabel, trees can't talk!"

"You can!"

"I'm not a real tree, though!"

She deflated for a moment, then perked up again. "Well, maybe they can't talk, but maybe they can think! Try thinking it at them!"

Dipper sighed again. No use in arguing with Mabel when she was in one of these moods. Feeling dumber and dumber by the second, he thought as hard as he could at the sapling: Hello?

There wasn't a reply in words.

But there was a weird feeling. He couldn't quite place what it was, but there was something.

Hello?

The feeling intensified. Frowning, Dipper concentrated as hard as he could at the sapling -

And his senses fractured. His sense of touch was impossibly intense! He could feel vibrations in the ground – something that felt almost like footsteps, coming from an animal trail he remembered being nearby, an unidentifiable sensation that had a scraping feel to it. And sounds sounded louder, and echoed, like he was hearing two at once. And his vision! He was seeing in two directions at once! One from his normal point of view, where he could see Mabel's slightly worried face -

And one from below, looking up at himself and his pained expression from about the same height as his "waist."

With a yelp, Dipper forced his focus back on an intensely watching Mabel, and the sensations were gone. The little sapling's trunk twitched, then went still again.

One of the faces in it's bark looked an awful lot like his, now. It hadn't been like that before.

How had that happened? What had happened?

"Dipper?"

Hesitantly, he focused on the tiny tree, on that weird feeling, and again, his senses split, but this time he was a little more ready for it. His original eyes stayed open, and it was like he was seeing a different scene in each eye, one eye looking down at the sapling, with it's little dark eyes that'd opened in one of the faces, and one eye looking up at himself, staring down at himself with a considerably more human face.

And also at Mabel, who was waving a little nubby limb in front of his face in frustration, and shouting.

"Hey, Dipdop! Hey! You okay?"

"Y-yeah." he managed, and watched both of his mouths – one his, one a mouthlike depression beneath the new eyes on the sapling – move with the words, making it come out as an echo of sorts. Mabel jumped, and turned to stare at the little sapling.

With an exhausting burst of concentration, Dipper slowly raised one of the sapling's hand-like branches, and waved it at her.

For a moment, she only stared. Then her little pink eyes scrunched up into a huge grin again.

"That's so COOL!" she screeched.

And even though his head felt like it was splitting in two at being literally in two places at once, Dipper couldn't help but feel a little better about himself.

He was still a tree, but maybe, just maybe, he wasn't as useless as he thought.