I was scrolling through the Maddie tag and I came across this and now I can’t stop thinking about it.

A very tiny Maddie (before she finds out Dipper is Alcor) having a school assignment or something about family trees or important ancestors or something. (And being the creative and dorky kid she is she definitely made her assignment look like a pine tree. Definitely.) At this point she realizes she really doesn’t know much about her dad, or probably even her brother (she knows none of them look alike, maybe even knows she’s adopted, but she still doesn’t know much about Dipper) and she starts to ask them questions.

Toby tells her about how he was adopted (she finds out he was adopted too, if she didn’t know already) and though he keeps out the more gruesome details (he doesn’t tell her till she’s older) he tells her about the streets Dipper found him in, the cats he used to take care of (they were practically his only family before Dipper came along, never mind that he was allergic to them), about the fire where he got his burn scar and which took his eye, about the church he lived in before that (he never knew his parents–neither did Maddie, and sometimes he wonders if they died or if they gave him up because they knew he was a “demon”, just like Maddie’s birth parents… it’s something they bond over when Maddie is older and knows where she really came from and why she was abandoned), about his twin sister who died…

Dipper listens quietly and realizes (perhaps not for the first time) that Toby knows exactly what the loss of a twin feels like (sometimes he hates to admit it, that they can sympathize, he hates it) and starts thinking about his own twin, his first Mizar, his sister Mabel… and when Maddie starts to ask him about his family tree, she does notice the sadness and pain–but he tells her anyway. Tells her about his beloved twin sister–someone Maddie assumes should have been her aunt–about all of their adventures and how she was creative and genius and brave and Maddie is so much like her, so much like her “Aunt Mabel”…

Maddie is in awe, she’s in love, she wants to meed this amazing sister of her dad’s, and asks if she can.

Dipper doesn’t say anything, Toby says they can’t. When she asks why, they gingerly explain, in the gentlest way possible (more for Dipper’s sake than hers) that Mabel is gone–but that’s okay, her spirit lives on. (Oh Maddie, you’re so much like Mabel, more than you know…)

They don’t tell her that she’s Mabel’s reincarnation. (Not until she’s older, not until she learns the truth…)

It’s been centuries since Dipper had to think about that first loss–it’s a mixture of happy and sad and pain and everything Mabel and her memory was and is and as soon as that feeling hits him, he remembers and he feels nostalgia and before he knows it he’s showing Maddie the sweaters Mabel left him and teaching her how to knit. He starts telling Maddie stories about Mabel at bedtime, and it doesn’t take her long to realize that the stories he always told her before were about Mabel too. (A heroine in the shape of a star, who helped a pine tree solve the mysteries of a small sleepy town…)

And Maddie thinks that, even though Mabel is gone, with the way Dipper smiled when he talked about her… she met Mabel anyway, and now she knows her family better.

(She focuses her family assignment on a bat-wielding, grappling-hook-toting heroine who helped save a magical town from an apocalyptic catastrophe. Toby and Dipper keep it up on the fridge forever.)