Dipper Pines is twelve years old when he gets shipped off to Gravity Falls with his sister. At first it seems like any other damp and dusty backwoods town, until books start showing up in hidden spaces underneath the grass and fake psychics start hunting for blood. Things get interesting, really interesting. There's gnomes and monsters and video game characters coming to life and Dipper can't just hide behind a book anymore because the one he's got now has him running all over the place.
Dipper is twelve when he learns what it's like to really live.
He's also twelve when he learns what it's like to die.
For about a good half an hour he thinks he's still alive. He wakes up in the middle of the crater that used to be the Mystery Shack, now blown to bits. He can't remember anything more than the black vans and the lights that kept chasing him, filling him with adrenaline. He remembers thinking that he's the one who started this, so he's gotta end it. He remembers the screaming.
He doesn't feel hurt, which should've been clue number one that something was wrong. He just feels confused and anxious. He's ready to jump out of his own skin.
He needs to find Mabel and everyone else. He has to make sure that they're okay.
A half an hour is how long it takes for him to find out. In that time he searches high and low, still in too much shock to notice that the trees aren't green anymore and he can't feel the ground underneath his feet. All he can concentrate on is finding his family and making sure that he did was right, whatever it was. He still can't remember that part.
They're at the diner, of all places. The place is abandoned, since everyone evacuated the town this morning. Still, it's Mabel, Grunkle Stan, Soos, and Wendy sitting in a booth and eating a tray of coffee omelette that grown cold and mushy. They're not saying anything, and don't make eye contact. Mabel is asleep, but the areas around her eyes are red and her nose is running.
Dipper can't help but rush through the door, literally. He doesn't notice, though. He's too happy to see that, except for a couple cuts and bruises, they're all okay. Everyone's okay.
"Guys, we did it!" he says. "We defeated Bill, we saved the day! Why are you—" He stops, noticing that no one has turned to look at him. "Why aren't you smiling?"
They don't respond. Dipper starts waving his arms. "Hey! Guys, come on. I know facing Bill on my own wasn't exactly smart, but I don't deserve the silent treatment."
Wendy goes to bring another bite of coffee omelette to her mouth, but her hand starts shaking so much the fork drops to the table, making everyone jump.
Her voice is shaky, too, as she begins to talk to Stan. "He could've…there's the possibility that…he couldn't just be…"
And it's weird, because Wendy's the most laid back person Dipper knows. But right now she's got her spine hunched up and her fingers nervously clutching the hem of her shirt. She looks like a wreck.
Soos also speaks up. He looks tired, to put it simply, and he's not smiling like he usually is. "Yeah. It's completely possible. Right, Mr. Pines?" Stan doesn't talk. "…right?"
Dipper watches the old man sigh and not make eye contact. "The kid made a reckless decision and now…" He glances towards Mabel, checking to see if she's still asleep. "Now he's paid the price. At least he ended up a hero."
"But he was here," Wendy continues. "I talked to him, like, an hour ago. Dipper can't just be dead."
The world freezes and tilts all at the same time. Dipper tries to shake it off, though, see it as a joke. This has to be a misunderstanding, right? After all, there was a lot of confusion and an explosion. He's just a little banged up, is all. Not dead.
Well, actually, he isn't banged up at all. He's doesn't have a single bandage on him, not even the one he had for the paper cut he got last week. Weird.
He starts laughing, in spite of himself. Part of him finds this to be a hilarious joke and the other is just trying to keep things happy and hopeful for a little moment longer. Stupid, he was so stupid. He should've noticed this in the first place.
"Haha, very funny. Pull a joke on the kid who just saved the whole town, maybe even the whole universe." He crosses his arms and sees that everyone has gone back to the somber expressions they had on before. Wendy's started to cry. "Oh, come on, Wendy. Don't be like that. See? Not dead." He grins, but she doesn't look up.
Dipper shakes his head. "Just…" He reaches to tap her shoulder. "Hey, look at m—" His hand phases through her like water. It feels cold and weird for a moment before he pulls his hand back. He remembers that feeling, from a time before this happened. When he got trapped in the mindscape and was a….oh. Oh, no.
Oh, god, no.
#
He follows them back to Wendy's house. Her family decided to stay behind, after all, Manly Dan doesn't just get up and run away like a sissy when the apocalypse comes. The house is almost ready to collapse, though, shaken to bits from the explosion.
"Nothing that won't be fixed, though," Wendy says. "Dad breaks the roof in half on a bi-monthly basis."
Mabel is still asleep when they arrive, and one of Wendy's younger brothers, Henry, offers up his bed so that Mabel doesn't have been put down on the floor. Stan carries her over into the small room and gives her a sad look before leaving. Dipper stays behind.
He floats, absently, and waits for her to wake up. If he gets close enough, he can feel her dreams. Like, feel the emotions that come with them. Must be a dead person thing.
But he can feel a lot of negativity and sadness in her head. He leans a little closer and hears whispers of voices he can't understand and makes out one that sounds like him, telling Mabel that he'll be back before making a cheesy joke about geometry homework. God those were bad last words. He should've said something cooler.
But he didn't. And now he's really, truly dead.
It makes him want to laugh, in a sick, twisted way. He's dead. How hilarious.
But he doesn't laugh. He concentrates on Mabel's dreaming, and the screaming that comes from it. Her screams.
He's gotta do something. Acting on impulse, he reaches to take hold of her and does so without thinking. He shakes her awake, yelling her name until her eyes blink open and she groans in exhaustion.
"Wha—Dipper?" she asks sleepily. She sits up rapidly and wraps her arms around him. She would be squeezing the air out of him, if he needed to breathe. "Dipper, you giant poophead! I thought you were dead! Did you defeat Bill? Well I mean, duh, you should've. Did you see that explosion? It was, like, whoosh!"
"Ah, Mabel?" Dipper manages to say. "Mabel, I gotta-"
Mabel let's go and hops off of the bed, arms flailing. "It was so big! Like you know that mushroom Robbie drew on the water tower? It was like that."
"Mabel, there's something I need to tell you and—"
It was so loud my ears were ringing like crazy! And we all thought you were dead but now you're not and—"
"That's just it, though," Dipper interrupts. "I am."
Mabel's smile fades slightly. "Don't be silly. You're right…" She looks at him, really looks at him, and sees his feet above the ground and suddenly everything clicks. Her arms begin to shake. "But…but you can't be…"
"I am. Mabel, I didn't make it out of there."
He watches his sister start to tear up. "B-But that…you saved the day. It's supposed to be happy now, that's how it always ends in movies and stuff. You can't…and now you're dead forever that just stinks and—"
"Hey, don't get like that. At least you can still see me. It'll be like I never…you know. I'll just forever be stuck in puberty." He gives a weak chuckle, hoping that the joke will make Mabel smile. It doesn't. "It's not all bad."
Mabel shrugs, wiping her nose on her sweater. "Yeah, I guess. Just…how are we gonna explain this to Mom and Dad?"
Crap. He hadn't thought about that.
"We'll burn that bridge when he get to it," he tells her. "For now I guess I'll just…keep my spirits up."
It's quiet for a moment before they're both bursting into laughter. It's nice, seeing as everything else has gone to shit.
"You're such a nerd, you nerd," Mabel chokes out between giggles. She tried to punch his harm, but ends up leaning too much into it. That causes more laughter.
Stan bursts through the door looking worried. "Is everything okay? I heard a thump."
Mabel gets up, still laughing. "I'm fine." Her giggles subside as she brushes herself off.
Stan frowns. "Have you been…laughing?"
"Heh, yeah. Dipper's being a huge dork."
Grunkle Stan's grip on the knot knob tightens and he looks down. "Um, sweetie…Dipper didn't…ah. Why don't you sit down?" She does so, slowly, and he sits next to her as Dipper floats aimlessly next to the nightstand, waiting. "You see, Mabel. Dipper did a stupid thing. A brave thing, sure, but also kinda stupid. And when people do stupid things, sometimes there's stupid consequences. You following me here?"
Mabel nods before frowning. "Is this about Dipper being dead?"
"And one of those consequences—wait, what?"
"Yeah, I know. But it's okay, though! He's a ghost, see?" She points towards him, and Dipper watches as Stan looks not at him, but the area behind him.
Mabel notices this, and plucks the glasses off of his eyes. She cleans the dirt and blood that's still around the corner before placing them back on his face. "That should help."
"I still don't see anything."
Mabel frowns. "But…" She looks to Dipper, who shrugs.
"Twin thing?" he suggests.
Mabel looks down at her knees, which are still pretty scraped up. "You don't think I'm crazy, do you?"
Stan laughs, which makes the twins jump. "Of course not, kid. You think after all we've been through I would call you crazy?" He chuckles a little before looking towards the area that Dipper's floating around. "So Dipper's right there, huh?"
"Yep," Mabel answers cheerfully.
"Well kid," he says, looking at the lamp next to Dipper. "What can I say? I told you so."
#
The next two weeks are weird, to say the least. Everyone just kind of accepts that Dipper is a ghost and things start to get better. The Corduroys get back into business a week after the Incident, seeing as a lot of people are returning from the evacuation and need their homes rebuilt. Wendy and the kid who let Mabel nap on his bed, Henry, stay behind most days to make sure that Stan doesn't end up burning the house down.
The general area is still sectioned off in order to contain the potential radiation from the explosion, which means that the Pines parents won't be able to come up for at least another month. All they know is that magic is real and their son isn't the same as he was before.
Mabel and Henry get along well, bonding over comic books and their matching pet rocks. When he's not around Mabel will gush to Dipper about everything they've done in the past day, like Dipper hasn't seen it himself because when you're dead you can't do that much.
He honestly doesn't know how that old couple at the Dusk 2 Dawn were able to do it. Sometimes he can concentrate enough to write small notes on foggy windows or mirrors, but even then he feels drained. He can't even see the color of the world anymore without getting a headache. Sometimes Wendy will write him notes and see if he can 'Ouija a message back to her'. It sucks having to have Mabel tell her that he can't even lift up a pencil.
He can do other things, though. Like, if he concentrates, he can lift up a piece of paper just by thinking it. It hurts a little, but not as much as trying to actually touch things out of the mindscape. And when its the middle of the night and everyone is sleeping, he can hear their dreams. Sometimes, if he leans in close enough, he catches glimpses of them.
He tells Mabel this, and she starts teasing him and calling him Matilda or the BFD (like the Big Friendly Giant, only for him its the Big Fricking Dork).
Still, it's unusual and Dipper wants to investigate. Mabel thinks that its nothing to worry about.
"It's probably just a ghosty thing," she reassures him.
"But what if its not? What if—what if something happened back at the Incident? What if I'm not—"
Mabel smacks her hand on his mouth. "Bwap. Don't worry, Lil Bro. You've just got special ghost powers." She gasps. "You could have a theme song!"
Dipper shoves the hand away. "It's still making me nervous. And don't call me that, I'm only younger than you by, like, five minutes."
"Yeah, well now you'll be little forever. I'll grow up to be Mabel Pines, successful businesswoman and part-time model, and you'll still do that thing where your voice gets all pitchy." She starts laughing.
"Shut up," Dipper says, but he can't help start laughing too. The idea is funny, after all. Mabel will keep getting older and he'll still be halfway through puberty for the rest of his existence.
Suddenly the idea isn't funny anymore, and they realize that simultaneously. The laughter dies down to a long period of sad silence that lasts the rest of the night.
#
It's another week before Dipper realizes that he was right after all. Something is wrong with him.
It comes in the most mundane of ways: a phone call. Specifically, one from their parents. They want to talk to their son and see that he's okay.
Stan tries to stall them for as long as possible before he gives up the act and starts telling the truth. He says that Dipper was a brave kid and did the best he could, seeing as he managed to save the world from certain chaos. Of course, with all the supernatural beings popping up out of nowhere, the world is still in chaos, but at least it isn't blown to bits. He tells them that there's no body, but he's still around and is doing alright for a dead kid.
Their parents yell and cry and they promise to be up there within the next two weeks to collect their daughter and (maybe) their son. They hang up before Stan can speak and Dipper just feels angry about the fact that he can't talk to them or anyone without having Mabel as a parrot. He feels angry about Mabel acting like everything is fine and Wendy trying to reach out with no response. He's angry that sometimes Henry and Mabel will talk about him like he's not there, just like everyone else in the house. He's angry, and his whole being tingles with electricity just at the thought that their parents going to freak because he cannot muster the energy to talk to them.
So, like any angsty preteen, he goes on a walk (or float, maybe) into the forest to collect his thoughts.
Bad idea. Bad, bad idea.
Because all those thoughts start to stew in a bad way, like rotten milk. And they make him feel anxious and sick and also sort of…alive. It's terrible. He hates it, and that just makes the thoughts even worse until he's in a clearing and he feels like he's on fire.
It takes him exactly .685 second to find out that he actually is.
The blue flames lick up his sides, crawling up his legs and burning away his skin to reveal a black, obsidian shell with cracks of gold breaking through. His hands are the same, along with his arms and feet and torso. He's something else entirely.
That is when it is time to panic.
Dipper yells and tries to rub the black and gold off to no avail. The flames have subsided to his fingertips, the familiar blue jumping t the sky before falling back down. He knows those flames, he remembers them from before the explosion, and he would know that color of gold anywhere.
He flies, searching a lake, a mirror. Anything. In the shock he doesn't notice the forest fire or the small crater he's left from where he stood.
The lake is the closest, in flying terms. He rockets for the shore and stops to hover just above the water's surface.
Dipper's eyes, they're not his. They're on him, but they don't belong to him. They seem borrowed, the whites turned as black as the rest of his body and his irises a golden. He has no pupils.
He screams, and the lake dries up.
#
Someone hears him, this time. Actually, everybody does who lives within the state of Oregon, along with some areas of Idaho and Washington. In the air, some thirty airplanes had their navigational systems go haywire for a good five minutes. Radio signals block out. And, in those deep dank caves where no one goes, creatures with no names perk up their ears in delight.
The panic attack lasts about fifteen minutes before Dipper realizes what he's done to the lake. He stares at the empty hole in wonder.
I did that, he thinks. Me.
Part of him wants to start laughing. Look at all this power he has. He could do anything. He could send Gideon into an alternate dimension if he wanted. He could make the Eiffel Tower a waffle cone. He can dry up a lake with his just his screams alone, and he revels in it. He can do anything.
Another part is fucking terrified of himself for even thinking that.
Slowly he calms down and wills the water back into the lake. It isn't gone, really, just changed into a different form of matter. Conversation of mass and all of that. All he needs to do is reverse the change.
He stops the forest fire and lets the untapped growth within the trees unleash itself, growing new branches and leaves so it looks like it never happened.
All of that is so simple, he just has to think it to make it happen. He can feel the world, somehow, connect to it and manipulate it. All he needs to do is will it so.
Changing himself back is much more difficult, mostly because he isn't a part of this world. Eventually he gets his form right again, down to the knobby knees and ratty hat, but the eyes are still the same. He's pretty sure he won't be able to change that.
When he walks through the door (literally) Mabel rushes up to him and hugs him. "I-thought-something-happened-I-heard-a-big-scream-I'm-so-happy-you're-okay," she breathes, squeezing him tighter.
"Ah, yeah. About that, um…" It's too late, though, and Mabel's already looking at his eyes and taking a step back. "I think something happened when I died. Or didn't die. I think I kinda…leveled up? Yeah." He goes to scratch his head, only to find his hand is on fire again. He blows it out. "Heh heh. Whoops."
#
The next year is…weird, to say the least. He can talk to people now, mostly because he doesn't have to write anything so much as will up a piece of paper with words already on it. It's how he communicates with Wendy, Stan, and the Corduroys when they want to talk to him. He also finds a loophole through video games, seeing as he can just will himself inside. It's how he talks to Soos more often than not.
He also talks to them through dreams, once he gets the hang of it. The first couple instances are messy, especially when he goes to talk to Grunkle Stan and finds the guy dreaming about his Vegas vacation with Old Goldie. Dipper never, ever wants to see that again.
Him and Mabel prepare for their parents' arrival and there's a screaming match between them, Mabel, Henry (who's actually a really cool guy and will play video games with Dipper sometimes), and Grunkle Stan before Dipper can't take it anymore and blows out the lightbulb of every lamp and ceiling fan within the house. He wills himself to not go any further and takes advantage of the stunned silence to write a note on the mirror saying that he's here and he's fine. Just different. He advises everyone sleep on it and leaves it at that. In the night, he really talks to them and has to endure the heartbreak every child feels when they see their parents cry.
After everything, they move up to Gravity Falls. After all, what worth is it going to be trying to raise a demonic son and traumatized daughter in a place that's just getting used to the supernatural?
Mabel heads off to school in autumn and Dipper follow her for the first couple of weeks before realizing that he's being kind of creepy. He starts wandering at that point, practicing in the woods to see what he can and cannot do. Manipulation of reality and dreams is easy enough, but when it comes to manipulating himself he can't get a grip. It still hurts to see the world in color and he phases through walls like mist.
He can age, he finds out. After all, his appearance is simply an illusion to those around him. If he wants to thirty, he can be thirty. If he wants to be five, he can make it so. But he usually just sticks to whatever age Mabel is out of habit.
Some nights, when the moon is full and everyone is asleep, he can make himself feel the breeze. The witching hour is when nightmares are at their peak, and he feeds off of the fear that almost seems to hover around him like a swarm of gnats. It's at those moments that he feels almost human again, ironically enough. Sometimes he can be corporeal long enough that he can actually lean against a tree and watch the stars go by.
Word spreads quickly around town. Soon everyone knows that the Pines boy is still around, just not in a living sense. Legends start spouting up that if you go to the crater where the Mystery Shack used to be, you'll see him. And yeah, that's true. But it's not in a menacing way. He's just trying to help rebuild the foundation for the new one that's being put in place.
Grunkle Stan can see a big opportunity lying in wait by having the new shack where the old one was. A mysterious crater hasn't appeared in these parts since Crater Lake happened thousands of years ago. With some flooding protection (mostly magical) and help from the community (which would be short of a miracle), the Shack will be up and running in less than a year.
Everything is fine. Different, but fine. And Dipper couldn't have it any other way.