Chapter Text
The images flashed through his mind: the glorious chaos and destruction, the possibility of escape, and the betrayal. Usually, it was he who did the betraying, not the other way around. But as he saw the flames encircling him, he could only call out to the one thing that might save him.
“!NRUTER YAM I TAHT REWOP TNEICNA EHT EKOVNE I !NRUB OT EMOC SAH EMIT YM !L-T-O-L-O-X-A”
He then turned to the flesh-bag imprisoning him in his mind and was promptly shattered into a million pieces.
He woke up—who knows how long after and trying to suppress memories of salamander-mandated therapy—and opened his eye… s? Two eyes? He pushed himself up; his arms felt much fleshier than usual and he didn't seem to levitate once he sat up. He quickly scanned over his body, binocular vision making him feel dizzy.
“Oh no,” he wheezed, his breath forcing itself in and out of his newly acquired lungs. His words barely sounded like words, and the contraction of his muscles felt foreign as he struggled to stand. His eyes watered and his body compelled him to blink. This felt so… weird. But… he liked weird, didn't he? He reveled in weirdness. Why was this so disgusting? He inspected himself further. He was pale and squishy. Eugh. Of course, the big A would bring him back as a meat-sack.
His hands latched onto something as he took his first wobbly steps. It felt cold and stony. He grumbled in frustration, realizing he was steadying himself on his corpse. How… He couldn't think of any words to describe what was happening.
He got himself completely upright, gripping his old top hat like his life depended on it. His gross, fleshy legs shook underneath him. How could humans survive like this? His lungs continued to push air through him as he took his first wobbly steps. Was he a human baby? Double eugh if he was. Luckily he saw that he was not. He was too big to be a baby. Although, it would be delightful to be a terrifyingly large version of something cute; completely negating the cuteness and making it horrific. The look on someone's face seeing that! Ha! How he wished he spawned in a more populated area.
But then again, appearing as a weak lifeform in the town where you initiated the apocalypse would be a very not good situation strategically. Even if no one recognized him as Bill Cipher, he knew a few human laws, and getting sent to the looney bin for spawning into reality with no clothes on, while entertaining, would be detrimental if he wanted to survive.
He shuffled over to some plant life, using his weak hands to shoddily fashion some sort of covering for himself. It wasn't a suit or anything fancy, but it would be useful for the time being.
He gave one last look to the statue of himself, feeling… sad. He was so, so close. He'd achieved a three-dimensional form, he was almost a god. He found himself clinging to his old body, trembling as water fell from his eyes. Crying… He was crying? He thought he'd purged himself of all emotion except mania and rage. Here was the all-powerful Bill Cipher crying at the foot of his lifeless body like a cultist begging to be saved by a false idol. He started to laugh, his throat dry from his sobs. He was a false idol! Good ol’ Axie was a god! Bill was just another being under the shadow of the pink salamander.
He was laughing and crying at the same time, a more enjoyable experience for him. The clash of his breath shuddering and gasping as it was forced out just as quickly in a crazed giggle as his face became warm and wet from tears, it was euphoric!… If you were a sociopathic triangle stuffed into a human body like the strange mush that fills a hotdog casing.
His brief joy was cut short as he heard a sort of rustling in the bushes. An animal? Or worse, a human. One of the humans that he hated so. The damned Pines family: Pine Tree, Shooting Star, Fez, and Sixer. He quickly dove into the brush, hiding himself from whatever might see him.
***
Dipper was just trying to enjoy a walk through the woods on his first day back to Gravity Falls when he heard a sort of… high-pitched whimpering. He couldn't readily identify it as human or otherwise so he rustled the bushes to gauge the awareness of whatever it was. It quickly stopped, followed by more rustling as he assumed it hid itself.
He entered the small clearing, feeling what felt like a thousand eyes on him.
Then again that's what happened anytime he saw the Cipher statue. He approached the stone-bound triagonal menace and kicked it, just to be sure it was dead or whatever. Once his foot made contact with the rock, he heard a terrible rasping sound.
“Pine Tree…”
He whipped around, eyes darting to and fro.
“Who’s there?!” he blurted out. “If this is a joke, it's a super lame one, uh… whoever you are!” His words were met by a creepy chuckle from behind him. The source of the sound stood up, covered in a cloak of leaves. It took a shaky, yet threatening, step towards him. His heart leaped into his throat as he saw the figure's eyes, jaundiced with slit pupils. Without thinking he ran in the opposite direction back to the shack, yelling “GREAT UNCLE FORD! GREAT UNCLE FORD!” over and over again in his mad dash to safety. All the while his worst nightmare trudged behind him.
***
Ford was sitting calmly in the parlor, trying to win a seemingly rigged game of Un against his great-niece. She was constantly making up rules that he was sure weren't in the game back when it came out.
“You do know that this game was around before I got sucked into the portal, right?” he asked with a slight chuckle. Mabel gasped dramatically.
“Grunkle Ford… Do you think I am cheating? ” She gave him a false look of incredulity and pointed to herself. “Do you think this face would cheat at a card game? ”
“You did spend almost all of your summer last year with Stanley, I’ve seen that man try to cheat at duck-duck-goose!” Mabel's fake suspicion turned real at that sentence.
“How do you cheat at duck-duck-goose?”
“Try to mimic the voice of the person choosing the goose—which Stan was not very good at—or once you were the person picking, just go in a loop of only saying ‘duck’.”
Mabel nodded seriously as if she were taking mental notes on the strategy. Before any more cards could be played, Dipper burst through the door covered in sweat and sputtering out nonsense. Ford stood up quickly and rushed over to him.
“Dipper? Just slow-” The boy grabbed him by the collar of his red turtleneck and shook him around.
“He's BACK! I saw him! I think-” he took in a few gasps of air and let go of Stanford. “I think he possessed someone, or- or he's a human now— which seems really unlikely —but I saw him-”
“Dipper,” he took the anxious boy by the shoulders, “slow down and breathe. You won’t make sense while you’re depriving yourself of oxygen.” But before Dipper could even take a breath, a strange, leaf-covered man shambled through the open door and made direct eye contact with Ford.
“Bill,” he grumbled through gritted teeth.
***
Bill's face contorted into a smile that seemed pained.
“Hiya Fohrdesthie…”
Ford stared at him in confusion, clearing his ears and then cupping one towards him.
“Pardon?”
“Hay Sthithsker.” Dang human mouth , he thought, this one's got no muscle memory. He opened the orifice again, ready to try another horrible pronunciation of one of the nicknames he had for the polydactyl human before Sixer let out a small bark of laughter.
“First day back in the world, huh, Cipher?”
Bill did his best to gurgle out a response before Ford opened his smart mouth again, but he was too late.
“It shows in how you're bumbling about like a toddler!”
As Shooting Star chided in with an “ooooh!”, he lurched forward with a fist aimed at Ford’s stupid face. He instead collided with the floor—another round of laughter for his stunning display. But then a brilliant idea hit him. With all his might and while Ford was gloating, he pulled himself to the man’s ankle and clamped down. Victory!
… Right about until Shooting Star started throwing cards at him and Sixer began to shake his leg to try and get Bill off him. And Pine Tree was screaming at an annoying pitch and volume.
“GAH! You infernal beast!”
“DIE TRIANGLE, DIE!”
He barely flinched as colorful, laminated cardstock hit him, his new body flopping about as he bit down harder. He was eventually tossed into a wall, hitting his head and falling unconscious as Stanley walked into the room.
“Woah, I sure did miss something,” was the last thing he heard before passing out.
***
Stan looked down at the man his brother had just thrown into a wall and knocked out. He didn't recognize the guy, but something about his face gave him the heebie-jeebies. There wasn't anything wrong with it, maybe just a slight proportional issue, but something just… rubbed him the wrong way.
“So, uh,” he started, “what's up with this guy dressed like he's ready for the first party in Eden?” Stan gave the man a little nudge with his foot. Yep. Out cold.
“That’s Bill Cipher,” Ford said, absolutely deadpan.
Stan just about did a double-take. That creepy little triangle was sprawled out on the floor… in a human body?! He looked at his brother, to the supposed “dream demon”, and then back to Ford. Ford looked dead serious and the weird guy on the floor kinda gave a sorta “not a human” vibe.
“Eh, I'll take your word for it,” he murmured, taking a sip of his Pitt Cola and nearly spitting it out as he looked at his twin's ankle. “Woah! Did y'get bit by a raccoon or something? Or did Freaky McFreakerson get you?” Ford sighed, examining his ankle.
“Yes, Bill bit me and I'm going to treat the wound,” his gaze flickered to the short blond on the floor, “but first, I'd like to get him restrained and… possibly clothed properly.” Ford looked uncomfortable just being near his former “muse”, which made sense given their history.
“Hey, I’ve tied lotsa people up for personal reasons!” Stan happily exclaimed, not realizing his offer to help was worded very strangely. “Cartel guys, pug smugglers, tax men, you name it! I can get this guy tied up while you go get your, uh… triangle bite sorted out.”
“Capital idea,” Ford said tiredly. Their gniece and gnephew, the former twiddling her thumbs and the latter succumbing to a quiet anxiety attack, were awkwardly sitting to the side. The two were clearly waiting for some kind of instruction from Ford, but Stan could tell that his brother was too tired and shocked to form words—something he was usually really good at ad nauseam.
“Hey, kids,” he started, “how’s about you two go upstairs and think up some interrogation questions for when Freakazoid comes to?” It was a smart plan for someone who was thinking in panic mode. Something to keep the conspiracy theorist from exploding and for the sparkly one to keep him in check. Genius plan Stan. He congratulated himself in his mind, imagining a high-five.
***
Dipper and Mabel gave a silent confirmation and began to stumble and skip up the stairs. Once they reached their room in the attic, Dipper pulled out his makeshift journal, similar to Ford’s with a pine tree instead of a six-fingered hand. Mabel, however, just laid on her bed and got out a piece of construction paper. She quickly labeled it “Questions for an Evil Triangle” and then turned to her brother.
“Paging Dr. Dips, what’s going on in the nog, bro-bro?” She broached her question the most tactfully she could, watching Dipper try to calm down after anxiously chewing on his pen.
“Okay,” he huffed, starting on a rant that would no doubt end in him hyperventilating again, “Bill’s back, but is he really? Maybe this guy is some old follower of his? Grunkle Ford told me that Bill had inspired a lot of cults. Maybe this guy is succumbing to some kind of psychosis—which happens in cults, y’know? It is a lot of psychological strain! Maybe Bill told this guy that if anything happened to him, he’d take over his body to continue his work. Maybe he believed it a little too hard and-”
“Dipper,” Mabel interrupted, uncharacteristically serious, “I saw his eyes! Those didn’t look like Halloween or Summerween eye contacts. Most of them have an edge where you can see the white part of the eye and the little pupil slits didn’t have a mesh or a little hole for real pupils!” She added some stickers and doodles to the “Questions for an Evil Triangle”, yellow danger signs, and radioactivity symbols—they just seemed to fit Bill.
“Alright, alright,” he sighed. He just didn’t want Bill Cipher, dream demon and body-snatcher extraordinaire, to be back again. “But… Why would he be in a human form? Wouldn’t he want to be a triangle again?”
“ Gasp! Maybe he’s being punished for his weird, interdimensional crimes by some kind of space god! Or it’s like that one Astral Journey episode you made me watch! With the all-powerful alien guy! Wasn’t his name a letter?” Dipper had to pause. His sister, an enjoyer of fantasy over sci-fi, had remembered more than just being bored during an episode of an old sci-fi show?
“Uh, yeah his name was ‘W’. Which episode did we watch?”
“The one where he gets kicked out of the W Realm for being too murder-y, and he chose to be a human on the spaceship the other guys were on cause he liked messing with them,” she grinned, eyes narrowing, “you didn’t think I was paying attention, huh?”
“Well, yeah. You don’t like that stuff usually,” he admitted.
“I was drawn in because I felt like it was gonna be a story where somebody learned a lesson or moral.” Mabel thought for a moment. “I think… like, ninety percent of the shows I watch follow that plot.”
“Well… if he is back,” Dipper sighed, “what would be some good interrogation questions?”