Caught in the Stars: Chapter V
A Gravity Falls Fanfic
Trigger warning: mention of panic attacks
It was 2:00 a.m., and Dipper knew he wasn’t going back to sleep anytime soon.
Are you awake? he texted Mabel. He stared at his glowing phone, willing her to reply, but the screen didn’t change. A notification appeared that he had a new text from Pacifica. Frowning, he opened it.
I know you won’t see this until morning, but I finally found the answer to #4 on the exam review. She had attached a picture of her textbook.
Why are you awake? he asked.
Did I wake you up? I’m so sorry. I assumed you slept with your phone off.
I do. I was already awake.
Why?
I asked first. He waited longer than seemed necessary for her reply.
I had a bad dream and thought I would do some homework before I went back to bed. You?
Bad dream and then couldn’t sleep. Want to go for a walk? He hit send before he could talk himself out of it.
Right now?
Yes. A long pause.
Sure.
He scrambled to type out a response. Great. Meet you in front of your building in five minutes.
He anticipated the annoyed response. Five minutes? That’s barely enough time to get dressed!
It’s 2am, he answered. Who’s going to see you? Just come out in your pajamas. That’s what I’m doing.
He slipped quietly out of bed so as not to wake Eli, grabbed shoes and a jacket, and walked over to Pacifica’s dorm building.
He pulled out his phone to see what sort of angry response she had sent after his last text, but to his surprise, there was nothing.
He texted, You might want a jacket. It’s a little chilly.
She appeared a minute later in pink satin pajamas with a denim jacket over them. She zipped up the jacket as she stepped outside. “Where are we going?”
He shrugged. “Around.”
She rolled her eyes. “Well, that’s helpful.” He tucked his hands into his pockets and they started walking.
“I can’t believe you made me come out here in my pajamas,” Pacifica muttered.
Dipper grinned. “I can’t believe you actually did it without arguing, but it’s pretty late, so it’s not like anyone’s going to see you.”
“We’re talking about college students here, Dipper.”
“Oh, yeah. Well, still. It’s dark.”
The streetlamps cast a yellowish glow over the sidewalk, but the darkness tugged at them as they walked, filled with reminders of sleep even the crisp breeze couldn’t drive away. When she spotted a park bench glowing in the lamp light, Pacifica gestured to it. “Let’s go sit down.”
“I thought we were going on a walk,” Dipper said.
She sat down. “Yeah, well, I’m more tired than I realized.”
He sat beside her and tapped his foot on the sidewalk. His foot occasionally tapped hers, which she assumed was accidental, until she realized it was growing more frequent and regular.
“What are you doing?” she asked.
“Tapping your foot.”
“Why?”
“Because I want to.”
“Well stop. Do something else.” He laughed and she realized her mistake as he began tapping her arm over and over and over–
“Stop it!” She shoved his hand away. “What’s gotten into you? Were you possesed by Mabel’s spirit or something?”
He laughed again, a completely innocent, happy sound that made her heart skip a beat. “That has happened before, but no. Mabel likes to joke we switch personalities when we’re tired, and I guess I am pretty tired. It’s not true, though. She’s just grumpy when she’s tired, and she says she’s acting like me.”
Pacifica shrugged. “I mean, it’s not that far off.”
“Hey!”
She laughed and leaned back. “So you had a bad dream too?”
“Yep. Dreamed about Bill again. I wish I could erase him from my head.”
“Sorry.”
“It’s alright. I just knew I wouldn’t be able to go back to sleep for a while, but my roommate is a light sleeper, and I didn’t want to wake him up, so that’s why I asked if you would come out with me.” He slumped over, leaning his head on her shoulder. Her breath caught and she couldn’t move.
He didn’t seem to notice. “The problem is, I feel pretty tired, but not tired enough to sleep, and if I do try to sleep again, I’ll probably just have nightmares again, so I don’t want to do that.”
She couldn’t hold her breath any longer and she let it out slowly. “Did you not sleep much?” She fought to keep her breath steady, and wished he wasn’t acting so strangely.
He shrugged. “I’ve had similar nightmares for the past three nights, so not really.”
“Dipper!”
“I’m fine,” he protested. “Just a little tired.”
She raised an eyebrow. “Tired enough that you’re acting like a different person.”
He sat up. “I am not.” She rolled her eyes, and he pouted, slumping back on her shoulder. He started tapping lightly on the bench beside her knee. “What do you want to do?”
“What?”
“I mean, what’s your dream in life? My dream is to study strange creatures and anomalies and one day be able to teach other people about them. I want to find someone who likes them as much as I do, so I can teach them.” He nudged her side with his elbow. “What’s yours?”
She looked away and rubbed her hands together. “I–I don’t know.”
“But you have something you wan to do, even if it’s small, right?”
She almost shrugged, then decided against it, not wanting him to move. “Not really. I mean, I’ve wanted to move out of Gravity Falls for a while, but other than that, not really.”
“Out of Gravity Falls, or your parents' house?”
“Both, I guess.”
“What’s wrong with Gravity Falls? And I’m actually curious. I’m not trying to tell you it’s great and you should want to stay or anything.”
“There’s nothing wrong with it, but there’s nothing good either. I mean, what’s to make me stay? I have no friends there, I almost died there, my parents live there. The only good things about it left.” His tapping slowed at that, then sped even faster than it had begun.
“So where do you want to go?”
“I don’t know. It doesn’t really matter.” She ran her hand through her hair and sighed. “I can’t tell you how nice it’s been to be here. I came because my parents wanted me to, but for the first time, I actually feel like myself. I don’t know if that makes any sense.”
“It does.”
“I still don’t know what I want to do with my life, though. That’s the problem. I can finally do what I want, but I don’t know what that is.” She chuckled dryly. “You probably don’t know what that’s like. You probably have your life planned out ten years in advance.”
“Not ten years, but yeah. Mabel tells me I plan too much. She doesn’t know what she wants to do. She’s changed her plans a million times since we were kids, and she’s no closer to narrowing it down than she was then. I make plans because that’s how I work, but there’s nothing wrong with waiting and giving yourself a chance to see what comes your way.”
She looked up at the stars for a moment, lost in her thoughts, until a tugging on her hair drew her attention. She glanced down at where Dipper was messing with a strand of her hair. “What are you doing?”
He dropped her hair. “Sorry.”
I asked for an explanation, not an apology. What were you doing?"
“Braiding. It keeps my hands busy sometimes.”
“You want to braid my hair?” she asked incredulously. He shrugged and began tapping his fingers in a quick pattern on the bench–the fasted yet.
She folded her arms and glanced away. “Fine, you can braid my hair. It doesn’t matter to me.”
He sat up, grinning widely and separated a small lock of hair from near her face. His fingers deftly slid through the strand, dividing it into thirds and then weaving it together. She stayed still and silent until he finished the braid, then he stood up on the bench, stepped over her legs, and took a seat on her other side to braid a strand there.
“Why didn’t you come back?” she whispered. He froze. “We all thought you were leaving for school and would be back the next summer, but you guys just . . . disappeared. What happened?”
He let out a slow breath and kept braiding. “We didn’t disappear. We wrote letters and would talk on the phone. If you missed us, you could have written back.”
“I didn’t think you’d want–wait, write back? You wrote me?”
Dipper sighed. “You didn’t get the letters, did you? We were afraid of that. But yeah, we wrote. Well, Mabel wrote you, like, a million letters. I think I wrote four. I’m not good at writing letters, and there’s nothing interesting happening in Piedmont, so there was never anything good to write about.”
“I would have read anything you wrote me,” Pacifica murmured. Dipper grinned, though she coudn’t see it. “You didn’t answer my question, though. Why didn’t you come back?”
He sighed and dropped the braid he had just finished. He turned her head to the side so he could reach the back to start a new braid. “Look this way. Thanks.”
He paused, considering how to explain. “My parents . . . they have no idea what happened to us that summer. Obviously they knew something was up when Ford started calling, and they realized they had accidentally sent us to live with a conman, never mind that he’s family. They said he was a bad influence and they didn’t want us to stay with him anymore. They might have let us stay with Ford, but he was too busy. We did everything we could to convince them to come out with us. We would have only been able to stay a week, but at least we could see everyone. We actually managed to convince them.”
“What happened?”
He closed his eyes. “Mabel had a panic attack. I wasn’t there. I don’t know what happened exactly. When I got home, she was screaming. When she saw me, she hugged me and wouldn’t let go until she cried herself to sleep. Mom and Dad had known something weird happened to us in Gravity Falls, but they didn’t know how bad it was until then. They told us we weren’t going back.”
“Does–does she still have them?” Pacifica asked.
Dipper rubbed the back of his neck. “Yeah. More often than our parents realize.”
“Do you have panic attacks?” He didn’t answer. “Dipper . . .”
“My parents don’t know. They don’t know I’ve ever had one.”
“Why don’t you tell them? They’d want to help you, wouldn’t they? Your parents sound like they care about you.”
“They do, they just . . . they don’t understand. They can’t.” He was quiet as he finished the braid and started another. “Mabel and I are going to Gravity Falls this summer.” Pacifica bit her lip and didn’t speak.
“Our parents don’t know we’re going, but we’re eighteen. Grunkle Stan and Grunkle Ford are coming back into the country for the summer, and they asked us to stay with them. If my parents knew I was having panic attacks–if they knew Mabel was still having them–they’d find some way to keep us from going, and–” He swallowed. “It’s going to sound crazy, but I feel like I have to go back, even if it’s just to make sure it exists, that it’s still standing. I have to. We both do. Besides, if our parents knew about the panic attacks, they’d try to send us to therapy again, and I don’t think it works if your therapist doesn’t believe anything you say.”
“I’m sorry. And . . . it doesn’t sound crazy.”
Dipper shook his head, though he knew she couldn’t see him. “Not your fault. And thanks.” He started another braid. “It’s getting better, for both of us. I mean, we go through bad spells. Like I said, I’ve had nightmares the last three nights, but before that I hadn’t had any for a while.”
When she felt him finish that braid, she turned back to him. “We should probably go to bed.”
“Yeah.”
Acting on impulse, she leaned over and brushed her fingers against his cheek. “Get some sleep. I want you acting like yourself tomorrow.”
He stared at her for a moment, then grinned. “I’ll try.”
She sat back and folded her arms. “But don’t go getting a big head over it. You’re more annoying than usual when you’re sleep deprived.” He laughed.
They both collapsed in bed when they got back to their rooms. When Pacifica woke up the next morning, she still had a bunch of tiny braids in her hair–far more than she had thought. She fingered the ones framing her face as she looked in the mirror, then turned away as she undid them.
Dipper had slept well once he went back to his room, then woke to a barrage of mortifying memories. When Mabel suggested they sit with Pacifica for breakfast, he hoped his face wasn’t as red as it felt, and he buried his face in his journal, hoping she wouldn’t send him away as soon as she saw him.
“Good morning, Pacifica,” Mabel chirped as they sat down.
When Dipper stayed silent, she elbowed him. “Good morning,” he muttered.
“Did you sleep?” Pacifica asked, bypassing all pleasantries.
He peeked up from the journal. “Uh, yeah, thanks. You?”
“Yes, I did.”
“Oh, good.” He turned back to his book.
“Do you ever stop reading that thing?” she asked, rolling her eyes. He slammed it shut and carefully avoided looking at her while he reached for his coffee.
Her hand reached it first. “Maybe, if you actually want to sleep, you shouldn’t drink this.”
He glared and snatched it out of her hand. “I can drink coffee anytime before ten in the morning and I’m fine.” He took a sip.
“Ooh, Pacifica, did you braid your hair?” Mabel asked. Dipper choked.
Pacifica’s eyes widened, and her hand flew to the back of her head. “What? What do you–” She broke off as she felt another tiny braid she had missed before. She hastily undid it.
“Yes, I was just, um, practicing,” she said.
“It looks cute!” Mabel reached over and fingered the wavy strands of hair framing Pacifica’s face. “You must have done a bunch of them. You should wear your hair like that sometime. It would be so cool!”
Dipper stirred his coffee and studied the wood grain of the table.
“Wouldn’t it be cool, Dipper?”
Dipper jumped. “What? I mean, uh, why would I care how Pacifica wears her hair?” Pacifica smirked and he dropped his gaze back to the table.
Pacifica checked her watch and grabbed her book bag. “Well, I think it’s time to head to class. See you later!”