Work Text:
Not so long ago (it feels like lifetimes), you associated religion with your stuffy agnostic schoolmates and their egotistical back-and-forths. With the way they perched on their high horses, smoking, quoting airily about ethics and small-minded possibles and achieving nothing but false smugness. Or, if not them, religion was war protests, God turning a blind eye to mortal violence, God as propaganda hurled this way and that. Furthest back of all, you thought of your mother and her incense, the menorah your father kept in the house, unused, out of strange obligation.
None of it touched you. You looked for divinity in science, in lore and legend and myth, unconnected to practical ritual or devastating emotion.
The town, of course, altered all that—with a name like Gravity Falls, you're almost ashamed you didn't expect it to.
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So West Coast Tech fell through. So your classes were mediocre, your advisors all misguided or willfully unhelpful. So? So you wrangled for your own opportunities, goddamn it. (Ha. Gods and damnation...let's not get ahead of ourselves.) You made your own way, your own money, and you found a muse on your side in spite of all that catch-up, someone who could see your brilliance in all its facets, not just through your work, or even the process, but through your mindscape itself.
Do you understand? The first form of worship! The joy of working feverishly only to collapse into rest, to collapse into an infinite pool of collaboration! Your body recuperating and your self-projection laughing with Bill, exhilarated, each answer unfolding. Do you understand? The first inkling of divine! Bridging the physics of different dimensions! Seeing how to pound frail matter into the guardrails and guiding lines of pure concepts! You work to make the Nobel prize seem tawdry in comparison. You work—oh, Fiddleford calls it work, and he's right, you suppose, but with you and Bill every charted solution is a twitch of mirth. No one telling you to dial it back, no one telling you to dumb it down. No room for the ghost of your brother when Bill's antics are louder and more genial than Stanley's ever were, and interwoven thick and fast with brilliant contribution.
He slid in and out of your head like a cat, like a snake, like things you catch glimpses of through him but don't have a name for yet. You will, smart guy, just finish the portal! You'll see all the extradimensional creatures you could ever want! Bill Cipher taught you devoutness, amidst the calculations and blueprints. He had you asking what angels looked like. Far from metaphorical, you wanted every possible connection point; to ascend into inspiration and glory even as you bowed your head. You asked him how to commune even further. And he told you.
Oh, how he told you.
The demon instructed worship. You learned as well as you always do. Chosen, inspired, partner, vessel, celebrant, zealot. Far too easy, when you put your mind to it—and oh, the places you put your mind, just for him. You knew the joys of the truly pious, how practical ritual could transform even the smallest thing into magnitudes, and magnitudes into nothing at all. You are Bill's, always, and Bill was as constant as he never was. You always had ink on your hands, were no stranger to chalk dust; but they became more, when he told you what ink and chalk could really do. You made that house a temenos. And so quickly after that, natural as you please, he asked for your blood.
All the water in Gravity Falls tasted of sulphur, always, but you developed a taste for it over again. Char and rust fumes settling rough in your nostrils, coating your throat. The phases of the moon had no meaning. In light, in half-light, in flickers, in darkness, all was candles and crystals. Smoke and ashes and blue fire that could burn with no heat. You could draw up magic circles in your sleep, but— (dream demon) —that's hardly a bragging right; you could draw up magic triangles while blindfolded, blacked-out awake, one hand behind your back. You learned to kaeps-sdrawkcab like a child taking to Pig Latin (you re-learned Pig Latin, you half invented Pig Latin-Latin.) You learned to etch sigils, meticulous, desperate, intent.
(And you learned to re-obscure them, panting, sated, and spent.)
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The metal plate doesn't keep out everything.
Some days you find yourself staring at your hand, left or right, or both, when the memory catches you. Both of them wearing down to the bone and the bone into powder and that into particulate and then nothing, nothing at the edges of your wrists. You let him, you laughed, there was no heat and you can't remember if there was pain
if there was, you managed to ask, through your screams
you managed to think for a millisecond “can you bring them back and stop at the fifth finger”
and bill filled you with mirth, his, yours, and you screamed the laugh together as he replied “oh, fordsy, that won't fix what's w r r i g h t o n g with you!”