Hello everyone! sorry for the gap between chapters, I've had a lot going on lately!

One note on the formatting - doesn't allow strikethroughs, so I'll be replacing them with [square brackets]. These are meant to look removed or edited out from the rest of the text.

Enjoy!

Dipper Pines was twelve years old when he stopped being human.

He was twelve years old when the demon Bill Cipher tried to fuse the Mindscape with the physical world, twelve years old when the two of them got locked into an intense battle waged in Dipper's mind and body, twelve years old when he defeated the demon.

Twelve years old when he became one himself.

Twelve years old when he became invisible, untouchable, nonexistent to his friends, his grunkle, his parents, even his own sister. They didn't know he was there, couldn't see him, couldn't hear him.

He was still there, watching, listening, trying to break through to them, to make contact, but he wasn't powerful enough to make it to the physical plane, where they could see him and hear him. His shouts for attention faded to whispers, and then he finally stopped talking, only using his voice when he was summoned, and only barely even then.

Dipper Pines knew he wasn't human anymore, but he wasn't going to leave his human life behind. He still had to let them know he was alive, still had to talk to Mabel, at least one more time. That one awful day when he'd lost her couldn't be the last time he talked to her.

He was determined to do whatever it took to get back to her.

There were ways for demons to get stronger, he found. Terrible ways, ones that involved bloodshed and soul-stealing and things that human minds couldn't comprehend. Dipper did them, and winced at how much he loved them, and kept his newly-clawed grip tight on whatever was left of his sanity.

It's all for Mabel, he told himself as he twisted a deal with the Cult of Fallen Branches and tore them to shreds, swallowing their bitter souls whole and feeling his life force strengthen as theirs fizzed out.

It's all for Mabel, he promised himself as he ripped the demon Elciorin the Slithering in half and devoured his constantly-regenerating form alive.

Destroying all the cultists offering a young girl as sacrifice. Tearing canyons into the Earth to swallow people whole. Making those who summoned him go insane, killing them outright, ripping souls from their bodies for his own use.

This is all for Mabel.

He learned the art of growing distant from himself, separating his mind from the violence and the carnage he wrought in order to grow stronger. He figured out how to ignore the blood, the screaming, the pleads for mercy, how to make his ears grow deaf until everyone but him was dead. There was no getting around it. He had to do these things, forced himself to even as he could feel the cracks in his mind growing and growing. If he didn't, he'd lose his sister all over again.

He would always return to her, and to the rest of them, to watch them and make sure they were safe, scare what evil he could away from them. Sometimes he could float over Mabel's shoulder, watching her paint or knit or even just think, and forget that anything had changed between the two of them at all.

And then the Cult of Endless Sleep had summoned him just before Mabel had entered her junior year of high school, with twenty cultists offering themselves and their souls as a sacrifice and hundreds more offering their souls for a fraction of his demonic power, and it was so easy to twist their deal, to lose himself in the bloodshed, and it terrified him, how much he was losing himself in the demon instincts that had joined his own. He had to stay sane, had to stay human. For Mabel.

He went back to the house instinctively, his form still spattered with blood, but he was invisible so it didn't matter. Mabel was listening to a playlist of pop songs and knitting a stuffed animal for the local children's hospital.

Just being in the same room as her helped. This was what he was doing everything for: to be a part of this again, to be a part of Mabel's life again.

Idly, he floated over to Mabel's bookshelf and ran his fingers over the spines of her books. A lot of them were about ghosts, now, the afterlife, the newest studies on subjects that hadn't existed half a dozen years ago.

She was trying to find him.

And under Dipper's fingers, the last book on the shelf tipped to the side when he knocked into it.

He started small, because it was all he could do. He couldn't move things very far or very exactly, yet, but he figured tipping them over and moving them across the room would be enough to get Mabel's attention. But it didn't. It didn't work when he tried it with his parents, either. It was too easy to blame misplaced items on rogue brownies or pixies now, when Mabel even noticed something misplaced within the chaos of her room. There was no way they would realize it was him if he just moved random things.

He'd need to think this through. He'd need to be strategic.

Strategic about knocking over small objects. Ironic, that with all his power, all the destruction he could bring in a summoning, he still wasn't quite strong enough to just make his presence known to his sister, his twin, the Mizar to his Alcor (and oh, how he hoped she wouldn't mind that he'd chosen his new, demonic name because of his relationship to her).

Whatever he ended up doing, it had to be something distinctly him, something she couldn't misattribute to another paranormal force.

Of course, he didn't do anything anymore except slaughter cultists and demons, sacrifices and offerings and innocent bystanders on occasion, and none of that would be recognizable to his sister. He'd have to think back a little—more like a lot, after almost six years of being so far removed from human life.

He'd been neat and tidy, when he still had things to be tidy with. That was a starting place, right? In this mess of a room, Mabel had to notice things getting tidier instead of more chaotic. And he'd used to flip her hair over her face to win arguments, too. She would recognize that, right?

She had to.

She had to know it was him, had to know he was still there, not dead yet.

She just had to.

I CAN'T

And of course she didn't get it, because he'd been so [stupid stupid stupid] vague with the clues. And of course she still thought he was dead, she'd seen his body hit the ground, she'd been to the funeral, seen his coffin in the ground covered with dirt. He was [dead dead dead] gone to her. Of course she'd think ghost, of course she'd think he was haunting her, tied to her, dying (ironicly) to move on.

'But

I CAN'T,'

He wanted to say, he did say.

And in the first real, worded conversation he had with his sister in years, he told her nothing of importance at all.

And still she found the answer of demon.

And still she found a Wiki page on him, even if he didn't want her to know everything it had to say.

She was so close, close enough for him to feel her arms around him in a hug—

But she shrugged it off, shied away. She'd set the hat on fire instead of using it as the simplest of symbols for summoning him, and he hadn't expected her to understand right away, but he hadn't expected her to go that far in the other direction, either.

She'd come so close only to dart back even further away than she had been, and it nearly broke him.

The difficulty in interacting with the physical world came in the finest details, the words, the letters, the handwriting. He was a master of brute force, of violence, but the subtlety was eluding him. It was painstaking to so much as try, and he did nothing but fail, fail, fail trying to write to Mabel again, to try to tell her more like I'm OK or Not Dead or even [Love You, Miss You, Call Me].

Do you hate me?

The words weren't right; too short, not enough, always lacking something he couldn't possibly add to the end with the control he had now, and he didn't have the time to waste waiting waiting waiting to be stronger, to be able to write it all for her at once.

He had to tell her in person, had to get her to summon him. Even with the simplest of circles, the weakest of offerings, she had to be able to see him for a few minutes at least, enough time for him to tell her the basics, to come to peace even if she'd never summon him again.

But she shied away from the circle, swore she'd never summon him, and even if she didn't really know it was him, it [hurt hurt hurt] stung a bit.

Dipper was dead to her, Alcor a threat to her. His sister never wanted to see him again, would never accept it. But he couldn't give up on her, not now, not after all he'd done to get this close.

He'd be a stranger to her, then. He knew he could change his appearance, enough that he didn't still look [human] twelve, enough that he could look like someone else entirely, if he wanted to. He'd clung to his human appearance for some hope at keeping his humanity along with it, but for Mabel, he'd do anything.

So he changed the plan. Wait to be corporeal on his own, wait to be able to change that form. Change it all, everything different, nothing Mabel would recognize. Nothing for her to be scared of, nothing for her to push away from. Unfamiliar, unthreatening. Different.

See Mabel again, have her see him back. Talk. Maybe they could even be friends again, though they'd never be as close as they used to be. She wouldn't know him as a brother, but she'd know him, and that was so much more than he had now.

The plan went up in smoke with Gravity Falls.