Chapter Text
It only takes Mabel one night to realize she’s going to need two cribs.
Working on the portal is many things— frustrating, confusing, dread-inducing, hopeless — but quiet is not one of them. Mabel becomes acutely aware of this when she finally heads upstairs to go to bed, and hears Stanley wailing. And he clearly hadn’t just started either, considering how bright red his face is when Mabel makes it up to her room and finds him crying in his crib.
Stanley is many things too— a complete shift to Mabel’s mental image of what her life would look like, a huge drain on her financial resources, the first creature since Waddles that she’d loved the second she saw him— but louder than two stories of basement and an interdimensional portal isn’t one of them. But she can’t very well move the crib into the basement, Maria will ask questions about where it’s gone.
So, the next day, Mabel goes into town and buys a second crib, and writes off the questions by saying the first one broke. Then she takes it down to the basement, and that night, after all of the customers leave the craft store, she carries Stanley down with her.
No, she doesn’t know what she’s going to do in a couple years when he’s old enough to remember this and she can’t just bring him downstairs with her, she’ll figure it out.
For now, it’s fine. Stanley’s sleeping in the crib next to the control panel in the first room, as far away from the portal as she can put him, and when he cries, Mabel can stop what she’s doing and hold him until he falls back asleep.
He does bring a different problem, though. Because Stanley may not be as loud as the portal and two floors of the house, but he is still loud. And Mabel is not exactly at her least stressed when she’s working on the portal.
“You said you wanted this,” she mutters to herself as Stanley cries in the crib. “You said you could handle it. And you are not giving that man the satisfaction of being proven right.”
She hears Stanley take a deep breath in, and Mabel drops her head onto Journal 1 and covers her ears just before he lets out an ear-splitting scream.
She can’t remember the last time she’s slept through the night. It’s either the portal, or it’s Stanley, or it’s the portal and Stanley.
God, she’s too old to be raising a kid.
Stanley keeps wailing, and Mabel forces herself out of the desk chair and over to the crib.
“Kid,” she says to Stanley, in a voice that she means to sound sweet but just ends up coming out exhausted. “I don’t understand what the problem is. I already checked your diaper, and I fed you before we came down here. It hasn’t been long enough for you to be hungry yet.”
Stanley just continues to wail and squirm back and forth in the crib, until Mabel is finally forced to bend down and pick him up.
Almost as soon as he’s tucked inside her arms, Stanley quiets down and looks up at her. He makes a happy babble noise.
Mabel gives a slightly hysterical laugh. “Kiddo, that’s really sweet, but I kind of need both hands right now,” she says, gesturing to the notebook she’d been writing in and the journal next to it, as if Stanley has any clue what they mean.
Predictably, as a two month old baby, Stanley does not respond to this.
Mabel sighs and walks back over to the desk, propping the journal up against the back of it as best she can while holding Stanley, and then sitting them both down and picking up the pencil. Her handwriting looks more than a little sloppy while focusing most of her attention on holding Stanley properly, but she writes as much as she can, until she feels her head starting to droop.
She really can’t afford to fall asleep while holding Stanley, so she pushes the chair back from the desk and stands. Time to call it a night, she supposes.
Stanley tugs on her hair during the elevator ride up, but Mabel’s tired enough that she lets him, all the better to keep her awake.
Waddles must be alerted to the sound of her closing the vending machine door, because he comes running into the room and slams his head against Mabel’s legs, oinking happily. Stanley babbles again in response, and then the two of them start talking back and forth.
Mabel smiles, exhausted but fond, and lets Waddles follow them both back up to her bedroom.
Waddles curls up happily in his bed, which is on the floor right next to Mabel’s, as soon as they get there. Stanley is calm enough that when Mabel sets him down in his crib, he doesn’t start screaming again, and Mabel manages to sing to him long enough that his eyes slip shut. Hopefully he’ll stay down for a few hours this time.
“God,” Mabel mutters to herself, looking from Stanley to Waddles. “Dipper is going to kill me when he gets back and finds out there’s a kid and a pig living in his house.”
She forces a laugh, because the other option is to sob, and she’s too tired to cry tonight.
She barely manages to make it back to her bed before she falls asleep, clothes and all. She does feel it when Waddles crawls up into the bed next to her, however. Give it a couple years and Stanley will probably be doing that too.
She’s going to have to buy a bigger bed.
Ah, well. It’s worth it for her pig and her boy.