Caught in the Stars: Chapter VI
A Gravity Falls Fanfic
Trigger warning: mentions of abuse
When Dipper arrived at Astronomy, he was surprised to find Pacifica wasn’t there yet. She usually beat him to class because she liked to be there so early. He wondered where she was, but didn’t think much of it, until she came in ten minutes after class had started.
Her face was white, and her hands were trembling, but she slid into her usual seat beside him and pulled out her books. Her eyes seemed to drill straight through the professor when she looked back up.
“Are you okay?” he whispered.
“Fine. Leave me alone.”
He didn’t try to talk to her again, but he could hardly ignore her. She didn’t take notes, and he didn’t think she was really listening either. The class dragged on, but he forced himself to pay attention and take enough notes that he would have some idea of what they studied later.
When the class ended, Pacifica grabbed her bag and started to leave with everyone else, but Dipper called her back.
She shifted from one foot to the other. “What?”
Dipper frowned and waited for the last student to leave the room. “Listen, I know what anxiety is like, and I know it’s hard to talk about things like that, but . . . if you need to talk, you know me and Mabel are here, don’t you?” She chewed her lip and didn’t answer.
Dipper sighed and looked down at his shoes. “Well, you have my phone number. Call if you ever need to. I’ll see you later.” He grabbed his bag and left the room.
Later that night, Eli left for their D, D, & D group, but Dipper had to stay in the dorm to do homework. Eli would be gone until ten or eleven that night, so he had the room to himself. He had almost finished writing a history paper when the phone rang.
He picked it up and stared for a moment before registering the name across the screen. Pacifica. He answered it.
“Hey, Pacifica. What’s up?” His tone came out sounding more confused than he meant it to, and he winced.
“You said I could call.”
“Yeah, of course, I just wasn’t actually expecting you to.” There was a long pause and Dipper realized he should have kept his thoughts to himself.
“If you were just being polite, I’ll hang up. I didn’t mean to bother you,” she said.
“You aren’t bothering me! I–well, I shouldn’t have said it like that. I’m surprised you called, but I meant what I said. Whatever you need to talk about, I’ll listen.”
“You aren’t too busy? I know it’s late.”
He shut his notebook, put his pen on the nightstand, and leaned back on his bed. “Nope. Completely free.” When she didn’t immediately answer, he picked the pen back up and fiddled with it.
“Mabel used to like puppets, didn’t she?” The question seemed to shoot from the phone and burn through him. He dropped the pen.
“Dipper?”
“Sorry, um.” He closed his eyes. “I don’t like puppets. At all.”
“Me neither,” she said quietly.
He swallowed hard and stared at the ceiling. “But yeah, she used to like them. Why?”
Her next words came out in a rush. “What if there were a puppet–”
Blue fire, a hand that grew too hot.
“And–and it managed to escape the person controlling it–”
That–monster–knocked out of his body.
“And it managed to live on its own, but then . . . but then something pulled its string?”
The laugh in his nightmares, the eyes he saw everywhere.
He forced himself to breath slowly, counting the seconds as he inhaled, held his breath and exhaled.
“Are you there?” she asked quietly.
He waited another few seconds to answer to make sure his voice wouldn’t tremble. “Yes. I, um, I really don’t like puppets.”
“Sorry.”
He closed his eyes. “I’m not trying to be rude, but is there a point to this?”
She was quiet for a long time. “You asked this morning if I was okay.”
“Mmhmm.”
“I–I think I’ve been a puppet for a long time, and today . . . something pulled my string,” she whispered.
“Oh.” He didn’t entirely understand, but her reaction that afternoon was certainly familiar. He picked up the pen and fiddled with it again. “Do you know why? Is–is there something you can do to keep it from happening again?”
“I usually do avoid it, and I can manage just fine, but today I–I was late, and–and I hate that bell tower!” Dipper flinched as her statement ended in a shout.
“The bell tower? What do you–” he stopped. He had assumed whatever problems she had with anxiety originated in Weirdmageddon, but a sudden memory arose of her father waving a bell–a bell that instantly shut her up and pushed her into the shadows.
“I don’t like bells,” she said, confirming his guess. “You talked to my family’s ghost, didn’t you?”
“Yeah, why?”
“I don’t know the whole story, but I know part of it.” She stopped a moment and he could hear her breathe slowly and deeply over the phone. “My family has always done everything they had to to make everything around them perfect. Everything.”
A wave of anger drowned out every other thought and he sat up. His fist clenched around the pen. He remembered vividly the fear in her eyes when her father had brought out that bell, and he felt stupid for not having understood the implications before. “Did he hurt you?”
“What?”
“Your father! Did he hurt you?”
“I–” She swallowed. “Would you believe me if I told you I don’t know?” He would believe it. There was too much of the end of that summer he couldn’t remember for him not to.
“I’m such an idiot,” he muttered, pushing his glasses up and covering his eyes with his hands. “When I saw that stupid bell before, I just thought . . . I don’t know what I thought.”
“It’s not your fault.”
He leaned back against the headboard. “Have you told anyone else? The police?”
She sighed. “That’s the thing about money, Dipper. It makes problems go away.”
He said nothing. What was there to say?
“Are you there?” she asked.
“Yeah, I’m here.”
“Now don’t be thinking up some complicated plan or anything,” she said, and he couldn’t help but smile a bit. “You said to talk, so I’m talking, and–and I think it helped.”
“What made you think I was planning?”
“I know you too well. When you find a problem, you look for ways to fix it. That’s great, but not every problem is yours to fix.”
“What if I want it to be?”
“It doesn’t matter. You have homework to do, don’t you?”
“Yeah, but not much. I can keep talking.”
She paused a moment, and he wished he could see her face so he would know what she was thinking. “No. Go back to your homework. It’s late. I’ll see you in the morning.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yes.”
“Okay. Good night, Pacifica.”
“Good night, Dipper. Thanks for listening.”
“Anytime. Sleep well. See you tomorrow.”
“You too.”
She hung up and he picked up his pen and threw it across the room. He doubted he would get much homework done that night.