2 September 2012 – Sunday

Thick as the ash clings to their skin, their clothes, for one brief moment their minds are clear. Certainty brings a sharp sort of clarity to their eyes – everything yellow, every scrap of cloth and paper and pen and paint – all of it is ash now. Gray and black and dull. It covers everything, but nothing remains of yellow within the house and even the dead-dying yellow-brown of the grass is now murky.

The purification ring glows bright cherry red and the containment wards pulse violet-blue beneath the soot, but nothing yellow remains. Nothing that might attract Him exists within the house. Nothing at all.

Clarity and certainty and, for just a moment, peace.

Then they turn back to the sharp angles of a modern house. Off-white walls and hardwood floors. Stairs and doors and pictures of the perfect life they use to have before they went home and were brutally torn away. Twice.

It's truly unfortunate that they cannot live in a perfectly circular house.

The Shack isn't perfect, but that's the beauty of it. Two weeks ago when the twins managed to huddle together in the elevator up from Ford's lab – unwilling but knowledgeable of the necessity – and made their way into the triangular monstrosity that is the Mystery Shack, they found that they could control the transference in a familiar setting. They knew, if not every inch of the Shack, the main rooms and their room so well that it was more comfort than nightmare.

Here, this place that is supposed to be their home, nothing is familiar. Not now. Three months and three years of literal and relative time – they can forgive themselves for forgetting, but they can't stop the magic. Everything here is a danger, a beacon for Him. Colors, angles, objects. It'd take them years to carve enough wards – it took Uncle Ford building a house, twenty years, and a pissed off pack of teenagers beating up a unicorn to make the Shack as safe as it is.

It's nearing noon when the bonfire dies down. Ash and dust and magic. It fades from the wards, dissipating into the air and leaving the yard monotone. It leaves the twins too, tugging at Dipper's blood and the connection where Mabel presses into his back, offering her power.

Dipper knows that if she could, Mabel would be good with magic. Only half believing, she used Gideon's amulet and her battles in Grunkle Stan's mindscape proved everything, now that Dipper's had time to think about it – knows enough to realize. She has just as much innate magical talent as he does. But she can't use it. Not the way he does.

The twins slip inside once the wards stop glowing, shedding filthy clothes like so much dead skin, ash flaking into pale stars over their trail of footprints in the carpet. It's a mess. Obvious, if they cared, but they didn't clean up the backyard or the smoke lingering heavy and thick in the air. It's no more obvious than the carvings in the walls, or that they aren't sleeping in separate rooms any more – or that they aren't sleeping and hate touching others not each other and won't eat.

Keeping things more secret than absolutely necessary here would be exhausting. They can't pretend. They don't even know where to start.

The water is cold, but no colder than rivers or garden hoses or the tank, and they scrub at skin until it's red and raw, murky bubbles clinging to the edges of the sink. It's more of a struggle to dress. Clean clothes are a foreign concept now, changing out of clothes that are still wearable – still in one piece and not shredded or crusted with three or five battles worth of blood, torn for bandages or for starting a fire when they were both too weak or in too much danger to even consider using magic – and into something that smells so heavily of detergent that a human could track them by scent.

Mabel helps Dipper into yet another long sleeved shirt when he can't lift both arms high enough to pull it over his head without straining the still healing scars across his shoulders. He forgoes the t-shirt this time; it's not worth the pain or the heat. Sweat already prickles under the sleeves of the thick garment. Inappropriate for the weather it might be, but it's necessary. Far too necessary. He doubts even his wards would be able to stop their parents from questioning the scars and open wounds they both carry.

He wonders if she regrets letting him sear the glyphs into her skin.

He wouldn't have done it. Not if it hadn't been an emergency. Not if he hadn't thought that her life and mental – well, not stability or well-being, but something along those lines – was at stake.

By that point, he had very little hope of their rescue, only of their inevitable death. At one point, death would have been a preferable outcome. Instead, they're linked, a matched set, more than they ever were as just twins. Rune for rune down their spines, each carved by the hand of the other, their souls bound together as close as two souls can be.

They fit. Like puzzle pieces they fill in the gaps where the other leaves off. And maybe the product isn't clear – originally they were different pictures even though they were cast with the same dye – but together they're mostly whole.

Washed and dressed, the twins slink up the stairs to their room. Dipper's room. Without the layers of glyphs scratched and painted and scrawled over every surface, the walls are quiet, less substantial. It's just another reminder that this isn't the Shack. They can't escape into the dark and cool of Ford's lab, curled up with Soos or Wendy or Grunkle Stan or even sometimes Ford himself. There's no fire pit hastily assembled in the basement. Their room, although warded, doesn't reek of old magic and rituals.

This place is foreign, stripped clean of all but the most basic of powers.

They ignore Mabel's door opposite Dipper's, her name bright in cheerful pink over white, and slip instead around the barricade to the mattresses. Futile though it may be, they crowd into blankets, pretend the oppressive weight is a comfort, and attempt to sleep.

Nightmares bring their own brand of torture, made worse in that they are not bound by the physical. Made worse in that the twins know how real nightmares are.

It's nearing dark when they stutter into wakefulness. Mabel heaves herself upright, gulping air as if she were drowning. She might have been. Dipper jolts. His lamp catches on fire.

"– smells like smoke?" they hear from downstairs. Dad. The front door clicks shut and footsteps tap across the tile in the entryway. Dipper smothers the lamp fire with a thought, used to fixing his uncontrolled bursts of magic now. It's easier to cast here than it was there. The magic of this reality is looser, less refined. Emotion, intention, power. That's all it takes. Rituals and runes and glyphs and spells are just ways to refine the process.

"It doesn't look like anything happened to the house," Mom replies, her voice drifting up the stairs. "Maybe the neighbor's place?"

"No." Dad's voice is tense. This will be the first true test of their wards. These wards at least, not the ones they've used hundreds of times before. Misdirection concentrated at individuals. Emotional manipulation. It's all very subtle. "Dipper! Mabel! Get down here now!"

"What did – dear lord."

Despite the distance, it still hurts to have their parents yell at them. Something like shame or guilt burrows under their skin. A conditioned response, probably. Mom and Dad have been their since the beginning, although not the beginning that matters.

Grunkle Stan was never much on discipline – he actively encouraged their rule breaking so long as things were kept presentable for the tourists. Lying and cheating were practically required to survive in the Shack.

Uncle Ford looms. He has rules and regulations and demands the twins follow them, but those are rules of life, of survival, and are flexible depending on the situation.

Wendy has rules also – don't run over any pedestrians – but laughed off things like vandalism. She'd be a little mad at them, they know, if she had any idea what they were doing. She has all these ideals about personal freedom that seem to apply to everyone, not just her close friends.

Soos, well, Soos is happy when they're safe. He's spent too much time idolizing Grunkle Stan to care overly much about people he isn't emotionally attached to.

"Dipper! Mabel!"

The twins have no room to care about anyone but each other here. Not when Dipper panics if he doesn't know where Mabel is all the time. Not when Mabel is certain Dipper is her only true connection to reality.

Not when physical distance pulls at the bindings on their souls.

No one here will understand. Soos and Wendy and Ford and Stan barely understood, and they knew more than anyone here ever will.