It seemed that it was going to be a long night.
It already had been before Bill had... before Bill, truth be told. The first working clock Stan had floated past kindly informed him that it was just shy of midnight, though a sliver of sunlight had still been peeking out from the horizon when he'd been outside just before everything had gone to hell. Probably wasn't a bad thing that Ford had marched the kids up to bed after they'd finished their phone call- it'd been a long day for them, far too long, and they were still growing, still so young, the last thing they needed was to spend more time panicking while half-asleep and worrying themselves sick in the process...
The night probably would have seemed a lot shorter if Ford had been willing to just talk to him, but that was beginning to seem like a lost cause. Ford had retreated to his study in the basement and encased himself in messy mounds of paper trying to research... well, he didn't say, but Stan had a feeling that he could guess the subject, at least in broad strokes. Not that he'd find out first-hand, because every time he approached Ford hastily shoved whatever notes he was currently perusing into the nearest stack, gave him a frosty glare, and started chucking pens at him. Most of the pens flew way off the mark, and even the handful that actually reached their target passed through Stan rather than actually hitting him, but that didn't mean it wasn't annoying. After almost an hour of that silent stand-off, Stan had sighed and retreated upstairs. He wasn't wanted, that much was all too clear, and sticking around the lab and pestering Ford further wasn't accomplishing anything. Maybe if he just left Ford alone like he'd wanted, he'd come to his senses and actually hear Stan out when the morning rolled around, after he'd burned off some energy, maybe even gotten a few minutes of sleep in between work sessions.
Stan grumbled as he sat in the armchair in the living room- or tried to, anyway. What actually happened was that he ended up sitting about an inch into its cushion, then floating a similar distance above it when he tried to course-correct. Not that there was anything for him to do there, either. The main source of entertainment in the room, the television, was turned off. Stan reached for the remote, just on instinct, but his hand passed through it just like it passed through everything else. He'd only bought this TV a few weeks earlier after breaking the previous one- actually went out and bought the thing rather than wait around for somebody to give one away or throw one out and snatch it up, though admittedly he'd grabbed the cheapest one he could find at a garage sale and haggled the owner into selling it for less than half their asking price- and now he couldn't even use it when he needed it most. It figured.
So what else did he have left?
He could go poke around town, he supposed, but he wasn't sure he was ready to see the damage that had resulted from the calamity. Things were bad enough inside, dealing with his own family's problems, he didn't need to start worrying about every last person in town, too- especially when there was that nagging little voice in his head that was suddenly producing brilliant ways of fixing the situation after the fact, hinting that he could have done better, should have done better, that everything that had gone wrong could be traced back to him and his poor decisions...
So that left the kids. He might as well check up on them, he supposed, make sure that they were doing okay, that they'd actually gone to sleep like they were supposed to.
Stan floated up to the attic and unceremoniously entered the kids' room.
Dipper was still awake. Not a huge surprise, really; that kid had already proved over the course of the summer that he had inherited the Pines family insomniac streak (and there were other reasons, of course, that the boy might have chosen to forego sleep tonight, reasons that Stan forced into the back corners of his mind). Instead of surrounding himself with pillows and blankets, Dipper had gathered together a fort of books and papers arranged in a rough semi-circle in front of him. He flipped between pages frantically, occasionally scribbling down something onto a post-it note and smacking it onto one of the papers. The table next to him held three supply piles: one containing carefully-stacked blue and black pens, one containing unused yellow post-its, and one containing half a dozen pens that had been chewed until they were nearly unrecognizable, the remains of their ink still staining the boy's lips and tongue.
Mabel, however, was fast asleep, her arms tightly wrapped around a purple stuffed rhino. Waddles lay by her side, stillness and loud snoring indicating that he too was sleeping, though the pig's eyelids did flutter when a sudden shift in position led to Mabel jamming her elbow into Waddles' head. Mabel was tossing and turning a lot in her sleep, actually, unusual given that she was usually the only one around here who could actually manage to get a good night's sleep.
Stan drew closer, wishing that his presence would calm his great-niece but knowing that even if she were awake, she would remain oblivious. What was going on in that head of hers, anyway? He figured that usually the girl's dreams would be filled with bright pleasant things, all sparkles and sunshine and rainbows... but as he watched her bump her head against Waddles while shifting position once more, Stan had a feeling that tonight, her dreams were not so calm.
And as he listened more carefully, tuning out Dipper's page flipping and pen clicking and the pig's raucous snoring, he could hear the girl moaning in her sleep, guttural noises of distress interspersed with mumbled utterings of the word "no."
Stan reached out to gently pat the girl's head, though he knew damn well that it wouldn't do a lick of good, that his hand would just pass right through again- but he had to do something, he couldn't just stand back and watch his great-niece suffer, he had to at least try...
He was right, of course. His hand didn't touch Mabel's head.
But it did land on the fuzzy head of a stuffed animal.
"What the..."
Stan blinked, taking in the scene before him anew. Where Mabel's head had been now stood a stuffed animal of indeterminate species, a hot pink creature with a bill and rounded ears and a tuft of hair on its head. And, as he looked around further, Stan saw that this was not the only change in scenery that had occurred while his attention was focused elsewhere. The attic and the kids were gone, replaced by plush dolls and tall trees with pale gray bark and puffy, colorful blobs in the place of leaves.
One blob fell off from the treetops, scraping against Stan's shoulder before resting in the palm of his hand, light and soft. When he touched it, the stuff gave way to even the gentlest of presses, imprints of his fingerprints still visible on its surface, while bits and pieces attached themselves to his fingers.
Stan lifted the blue, round glob up to his face and sniffed it, immediately wrinkling his nose at the sickeningly sweet stench. The smell was unmistakable, bringing back memories of all the old carnivals he'd attended, as a kid and as an employee and, hell, they'd even ran one this summer, though that seemed so long ago now...
Cotton candy. Somehow, these trees were growing cotton candy.
Stan absentmindedly dropped the glob of cotton candy to the ground as his thoughts wandered, trying and failing to come up with an explanation for the abrupt change in his surroundings. Trees that grew cotton candy weren't one of Gravity Falls' usual anomalies, even without getting into the whole business of him reaching where they were in the first place- but, hell, nothing else had been normal (or even normal by Gravity Falls standards, which was an altogether different beast) today, so sure, why not top it all off with a realm filled with cotton candy trees. At least the trees weren't attacking him or anything, though Stan did have the feeling that he was being watched, and not just by the big dopey eyes of the pink stuffed critter he'd inadvertently touched or the animal he saw out of the corner of his eye that looked like some freakish mix of a snake and a badger. He'd learned the hard way over the years to trust his instincts, and now would be no exception. The place might have appeared all but deserted, but despite appearances, Stan could sense that he was not alone.
And when he heard a familiar high-pitched cackle in the distance, Stan thought he had a good idea who it was that was watching over him.
Stan charged towards the sound of that unholy laugh, weaving his way through the trees and dodging bizarre creatures both stuffed and living, even though the thought of the encounter to come was enough to make his blood run cold (but he would still fight, oh would he fight, Stanley Pines was nothing if not a fighter)…
If Bill was somehow still up and kicking, well, he'd just have to finish the job he'd started a few hours back.
But as he drew nearer to the sound's source, Stan noticed something odd about the laugh. It had the same inflections every time, the exact same tone, over and over… it was on a loop. The damn demon's laugh was on a loop.
And that loop led him to the rift, the tear in dimensions that Bill had unleashed, and he could've sworn that they'd gotten rid of it but there it was, hanging in the sky just the same...
Except that the rift didn't look quite like it had before. Oh, the shape was right, the same big X hanging in a now-starry sky, but it looked as though all the color had been leeched out of it, the bright yellows replaced with whites and grays. And though Bill's voice, Bill's laugh, seemed to be echoing out from inside of it, the demon himself was nowhere to be seen.
On the ground beneath the rift was the portal, looking almost new despite it having been in ruins the last time he'd seen it, the inside circle filled with blue light. And next to it was a pedestal that held not a red button, but a red replica of the rift as it had looked while still trapped in glass, its contents swirling violently.
The stars shone pink and yellow, aside from a handful closest to the rip in reality that remained white, and the dark ground was sprinkled with glitter, and oh look there was another one of those snake-badger things running by, and Stan could swear it was looking at him funny…
"What the he-"
And between the portal and the glass-enclosed rift was Mabel, wearing an indigo sweater that covered her hands down to her fingertips, and her big wide eyes were looking right at him.
"-heck is going on?"
Mabel's eyes lit up as they met his, and in that moment Stan could swear the stars lit up as well, their soft pastel light making the area warm and bright.
"Grunkle Stan?"
Stan chuckled gently, his laugh growing as Bill's faded away. "The one and only."
And suddenly Mabel was running towards him, sprinting towards him, hands extended, and before he could react she rammed right into his chest, the sheer force of the impact making him fall to the ground. The ground was cool, pleasantly so, and when he made contact with it a puff of glitter flew into the air and tickled his nose, and even though none of it made a lick of sense it all felt so vivid, so real, almost more so than the rest of the night had been.
As he sat up gingerly, Mabel pulled him into a tight hug, pressing her face against the shoulder of his suit. Stan reciprocated, cotton candy-encrusted fingers clutching the soft wool of her sweater.
"I... I was so worried... I thought you were..."
"I know."
Mabel nuzzled her head against Stan's shoulder once more, then looked up at his face, studying it for a moment before breaking the silence again. "Grunkle Stan, are you okay? Why are your eyes all wonky?"
"Oh yeah, that... listen, don't worry about that, sweetie. I'm sure it's nothing."
Mabel loosened her grip, leaning back a bit as the two remained eye to eye, her expression sinking into a slight frown. "...you aren't Bill, are you?"
"NO!" The word came out louder than he intended, and as Mabel stood up, he took a deep breath before continuing, pulling himself off the ground and wiping off some of the glitter that had accumulated on his pants as he spoke. "No, I'm not Bill. Really. It's me, Mabel. It's your uncle."
They stood silently face to face for a good long minute, Mabel looking straight into his "wonky" eyes, searching them for something he couldn't quite name. Finally she nodded, her frown fading away, though the smile that emerged in its place was weak and thin.
Stan crouched down, kneeling as he reached out and rested his hand on Mabel's shoulder. "Look, I'll be honest with ya, kiddo, I don't really get what's going on here either. But what matters is that I'm here, and I'm okay, and... everything is going to be okay."
The words weren't perfect, he knew that. And he knew they wouldn't, couldn't, make everything better. But what he didn't expect was for Mabel's smile to disappear altogether, replaced by a thoughtful frown.
Her voice, when she spoke up again, was soft and weak.
"Am I dreaming?"
"What?"
"...none of this is real, is it?" Mabel's eyes turned towards the floor, the girl staring resolutely at her shoes as she spoke. "It's not really you here. This is all just a dream."
"What are you talking about?" Stan dropped his hand and looked up at the stars, twinkling in shades of pink and gold, and at the thankfully-silent gray rift in dimensions above, and the blood-red rift imprisoned in glass below. Okay, so the kid had a point, something was off about this place. But...
"This can't just be your dream, I'm here too!" Or... could ghosts enter dreams? He couldn't recall any references to that in Ford's notes, but in all fairness, he'd had other things on his mind when reading those over...
Mabel squatted to the ground, wrapping her hands around herself and burying her head in her blanket.
"Mabel, just talk to me."
The stars began to fade away, one by one, the far edges of the world retreating into a dull white mist.
Mabel's quiet murmur of a response could barely be heard through the thick fabric of her sweater.
"I don't want this to be a dream."
The mist was eating away at the rift in the sky now, and the cotton candy woods in the distance had all but vanished.
"I'm here, Mabel. I'm real. I can't speak for the rest of this place, but..."
The two of them stood together in a sea of white, and Stan reached out his hand to hold on to Mabel... and the world came rushing back.
He was back in the attic, right where he had been before, on the side of Mabel's bed. His hands were clean now, the cotton candy that had assaulted him before now gone, with only the memory of its sweet scent lingering in his nose. Dipper was still shuffling around old notes and clicking his pen incessantly. And Mabel's eyes were open now, though only just, as she leaned forward and squinted at her surroundings, looking as disoriented as Stan felt.
After her bleary-eyed survey of the room was completed, Mabel collapsed back onto the bed, letting out a soft groan.
Two voices spoke up at the same time in response to the noise-
"Oh hey, Mabel, you're still awake?"
"Don't worry, Mabel. I'm right here. Can you still hear me?"
-but Mabel only responded to one of the two, prefacing her response with another weak groan.
"Jus' had a weird dream, and... and Grunkle Stan was there..."
Grunkle Stan sighed, shaking his head solemnly.
Dipper dropped his papers and turned his head to face Mabel. "You wanna talk about it?"
Mabel hesitated, then shook her head, throwing several long strands of hair onto her face in the process. "Uh-uh."
"...alright. Just let me know if you want to talk, okay?"
"Mkay." Mabel turned her body to face away from Dipper and threw a pillow on top of her head, causing Waddles, who had been leaning against said pillow, to wake up and stare discontentedly at Mabel before snorting and closing his eyes again.
Dipper watched his sister for a minute more before turning back to his work, though he stopped clicking his pen, leaving the room more or less quiet as she settled in.
Stan floated over to the far wall and looked down at Mabel, whose eyes were fluttering fast, swift silent tears dripping their way down her face away from her brother's watchful eyes.
"Hey, Mabel, don't waste your tears on me, alright?"
Stan reached out to wipe away her tears, but once again his hands passed through her as easily as through thin air.