...and who will take care of you now

Dipper wakes up coughing, his chest on fire.

He's not happy about it, but he's not surprised. The cough that had dogged him in the maze persisted through the rest of the previous day. After taking Great-Uncle Ford to the hospital, even a hot shower and all that wonderful, warming steam hadn't chased away his sniffles. He coughed intermittently until sleep took him, and now he's waking up with his lungs burning and the rest of him wracked with chills.

Groaning, he rolls over and pulls his sheet up, stuffing it tightly around his body. It doesn't help. Coughing and shaking, he makes his trembling way to Mabel's empty bed and borrows one of her knitted blankets. With the heavy covering in place, his chattering teeth gradually subside. He knows he should take some painkillers and probably alert someone that he's sick, but he can't bring himself to leave the cocoon of his bedding. He huddles in misery until he dozes off, his light and unsatisfying sleep frequently broken by jagged coughs.

He's awoken again when his bedsprings squeak and his mattress bends under new weight. The light from the window is like daggers when he opens his eyes, so he squeezes them shut more tightly and turns his face into his pillow.

"Uh oh. Are you dead?" Mabel asks sympathetically.

"Yes," he rasps.

She puts a delightfully cool palm against his forehead. "You need all the pills. Be right back!"

He blindly reaches out and manages to capture her wrist before she leaves. "Wait. I know you're mad at me and I just want to say—"

"I'm not mad," she says.

"You're not?"

"Nah, I'm trying something new this time, Mom-style. I'm not mad, I'm just disappointed."

"…But that's worse!"

"That's what you get," she cheerfully replies. "Okay, stay awake while I find some medicine and tell Grunkle Stan you're sick."

He's never been sick in Gravity Falls before, and he knows better than to expect much in the way of care from Grunkle Stan. At least Mabel is here to help him out. He's not sure how Pacifica will react, but he hopes she won't stay mad at him for too much longer. Maybe she'll cool off by the time he gets better. Avoiding the worst of her wrath could be the silver lining to this illness.

He hears footsteps coming through the door. Assuming its Mabel with a handful of Tylenol, he holds out his palm without looking. Instead of pills, a hand presses against his. He opens his eyes to see Pacifica hesitantly holding his hand. She's holding it cautiously, like it's covered in something gross.

"Are you okay?" she asks.

He makes a negative sound in the back of his throat.

"You're not going to sneeze on me, are you?" she says warily.

"Not on purpose."

She drops his hand and takes a step back. "Keep your maze-germs to yourself," she orders.

"I think they're just regular germs," he mumbles.

This does not placate her. "Keep those away too." She stands there for a moment, clearly struggling with something. He's pretty sure he knows what it is. She finally bursts out, "You're a real jerk, you know that?"

Dipper does his best to weigh his options, despite the slim cooperation from his fevered brain. This is a pretty mild admonishment from Pacifica given the circumstances, and he knows that his illness is working in his favor even as it also works to shred his lungs and pack his sinuses. The more pathetic he is, the more blunted her ire will be—he's already paying for his stupidity, after all.

So he hacks pitifully into his pillow a couple times and says, "I really messed up."

"Not as much as your lunatic uncle," she mutters, backing off slightly. "Maybe your problem is you're just crazy enough to listen to him."

He can accept her anger and understand it: She feared for his safety and she's justly ticked off that she was excluded. And it's not like he didn't expect it or isn't acclimated to her temper; he knew what he was getting into before he started dating her, just like he had known, despite his rationalizations, that not telling her and Mabel about the mission with Ford wasn't the smart move. He's a bit more worried about her attitude towards Ford because he's not sure how she's going to handle it. Pacifica has a precarious relationship with authority in general, and Dipper doesn't want her to hold a grudge. Ford made a mistake, but there was no malice in it.

"Just give him a chance to explain, okay?" Dipper feebly requests.

"Right, that should be good," she sneers.

Pacifica sits at the edge of Mabel's bed and glares at him for an uncomfortable amount of time. He's beginning to see the downside in dampening her ferocity—as bad as a blow up could be, at least it would be over quickly. She's teetering on the edge of fury, continually brought up short by his pathetic state.

It's also obvious she has no idea how to handle his illness. "So, do you, like… need medicine or something?"

"Mabel went to get some stuff."

"Oh." She hesitates. "…Is it serious?"

The sign that she's still concerned eases some of his tension. "Probably just a bad cold," he says, the end of his sentence punctuated by another coughing jag.

Mabel arrives a few moments later to take the edge off with a handful of pills. The painkillers bring his fever down to a more manageable level, and now he's burning up, kicking the blankets and sheets to the foot of his bed and letting the weak breeze from the bookshelf vent waft over his sweaty forehead. Pacifica leaves with Mabel and Dipper spends an indeterminate amount of time alone, aching and coughing and wishing he'd just pass out already.

When Grunkle Stan comes up to check on him in lieu of Mabel, Dipper braces himself for a heckling.

"Hangin' in there?" Grunkle Stan asks in a surprisingly gentle tone.

The fever must already be climbing again because Dipper's legs are freezing. "Trying," he says wretchedly.

"Stinks bein' sick." Stan sits on the edge of the bed. "I'll do you a favor and keep Soos outta here. Last time I got bronchitis he tried to feed me some homemade soup. Smelled like kerosene. Tasted like kerosene. Pretty sure it was just kerosene—I was afraid to hold it next to a light."

Dipper takes a raspy breath, feeling like he can't put this off. "Grunkle Stan, I'm sorry about—"

"Forget it," he says, dismissing the apology with a wave of his hand.

"It's just, I know I should have told you."

Stan looks up at the ceiling with a sigh. "Listen, kid. You… You're a kid. And maybe you shoulda said somethin', but my brother? He's the adult. He needs to act like the adult." He shakes his head. "I need to act like the adult," he adds, and it seems like he isn't really talking to Dipper.

Dipper doesn't know what to say to that. He coughs a little, then says, "Well, it won't happen again."

"Nope." Stan pushes off the bed, his expression suddenly more like his usual self. "Try not to sneeze on anything valuable. Also, that's the only set of sheets I got. Make 'em count."

An indeterminate amount of time later, Dipper emerges from a shallow doze to the sound of voices coming up the stairwell. Wrapping a heavy blanket around himself, he staggers over to the stairs, one of the voices becoming clearer with every step; as he thought, it's Great-Uncle Ford.

He descends the stairs unsteadily and finds Ford doing his best to maneuver through the doorway to the living room. The scientist is hobbled by a cast that covers almost his entire leg, and the uneven floorboards of the Shack aren't doing his crutches any favors.

"Dipper, there you are," Ford says when he spots Dipper standing at the foot of the steps. "Stan said you were under the weather. Nothing too serious, I hope?"

"Probably not," Dipper says, though that's more of a wish than a fact.

"Get back to bed!" Stan yells from the living room. "You'd better not be givin' the plague to any of my customers!"

"I've seen your customers, Stanley, and you've got the disease vector reversed!" Ford retorts. Looking back at Dipper, he says, "Try to recuperate for now. I'm putting the cracked heart into the Faraday shield, so don't worry about that."

Dipper eyes Ford's cast. "Are you okay?"

"The injury? It's nothing permanent," Ford says dismissively. He smiles, but it doesn't quite reach his eyes. "It's just that our regrettable escapade raises many questions… and not just about the heart. But there will be plenty of time to talk later. Get some rest, Dipper. You earned it."

Dipper spends the remainder the day sinking in and rising out of sleep, bobbing in the waves of consciousness. Mabel and Grunkle Stan check in on him periodically, no doubt more times than he's aware of. He's disappointed that he doesn't see Pacifica again; maybe he's slept through her visits, though he doubts it. She's still mad at him, and as much as he would like some TLC right now from his girlfriend, he knows she's not big on germs.

Sometime past midnight his fever takes a turn for the worse, and his dreams become stranger, and darker.

He's looking for Grunkle Stan—he owes Stan some money and for some reason he's in town, trying to find his great-uncle in streets that are packed with people, so tight he can barely squeeze between them. A hand brushes his from behind and puts a piece of paper in his palm. It's a note. It reads: Suns over agora—the dry beds will run. He nods in understanding and places it in his pocket, where it folds itself over and over until it is every paper, all at once.

It takes days but he finally makes it to the Shack. Inside, every door he opens leads to the same room, a vast space filled with clocks, and he knows that if he can set them all then Grunkle Stan will come back and forgive him.

Stan's voice comes out of a clock radio, fuzzy and distant. "If it doesn't go down soon, we're takin' him for a ride. And rhythm of anchors creates new tides."

Dipper starts handing the clocks to Pacifica, but she refuses to take them. They start arguing. He's so angry, and the room is so hot, and when she spins on her heel and storms out, he follows her into the woods, into the roots of a tree that blots out the sun. Now he's trying to stop her—she's walking into the maze. She won't listen to him. She goes into the sideways corridor and the shadows move to cover her.

"Words stack strange castles," she tells him.

She takes a step forward, and another Pacifica walks out of the gloom. She's wearing a blue knitted cap and a blue backpack, and her eyes are closed. She goes everywhere with closed eyes. Dipper tries to warn his Pacifica about the other-Pacifica, but he can't speak. He's jammed between the hexagonal pillars and he can't breathe, he can't breathe, he's turning to ice—

He wakes up in the bathtub. He's lying in a few inches of lukewarm water and he's got a wet washcloth on his forehead. He puts his arms out—either to defend himself or just to make sure everything is real, he's not sure—and Mabel catches them, leaning over the tub with an expression of relief.

"Hey, Dip," she says. "Are you back with us?"

He sees Grunkle Stan is here, leaning against the towel rack. And there's Pacifica in her nightgown, her eyes wide and her mouth slightly open. She looks about as concerned as he's ever seen. He catches his breath and wipes water from his eyes; he realizes he's wearing nothing but a soaked-through pair of boxers. He lowers his arms to self-consciously cover his bare torso.

"I think so," he replies, still not completely certain he's awake.

"We were about five minutes away from taking you to the hospital, bro-bro," Mabel says.

Grunkle Stan leans around Mabel and jams the thermometer in Dipper's ear. He takes it out once it beeps. "That's more like it," he grunts. "Let the kid change and get back in bed."

Dipper's fever may have dropped, but it's not quite low grade enough for him to feel hot again. His teeth start to chatter as Mabel helps him out of the tub and wraps a towel around him, the others leaving the bathroom so he can slip on a dry pair of boxers beneath the towel. The journey back to the bedroom feels like a marathon, and when he sheds the towel and crawls back into his blankets it takes forever for the cloth to warm against his damp skin. Mabel sits behind him and strokes his hair as he shivers; he remembers the trip to the Grand Canyon when he got sick at the hotel and Dad had done the same.

"Guess that maze really got you good," Mabel says, curling a blessedly warm hand around the back of his neck.

"Stupid maze," Dipper mutters through his trembling jaw.

"Who's Emilia?" Pacifica asks.

The question startles Dipper—he hadn't realized Pacifica is standing by the foot of the bed. "What?" he says.

"You said something about 'Emilia.' You told her you were sorry."

"Emilia was a little girl," Dipper says hoarsely. "She got lost in the maze."

"Even longer than you?"

Dipper sighs. "She didn't make it out."

Mabel's hand stills on his head. He can hear her breath catch.

Pacifica walks around the edge of the bed and sits next to him, her weight sinking the old mattress and making him lean against her. She's leaning forward just enough that her hair has swept past her chin and is concealing her face. He can't tell what she's thinking.

"We should have been there," she says.

"Yep." He coughs into a fistful of blankets. "At least you're not sick, I guess."

Pacifica looks him over with a critical eye. "You're shaking," she says.

"I'll warm up in a minute," he says, his stoicism probably unconvincing considering his wobbling words.

Pacifica stands up and Dipper does his best to hide his disappointment. He figures that even if she wasn't mad at him she'd still leave, not wanting to get sick. Instead, she surprises him by turning around and scooting onto the bed, draping one arm over his torso and putting her legs over his (though she keeps a healthy distance from his exposed face). Mabel lays down behind him, facing the opposite way and putting her back against his. Their combined body heat finally stills his fever-wracked form, and his chills subside.

He falls asleep almost immediately after.

…and who will take care of you now by Magma Waves (Narshardaa, 2017)