Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

“The Author—that is, Great-Uncle Ford—he says he encountered one of the Native tribes indigenous to the Pacific Northwest, up around Canada actually, and they had a name for it.” Dipper squinted at the scrawled letters, a little uncertainly. His left leg jiggled restlessly in place, the only outward sign he gave of his extreme inward agitation. “The … darn it, Great-Uncle Ford, would it kill you to write on a flat surface now and then? … okay, um. I think they called it the … uh, ‘the God-killer.’”

Dot groaned. “Oh, charming. What an absolute delight.”

“Yeah,” Bill agreed, tapping his cane on the cavern floor in a frustrated tattoo. “Talk about reassuring, huh? Sheesh, kid! We’re demons, and you expect us to fight something called the God-killer? I dunno whether I oughta be touched you think us so capable, or just a leeeetle sick that you want us both to die horrible, screaming deaths.”

“Wait,” Mabel broke in, glancing up from her candlelit knitting to look uneasily at her guardian demon. “I thought you guys were immortal? I thought that was, like, a given with demons. Dipper said you were just energy, and energy can’t … can’t die, right?”

There was a moment’s perfect silence.

“Right? ”

Dot Matrix, a one-eyed Masonic symbol drifting in mid-air, glanced at the human girl that had been assigned to his care at the moment of her birth. “Well …”

“The God-killer,” Bill repeated. It was not an argument, he felt, that could be much improved upon with further rhetoric. Then he took in Mabel’s anxious expression and sighed, kneading his brow with one gloved hand. “No offense, Shooting Star, but I don’t think this guy got that name on account of his killer-delicious baked goods. What a disaster. Fuckin’ Christ.”

“Bill,” Mabel scolded, stern and sharp.

Bill considered telling Mabel exactly where she could go jam her G-rated language, repeatedly and with varying rhythms of force—and then his sightline drifted a little further left, where Matrix still floated, his eye narrowed as he glared at Bill. Bill sighed and lifted his hands, palms upward.

“Fine, geez. Killing the God-killer. The God-killer,” he couldn’t help but stress, one last time. “And we’re demons, did I mention that? Oh, this is gonna be a blaaast!” We’re gonna die. Every single one of us. For fuck’s sake … the shit I do for power.

“Uh oh,” said Bill faintly. This was not well-planned. He could see himself reflected in the beast’s eyes, from the tip of his top hat to the toes of his shiny wingtips. He could also see a lot of other things—lots of goddamn pine trees, fields of goddamn pine trees, and by now he hated pine trees just so goddamn much—but seeing a reflection of your entire body, reduced by relative comparison to a tiny yellow pinprick, in the eyes of something that is perfectly capable of smearing your electrons across a vast and bleeding void of agony … well, turns out that’s a tad hypnotic.

Then, because Mabel wasn’t there to rebuke him and Bill appreciated the little freedoms, he leapt to his feet and lunged for the God-killer fist-first, snarling, “Take my regards straight to Hell, you ugly skyscraping motherfuc—!”

“—HHHH! AAAHHHHH!! Aaaaaaaahhh— hh … hhhhh … huh?”

Dipper stared wildly in all directions, wrapping his arms tightly around his torso and trying to choke back his tears. (The attempt, while valiant, failed miserably: Dipper wept like any twelve-year-old boy, coughing and spluttering wetly as snot dripped from his chin, soaking his shirtsleeves—comely crying was for the strapping, handsome leads in movies, which he most definitely was not. )

Nothing made the least amount of sense—he remembered running, and screaming, and the God-killer picking him up; he remembered the thing lifting him up to its immense, mind-defeating face, and that the speed at which he’d flown so high into the atmosphere had briefly extinguished his consciousness altogether before his blood pressure was able to catch up.

He remembered feeling intensely grateful that Dot had teleported Mabel safely out of the monster’s reach, even as he burned with hatred and no small measure of anguish that Bill Cipher had not done the same. What was the use, he’d thought, of having a demon for a guardian if it got you killed?

Of course, he was aware (and had been for months) of Cipher’s obsession with his own bid for world domination, and so he thought that Cipher would probably have been pretty bummed if Dipper had died, or been eaten, or macerated into a paste by some Lovecraftian horror. That wouldn’t have made him, Dipper, any less dead, however; it was a cold comfort at best.

As the God-killer’s fingers had wrapped tightly enough around Dipper to bruise his ribs, pride had kept Dipper from screaming for Cipher—well, pride and a troublesome lack of oxygen, as he ascended several thousand feet into the air within moments, his gut and his brain madly swapping places—but Dipper hadn’t figured it would really have done any good, even if he’d had access to all the air in the world. Cipher had complained enough about the whole venture that Dipper suspected the demon hadn’t even stayed in the same hemisphere once Dipper had voiced the horrifying revelation that the valley they were in had been, not just a footprint, but a very recent footprint.

Then … then he had woken to the reality of pine needles digging into the raw flesh of his skinned palms, and Dipper had opened his streaming eyes to find that he was sitting sprawled on his butt in the dirt, safely on the ground. Around him, branches creaked in a rising wind, and he was completely alone. The woods glowed silver, awash in moonlight, and Dipper felt a scream of fear and frustration and total incomprehension building in his throat, choking him, hot as bile—or maybe blood.

Dipper rolled over and was noisily sick in the dirt for several minutes.

Just as he was wiping a shaking hand over his mouth, fighting to collect enough of himself that he might have been able to summon the energy and presence of mind to even think about standing back up and, eventually, trying to find his sister and her demon, there came a blinding flash of light. The concussion hit a full five seconds later, and Dipper lurched forward into his vomit as though shoved bodily from behind.

A nuclear blast!? Dipper wondered wildly. But who would know enough about the weirdness of Gravity Falls, yet have enough political clout, to be permitted to store warheads anywhere within or near the Oregon/Washington state area? Not that it wouldn’t have come in handy a few dozen times Dipper could think of, right off the top of his head … he sat up, slowly and tentatively, before wiping his face with an involuntary little sneer of disgust. My flesh isn’t sloughing off my bones, at least; so that was probably not nuclear. While it didn’t really clear much up, at least ‘not nuclear’ was a start. As well as a step in the right direction: Dipper was pretty attached to his flesh, after all.

“Dipper!”

“Mabel?” Dipper looked up so fast his neck creaked.

Here came his sister, astride a beautiful, trotting charger, its pure-white hide all but gleaming in the moonlight. Its mane and tail floated back in a slipstream that did not seem nearly sufficient enough for the purpose, silken as ribbons, snapping like banners. Mabel’s hair, cascading in curly waves down her back, completed an image that rightfully belonged on the back of a Lisa Frank trapper-keeper.

Dipper’s eyes narrowed and his recently-emptied gut stirred warningly in a spasm of the reflexive loathing reserved by all twelve-year-old boys for unicorns, its deepest reaches unsapped in Dipper despite a childhood spent suffering from daily near-fatal overdoses of glitter, dolphins, and rainbow-spotted leopard cubs.

“Is that a horse,” Dipper said. His flat tone made it a statement, not a question.

Mabel grinned foolishly. “D’you like it? Dot called it up for me from … somewhere. I figured it was safer not to ask.”

“It’s very … white,” Dipper allowed judiciously. Even though his demon hadn’t conjured up a pony for him to ride out of the line of fire, there wasn’t any point in dragging down Mabel’s mood … too much. “Grunkle Stan will never let you keep it,” he pointed out, a cynical Cassandra.

“Oh, I know,” Mabel said cheerfully. “It’s just a rental, y’know?” The horse came to a well-trained stop just short of where Dipper sat in the mud, half-crouched over his own emesis. Dipper glared at it.

After a little awkward wriggling, Mabel slipped down from her steed’s neck, and offered a hand to Dipper. He accepted it with ill-grace as she asked, looking around curiously, “Where’s Bill? Did you see that weird flash? It made Dot disappear altogether. Poof!”

“Yeah,” Dipper answered the easier of her questions, and the only one with a concrete answer. “I thought maybe it was nuclear, for a little while. Like Hiroshima. If it made your demon freak out, though,” and he released his pet theory with only a small pang of regret, “it probably wasn’t.”

Mabel slung a companionable arm around Dipper’s shoulders. “Well, look at it this way, bro-bro. If it had been a nuclear explosion, we’d all have been poofed.”

Dipper couldn’t help but grin at this line of pure practicality. “You’ve got a point.”

“But if I keep my hat on, no one will notice!” Mabel crowed triumphantly in his ear. “You’re losin’ it, Dipstick! You walked right into that one! Right into it! ”

“Yeah, yeah,” Dipper agreed, still grinning. “You got me, Mabel.”

His sister turned abruptly to look at him, her mouth serious but her eyes glinting wickedly. “Wanna drive?”

Chapter Text

Bill awoke to darkness, first; then there was cold, seeming to envelope his entire body, sending him into a succession of involuntary racking spasms that shook him like a particularly savage dog for several eternal moments, then left him both slack-limbed and utterly perplexed. It was only when two more such convulsions struck him, subsiding each time for a few precious minutes, that Bill realized he was shivering. He had never had cause to do that before—he had never been cold before—and he didn’t think that he much cared for it.

Humans, he recalled distantly, raised their core temperature in a really quite creative variety of ways: catching and killing animals in order to wear their skins—that was right out, of course; not that Bill harbored any notable fellow feeling for all creatures cute and furry, but rather he felt so drained, so damn dead-dog-tired, that the very act of continuing to draw breath after breath after breath was beginning to seem somewhat greater of an undertaking than it was necessarily worth. The cost-benefit analysis—and oh, God, he was starting to sound like the twins’ nutty grand-uncle—ticking calmly away in the back of his mind was not producing encouraging results. So, butchering his own fur coat, while it would be hilarious, was absolutely not on the table.

They also built fires, he remembered. He glanced around for a couple of sticks to rub vigorously together—at which his knowledge of building fires both began and ended—but, this being a pine forest, he was not exactly thrilled by an abundance of choice. Experimentally, he snapped his fingers, a gesture that, in this context, would normally conjure up a handful of blue flames.

Nothing happened.

He tried again, this time with his non-dominant right hand. He was sullenly unsurprised to find that nothing continued to happen.

Bill sighed heavily, then gasped as white-hot agony slid between his ribs like a knife. He doubled up around his midsection, then flung himself back again with a cry, so suddenly and with such violence that he cracked the back of his head on the cold ground. He didn’t just see stars; he saw constellations, the births and deaths of entire galaxies, each occurring simultaneously in a flash as well as over an eternity beyond even his comprehension, whirling around his all-too-human head as he fell backwards into the frigid dirt, reeling mentally as well as physically.

Why had he ever wanted to be human, again? Bill exhaled, shakily. If this was how Dipper felt all the time, then it was no wonder the kid was a goddamn basketcase. Just getting up in the morning without breaking something felt to Bill like it had to be a minor miracle, or at least an act of serious heroism. The kid could be forgiven his (many, many) neuroses.

Cautiously, Bill laid the impossible weight of his aching head down onto something icy and unyielding—probably just frozen earth, but maybe the ancient bedrock of existence, for all he knew (or cared). His thoughts felt like shards of glass tumbling in a wet cardboard box. Although he was breathing shallowly, through his mouth, every breath raked across the raw flesh of his throat, rasping like sandpaper; each inhale tasted like metal shavings, and every exhale brought up blood from a shredded lung.

He wasn’t sure what would happen if he tried to teleport in this tattered condition, and he rather doubted he had the strength for an attempt anyway. Bill barely felt capable of closing his eyes. He resolved that, if by some completely undeserved miracle he made it to see a shiny new day, he’d try to be nicer to the kids: being mortal was a hell of a gig.

“Bill’s hurt,” Dipper announced without preamble.

Mabel looked up from her magazine. It was the steamy July issue of Boyz Kray-Z, and she’d been studying the ginger centerfold with a degree of intense interest rather more prurient than one might feel comfortable associating with a twelve-year-old girl. “What? But I thought you said he’d probably skipped the dimension altogether.” She glanced at Dot, drifting beside her in air; the little demon just shrugged. “How do you know?” Mabel asked.

Dipper hesitated, then replied, sounding bewildered, “I … I really don’t know. I just do. Know, I mean. That he’s hurt. He’s lost, and he’s hurt, and he’s scared, and—” He closed his eyes, lifting his hands to lightly touch his temples with the tips of his fingers, wincing as though stricken by a terrible migraine. The gesture looked hokey, like something that creep Gideon might pull in his fake-psychic act, but Mabel thought Dipper didn’t realize he was doing it, and that worried her. “—and maybe he’s dying. I have to go find him!” He raced out of the attic room, pausing only to slam the door behind him.

There was a moment’s silence. Dipper’s frantic footfalls ceased, then became louder again, and from outside their bedroom door he called, “At least, he thinks he’s dying. He might just be being overdramatic,” before thundering back down the stairs a second time.

Mabel, already on her feet and halfway across the room in pursuit, glanced back thoughtfully for a moment at the ginger centerfold still lying open on her bed. She came back, carefully stashed the magazine between her mattress and the box spring, then took off after Dipper at a run.

They began to realize how daunting the scope of their dilemma, though, not when they had trouble finding Bill—Dipper had some kind of homing thingy in his head now, Mabel knew, judging from the vague terms and expansive gesticulation with which her brother tried to explain why they were striding with such unflinching determination in a direction that seemed random to her—but when they fell headlong into an impact crater that was, of course, completely undetectable in the dark.

Congealing at the bottom was several inches of thick, unidentifiable goo. It had streaked all across Dipper’s face and splatted in Mabel’s hair; in the interest of scientific inquiry, Dipper smeared a little of the mess onto his fingertips, rubbing it against the ball of his thumb in an attempt to categorize the texture. Great-Uncle Ford, he thought, would almost certainly taste it. Dipper, on the other hand, was not quite that dedicated to his studies, and anyway it stank foully. He’d probably contract some kind of horrific disease, or his lips would fall off, or something.

“Oh gosh,” Mabel wailed under her breath. Dipper didn’t think she was aware she was making any noise at all. “Oh gosh, oh gosh, oh gosh. Dip-dop? Dipper?” Her hands flailed out, as blind in the pitch dark as Dipper was himself, bumped against his arm, then latched on with all the panicky strength of a poor swimmer. “Dipper,” she whimpered; her voice made him remember, suddenly, the countless late nights spent huddled under the old embroidered quilt, Dipper clinging to his big sister in terror of the savagery of a coastal California storm raging out their window.

Dipper wiped his fingers on his shorts, then began to stroke Mabel’s hair, soothingly. “Shhh, it’s okay,” he murmured. “Dot’ll be back for us soon—probably doesn’t even realize yet that we’re not right behind him—and he’ll get us out. He can teleport you, easy, then you can help me … “

“Dipper,” Mabel whispered, a little more strongly now. “That’s the problem. I think I hurt my ankle when we fell. I don’t—think it’s broken, but I can’t … “ She trailed off as Dipper’s fingers tightened spasmodically in her hair. “Ow, Dipper—”

“He did this,” Dipper hissed. “Bill—he must’ve lied to me, like he lied to Great-Uncle Ford all those years ago, and now you’re hurt—” His voice was so low and so savage that Mabel felt a twinge of fear. It was the first time she had ever felt the least bit afraid of her twin.

“Dipper,” Mabel said. “Come on, stop, that’s silly. I don’t think our demons can lie to us … ” Her brother’s grip tightened again, without warning, his fingers twisting sharply. More shocked than actually hurt, Mabel gasped, “Dipper, you’re hurting me—”

Naturally, it was then that Dot came swooping erratically at them from out of the dark, calling Mabel’s name in a shrill tone that suggested his mental state was somewhere just barely to the left of outright panic. He obviously hadn’t overheard the entirety of their conversation; nonetheless, he did not hesitate in snatching Mabel from Dipper’s grasp, leaving the boy on his hands and knees in the foul black muck.

“I’m sorry,” he was crying, over and over. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry.” But Dot didn’t come back, and after a time, Dipper scrubbed his gooey hands across his streaming eyes and set slowly and laboriously about hauling himself out of the crater, at a loss for alternatives. Sitting around and crying about it, while undeniably cathartic, seemed a waste of both energy and resources. He just hoped Dot had taken Mabel back to the Shack, and that Grunkle Stan had taken her to the hospital without asking too many (inherently unanswerable) questions.

At length, it began to rain.

Chapter Text

As angry as he was at Bill for (however unwittingly) setting in motion the events that might have stolen Mabel from him forever, Dipper was not prepared for the surge of emotion he felt when he finally found the wretched remains of his demon.

Soaked to the skin, so bitterly cold that he was shivering ceaselessly, Dipper was not in any enviable condition himself; as it was, he’d been combing the forest with waning assurance for over two hours, and now he felt hollow with weariness and bleak despair, as scoured as an old bone stripped of marrow a lifetime before.

All he wanted was a moment’s respite from the frigid, needling rain, and his standards for shelter had never been lower. He staggered nearly to his knees against the skeletal, spindly trunk of a dead willow, catching himself against the glass-smooth bark on bleeding palms, breathing hard. As he rested, his gaze drifted over what he took to be a dead animal; he was too exhausted even to move away, and only closed his eyes, feeling heartsick.

It was a moment before recognition burst over his mind like shrapnel, and the sick sensation sharpened to a grief so strong it stole his breath. His eyes snapped open, and now he did go down onto his knees, reaching out with shaking hands to touch the sodden black suit jacket.

“Bill?” Dipper whispered. He felt raw inside, shattered like glass. It wasn’t supposed to be like this. He and Mabel had never really discussed it, not aloud, but they’d both known without needing to be told that their demons were hundreds, if not thousands, of years old—he shouldn’t have lost his, not already, not before he, Dipper, had a chance to, to get married and have children and grow up … Dipper started to cry, silently, curling his hands to fists.

Then a ragged, paper-thin voice said, hoarsely, “H-hey, kid. How’s … how’s tricks?”

Dipper gasped, inhaling a fair amount of the rainwater now drizzling in diagonally beneath the leafless, raking branches. He sputtered, “Bill! Oh my gosh, hold on—” Dipper took off his vest, shook it out with a snap, rolled it up and wrung it out—it was still soaked, but now, at least, it was no longer dripping—and laid it carefully over the bloody ruin of Bill’s broken chest. The vest looked very small, a brilliant blue against the slick black fabric, and seemed woefully inadequate, either as cover or for warmth.

“Mm,” said Bill, after a moment. “Thanks, Pine Tree.”

The reason that Dipper hadn’t immediately recognized his demon—the bright yellow triangular head normally being a pretty considerable tip-off—was that Bill was now entirely human, head and all. Dipper’s demon had high cheekbones, a narrow chin, skin the color of coffee with just a dash of cream, and curly yellow hair cropped short; his eyes were a startling, feral gold, with cat’s-claw-thin vertical pupils, and they were glowing very faintly, although glazed with pain and fever-bright.

More worrisome was the blood literally, it seemed to Dipper, everywhere: there was blood on Bill’s gloves, and pooled thickly enough beneath where he had curled stiffly against the trunk of the dead willow that the frozen ground wasn’t absorbing it. When Bill spoke, Dipper saw blood on his teeth. Half his hair was matted with it; Dipper worried that there was a skull fracture somewhere underneath the mess, although Great-Uncle Ford had told him that head wounds bled a lot so maybe it just looked bad. There wasn’t any sense borrowing trouble, his mother would have said.

Dipper chewed the inside of his cheek anxiously. It was one thing to borrow trouble, and another to assess your (many, many) problems realistically.

He’d been working toward this moment for hours, but now that it was here, he found that he had no idea what he should do. He had had the vague idea, when he’d first galloped out into the wilderness, that he and Mabel would, between them—with Dot’s help, probably, if Dot would help: he and Bill didn’t seem to get along very well—convey Bill home, and then they could go from there, appealing to the Grunkle twins for help. Now, by himself … Dipper had never felt more dismally aware that he was twelve years old and small for his age.

“Hey,” Bill said. He coughed, cleared his throat, then snapped his fingers up at Dipper. “Come in, space cadet. You’re givin’ me a crick. C’mere, kid.”

Dipper sat, gingerly, on the bloodied earth, wincing in spite of himself at the cold seeping through his shorts. How did Bill stand it? He was wet through—wetter, even, than Dipper himself, and Dipper felt that he’d been born soaked and would die soaked; warmth was a distant memory, glowing like a coal and oh, gosh, a fire would be so nice—

Exasperated, Bill reached up, slung an arm around Dipper’s shoulders, and dragged him down against him into the cold mud. Dipper closed his eyes and set his jaw, bracing himself in a kind of all-over bodily cringe … but he found that Bill’s body was actually quite warm. It was, he thought, like curling up with a small portable stove, or a large (if gangly) cat.

“Oh,” Dipper said, surprised. Bill grinned smugly, looking more like a cat than ever.

They sat together like that for a little while, unspeaking, Dipper cuddled against Bill’s shoulder and Bill’s eyes half-closed, as though he were dozing. The only sound was the ceaseless hissing whisper of the rain, rattling together the willow’s fanned-out, bony branches. After a time, Dipper became aware of something warm and wet in the small of his back, and his stomach sank; he squeezed one hand between his body and Bill’s to touch the spreading stain. When he raised his hand back to eye-level to examine his fingers, sick with foreboding, he saw that his assumption was correct: his fingertips were sticky with blood, and there was a long, thick smear of it across his knuckles and down his wrist.

Great-Uncle Ford would doubtless be fascinated to learn that demon blood was red, like human blood. Dipper just felt nauseated.

“Bill,” Dipper whispered; his voice was barely audible over the whisper of the rain, even in his own ears. He thought again of California, of himself clinging to equally young sister as thunder rolled overhead, and his scalp prickled with apprehension and self-loathing. Was he really going to sit here, clinging to Bill just like he’d clung to Mabel all those years ago? And after Bill had saved his life, was he really going to sit here and let him die—because he, Dipper, didn’t know what to do?

“Mm?”

“You’re a hero,” Dipper said, in a very small voice.

Bill’s eyes opened at once. His pupils contracted, thin as a papercut. “Wha—?” His expression, while still undeniably feline, took on a cast of horrified panic, like a cat that, having finally caught the red dot of a laser pointer, has just discovered its white-hot cutting edge has severed its feet.

Dipper shook his head, turning his face against Bill’s shoulder, trying not to breathe in the coppery scent of the blood in his hair, and trying just as hard not to feel like such a lowlife creep for taking even this incidental comfort from someone in Bill’s weakened state. “I hated you,” he breathed. “I hated you so much for, for always being so mean to me, for calling me names and scaring me—”

Bill said nothing. Dipper wasn’t sure that he was breathing, but when he glanced at him, alarmed, he saw the yellow cats’ eyes watching him, intent but utterly unreadable. Dipper released a breath he hadn’t known he was holding.

“... for not being more like Dot,” he finally finished. “Mabel’s demon—he loves her, and she knows it, he never lets her not know it. And I always thought, why can’t that be me? Why did I have to get Bill?” Dipper felt Bill flinch at that, but he went on, resolutely, “So, after the God-killer, when we couldn’t find you, I figured you’d just taken off again, like you always do. I wasn’t worried. I wasn’t mad, even. It was all so … so normal.” He bit his lip hard enough to taste blood, and hid his face once more against Bill’s shoulder. He didn’t want to meet those yellow eyes.

He was afraid that he’d hurt Bill, but more afraid that he hadn’t.

There was perfect silence. Dipper tensed, but heard Bill breathing, and forged ahead.

“So when I realized you were hurt—”

“Pine Tree,” Bill said suddenly.

Full of spent intent and bewildered by the interruption, Dipper snapped, “What? ”

Bill smiled, thinly: a scimitar-smile, radiating sharpness into his voice. “Let’s make a deal.”

“Uh … “ Dipper felt that, somewhere, he’d lost whatever advantage he had. He wondered if Bill was suffering from delusions. Blood loss and all. Did that happen to demons? “What exactly are you—?”

With that same unnerving grin, Bill shifted, wincing only slightly, in order to shove his hand rudely into Dipper’s face. “Never, ever mention any of this again, and I’ll stop putting spiders in your pillowcase every morning.” He paused, then amended, “Make that on weekend mornings. Have to get you out of bed quick for school. S’my job.”

Dipper’s eyes narrowed suspiciously. “What are you … “

Bill flapped his hand. “Deal! No more feelings, no more spiders!”

Exasperated, Dipper thrust his hand impatiently into Bill’s. “Fine, but—”

Dipper’s hand burst into familiar blue flame, and he inhaled so sharply that he began to choke. Bill withdrew his own hand at the last moment, his expression fiercely gloating. “Hah! I knew it. You got my powers, kid. Good fuckin’ luck with ‘em. Bet it happened when I switched us—”

“When you what? ” asked Dipper faintly. He was staring down at his hand as if it had bitten him.

“Switched us,” Bill repeated simply. “Funny bit of fiddling. Never done it before, hope never to do it again—I took your place, you took mine. S’why I was getting the hell out of Dodge, so you wouldn’t just hang around all stunned and maybe get stepped on and squashed. I was not running away.” Bill sniffed, then coughed, clearing his throat thickly. “Okay? Anyway, sorry and so forth, but I figured you’d prefer it to getting reduced to a splat of blood on somebody’s palm. I’m saying you were an insect, in every conceivable way, compared to that ugly bastard,” Bill clarified unnecessarily.

When Dipper failed to rise to the taunt and instead just curled a little tighter against Bill’s side, hugging himself, Bill began to feel uneasy.

“I didn’t mean it about the spiders,” he said wheedlingly. “It’s spiders from now ‘til the heat death of the universe, I’m afraid. And we didn’t actually shake, so you can’t hold me to it. Which means you can go on with your gooey feelings-sharing, if you want.” He ratcheted his voice into a shrill but lethal impression of Dipper’s stutter. “‘Uh, uh, B-Bill, you’re my, um, my hero! You, you saved my life and I l-love you even though you’re not, not a huggy British jerk with a d-dumb um, um, umbrella!’ That’s where you left off.” Bill smiled in what he clearly believed to be an encouraging manner.

Dipper said nothing.

Bill let out his breath in a small sigh, and slipped his free arm around Dipper’s shoulders. The boy felt cold, and Bill’s concern began slowly to rise, mercury in a thermometer held inches above boiling water. “C’mon, Pine Tree, kiddo, cheer up. You could take over the world now, if you wanted. Remake everything in your image. Your fidgety, weirdly sweaty image.” If Bill expected a reaction to that—Dipper felt very sensitive about his problems with certain fluids—then he was quite disappointed. Dipper continued to say nothing, although he lifted one hand to clutch at Bill’s silken lapel, like a child in the thorny grip of a nightmare clinging to his teddy.

Or to his big sister.

Oh, Mabel …

Bill felt like hell.

His chest hurt, his head hurt, and the amount of energy he was spending to keep Dipper more or less warm was draining him as rapidly as a sieve: it was far more than he could afford, without his usual nigh-limitless reserves to draw on.

Little flashes of formless movement in his peripheral vision made him jumpy and paranoid; being limited to just five senses on only three dimensions was quickly driving him completely crazy, something he hadn’t believed possible before now. There was blood, foul and metal-tasting, in his mouth, and blood dripping into his eyes. He kept trying to blink it away, but his right eye was almost completely useless—he had no idea what had happened to it.

(He was used to mono-vision, though, so it wasn’t as much of a catastrophe as it might have been; it just hurt his already aching head to keep it screwed so tightly shut.)

And now, now, he was having to deal with the kid’s little mental breakdown, or whatever the hell it was. God damn you, he thought venomously at Dipper. You little shitcake. You’re not worth this. Nothing and nobody is. Go straight to Hell.

Bill felt like crawling into a black hole and pulling it in after him.

Instead, he tightened his arm around Dipper’s shoulders, resisting the urge to crush the fragile collarbones. His mortal muscle mass probably wasn’t up to it, anyway, although it was a nice fantasy. “Hey. Hey, kiddo. Pine Tree. Listen to me,” you little asshole, he added mentally. Onward. Forward momentum, so he wouldn’t fall flat on his face. “Look, it’s not the end of the world—”

“But it is!” Dipper cried. Bill drew back, surprised to find the kid crying like … well, like a little kid, he supposed. “It is the end of the world! I’m never getting Mabel back now, because I’m, I’m a demon—”

“Wait,” said Bill. “No. There’s some serious misinformation here.” He paused to cough; it left a bitter taste at the back of his tongue, different from the taste of blood, and somehow worse. Onward.

“You’re not a demon. You gotta be—well, we’re not born, exactly—we’ve got parental types, sure, but—” Don’t get bogged down in little details, Cipher. He’ll never understand them. Go! “Demons are beings of pure energy,” he went on, doggedly. “It’s why we’ve gotta bond with human beings, to get a physical form. Um. Not quite this physical,” Bill amended, nervous about that bitter taste. “I don’t think, anyway. I’m gonna wring Duane’s birdy neck if this kind of shit is what we’re really all working toward.”

“Duane?” Dipper raised his head a little, beginning gradually to be coaxed from his miserable huddle by curiosity.

Bingo, thought Bill. “Not important,” he said airily. “Pan-dimensional being in charge of special forces. Assigns demons to humans, uhh … runs the complaint department.” Bill frowned, remembering a certain searing session after he’d found out the catch about guarding Dipper Pines. “Communicates through owls,” he added, victoriously delivering his pièce de résistance.

“Owls?” Now Dipper was staring up at him, his mouth a little open. Enchanted, Bill thought; then, no. Fascinated, like a rabbit by the hunting weasel. Yes, yes, yes! Cipher carries the day! Into Bill’s momentary silence, Dipper persisted, “Like, regular owls? Normal owls? Not, not freaky-weird owls?”

“Like regular, normal, non-freaky-weird owls,” Bill confirmed, settling back down. He was so tired … “You contact Duane by shouting owl jokes at owls until he tells you to shut up. That’s how you know you got him on the horn.”

Now Dipper scowled, uncertain. “You’re pulling my leg.”

Bill raised his eyebrows. He found that he quite liked eyebrows. They were very expressive. “My hand to … well, you know. Owl jokes. Any old owl you find flapping around.”

“So I could go talk to him right now!” Dipper tensed, as though readying himself to pelt out into the rain in search of an owl right then.

Bill groaned, for internal consumption only. “That would be a monumentally bad idea. Duane’s a stickler for regs. If he knew what I’d done—” I’d be a bucket of quarks smeared from here to Oz was the truthful thing to say, but probably not what Dipper needed to hear at this exact moment. “... I’d be in a lot of trouble,” he bowdlerized lamely.

So would you, Bill added silently, without a demon to thumb its nose at your fate. And no one’s better at thumbing their nose than Bill fucking Cipher. But Dipper’s eyes were shining, and he seemed to have forgotten all about his little existential crisis. Bill decided to be content with that.

He closed his eye and let out his breath in an uneven, rasping sigh.

Dipper looked at him with sudden alarm, going so far as to lightly touch his face, patting his cheek. Bill quelled an instinct to snarl, and instead muttered, “‘M fine, kid. Just resting my eye … uh, my eyes … for a second.” It was within spitting distance of the truth, anyway.

“We should maybe get out of here,” Dipper said nervously. In an absent gesture of equal parts anxiety and a certain possessive concern, he smoothed the shoulders of Bill’s suit, straightening the soaked lapels he’d clung to not long before. “If I have your powers, can I teleport us … ?”

“Dunno,” Bill replied frankly, not bothering to open his eye. If he was being entirely honest with himself—and what else did he have now, anyway, than honesty?—he was not confident that he had the energy to do so, and he noticed, wretchedly, that Dipper was starting to shiver: Bill wasn’t producing as much heat as he had been. He was scraping the bottom of the barrel where his reserves were concerned, yet in spite of that, he made a conscious effort to summon up a little more, just a little, so the dumb little human wouldn’t be so miserably cold as Bill was himself. “It’s never come up before, as far as I know.”

“I could try,” said Dipper. His voice was doubtful, but adamantine determination lay beneath the apprehension, like steel beneath slippery silk; in that moment, Dipper’s simple human determination had a power all its own that Bill couldn’t help but admire. To Bill, it intimated something even more incredible, an implacable core of strength buried so deep Dipper himself wasn’t aware of it. Maybe, with access to Bill’s own reservoir of demonic power, Pine Tree might be able to pull off a miracle after all …

I did think it’d probably take one. And I was right: I don’t deserve it.

Bill smiled, his eyes closed, the right oozing blood from beneath the lid that trickled slowly down his face, like tears. The moon came out, at last, although it was still raining; to Dipper, by its peculiar gloaming light, the blood on Bill’s face looked black. “Give it a shot,” he encouraged weakly. “Couldn’t hurt.” A beat. “Too much.”

Then, on some bizarre impulse, he said, “But Dipper—” Bill realized it was the first time he’d ever called the kid by his actual name.

The cold and the rain and the agony of his wounds swung away from him. That was fine, good even, to no longer be in such pain … but it took away Dipper, too—the boy’s powerful determination, radiating like fire; Bill’s understanding, at last, that Dipper did care for him, in some way, or at least didn’t want to live bereft of his demon entirely; most importantly (for some damn reason), it stole away the warmth of Dipper’s small body curled against Bill’s caved-in chest, which had eased some of the pain, not only of his body but also of his heart.

The entire world slipped like a dishonest smile caught in its lie, and Bill could not hold any part of it, not even the memory of that incredible warmth, given so freely; instead, his mind filled with ash, and as he lost consciousness, Bill had time to think, in agonized surmise, Another? Oh, no—no no, can’t be—I can’t have destroyed ANOTHER—

No, no, no no no—I’ll give anything, money, fame, power, whatever, just don’t let it be true, oh no, no no NO, DipPER—

After that, lost in a darkness that was as vast and cold and silent as the spaces between stars, Bill knew no more.

Chapter Text

Dipper waited a long time for Bill to continue.

‘But Dipper’. But Dipper what? But Dipper, don’t overreach yourself? Very feasible. Likely, even, although Dipper guessed shrewdly it would be some more vulgar variant. But Dipper, you can do anything you set your mind to, like his mother always said? Hah! Yeah, right.

Dipper had ached to find out, so he’d waited, until it became clear that Bill, while breathing, was no longer receiving on any wavelength Dipper could reach. Dipper tested his hypothesis, tentatively patting Bill’s cheek again, then pulling a little on his shoulder, shaking him gently; the demon’s head just lolled on the ground, and Dipper realized suddenly that the lee of the dead willow, which had improbably become a cozy little nest, was growing cold and uncomfortable, the forgotten rain slashing in on a savage diagonal.

Oh no, Dipper thought, dismayed; then, aloud, he repeated, “Oh no. Bill? Bill? Oh, darn it—” He wished, passionately, that he could swear. The fact that there was no longer anyone out here who could hear and scold him for his language never occurred to him.

He’d watched Bill, usually in his completely non-human demonic form, teleport around dozens of times, and it didn’t appear there was anything to it. Of course, if he hadn’t known better, he could also have said that for, say, laser surgery or operating Great-Uncle Ford’s inter-dimensional portal. It had looked as natural as breathing, and Dipper now had the undesirable objective of mechanically recreating respiration.

Shivering, Dipper huddled closer to Bill’s motionless form and weighed the pros and cons of just closing his eyes, snapping his fingers, and visualizing his and Mabel’s room in the attic—or Grunkle Stan’s TV room—the gift shop—or even the front yard, on the off-chance that structures possessed some kind of natural shielding … frustration swelled in his gut like an acid belch. That was one of the critical difficulties with this whole venture, he decided: he had to play the game, he didn’t have any other choice, but he didn’t know the rules.

The only magic he’d ever worked before were simple spells, read verbatim from Great-Uncle Ford’s journal, and even those had gone spectacularly badly (though he allowed, with a certain amount of pride, that that, at least, was not entirely his fault: he’d performed them well enough, as far as he knew, but the spells themselves were singularly ill-chosen, for one reason or another).

Did it matter if this wasn’t magic, per se, so much as a magical ability? Dipper worried about staking his life—and Bill’s, for that matter, although it felt weird to think of Bill’s life, or whatever, being subject to anything short of  the spaghettification of all existence—on so fine a distinction.

The realization that he was dithering did nothing whatsoever to instill Dipper with confidence.

He plucked nervously at his vest, trying to spread it to greater purpose over Bill’s chest, cursing himself for not having worn a coat. Preferably one of the insulated winter ones currently home in Piedmont. The wind shifted, spattering Dipper and his demon with rain and turning what had been the lee of the dead willow to its broadside. Rationally speaking, Dipper knew it was highly unlikely for the temperature to have plummeted to below freezing, but it sure as heck felt like it had.

There wasn’t any point in risking everything for no significant gain. Dipper was twelve, sure, and small—that hadn’t changed. But even apart from the fact that he was Dipper’s guardian and therefore, in a twisty way, Dipper’s responsibility, Bill was the only one who knew how to reverse the, the whatever-it-was that he’d done to get them into this situation in the first place. If Dipper ever wanted to trust himself around Mabel again—if he wanted to be himself again—it would be through Bill’s magic and knowledge, or at the very least Bill’s magic and substantially-more-educated-than-Dipper’s guess.

He’d just worked his shoulder under Bill’s left arm, and was bracing himself for the demon’s mortal weight, as yet unguessed-at, when the unremitting hiss of the rain suddenly stopped. Dipper wrestled, briefly, with the attractive impulse to just keep his head down and not look. He wasn’t sure how much more he could take today … then there came the sound of an androgynous throat clearing itself politely, and Dipper’s sinuses made a valiant attempt to suck up the interior of his nostrils.

Dipper opened his mouth, but all that came out were thick consonantal sounds. He edged gently out from beneath Bill, moving to stand a little between him and the newcomer, and half-raising his hands in a gesture he dearly hoped conveyed tentative, if not outright casual, goodwill and didn’t show his slight anxious tremula to too much disadvantage.

Standing before him, outlined by a silvery halo and untouched by the rain, stood either a slim, almost pretty man, or a handsome and particularly determined woman. His—her—its clothing gave no clues: a black turtleneck, close-fitting jeans, strange garb for a demon in semi-human form but not, he supposed, any weirder than outdated formalwear.

The face reminded Dipper rather of Bill’s semi-demonic visage, but there the similarities ended. Instead of the eye of Providence, this demon’s design was based upon an odd, multi-jointed, rectangular beast, stylized to appear snarling, looping back on itself to form a solid plate, the economical design oddly familiar to Dipper. The symbol itself was greenish in color, almost black in the stormy light—except for the eye of the beast, which appeared faceted like a gemstone, glowing a poisonous green. It didn’t appear to have pupils.

The familiarity nagged and needled, chewing on the back of Dipper’s mind, but he couldn’t place it. He couldn’t even place where he might have seen it before, although he thought if he could get away somewhere to think about it for half a minute …

“Gh,” said Dipper; then, more coherently, “Please leave us alone.” This new demon hadn’t made any hostile overtures, but Dipper hadn’t survived his summer in Gravity Falls by taking such things on faith. He started to say, My guardian’s hurt, I have to get him out of here, then remembered what Bill had said about Duane unswerving dedication to regulations … oh gosh, could this be some kind of enforcer? Will I have to fight it? He didn’t feel equal to fighting his way out of a wet paper sack.

And Bill …

Well, he hadn’t known Bill to be afraid of anything, but he’d sounded almost respectful of Duane, which was scary all on its own, for all sorts of reasons.

Dipper felt ridiculously out of his league. Why can’t anything ever go according to plan?

The demon tipped its angular head to Dipper, almost a genuflection, and replied in a voice like reeds fluting in the wind, “Most things proceed according to some plan. Just not yours, at this moment.”

“How did you know what I was thinking?” Dipper demanded.

The narrow shoulders lifted in a noncommittal shrug.

“Get out of my head!”

Pale hands spread like daylilies in a gesture of acquiescence. “As you wish. May I suggest, however, that our transaction will progress much more smoothly if only you allow me to … ?”

“What transaction?” Dipper narrowed his eyes. Without realizing it, he’d squared his stance, standing much more protectively in front of Bill. The fact that he had to look up—and up—at the stranger didn’t much signify just now. “Who are you? What do you want?” When there came no answer, Dipper growled, “You’d better start answering me, buddy, or … !” Or what? He wished Grunkle Stan were here; no one could bluff like his Grunkle Stan. Dipper, on the other hand, had never once won a game of poker, even against Mabel after she’d broken her arm in third grade and was strung out on pain meds.

In spite of its stony absence of expression, Dipper got the feeling that this new demon was very much interested in what might have followed that ‘or’, but it only shook its head regretfully, intoning, “I am very sorry to have startled you, Mason Pines. I only thought you might require my … “

“How do you know my name?” Dipper gasped. Only two people here did know that Dipper wasn’t his real given name—his sister, Mabel, and his Great-Uncle Ford. Grunkle Stan, he recalled, had even remarked on how much his parents must have hated him, saddling him with a name like that. Mabel had kept her expression carefully neutral. Had she or Great-Uncle Ford told someone?

Or had the demon plucked it out of his subconscious? It certainly wasn’t there at the forefront of his mind; he sometimes forgot entirely. The thought of this freaky animal-statue-headed weirdo pawing grubbily through his head made him want to take a shower. A nice, long, hot one.

The demon’s voice was even, surrendering nothing. “I know many things.”

“Sure,” Dipper said. He was proud that his voice didn’t quaver much. “Bill said that, too. Seems to be you guys’ way of making yourselves feel better, holding all your endless knowledge over us poor little mortals’ heads.”

“Not entirely mortal, I don’t think,” the demon said thoughtfully. Its eye flickered from toxic green to a cool, luminous blue as it swiveled its head in the opposite direction, toward its left shoulder now, like a dog trying to get a bead on a strange sound. “What happened to you, child?”

All of a sudden, Dipper’s newfound abilities felt entirely inadequate to this situation. Bill, I wish you’d wake up and help me out here. Better yet, I wish you’d let me get squashed. “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he growled.

“You lie badly,” the demon remarked, a smile in its voice. Dipper suppressed a shiver. “Never mind. It’s interesting, but … I imagine it has something to do with dear William’s regrettable lack of forethought. Never mind,” it repeated, then seemed to gaze meditatively into Dipper’s soul. It was giving him a serious case of the willies, but at least it was keeping the rain off: its forcefield, or aura, or whatever, had extended to cover the better part of the little shelter, although the ground was still wet, and it was still bitterly cold.

On the off-chance all that drivel about the eyes being the windows to the soul contained some grain of truth, and Dipper’s unrestrained staring had only been assisting the demon in reading on the back of Dipper’s eyeballs things it had no right to know, Dipper crouched to rest his hand on Bill’s shoulder; the flesh beneath was cold, and when he touched the backs of his fingers lightly to Bill’s face, he realized that what he’d taken for droplets of rain water was in fact sweat.

Dipper’s gut clenched. Were those awful bloody wounds already infected? And if they were, could he or the others do anything about it? Do antibiotics work on demons?

“I can help you,” the demon enticed. “You can save him.” Its voice was nearly lyrical with the subtle force of its persuasion.

Without looking up, Dipper made a sound down in his throat, neither outright receptive nor overtly discouraging.

“You will, however, incur a debt to me, which you may pay at a later time.” Could a faceless entity smirk? Dipper had spent entirely too much time with Bill to be able to maintain the luxurious delusion of believing otherwise. He was discovering, however, that there were less predictable creatures than Bill, who was so reliably twisty that he’d somehow come out the other side into a sort of weird trustworthiness. “Though that time will be, of course, my choice.”

“Of course,” Dipper echoed scathingly. He stroked Bill’s high cheekbone, gingerly, as he would pet a sleeping cat. Bill was so cold … what would he have done if Dipper had been the one bleeding? No, wait—there wasn’t any point to that line of self-inquiry. Bill knew his own powers. He wouldn’t have had to rely on some, some damn deus ex machina. Dipper sighed, raking his fingers through his hair.

Finally, he asked, without inflection, “What do I have to do? Do we shake?”

The demon’s eye lit as though from within, flickering between the radioactive green glow and an excited sort of amber, not unlike, Dipper thought disparagingly, the dashboard of a car in serious distress. “Oh, no,” the demon replied, its voice still modulated to neat neutrality, but the breathiness of its tone betraying its excitement. “Your word will be enough. The spirit is in the breath; whatever you agree aloud, in what terms, is as binding as a contract. More, in some places, some periods.”

“Okay, then.” Dipper took a deep breath. “Get us home—make Bill well again—and I’ll owe you.”

“I can’t heal your guardian,” the demon answered, with a show of regret that Dipper might have once believed. “But the other … that I can do.”

“Then do it,” Dipper snapped. He gripped Bill’s shoulder tightly, between both hands, just in case. Demons had a tendency to interpret perfectly clear commands in the worst way possible. “Deal already!”

“Deal, Dipper Pines.” In the moment before the dead willow twinkled prettily out of existence, Dipper realized where he’d seen that strange demon’s symbol before.

It looked, he thought, an awful lot like the old Chinese stonemasons’ depictions of demon-gods, half-animal, half-man, and all crazy. Or, worse, like the ancient, mysterious Mayan gods, drenched in blood and thriving on sacrifice.

Chapter Text

The jarring sensation of the strike itself, his fist colliding with yielding slime, then the shockwave reverberating up the suddenly tender bones in his arm … the horrible lurching feeling of sudden, unexpected weightlessness; a waking nightmare, twisting desperately, writhing in midair, too aware that there was nothing between him and the ground, spread out beneath like a quilt; unable to scream for the wind wrenching the breath from his chest … “I don’t remember,” repeated Bill stoically.

“That’s silly,” said Mabel, kicking her unhurt foot. “You killing the God-killer and not remembering anything! I remember breaking my ankle and lying to Dipper about it so he wouldn’t worry. Not that it helped,” and she made a fantastic production of rolling her eyes. “He worried anyway, and Dot didn’t exactly make anything better, snatching me away like that. Dipper wasn’t gonna hurt me,” she confided earnestly to Bill, but he thought something behind her eyes looked a little anxious. Interesting.

“Mm.”

Mabel persisted, “You have to remember something. I mean, it must have been so epic! Like an action movie, but starring you!”

It took just over two minutes, the ground rushing up and up, and not a damn thing I could do … and it took me a solid sixty seconds to realize that. Sixty seconds, a subjective eternity, of shrieking terror … But what could he say? That it hadn’t felt especially heroic at the time? That he hadn’t even had contents in his bladder to void? That even now he sometimes woke gasping, tears of panic stinging his eyes as he fought his way awake, clawing for solid ground away from the dreams he used to be able to control effortlessly?

“Sorry to disappoint, kiddo.” Bill shrugged. “But feel free to imagine me walking away from an explosion, if that flips your trigger.” Silently, he wondered if he asked Stanley very, very nicely, would he be permitted to move to the spare room? If not, there was going to be blood, and then everyone would start bitching at Bill for killing children again. He doubted if ‘she was asking for it’ would hold up any better this time around. At least no one but Dot had noticed Dipper’s biggest bully, circa third grade, going missing, and at least Dot hadn’t minded. Much.

Mabel sighed and fell back, staring up at the attic ceiling.

After an interminable while, she threw up her arms, letting them thump noisily down at her sides. “This is boring,” she declaimed.

Bill was amused to find that he was in complete agreement. However, he considered playing devil’s advocate one of his more enjoyable responsibilities. “Something something letting our bones set,” he droned; it was the best he could muster on such short notice. “Your ankle, my everything.” He wasn’t really feeling his role just then. The cast on his arm, for one, itched like fire, and it felt like his brain was liquefying in his skull. Soon it would begin oozing out every available facial orifice, puddling on his pillow …

“Boring,” Mabel repeated. She lifted and dropped her arms again for emphasis.

Bill weighed the pros and cons of reaching across the short distance between their beds to throttle her, just for something new to do. On the one hand, Dipper would be upset, but on the other …

“Bee-oh-are-eye-enh-gee,” Mabel sang.

But on the other, he could enjoy silence. Silence, they said, was golden. He believed it. Buy gold … he was losing it, cracking up. He had to do something, anything, since he didn’t want to get reamed for hurting Dipper’s sister, and couldn’t physically climb the walls. He’d tried reading, but his right eye was still useless; Stanley had loaned him an eyepatch, which Bill now wore every waking moment. It had been remarkably rakish before Mabel, being Mabel, had adorned it with a triangle-shaped sticker, recolored by way of lemon-scented scratch-’n’-sniff marker from white to yellow. He hadn’t yet had the heart to remove it.

“We could try going out the window … ”

“Nope,” Bill interrupted. He sat up as quickly as he dared, bracing his good arm against his ribs for support; they had been taped, but were still incredibly tender. Whenever possible, he tried not to breathe deeply. “I don’t know if you remember the grilling we got last time—”

Mabel grimaced. “Yeow, and how. I’ve never seen Dot turn red before. And did you see that vein in Grunkle Stan’s forehead? I thought it was gonna pop!”

“Yeah, and I’m not in a real hurry for an encore. I’d rather not kill the old guy, anyway; he has great taste in accessories.” Bill touched his fingernails to his eyepatch, in a kind of salute. “So you, shut your trap—” he made a closing gesture, miming a sock puppet shutting the hell up, and urging Mabel by force of suggestion to do the same, “—and … “ Here his inspiration, thin to begin with, ran down.

It was the middle of the afternoon, and he’d just heard a busload of vict—patrons arriving. Dipper would be busy keeping the gift shop tidy, or fixing the attractions if they’d begun to slip or crumble, or maybe covering the cash register, if his little crush had snuck out onto the roof for a nap. Dipper let himself be taken advantage of entirely too much, Bill reflected, without irony.

The kid hadn’t spent a moment alone with Bill since Bill woke, just over a fortnight before. Dipper had visited him every night, Mabel had assured Bill, but Bill privately wondered how far these assurances were exaggerated, presumably so that he and her brother could, to use her unique parlance, ‘hug it out’.

Bill had also speculated, during the eternal watches of the night, what death would have felt like. He was mortal now—or, at least, mostly mortal: he’d endured all kinds of shit about how lucky he was, the devil’s own luck, ha ha … Fordsy, good ol’ Sixer, had done the actual cut-work, as Bill understood it—repairing Bill’s broken ribs and removing a good portion of his ravaged lung entirely, among other, fiddlier things, mostly involving the truly unbelievable array of bones he’d broken in his fall from the God-killer’s grip—but Stanley had been the one designated to scold Bill, at protracted and wandering length, about what the hell he had been thinking, et cetera, et cetera.

He hadn’t heard most of it, but tracing the waning moon’s spidery progress up along the windowpane, listening to Mabel breathe, Bill had wondered.

Bill had had plenty of experience with corpses, of course. In his line of work, you couldn’t really avoid them, even if you really wanted to, which he didn’t particularly. He was intimately familiar with the physiological process, the breakdown of chemicals and gases within the countless extraordinarily intricate systems, but what happened to the essence of a person? If he had died, what would have happened to whatever inscrutable thing made him … well, him, Bill Cipher?

Energy just dissipated, sure, and if he’d been destroyed as a demon—however improbable that was, for a boatload of reasons—he had no questions about his fate. But if he was mortal, even just a little, did that mean he had a little bit of a soul? Or was that like being a little bit pregnant, a hilarious contradiction in terms?

He could find out. It wouldn’t be hard: humans were so fragile, just ambulatory meat in a thin membrane, easily sliced, easily spilled. But what would happen to Dipper then? And why hadn’t Dipper said half a dozen words altogether to him since Bill came to? Had he done something terrible, during that hazy period he couldn’t quite remember, somewhere between the fall and waking up in the attic? It was entirely possible, but there wasn’t anyone he could ask except Dipper.

Bill brooded on this now, his plans to suppress Mabel wound down to silence.

Mabel watched him worriedly.

“He’ll come soon,” she told Bill in a very different voice. It was gentle, reassuring, and deceptive as all hell, Bill judged. “He’s just … embarrassed, I think. I don’t think he really knows what to do about, you know … “ She made a vague, flappy gesture, involving both hands, which Bill took (correctly) to indicate the odd switch that had been entangling the both of them, Bill and Dipper, Dipper and Bill. Bill, without his powers, unable to retrieve them until he was recovered, stronger; Dipper, endowed with those powers, and without the least idea of how to deal with them.

Bill would have vented a deep and despairing sigh, but he’d learned pretty quickly why that was a singularly bad idea. Instead, he just emanated misery in all directions, like a little angst generator. If he was as much a hero as Mabel seemed to believe, he was entitled to a little self-pity, he thought.

“I could help him,” Bill muttered into the open collar of his dress shirt. He cringed inwardly from the very concept of discussing anything with Mabel, but seeing as she had been the only person to willingly speak with him in over a week, he felt conditions couldn’t deteriorate much more and he might as well burn down everything , at least figuratively speaking. Literal burning would come later, if things got bad enough. It was nice to have plans. “I have experience. Lots of it. Centuries. A couple millennia.”

Mabel’s eyebrows rose. “Really?”

“I’m older than I look.”

“Well,” Mabel said pragmatically, “you usually have a big yellow triangle for a head, so I can believe that.”

This startled Bill into outright laughter. It felt wonderful. He revised certain fantasies he had held about slitting Mabel’s throat as she slept.

She smiled, seemingly aware of the shift, although Bill couldn’t imagine how. Was he really that predictable? That readable? Maybe it was just the damnable streak of mortality.

“So,” Mabel began, “about the window—” But at that moment, the attic door creaked open, and Dipper slunk in with the air of a thief in the night. Several hundred things sprang immediately to Bill’s mind, hovered near his tongue, and then collapsed, instantly, to ashen ghosts. He felt the bizarre desire to hack them out, these purely imaginary constructs—like breathing in wildfire, coughing out smoke.

“Hi,” said Dipper, closing the door behind him.

“Hi!” Mabel chirped. “What’ve you been up to? How’s the Shack? How’s Grunkle Stan? How’s—”

“Everyone’s fine,” Dipper said, and stood a little awkwardly equidistant from the two beds. Bill drew up his long legs gingerly, indicating the foot of what had originally been Dipper’s bed in the first place, but Dipper ignored the movement and its implicit invitation, with a little motion of his head that took his line of sight nearer Mabel and eclipsed Bill almost entirely. Bill only narrowly suppressed a sigh.

Mabel, meanwhile, glanced toward the window—a little longingly, Bill thought. “It’s awful early for you to be coming up here,” she observed, her tone nonchalant, interested but not insistent. Not wanting to drive her brother away, Bill guessed, although Mabel’s thought processes were still largely opaque to him. Did she want Dipper to stay for his novelty, as compared to the wallpaper, or was she still trying to repair relations between Dipper and his demon? Initially, Bill had been annoyed, scorning her leading questions and offended by the unspoken doubt running beneath her concern, but now—days later, without a resolution one way or the other—he wasn’t sure what he felt.

“Yeah,” said Dipper. He licked his lips, then went to sit on the old steamer trunk on the far side of the room. As he sat, his eyes passed over Bill, but neither lingered nor changed appreciably; Bill quashed a ridiculous impulse to wave. “Some lady tripped going out the door, and she threatened to sue. Well, you know how Grunkle Stan gets when litigation comes up … “

“Ah,” nodded Mabel. “They’re having a screaming match?”

“She called her lawyer, I guess. All the way in New York. When I left, Grunkle Stan was yelling at the poor guy on the lady’s cellphone. I dunno if she’s gonna get anything out of him, because—”

The twins chorused, in unison, their great-uncle’s familiar workaday mantra: “You can’t get blood out of a turnip.” Mabel laughed, her heartiness rather suspect (at least to Bill, who was growing paranoid and oversensitive to such things), but Dipper only smiled. It didn’t quite reach his eyes.

Bill had been listening to this with his hands clenched white-knuckled in his lap. Finally, his exasperation and, yes, his loneliness swelled, like a balloon filled with boiling water; it reached a breaking point he had never imagined possible, and burst, spattering and scalding everything. “What the hell did I do?” he exploded at Dipper, at last, who flinched back, his body language screaming his desire to be gone, gone: perhaps dealing with the contentious visitor downstairs, or maybe cleaning up the goat Gompers’ pen on his hands and knees, with a toothbrush.

“You’ve been avoiding me, you’ve hardly said a single word to me in two goddamn weeks, and I can’t fucking figure out how the fuck I disobliged His Majesty—” He’d rather be doing anything else, Dipper’s eyes said. Anything at all, but enduring this awful, inevitable eruption. It infuriated Bill, enough for him to swing his legs out of bed—a horrible mistake, but he was too angry to stop, almost too angry to feel the agony lancing through his chest as though he’d impaled himself on his own ribs all over again, though of course that was impossible—and advance on the boy, red mist occluding his vision.

“No! Stop! Stop it!” shrieked Mabel, forgotten; she might as well have been screaming at them from the surface of the moon, for all Bill or Dipper heard her. Dipper scrambled back over the steamer trunk, and the fear on his face, rather than taking Bill aback into any semblance of sanity, only stoked his rage, making it blaze up and up, a flare that grew into something terrible, something atomic, something that would twist and torture and warp whatever was caught in its blast radius … His hands, pale spidery things after his many injuries, reached for Dipper’s throat, and sought to close around his windpipe. Frenzied, overcome by fury, Bill was marvellously strong.

But Dipper, driven by that primordial force that compels all living things to struggle endlessly toward survival, was stronger. As he would lash out physically at an attacker, an unbelievable tongue of strength struck out, but it was blind with panic and necessity; Bill, his hands locked in their crushing grip, took a fringe of the blow broadside, rocking back with the force of it. Dipper, perforce, went with him, jerking and twitching frantically in Bill’s grasp like an insect. Mabel threw herself on the both of them, clawing and kicking, screaming, screaming. Bill felt quite lost in noise and static, his mind completely separated from the events occurring in the stuffy attic room. He’d been lost before in dimensions like this; the trick was just to ride it out, wait for things to clear. They would, eventually.

Dipper was weakening, life-giving oxygen prevented from reaching his brain, his muscles. His struggles became more random, less organized. Mabel hauled at Bill’s arm, but it was like trying to wrestle steel cables: they looked ropey, easily overcome, but it was all an illusion, a lie by association. She was crying. Bill thought, It took two minutes to fall. He wasn’t certain where the thought had come from, but it disturbed him. It had been almost two minutes.

Wildly, weakly, Dipper lashed out again, a wallop of physiological energy that drove Bill back, and broke his hold, briefly; at the same time, Mabel—clinging agitatedly to Bill’s forearm, the one that had been driven back—screamed in his ear, “Bill, stop, stop it, please, you’re killing him!”

That made it through. He drew back suddenly, releasing his grip on Dipper’s throat; Dipper inhaled, one mighty, whistling breath, and wrenched himself away from Bill and Mabel both. Mabel immediately released Bill’s arm and flew to her brother, crying. And Bill, disoriented, retreated, sitting on the steamer trunk with a heavy thunk. He wasn’t certain what had just happened, but judging from Mabel’s state and the way that Dipper lay, gasping throatily, it hadn’t been at all good.

Where was Stanley? Where was Dot? Dot was his check, his control: so long as Dot was there, Bill was assured that he would not be permitted to do anything irrevocable. Bill felt very nervous about Dot’s continued absence.

“Dipper?” Bill’s voice was quiet, scarcely more than a whisper. “Dipper, are you—”

“You stay away from me,” Dipper snarled. The words were low and rasping, hoarse, and bit into Bill like a blade. “You’re a, a—a lunatic! I n-never should have saved you!”

There it was, out in the open, revealed in all its horrific grandeur. Bill’s eyes closed, briefly. He felt his eyelashes brushing against the eyepatch, an odd sensation.

Mabel was still crying. She said, thickly, “Dip-dop, he didn’t mean—”

“You, you stop defending him!” Now Dipper’s voice was rising, though it still sounded painful and bruised. “He isn’t yours! And he didn’t just try to kill you!” There was a momentary lull, as the peace in the eye of a hurricane. What have I done? Bill’s chest felt tight and painful, and his insides hurt, writhing like snakes. It was ridiculous that he should feel like that, when he had taken no new wounds. None that could be seen, anyway; his heart bled, surely.

“Dipper—” Bill began.

Dipper made a sharp throwaway gesture, scrambling back towards the door, one hand at his throat. Bill could see bruises beginning there, in a familiar splayed pattern of slender, almost spidery fingers. “You stay away from me!” Dipper said again, and there was gravel in his voice, gravel and hatred, grinding and grinding … “I wish I’d let you d-d— I wish I’d let you—” He seemed to have a little trouble with that word, now, and maybe the concept, maybe it was just meant to hurt Bill—

… But after a moment, the initial hesitation vanished into a throaty whisper of the purest hatred, slicing into Bill with a terrible surgical finesse, so sleek and so sharp that it would take him some time to fully realize the extent of the hidden, private injuries these words had wrought. “I do, I wish I’d let you die! Do everyone a favor and, and go back to Hell, where you belong!” Bill had no doubt, none whatsoever, that Dipper meant what he said.

When the door slammed, Mabel turned to look at Bill, bleakly, her face red and smeary with snot and tears. Bill simply put one hand up, over his face, as he breathed, his eyes half-closed, gazing pensively into nothing.

Everything hurt, somehow.

Even his eyelashes.