Disclaimer: I DO NOT own Gravity Falls.
A Wonderful Caricature of Alice
Bill Cipher watched over the scene unfolding before him, clenching his stick-like fists as fury rose up and slowly consumed him, transforming his usually bright neon yellow visage to a darker and more sinister crimson. He was completely beside himself; completely enraged and furious that the blasted Pines family had managed to take away from him his prisoner for the last thirty years. Stanley Pines should have failed, he had been sure of it. He had made sure of it.
All those times he had subtly influenced those police meat bags, all the underhanded deals he made for these past thirty years to hinder Stanley's progress, all had been for nothing.
Wasted. Completely wasted.
He swiped his fist through the scene, his hands clenching and unclenching in frustration. The return of Stanford Pines was a major setback in his plans. Careful and meticulous centuries of planning, and all of it nearly destroyed by this unprecedented predicament. He would have to reset his hand now that the Ace he held was taken from him.
And it was all her fault.
"There was no label this time with the words 'DRINK ME,'
but nevertheless she uncorked it and put it to her lips.
'I know SOMETHING interesting is sure to happen,' she said to herself,
'whenever I eat or drink anything; so I'll just see what this bottle does."
-Alice, Alice in Wonderland
Like she had been dunked in a tub of oil and then casted into a roaring furnace, every part of her being came aflamed, and it burned. It was excruciating, and Mabel struggled to draw breath. Pain. Her head was spinning, colours seared into her mind blinding her even though her eyes were closed shut. Make it stop. Nausea rendered her body into a pile of uncoordinated limbs that refused to function at her will, as she twitched and turned, violently dry heaving in pain as she tried to banish away her reality to escape from it.
Distantly, as if she was standing on the other side of a large canyon, she heard her brother calling her name, heavy with concern and fear. For her. She wanted to respond in kind, to tell him to help her, because everything just hurt so much but his voice slurred together with her loud, laboured breathing as her vision became dimmer as her body tried, unsuccessfully, to cope with the pain. Her awareness of reality was losing ground fast, and no matter how hard she tried to hold on to it, it slipped through her fingers easily as falling water. But Mabel did not want to fall, did not want to embrace the inevitability of the darkness to come.
Even while experiencing this awful predicament, a small thought managed to manifest in her mind, the longing for the comfort of something familiar made the ache in her body stronger and harder to endure. 'I wish I was in Sweater Town.' Because Sweater Town was a safe haven for her, a place to retreat until everything that was wrong with the world saw fit to righten itself.
And after enduring cops (though that is already a daily occurrence), betrayal (she betrayed her own brother for a Grunkle who was reported to be dead) and the suspense of the end of the world (she had enough of those for a lifetime), Mabel was at the end of her tether with managing with all this (if she could've, she would have gesticulated at everything with her hands), because - she screamed silently as another wave of pain wrecked her body, dunking her mind viciously back into a sea of pain - if she makes out of this ordeal alive, she was absolutely done with the world.
Self-preservation slightly triumphed over familial ties in her book, because if she died choosing to follow Dipper to this lab, choosing to trust Stan even though he gave her nothing but words - words that could have been lies disguised cleverly in sheep skin - because she thought she was doing the right thing…
Mabel Pines is not normally known as a vicious, vindictive person. But when backed up into a corner by the shadowy wraith known as Death, like all perfectly normal human beings, their true colours would show. Thus, if she died for trusting a stranger and setting the world on course to its own destruction, she will be damned if she did not come back from the dead to haunt her family to madness.
"Mabel, no no no no...do something...dying...can't lose her..." She faintly heard Dipper say, her brother's voice sounded to be bordering on hysterics, the shrill-ish way he shouted those words giving way to his frantic and panicky state of mind.
"Soos...come here...help me…Mabel...door..." Words were coming in patches, and even though she knew it was futile, she strained her ears to hear them, anything to keep the dark at bay for a little while longer. Her throat felt constricted as fear washed over her. She did not want to go. There was a sudden burning sensation behind her eyes, the sudden wetness on her cheeks and mouth. She did not want to die.
"Ma...bel...sorry...I'm...so...sorry..." There was a rough, calloused hand on her arm, the gentle pull of someone pulling her into an unreciprocated hug. "S-sorry...p...please…Mab..."
Even with her mind slipping, she managed to pour her remaining energy into powering her vocal cords to say those words to him.
"I-I...ha...te...you…" she rasped out, her voice barely audible but her hatred was as sharp as a wicked blade. "I-I'll...n..ever...f-forgive...you…"
Behind the curtain of unshed tears, she watched him crumbled, the sudden slump in his shoulder, the raw pain painted clearly on his face. But she did not care. It was his fault, his obsession with the journals, her faith in him, that had lead her to her demise. Dipper and Stan.
'I will never forgive you both.'
So as the last dredges of her consciousness slipped beneath the surface, and the mighty jaws of darkness sought to claim her, she held on tightly to the thoughts of anger, vengeance and hatred as she sunked into her own pits of Hell.
As she drowned, an ominous, familiar dark laughter echoed.
"Little Alice fell
d
o
w
n
the hOle,
bumped her head
and bruised her soul."
- Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland
It was a relatively straight forward plan, even for him.
Enter her mind, mess it up and leave. Simple.
The yellow-bricked triangle circled around her bruised and battered head, savouring for a moment the look of abject hatred and desperation on her face as she claws for some purchase that will save her from falling into the abyss.
"Nothing will save you now, Shooting Star," Bill said, glowing a brilliant shade of yellow whilst raising his hands above her head in mimic to pulling something out of it. Lilac coloured runes rose up from her, spinning around rapidly in a continuous circle that the runes blurred together it was practically indiscernible. But he could make them out just fine.
Glitter key. Hamster shield. Shooting Star.
It was pitifully easy, Bill contemplated silently as he held the makeshift sphere of runes in his hands, to just close his tiny fists around it and crush it. Leaving her terribly exposed to his power and influence. Tempting.
No.
Bill floated closer to her, the sounds of her whimpering becoming softer and softer. Pine Tree was at her side, kneeling beside her, crying openly.
"I-I...ha...te...you…" she rasped out, her voice barely audible but her hatred was as sharp as a wicked blade. "I-I'll...n..ever...f-forgive...you…"
Bill closed his hand around the orb, the distant tingle of warmth licking the inside of his palm. A surge of power flowed through him then, the tantalizing scent of her mind practically beckoned him to corrupt it, to consume it all.
Because what he wanted was to disassemble the very threads of her personal mindscape, and completely destroy her self-identity, the very essence that made her Mabel Pines.
"I will never forgive you both."
Bill Cipher wanted to break her.
"Why, there's hardly enough of me left to make ONE respectable person!"
- Alice, Alice in Wonderland
But somehow his schemes turned against him, warping his plane of domain into a cage to chain him within. As he cried out in disbelief, agony and rage, his powers were stripped from him as easily as tearing a candy wrapper apart.
A bright colourful halo of a shooting star flashed before his single eye; one of the many symbols on his wheel, mocking him into submission with the power it held over him now.
Bill strained pitifully in his chains as his flat two-dimensional trigonal shaped body was forced into undergoing a sudden metamorphosis against his own will. For a second he was a crimson carnation, the next moment he was a pair of loafers, then a yellow-furred deer.
It continued on and on, and showed no sign of stopping. There was no order in his transformations, which were became more unpredictable than the last.
He tried snapping his fingers (or paws, whatever) whenever he had a body with plausible thumbs. But somehow, his powers did not work in this mindscape (of course, because that would ruin the fun, he thought snidely). Because somehow she had prevented him from accessing it (which was ridiculous, impossible, absurd and…and...just crazy).
Just as the next form stole over him, he did not have the chance to react before her mindscape began infolding itself, warping everything into a war of colours, sounds and the uncomfortable tingling sensation of fire ants crawling up his legs.
Desperately, he pulled against the chains again (curse this weak and pathetic form), but like how all his previous efforts, it was in vain. He could not escape.
It was a contest between a dream demon stripped of his powers against the might of a self-destructive (sneaky, manipulative -) mindscape.
It was hardly a fair fight.
"I knew who I was this morning, but I changed a few times since then."
-Alice, Alice in Wonderland
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