Chapter Text
Bill Cipher had taken over Gravity Falls and Dipper had had enough.
He was tired of the red dripping skies, of the burnt dust-drenched earth, of watching those he cared about be turned to stone. The world he had come to know was dismantled and broken, and he was sick of it.
Outside the Shack’s window flew an eye-bat, its quick-flicking wings stirring up the dirt and brush. Dipper watched it. Something burned inside his guts.
“Kid,” hissed Grunkle Stan. “Get down.”
Every human and beast sheltering inside the Mystery Shack cowered, hiding in any place they could. But Dipper didn’t cower. He stood at the window and watched the eye-bat. Its reddened light caught an unsuspecting squirrel, transforming its flesh and carrying it away.
“It’s gone,” he said.
Cautiously, everybody else rose from their places. They listened to the silence outside as if waiting for something even fouler to make its appearance.
The days locked inside melded into one another. It was becoming difficult to know just how long Bill’s reign had been going on. Every now and again, those brave enough slipped away to attempt to find resources or simply to try to see the true state of the world. Sometimes, they would lose a member, caught in that violent red light. People were growing anxious. People were falling quiet. Hope and strength were quickly dwindling away. Once, a gentle-voiced man who had stayed to himself shouted into the night. “Oh, god!” he had wailed. “Oh, god! Those Things are gonna kill us!” Stan had tried to shush him, others had tried to calm him, and yet he shouted and shouted and eventually, unable to hold back his terror, he made a run for it. But as soon as he touched the soft brush of leaves, he shouted one final time and with it were sounds of slaughter. A child had cried inside the Shack. Dipper recalled he too had cried – he and Mabel holding each other tight – despite not even knowing that man. Perhaps he should have spoken to him more, maybe then he wouldn’t have run.
Dipper could still see the darkened stains of blood marking the trees.
Something smacked the back of Dipper’s head, pulling him from his thoughts.
“What the heck do you think you’re doing?” said Stan. “You’re just making yourself a target standing there like that.”
Dipper opened his mouth then closed it, glancing back at the window. The voices inside were dulled and frightened. Quietly, Dipper trembled.
“Nothing,” he eventually said.
Dipper didn’t think he would have missed the stars so much. It wasn’t something he often ever made note of in the past, yet now, with the skies a perpetual fog of twisting red dread, he realized he would give anything simply to see one single star. Heck, he’d even take the light of a planet.
“I wonder what Mom and Dad are doing,” Mabel said.
She was scratching into the floor with her fingernail as she hung an arm from her bed. Dipper moved from the window in their room to sit on the floor next to his sister, watching the little patterns of nothingness she was making.
“I bet they keep trying to call Stan.”
“Do you think they’ll drive up here?”
He shrugged. “Maybe.”
Mabel stopped moving her finger and pulled her dangling arm into her chest, curling in her body tight.
“I want them to but, I also don’t want them here.”
A small group of others chattered from the opposite side of their door. Somebody was crying. Somebody was praying. Somebody was cursing. Somebody was wailing.
“Dipper,” she continued, voice small and fragile. “I’m scared.”
There was the burning in Dipper’s guts again. There was also the added burn in his lungs and throat and eyes.
“I’m gonna fix this,” he said.
And that was a promise.
He didn’t have some grand, well-thought-out plan, but enough was enough.
One day, after red lights outside stole away another life, Dipper stood up from the thinning crowd, walked to the center of the room, and climbed atop the table. His heart pounded as he did so. Shaking breaths filtered the space as voices quieted, surprised by Dipper’s actions.
Mabel watched. In that moment, she was both startled yet proud of his abruption, ready to stand by him with whatever he said.
Dipper cleared his throat and silently begged to himself that his voice wouldn’t crack.
“Alright,” he called out. “I think we’re all sick and tired of this.” He tried not to look at all the eyes in the room falling onto him. “Bill and his ‘Weirdmageddon’ have gone on too long, and if we want this to end, we gotta do something about it. Let’s fight back!”
“Yeah!” Mabel sprang from the couch, pumping her fists into the air.
“I know it seems impossible,” he continued. “I know we’ve lost people, but look at us! There’s plenty of us to fight against Bill.” His heart pounded and pounded but he smiled with his growing excitement. To his side, Dipper saw his sister urging him on. “I say we first start with those friends of his. I’ve seen them wandering around, and even though they may look scary, they certainly don’t seem to have a lot going on upstairs.”
From the edges of the room, people mumbled. Others stood and listened, a murmur of hope in their eyes.
“Let’s do a sneak attack. If we team up and attack them when they’re unprepared, I know we can win.”
“Alright, I think we’ve all heard enough.”
All eyes left Dipper and fell onto Stan. His arms were crossed, eyebrows furrowed.
Stan continued. “You can’t be serious? Have you seen those monsters? You’re just gonna end up getting everybody killed.”
“What else is there? We can’t keep sitting and doing nothing in here! And what about Grunkle Ford?”
“He got us all in this mess, he can get himself out.”
“But he needs us – everybody needs us!”
“How is dying gonna help anybody?”
“We’ll be fighting together. I believe in us, we won’t die.”
“No way.”
Their voices rose and rose, straining with both of their growing frustrations. Stan stepped closer to Dipper, pointing his fingers this way and that.
Finally, Mabel too clambered atop the table.
“Come on, Grunkle Stan,” she said. “Listen to Dipper! I know it’s scary, but he’s right. The only way out of this is to fight.”
“You really think we can win?” Sarcasm blistered Stan’s words. “I’m just thinking realistically. Yeah, it’s not like I want some freaky demon-triangle here, but I don’t want you kids getting hurt neither.”
“We’re gonna be fine. Mabel and I have gone up against hundreds of crazy things, this isn’t any different.”
“Yeah.” From the crowd, Wendy pushed herself forward. “I’ve seen it for myself. If anyone can do it, it’s those two.”
“See!” Mabel said.
Stan shook his head. “Well as the one in charge, I think going out there is stupid and pointless.”
Dipper swallowed, trying to keep himself calm. “You’re wrong, Grunkle Stan.” He hopped off the table, raising his voice ever more. “If anybody wants to actually do something, follow me.”
In the end, there were seven. There were two adults. There were five kids. They were all humans.
Dipper couldn’t help but feel hurt by Stan and the others. This was their home, yet they chose to hide inside and let Bill continue to hold power. But as he looked at the few around him, he still held hope.
“Tomorrow,” said Dipper. “We’ll sneak out and wait for at least one of Bill’s friends to come out. Then, we’ll get them with everything we’ve got!”
Grenda and Candy high-fived. McGucket and Mabel hollered their readiness. Soos and Wendy encouraged Dipper fully.
Dipper smiled. There was nothing that was going to stop them. Even if it was going to take time, they were going to defeat Bill. They were going to win.
Bill watched the burning world. He saw the few humans he allowed to walk scamper around the ruined buildings, and he smiled as they bowed and trembled when his eye-bats flew by.
It must have been the humans’ September by now, but that didn’t matter to Bill. Time didn’t matter. All that mattered was himself, and humanity had finally come to understand that.
In the warm little room was a bed. Bill glanced from the window to, instead, watch the rise and fall of the blankets by the sleeping human inside.
There was a quiet understanding between him and Ford: although Ford stupidly kept the equation to himself, as long as he stayed and did what Bill wanted, Bill wouldn’t seek out his family. It was almost fun, keeping Ford as his pet – speaking to him in their strained harsh ways, sleeping with him whenever Bill wanted to, tugging Ford around the castle with blue-glowing chains. Ford was his.
And the best part was, the Pines never even tried to show themselves. They stayed away from the Fearamid and simply let Bill do what he wanted to do to Gravity Falls. Yes, Bill wanted that equation. Yes, he wanted to expand his rule outside this stupid town. But still, he had Ford, he had humans bowing to him, he had his party. Eventually, Bill was going to get that equation, he knew that.
Bill had won, and he was going to get everything he wanted.
Mabel hadn’t felt hope like this in a long time. Adrenaline pumped through her body. Excitement churned in her heart. She looked to her brother as they hunched in the brush together and felt nothing but pride. Here they were once again, ready to fight against something seemingly impossible.
Their small little group was hiding around a dusty clearing at the edge of town. Wendy had been one of the few who had regularly slipped out of the Shack to collect anything she could find and knew this area was a regular for Bill’s henchmaniacs. She would watch them, waiting to hurry by without a sound. Often, they would meander along the earth, joking and chatting to one another without a care in the universe.
Weapons consisting of bats to banjos armed the team. They watched both the clearing and the brush Dipper hid in, waiting for his signal to strike.
Minutes passed by and it was hard to keep still. They held their breaths and for the first time, they were eager for Bill’s friends.
Finally, there was a light. It was white and pink and with it, the sharp cackles of a voice.
Stan, despite his trepidation, let the kids leave. He didn’t know why – perhaps his rule-flippant younger years had shown through, seeing himself in those kids – but in the end, he did.
Mabel had led the group out as others slept – a rare moment of reprieve. They scurried out as cats in a determined hunt, trying not to make a sound. But Stan still heard them. He was neither asleep nor awake, merely stretched out in his chair with feigned calm. Eventually, he opened his eyes to find the last of the group leaving with Dipper at its end. Just before he followed suit, Dipper looked back at Stan. He stood. He stared.
Stan didn’t say anything. Dipper didn’t say anything.
Don’t, Stan wanted to tell him. But he didn’t.
There was a look in Dipper’s eyes which choked Stan – frustration, disappointment, hatred. It was a look that he hadn’t seen in some forty-odd years, standing in front of his childhood home for the very last time.
Stan opened his mouth to speak but suddenly, Dipper was gone.
Pyronica was the first of the party Mabel saw. Back in the Shack, Dipper had explained to her each of the nightmarish friends Bill had introduced to the town. In another life, Mabel liked to believe she could be friends with the monster, perhaps even share flame-fashioned tips together. But this was not that life.
Her heels sank slightly in the dirt as she walked into the clearing, arms folded in apparent boredom. Smoke followed her every step and burned the earth.
Mabel could feel Dipper quiver next to her as he crunched lower into the brush. His sweat-damp hands squeezed his weapon tighter. It was a simple wooden bat, its tip carved sharp enough to draw blood with its base still thick and beatable.
“There’s probably more,” Dipper whispered, leaning in so only Mabel could hear. “Be ready.”
With a smile, Mabel nodded.
The henchmaniac glanced at her fingers and as she sighed, two more creatures appeared. Something short and blue and exceptionally stupid looking whined to Pyronica. Just behind it was a pair of walking teeth. The blue thing scratched at the hole in his head.
“Keyhole should be easy to take out,” said Dipper. Mabel couldn’t help but agree. “One shot with your grappling hook should knock him down, I beat. I think for Teeth, I’ll stab him in his gums.”
Mabel held her breath as she watched her brother slowly, slowly, slowly push out a small manzanita branch. Its bright red skin contrasted against their shelter of green, clear enough for the group to see the sign while still looking like a random stick that got swept up in the disorder. Dipper let the stick rest in the open for a moment. Breathe, breathe, breathe. Mabel moved her finger to the grappling hook’s trigger. She smelt the burnt dirt and watched her greasy-faced target. Breathe, breathe, breathe. The henchmaniacs burbled away. Breathe, breathe, breathe.
And Dipper yanked the stick back.
From the brush-edged lining of the clearing burst seven humans, shouting their intentions and leaping to the beasts. Chaos erupted. As Dipper predicted, none of the henchmaniacs expected them, gasping as the humans began their attack. Mabel immediately took her shot at Keyhole’s face. The hard metal hook knocked him to the dirt as he yelped in pain. Seeing the opening, Grenda – her fists armed with brass knuckles – ran straight for him and at once, she started pummeling his head and face and anything she could bruise. He curled and wailed in the dirt, begging for the girl to stop through his huffing, thumping breaths.
Dirt churned and spun into a blinding storm. There were shouts and stabs and shards of earth breaking apart in the violence. Sharp, unrestrained laughter burst from McGucket as he beat his banjo over and over again over Teeth, slipping through his grip each time Teeth tried to snatch him. The painful distraction proved perfect to allow Dipper to stab at Teeth’s gums, thrusting his speared-bat in the crevasse between tooth and gum.
Mabel smiled and wanted to laugh alongside the hillbilly, her hope in the situation blindingly bright.
“Need help, Grenda?” she shouted over the noise.
Grenda puffed through her punches. “Nope!” she said, the smile vibrant in her breath.
So, Mabel raced away to join the majority of the group.
Her friends weren’t quite sure the best way to take on the fire-drenched monster without causing themselves irreparable harm. Candy kept back, chucking every stone and hard object she could reach, running here and there to – like McGucket – keep the henchmaniac’s eyes away from their true threat. As Mabel approached, Wendy and Soos were attempting to trip or tie or something Pyronica’s legs with rope, but to no avail. Her blinding flesh burned away the rope the moment it touched her. She shouted at the humans’ attempt and kicked away the two like a child with a ball. They tumbled backwards, each grunting as their backs smacked against the hard ground. Before Pyronica could get to them – presumably to stomp their bodies into burnt red meat – Mabel squeezed her hook’s trigger. The metal punched straight into Pyronica’s stomach. As she hunched forward with a cry, Mabel quickly fixed the hook back into place and shot again, this time into her eye.
Thick blue-tinted blood streamed down Pyronica’s face and dripped into the dirt. She screeched a deafening, sickening wail.
“You shit!” she cried, pawing and scrapping at her face.
“Again, Mabel!” shouted Wendy.
And she did. Creeping closer with quick-skipping steps, Mabel fired the grappling hook once more into Pyronica’s eye.
It struck, hitting ever harder with the shortened distance. Pyronica cried out again, shaking her head violently and spraying sizzling blood. Blindly, she reached out for Mabel, flames spewing out in any direction she could aim. Mabel ran back and zipped to the right, keeping her steps light on the balls of her feet. Soos just managed to miss a burst of fire. With surviving rope, he twisted it around a boulder likely weighing more than Mabel and Dipper combined, lifted it to his stomach with shaking legs, and started to spin and spin and spin. Once he felt the momentum was great enough, Soos kept his grip to the end of the long rope just as he let go of the rock. Before Pyronica could understand what the human was doing, the stone pummeled into her chest.
For a brief, glorious moment, Mabel believed that took out the henchmaniac. If any human took that hit, their ribs would have crushed into their chest, the splintered bone shredding apart their mangled lungs and heart.
But Pyronica was no human.
Just as Soos began to pull back the rope, flames brighter than the heavens erupted from Pyronica’s body. It engulfed every centimeter of herself, sizzling the soil as she cried out a desperate, violent rage. The fire stretched and grew and with it, Pyronica herself stood triple her size. As the flames parted from all but her limbs, there was a dullness to her newly-revealed flesh. She stopped and screeched and to Mabel’s luck, her eye still bled.
“I’m gonna burn away every last one of you!”
“Doubt it!” Mabel shouted back just as she ran from a spattering of fire.
The weight of Pyronica’s stomping shook the earth. Mabel leapt over shaking stones and burning brush. Yards away, she could faintly make out the gurgled sobs of Keyhole as he ran from Grenda’s fists. Although he wasn’t dead, there were at least now only two henchmaniacs to fight. With the obvious adrenaline from beating the pulp out of Keyhole, Grenda came at Pyronica with equal tenacity. She moved her fist quick enough to avoid a painful burn as she slammed a Keyhole-slaughtered, brass-knuckled fist into the bottom of Pyronica’s shin – first her left, then her right. Pyronica stumbled and shrieked and in the same moment, Mabel released her hook as Candy chucked every painful object she could.
They worked like that for what felt like a blink of eternity. Painfully short. Painfully long. People ran and switched who was close to her and who stayed back, each trying to keep as quiet as they could to avoid Pyronica’s ears.
But, despite their will, they were still human, and their bodies were growing exponentially tired and strained.
Mabel wiped the dirt-stuck sweat from her eyes as she gulped for air. The smoke and dust burned her lungs.
It was hard to tell if Pyronica was getting any weaker, but regardless, she was proving more and more impossible to defeat. And the group was quickly realizing that.
“Dudes,” huffed Soos. “I think we should call it.”
Mabel couldn’t help but agree, believing it best to restore themselves at the Shack then try again. But Dipper seemed unwilling.
“No!” he said, jumping away from a bite by Teeth. “We can’t give up now!”
There was a grunt as McGucket was kicked in the stomach.
“I’m with Soos,” said Wendy. Even her breath was painful and loud. “It isn’t giving up if we try something different later!” A burst of fire lit her ankle and she yelped at the sudden pain, quickly managing to extinguish it before it spread but unable to prevent the accompanying burn.
That seemed to take Dipper out of his concentration, allowing for Teeth to bite and tear away a chuck of flesh from his arm.
“Dipper!” Mabel cried. Ignoring her previous thoughts, she bolted to her brother. Fire and dust and stone erupted all around her, but she kept running, listening to his sickening cry. Grenda – already closer – switched her attention to Teeth, fracturing a tooth with a deafening crack by her punch. Blood emptied from Dipper’s wound and spilled over his hand as he tried to hold his lower arm, the flesh hanging grotesquely. “Dipper!” Mabel reached for her brother, but just before she could drag him away, a burning hand grabbed her waist and dragged her away.
“Mabel!”
She squirmed under Pyronica’s grasp, the heat making the pain in her body pulse angrily.
“Oh, I’m gonna enjoy killing you,” Pyronica hissed. Her hot-drenching breath suffocated Mabel.
Mabel spat and clawed and bit. She ignored her pain. She wasn’t going to die, not like this.
And as Pyronica began to squeeze and as her flames began to glow brighter, she stumbled over what Mabel believed to be the work of Soos. The henchmaniac’s massive body plummeted to the earth, dirt and dust flying up as she hit the ground. But she still held onto Mabel, and Dipper understood that. Ignoring his throbbing, bloody flesh, Dipper picked up his weapon and raced to his sister. He impaled his bat’s spear into Pyronica’s inner wrist, forcing her hand to open. The second her claws uncurled, Dipper grabbed Mabel’s arm and yanked her away.
Mabel tumbled from Pyronica and Dipper, coughing and choking for any air.
“Mabel, run!” Dipper shouted as he struggled to yank his weapon from Pyronica’s wrist.
“But –” And Pyronica twisted her body inward to Dipper the moment he pulled it out. Her fire exploded and with it, the world. There was light and fire and howling and tumult. Mabel had to cover her eyes from it. One second, the universe tore and screamed, and the next, silence. There was no voice, no slaughter. The dust settled. The fire burned away. Mabel blinked her eyes open.
And there was Pyronica. There was Pyronica stilled and bloodied. There was Pyronica without flames to her limbs nor light to her eye. There was Pyronica with the handle of a bat sticking out from her blinded eye and piercing through her head. There was Pyronica. Dead.
It seemed impossible. Mabel was sure it was a dream. Here, she stared at the massive, limp body of an otherworldly nightmare, a friend of Bill Cipher. And her brother had killed her.
Mabel started to laugh. It burst from her blistered throat unwillingly, the joy too much to contain. She lifted herself up.
“You did it, Dipper!”
But there was still silence where there should not have been. There was still Teeth and those fighting him. There was still the coughing and sputtering around her. There was now the harsh flapping of wings from fast-approaching eye-bats. But there was no sound near Pyronica’s body.
A panic snipped at Mabel’s guts, but she tried to swallow that thought down.
“Hey, Dipper?”
Carefully, she stepped forward, glancing at Pyronica’s bloodied face as if she could potentially reawaken.
“You did it, Dipper.”
The final remnants of dust settled. It crunched under Mabel’s footsteps.
She saw her brother.
She saw her brother lying next to Pyronica’s side. She saw her brother’s burnt clothes and shredded skin. She saw the red of his blood. She saw the white of his eyes. He was staring at the twisting skies of red and yellow. But the skies didn’t shine in his eyes. They were dull. They were dull and he wasn’t staring at anything because he was dead.
Mabel believed she wailed. Perhaps her lungs split open, perhaps her chest and her stomach and her legs did too. Perhaps she fell, perhaps she stumbled. Tears might have been smearing her face. Someone might have called out for her. She believed she cried out for Dipper, because the body she saw on the ground – dead dead dead – couldn’t have been Dipper. He couldn’t die. That was her brother, the most important person in the whole of the universe, and a person like that doesn’t just die.
She was reaching for him, faltering over the still-cooling body of Pyronica. For a second, she touched his arm. She needed to hold him. She needed him to hold her.
“Oh, god,” somebody cried. It might have been Mabel. It might have been somebody else, her ears were ringing too loudly to tell.
Wake up. Wake up. Wake up.
Somebody was pulling her backwards. “We have to go!” they said. Mabel screamed and thrashed and reached and reached and reached for Dipper. He was staring at the sky. God, he was staring at the sky.
“No!”
She grabbed Dipper’s hand and squeezed it but he never squeezed back.
“Mabel, please!” Their voice was strained and tried to stay strong. “The eye-bats are coming, we have to go!”
“Dipper! Dipper, come on.” Mabel tugged at the loose arm.
“I’m sorry.”
And suddenly, Mabel was torn away from the body of her brother.