Dimension ?, Month ?, Day ?
Mabel was not okay.
She flew from door to door, stair to stair, tears blinding her until she just had to feel her path with feet and hands. All the passages and stairs stretched endlessly, but that's how she wanted it. She had to get as far away from Ford as possible. She wanted to scream and cry and beat her fists against him. How could he do this? How could he be the way he was? How could he be related to the rest of them at all?
The threshold of a fancy wrought iron door caught her foot. It sent her flying, yanking her bad leg and slamming her bad shoulder against the wooden floor.
Grunkle Ford wasn't there to pet her hair and check if she was okay. She wiped her nose on her sweater sleeve as she sat up, peeling it back to check her shoulder like Ford would.
A massive lightning tree stretched from shoulder to chest and all the way down to her elbow. She grimaced, prodding it gently and wincing. It hurt, like the outside of her skin was tingly and numb, but the inside was hot and stiff and sore.
Ford didn't mean to strike her, she knew. He was just trying to keep her safe like he always was. That didn't change the fact it hurt, and she sniffed as she pulled up her pants leg to check on her bite.
It didn't look like she had torn it open again. It was mostly healed anyway. Healed into an ugly mottled scar that ran streaks up her shin and calf. She threw her pants down to cover it, her gut threatening more wracking sobs if she kept looking. That wasn't her leg. She wasn't supposed to have huge scars like that. She didn't want this life. She didn't want to never have a soft place to sleep or never have friends her age or nearly die every other day. She wanted Gravity Falls, where adventures ended with watching TV with her family and wrestling with Dipper. She wanted Piedmont, where her dad made the best pancakes and her mom always asked about her newest crush. She wanted home .
She didn't even get to tell Dipper goodbye.
Mabel pulled her sweater collar over her face and wiggled until she was shoved into the corner of the empty room (that looked like every other room without the stairs or doors). She wanted Dipper. She wanted to see him and talk to him.
Maybe that was the worst part. She drew her knees under her chin, her sobs turning into hiccups under her dirty white sweater. The noises she made just sounded sadder for bouncing around a completely empty room. Those last moments she had with her family weren't satisfying at all. It was just sound and fury, everything floating everywhere, Stan asking for her trust, Dipper asking for reason.
That's not how last goodbyes were supposed to go. They were supposed to have hugs and declarations of love and reassurances that they'll see each other again someday.
(Would they ever see each other again, even in death? Would her and Dipper's spirits ever find one another worlds away?)
Mabel let out one long wail, digging her fingers into the knots of her sweater and bending over her knees, the sobs renewed. It was like Ford had just stuck his hand into her gut and tore out all her organs. She wanted her brother. She wanted to tell him she loved him and she'd always love him even if they were worlds away and he never stopped being dumb and neurotic. Now she never would, because Pacifica would pick the world over bringing Mabel home and Pacifica had the resources to destroy the whole Mystery Shack if she thought she had to.
Would it have been so much to ask that Mabel at least get to talk to her brother again? Maybe to Grunkle Stan and her parents too? Would it have been too much to ask Pacifica to give Dipper the mirror instead of destroying it?
The sobs began to taper off again. She missed them. She missed them so much. Why wouldn't Ford miss their family just as much as she did?
She wondered if he got a good last goodbye.
She'd never asked how he came to be in the portal. It was so hard to get him to open up about anything that she had just started dispensing pieces of her own life and waiting for him to give crumbs in return.
She knew he and Stan used to play on a beach in New Jersey. She knew Ford cut his foot on glass during one of their games and Stan carried him to safety. She knew Ford thought Stan was soft, but something had happened and they didn't talk for years.
He told her once that he made an effort not to think about home. Maybe never talking about it was just part of that. Come to think of it, Stan never talked about his life either. He'd allude to things, but he never talked about them, and Mabel had never thought to ask.
Mabel took a deep, steadying breath. In the quiet of the empty room and the dark of her sweater, her hair stood on end, but it was easy to get lost in thought. She wondered what she would be like, all alone, passing from world to world for thirty years.
Lonely, she decided. She'd be very, very lonely. She'd cry a lot, but no one could cry forever. She'd need to move on and keep going eventually. Maybe Grunkle Ford was a grumpy clam sometimes because it was the only way he could live this long. Maybe he didn't sound like he cared about their family back home because he cared too much.
Slowly, she pulled the collar of her sweater back down to her chin. She was still so mad about what he did, but she shouldn't have said what she said.
There was only the two of them now. Grandniece Mabel, Grunkle Ford. Ford had been all alone for thirty years, and now they'd both be all alone for thirty more if Mabel ran away.
Mad or not, Ford was the only family she had now, and she was the only family he had.
The floor creaked when she pushed herself to her feet. She squeezed the ends of her braids, brushing against her earlobes. Ford had twisted them up into stars himself yesterday because she wanted him to, even though there were a ton of easier braids. He didn't complain. He just said he thought stars were appropriate.
Hopefully, she hadn't run too far away. She had to go find him again.
Every floorboard groaned louder than before as she opened up the wrought iron door to retrace her steps, but something was wrong. She had run down dirty plastic stairs to get to the room, but now she was on the top of a carved wooden staircase with a worn red carpet running down into darkness.
"Grunkle Ford?" Mabel walked to the banister, peering over it, but she didn't walk down the stairs yet. Maybe she was remembering wrong? Maybe the plastic stairs were somewhere else.
No one answered.
"Grunkle Ford," she tried again. "Where are you?"
"Why would he even bother answering?"
Mabel jumped with a yelp and almost fell down the stairs. Dipper was leaning against the banister next to her, the bill of his pine tree cap pulled low over his eyes.
"I mean it, Mabel. Why would he bother?" Dipper propped his chin on his fists, his mouth twisted up in that bitter way it always did when he was mad, and he stared into the darkness. "He's just like Stan. They're always lying. All they care about is themselves."
He moved to pull his cap even further over his face, but Mabel got there first. She snagged the bill of his hat and pulled it right off his head.
"Hey!" Dipper scowled as he grabbed for the hat, but she held it out of his reach. "I'm being serious, Mabel!"
"You always are," Mabel said as she plopped the hat onto her own head instead.
"Are you even listening?" he snapped, his shoulders tensing up.
"Nope." She adjusted the cap on her head so the bill bowed to the side. "How do I look?"
"Typical." He hunched back over the banister, giving her a dark glare. "I don't understand why I'd ever try to be serious. Everything that's ever been important to me is just a game to you."
Mabel knew her brother like she knew her own mind. This wasn't her brother. The lines around his eyes were too harsh, the turn of his scowl too bitter, the shadows in his cheeks too deep. Without his hat, she could see him close to the way she had her whole life—with a head of fluffy brown hair and bangs that only mostly hid the birthmark on his forehead.
He was still talking, but she didn't bother listening. Instead, she reached out, gently pressing her hand against his cheek.
Dipper stopped talking. For about a moment. "What are you doing?"
Mabel pushed his bangs back. There was his birthmark. They got that much right.
He was scowling at her, but he still looked like her brother. He still had the birthmark, still had the same jawline as her, the same eyes, the same nose, the same fluffy hair. The lines weren't right, but the form was.
Tears blurred her vision. She smiled.
"What are you doing?" His voice was pitching up the way Dipper's always would when he was anxious. She poked his birthmark.
"Seeing you for the last time."
It wasn't her brother. She knew it wasn't. But for now? It would have to be enough.
She threw her arms around him and tugged him close. He yelped, thrashing, but she just hugged him tighter and buried her face in his shoulder. He didn't smell right. That was okay. She could overlook that.
"I love you, Dip-Dop."
He heaved, like he was choking. His chest convulsed against hers. An unholy shriek erupted.
Mabel reeled back, slapping her hands over her ears. Her brother's face morphed, his skin sliding and slipping down his skull, peeling off in wads like silly putty as he screamed.
Under his skin was thousands of screaming faces all over what should have been bone. Human faces, animal faces, alien faces, all kinds knotted together under her brother's melting flesh, gaping mouths shrieking and crying and yowling now that skin no longer muted them.
The top of Mabel's head burned, the hat melting into her scalp. With a yelp, she tore it off, her fingers sticking together in the screaming glue-like substance, and she threw wads off the railing and into the darkness below. Oily residue stuck to her braids and fingers. Not even scrubbing her hands furiously on her pants could get rid of the oily feeling that clung to her, and she watched her brother melt.
Dipper's face slid off entirely and landed with a wet plop on the floor. The thing that pretended to be him was only a surface of writhing faces with brown eyeballs.
Then the eyeballs fell out. Thud, thud, thud, they bounced down the steps. The thing was only screams with gaping eye holes and no mouth.
It collapsed into a pool of its own melt and shrieks, the noise echoing in Mabel's head even as the pool sunk into the frayed rug covering the stairway and went silent.
Mabel stared, mouth gaping at the new stain on the floor.
"Well," with a shaky breath, "I'm scarred for life."
Thank God that wasn't really Dipper. She could just forcefully remove that last bit of nightmare-inducement through denial and pretend the hug was her goodbye.
The whole world groaned. Like a pair of invisible hands was pushing up, the whole floor around her curved upward, creating a pit for Mabel to stand in as the walls grew higher and higher. "No!" She clawed at the floorboards, at the stair rug, but the wood and cloth and everything wept oil, horrible oil with the twisting screaming faces that got all over her hands and clothes. She leaned her back against one of the rising walls and wedged her feet against the other side, trying to climb out, but the walls peeled away from her, dropping her back into the pit.
The world was trying to kill her.
No.
Mabel clenched her teeth and kicked the wall. Wham, wham, the boards started to creak.
"I'm grateful for the sun in the sky." Wham. "I'm grateful for the stars." Wham. "I'm grateful for my family." Wham, cracking under her feet. "I'm grateful for my brother." Under her feet, wood splintering. "I'm grateful for my grunkles." Spider webs of cracks. "And I'm grateful for all the time I have left with Grunkle Ford!"
The wood splintered under her feet like bone, fragments flying in her face, and the world shattered.
Screaming, Mabel was in free fall, dropping below the stairs and wooden rooms and thousands of doors into nothing.
Then she hit the ground.
She groaned softly before pushing herself up to her hands and knees. Ugh, the floor was moist. Floors shouldn't ever be moist. "Things need to stop trying to kill me." Between hungry sea monsters, hypothermia, and angry floorboards, she'd had enough near-death experiences for a lifetime, thank you very much.
Then the new floor she was on thumped.
"Nope!" Mabel sprang to her feet and pointed at the ground. "We are not doing this again! You stop moving right now!"
It didn't stop moving. It thumped again, bouncing under her feet just enough to put her a little off balance, but then it was back to normal. Then it thumped. Then it flattened. Thump. Flatten. Thump. Flatten.
The space was completely dark, or at least she thought it was. Slowly, her eyes adjusted, and she saw that there was absolute nothingness all around her besides darkness above, to the sides, and an uneven pulsing ground. There weren't any sources of light, so she didn't know how she could see, but then she noticed she was the source of light.
She looked down at her hands. The few times Ford had told her what she looked like between dimensions or in Bill's world, he always said she was like colorful light. She'd never seen it, but now she could. Pretty colors shone out of her skin and lit up the darkness, making the dark world look a little like a rave. Raves made everything better.
The ground thumped again. She held her arms out to shine the light on the floor. It was made of muscle, ribbed with veins. It thumped. The ground was beating like a heart.
Mabel took it back. Raves didn't make everything better.
"Dear Dipper," Mabel said as she put her hands on her hips. "I hope you still have that memory gun handy, because I'm going to need you to ship that to me ASAP when I get out of here. You think UPS does interdimensional shipping?"
She forced herself to giggle, even if she was screaming internally.
The light from her skin brightened and the heart under her feet shuddered arrhythmically on the next beat. Mabel's forced smile turned into a grimace.
"Grunkle Ford?" she called out to the dark. She didn't expect a response, but it was either call for him or just pick a direction and walk. "Grunkle Ford, I'm sorry! I promise not to run away again!"
More silence.
Putting one finger up, Mabel closed her eyes and got ready to spin around to pick a direction, but then crooning drifted through the dark. Grunkle Ford. She could recognize his voice, even if he'd never sung to her before, and he was humming… Hebrew? Definitely Hebrew, but it wasn't any blessing she knew. It sounded so sad.
"B'Gan Ayden t'hay m'nuchatah; la-chayn Ba-al Harachamim yas-tire-ha b'sayter k'nafav l'olamim…"
She followed his voice into the dark. The ground beat under her feet, but her skin kept her way lit.
At the edge of her light, there were occasional cocoons, the only real indication she was moving at all. They looked like the chrysalises that caterpillars made, except instead of hard exteriors, they looked like they were made of lots of threads twisted and wrapped around them until they were encased.
Carefully picking her way towards one, she saw it was around six feet long and all the threads connected to the ground. Mabel snagged her finger on one thread and tugged it gently.
It was brittle and dusty and snapped, bowing away from the cocoon. It was hollow. It wasn't a thread, but a tiny tube. The entire cocoon was so dry that any part she touched crumbled to dust.
The Hebrew was fading away. Mabel picked up the pace again. "Grunkle Ford?"
It was gone. Her grunkle's voice was gone, but she could still feel which way she should go. It tugged her heart forward, and she didn't see any reason to question it. It wasn't like she could think of anywhere else to go on a giant dark heart with a bunch of cocoons on it.
Every step on the heart made a soft sucking noise, like it wanted to stick to her but it could never gain traction. She twisted the hem of her sweater in her hands and kept walking. She just had to stay positive.
Ford was out there, and she would find him soon. Then they would go to another world and do fun things like dance and talk to aliens and draw. She'd bug him to do more things while he was making his notes, he would chide her about patience, and it'd be fun.
There are worse things she could do for the rest of her life. There are worse people she could spend the rest of her life with. Ford always seemed to know what to do when things went wrong, so they would be okay even if sometimes they were in danger, and Mabel could make him have fun. So what if she had to put up with things like sea monsters and murderous floorboards and walking on giant organs if she had her grunkle by her side?
The light from her skin was getting brighter. The pull in her heart was more powerful, and in the distance, she could make out a dim light completely separate from herself. The light was far less colorful than hers, but who cared? It was light.
Grinning, Mabel broke into a run, sprinting towards the light, but then she stopped short, almost falling over herself. There was noise. Awful, slithering noise in the dark. Things were coming, and if the day had taught her anything, it was that this world was trying to kill her and anything that wasn't her grunkle should be avoided at all costs.
She scrambled for a hiding spot as the slithering grew closer. Nothing, nothing, just a wide expanse of veiny beating heart and white cocoons.
Not that it would help her, she realized. She's light. She's one of the only sources of light. They'd be able to find her. She pat her arms, trying to extinguish the glow in her skin, but then she remembered—she still had the black crystal from the ice planet.
She shoved her hand in her pocket, pulling out the crystal and uncapping it. Immediately, she was plunged into the dark, but she could still feel the warmth of her light coming from her skin even if she couldn't see it.
The slithering paused. Mabel held her breath and clutched the crystal until it left imprints in her fingers.
Slithering started again, but it was going towards the other light, the far dimmer one ahead. Mabel inched towards the light, sliding her feet on the throbbing ground and trying to stay as silent as possible, but when she finally got close enough to see what was making the light, she forgot herself and gasped.
Ford. It was Ford, lying unconscious on the ground, his skin letting out a dull glow that dimmed by the minute. Thick tubes stuck from his stomach, his chest, his legs, and his arms, leading back into the ground. Something thick and black that sucked in light leeched through the tubes and poured into the heart, and more tubes were growing from the floor to connect with him too.
Oh God, it was eating him. It was turning him into a cocoon and eating him.
As all the gunk was pumped into the heart, the ground shimmered. Gray, colorless images danced on the squishy, organic surface, and it took Mabel a moment to realize that the images made sense. It was of people.
"Wait, no, I can explain; it was a mistake! "
Mabel knew that voice—deep and gravelly with too much smoke. A blur of a beefy teenager was thrown on the street. The details were fuzzy, like the way his clothes hung on him or the cars driving behind him, but his face was clear. The frightened, pleading expression on his face was the one pocket of clarity.
"All you ever do is lie and cheat right on your brother's coattails. Well this time you cost our family potential millions! And until you make us a fortune, you aren't welcome in this household. " Someone threw a gym bag at him. He was being viewed from above, like from a window. The teenage Stanley (because that was the only person he could possibly be) looked up at whoever was looking at him, desperation burning his face.
"Stanford, tell him he's being crazy! "
Whoever was watching him (it was Ford it had to be Ford but Mabel didn't want it to be Ford) winced and closed the curtains, flopping down at a desk covered in blueprints and textbooks and designs.
"Stanford? Don't leave me hanging. High six? "
The viewer swept all the designs to the floor as the front door slammed. He didn't do anything while Stanley raged and drove away.
The surface of the thumping heart beneath Ford became smudged again, but it never gained any kind of color. Different images started forming, but Mabel felt sick already. What had she just seen? Surely, Ford and his parents hadn't let Stan be homeless. Surely. She couldn't conceive of Grunkle Ford just abandoning his brother on the street, no matter what he was mad about.
The slithering came closer, distracting her from whatever new thing the heart was going to show. Mabel held her breath, focusing on the dark instead, hoping that whatever was slithering would move on.
"I can't do this anymore, Stanford! After all the cockamamie you've put me through— "
That was Old Man McGucket. He was young, coherent, and angrier than Mabel had ever heard him.
"Fiddleford, don't be so dramatic. You'd getting paranoid. "
"I'M the paranoid one? "
The slithering stopped. McGucket and Ford kept arguing, very nearly coming to blows, but Mabel wasn't listening. A long claw, bigger and longer than Mabel herself, peeked into Ford's light, reaching for him.
It was going to kill him. It was going to kill him and he was utterly defenseless.
Utterly defenseless save for Mabel.
"GET AWAY FROM MY GRUNKLE!"
Mabel launched with a howl.
Her crystal swallowed up Ford's light too when she leapt at the claw, but she still hit it with a thunk, and then she was dangling from it like a monkey. She kept screaming until she drove her teeth in the claw. Its oily carapace burst.
A howl echoed that rattled Mabel to the bones. Her mouth filled with horrible and bitter bile. Under her clawing hands, the carapace started to melt.
Something knocked against her mouth, trying to force her off. It pulled back, but she was yanked along with it by the teeth. She hit the ground. Her stomach dragged on the heart as the thing started slithering away from her. It was caught on her braces.
She was dragged faster, deeper in the dark. She clawed at whatever hooked her, but it wasn't yielding under her nails. She had to cut it.
The razor fur. She unfurled the hem of her sleeve and slammed it against her braces.
It sliced through the hook, right through her lip, right through her braces band. Blood poured down her chin as a metal wire sprung free from her mouth and her sleeve scored her incisor, but she hit the ground and she was free.
There was a roar loud enough to shake the ground. Mabel fumbled with her crystal and shoved the cap on.
Her light was back. For a moment, she could see a flash of the beast, long coiling tube-like limbs covered in silently screaming faces, but it wailed and reeled back from her light, its skin bubbling and blistering as it shrieked. The air stank of burning oil as it fled into the dark. Mabel spat out bile and blood in its direction before running back to Ford.
"Grunkle Ford!"
The floor beneath him was showing Stanley again, but older, with a brand on his shoulder and shouting, but Mabel didn't care. She threw herself down next to Ford, tugging at the biggest tube connected to his stomach, but it was firmly attached. She tugged harder, but his skin was stretching with it, like she'd have to tear off his flesh to get the tubes off too. What if they had burrowed down to his organs?
"Grunkle Ford!" She did the next best thing. She smacked his face. "Wake up!"
He winced. Mabel couldn't stop a relieved grin, even though it hurt and made her lip bleed more and her eyes sting, because he was alive. "Grunkle Ford!"
His eyes fluttered. Mabel leaned in close to see his eyes open to slits, but they were clouded. She gave his cheek a lighter smack. "C'mon, I need your help. I don't know how to fix this."
There was no answer. His eyes only sort of focused on her. He tugged one arm upwards, but it was pinned with tubes sucking the life out of him. Without skipping a beat, he used the other arm instead. She waited for him to do something life-saving, but instead, he just cupped her cheek in his one free hand.
His hand was callused, all roughed up from years of being on the run, but it was so gentle when he touched her that it almost felt like he expected her to shatter. Her lips hurt. She was dripping blood on the floor. He drew one thumb along the corner of her mouth, wiping some of it away.
"Grunkle Ford?"
His chest let out an awful rattle. His eyes fluttered again, drifting off to stare into the dark, but his hand didn't leave her face.
"No, no, now isn't the time to—"
The light from his skin brightened, moving up from a glowworm to a candle. Color rushed into the veiny, throbbing surface beneath them, and a completely new scene started to play.
It was quiet. No more shouting or screaming or punching. Mabel glanced at the ground just to see… herself. Just her in full color, sitting on the desert sand, her freckles coming out in the sun as she leaned against Ford's knee and drew pictures in the book he gave her.
The only sound was the memory of Mabel's pencil scratching paper.
Why did this appear of all things? Ford's eyes drifted shut. His hand started to fall, but Mabel caught it and squeezed tightly, lacing their fingers together. "Don't fall asleep again!"
Something weird was happening to the tubes burrowed in his flesh. They weren't sucking out sludge anymore, but something that looked like oil mixed with water, spread thin with swirly pools of color. The tubes were getting stiff, like the new stuff was drying them out. The beat of the ground was becoming uneven. Big pumps punctuated by little pumps, and their patch of floor dried and flaked.
The new stuff being sucked out of Ford was hurting the heart. It was hurting everything that touched it. It was hurting just like how her hug hurt not-Dipper, or how her light hurt the slithering monster. All the awfulness in this place was only able to live when things were bad.
Mabel gasped.
Then she immediately flopped down, lying on her side and facing her grunkle.
"Grunkle Ford." She batted at his face. He winced, drawing away, but she kept batting. "Grunkle Ford, think happy thoughts."
His eyes cracked open again, and through the clouds and grogginess, he managed to look skeptical.
"Don't give me that face." She poked his nose, causing another wince and something that sounded suspiciously like a grumble. "Happy thoughts. Hop to it."
He squeezed her hand and closed his eyes again.
Mabel's eyes stung as she prepared to smack him again. He had to wake up. He had to.
Then the floor changed. Now, it showed Mabel knitting her sweater. Then it changed again. Mabel was cuddling his chest. It kept changing, kept showing her playing or making things or even just being near him doing nothing much at all. She was his happy thought.
Mabel's stinging eyes overflowed as she scooted to be closer to him. She grabbed the tube in his stomach again, trying to pull it free, but it was still resisting too much, even as flakes of it came off into her palm.
"Almost there, Grunkle Ford." She hugged his arm, pressing her ear against his wrist so she could hear his pulse. "When else have you been happy?"
The memories on the ground rushed backwards in time. As they went back further, the colors became more washed out. Ford was in Gravity Falls, chasing monsters and writing his journals. Ford was working on piles and piles of problem sets while a very young Fiddleford McGucket plucked on a banjo in pastels.
Then the memory was complete grayscale. Ford was on a beach. There was a big moldy boat. He had a small crowbar in his tiny six-fingered hands, and he tried to wedge it under one of the rotted boards on the boat's side.
"Get over here. Let me show you how it's done. "
A boy that looked a lot like Dipper gave Ford a gap-toothed grin before taking the crowbar from him and swinging it like a baseball bat. The boards all splintered under the metal, leaving the wood in pieces on the ground.
"You just broke the boat. " Instead of being serious, Ford was laughing, kicking pieces of splintered wood in the sand.
"It was already broken! We have to rebuild it from the ground up, you said. " There was a flush of sudden color. The boy's sunburnt skin. He flicked Ford's glasses, making Ford giggle harder. " You think too much, Sixer. Sometimes you just need to punch things really hard. "
The tubes weren't dying. There wasn't enough color and light in the memory. It made him happy, but it was too muddied up with other stuff.
Ford wasn't happy enough to kill the heart on his own.
Something slithered in the dark, just beyond the edge of Mabel's light. The monsters were back, waiting for them to lose hope and extinguish their lights.
Mabel bared her bloody teeth at the shadows. "We'll see who'll be eating who!" She paused a moment. "That means no one is eating anyone. Because you taste awful." She grimaced at the way the taste of the oil under that last monster's carapace lingered in her mouth before looking back down at her grunkle. "It's probably best if you're way out of it for this one because I'm about to do something really dumb."
She grabbed one of the tubes growing out of the heart to feast on her grunkle's emotional issues. "No time to reconsider questionable decisions!" She shoved the mouth of the tube into her wrist, where it immediately bit down.
Pain shot up her arm like lightning, but she clenched her teeth and thought about her grunkle. Her grunkle, who loved her so much even though he only knew about her for a few weeks. Her grunkle, who really needed her help right now.
Stan, who kept so many secrets but still loved his family so fiercely.
Dipper, who had been with her since birth and would still be in her heart when she died.
The floor exploded in color and light and a flurry of memories. Karaoke with the family. Stan lighting fireworks with them. Tramping through the woods with Dipper. Doing makeovers with Candy and Grenda. Dressing up Waddles. Recording bad rap songs with Wendy and Soos. Making cookies with her parents and brother. Setting up glitter bombs all over the house.
It was like her blood vomited rainbows directly into the heart. Pump pump pump it beat so hard it was like they were on a bouncy castle. The things slithering screamed.
Then the heart burst.
A vein exploded, spraying oily rainbows and bile over everything. Things in the dark wailed and lunged into the light. They were made of screams and claws and teeth—Mabel fumbled with Ford's belt before finding his gun, yanking it from its holster and squeezing the trigger at the beasts.
The shot blew through a claw. Her ears rang. Recoil slammed into her wrist. The tube connected to her skin dissolved. Another monster—she couldn't count them, they writhed together like screaming snakes—lunged over the first. Off went the gun and the beast reeled back, bile pouring from the screaming mouths on its body. Mabel's wrist hurt.
The beasts thrashed in bile and light before dragging themselves back in the darkness. Some of them were back in the dark. Some of them were waiting for a better opportunity. Some of them were dying.
Mabel didn't have time to think about it. The tubes had mostly dissolved off Ford's body, but when she brushed off the residue, his black shirt was wet.
"No, no," she groaned. Anything she said provoked fresh waves of blood to dribble over her chin. She pulled up his shirt, and in a nest of old scars, there was… nothing. At least, nothing that could be making all that blood. There was a bleeding puncture in his gut, the circumference of her thumb, but his skin was smeared with enough blood that it looked like he was dying, and she couldn't find where it was coming from. Had it all come from that one little stab?
Ford stirred. His eyes opened halfway. A thick layer of confusion still hung over his pupils, but they focused on her. "Mabel?" His voice was slurred like he had just woken up from a thirty year coma.
"Where do you keep your first aid stuff?" Mabel said, hoping against hope that it wasn't in his bag and she wouldn't have to waste time trying to figure all those pouches out.
He blinked sluggishly. She groaned and started digging through his pockets again. His hand bumped her arm. Clenched in the fist that had been tied down by tubes was a fresh roll of bandages. Mabel's grin hurt her lip again and stabbed it against the free wire in her mouth as she grabbed them.
After a moment of staring at the wound in Ford's gut, Mabel remembered that she had no idea what she was doing.
She did her best to wipe up excess blood and grime with her sleeve—her white sweater was starting to look red and black—before simply stuffing bandages into the puncture. Ford gave a grunt of discomfort, but he didn't move to stop her, so she was either doing it right or he was too blissed out to care, and either way Mabel was just going to keep doing what she was doing. She hoped she wasn't pushing bandages into his spleen or something. That couldn't be good.
She couldn't think too hard. Think too hard and she'd panic, like Dipper would right about now. Just move and think later.
She tore the bandages with the razors in her sleeve once it felt like she couldn't push anymore in, then quickly checked all the other tube punctures. None of them were good, but they weren't life-threatening, so Mabel tugged Ford's hands. She still didn't know where all the blood came from, but she hoped it wasn't his.
"Grunkle Ford—" she barely noticed she made her mouth bleed again, "—you have to get up."
"Yes, yes," he mumbled from far away. He started to push himself up, but he moved like a tree struggling to uproot itself.
She tugged and tugged at his hands as his joints popped and creaked like a man twice his age. His palms were all blistered and burned. Did she do that? No time to think. Had to get him up. She pulled his arms as he drew his legs under himself and finally stood, but he didn't straighten. He stayed bowed like weights were tied to his neck.
Mabel placed one of his blistered hands on her uninjured shoulder, and he wilted in her direction, leaning weight on her like a cane, but he was staying upright so she didn't care.
Things moved in the dark, waiting for them to give up, but Mabel started pawing Ford's pockets for the steampunk radar thing he always played with before finding a portal.
Ford's entire body creaked as he twisted to pat one particular pocket on his side. Mabel dug through it and pulled out the rounded radar, frowning at its blank screen before playing with the knobs and buttons dotting its edges. Eventually, it sputtered to life, showing a big grid with lights of varying intensity peppered through it. She decided to go towards the brightest light and shoved the radar into one of her own pockets.
"We're going to walk now," she said, placing one steadying hand on her great uncle's back as they started moving forward.
With a grunt of assent, he moved. He never complained or tried to stop, but he could only shuffle, never picking his feet too high off the ground. The bile and rainbows sloshed around their boots. The erratic beat of the heart continually pitched him to one side or the other, like it wanted to topple him.
The heart gave a massive pound. Ford tipped forward. Mabel caught the back of his jacket but she didn't have a chance of pulling him back up.
His knees buckled. Mabel sidestepped in front of him, catching his weight on her back. Her legs strained. He breathed heavily into her hair. She could feel his muscles twisting to make him stand, but he couldn't. The best he could manage was putting both hands on her uninjured shoulder and pushing himself up partway. All the weight left her unbalanced, but it wasn't as painful as leaning on her hurt shoulder would be.
"Not too far now, Grunkle Ford!" She had no idea if that was true or not, but she said it anyway and patted his hands as she started to trudge again. He didn't move with her. Instead, he patted her shoulder gently.
"It's okay, Mabel." His voice sounded so far away. "I'm going to take a second. You go ahead."
Mabel curled her fingers around his before he could try to move his hands. Her blood ran cold and coils of panic unfurled in her tummy. "That's okay. We'll walk slowly together." She grabbed a handful of his jacket in her fist for good measure.
"Sweetheart…" He never called her sweetheart. It was always her name, nothing cute. Ford was too awkward and distant to give her cute names like Stan did. She tightened her grip on him and hobbled forward. When he started to shuffle with her, she let out a breath of relief.
"We'll walk slowly together," she said, keeping a firm hold on his hand and clothes.
"You might need to go ahead of me eventually," he said. The darkness pressed in.
"Not yet," Mabel said.
The ground was uneven, but Ford didn't try to talk again and instead focused on not falling over. Mabel's back hurt from supporting his hands, but everything hurt at that point, so she stopped caring. Their pace slowed like a dying wind up toy's. Ford's strides became shorter, sluggish. Mabel fixed her mouth in a grim line.
"I'm grateful for clothes that keep me warm. I'm grateful for the light in our way. I'm grateful for the cool musical aliens we saw. I'm grateful that we got to dance…"
He didn't repeat anything, but Mabel kept talking and they kept moving. He stumbled on a vein. The weight on her shoulder was starting to strain her muscles, but he didn't fall down, and they kept going.
Eventually—thank God—a light besides their own burst open. A portal. Inside, the image of an underground cave full of punched holes in the ceiling dripping rainwater down into large pools appeared.
Mabel had been hoping for a city with lots of doctors or something, but she would take what she could get. She did what Ford always did and took a little rock from her pocket and threw it into the portal.
She strained her ears. There was a clatter.
"Come on, Grunkle Ford."
She pulled him in.
The space between worlds spread out before them. Ford's six prongs of lightning weren't crackling like they were supposed to. They weren't crackling at all. Instead of lightning, he just looked like a golden hand with writing glinting dully on its surface. His thoughts didn't roar in her head. The best they did was wordlessly hum.
Ford told her that she was a warm light. She kept burning him. Pulling back herself as much as possible, Mabel wrapped herself around the hand, never touching but never letting him drift away.
The next world came too fast. They hit the ground hard enough to echo. The damp chill of the underground cave immediately settled in Mabel's bones. Ford didn't move.
"Grunkle Ford?" Blood dribbled down her chin as she got on her knees and shook his arm. "Grunkle Ford, get up!"
Something clicked above her. On the ceiling, white cocoons dangled, and massive gleaming faceted eyes stared down at her.
"My grunkle needs help!"
The clicking got louder. The faceted eyes were coming closer.
"Please help us."
Content warning for violence against children.
Thank you to Eregyrn-Falls for betaing this chapter. Also, thank you to everyone who reviewed. Comments, compliments, and critiques are always warmly welcomed.
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