Chapter 10: Eye to Eye

People call me crazy, and they might be right,

Maybe I'm crazy, maybe I'm insane,

I wanna squash the sun and bring eternal night,

I wanna smash the beetles that are eatin' my brain—

I'm insane! I'm insane! Craziest guy in the joint!

You say! I'm insane! Sure, I am, but what's your point?

—Robbie V. and the Tombstones, "Plain Insane"

"Hello, Bill," I said. "You prepared to try to kill me?"

Still lounging on his throne, Bill replied, "Try? Ah-ha-ha-ha-ha! You mean—like THIS?"

He pointed a finger, like a quick-draw gunslinger, and a red bolt zapped out. I anticipated it and waved it away, wax off, and it ricocheted off to strike Gideon's dead body. In less than a second, what was left of Gideon looked like a marshmallow that had fallen off the stick and into the campfire.

"Uh-uh," I said, smiling. "Not like that." I hefted my axe. "You and me. Face to face. We have unfinished business."

"Oh, so you learned a trick or two, huh?" Bill asked, materializing a martini. His eye became a mouth to sip it. "Look, Red, you're way out of your league. Thanks for offing the whiny little bastard there, by the way. His dancing never got any better. He was a rotten PA, too. Little shit-head. Maybe we do have business, Red, you and me." He drained the martini and the glass vanished.

"Come down to the floor," I said. "Unless you're scared."

"You mean like in the old days?" He floated off the throne, snapped his fingers, and flashed back to a two-dimensional Bill, flat as a pancake. "Like this? You don't know anything! In this form I'm ten times as formidable. Hey, I'm being reasonable here, no need for violence, so let's you and me make a deal. For some reason, I seem to be running a little short in the friends department, Red."

"Hate to break this to you, but you got no friends—Yellow."

"Ooh, we're gonna be all racist, are we?" Bill cooed. "Come on, Red, I gotta admit you impressed me. You took down Pyronica, Hexagony, 8-Ball, little Giddy there—and what the fuck did you do to Kryptos's eye?"

My silver axe was vibrating, humming, whispering in my grip, eager for action. "Nothing much. Gouged it out."

"He couldn't regenerate the fucking thing!" Bill said. "Blind! And I couldn't magic it back, either. Tried and it wouldn't hold. He was boring me, so I had to kill him. You got some secret weapon, Red. Use it on my side. You know, the winning side. Let's talk about a deal."

I shook my head. "No deal."

"C'mon, I'm the master of the deal! Look, Asia's falling apart without a leader. You can take Pyronica's place, OK? I'll grant you mystic powers! You can use magic. All I ask is that you hold things together over there. I know you can do it. Whattaya say?"

"I say you killed my friends, and I say I'm gonna fuckin' kill you, Cipher."

"No loyalty!" Bill yelled. "My henchmaniacs all fail me! They're not loyal, that's the whole problem. Come on, Red, I'm on the verge of leaving this dirtball and taking over another, bigger civilization about a hundred light-years away—that's only an instant in magic travel! I could even leave you here as the ruler of Earth, kid. Dictator for all eternity! Own anything and anyone your heart desires! This is the chance of a lifetime!"

"Come down," I said. "And fight.

"Sheesh, kid, you're asking for it. I should've checked to make sure you were dead back during Weirdmageddon."

"You shouldn't have come to Earth to begin with," I told him. "You've been alive for trillions of years, they tell me. Today you're gonna be dead."

He sighed. "Look, Red, do you think you got into the Fearamid here by yourself? I foresaw your coming here. It's a trap, kid! You've already lost."

"Then come down and prove it," I said.

"OK. OK. I guess I gotta kill you." He floated down to the ground, took off his stupid top hat, and laid aside his cane. "I guess we start by bowing?"

I feinted a bow, and as I expected, he shot another red bolt at me. I did the wax-on mirror gesture, and it rebounded, incinerating his hat. "Damn you!" he said. "You're really full of yourself!"

"If you want to take down Bill Cipher for good, you have to remember three main points," Master Ax had warned me.

"What are they?"

"When the time comes, you will know."

I figured that the first point was mine already—I'd lured him down for a face-to-face. Now getting close enough for a swing must be the second point, I supposed.

We circled, wary as two mama cats, each intent on protecting her litter, each eager to tear out the throat of the other.

He taunted me: "You look older, Red. Not bad, though, not bad. Some nice muscles there. Shame you never grew tits."

"Come closer and check 'em out," I said.

"C'mon, kid. You know you can't win. I'm all-powerful! And even if you got close, I could do this—" He kited up fifty feet.

"Yellow," I said. "You know what that used to mean, if somebody was yellow? It fits you!"

He floated down like a falling autumn leaf. "First thing, I guess I oughta take away your toy axe." He sprouted six more arms and came at me, trying to hammer me. I dodged and then chopped one off. He stepped back. "Good aim. But lookie here!" He held out the stub and the arm regenerated. "I could do this for all eternity!"

It was no good sticking with defense. He'd wear me down. But how to attack?

"You will have the problem of how to make him earthbound, how to keep him from floating away. The first point. That step is the way to eventual victory."

Thanks so much for your instruction, Master Ax, you axhole! As I moved and danced, avoiding his fist-blows and his red bolts, I ran over what Master Ax had said.

And realized that words had more than one meaning.

When I feinted a blow at his eye, Bill half-turned, and I changed the vector. The axe crunched as though I were cutting into a dry, hard oak log—

And a tiny piece of Bill fell off. It was only the lower left corner of the triangle, a mini-triangle of its own, maybe an inch on the sides—but it flashed blue and then vanished.

"Ouch!" Bill howled. And then he laughed. "Ah-ha-ha, I'm kidding! Didn't hurt, Red. Watch this!"

The corner reformed. And then faded. The eye frowned, Bill tried to re-form the corner again with the same failed result, and then his eye went wide with panic.

"From now on," I told him. "You can't regenerate, you bastard. Not before one of us is dead, and if it's you, that's too bad, right?"

He tried to rise in the air, but only made a pathetic short hop and then came down again. "What did you do to me?"

"This!" I said, and before he could react, I chopped off the right point of the triangle.

"No!" Bill shrieked. "No, no, no, no! I can't be losing—"

He was losing, at least losing his power to hold things together. Around us the Fearamid dissolved into showering rust-colored dust, We two floated down and finally stood on the mound of pulverized rubble that had been his citadel.

"Come on, Red!" he said, cajoling. "Last chance! I've been easy on you, but I can always summon my armies!"

"Nope," I said. "I heard there were three points to defeating you. You're down to one." It was ridiculous, but I swung Whisper and took off the top point of Bill as easy as chopping down a sapling. "You've had it, Bill."

Now he snapped his fingers and nothing happened. Nothing. His eye was saucer-sized with fear. He couldn't fly. He couldn't call his minions. He could only scrabble across the pile of dirt, frantic like a wounded crab, trying to put off the inevitable. "Come on, kid! Don't—don't kill me! Look, what will it take to buy you off?"

"Are you sorry that you killed all my friends?" I asked sweetly, approaching him with my axe at the ready.

He gazed at me, his pupil actually forming a question mark. "Sorry? What does that mean?"

"I thought not. Goodbye, Bill." My next blow caught the mutilated triangle right in the eye. He changed forms like a jerky movie, monstrous, mucous, shattered, boiling, and then—he began to evaporate into a melting puddle of sick slime and yellow oily smoke.

All around me, Washington, D.C. began to re-form itself.

I should have stayed on my guard.

From the wreathing, greasy yellow smoke of a dying Bill, one last red ray shot out.

Damn it. Didn't expect it.

It hit me . . . in the heart. . .

I was fighting my way through a darkness that was physical. Devils were dragging me. I was trying to find my axe, Zyeribia Sto', Whisper of Death. I needed it to chop down the gates of hell for Niyako Miyanzo as soon as I got there, I'd promised the master bladesmith—

"Sh-sh-sh. Lie still. You're OK. You're not dead."

"Huhh?" I heard myself groan. "What—Bill Cipher—"

"He's dead. You did it, Wendy. You killed Bill Cipher."

"I . . . did it?"

"You're safe. Here. Drink this."

Someone was holding me up and putting a cup to my lips. I sipped from it.

Hot. It was fucking . . . tea.

That time I slept without nightmares. And when I woke, I hurt all over. The voice, a guy's voice: "How do you feel now?"

"Hurtin' like hell."

"Good. That tells you you're alive." He moved closer to the bed, but it was so dark I couldn't see him. "You took a death-ray to the chest, but it was weak, and the Master had given you some magic protection, so it didn't hit you as hard as it was meant to. He sent me to find you and return you here. Do you want anything?"

"Light?"

"Master Axolotl! Wendy wants light."

The place glowed as if morning were pouring through a window beside the bed. I blinked and looked around, my head not right. I saw—log walls. A bed framed from solid oak. A . . . a sign on the wall over my head, foreshortened. But I knew it—a fallout shelter sign. And hanging beside the window on the wall, Zyeribia Sto', the axe that Niyako Miyanzo had made for me, shining like the glory of angels.

I knew that room, but it was impossible. "Where in hell am I?"

The guy—it was a strangely familiar guy, good-looking, little gawky, about my age, shaggy brown-haired, wearing a—I almost laughed—a green plaid flannel shirt—sat in a chair beside my bed. "Not hell," he said. He smiled. "Not Gravity Falls, either, but a place to rest and heal."

"This looks like my family's place, but I've been there, and it got busted all to hell."

The boy looked around. "Well, it's sorta modeled after your old bedroom. It's good to see you again."

I frowned. "I ought to know you."

His eyes were brown and bright, and he had the greatest smile. "Thanks for lending me the keys to the golf cart," he whispered.

Oh, damn, damn, damn! I thought I had got over weeping. But damned if I didn't bolt out of bed and cling to him and bury my face in his shoulder and clench my fingers in the flannel of his shirt and then I shook and sobbed and cried until I could talk again. "Dipper! Oh, my God, Dipper! But I saw you die!"

"I know," he said softly.

"But you didn't!"

"That's . . . complicated," he said. "But rest, and then eat, and then we'll see the Master."

Rest, eat, I couldn't, oh, God, I had to go then, I had to. And Dipper went with me, outside, in the clean air, in the forest that I loved. When we got there, the Axolotl was already waiting and gently told us a few things:

"Wendy, your Dipper is dead. And your friends. That is true and cannot be changed. I'm sorry. I can't fix that. When you killed Cipher, time rewound, but what had been done up to the point of his abolishing the weirdness barrier and his escape from Gravity Falls remained done. In many ways, that world is still broken, and the people in that reality must fix it. All the frozen ones in the Throne of Agony are alive again—your family, the people of Gravity Falls. But those whom Bill actually killed, the Pines family and your friends, are truly dead. As are the ones you have killed. All of Bill's minions, in fact, were pulled back into the Nightmare Realm and wiped from existence in the thousand corrupted time lines that branched from yours. But the devastation on your personal Earth is still great. If you wish, you could return—"

Go back to the place where I'd seen them die. My stomach turned at the thought. "I don't want to go back," I said. "But wait—if this is Dipper—"

"I'm the same as you," Dipper told me. "A survivor. But from a different reality. In mine, Cipher killed my whole family and you and all your friends. All the Zodiac, except me. He froze me into gold as a trophy, but that wore off when he left the valley and forgot about me. Then later the Axolotl sent someone to bring me to him and he and trained me, and in my dimension, I killed Cipher, too, and wiped out his minions in the time lines that branched from mine. I feel the same as you. I could return to my reality, but there's no point. I'd be without my sister, my Grunkles . . . and without my Wendy."

"You have each other," the Axolotl said. "And now all the other realities, the ones that did not branch from yours, are repaired. In a major one, you all survived because Stanley Pines sacrificed his mind to destroy Bill. In every other one but your two, Bill perished by other means. Now the last of his manifestations have been dealt with. And there is a Dipper and there is a Wendy left over, and they are alone and they need each other."

"How old are you?" I asked Dipper. Damn, Dip had grown up to be a handsome, strong guy.

"Nineteen last birthday," he said. "In my dimension, I was thawed out for seven years and kept on the run in and around Gravity Falls, hiding from Bill's minions all that time before the Oracle finally came to my Earth to rescue me. I was brought here and then Master Axolotl trained me for another seven years, except here—"

I put my finger against his lips. "Except here, no time passes. I know. Same with me. I'm nineteen, too." I turned to the Axolotl. "Where will we go?"

He sighed. "You could return to any one of many thousands of Gravity Falls dimensions, children. But in all of them, you will either miss your dead friends or else have to deal with being duplicates of the versions of yourselves that live there already. Or—you could stay here and help me."

"Here," as he explained, was not his own dimension, but a newly created pocket dimension—Gravity Falls, but with only the Mystery Shack, which now somehow contained my old bedroom, and the woods around it, no other people. And no time passed there. "What would we do?" I asked.

"Be my helpers." The Axolotl said, "Bill Cipher wiped out the Time Baby in all universes. However, he will eventually re-form. It is good that he will create the Time Paradox Avoidance Enforcement Squad. They have their role to play. However, I want him to realize that destroying the world he finds when he reawakens is attacking the wrong thing—the victims, not the enemy. You can help me persuade him. I will let you live here between missions, but I will send you to many different Earths to work for and with me. Together, we can make better worlds and, I hope, you can eventually find one for yourselves. But it will take eons, as measured on Earth."

Dipper reached for my hand. "I'd love to spend eons with you," he said.

I smiled through tears. "Hey, you mean a lot to me, and I—I guess I'm not too old for you. Not now."

"You're just right for me," he said. He raised my hand to his lips and kissed it. "If I'm good enough for you."

"We could teach each other fighting techniques," I whispered.

He grinned, the old grin that I remembered and that melted me. Squeezing my hand, he said softly, "And we could keep alive the memories of those we lost. Maybe one day even somehow find our way back to some version of our old lives. Together."

"Together," I agreed.

Axolotl sighed. "You two humans, so emotional. Kiss each other already; it's high time."

We did, and then he added, "And now one of you—make me a fucking cup of tea."

End of Volume 2