Her ears may not hear the sounds, but the vibrations Mabel feels under her finger are deafening. The hairs are small, but stiff and dark. Mabel never really considered brunette to be “dark” but against the fair color of her skin it’s painfully obvious in the mirror.
Weren’t the hormones supposed to prevent this? She’d started them early enough. Everything had been going the way it was supposed to before now. Why is she seeing hair on her chin?
“Mabel?”
Her heart seizes. No, no, no! She’s not ready! She was just about to accept a solo cry-sesh, but “solo” was the keyword!
Mabel involuntarily sniffles, then immediately coughs in her struggle to resist crying. Tears spring to her eyes despite her efforts as she feels his arms wrap around her from behind. She doesn’t know if the tears are there because she’s sad or embarrassed he’s found her like this. Does it really matter, though? They have the same cause…
“What’s wrong?” Dipper asks.
Mabel squints her eyes so hard it hurts, “It’s not right…” She grasps his hand and guides it so he feels the *flick* *flick* *flick*.
Dipper hums in thought as he squeezes her tighter. “Um, m-maybe if we pluck them they’ll go away? I read a thing that said it can kill the follicles. So, like, maybe that could help?”
Mabel frowns to herself. She knows he’s trying to help find a solution to cheer her up, but it’s not really what she wants right now. To be fair, he has no idea what she wants since all she’s done is point out her problem.
Turning in his arms, she finds her face in his neck. “Am I pretty, Dip?” she murmurs.
“You’re beautiful, Mabes,” he responds, kissing her forehead. “You’ve always been beautiful, and you’ll always be beautiful.”
Smiling to herself, she nuzzles against him. After a few seconds, she feels a *flick* between them, though, and she freezes.
In an instant, she feels Dipper’s hands catch her face. He moves it so he can stare her straight in the eyes. “You’re beautiful,” he repeats, then kisses her cheek before letting her go.
Mabel watches him as his hands move behind her. His expression quirks about as he struggles to decide on how to comfort her. She can tell he isn’t sure if he should look serious or warm, leading to a goofy combination of hard eyes and a soft grin. Honestly, he should have just gone with warm, since she doesn’t need to see him to know he’s serious about his words.
“Thanks, Dip,” she says quietly, “It means alot to me, you being here…” She kisses his cheek back. “I’ve got some tweezers in my room, can you get them? Sometimes it’s hard to pluck things with just a mirror.”
“Sure. One second.”
Mabel misses his embrace as he steps off. She decides that it really was embarrassment that made her cry. She can tell because she feels it rising even more after such a request. Still, she did mean every word she’d just said.
It was hard doing things in the mirror, not just because of the reversal, but the fact she had to see it on her own face. A burning reminder of something she wasn’t that flittered through her body and made her shake. Not always, but enough that she could never be sure whether or not it would happen until it did or it didn’t.
Dipper returns, twisting the tweezers about in his fingers with a look of concentration on his face. He’s probably wondering which direction they should face to make things easier, not that either is actually better than the other. It makes Mabel happy, though, since she truly does appreciate him being here for her through this transition, doing the best he can do to support her.
non-suspicious 