Being dead felt a lot like being cotton candy. Without a definable shape or gender, the glimmering spirit coasted through the space between its latest end and its newest beginning. Once it had been a girl in India, a boy raised to worship a powerful demon, and, a few times, it had been a twin, with a brother or a sister that the spirit still loved. Most of its siblings, spouses, and children returned to the reincarnation cycle. They passed by each other, sometimes without recognition. There were times, however, when their energies would overlap, bumping into each other like fish in a stream, and the warm, familiar touch would provoke a shared aura of radiating fondness from the spirits.
They knew and loved and soon forgot. The reincarnation cycle was not the place for memories from the past. It existed as the unwritten future.
So the spirit drifted, quite content to be alone until its time to be born again arrived, when the atmosphere suddenly changed. Rather than a noticeable, tangible difference, the spirit merely sensed that something had arrived in its space that did not belong. Something that soured the energy near it, filling it with the chaotic power of potential. The potential for disasters like lightning storms and tsunamis thrummed in the spirit's space, encroaching on its peace and disrupting its peaceful state. Frightened, the spirit cringed from the disturbance as it began to take shape.
"Hey, toots." It formed a square, one half-lidded eye making up its entire face. The spirit thrummed experimentally towards it, colors and light feeling out this new presence.
There was something overwhelmingly powerful and ancient about this new creature. A single word popped into the spirit's mind. Demon.
Bill, hissed the spirit in reds and dark purples, throwing the word like a weapon. The demon knew, however, that the spirit was utterly defenseless against it. It shook with glee, eating up the fear and anger it was planting in the formerly blissfully ignorant and docile spirit.
"Sorry, sweetheart, the name's not Bill. That guy's long gone. Eaten up by your brother." A monocle appeared over the bulging eyeball, followed by a tie and a black umbrella. Barely paying attention to the physical changes – what did they matter to a soul? – the spirit reacted to his words, thrumming confusion and shifting from pink to a distressed grey. With thousands of years to sort through, finding the right one was an all-consuming task. One that could take centuries.
Still, the spirit flipped through its past lives, feeling guilt saturate its existence because the demon was watching. waiting.
The demon cackled, swinging its can gleefully. Spirits were innocent sheep. Accessing them was difficult, since the universe usually did its best to protect them from mean, nasty demons like him, but this demon was old, much older than the silly flesh sacks that inhabited the Earth, and power came with the experience that came from age. It had rent a hole into the Afterscape, all so it could get its hands on Alcor's precious sister. His Twin Star. His Mizar.
The demon was young, an upstart, really. But he was a powerful one. For the past six thousand years, they'd tolerated him – tolerated his rules, his threats, his numerous warnings to leave the humans alone. They figured he'd burn himself out at some point, or the humans he loved so much would kill him. Unfortunately, outside forces kept saving him. And more often than not, Mizar was responsible. They clung to each other like barnacles, refusing to bend even to the passing of time.
It was infuriating.
So, the demon came up with a plan. Why not make it so Alcor never happened? Erase the little punk from the timestream entirely.
And the spirit was more than willing to rise to the bait. "Guess you're not that great of a sister, after all, Mizar – or is it Mabel? What kind of a sibling forgets their own brother?" The Afterscape swirled, mirroring the spirit's tumultuous emotions as it zeroed in on one life. One brother.
Dipper, whispered the spirit, a soft breeze in the space created just for her. She wasn't indefinable, anymore. No longer the blank page ready for a new life. The demon had made her Mabel again.
What happened to my brother? What did you do?
She reared back; all for show really, there was nothing a being of pure energy could do to the culmination of chaos and magic that formed demons.
The demonic floppy disk waved a hand dismissively, the movement temporarily dispersing everything that was Mabel. Frazzled, she focused on recombining herself as the demon stated airily, "Oh, it wasn't me. He decided to doom himself to an eternity of misery on his own." With a wink, he twirled his umbrella and added, "Wanna save him?"
Save him? How?
Pieces were coming back to her, a warning rising to the forefront of her mind, a memory, but before she could fully process the thought the demon held out a spindly hand. "Doesn't matter how, toots. Just shake and I can guarantee that our favorite little meat stick will stay nice and human until the day he dies. Of course," blue fire enveloped his hand as he pretended to inspect his nails, trying to convince the little sheep in front of him that he was beyond bored, only helping her save her dumb sibling out of the goodness of the black hole he had for a heart, "this is a limited time offer, Shooting Star. In fact, it's over in three, two, on-" Psychically, Mabel reached out, curling over the flames in the closest approximation of a handshake she could manage.
"Haha!" Storm clouds gathered around the demon, malevolent and threatening as Mabel fought to regain control of her Afterscape. They surrounded her, spinning and tossing her, as the dream demon watched, growing in size until the ceiling shifted to accommodate him, and continued to cackle, making sure that the little sheep realized what a fool she was before the clouds sucked her screaming soul into a whirling vortex with one destination.
Six thousand years into the past.
It's a strange feeling, waking up in a body after being reduced to energy. Limbs feel like tree trunks, a head feels like a boulder. There's too much weight, moving is complicated; no longer controlled by simple thought but now requiring the added effort of blood pumping through veins, flexing muscles, bending bones.
Luckily, the strangeness quickly fades, replaced by the familiarity of live, as though waking up in a twelve year old body wasn't too different from riding a bike. Except the bike is in the middle of a barren wasteland created by the demon trying to possess your brother and end the world as you know it.
Mabel took off running, the single-minded need to get Bill away from Dipper powering her legs, as well as the well wishes a very powerful demon. A demon that watched, grinning and unseen, from the sidelines.
It cheered as Mabel dived between Bill Cipher and her brother, rolled on the ground laughing when Bill entered her and she started to scream, and when she opened golden eyes, when she struggled to comfort her brother with words alone because she couldn't touch him and no one else could see her, he gave her a jaunty salute with his bowler hat.
Alcor the Dreambender had finally been vanquished. And by the very Mizar he treasured above all others.
Now, even if Dipper Pines died tomorrow, he would die a human. Just as promised. And Mizar would know the loneliness so great it destroyed the unkillable, driving them mad until their brains grew bored of it and reached for sanity, just to driven back to madness again.
"Aren't you lucky, Mizar?" Only time would tell how Mizar would differ from Alcor, but Tad Strange was certain that their new demonic sister would be so much more fun.
A/N: Well, that was a blast. I don't know if the Afterscape is actually a thing, but for the purposes of this story it's where human spirits reside when they're in-between reincarnations. Spirits don't have mouths so they don't use words to speak so much as different shades of light and color. Even if a living human managed to enter the same plane of existence, they would have no idea what the spirit talking to them was trying to say, but a demon can understand them just fine. Mabel, in her spirit form, is kind of a sparkly pink cloud of puff. Which is why any and all attempts to be seen as intimidating garner the general reaction of "Aw, that's adorable."
Tad Strange is an odd one. I knew I'd seen a square demon before and I absolutely wanted him for this story... but I had no idea what his name was. Turns out he's from something called The Demonic Guardians Au? Just typed "transcendence au floppy disk demon" and he popped up. Lucky.
I don't know anything about Tad Strange, so he ended up being sort of sadistic and rude like Bill, but he hates Alcor. And not because he liked Bill - he's definitely not a fan of Bill - he just hates Alcor because Alcor tells him what to do. And he has the power to make sure he does it. It's like having a sulky Batman boss you around for 6,000 years. Who wants to be bossed around by a sulky Batman?
