"...NO!" The boy cried in despair as his grasp fell miserably short. His sister likewise desperately stretched her arms out as far as they could go in a frantic attempt to reach him, but all to no avail.
"Dipper! Dipperrrrr!" Mabel wailed as they were dragged further and further apart, each one completely trapped in a brilliant aura of crimson energy. Now separated from the forest floor by at least four feet thanks to their private prisons, neither preteen could do much besides struggle helplessly. Their captor cackled as he happily drank in their panic through his single unblinking eye.
"That's right, keep it up!" Bill Cipher taunted them mercilessly. "C'mon, don't stop! I think you're getting there...getting a little closer now...hey, looks like you almost got it...oops, never mind!"
He only needed to snap his fingers just once. The distance between the siblings was instantly increased by ten feet more, and there was literally nothing that they could do about it.
Things were getting grimmer by the moment. This was a completely different playing field from the last time the twins had clashed with the inter-dimensional demon. Bill had ambushed the unsuspecting siblings out in the physical world, where there were no fantastical powers of the mind to draw upon to defend themselves. They had merely been doing some exploring in the woods when he had appeared from out of the blue mere minutes before. It was all happening so fast, their heads were still spinning.
Dipper scowled at their isosceles foe with a burning hatred. This was wrong. This was so wrong. Didn't they have a truce? He didn't understand.
"Put us down!" He demanded, tone dripping with fury. " Put us down now, Bill!"
"Or what? You'll whine some more?" Bill joked, getting another growl out of the boy.
"What the heck do you even want?" Mabel yelled. The multidimensional being let out another hearty laugh that sent icy chills racing down their spines.
"You kids really think I'm gonna let you in on my plans?" His shook his point with amused disbelief. "Wow, just when I think you can't be any dumber, you go ahead and ask me something like that! Haha!"
"You're not getting away this! Whatever it is!" Dipper yelled out in defiant refusal. "We've beaten you before, and we'll...do...it..."
All Bill had to do was give his hand a lazy twirl. The scarlet energy trapping the boy in midair started glowing with double the intensity. Immediately the tween found himself in a world of intense pain. It felt as if he was being jabbed all over by a hundred red-hot needles, all jabbing ferociously at once. Dipper thrashed and cried out. For his twin, being forced to watch the torment was a nightmare beyond all comparison.
"Stop that!" She glared daggers at their captor. "Stoppit! You leave my brother alone!"
"Jeez! I can't believe I forgot how noisy you brats are." Bill remarked casually, unmoved by the pitiful scene before him. "That's all right! Nothing I can't fix before we really get the ball rolling here. Let's see now...who's it gonna be...hmmm...well, since he's making the biggest racket, how about we start things off with Pine Tree right here?"
"What? No! No, no, no, no, NO! NO! NO! NO! DON'T!" Mabel began shrieking at the top of her lungs. The triangular being's bright yellow coloring changed to a haunting blue as he hovered over to Dipper, then slowly started to descend upon him.
Through immense force of will, Dipper gritted his teeth tightly. He wasn't going to give their tormentor the satisfaction of hearing him cry out in pain anymore. Bill meanwhile kept fading until he was little more than a faint outline around the boy's head, before he finally vanished completely from sight. Dipper's eyes now began to glow with a bright white light, and his entire body went limp as a rag doll.
Hot tears streaked down Mabel's ruddy cheeks. Again she reached out, but still couldn't do much more than grasp helplessly as her brother was ruthlessly invaded.
"STOPPIT! STOPPIT! LEAVE HIM ALONE!" She half screeched, half sobbed one last time in desperate defiance. If they were going to have their minds broken one by one so they could be pawns mysterious schemes of an otherworldly being, she wasn't going out quietly. "STOPPIT, NOW!"
It was as if she had spoken the magic words. In a heartbeat their prisons of glowing energy instantly dissipated. With nothing to hold them up, both twins unceremoniously plummeted to the forest floor. Mabel only gave herself a merely moment to comprehend what had just happened. Hastily she bounced to her feet and tore over to her brother's side as fast as her legs would carry her.
"Dipper? Dipper! Dipper!" She seized him by his vest and dragged him upright. The next several seconds pass like an eternity as she waited for a response. Finally, her twin's eyes cracked open. A dazed groan tumbled off Dipper's lips.
"W-what...what hap-" No sooner had he come to when his sister started to frantically shake him. The boy jerked violently back and forth in her grasp.
"You evil three-sided jerk! Get out of him! You get out of my brother right now, or else! Get out! Get OUT! Get out of him! OUT! OUT!" Mabel grabbed his head and began screaming determinedly into his ear. "DID YOU HEAR ME? GET OUT! YOU LEAVE HIS BRAIN RIGHT NOW! I'M WARNING YOU! YOU GET OUT NOW, OR ELSE I'M GONNA-"
"MABEL! Ow! Mabel, stop! It's okay!" It felt like his assaulted eardrums were on the verge of rupturing. "I'm okay!"
"Dipper?" She squeaked hopefully. Leery skepticism quickly returned with a vengeance. Her brief grin hardened into a wary scowl. "HEY! Stop that! If you think you can pull a fast one on Mabel Abigail Pines, then you have another thing coming, you-"
"It's me! It's really me! It's me!" Dipper continued to yelp, until he finally wrenched himself free. "Mabel, seriously! Cut it out! It's me!"
While he nursed aching ears, his sister's jaw dropped so far it nearly hit the the ground.
"...Really?" She gasped, her incredulity knowing no bounds.
"...Yeah." He was no less surprised than her. "Hey! What are you...? Ow!"
Baffled beyond words, Mabel began thoroughly checking him over for any signs of ongoing mind possession. Dipper squirmed in discomfort as she held his eye open and peered at his pupils.
"But...but how? Dipper, that doesn't make any sense!" She half-exclaimed, half-protested . "I saw him! I saw him go right into your brain! He was all glowy and vanish-y, and he just went right in there! He went inside your head, didn't he?"
"...I did." A familiar disembodied voice confirmed. The confounded twins looked up and found themselves gazing upon a strikingly changed Bill.
The demon's reappearance would have startled the daylights out of them had he not looked so obviously traumatized. His normal vibrant banana-yellow hue had gone several shades paler, giving him a sickly color. Jet black arms now dangled limply, as did every one of his three corners. To top off the perplexing spectacle, his single eye carried a haunted, thousand-yard stare.
Uncertain of what to make of any of this inexplicable turn, Dipper cleared his throat, mustered together some courage, and broke the awkward silence. "Uh...are you okay?"
"No...no, I'm not." Bill replied only after a mighty burst of effort. It was like someone had turned on a tap and poured out all his vibrance and energy, leaving nothing more than a triangular husk. "I just...I...I-I…."
He continued to mutter nonsensically until he took a deep breath through his nonexistent mouth. "Okay, just...just what was all that?"
"What was what?" Mabel piped up curiously. For a few moments the self-proclaimed Master of the Mind just rested his top corner in his hands and moaned. The twins kept watching on in wordless bafflement, pausing occasionally to exchange bemused looks with one another.
"That...all of...all of that!" A noticeable shiver tore through his two-dimensional body. "The anxiety...all that worry...just...it was nothing but constant over-thinking about everything possible! I-I've never felt anything like it. What...what was all of that? All that stuff with the body weight, and the high voice, and….and that thing with the chest hair? Eeesh!"
"W-what?" The boy automatically crimsoned at the mention of several of his everyday concerns. He coughed and lamely tried to play innocent. "Uh...I...I just...what do you mean-"
"And what's your deal with that redhead that kept popping up everywhere?" Bill snapped, sounding a little cross. "I seriously couldn't take two steps in there without running smack into something about her!"
"I...I-I…." Dipper's cheeks continued to redden, and soon his face resembled a gigantic tomato. "Wendy is….she's just a friend!"
"Yeah, right! Nobody's that obsessed with someone who's just a 'friend!'" Bill made sure to add air quotes. "Kid, I just….it's...it's all...I don't even know what to say. I just don't...h-how do you do it? How do you even get through the day? How do you even get through an hour with all of that constantly on your mind?"
"What?" Put on the spot, Dipper fidgeted uncomfortably under the demanding stare. "Oh c'mon, it's not that bad...is it?"
Feeling severely embarrassed by this point, he nervously glanced to his sister. "...Do I really get that bad?"
Mabel just shrugged. Their foe though still had a couple things left to say.
"Not that bad? Not that bad? I was barely in there for a minute, and you stressed me out so badly I feel like I have a knot in my stomach the size of a basketball. And y'know what? I don't even have a stomach! I don't even eat! I just...I just can't..." He trailed off again. "So much..."
Bill Cipher, manipulator of a thousand minds, had finally met his match, and its name was preteen anxiety. Hopelessly overwhelmed by its crushing weight, he aimlessly floated about for a few moments, muttering incomprehensibly under his breath. Unsure of what else to do, he reached into his very being and tossed out a few handfuls of assorted bills and spare change onto the ground.
"What's this?" Mabel picked up a dollar and scrutinized it curiously.
"What do you mean what's this? You have eyes, don't you? It's money!" Bill grumbled agitatedly, earning yeat another round of puzzled stares from the twelve-year-olds.
"Umm...so...what? Are we supposed to do anything with it?" Dipper cocked an eyebrow. This reversal of fortune was getting stranger by the second.
"Yeah, something! Anything! Literally anything! Seriously! Go buy some weights, or...or get a self-help book or...I don't know, use it to go start a hobby. Buy a model, or a new book, or….whatever! You can use it to start a stamp collection for all I care, I don't know!" Bill hurled his hands up in despair. "Just...just do something! Anything to start getting all that under control! Okay? It's just too much! It's too much, and I just...I just can't..."
It was just too much for him to handle. After mumbling what sounded suspiciously like an apology, he listlessly waved his hand and a small flaming portal appeared blow him. With a loud sigh he simply lowered himself out of sight. The magical exit sealed up behind him, leaving the twins completely alone in the middle of the evergreen woods.
Mabel gazed back to their financial haul and almost immediately got over the entire ordeal. The little brunette bubbled with laughter as she eagerly threw the mix of cash and coins into her sweater pouch.
"Ka-ching!" She paused to yank an imaginary slot lever. "Dipper, check it out! jackpot! There's quarters...a bunch of ones...oooh, some fives! Ahh, a ten! No, two tens! Wow, three tens! Look! Oooh, look! Look, there's a twenty in here! Dipper, see? See the twenty? The twenty big ones right here! Dipper? Dipper c'mon, you're not looking! See it?"
She happily dangled the bill only inches away from his face. But whereas she was feeling as jubilant as could be, her brother was a vastly different story. He appeared conflicted beyond words.
"Uh..." The visibly distressed tween could do little more than just grunt dumbly as he sat in the dirt. Mabel delivered a bombardment of pokes to his side.
"Dipper? Dipper, are you there? Hellooooooo! Earth to my brother! Anyone home?" She pressed his nose with a chiming squeak. "Ding dong!"
"Uuhhh..." Again, he just mumbled incomprehensibly before turning her way.
"Dipper, look!" She triumphantly whooped. "He's gone. And now we have money! Spending money! Spending money for stuff! Awesome stuff! That's great, right?"
"I….I...I..." Dipper mumbled before finally confessing, "I...don't know."
"What do you mean you don't know?" Mabel glanced over to the cash that still littered the forest floor. "Do you even see the money?"
"Yeah but….I...I...I just..." He gestured frantically with his scrawny arms as he struggled fervently to to process his maelstrom of thoughts into actual words. Only after drawing deep from hidden reserves of desperate willpower was the flustered tween finally able to make sense again. "I...mean...yeah, he's gone...and I think that I saved us...at least I'm pretty sure, but…"
"But what?" His sister chirped.
"...I'm also pretty sure I was just insulted...like, not intentionally, but still pretty badly. Like, really badly. Really, really badly." At a complete and utter loss, the boy let his arms drop limply back to his sides. "And...I don't know what to say about that. At all."
Grinning anew from ear to ear, Mabel instantly dismissed his concerns. Without further ado she wrapped her arms around him in a half-celebratory, half-comforting embrace. "Who cares? You're still getting all the hugs anyway, you big nervous dork."
"Thanks..." He gladly excepted the squeeze with an exhausted smile. "Apparently I could really use them..."