Here is where we end our long tale. I hope you guys had fun along the ride!
When Dipper slept, Bill wasn't there.
He had dreams. He had nightmares. And yes, the demon appeared in those dreams, those nightmares, just as he had since the summer of Dipper's 13th birthday; but they were just that. Dreams. No frothing gray Mindscape, no annoying laughs or jeers or glimpses of that great yellow eye gleaming in amusement.
And often when Bill appeared in Dipper's dreams now, he was human and hurt and afraid, and Dipper couldn't do anything to help him.
Settling back into routine at the Shack wasn't an easy task. His life had been consumed with the demon for the past several weeks, and by necessity, there had rarely been a time when his mind was off of Bill. He'd run through the entire gamut of emotions in his dealings with the entity; from panic, to fear, worry, pity, appreciation...all the way to wanting him, craving, eager for every touch, every weird smile and every compliment slipping like honey from his loud mouth. Caring about him. Maybe even loving him. Now he felt...empty. There was nothing.
Mabel did her best to cheer him up, but he could tell she was grieving too. Her smiles weren't as bright, and her usual frantic eagerness had mellowed out considerably.
The incident at the church left them all with injuries, but thankfully, none were life-threatening (though Stan did groan loud enough to wake the dead every time he got up from a chair). As for Dipper, the various wounds he'd accrued throughout the summer were healing well. The pain in his arm had abated, but the Lichtenburg figures still reached, long and crimson, from his shoulder down to his knuckles.
"I think those scars are there for good," Stan muttered as he finished inspecting his great-nephew's arm, "and believe me, I know a thing or two about which scars stay and which ones fade."
Mabel looked up from her cup of cocoa, her eyes wide with awe.
"Grunkle Stan! That was a beautiful metaphor..."
"Huh?" Stan grunted, "oh. Oh yeah. That's what I meant! Metaphor! But seriously, you're probably scarred for life. Sorry, kid."
"Could be worse," Dipper shrugged his vest back on, rotating his arm to look at the burns, "at least they're kinda cool looking."
"The ladies love scars," Stan winked, then paused, a hand to his chin, "or was that puppies? It's either scars or puppies. Puppies with scars? No, that's not right…"
"What about scars shaped like puppies?!" Mabel interjected excitedly, "can you imagine? Maybe one of mine will end up looking like a puppy!" she thrust her injured leg out from under the table, kicking Dipper in the stomach, "what do you think?"
"Huh," Stan peered at the healing wounds on Mabel's calf as Dipper doubled over and gasped for breath, "that one looks kinda like a chicken."
"Do you guys know where Grunkle Ford is?" Dipper wheezed once he finally regained his ability to breathe, trying to rub the pain out of his stomach.
"Down in the basement, cleaning up the mess that crazy demon left behind," Stan jabbed a thumb toward the basement door, "looks like there wasn't an inch of this place that equilateral brat didn't rifle through. I found a cheese grater in my chair cushion. And a rabbit skull in the fish tank! Why? Why, I ask you!"
"Most of the things Bill did are things we'll never get answers to," Dipper answered, and pushed his chair out from under the table, "I'm gonna go check on Ford. See if I can help him."
"Yeah yeah," Stan waved him off, "you go help Poindexter, me and the girl will clean all the dried honey off the walls."
"Aww maaan!" he heard Mabel groan as he rounded the corner and made his way down in to the basement.
Ford was in the shrine room, placing something in a cardboard box as Dipper walked in. One of the Bill idols. The boy looked around, and immediately noticed the room was looking barer than usual; the tapestries and paintings had been taken off the walls, the crystal pyramids and statues put away. He looked at his great uncle.
"You're packing it all up?" he asked. Ford offered him a tired little smile.
"I think it's about time. Don't you?"
Dipper looked at the idol in its box, its eye gold and gleaming.
"...yeah. I think so too. Do you need some help?"
"Oh, come on, Dipper! I'm not that old yet. I can handle putting a few things into boxes," he chuckled playfully. Dipper laughed along with him.
"Summer's almost over. Are you and Grunkle Stan gonna start traveling again in the fall?"
"Oh yes. New Mexico first. I hear there are some fascinating creatures that roam the deserts at night. And your Grunkle Stan said something about 'licking a toad'. I'm sure I don't know what that means, but I assume it's not good."
"Probably not," Dipper agreed. He leaned against a bare wall and watched Ford. The room looked larger without all its triangular embellishments, but a little drab, even with all the mystical artifacts it still held. He was sure Bill would have hated it. He could hear Bill, anger threading the edge of his voice.
'CAN YOU BELIEVE this GUY?! TAKING DOWN all my SHIT!'
Dipper almost laughed, then caught himself. The voice wasn't real, and Bill wasn't there. This was just one of a handful of times he'd heard Bill's voice in his head since they'd gotten back from the meadow, and he was starting to wonder if he was going insane. Bill did have that effect on people, after all. If there was anyone to ask, it was Ford.
"Grunkle Ford…do you still hear him sometimes? His voice? Talking, like he was there with you?"
Ford straightened and looked at Dipper for several long seconds. When he answered, it was with a labored sigh.
"Yes...often. Once you let a creature like Bill into your life, it leaves...scars. Impressions, deep ones, embedded in your mind. Ghosts. I was...hoping you'd be free from that."
"I have the feeling it's not as bad for me as it is for you," Dipper murmured, feeling a stab of guilt for a reason he couldn't quite discern.
"I certainly hope not, Dipper. I pray your ghosts are kinder than mine."
"Do you still love him?" the words were out of Dipper's mouth before he could stop them. Ford looked at him in surprise, gazing at him for a moment before turning his eyes back down to the idol in its box.
"...I hate him more than anything else. But...yes, part of me does still love him. I suppose part of me always will. Once Bill gets his claws into you, be it as friend or foe or anything else...he doesn't let go."
More silence followed, an awkward lull. It was beyond embarrassing to be discussing these things with his great uncle, but he figured...well, Ford was the only one who would really understand, wasn't he?
"I miss him," Dipper admitted, staring down at his dirty sneakers, "I miss him a lot. I thought maybe he might show up when I fell asleep, in the Mindscape, like he had been...but…it's been a few days and...nothing," he lifted up his head, looked at Ford, "what do you think happened to him when that body shattered? Is he...dead?"
"For now, probably. But we've talked about this...as a demon, he'll be back one day, alive. Whatever 'alive' means to him, I suppose."
"And by then, we'll be dead."
"By the time he's back to being the entity we know as Bill Cipher?" Ford asked, "most assuredly."
Dipper nodded to himself. So...there it was. An answer he needed but didn't want. He was mourning, he knew that much, and wondered...would Bill mourn as Dipper was? Would Bill eventually coalesce and seek him out only to discover it had been a thousand years? Ten thousand? And that Dipper had long been dust? Would he feel any type of sadness? Could he? Bill had said he'd miss Dipper, and Dipper believed him. But would he grieve?
He took a deep breath.
"I asked him if he'd want to stay as a human. So we could...be together, I guess…"
"I see…" Ford tilted his head in concern. He set aside his task of packing the boxes and pulled up a chair, sitting in front of his nephew and threading his fingers together, "and what did he say?"
"He said it wouldn't be healthy. For either of us."
"An uncommon bit of wisdom," Ford said, eyebrows arched in surprise, "and he was right. Bill...he doesn't belong in this world. We can't even begin to understand what he is. Believe me, I've tried. For a creature made of pure energy, being trapped in the body of a powerless human would be like prison, something I'm sure Bill has always been keen to avoid. How long do you think he would last in a human body before he got too bored and began to run amok?"
Ford was right. Bill had been a whirlwind even for the short period of time he'd been living in the Shack, even with his body wounded and his energy drained; what would he have been like in two years? Ten? Twenty? Dipper could imagine him, wild-eyed and starved for chaos, lawless parties, supernatural mayhem, something besides being a normal human doing normal human things in a normal human world.
"And besides…" Ford continued, "what would you have done? Date? Marry? Make a life together? It was never going to happen, Dipper...it was never going to happen for either of us. And we're better off for it. Bill can't be what a person needs. And we can't be what he needs. Whatever the hell that may be."
Hard truths. But Ford was delivering them as gently as he could, and Dipper appreciated it, as much as it still hurt. He nodded, and Ford pulled up another chair for him to sit in.
"Did you learn anything new about him?" the man asked curiously as Dipper settled into it.
"Not really," he answered, "he didn't talk about himself much, weirdly. I mean, aside from bragging about how amazing he is."
"Sounds like my experience. As much as he liked to talk, he never offered up much information about himself. Only ever listened to me complain about my life, my family...part of his tactic to ingratiate himself with me, I imagine."
"I asked him some questions, but he never really gave me much...he said he'd never been in love. He implied he had parents. He said he'd been lost and helpless before...that was about it. But even then...maybe they were all just lies."
"With someone like Bill...you can never know."
"...you can't forgive him, can you?" Dipper asked, turning his gaze toward his great uncle's tired, worn face, "for everything he's done."
"No," Ford shook his head, resolute, "no I can't. Can you?"
"...no. But I want to."
"...Dipper," Ford started with a sigh, leaning forward and placing his hand on the boy's shoulder, "I'm worried about you. I know what it's like to have such a connection with Bill...and to have it broken. Even if the circumstances were different, I fear this loss isn't going to be easy for you. I...I don't offer this flippantly, but in this case it may be for the best...do you want to use the memory gun?"
Dipper stared back at the man. The memory gun. He had, ironically enough, forgotten about it, and so the thought had never even crossed his mind. He closed his eyes and breathed deeply. This new realization...it was tempting. The ability to expunge this nightmare summer...a way to erase the pain and the hurt, the fear and the trauma, the visions of a body that had once held him splitting into a million burning pieces before his eyes.
He shook his head.
"I'd rather remember him the way he was this summer. Even if that's not really who he is, even if it was all some big trick...I want to remember him like that."
Ford's lips spread in a somber smile and he nodded, leaning back into his chair.
"You know, I still don't think I quite understand what your relationship with Bill became...I don't understand from your point of view, and I certainly don't understand from his. And, to be honest," he gave a helpless chuckle, "that makes me a little jealous. But you're a smart kid, Dipper. A good kid. And I know you have the strength to handle what comes next."
"Thanks, Grunkle Ford...I hope so."
"Just promise me, Dipper...promise me you won't try to find a way to bring him back. It's obsessive, and it's unhealthy. More than that, it's dangerous. Take this advice from an old man who's been down this road before."
Dipper paused, then nodded.
"I promise."
But somewhere deep inside, he knew it was a tenuous promise at best. Ford nodded back, and Dipper knew that Ford knew it too.
Mabel and Dipper had been agonizing over how to tell Pacifica Northwest that her parents had been part of a demon-summoning secret society intent on ruling the world and were blasted into ash by the very entity they hoped to control...but it turned out they didn't have to. Preston and Priscilla Northwest had survived, barely, and only by Stanley's grace; he had dragged their unconscious bodies into the treeline, shielding them from the worst of the raw power that had disintegrated their colleagues. They'd been found wandering the Gravity Falls back roads, dazed and nearly unrecognizable for their injuries, but alive.
Now Mabel and Dipper had to agonize over how to tell Pacifica Northwest that her cousin had been offered as a sacrifice and his body used to contain the demon that had once nearly killed them all years ago. And that now, there was nothing left of the bound body, nothing left to bury. Nothing left to mourn over.
They all three sat on a fallen tree in the woods near the Shack, Pacifica in the middle and Dipper and Mabel on either side of her. She'd taken it as well as she could have, and more importantly, she had believed them; how could she not? Her cousin had been a missing person for weeks, and besides, she'd seen crazier things happen with her own eyes.
"Barnabas was such an idiot," she scoffed fondly, a sad smile on her face as she scrolled through the photos on her phone. She held it up for them to see one; a picture of a young man standing on the bow of a yacht and smiling, all wavy blonde hair and bright blue eyes, "probably the most gullible person I've ever met. But he was nice. A good guy..."
Dipper stared at the pictures as she scrolled through. In them was the face he'd come to associate with Bill. The tousled blonde hair. The sharp contours of the nose, the cheekbones. Thin brows over eyes dark with lashes.
But...it was also different. This person obviously wasn't Bill. There was no manic smile displaying white teeth ready to bite, no crazed, gleaming eyes. Even his stance was different. It was only now that Dipper realized that Bill, in that body, had seemed to constantly be leaning forward, eager to throw himself into the next mess. Eager to sink into chaos.
No, these pictures were just of a kid. A kid he didn't know, but one he felt pity for. How had Barnabas Northwest met his end? He couldn't have known what fate would befall him. Did the cult kill him first? Were they kind, were they cruel? Or was he still alive in that body when Bill was dragged, black and red and shrieking, into it?
"Were you close?" Mabel asked softly. Pacifica gazed down at her phone and shrugged.
"We used to be. When we were little kids. After a while, I only started seeing him on family trips, and even then we didn't talk much...just grew apart, I guess. ...there wasn't anything left? Nothing?"
Dipper looked down. Mabel shook her head.
"I'm so sorry, Pacifica..."
Pacifica sighed and lowered the phone into her lap as she gazed up at the treetops. She was silent for a while before turning to look at Dipper.
"Dipper...you know all about these weird...things. What do you think happened to him? You know...his...I guess his soul...or whatever…?"
Dipper studied the swaying branches of the trees, taking in the colors around them, the sky streaked orange and pink with the setting sun. A gentle breeze blew, heavy with the smell of cedar and honeysuckle. He looked back at her, into her searching eyes, and offered a comforting smile.
"I think he's in the next place. Wherever we go from here. I think he's at peace."
His answer seemed to be a good one, and she gave him a melancholy smile back. They watched the sun set and the stars blink into view, one by one.
The path was familiar to him. He had done this every year after all, and three times so far this summer. Two times with his sister huffing and groaning behind him, and once with him huffing and groaning behind Bill. He remembered their trip to the statue well, Bill's bare feet nearly silent against the undergrowth, how the wounds made him sway slightly. The back of his head, a bouncing mop of golden hair.
Dipper had been afraid then, worried. Now that he thought about it, he guessed both of them were. Bill just hid it better.
When the trees thinned out and the clearing open up before him, he froze; had he walked the wrong path? He looked around, saw the familiar landmarks, a fallen log, a mossy boulder. This was the place where Bill's statue had stood.
But he didn't see it.
After a long pause, he scrambled over to where it had been, his heart thudding hard against his chest. Bill had said the statue was the last remaining link to his physical form, something he could see through, something he could see them through...so where was it? Had Bill somehow returned back to it, become physical again, disappeared? Had he, and the statue, vanished back to the Nightmare Realm or some other forgotten and chaotic dimension?
But his heart fell when he got a closer look. There, among the heavy indentation in the soil where the statue used to sit, was a pile of shattered stone. Dipper lowered himself to the ground, sitting on his knees and slowly, cautiously, reached out to pick them up. They were recognizable. The rounded piece of a hat brim. The recessed slit of a pupil. The tiny, reaching hand.
He held the hand in his, held it for a long time, and stared. He remembered when his hand had been sandwiched between Bill's, one stone and one flesh. The jolt of electricity that, to this day, he still didn't understand. The disappointment on Bill's face, his mouth twisted in a frustrated frown.
Dipper had been trying to destroy this statue for years, and here it was, in pieces. But it brought him no joy.
He brought the little stone hand to his chest, and for the first time that summer, started to cry.
The last couple of weeks of the season passed as they usually did. Dipper and Mabel had their 17th birthday party at the Shack, complete with a huge cake and streamers and literal mountains of sprinkles (that had been Mabel's idea). Mabel was overjoyed when Stan gave her a new grappling hook, since hers had been destroyed in the incident at the church; she spent at least half of the party using it to swing through the trees, accidentally kicking several guests in the head.
Wendy, Soos and Melody didn't ask Dipper any questions about Bill or what the demon had been doing hanging around them all summer; Dipper guessed that Ford or Stan had taken them aside and explained at least part of the story, told them to keep their mouths shut. He was grateful for it. The party was a welcome distraction, and he could have spent all day watching Soos try to master the rented mechanical bull, or staring in awe as Wendy won every single round of ax tossing.
But as the party wore on and day became night, the electric lights outside the Shack flickering to life, he found his thoughts straying to the broken statue still laying in that lonely clearing. An idea nagged at him, a notion. He wasn't about to try and take it home with him, that would be a little too pathetic, but he felt like he had to do something.
Eventually, the idea rolling around in his head solidified into a plan.
So the last day before they were scheduled to head back home, he put on his hiking shoes, slung a canvas bag over his shoulder, and set off into the woods. The first stop was the clearing. Sure enough, the pieces of the shattered statue were still there. Some were buried a little under the dirt, some covered with leaf litter, but he checked, and all were accounted for. One by one, he placed the broken chunks into his backpack.
He took the cart out to the Gravity Falls backcountry until it couldn't go any further, then set out on foot. Lugging a bunch of stone around under the late summer sun wasn't easy going, and the hike was just as intense as Dipper remembered. Up, up, up into the foothills of the mountains, where the grasses grew wild and animals scattered at his approach. Until finally, he crested that last hill and the meadow spread out before him.
The sight of it, black and burned and scarred, with its big empty pit of a pond, made his stomach heave. He was starting to wonder if this had been the best course of action after all. Though the pain washed over him anew, he trekked down the hill, his heart in his throat as he passed the burned mausoleum, the church foundations, and reached the triangle gouged into the ground.
Dipper slung the backpack down, sat beside it, and started to work. Bit by bit, he lay the stone pieces that once were Bill flat onto the barren earth. He arranged them together as best he could, gluing the fragments until the statue lay, cracked but whole, within the scorched triangular pattern.
He stood back and studied his work. He hadn't expected anything to happen. He had hoped, sure, but somehow, he already knew that it wouldn't do anything.
This was for him. And for Bill. A kind of a thank-you for saving him. An apology, for not believing him. Mostly, it was a way to let him go.
He wondered if Bill would have appreciated it.
'You're the SAPPIEST PINE TREE I've EVER MET,' the voice in his head scoffed.
"Maybe so," Dipper answered aloud. No one was around to hear him, to think him crazy, and so he indulged in a little banter with the ghost in his mind, "but I'm the only Pine Tree you like."
'My FAVORITE STICK,' the voice said earnestly, and together, they laughed.
Just as Grunkle Ford had warned, getting over Bill wasn't an easy task. Dipper struggled through the following year. He was mourning, and he had never really mourned before; he'd been lucky enough not to (at least not permanently) lose anyone close to him. Too many times he'd find himself in class, staring down at his lightning-burned arm, fingertips running over the raised scars, remembering his very last journey into the Mindscape. How Bill had sung, how they had danced for what seemed like hours, spinning and swaying and laughing.
The memory of it hurt.
When the grief struck, it always took him off balance. Sometimes little things set it off, sometimes big things. One day, he'd been flipping through some pictures on his phone, when Bill appeared. It was the photo he'd taken for Bill after a shower, when the demon wanted to study the binding tattoos on his back. Bill stood straight, back facing the camera, displaying the black geometric patterns and large purple bruises adorning it. He was looking over his shoulder, that one oil slick eye staring black and endless out from under wet curls of hair. The eye that, in Bill's words, saw 'everything and nothing'.
That one photo sent him into a spiral of depression that lasted a good two weeks, but even so, he couldn't bring himself to delete it.
Mabel was, as usual, his rock, distracting him when his thoughts strayed too far downwards, cheering him up when his moods took a sour turn. She never tried to make him forget the previous summer. Actually, she did the opposite. She'd recount tales of their adventures, remind Dipper of the more awkward and embarrassing moments, laugh with him about things that once were scary but now were funny. She'd tell him stories about mischief Bill had gotten up to whenever Dipper was asleep or otherwise occupied.
"You were taking a bath or something, I don't remember," she laughed, laying on the floor with a scrapbook spread out in front of her. Dipper lay beside her, watching as she flipped through the pages, "he filled a bunch of balloons with strawberry jam then climbed up on the roof like a spider monkey and threw them at customers. It was pretty great. He had weirdly good aim for a one-eyed abomination of nature."
"And no one cared that there was a crazy-looking guy on the roof chucking jam-filled balloons at them?" Dipper asked as he looked at photo of Bill holding Gregory Frill-face and beaming.
"Dipper, it's Gravity Falls. They're used to weirder things happening."
"Good point."
"It was funny, though, you should have seen it! And I threw one that nailed Toby right in the back of the head! Bill cracked up, he was doing that crazy laugh and he just was like 'JAM!'" she finished in a startlingly good impersonation.
'JAM!' Bill's voice echoed in his head, cackling madly. Hearing him wasn't exactly a common occurrence, but it happened enough that Dipper had stopped being surprised or alarmed by it.
It was just the ghosts in his head.
"You two are kindred spirits," he said, turning to a photo of the demon rummaging through a drawer for god knows what, "which is disturbing."
"What's disturbing about that?" Mabel asked, "it was fun!"
"You want to be like a psychotic probably-evil triangle demon?"
"Better than dating a psychotic probably-evil triangle demon!"
Dipper really didn't have a comeback for that one.
By the time summer rolled around again and they were ready for another trip into Gravity Falls, the pain, which had dulled to an occasional ache, sprang up anew. It was going to be a hard thing to face, Dipper knew, but he cherished his summers there with his family too much to back out. Besides, he was excited to see what new secrets he could uncover, what new stories his friends would have to tell. He even let Mabel drive most of the way there from California, which, he realized after they almost veered off the road for the twentieth time, was probably a mistake.
They hugged their Grunkles, freshly back from their own adventures, hung out with Soos and Melody, settled back into the Shack, did all the normal things that had become yearly tradition.
And on the third day in, Dipper began his yearly pilgrimage to Bill's statue. The path was longer now since he relocated it the previous year; it was no longer just a quick jaunt through the woods from the Shack. But the journey was a peaceful one, through familiar countryside, with only the calls of birds to accompany him. The fields weren't quite as overgrown with their full summer foliage yet, so it was easier going than he remembered. He spotted a manotaur in the distance and they exchanged friendly waves. He saved a gnome that was stuck legs-up in a gopher hole. He pried a jackalope from the jaws of an angry fox.
The usual Gravity Falls stuff on his usual trek to see the unusual chaos god turned to stone.
He huffed as he pushed up the final hill, finally climbing to the top to see the grassland spread out before him. He'd expected it to still be desolate, blazed black and sterile.
He was wrong.
The meadow was overflowing with life, all manner of strange and wonderful flora. Vibrant flowers and sprouting grasses blanketed the once-burnt landscape, thick and lush. As Dipper traveled through, he marveled. It had only been a year, not even that, but the plants grew up to his waist. The blooms were vivid, over saturated; bright purple coneflowers, turquoise primrose, garish yellow barberries. There were even some species he had never seen before; flowers with spindly tie-dyed petals, weird purple-pink berry bushes, green tree saplings twisting up from the earth like question marks.
The mausoleum was still standing, now covered in thick, zebra-striped ivy; he used it as a landmark to guide him through the wild terrain. The old stone foundation of the church, once covered in ash and bone, was now carpeted with creeping thyme that released a pleasant smell with each footstep. He was looking for the place he'd last seen Bill alive, the place he'd set the statue into the dirt. He was expecting it to be difficult to find among the thick foliage.
Wrong once again.
Plants spilled out of what once was the blasted barren triangle of earth; azure blue iris, blindingly yellow sunflowers, crimson poppies. Among them were conifer saplings, too tall and too strong to have grown naturally in less than a year. The plants flourished together as one, twisting, wrapping around one another, blooming in tandem. The conifer trunks and sunflower stalks were dotted throughout by the smaller flowers, their stems winding in and out like gleaming green threads.
The plants had pushed the cracked statue up and away from the earth as they had grown, wrapping their strong stems around it, holding it aloft. The stone triangle stood horizontal now, at Dipper's eye level.
He stared at the statue. It stared back.
Irises were wrapped around the arm, the hand. It stretched toward him. A cool breeze blew through. Grasses rustled, and Dipper thought he heard voices on the wind.
He reached forward with his lightning-marked arm and shook the statue's hand.