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Bass thrums. Dust motes and other minuscule debris shake loose from the Mystery Shack’s timbers, and Bill wonders, is what he’s seeing just a feature of organic, genuine article meat sacks?
She’s moving as if her body has glutted itself on synth and rhythm and glorious cacophony, just soaked it straight out of the air, filling the shivering molecules of her to bursting, and now all she can do is give over in total, joyous abandon as the music escapes again – waves of sound freeing themselves in the arch and sway and roll of all that makes up Mabel Pines.
Bill watches, and he listens, and he feels that something is happening. Something maybe to do with all this extra everything he’s subject to lately, like a trillion odd years of near total sensory deprivation have left him a cheap drunk, tipsy after the first round of the real thing. Shaken, stirred, imbibed with all five senses; real colour, real texture, real sight and sound.
Real is a four letter word to Bill Cipher. Real is strictly for the rubes and the marks. ‘Real’ is whatever razzmatazz Bill chooses to pull out of his hat at any given second. He is used to casting stimulus and reeling in response. He's not accustomed to being the one on the hook.
And, he wonders… how do they stand it? These mere bags of flesh and bone and viscera? How do they cope? He’s inhabited a select few – worn them like squishy, bruiseable overcoats – but it was nothing like this.
All the different wants that contrast and overlap and collide. There’s no veil. No curtain. No distance. This belongs to him. It is his. He wants to string the stars in her hair. Or in her unspooled guts. Or maybe just draw them onto her skin with the nails and teeth and tongue that are also now his.
And when oh when oh when did pretty doe eyes trump pretty doe teeth? Not to hoard in a pouch between dimensions but just to keep right where they are, in her delicate sockets, in her delicate skull, where they can…
(LOOK AT ME
LOOK AT ME
LOOK AT ME)
And, she does. Mabel turns and her eyes meet his, and he waits to see her sweep her hair over one shoulder. To see her fingers comb through its length. Waits for the Mabel-speak that says, ‘Oh no. This is Bad.’
But none of that is what happens next. What happens next is Mabel Pines standing in a beam of late afternoon sunlight, golder than gold, with her chest rising and falling as she pants and pants and does not touch her hair and does not look away.
He can see her mouth smile and start to sing the words of the song. Can see but can not hear, and this is confusing. Because he can’t make out her voice over the volume of the music, but another sound, a softer sound, he hears. He swears he does. A gentle susurration. The whisper of Mabel’s skirt against the skin of Mabel’s thighs as she starts to walk towards him.
He could stand and walk to meet her. He’s not so much a human being as he is a mass of energy that’s willed itself into the idea of a man, but he can walk and talk and move about like the real McCoy.
He stays planted in his chair, though, fingers curled around the ends of the armrests. And, as she moves closer, closer, closer at a speed that he sees is normal and feels is glacial, he has no idea what to do. Drown and burn and be buried in her seems like a good answer, but how does that start?
The scuffed toe of her sneaker bumps the not-really-there leather of his shoe, and he clamps his un-teeth shut to keep the heart that he doesn’t have from leaping out of his chest and out of his mouth and landing at her feet.
She steps between his legs, and she bends forward, resting her hands on the back of his chair. Her long hair is a curtain that tickles his cheeks. Bill feels his own hand settle on the back of her thigh, feels the heat of her skin through the idea of his glove.
Their noses bump. Mabel pauses then laughs then does it again, deliberate, tender and very, very slow. The distance between their lips seems no more than the translucent skin of a soap bubble. His hand on her thigh squeezes, and when she draws in a soft, shaky breath, he swears it’s his own lungs she pulls it from.
She says his name, says like it could mean something entirely different, now. Something entirely new.
And, it just might, he reflects.
The drag of her lips over his is curious and sweet and leaves a ghostly, agonizing friction in its wake.
Oh, Miss Crazy Beautiful, it just might…