A/N: So I don't know how this will be received, but I had to get this idea out there before it haunted me forever. Enjoy?
He senses it with an anticipation he had not known since the blink of an eye ago, and yet he can equate it having waited billions of years just to see a floating rock form so that a sun could rise upon it.
Bill had been caught in a miasma for quite some time, in a state where he had no form to speak of and yet which stayed tucked into a crawlspace, so to speak. Stan Pines – the man who hadn't defeated him so much as impeded his progress with a short, irritating delay that had been both humiliated and further fueled the dream demon.
He was no longer a dream demon, but he was a something with a capital S in the old man's mind, which didn't carry as many figurative cobwebs as Bill might've imagined. Bill can imagine grabbing an eyeful of the many doors in a semi-fixed mindscape with a feeling, conscionable eye. He knows Stanley Pines's life forward and back, and knows that his mind which births and ages and dies within the space of a day can never be fully healed. The swing-set may swing with two seats for two look-alike children again, but it still creaks in the dreary wind.
Humans. They had such fascinating inclinations to cling to all their hurts, when their struggles and strife weren't but an insignificant spectacle in the grand scheme of things.
Bill can't sit or manipulate in the state he's in now, can't twirl a cane or adjust a top hat, can't snap his fingers and create a plethora of genuinely scary nightmares for his host – but he's conscious as Stan is conscious, and beyond that. He can watch, though much is obscured while he's only a molecule of his former self. And he watches.
He senses it – his return. Bill had invoked it and the tingling was right at the tip of his figurative fingers. He knows it's coming, and he watches Stan's mind as it shapes and goes shapeless.
Waking was like rematerializing after a long, long dormancy that he wanted to forget as soon as he was mid-consciousness. It was also like coming up for air, which Bill had never experienced before, but he blamed that on ripened lungs and a lame body. But his biggest epiphany flashed in his mind before he could rejoice in his personal bitterness; he remembered everything but it didn't compare to what he realized the minute his eyes opened.
He felt.
Two-dimensional space and two-dimensional beasts generally didn't interact in a fashion that resulted in feeling pain or temperature.
He felt cold.
"Grunkle Stan?" A soft, feminine voice rose from the drudgery of his surroundings and forced Bill to turn and seek it out. "How are you feeling?"
Nothing about the room that was floating around him was quite as interesting as the woman who sat beside him. Her elbows were propped on what he realized was his bedside, and her eyes practically shone in the dark – sunny brown to match the sunny curls that tumbled from her head to reach down past her shoulders. She was clad in a fuzzy magenta sweater with the patch of a sea otter in the middle, and a necklace of homely, clay stars right above it.
Stars.
"You were asleep for so long…" She hiccupped a laugh. "We – we thought you were a goner!"
He has options, but approaching any of them with an inkling of thought now is as good as tethering himself to concrete for all eternity. He's free now, as free as possible given the circumstances (he realizes somewhere in the chain of reactions distinguishing himself from Stan Pines that something isn't quite as he'd like it, Bill just can't put his finger on what that is in the seconds between nonexistence and being).
So, he vouches for using all the best options possible.
"I'd never leave you, kids." Bill made a mockery of Stanley Pines's original speech pattern, with a wide, teeth-baring grin over his ancient features.
The air became tense before Mabel's upbeat demeanor chilled, and before there were simultaneous gasps above Bill's head, and before another voice, masculine but still reedy, shot in the dark.
"Mabel! Get away from him!" Dipper emphasized his own words by lurching, like a trained fencer, toward his sister just as she sat up abruptly with the scrape of the wooden chair at Stan's bedside protesting her movement. Bill didn't mind that his pretense was over before it even began. He threw caution to the wind and threw his head back in a manic laugh.
When he'd wiped the tears from Stan's wrinkled cheeks, Bill kept smiling. "It's good to see you too, Pine Tree!"
Both twins, still the younger in the Pines prominence though they'd aged considerably – for humans, looked within an inch of hyperventilating.
"How?" Dipper asked hoarsely, when they'd stopped cowering long enough to see that his pupils were, as Bill assumed, slit. "We erased you out of existence!"
"Aw, it's so like you flesh-puppets to believe you can erase true chaotic genius from actuality!" Bill replied gleefully. He reached out, playfully acting like he might grab them, and giggled when they flinched.
"Dipper!" Mabel clung to her brother's shirt, eyes doe-like and manic. "Dipper, the notes! The journals!"
"Dipper?" Mabel shouted. "Where's Grunkle Stan?"
Her brother didn't say a word.
"He already took Stan away. Grunkle Stan is dead." Dipper spoke hollowly. Mabel froze upon hearing him, eyes widening to an impossible size. Tears slipped down her cheeks, seeming to pool in the dark circles beneath her eyes before slipping down to the wood floor below.
It wasn't long before her shock transformed into silent horror, and she shook her head frantically in every direction possible before running out of the room.
He was left in the cabin for days without a soul to speak to. Not that he wanted to talk to the Pines unless it was to mock and tease them mercilessly before burning them to ashes from a much higher plane of existence. He liked the latter idea however, and was content with replaying the idea in his mind as many times as he pleased instead of twiddling his thumbs, or whatever it was that humans did while waiting.
Bill watched as the port window made Stan's possessions grow long shadows then disappear altogether in the darkness of night. He grew more and more bitter as the passage of time traveled at a snail's pace as long as he was stuck developing bed sores and wood splinters from his frumpy bed.
The demon, if that's what he still was after pleading to A-X-O-T-L-E once before, could've hypothesized and theorized all kinds of chaotic messes this world over in mind. But what was imagining compared to the real thing? He couldn't wait to get out of Stanley's body and return to creating his own world of nightmares… if he could.
All he knew was that the first time he'd attained senses and a dimensional body, he hadn't felt as bound to it like he did Stan's body, and that made Bill antsy. He wasn't able to recollect the resources or knowledge he'd once had, and it was almost like his long-term dormancy had cut him off.
The boy now a man with cropped and combed hair and a well-defined face, brought in a bowl of faintly smelling chicken broth and set it on the desk at the side of the bed, nailed down to keep it from sliding as the boat rocked.
"You should eat. It's been days since you –" An indent formed above Dipper's brow, which was already starting to crease permanently. "Since Stan ate."
"Ha! You think I need your baseless nutrients to live? My existence far surpassed yours, your parents, your grunkles – I've been around far longer than your ancestors, kid! And I never needed food to keep me goin'!" Bill chimed, face split open in a manic grin.
It must've been hard to witness the face of his beloved great uncle morphed horrendously by Bill Cipher, as Dipper's expression darkened further until his jaw and knuckles cracked noisily. The demon geared up for a fight, mentally preparing insults and snark the world over in wait for Pine Tree to come for his bait.
"Don't be so loud! I finally got Mabel to sleep yesterday, she doesn't need this!" Dipper whisper-yelled instead. "Don't take that away from her!"
Bill struggled to not react by rearing back from him, but could not resist the look of incredulity as it twisted his and Stan's features.
"Whatever." Bill finally muttered, crossing his arms. He wanted so badly to pull up something that would make the man second-guess himself, like the good old days, but Bill conceded despite inherent impatience that this body blocked Bill from accessing his innumerable extent of knowledge.
Nothing kept Bill from whining outwardly about it, however. This old geezer's fleshy remains were a pain in the ass.
Breathing in his flesh prison was just as easy as trying to break an entire spectrum of dimensions with a sledgehammer. Bill couldn't believe how difficult it was becoming just to inhale oxygen and to spew it back out. He felt the cotton-texture in his throat thicken with every painful withdrawal, and the entire struggle went straight to the pain receptors all throughout Stan Pines's body.
"Ugh! Pine Tree!" Bill stretched a gnarled hand up to the ceiling in a show of theatrics. He ignored all the shocks of pain from the body's hand to its sternum. "Get Sixer in here, at least! His big, dumb brain could create painkillers for his own brother, couldn't he?"
Bill went on. "Since I assume you didn't tell him about you and your sister's discovery, as Stan is still in one piece and no one's burst through the door with a heat-ray or whatever gizmo of the week –"
"Grunkle Ford died three years ago." Pine Tree said flatly, before Bill Cipher could finish his train of thought.
Eighty-Nine. Bill snapped imagined black, simplistic fingers, once he'd processed the news. At the same time he felt airy inside, as a rush of feelings he couldn't decipher (not now) mixed chemicals in Stan's brain. Damn. I was this close.
He could see lots of things, but not everything.
The man standing over Bill-Stan scrutinized the bedridden hybrid with a frustrated sigh, beginning to turn before Bill spoke again, less like himself and more hesitant. That rush of feeling was steady and unyielding, and it irritated Bill like a persistent itch.
"I didn't take your uncle away, kid." Bill snapped at the man despite himself. "He died before I got here. Before I was conscious."
Dipper stared, eyes hooded as he simply stood there like a wall for Bill's words to bounce off of for the longest time… until he turned heel and left without a word.
He was surprised, but not shocked to see Mabel Pines come bustling in one day. She came in with a long skirt flowing from her hips and a book balanced on top of her head, which she walked around with like it was an routine she'd perfected. It was a lot more interesting than having her brother come in like he was walking on hot coals to drop off some 'food' and go.
But then Bill thought of a reality where the twins were made to work in a carnival, and where he could be their ringleader foisting their futile talents onto the human public. And that earned a chuckle as he got more elaborate with his daydreaming.
"Ya know, I may have been too hasty with my earlier plans." Bill ignored Dipper's idea completely, as Mabel brushed her skirt beneath her to sit down and scoot in with the book clutched tightly to her chest. "It was a shame I never made a deal with you."
Mabel flipped through the pages. She had never been a fan of bookmarks beyond fawning over the selections in bookstores or creating her own, and so the woman relied on finding her place by memory. But since when did someone like Mabel sit down and read anyway?
"We could've had a ball, couldn't've we, Shooting Star?" Stan's eyes creased while Bill grinned.
She kept flipping before she was just ahead of the midpoint in her book, and she looked up at Bill with one eyebrow raised. "Is that supposed to be a compliment?"
Bill shrugged, and stopped with the sudden cord of pain that tightened in some nebulous part of his shoulder. "You're fun, and so am I! It would've been a perfect match!"
"We'd have been a real dream team." Mabel quipped fitfully. "Or would you have preferred it to be a nightmare pair?"
Bill laughed. "See what I mean?!"
The girl, no woman, smirked briefly with both brows raised. She may have been one half of a perfect nightmare pair as a child, but like with many adults, there was something more reserved in her demeanor here than her demeanor as a twelve-year-old. "Shame that you saw the light twenty years too late."
Twenty years.
"What're ya doin' here, anyway?" Bill stapled his feeble fingers together, entertaining thoughts of making a deal now.
"I always come here in the evenings." Mabel said evenly. "I'd read to Stan and I… ya know. I miss it."
"Is Stan really gone?" She looked at Bill pointedly, though the desperation in her eyes was like a glaze. Bill met her look but couldn't for the life of him muster up enough humor or mean-spiritedness while he was getting so tired.
"Yes. Yes, Shooting Star. He's gone." At least, Bill couldn't find him, even when he tried nightly. The dreamscape maintained itself, but its color and linear structures were fading like a fog after the rain. The whole mindscape was deteriorating while Bill continued to be weighed down by the mortal coil of the body he'd been cursed to.
"Wish I could've seen him go." Bill added, though it came like an afterthought.
Mabel stared, and stared and stared while her eyes watered and her lips trembled. Bill grew uncomfortable with the scrutiny, and settled deeper into the sheets and the oversized pillow behind his back, but she nodded resolutely after a time.
Her voice shook. "I knew it."
"He's a person, Dipper."
Bill couldn't remember falling asleep. Demons had no need for rest, and it was taking longer with the element of time in full affect against him, for Bill to realize that this body required it. Although in opposition to that, waking to live another day of boredom in the cramped, planked room was an unfortunate effort.
"No!" Dipper shouted back. "He tried to kill us! As kids! And the rest of Gravity Falls – the whole world was gonna pay because of him! Stop empathizing with him, Mabel!"
"If he's dying like you said, what's wrong with giving him basic human rights?" Mabel asked.
"You stared it, anyway, giving him… you treated him like Stan first." She sniffled frustrated tears away. "Sometimes… I'm sorry, I'm sorry! I'm sorry, bro-bro."
It was quiet again, save for the rustling that must've come from their embrace just outside Bill's room. His eyes never blinked in the dark, but stayed dead-center on the door. What he wouldn't give to leave this room and simply enter the next.
"Did you ever notice how similar Grunkle Stan and Bill were? Sometimes it's just like he hasn't left yet."
Bill blinked. He wished he could leave and just understand. His dreams were fading and disintegrating too. He was sleeping dreamlessly before he could say otherwise.
"I don't belong here!" He's panicking, shaking. He can see Stanley Pines shooting up from his bed and racing out of the prison-like room on this blasted venture, but he can only see it – the possibility is, is just… he hates the idea that it's impossible.
Still, Bill can't move his limbs voluntarily. He's weak, he feels weak and like he's cooling as a meteor fallen to earth might. A shooting star losing all the heat it'd gained making its way to puny, lonely Earth. "I've gotta get out! I gotta –! I need to –!"
The shadows has fallen and disappeared and he'd never counted how often. Bill despaired over that now, more than he ever would've in his original form.
The twins stare at him with saucer-wide eyes, but they too are at a loss with how to deal with Bill's episode. He makes to thrash in his bed but he just can't, and so no effort is necessary to keep him from going berserk outside of his mind.
"I don't… I don't want…" He swallowed, hoping to lessen the thickness in his throat that made his voice break. "I don't want to die!"
"I don't wanna die." Bill said noiselessly, hopelessly like a child at the hands of unfair treatment. He'd never, ever, ever felt so small. Never.
Mabel sobbed quietly in answer, and Dipper was silent, looking less accusatory and more starkly grim-faced than Bill had ever seen him. They sat on either side of Stan's body, rigid like gargoyles atop a dreary tower as Bill panicked inside.
Then, unexpectedly, Mabel sobbed again and gently took Stan's hand – Bill's hand, since he felt it with fading but prevalent senses that he could no longer deny belonged to him. Her fingers trembled against his and his palm while she entwined her hand with his to comfort him.
Bill should've shoved her hand aside, should've raged and thrown an almighty tantrum that this wasn't fair. He didn't deserve to die and then die permanently. He didn't deserve to be saddled with the twins that had ruined his existence and his plans, the purpose for his being.
Bill didn't deserve to have one of those twins shake in his hand while she put up a pitiful excuse of comforting him as he literally died in front of her.
But Bill was just too tired.
He swore that some remnants of Stanley Pines still resided in the old man's body, and were finding ways of morphing Bill's being to their whims. He felt a deep ache in not only the body he was trapped in, but… in his soul? Bill didn't believe that he had one, or hadn't beforehand, but whatever his essence was, was being tainted by pure exhaustion. Tainted, absolutely, because he couldn't invoke any curse or make any call now – it wasn't even at the forefront of his mind because he just knew it'd be for naught.
"We're getting close to the shore." Dipper was in the doorway, by the sound of the echo of his voice and the outline in the corner of Bill's eyes.
Bill couldn't turn his head to get a better look, but he doubted the action would yield quality results anyway. The shadows on the wall were growing long and deepening again.
What time was it?
Bill didn't know if he'd asked that question out loud, though no one answered. He set his eyes on the twisting and turning of Mabel's hand in his, and before he knew it Bill had her in his grip. He let himself feel the softness of her skin and the fragile bones beneath, all of which would weaken and be marred with age. Humans were such breakable things.
And he was literally dying.
She was still crying and Dipper was still in the doorway when the horns of other boats drifted nearby and the rolling of their ship grew less steady.
"You don't have to hold my hand." Mabel managed to say, with more kindness than anyone deserved. "You can let go if you want to. I'll still be here."
He didn't. Bill squeezed her hand in answer, but kept silent for once. Forever.
Mabel wanted to bury his body near the water. She'd seen the light, however, when Dipper explained that the tide would dredge it up quickly and make for a terrifying discovery for some poor tourist.
"But wouldn't Grunkle Stan want it that way?" The woman asked with watery eyes. "It'd be funny."
She left out what would remain unspoken. Bill would think it was funny, too.
She could've gotten her way, with Dipper wanting to make her happy as badly as he did, but he thought too long on it. "It wouldn't be dignified, though, Mabel."
They wrapped Stan's body in blankets, some that had been knitted by Mabel and sent during the years when the older Pines twins were unable to be around the Shack during the entire summer. She'd postmarked anywhere viable, from Toledo to Antarctica to Timbuktu, and had jumped for joy every time Stan confirmed that her postcards and packages had been received.
Carrying him up the beach to a grassier patch of land, still riddled with dry, heated sand, was heartbreakingly easy after he'd lost so much weight in his final year. They found a shovel closer to civilization while Dipper stayed with the body, with Mabel assuring her brother that also finding water to bless and make Holy would be unnecessary in the grand scheme of things. Stan and Bill were both dead, and were covered in sand as the sun waned behind the skyline.
It was dark before the siblings left, after marking the grave with shapes made by the smoothest stones they could find on the quiet coastline. The waves crashed against the shore, and dissolved back into the sea below his grave.