concrete smiles at the midnight hospital diner
It takes Pacifica about twenty minutes to conclude that she hates Gravity Falls Hospital.
It's surprisingly big for a hospital in such a small town. But it makes sense, considering it serves the entire county. Its halls are wide and everything is white, heavy with the smell of disinfectant and something else, something sterile and plastic. As if it all comes from the same sealed jar of astringent fluid. No wood, no plaster, no fabric that isn't spill proof. Immersed in the artificial air, she starts to feel like her sinuses are getting bleached.
But that's not what she hates about the place.
What she hates—what she can't stand—is the way Mabel sits, slumped and quiet in her chair, as they wait for Dipper to come out of the ER.
The twins are two very different friends to Pacifica. But despite their dissimilarities they are each one half of the Mystery Twins. And if Dipper is the brains of the operation, then Mabel has always been its beating, star-bright heart.
With Dipper, Pacifica had to prove herself to earn his friendship, his trust, and then eventually something more; she did it through levers and late-night confessions and trying so hard to be different. Her friendship with Mabel is… it's like Mabel willed it into existence, like she believed so completely Pacifica was her friend that it came true. Mabel really is the shooting star; Pacifica got caught up in her rainbow wake.
Now Mabel sits in a lumpy waiting room chair and the light in her eyes is dimmed from an inner blaze to the faintest spark, rainbow wake gone monochrome. She is a candle in a bell jar, flickering fitfully as the oxygen leaves the room.
Pacifica gets it. It hurts, but she gets it.
The second Dipper hit that cavern floor her heart stopped with the impact. He fell so far. It's the Boss-Lobster's claw all over again, that moment of pure, undiluted terror—except this time, she and Mabel couldn't save him. He had been unconscious for what felt like forever before jolting back into wakefulness, if not coherency. Nothing he'd said after that point made much sense and the girls had done their best to keep him standing while they found a way out. The precious minutes wasted while they staggered through the tunnels with Dipper barely able to walk were so unbearable that Pacifica can feel hot, frustrated tears pressing at the bottoms of her eyes with just the memory.
Not that this waiting is any better.
The doors to the waiting room swing open and Ford hurries in. He seems to hurry everywhere, rushing from one idea to the next. "The rat is taken care of," he says, sitting down next to them. "Any news?"
"Nothin' yet," Stan grunts. He looks as worried as Pacifica feels.
"Well, perhaps no news is good news."
Pacifica is suddenly furious at Ford. Where was he when they needed him? It's his stupid mad scientist footsteps that Dipper is trying so hard to follow, that created this mess. Ford should be telling Dipper to be careful, to stop being reckless. Instead, all Dipper gets is encouragement to grow and learn at the cost of his health and sanity. This is crazy. They're both crazy!
She shunts aside nagging thoughts of her own incipient enthusiasm for the anomaly-hunting life, along with the inconvenient fact that she pursued the rat just as thoughtlessly as Dipper had. Her anger has no time for details.
Her burgeoning tirade is just as quickly forgotten when a doctor comes into the waiting room. The doctor looks down at her papers, then around the sparsely populated space.
"Are you Mason's family?" she asks them.
"That's us," Stan tells her, standing up. "What's the damage?"
"Mason has a concussion along with a sprained wrist and elbow where he landed. His bruising is extensive, but there doesn't seem to be any internal damage. The concussion is his most severe injury. We're going to keep him overnight and make sure the swelling goes down. Hopefully, he'll be able to sleep through the night."
"Can we see him?" Stan asks, echoing everyone's thoughts.
"Of course. Just don't try and wake him, okay?"
They follow the doctor down the blank white hall into a room that's a little cozier than the others Pacifica's seen so far. There's a bit of wood trim around the window and a small couch near the door. The room is dominated by the bed against the wall, jutting out like a promontory.
Dipper is there, prone and pale, a baby blue blanket draped over the lower half of his legs. A tube runs down from an IV pole, disappearing into the mass of tape on the back of his hand. His left arm is in a sling and there are bandages peppering his face, along with a much heavier bandage over what she remembers is a jagged cut just below his hairline. His closed eyes are sunken with dark purple bags beneath. He looks smaller, for some reason. Maybe it's the size of the bed, or maybe it's just the way he's so still, so silent.
Logically, she knows he's probably going to be fine. But it's hard to believe it, seeing him like this.
Stan sighs heavily. "Dang it, kid. You'd better wake up soon, 'cause I don't want to call your parents."
"He'll be fine, Stanley," Ford says. "He's just as tough as we were, and probably more. You should have seen him bring that Security Droid down."
Stan just shakes his head. "Last summer I thought I'd be here a lot, but somehow it never happened," he tells Ford. "Guess the kid's luck finally ran out."
Ford pats Stan bracingly on the back. "This is a minor setback. He's young and he'll heal, you'll see."
Mabel just goes back out into the hall. When she returns, she's dragging one of the plastic chairs, which she stations next to the bed before sinking into it. Pacifica wants to be close to him, too, but she feels out of place amidst all this family concern. She sits on the couch while Stan and Ford converse. Pacifica has nothing to say; she needs Dipper to wake up so she can shake him and berate him and hug him, and not necessarily in that order. Mabel's silence is almost as unbearable as his.
Eventually, Stan and Ford return to the Shack to close up and see to still-running experiments. Pacifica is tempted by the opportunity to go with them, but she feels like that would be abandoning the twins. Mabel relocates to the couch as the sun begins to set, a blaze of golden orange seeping through the window blinds. Pacifica tries to pass the time by reading on her phone, but she's exhausted. Next to her, Mabel is already asleep.
She doesn't remember deciding to sleep, so she must have drifted off at some point. She wakes up when someone brushes by the couch on the way to the bed. Her neck is stiff from its awkward position against the couch arm; she sits up rubbing at it, blinking the room back into focus.
It's one of the nurses who has entered the room, checking on Dipper. Pacifica looks over at Mabel, but the other girl is still out cold, face buried beneath her brown tresses. Pacifica's stomach rumbles. She hasn't eaten since before they started chasing the rat.
The nurse hears it and he smiles kindly at her. "Do you need something to eat? The kitchen is closed, but there's still snacks downstairs."
Pacifica thanks him and contemplates waking Mabel. This turns out to be moot when Mabel sits up and brushes the hair from her face, awoken by the short conversation.
"Want to find something to eat?" Pacifica asks her.
Mabel must be starving, but she looks at Dipper hesitantly. "I don't want him to be alone," she says.
Pacifica doubts he'd know the difference. But she and Mabel would, and maybe that's what matters. "Okay. I'll bring you back some gummy koalas or whatever."
"Thanks, Pacifica." Mabel's eyelids are already starting to droop again.
Pacifica looks across the short space to Dipper's still form. "He's going to be all right. They said he'll wake up tomorrow, I think." She's trying to make Mabel feel better; or maybe she's trying to make herself feel better. Either way, it's not working.
Mabel's voice is a husky shadow of its exuberant self. "I was supposed to catch him."
Pacifica can't stand hearing Mabel sound that defeated. It's just plain wrong. "Yeah, well, he was supposed to not jump like he thinks he can fly! It was his dumb idea. If he doesn't wake up when he's supposed to, I will sue him so much."
To her surprise, the ghost of a smile flits across Mabel's face. "More like kiss him so much," she says in a lowkey approximation of her usual jokes. "All the better to wake your sleeping prince…"
"Shut up, Mabel," Pacifica says, and she's never meant it less.
A short elevator ride later, she's traversing the lower halls of the hospital, following the signs to the cafeteria. Like the nurse said, the kitchen is closed; metal shutters cover the openings beyond the long countertop where she assumes the line forms. But there's a wide selection of vending machines in an alcove beyond all the tables and benches. Only some of the lights are on and it gives the place a dreamlike quality, where the lit rectangles of the fluorescent fixtures form a bright path through the gloom at the edges and corners; she feels as if she's wandering the lunchroom at school after dark.
She has enough money to get a fair amount of food. Mabel was already half-asleep when Pacifica left Dipper's room, so there's no point in rushing back upstairs. By the time Mabel's ready to eat the kitchen will probably be open.
Pacifica gathers up her snacks and turns to pick a table when she's startled by the presence of a familiar face. Wendy is sitting by herself, drinking a bottle of water with a few empty wrappers in a crinkly pile.
Pacifica isn't really looking for company, but it would also be weird and standoffish to go sit somewhere else. Mixed as her feelings towards Wendy are, the fact of the matter is that the older teen is a good friend to the twins and she's not going away. Part of being a better person, Pacifica figures, is at least tolerating someone she doesn't really know and isn't sure she wants to.
It's not all about Dipper. It's not. Wendy is just… too much of all the things Pacifica wants to be but can't seem to find in herself. Real confidence. Real cool, not purchased cool. And there's several summers' worth of memories of Wendy and her friends sitting on the sidelines of Pacifica's pageant of a Gravity Falls life, snickering and mocking. Maybe Wendy is someone Pacifica decided not to like a long time ago and she just hasn't changed her mind yet.
"Hey," Wendy says when Pacifica sits down across from her. "You just missed Soos. We stopped by the room earlier when you and Mabel were sacked out."
"Oh," Pacifica replies, not looking up from her food.
Wendy pauses slightly before saying, "Gideon's giant robot and all of Weirdmageddon, and Dipper gets hospitalized by a freaking rat. Go figure, huh?"
"He'll be fine," Pacifica says automatically. She needs to say that.
"Definitely. Then I can kick his butt for not calling me."
Inviting Wendy along wouldn't have been Pacifica's first impulse, but she does have to wonder if things might have turned out differently if they had. Wendy is nothing if not physically capable, something Pacifica envies. It's becoming increasingly apparent that adolescence will not be granting her much in the way of height. Both her parents are tall, too. It seems they just can't give her anything that's good, even unintentionally.
She munches her way through a few pretzels; the sooner she finishes eating, the sooner she can walk away from this uncomfortable encounter.
Wendy's enigmatic gaze remains fixed on Pacifica, as if the older girl is studying her. It's not making things less awkward. "It's really cool that you're in the monster hunting biz now," she says.
"It's alright," Pacifica allows.
Wendy smiles knowingly. "Dipper's like that, right, even more than Mabel. You wouldn't think it to look at him, but he's always got something going on. That kid's crazy in the best way. He's, I don't know, exciting. I get it, though, now that I've met Ford. That dude is a trip."
Pacifica isn't enthused about having a weird heart-to-heart with the girl who is maybe-sort-of-but-not-really her rival. Wendy is being nothing but friendly and yet the fondness in her voice when she speaks of Dipper is like fingernails on a chalkboard somewhere in Pacifica's head. Pacifica has never had a boyfriend before, but she's been possessive about everything else in her life up to this point, so this shouldn't be a surprise. She's never thought of herself as the jealous type, but that's mostly because she's never thought of herself as any 'type' at all. This is uncharted territory. Which is familiar, in its way, after an entire year of uncharted territory. She hasn't known exactly who she is and what she's doing for a long time. This strikes her as another of those moments where she has to choose who she wants to be.
She looks good in green, but this is a shade that doesn't suit her.
She opens her mouth to tell Wendy that she agrees. Instead what comes out is, "Why did you turn him down?"
Oh god.
Wendy laughs, darn her. "Heavy! Wow, I didn't know if you'd work up the guts to ask me. You're alright, Northwest."
"I have to go," Pacifica mutters desperately, gathering up her snacks.
"I didn't feel the same way," Wendy interjects. Pacifica stops and listens despite herself. "Seriously. I knew about his crush. He's not… I mean, he's a good guy, but subtlety isn't really his gig. One of my brothers has a crush on an older girl. I think that's just a thing for some people, like, part of growing up or whatever."
Pacifica doesn't understand how to not like him like that. The way she saw him in the first half of last summer is so far away from where she is now that it's like someone else's memory.
"He was so desperate to hang with me and I was in this tight spot, 'cause I thought he and Mabel were cool kids and I wanted to hang with them, but at the same time I didn't want to lead him on. I kinda hoped he'd just get over it." Wendy sighs, resting her chin on one hand. "I think I just messed him up even more. I should have told him straight up, in the first couple weeks. But I got to do all this awesome stuff with him and I was totally bummed thinking that we might not be friends anymore, even if I let him down as easy as I could. That was my bad. I guess I got scared."
Pacifica has a hard time imagining Wendy being scared of anything. "Okay, but… why didn't you feel the same way?"
Wendy shrugs. "I don't know… He was so short and not even a teenager yet, he was a kid. Like, I'm a kid, too, I guess, but there's a big friggin' difference between twelve and fifteen. Man, I barely remember being twelve. Besides, high school kids don't date middle-schoolers, come on. That's screwed up."
Fair enough. "Yeah. It's just, in a few years—"
Wendy rolls her eyes. "What, wait for him to age into it? He's not a banana. I don't put people on a shelf, like, 'I'll come back to him later.' That's a really weird way to see things."
Pacifica feels reassured and hates that she needed it. "No, that makes sense. I was just curious."
Wendy gives her an easy—if not very believing—smile. "It's cool. Hey, do me a favor—don't get on to Dipper about me, okay? He went through a lot last summer. And for what it's worth, that dude is way into you."
Not knowing how to answer, Pacifica just nods and fiddles with her drink. Anything she could say about that is something she's not ready to say in front of Wendy.
"Enough boy talk," Wendy declares. "I wanna know about this giant flippin' rat you guys were chasing."
Pacifica can still smell the unwelcome aroma of rat urine on her clothing. "Ugh, it was so nasty. We trapped it with a bunch of vines."
Wendy grins. "Dope!"
About half an hour later, Wendy drives Mabel and Pacifica back home so they can shower and change, Mabel finally convinced to leave Dipper's side by Wendy's promise to return to the hospital. Pacifica collapses on the cool sheets of her bed and falls asleep almost instantly.
She's awoken by Soos the next morning; sun streams in through the window as he knocks on her door.
"Hey, Pacifica?" he says through the wood. "You awake?"
"Yes," she says groggily.
"Me and Mabel are going back to the hospital, you want a ride?"
She throws on the first clothes at hand from her suitcase and stumbles out into the sunlight trying to rub the sleep from her eyes. It seems almost unbearably bright out after spending most of the previous night in the dim interior of the hospital. The transition is jarring.
When they get to the hospital room the first sight that greets her is Dipper, sitting up in bed and eating oatmeal one-handed from a tray. He drops his spoon when he sees them. "Hey, there you are! When can I get out of here?"
Mabel practically teleports to his side. "Never," she says as she tightly hugs his good arm. "You scared me and now you're in brother-jail."
"Seriously, Mabel, I want to get out of here. What happened to the rat? Did we get it?"
Pacifica crosses the room and gets right in his face; he shrinks back into his pillows. "You got hurt and you are not going anywhere until the doctor says you can," she informs him with flashing eyes.
"I— okay, but, I mean I feel pretty alright, my head hurts but other than that—"
"Gee, I can't imagine why your head would hurt when all you did was try to fly."
"Man, I really thought that would work…" he mutters. "At least tell me we got the rat."
Pacifica throws her hands into the air. "Yes, we got the rat! Oh my god, you are such an idiot. Nobody cares about the rat."
"…I mean, I care about the rat," he says weakly.
"Better quit while you're behind, bro-bro," Mabel advises.
Pacifica, tired of not touching him, commandeers the edge of Mabel's chair and takes his hand. "Don't ever scare me like that again," she orders.
He smiles sleepily. "Yeah, not planning on it."
Pacifica threads her fingers through his and feels like she can finally breathe again.
Portions of this chapter were inspired by Let Me Clarify by carpenoctem22.
Concrete Smiles at the Midnight Hospital Diner by One Toy Soldier (Bravestar, 2005)