Not Reverse Falls I'm afraid, but I really love this. I got inspired after a few hours scrolling through Gravity Falls fanfiction so these ideas are not original to me. Happy holidays!
Disclaimer: Gravity Falls isn't mine either.
Sometimes, when Dipper wakes up, his body doesn't leave the bed. He'll stumble into the bathroom and it's not until he can see the wall behind him in the mirror that he realizes something is wrong.
Sometimes it takes until he gets downstairs and no one sees him or hears him.
Mabel knows not to bring it up unless he mentions it first. Their parents are under the impression he's started sleeping in and embracing his teenage nature of being lazy.
Sometimes he's terrified to go back to his body, afraid the eyes will snap open and be yellow with black slits instead of brown orbs. Mabel will pull his eyelids back and show him the white.
It happens at school too, outside, anywhere really.
A loud noise will go off, someone will come up behind him, and the fear will yank him away too abruptly for his body to follow. His body falls down dead, and everyone but Mabel will panic until he can get back in and blink open his real eyes. Everyone thinks he's just even more of a wuss than he used to be. But once, a teacher managed to get his pulse before he could wake back up, and everyone who was there still looks at him fearfully and tries not to scare him.
And rarely, oh so thankfully rarely, it happens when he shakes someone's hand. He avoids that where possible anyway.
Sometimes when Mabel wakes up she forgets where she is.
She'll clap and the lights will turn on, and Dipper will lay still but then something will clatter to the floor in the bathroom and his body will bolt upright a second later.
Sometimes when Mabel gets well and truly angry she'll command someone to be quiet or stop whatever they're doing and they'll listen. They'll look at her in horror and she'll shrink in on herself.
Sometimes when she really wants something she can't have, like cereal that her parents won't buy or clothes she can't afford, she'll find it in her room or her backyard.
She only picked up something once. She threw it into the trash when Dipper asked her why she was carrying a bunch of bugs.
Sometimes she forgets it's not summer, so she forgets her homework or has to be reminded by her panicking twin that she'll be late for school.
Sometimes the sky turns rainbow and sunrise at noon, trees will have faces and animals will speak. Colors will oversaturate and everyone's voices will turn over exaggerated.
Stress causes it, usually. An assignment that feels particularly daunting, having too many things to do in a week, parents fighting.
Dipper can pull her out of it, most of the time.
Sometimes there are days when Mabel wakes up in her tower and Dipper doesn't get out of bed. Those are the worst.
They both miss school and their parents bang on their door but they lock it at night and hide the key because neither one feels entirely safe behind an unlocked door anymore, so their parents yell at them the next day.
Mabel will walk around the room talking to stuffed animals and the walls and air, and Dipper will make the stuffed animals talk back because he doesn't want to go back to his body just yet, because it feels safer when nothing can touch him or see him.
When Mabel shakes herself out of it or Dipper finally gets the courage to be real again, Dipper will get back to his body and they'll go down for dinner or go straight to sleep.
Sometimes Stan keeps his eyepatch pulled down because having two eyes feels just a little…wrong. He stopped calling Ford sixer after his memory came back (mostly), but some days he slips up. Sometimes he remembers things he shouldn't know about.
Sometimes he doesn't feel quite like himself. He gets angry fast, and swings back to manically happy just as quickly.
Ford worries about him on those days, has started researching the effects of the memory eraser gun being reversed.
On those days he reassures Ford just a little too brightly, voice just a little higher than normal.
Dipper gets tattoos and piercings, he tries to ground himself in his body, but it doesn't work. He does like how it looks though. The most disturbing part is, he can't feel it. He feels his body when he's in it, but there's no telltale chill, no feeling of falling, no feeling at all when he drifts out of himself. When it becomes natural to reach out with phantom limbs instead of flesh, when pain and touch feel muted like he's wearing gloves he learns to feel his own body and control it all over again. He learns to listen, to feel, for his own blood pulsing, he can't hear that outside himself. It is, in a disturbing metaphor, like an extra limb. He figures out what he can manipulate outside it, how much effort it takes.
Mabel finds that contact helps assuage the visions, touches the trees and the flowers and runs hands along their unmoving, silent surfaces. Learns to find that thread of power in her voice, her hands, that extra spark of something. It crackles like electricity between her hands, burns like cinnamon across her tongue. She figures out how to yank on it to bring it out and how to gently coax it back to nonexistence. She gets looser with it, finds the limits of what she can do.
Cinnamon sits on the back of her tongue most days now, and the clicking of her nails sounds like sparks.
Stan gets a little more charismatic on some days. He finds the right words a little quicker, Ford looks at him sideways when compliments roll off his tongue like they never did before. He can't really get a handle on it, but he doesn't feel like destroying the earth or killing his family, so Ford lets it go most of the time.
Dipper knows how people see him and Mabel. He knows how it looks when he falls down abruptly, when Mabel starts talking to inanimate objects.
He may or may not quiet them down with methods his sister would find objectionable, but when she finds his body slumped in a closet she sits with it until he comes back and she demands answers.
Mabel knows what Dipper does to keep the nasty words from her ears, and so she repays him be commanding the bullies who mock him for being a nerd to shut up and study more. She stays with him when he "faints" and pretends he's got a pulse the first few weeks of high school.
When they go back to Gravity Falls they stop pretending Bill didn't leave marks.
Their friends are sort of alarmed, but they sit with Dipper's body when they find it in the woods or around town, and bring it back to the shack if he's hurt.
They shake Mabel out of her flashbacks and hallucinations, and they walk her back to the shack afterward.
Sometimes it still panics Mabel to think that she can control people like that.
Sometimes Dipper claws at his arms just to remind himself that he is physical.
Sometimes Ford wonders if Bill is truly gone.
But most of the time they have grown to accept the scars they have been left with.
