Hello everyone!
If you recognize this story, don't jump to the newest chapter just yet! I've rewritten and edited the first four chapters to fit in what we've seen of Robbie and his life in canon.
To those of you picking up this story for the first time, welcome! This story takes place in the MonsterFalls AU of Gravity Falls and specifically follows the headcanons and thoughts of tumblr user onestler on Robbie's character and how it would be affected in this AU.
This story is rated T for graphic violence and gore, body horror, eye trauma, autocannibalism, eating roadkill-condition animals and some other nasty things, most of them centered on violence and eating really gross things. It is not for the squeamish.
If you think you can handle it, read on and enjoy! :)
Robbie woke up hungry.
Of course, he was a few other things too - he was wet, cold, and (although he didn't know it yet) dead.
But mostly hungry.
The hunger - it was weird, like hands clawing at his stomach from the inside out, scraping at his insides with sharp nails, demanding that he eat. It was much stronger than anything he'd felt before. What was weirder, though, was that he hadn't even been that hungry, last he could remember. Hunger hadn't even entered his mind as he'd been trying to find his way back out of the woods that Dipper, that god-awful relationship-destroying twerp, had led him into. (Okay, maybe he'd been following Dipper without the other boy's knowledge, but it was so he could get revenge for the merciless way the kid had torn Wendy away from him, so it was totally Dipper's fault and not his.)
But now? He was starving.
He stood up and finally noticed the water dripping from his hair, his clothes, his fingers and into the stream that burbled past his ankles. It took him a moment to realize.
He'd been in the stream.
Facedown.
No way that was good.
What had even happened? He could remember tripping, hitting his head on a rock . . . his face must have somehow been propped up above the water but man was that close. He could have died!
(He had.)
Robbie quickly stepped out of the stream, which was creeping him out because he almost died! Right there!
He reached up a hand to brush some of his sopping wet hair a little farther back from his eyes, but he never did. Instead, once his hand came into view, Robbie froze.
His hand was blue.
His hand was fucking blue.
Last he checked, his hand was not blue. But why would one hand be blue unless . . .
Robbie unfroze and lifted his other hand into view.
"Oh man," he whispered. His other hand was blue too.
Robbie began pulling at the sleeves of his sweatshirt, hiking them up over his wrists, over his elbows, trying to find the point where the blue paint or gloves or whatever was making his hands look blue stopped, but it wasn't there. It wasn't there. Instead, the blue continued seamlessly up his arms, disappearing into his sweatshirt.
He looked down at the few inches of skin on his legs, exposed between his shoes and jeans. That was blue too. Holy - was all of him blue? And how on earth does that even happen? How does a person turn blue?
He leaned over the stream a little, to see if his face was blue too, but the rippling water distorted both shapes and colors, and he was not eager to fall back in by trying too hard to see his reflection.
Okay, so his skin was blue. It wasn't a big deal. He just had to calm down and find his way out of the forest, and then he could find a way to get the blue off. It was probably just dye or something that someone had dumped into the water further upstream. That made sense, right? It's not like anyone ever checked the streams that ran through the woods to make sure no one was dumping chemicals, and some of the people in this town were crazy enough to try. He could probably just wash it off when he got home.
Of course, none of his clothing was looking more blue than usual, but he was wearing dark colors - those wouldn't show a little bit of dye, right?
He looked down at the stream. It did look eerily blue.
He quickly looked away from the stream and at the forest. It wasn't familiar. Looked like he was still lost, but now he was more eager than ever to get home, so he picked a direction at random and just kept walking. The forest had to end somewhere, right?
The plants in the forest around the stream grew together so thickly that walking was difficult. Thorns tore at Robbie's new skinny jeans and when he got out of here Dipper was going to pay because those jeans were not cheap.
But as the sun began to dip in the sky, Robbie became less worried about his jeans and more worried about finding his way back to Gravity Falls. He had no confidence in his ability to find his way back, or even camp out, in the dark if he needed to. He knew there was no way he'd be able to find something to eat, and judging by the way his stomach was killing him, he needed to eat, soon. And he'd been walking a while. He couldn't help worrying that he was heading deeper into the forest and not out of it.
But just when he'd decided that he was not going to find the town before dark, the vegetation on the ground thinned, and he found himself on the outskirts of town, not far from the Mystery Shack. He'd picked up Wendy from the Shack enough times to know his way home from here. He considered heading into the Shack to buy some of their overpriced snacks and hopefully kill the hunger he was feeling, but the thought of Dipper, or worse, Wendy seeing him coated in head-to-toe blue dye he'd been stupid enough to get covered in was off-putting enough that he turned away from the Shack and onto the main road and began walking back towards town.
As Robbie walked along the road through the woods, a group of crows gathered and circled overheard, cawing and diving for the ground, pulling up short and ascending again. Robbie glanced at them, but didn't pay attention, didn't notice that they seemed to be following him. He was more focused on getting back home and eating and holy crap he hadn't ever been this hungry in his life.
So it seemed to come from out of nowhere when a crow swooped down from the sky, claws stretched out in front of it, cawing loudly. Robbie threw his arm up over his face in some instinctual attempt to shield himself, and the crow landed on his arm, claws digging into the cotton of his sweatshirt. After a moment spent silently freaking out because there was a bird on his arm why was it there why did these things always happen to him?, Robbie slowly lowered his arm. The crow was still perched there, perfectly still. After a moment, it cocked its head to the side and shuffled up Robbie's arm an inch or so. It stared at him with glossy, pure-black eyes.
Robbie's lip twitched in the suggestion of a smile. The crow wasn't scary. It wasn't attacking him. It was almost tame.
The crow lunged, beak-first, for Robbie's left eye.
Robbie jerked his arm to throw the bird off, but it was airborne, circling, hovering, fixated on Robbie's eye, and crows don't act like this what the hell was wrong with it?
The crow kept circling, thrusting its beak through the spaces between Robbie's arms, which he'd thrown up again because he didn't know what the hell was going on but he was not about to let some crow peck his face apart. He couldn't keep it up, though. His arms couldn't shield all of him, and the bird was persistent. Any hole between his arms, any misplaced limb, and the crow's beak was thrust at his face again.
Robbie was running now, flat-out sprinting for town, hoping to come across someone who could help. But there was a long way to run, and the crow was following him. It dove again and again, thrusting its beak at Robbie's face at every opportunity it got.
The crow's claws raked across Robbie's right arm, ripping through sweatshirt and skin alike, and left it oozing thick red blood.
Robbie jerked his arm out from its tightly controlled position instinctually, startled.
It was enough.
The crow's beak reached for him once more, and this time he couldn't do anything but watch as the crow's beak grabbed his left eye and roughly yanked it from the socket, quickly flying up towards a tree with it. The bird's beak pressed too hard against the delicate sphere and it broke, eyeball fluids spilling one way and Robbie's iris falling another. The crow didn't seem to notice, and continued carrying the membrane coating of Robbie's eyeball into the forest.
Robbie's hand reached for the socket where his left eyeball was a moment ago, expecting to find a fountain of blood at his fingertips, but his fingers stopped short of the skin. He braced himself for crippling pain that must just be taking a second to kick in, like it did with people in shock, and if anyone was in shock it was Robbie right now. But the pain didn't come, and Robbie stood there for who cares how many minutes waiting for it, for even a little twinge of pain, but there was none, he felt nothing except for the hunger, and why the fuck didn't that hurt that had to hurt what is going on.
After a while, with no pain from his face and no blood from his wound, Robbie pressed his hand to his face over the hollow where his eye used to be. The skin was dry, no blood. Not one drop.
What the hell was wrong with him?