The first thing Mabel saw upon waking up was white. The next thing she saw was also white, because there was nothing but white all around her: the "ground" she was laying on, the "sky", and the wide expanse all around her was all a blank, blinding emptiness. There was no wind, no sound, and most importantly, no Dipper. Wasn't he with her before...before- what?
The girl squinted into the blank abyss above her head, trying to remember how the heck she got here and why there was a heavy dread pooling in her chest that wouldn't go away. She remembered Dipper, he was there with her, he looked...scared. And the Grunkles were there too...panicking?
"ENIE!" Wait.
"MENIE!" No.
"MINIE!" No no NO.
"YOU!" She- she was-
"WELL, YOU KNOW WHAT THEY SAY ABOUT SHOOTING STARS, THEY BURN BRIGHTEST BUT LIVE THE SHORTEST!" There was an intense amount of heat and then-
She'd died. She'd died, and now she was-
"No no no no NO!" It took a moment for Mabel to realize that the voice wasn't coming from her head. "YOU CAN'T DO THIS SO ME! COME ON, I INVOKED YOU, YOU'RE SUPPOSTA GET ME BACK!" She raised her head and saw a familiar yellow glow that froze the blood in her veins. The triangle was floating only a few feet away from her, shouting obscenities at the white expanse of sky, some of which did not even sound human. "YOU WERE SUPPOSED TO-" the demon turned around, his single eye fixing onto her, pupil narrowed to nothing but a pinprick. "YOU."
Oh no.
"WHAT ARE YOU DOING HERE?! HELL, YOU'RE NOT EVEN SUPPOSED TO BE HERE, YOU'RE SUPPOSED TO BE-"
Dead. She was supposed to be dead, and if she was dead, and Bill was here with her, than he was also dead. By the look in his eye, the demon seemed to come to the same conclusion. Whatever quick glimpse of distress she saw was quickly masked by fury. "Well well, we just gotta fix that real quick, don't we?" Bill floated down closer to her, and extending into the air as if preparing something to strike her down. Mabel's breath hitched, and she couldn't help but crawl backward in fear. If the aching feeling in her chest was something to go by, dying hurt, and she wasn't looking forward to doing that a second time. Bill clenched his hand and snapped his fingers-
"What." And nothing happened. The triangle tried again. And again. The snap echoed through the vast expanse around them, but no horrible monster came to eat her, and no jets of fire came to turn her into ashes. Mabel let out a sigh of relief, falling back down on the ground, while Bill's panic only seemed to increase. The demon glared at his shaking hands, clenching them into tiny fists. "ARE YOU KIDDING ME? WHAT THE HELL AM I SUPPOSED TO DO NOW, HUH?" Bill, Mabel noted in the corner of her mind, was a lot smaller then he was during Weirdmaggedon, so that she was now a foot taller than him. The demon kicked out his little legs, which now seemed so silly Mabel couldn't help but laugh. Maybe it was slightly hysterical, but the girl couldn't seem to stop, not even when Bill turned to her again, eye red with anger. "OH, YOU THINK IT'S HILARIOUS, DON'T YOU? LET'S SEE HOW HILARIOUS IT IS WHEN I... WHEN I-... AUGHHH!" the demon threw his arms up, floating away from her, apparently frustrated that he couldn't physically harm her anymore.
"Ha ha, sorry, it's just,-heh! It's just we're dead and stuff, right? Kinda expecting something else. This...actually, this seems really boring." Mabel's smile dropped abruptly. A wide expanse of nothingness. Forever. That was not what she was hoping for at all. She kinda hoped on being reborn as a sea lion or something, but this was so much worse than anything it could have been.
"We're not dead, kid." the sudden change in volume made Mabel raise her head. Bill now looked frustrated more than anything, but at least he stopped screaming in rage, so that was a plus. She didn't know how much of his grating voice she could take in those volumes. "I looked, and there was nothing there. This is something. Something terrible, but still something. We haven't kicked the bucket yet, kid." he squinted at her. "Though why the heck you're here is one hellova question."
The girl shrugged. "Dumb luck?"
"Yeah, apparently." Bill snorted, which brought the question to how he could snort. He didn't have a nose. Or a mouth, for that matter. "Good ol' Frills messed everything up. Some god of rebirth."
"Who's 'Frills'?"
"Noneya."
"What?"
"None ya business."
Mabel scowled. "Okay, so you're five. Got it."
"Hey, look who's talking! I gave ya a place where you could literally do whatever you wanted, and you make it into a sparklier version of disneyland." the demon threw his hand up. "I mean, talk about wasted potential, yeesh!"
"Jerk." Mabel folded her arms across her chest, "If you wanna talk to me, you better stop being one."
"Who said I WANT to talk to ya?"
"Then why are you still here?"
"Hey! Good point! Why am I still here?" Bill turned his (back?) on her, floating away into the abyss. "SEE YA NEVER, KID!"
"FINE!"
"FINE!"
And then Mabel was alone.
Mabel took her hair band off her head, playing with it for a while before putting it back on her head. She layed down on the ground again, staring unfocused into the white "sky" above her. She let her thoughts wander for a bit, seeing as there was nothing else to do. Unfortunately, they took her to places she didn't want to be at the moment. What happened to the Grunkles? To Dipper? The rest of the town. She assumed they defeated Bill somehow, otherwise he wouldn't be here. Were they okay? Was everything back to normal?
Did they miss her?
As what happened finally sank in, Mabel felt a lump for in her throat. She would never get to turn thirteen. She would never see her brother or her parents again. Waddles would never get his owner back, and the Grunkles would never get those goodbye sweaters she was planning to finish. She was dead, and as the million things she would never get to do came back to her, the girl felt the first stray tears slide down her cheeks, splattering onto the whiteness her head was resting on.
"Why are you leaking?" Great, him again.
"GO AWAY." she wiped her face with her sleeve, turning away from the glowing yellow monster making circles around her head. "Weren't you gonna do that in the first place?" the triangle did what could only be described as a shrug. "Got bored. So why's your face producing liquid." he floated closer to peer at her face, only to back away when Mabel tried to smack him. "Wait, don't tell me. Okay, you're not a toddler, so that crosses off like 90% of reasons. Are you-"
"I'M SAD, YOU JERK!" Mabel took off her shoe to fling it at the demon, only for him to foat out of the way again. "AND IT'S YOUR FAULT! YOU KILLED ME!"
"Hey, don't take it personally. Sixer wouldn't hand over the equation, I HAD to make 'im see what the stakes were. The odds happened to land on you." Bill flicked her nose, only for Mabel to smack his hand away. "I kinda liked you, to be honest. Should have gotten rid of Pinetree instead."
"Don't bring my brother into this! He's not the one to blame, I am!"
"Woah, okay, relax, yeesh. Can't really bring him into anything right now."
"I-it was my fault. I was a selfish brat, like usual, and handed you that stupid rift, and now I'm dead. I guess it's better this way."
"Hey! You're not dead! Stop saying you're dead." Bill's eye narrowed. "If we were dead, then he'd be here, and he's not!"
"...Who'd be here?"
"I don't-" the triangle clenched his eye shut, gripping both sides of his frame. "I don't know. But he's not, and if we were dead, he would."
"I thought you knew lots of things."
"Yeah, well clearly not this." Bill's tone was sharp, and held a silent but obvious message to let it be. So she did.
…
"Your turn."
"Ugh, fine. I spy, with my ALL SEEING EYE something…pink."
"My sweater."
"Wow, how did you guess?" Bill gives her a sarcastic look. She ignores it.
"Okay, my turn. I spy with my little eye something...white."
"Everything here is white, kid."
"...This game got boring."
"WELL, you're the one to suggest it in the first place!"
Mabel chewed on one of her hair strands thoughtfully. Bill lay next to her, his stick figure arms folded behind his upper angle. The triangle looked blankly up, or the direction the two decided to call "up" since gravity seemed to work in the opposite direction. This was weird, how calm everything was, despite Mabel laying next to the guy who killed her only a few hours ago. Or it seemed like hours. How long has it been, really? She turned to look at Bill's blank eye. "So tell me some stuff."
The eye shifted to her face. "What 'stuff'?"
"You know, like stuff! You said you know lots of things. Give me a fun fact about the universe or something."
He frowned for a moment, seeming to think it over. "The moon landing was faked."
"Oh. I remember Dipper ranting about something like that last year." she frowned. "Something about alien surveillance?"
"Oh yeah. That thing you call the moon is just a giant disk hiding the guys that feel like studying you humans. Why'd ya think you never got to see the back of it?"
"I dunno, rotation and stuff?"
"Ha! That's what they want you to think." Bill tended to gesture a lot when he was speaking, something Mabel took note of. "Never trust people with authority, kid."
"Gotcha." The two spent an unclear amount of time in total silence, before Mabel tried to break it again. "So where did you come from?"
Bill's eye narrowed, and for a moment Mabel regretted ever asking that question. "A dimension far far away. It's gone now, I made sure of that."
"Was it really that bad?"
"Oh, you have no idea, kid."
"I mean, your definition of 'bad' kind of differs from the rest of us."
"...There was no color."
". . .WHAT?"
"Yep. The suckers banned it, just like they banned anything even remotely fun."
"Okay, that is horrible."
"I made it better," Bill's eye narrowed again, and he seemed to be talking to himself now, "I let them do whatever they wanted, and they threw it away. A bunch of flat, idiotic minds stuck in their own box of rules. The universe was way better without them."
"That's...really sad." Mabel frowned, thinking it over. "Also kind of a paradox. I mean, in the bubble I could do whatever I wanted, too, but I ended up hurting Dipper in the process. Something I didn't want." she looked back at the triangle. 'So you could say you can't really have what you want, can you? Not completely." She frowned. "What did you want, Bill?"
"I wanted it back."
There it was again. "What are you talking about?"
"I-I don't know. I can't remember. Why can't I remember? Mabel blinked as the demon left her side, floating a few feet from the ground and rubbing at his eye. "It- it was important, why can't I- That wasn't there before."
Mabel sat up to look where the triangle was staring. It was...a door. In the middle of literally nothing. Okay.
The door was dull and gray and was made with looked like chipped and heavy wood. Big, several times taller than Mabel herself, and it looked like she could barely reach the knob. The most noticeable thing, however, was the heavy, rusty metal chain that was wrapped around it, holding it shut. "Uh…"
The two look at each other, then back at the newfound anomaly. Beats nothing but white void, in Mabel's opinion. But the fearful way Bill looks at it tells her he doesn't feel quite the same. The girl slowly approached the door, pausing before grabbing the knob, the metal burning her palm with a freezing cold.
"Don't."
Mabel spun around to find the demon hovering a few feet behind her, his eye shifting from her hand to the door itself, which such a hopelessly terrified look on his face that she couldn't help but feel sorry for him. And also hesitant. Because she had no idea what was on the other side, and if whatever it was was capable of scaring the all powerful triangle guy, who reveled in destruction and commanded creatures that may as well have walked out of a surrealist painting, then it definitely wasn't good.
And yet the longer Mabel stared at the door, the bigger the urge to open it, to find out what's on the other side became.
The twin reached for the doorknob again.
"DON'T."
She slowly twisted it.
"SHOOTING STAR, DON'T YOU DARE."
The metal was cold under her palm.
"I-I'LL RIP OUT YOUR ORGANS! EVERY SINGLE ONE I SWEAR IF YOU- NO STOP STOP!" Bill's empty threat transformed into a scream of fury? Terror? She wasn't sure, but at the moment, it was like none of it mattered.
Mabel opened the door.
And gazed into the unknown.