Mabel sat along in a quiet area around the Shack, having found a nice sign post from some long forgotten event to slowly bump her head against. She'd been soaking in the damp dirt for some time now, leaving her quite filthy looking, a fact that was entirely eclipsed by the emotional turmoil she was sorting through at the moment.
"Dipper doesn't trust me" she thought to herself, turning it over in her head and trying to make sense of it. If she were to vocalize the thought, Mabel had no idea whether the sentence would end in a question mark, and exclamation point or a period. "We're just like our Grunkles after all..."
Then, with another bonk to the post, she rethought her position. "No, that's not right Mabel, you looked in Dipper's eyes when he willingly stepped in the portal, and he was as sad as you were! Dipper WANTS to be able to trust me, but thinks he can't."
Her head hit the post again, harder with anger this time. "Well then, I'll just stay right here until Dipper comes back from his stupid adventures and decides to trust me again!" Within moments, the absurdity of her statement hit her and the anger deflated. "No, that's hopeless, Dipper won't just come back to me at some point. He's got Grunkle Ford, and the mysteries of the infinite, and Pacifica Northwest now!"
The next hit to the post was another strong blow. "Of course Dipper trusts them though, they deserve it! They didn't help Bill Cipher destroy the world, and they weren't useless against him!"
A sense of realization was beginning to flow through Mabel Pines as she banged her head on the sign post. "Just look at me! I'm laying around in the mud hitting my head on a post, of course Dipper can't trust me, he can't even depend on me! I'm not smart like him or Grunkle Ford, and I'm not even clever or strong like Grunkle Stan! I've always gotten through life just by being Mabel, but Mabel isn't going to cut it anymore!"
Flesh slammed into the wooden post again, but this time it was an angry, determined fist, cracking and splitting the wood in several place. "Even if I have to change who I am to make myself worthy of Dipper's trust again, nothing will stop me from getting my brother back!" She proclaimed out loud.
"No way kid." replied Grunkle Stan, looking over at Mabel applying bandages to her recently de-splintered and cleaned hand.
"But Grunkle Stan, I need to be able to help and protect Dipper if he's ever going to be able to trust me again!" Mabel begged. "And you're the toughest, coolest old man I know! Can't you show me some of your tricks?"
The old man let out a regretful sigh. "Mabel, I didn't exactly train at some kind of crime dojo that I'm sure you're imagining to pick up these skills of mine you know. I mean, the boxing lessons as a kid helped, but that was basic stuff. Everything I learned about real fighting, survival, I learned on the cold, hard streets, and I'd rather relive every bit of pain and cruelty that part of my life had then let you experience a second of it!"
"Fine, don't do it for me, do it for Dipper!" Mabel yelled. "When he said he couldn't trust me it hurt him just as much as it hurt me. Help me stop that Grunkle Stan, I need to be capable and helpful, someone Dipper can depend on, someone worthy of his trust!" She exclaimed, tears beginning to creep into her eyes.
Stan seemed to be getting nervous now. "Look, pumpkin, you're overreacting. Dipper's just got a lot going on right now, he'll cool off and you'll be back best friends in no time! The best thing to do is wait it out and not do something stupid that could get you hurt while he's gone." He said hurriedly.
"Is that what you did when you lost Grunkle Ford?" Mabel asked pointedly, then looked down when she realized what she said. "I'm... I'm sorry Grunkle Stan, that wasn't fair. I haven't lost Dipper, he's just... being distant right now. It'll pass I guess." When she looked up, Stan had taken to staring at his own feet.
"I'll help you Mabel." He said in a softer voice. "I'm sorry, I just... I want to keep you kids safe more then anything else, but if you and Dipper split up it'll be way more painful then anything that could go wrong if we do this." Then, he perked up a little and cracked. "Alright, rule number one: never tell you parents I taught you anything!"
Mabel's face brightened up and she giggled back. "Come on Grunkle Stan, I'm not a kid anymore, I'll be 17 by the end of this summer! And besides, I've been following rule number one since that fishing trip you took me and Dipper on!"
"Hey, when you're as old as I am, you can call anyone you want to kid!" He laughed back. "Come around the back of the house in 20 minutes, I'll have things set up."
20 minutes later, the two spirited twins were behind the Mystery Shack, where Stan had set up a punching bag on a stand and was presenting Mabel with a pair of boxing gloves. As soon as she slipped them on her hands, Stan bopped her on the head with a rolled up newspaper. "First mistake Mabel: playing fair! The gloves alone might cut it back in boxing class, but I think we can skip to the more advanced concepts! Now, I'm gonna turn my back for 10 minutes, and during that time you're gonna weigh those gloves with whatever you can find!"
10 minutes later, Stan turned around to find Mabel waiting for him, humming an innocent tune with a smile on her face. Stan grinned back at her. "That'a girl! Now, since I don't really know where I'm starting here, just go to town on that punching bag for a bit, let me size you up a little."
Mabel nodded her head, then set up in front of the bag. She jittered in place for a few seconds, dukes up, then began throwing punch after punch at suspended bag.
"Hmm, no technique at all and very little strength behind each hit, but boy is she fast!" Stan thought to herself as she landed a lightning quick barrage of light, untrained blows on the punching bag. As she went though, Mabel's punches were hitting harder, as it seemed she built energy from extended hitting as opposed to draining. She slowly grew a more focused and angry expression as she hammered away, turning Stan's proud smile into a small frown.
He became properly concerned when her constant punching eventually snapped the old rope connecting the bag to its rickety setup, and instead of collapsing in exhaustion Mabel jumped on top of the bag as soon as it hit the dirt and viciously punched the same spot over and over. "Mabel, Mabel, stop, that's enough!" Stan called out in a concerned tone, then added "I think you got him." in a sarcastic tone as her arms slowed down, the section she was punching over and over beginning. "Jeez kid, what got into you? Thinking of a high school teacher you didn't like?" His jokey tone faded as he saw Mabel's eyes were beginning to water over.
It vanished completely when her gloves slid off revealing a thin layer of blood all over her hands.
Stan was stunned silent as he checked the gloves, revealing Mabel had filled the gloves with discarded garden bricks. They'd added weight to every punch while grinding her knuckles raw. Trying to blink back the pain without any complaining or further tears, Mabel asked "So what's the next lesson?"
"Next lesson is not to give yourself bloody knuckles by dropping a brick in the gloves!" Stand yelled, anger born of worry. "I left a perfectly usable pair of broken garden spades right in the open. The flat metal plate would have slid in perfectly, and more importantly wouldn't have ground up your hands!"
"I wanted the most damage per punch." Mabel replied simply.
"More damage at the cost of hurting yourself is never worth it kid." Stan stated in an usually stern voice. "You fight to keep people from hurting you, to punch back at the world when it punches you. Damaging yourself defeats the whole purpose of it!"
"If it protects Dipper, I'll take all the damage I have to." Mabel said determinedly. "I have to become worthy of his trust again Grunkle Stan, I can't let our bond dissolve! But I'm useless to him as I am, a helpless complainer who killed all those people by helping Bill Cipher invade so I don't know why he'd ever... ever trust me again..." Her previous tears of pain had begun to turn to weeping.
Grunkle Stan looked down at her solemnly. "You're not a murderer, Mabel. I mean, at best all that would get classified as manslaughter." Realizing that was rather tactless, he then added, in a more serious tone of voice, "Besides, it takes one to know one..."
A shiver went up Mabel's spine as she looked at Stan with wide, almost scared eyes. "No... no Grunkle Stan, that's not true!"
He looked down at his feet, a very rare expression of shame on his face. "Kid, I was a wandering criminal since I was a teenager until I stole Ford's identity. I never went out and... well, hunted someone down to kill them, but you don't need to be a genius like Ford to know that sometimes when you beat someone's ass they can just die from that!" Stan shouted in an unexpectedly angry and frustrated tone. Then, he emotionally deflated and sat down on the beaten punching bag, holding his head in his hands.
Despite the foreign feeling of fear of her Grunkle worming into Mabel's mind, she nonetheless sat besides him and patted him on the arm. "Do you want to talk about it?" she asked awkwardly, not sure if this was at all appropriate but finding it strangely cathartic.
Grunkle Stan pulled his face up, and looked dead ahead as he began to speak. "His name was Jacob Daleson, he was a fence who did business out of his garage in an ideal small town America, post the coal mine drying up and crank becoming the area's main export. I was trying to sell some... god I don't even remember what it was. I might not even have stolen it. Anyway, we were arguing over price, he got mad and attacked me with a tire iron. He got a few good hits in, but I managed to snatch it from him, bashed him across the chest with it, then punched him in the head until he went down. Then I stole one of the bikes he had stored among the goods and fled."
Mabel was quiet all the while, but could tell Stan was burdened by the same feelings she felt upon seeing the forest graveyard, and they weighed down on him for many years. "I was reading the paper a few days and... and he was in the local obituary. I hadn't even seen it when I ran away, but he landed face down and drowned in his own blood. Like I said, you don't need to be a genius to know that could happen... you just needed to be smarter then me."
He let out a long sigh at this. "I felt sick as soon as I read that. I had to throw up in a cheap public toilet. I had only been out on my own for a few years at that point and just... felt terrible about killing the guy but didn't know what else I could have done. So, for a few months I did my best not to end up fighting people. When that ended up with me getting beaten up, I fought back again but tried to be more careful with how I was swinging. That didn't work either, so then I just made sure to avoid reading the obituary."
The two were quiet for a very long time after this. Grunkle Stan, despite his desire to come clean, used the silence to tell a practiced life of omission, his lifetime habit of deception crushing him like a weight, added by the emotional pain he felt as the possibility of losing Mabel. "After all, you're already in dangerous water here Stanley. She'd never want to look at you again if she knew what happened in that South American prison." And so, despite having barred his soul to her less than a minute ago, Stan closed it again, sealing away the unspeakable things he did to survive in that foreign penitentiary, never to see the light of day.
"Mabel... do you think I'm a bad guy?" Stan asked, genuine nervousness in his voice.
"If you're a bad guy Grunkle Stan, then I'm a bad guy too." Mable replied in a comforting tone.
"Heh, I'll agree with that." Stan replied in a relieved, forced jokey tone, and the two opted to just sit there for awhile, watching the sky and ruing their mistakes.