Gravity Rises (S1)

MM: Part Three

Mabel woke up screaming.

One moment she was asleep lying on her back with her eyes closed. The next, she was sitting upright, her knees drawn halfway to her chest, her eyes wide open, her breathing heavy. Her head throbbed faintly from the sudden movement, but she hardly noticed. She couldn't even remember what she was screaming about—

Then the images came back, and she remembered.

She wrapped her arms around her knees and shut her eyes tightly, trying to squeeze out the memories and the tears. But no tears came, and the memories played behind her eyelids, vivid and rebellious.

"Mabel?"

Mabel opened her eyes and glanced over at her brother without turning her head. In the predawn light, she watched him sit up blearily, his hair sticking out in various angles. She guessed it was about six-thirty in the morning, and it surprised her a little that she didn't wake up like this earlier.

Dipper got up and made his way over to her, sitting down carefully on the bed next to his sister. It took him a couple tries of opening and closing his mouth to say something, but eventually he put his arm around Mabel and said simply, "It's okay now."

Mabel stared straight ahead and wondered why she wasn't crying.

They sat there in silence for a minute. "Do you want me to sleep with you?" Dipper asked.

Mabel considered it. As the twins got older, it became increasingly more awkward for them to sleep in the same bed, what with them being different genders. Their parents generally discouraged this and had recently given them their own rooms, but sometimes one twin would go crawl in bed with the other if they were scared or sad or lonely. More often than not, Dipper would appear in Mabel's doorway, claiming he could sense something was wrong with Mabel — and he was usually right. No, Mabel didn't feel too weird sleeping next to her twin brother. But, she decided, she was done with sleeping for now.

She eased Dipper's arm off her and stood up. "Thanks, Dip," she said, "but I'm going to go for a walk."

"Can I come with you?"

"No."

He didn't push her, and there was a rather tense quiet as Mabel changed out of her pajamas. That was another thing that had grown awkward between the two twins. (Mabel still remembered Dipper freaking out the day she got her first sports bra, just a couple months ago.) But Mabel was fast, and it was only a couple minutes before she was ready to go. She glanced at herself in the mirror, making sure she had her snow boots on over her jeans and her orange jacket over her pine tree shirt; then she grabbed the Journal and her compass off the bedside table and headed for the door.

"Mabes, wait. Why do you have the Journal?"

She stuffed it under her jacket. "No reason."

"Mabel, please, let me come with you."

But she was already gone.

~~~~~

Mabel now knew that a forest in the predawn winter was cold.

Maybe it was for the better this way. The chill seemed to chase away the memories that danced behind her eyes, at least temporarily. All Mabel knew was that she had to keep going: so she forged on, her boots sinking into the deep snow. It didn't feel like she was running away from her problems, since her progress was so slow. It felt like she was. . .

Okay, so she was running away from her problems.

A huge shiver started from her head and radiated to her toes. She pulled out her Journal with cold fingers — why hadn't she brought gloves? — and opened it, hoping to find a warm place described in its pages. She might be running from her problems, but that didn't mean she had to freeze to death.