"...Dipper?"

She could hear him.

It had worked.

Dipper saw Mabel's eyes grow wide with understanding as she stared... not at him, exactly, not into his face, but at the sock puppet that covered his hand, his lone means of communication.

The moonlight lit up her face, but passed right through his own.

"Yeah, it's me- I wasn't sure that this would work, because the puppet doesn't look like me, but I guess that didn't matter, and I'm sorry I didn't do this sooner, I tried but I just-"

"Bwap." Mabel made a fist and gently bumped it against the top of the sock puppet. "Good to hear from ya, bro-bro."

And then, without warning, Dipper found the sock puppet that he was inhabiting being engulfed in a tight hug.

"You giant dork I thought you were dead I thought you were gone I can't believe it-"

"Mabel-"

"I should have realized but I didn't and it's all my fault-"

"Mabel?"

"But it's okay because you're here you're really here I mean it's not the same but still-"

"Mabel, you're squishing my hand."

"Oh." Mabel loosened her grip, though not giving it up entirely, and let out a soft, nervous giggle. "Sorry, Dipper."

Dipper felt a teardrop sink into the sock's scratchy fabric.

"Don't worry about it, sis."

"And I'm sorry for obsessing over some dumb guy all week when I should've been watching out for you."

Dipper forced himself to slap on a grin as the sock puppet grew damper. Mabel was supposed to be the cheery one, the one who comforted him when he got too worked up over something, not the one begging for some modicum of solace. In the course of one day, the world had gone all topsy-turvy. "It's okay, Mabel. It'll be okay. We'll figure something out."

"Okay." Mabel sniffled and gave a weak smile, relinquishing her grip on the sock puppet before holding up her hand in a fist. "Mystery twins?"

"Mystery twins." Dipper made a fist of his own and bumped it against Mabel's.

His sister giggled gently, though the tears in her eyes still glimmered under the light streaming in from the window. "I just fist-bumped a puppet. How weird is that?"

Dipper rolled his eyes. "Tell me about it."

Their conversation was disrupted by the sound of loud thumping below them, footsteps pounding as they rushed up the stairs. As the door to the twins' room in the attic burst open, Dipper instinctively let go of the puppet, which promptly flopped onto the floor.

"What's with all this racket, kid?" Grunkle Stan had dark circles around his eyes, much like those that had covered Dipper's face only the day before, and a number of red splotches across his face. "It's the middle of the night. You should be sleeping."

Mabel stared at the puppet on the floor, which showed no signs of the activity that had been present only moments before. She was waiting for his response, Dipper realized. Well, if she was waiting for him to explain everything to Grunkle Stan, they might be stuck here for a while.

"I couldn't sleep." Mabel eventually replied, glancing back up at Stan.

"And all that yapping I heard? Talking and going to bed don't mix, ya know."

"Well..."

Her gaze fell onto the puppet again. Dipper weighed his options in his mind. Was he ready to share this secret with Grunkle Stan, the man who had been lying to them about his knowledge of the paranormal for so long? Or might it be best to lay low for a while, to size up the situation further before deciding who to trust?

Dipper reached a conclusion.

Mabel, apparently, reached another.

"I was talking to Dipper."

Stan's eyes grew wide as he crouched down to look at Mabel face to face. "Mabel. Honey. Believe it or not, I know what you're going through. And-" It felt downright unnatural to hear the voice of his grunkle- always gruff, always stoic- waver like that. "-if it helps you to talk out your feelings, well, just make sure to get some rest while you're at it, and maybe keep it down a little."

"You don't get it!" Mabel leaped to her feet, her shadow falling over Stan's head in the moonlight, her eyes blazing. "Dipper's actually here, like, over here-" She waved her hand in the general direction of the sock puppet, roughly where Dipper was floating as he observed the situation, unwilling if not unable to do more than watch. "See, I wasn't fighting him, he made a deal with this evil triangle guy, and so now he's a ghost and-"

Grunkle Stan stood up and shook his head, his face hardened into a deep frown. "Look, you've had a long day, kid. Get some sleep, and see if you still want to talk about this 'evil triangle demon'-" He surrounded the phrase with air quotes. "-in the morning."

"But Grunkle Stan-"

"Go to bed, Mabel."

And with that, Stan walked out of the room, shutting the door behind him.

Dipper slowly, sheepishly, returned to the sock puppet, though it remained close to the door, Mabel towering over him by much more than the one millimeter separating their usual heights.

"What was that all about, bro-bro?" Mabel put her hands on her hips.

The boy hesitated before responding. "I'm not sure I want to tell Stan about this just yet."

"And why not? Do you really not trust him?"

Dipper thought back to all the times that Grunkle Stan had professed ignorance of the paranormal this summer- how he'd made fun of the journal, claimed that their accounts of supernatural adventures were just proof of an overactive imagination- before revealing that he'd known the truth about the strange happenings of Gravity Falls all along.

The boy couldn't help but wonder what other secrets Stan might still have up his sleeve.

"...I don't know, Mabel."

"You don't know?" Mabel glared at Dipper with a fiery gaze. "He's our grunkle! He took care of us this whole summer, remember?"

The boy's response slipped out before he could think it over.

"And look how that turned out."

The girl's face fell, indignation turning to shock and horror, the fire in her eyes replaced with ice.

"You... you don't really think..."

"No, no, I didn't mean it, I-"

"This is not Grunkle Stan's fault, Dipper." He'd never heard Mabel's voice so flat and cold before.

"I know, I know-"

"And maybe if you'd trusted him a bit more, he could've helped, and things wouldn't be like..." The girl threw her hands into the hair, then let them descend, instead pointing at the sock puppet. "Well, like this!"

"So you think it's my fault." He'd meant it to sound like a question, an accusation, but the statement came out soft and dull and matter-of-fact.

"I-" Mabel thrust the palm of her hand against her forehead hard enough that the boy wondered if it would leave a mark. "No, of course not- I just- augh, I don't know!"

"Maybe Stan was right. Maybe you do need some sleep."

Mabel put her hands back on her hips- her forehead did, indeed, look slightly reddened where her hand had made contact- and rolled her eyes. "Do not."

"Do too. We can discuss things in the morning, alright?"

The girl huffed. "O-kay. I bet I won't even sleep anyway."

"One way to find out."

Dipper left the puppet, which sank back onto the floor, as his sister stomped her way into bed, ruffling the sheets noisily and dramatically before immersing herself in them. Despite her words, she soon was caught up in a deep slumber, filling the room with soft snores.

Dipper, for his part, lay down as well, though he knew better than to think he could actually sleep in his current state. He just stared up at the wall, floating an inch above the bed, mind racing. He wondered if there was a way out of his predicament, he thought about how he could patch things up with his sister, and, as those issues led to a number of half-formed jumbled-up ideas with no actual conclusions in sight, the boy tried to figure out why Grunkle Stan's conversation with Mabel had set off warning bells in his head.