Trigger warning for choking!


The jarring sensation of the strike itself, his fist colliding with yielding slime, then the shockwave reverberating up the suddenly tender bones in his arm … the horrible lurching feeling of sudden, unexpected weightlessness; a waking nightmare, twisting desperately, writhing in midair, too aware that there was nothing between him and the ground, spread out beneath like a quilt; unable to scream for the wind wrenching the breath from his chest … "I don't remember," repeated Bill stoically.

"That's silly," said Mabel, kicking her unhurt foot. "You killing the God-killer and not remembering anything! I remember breaking my ankle and lying to Dipper about it so he wouldn't worry. Not that it helped," and she made a fantastic production of rolling her eyes. "He worried anyway, and Dot didn't exactly make anything better, snatching me away like that. Dipper wasn't gonna hurt me," she confided earnestly to Bill, but he thought something behind her eyes looked a little anxious. Interesting.

"Mm."

Mabel persisted, "You have to remember something. I mean, it must have been so epic! Like an action movie, but starring you!"

It took just over two minutes, the ground rushing up and up, and not a damn thing I could do … and it took me a solid sixty seconds to realize that. Sixty seconds, a subjective eternity, of shrieking terror … But what could he say? That it hadn't felt especially heroic at the time? That he hadn't even had contents in his bladder to void? That even now he sometimes woke gasping, tears of panic stinging his eyes as he fought his way awake, clawing for solid ground away from the dreams he used to be able to control effortlessly?

"Sorry to disappoint, kiddo." Bill shrugged. "But feel free to imagine me walking away from an explosion, if that flips your trigger." Silently, he wondered if he asked Stanley very, very nicely, would he be permitted to move to the spare room? If not, there was going to be blood, and then everyone would start bitching at Bill for killing children again. He doubted if 'she was asking for it' would hold up any better this time around. At least no one but Dot had noticed Dipper's biggest bully, circa third grade, going missing, and at least Dot hadn't minded. Much.

Mabel sighed and fell back, staring up at the attic ceiling.

After an interminable while, she threw up her arms, letting them thump noisily down at her sides. "This is boring," she declaimed.

Bill was amused to find that he was in complete agreement. However, he considered playing devil's advocate one of his more enjoyable responsibilities. "Something something letting our bones set," he droned; it was the best he could muster on such short notice. "Your ankle, my everything." He wasn't really feeling his role just then. The cast on his arm, for one, itched like fire, and it felt like his brain was liquefying in his skull. Soon it would begin oozing out every available facial orifice, puddling on his pillow …

"Boring," Mabel repeated. She lifted and dropped her arms again for emphasis.

Bill weighed the pros and cons of reaching across the short distance between their beds to throttle her, just for something new to do. On the one hand, Dipper would be upset, but on the other …

"Bee-oh-are-eye-enh-gee," Mabel sang.

But on the other, he could enjoy silence. Silence, they said, was golden. He believed it. Buy gold … he was losing it, cracking up. He had to do something, anything, since he didn't want to get reamed for hurting Dipper's sister, and couldn't physically climb the walls. He'd tried reading, but his right eye was still useless; Stanley had loaned him an eyepatch, which Bill now wore every waking moment. It had been remarkably rakish before Mabel, being Mabel, had adorned it with a triangle-shaped sticker, recolored by way of lemon-scented scratch-'n'-sniff marker from white to yellow. He hadn't yet had the heart to remove it.

"We could try going out the window … "

"Nope," Bill interrupted. He sat up as quickly as he dared, bracing his good arm against his ribs for support; they had been taped, but were still incredibly tender. Whenever possible, he tried not to breathe deeply. "I don't know if you remember the grilling we got last time—"

Mabel grimaced. "Yeow, and how. I've never seen Dot turn red before. And did you see that vein in Grunkle Stan's forehead? I thought it was gonna pop!"

"Yeah, and I'm not in a real hurry for an encore. I'd rather not kill the old guy, anyway; he has great taste in accessories." Bill touched his fingernails to his eyepatch, in a kind of salute. "So you, shut your trap—" he made a closing gesture, miming a sock puppet shutting the hell up, and urging Mabel by force of suggestion to do the same, "—and … " Here his inspiration, thin to begin with, ran down.

It was the middle of the afternoon, and he'd just heard a busload of vict—patrons arriving. Dipper would be busy keeping the gift shop tidy, or fixing the attractions if they'd begun to slip or crumble, or maybe covering the cash register, if his little crush had snuck out onto the roof for a nap. Dipper let himself be taken advantage of entirely too much, Bill reflected, without irony.

The kid hadn't spent a moment alone with Bill since Bill woke, just over a fortnight before. Dipper had visited him every night, Mabel had assured Bill, but Bill privately wondered how far these assurances were exaggerated, presumably so that he and her brother could, to use her unique parlance, 'hug it out'.

Bill had also speculated, during the eternal watches of the night, what death would have felt like. He was mortal now—or, at least, mostly mortal: he'd endured all kinds of shit about how lucky he was, the devil's own luck, ha ha … Fordsy, good ol' Sixer, had done the actual cut-work, as Bill understood it—repairing Bill's broken ribs and removing a good portion of his ravaged lung entirely, among other, fiddlier things, mostly involving the truly unbelievable array of bones he'd broken in his fall from the God-killer's grip—but Stanley had been the one designated to scold Bill, at protracted and wandering length, about what the hell he had been thinking, et cetera, et cetera.

He hadn't heard most of it, but tracing the waning moon's spidery progress up along the windowpane, listening to Mabel breathe, Bill had wondered.

Bill had had plenty of experience with corpses, of course. In his line of work, you couldn't really avoid them, even if you really wanted to, which he didn't particularly. He was intimately familiar with the physiological process, the breakdown of chemicals and gases within the countless extraordinarily intricate systems, but what happened to the essence of a person? If he had died, what would have happened to whatever inscrutable thing made him … well, him, Bill Cipher?

Energy just dissipated, sure, and if he'd been destroyed as a demon—however improbable that was, for a boatload of reasons—he had no questions about his fate. But if he was mortal, even just a little, did that mean he had a little bit of a soul? Or was that like being a little bit pregnant, a hilarious contradiction in terms?

He could find out. It wouldn't be hard: humans were so fragile, just ambulatory meat in a thin membrane, easily sliced, easily spilled. But what would happen to Dipper then? And why hadn't Dipper said half a dozen words altogether to him since Bill came to? Had he done something terrible, during that hazy period he couldn't quite remember, somewhere between the fall and waking up in the attic? It was entirely possible, but there wasn't anyone he could ask except Dipper.

Bill brooded on this now, his plans to suppress Mabel wound down to silence.

Mabel watched him worriedly.

"He'll come soon," she told Bill in a very different voice. It was gentle, reassuring, and deceptive as all hell, Bill judged. "He's just … embarrassed, I think. I don't think he really knows what to do about, you know … " She made a vague, flappy gesture, involving both hands, which Bill took (correctly) to indicate the odd switch that had been entangling the both of them, Bill and Dipper, Dipper and Bill. Bill, without his powers, unable to retrieve them until he was recovered, stronger; Dipper, endowed with those powers, and without the least idea of how to deal with them.

Bill would have vented a deep and despairing sigh, but he'd learned pretty quickly why that was a singularly bad idea. Instead, he just emanated misery in all directions, like a little angst generator. If he was as much a hero as Mabel seemed to believe, he was entitled to a little self-pity, he thought.

"I could help him," Bill muttered into the open collar of his dress shirt. He cringed inwardly from the very concept of discussing anything with Mabel, but seeing as she had been the only person to willingly speak with him in over a week, he felt conditions couldn't deteriorate much more and he might as well burn down everything, at least figuratively speaking. Literal burning would come later, if things got bad enough. It was nice to have plans. "I have experience. Lots of it. Centuries. A couple millennia."

Mabel's eyebrows rose. "Really?"

"I'm older than I look."

"Well," Mabel said pragmatically, "you usually have a big yellow triangle for a head, so I can believe that."

This startled Bill into outright laughter. It felt wonderful. He revised certain fantasies he had held about slitting Mabel's throat as she slept.

She smiled, seemingly aware of the shift, although Bill couldn't imagine how. Was he really that predictable? That readable? Maybe it was just the damnable streak of mortality.

"So," Mabel began, "about the window—" But at that moment, the attic door creaked open, and Dipper slunk in with the air of a thief in the night. Several hundred things sprang immediately to Bill's mind, hovered near his tongue, and then collapsed, instantly, to ashen ghosts. He felt the bizarre desire to hack them out, these purely imaginary constructs—like breathing in wildfire, coughing out smoke.

"Hi," said Dipper, closing the door behind him.

"Hi!" Mabel chirped. "What've you been up to? How's the shop? How's Grunkle Stan? How's—"

"Everyone's fine," Dipper said, and stood a little awkwardly equidistant from the two beds. Bill drew up his long legs gingerly, indicating the foot of what had originally been Dipper's bed in the first place, but Dipper ignored the movement and its implicit invitation, with a little motion of his head that took his line of sight nearer Mabel and eclipsed Bill almost entirely. Bill only narrowly suppressed a sigh.

Mabel, meanwhile, glanced toward the window—a little longingly, Bill thought. "It's awful early for you to be coming up here," she observed, her tone nonchalant, interested but not insistent. Not wanting to drive her brother away, Bill guessed, although Mabel's thought processes were still largely opaque to him. Did she want Dipper to stay for his novelty, as compared to the wallpaper, or was she still trying to repair relations between Dipper and his demon? Initially, Bill had been annoyed, scorning her leading questions and offended by the unspoken doubt running beneath her concern, but now—days later, without a resolution one way or the other—he wasn't sure what he felt.

"Yeah," said Dipper. He licked his lips, then went to sit on the old steamer trunk on the far side of the room. As he sat, his eyes passed over Bill, but neither lingered nor changed appreciably; Bill quashed a ridiculous impulse to wave. "Some lady tripped going out the door, and she threatened to sue. Well, you know how Grunkle Stan gets when litigation comes up … "

"Ah," nodded Mabel. "They're having a screaming match?"

"She called her lawyer, I guess. All the way in New York. When I left, Grunkle Stan was yelling at the poor guy on the lady's cellphone. I dunno if she's gonna get anything out of him, because—"

The twins chorused, in unison, their great-uncle's familiar workaday mantra: "You can't get blood out of a turnip." Mabel laughed, her heartiness rather suspect (at least to Bill, who was growing paranoid and oversensitive to such things), but Dipper only smiled. It didn't quite reach his eyes.

Bill had been listening to this with his hands clenched white-knuckled in his lap. Finally, his exasperation and, yes, his loneliness swelled, like a balloon filled with boiling water; it reached a breaking point he had never imagined possible, and burst, spattering and scalding everything. "What the hell did I do?" he exploded at Dipper, at last, who flinched back, his body language screaming his desire to be gone, gone: perhaps dealing with the contentious visitor downstairs, or maybe cleaning up the goat Gompers' pen on his hands and knees, with a toothbrush.

"You've been avoiding me, you've hardly said a single word to me in two goddamn weeks, and I can't fucking figure out how the fuck I disobliged His Majesty—" He'd rather be doing anything else, Dipper's eyes said. Anything at all, but enduring this awful, inevitable eruption. It infuriated Bill, enough for him to swing his legs out of bed—a horrible mistake, but he was too angry to stop, almost too angry to feel the agony lancing through his chest as though he'd impaled himself on his own ribs all over again, though of course that was impossible—and advance on the boy, red mist occluding his vision.

"No! Stop! Stop it!" shrieked Mabel, forgotten; she might as well have been screaming at them from the surface of the moon, for all Bill or Dipper heard her. Dipper scrambled back over the steamer trunk, and the fear on his face, rather than taking Bill aback into any semblance of sanity, only stoked his rage, making it blaze up and up, a flare that grew into something terrible, something atomic, something that would twist and torture and warp whatever was caught in its blast radius … His hands, pale spidery things after his many injuries, reached for Dipper's throat, and sought to close around his windpipe. Frenzied, overcome by fury, Bill was marvellously strong.

But Dipper, driven by that primordial force that compels all living things to struggle endlessly toward survival, was stronger. As he would lash out physically at an attacker, an unbelievable tongue of strength struck out, but it was blind with panic and necessity; Bill, his hands locked in their crushing grip, took a fringe of the blow broadside, rocking back with the force of it. Dipper, perforce, went with him, jerking and twitching frantically in Bill's grasp like an insect. Mabel threw herself on the both of them, clawing and kicking, screaming, screaming. Bill felt quite lost in noise and static, his mind completely separated from the events occurring in the stuffy attic room. He'd been lost before in dimensions like this; the trick was just to ride it out, wait for things to clear. They would, eventually.

Dipper was weakening, life-giving oxygen prevented from reaching his brain, his muscles. His struggles became more random, less organized. Mabel hauled at Bill's arm, but it was like trying to wrestle steel cables: they looked ropey, easily overcome, but it was all an illusion, a lie by association. She was crying. Bill thought, It took two minutes to fall. He wasn't certain where the thought had come from, but it disturbed him. It had been almost two minutes.

Wildly, weakly, Dipper lashed out again, a wallop of physiological energy that drove Bill back, and broke his hold, briefly; at the same time, Mabel—clinging agitatedly to Bill's forearm, the one that had been driven back—screamed in his ear, "Bill, stop, stop it, please, you're killing him!"

That made it through. He drew back suddenly, releasing his grip on Dipper's throat; Dipper inhaled, one mighty, whistling breath, and wrenched himself away from Bill and Mabel both. Mabel immediately released Bill's arm and flew to her brother, crying. And Bill, disoriented, retreated, sitting on the steamer trunk with a heavy thunk. He wasn't certain what had just happened, but judging from Mabel's state and the way that Dipper lay, gasping throatily, it hadn't been at all good.

Where was Stanley? Where was Dot? Dot was his check, his control: so long as Dot was there, Bill was assured that he would not be permitted to do anything irrevocable. Bill felt very nervous about Dot's continued absence.

"Dipper?" Bill's voice was quiet, scarcely more than a whisper. "Dipper, are you—"

"You stay away from me," Dipper snarled. The words were low and rasping, hoarse, and bit into Bill like a blade. "You're a, a—a lunatic! I n-never should have saved you!"

There it was, out in the open, revealed in all its horrific grandeur. Bill's eyes closed, briefly. He felt his eyelashes brushing against the eyepatch, an odd sensation.

Mabel was still crying. She said, thickly, "Dip-dop, he didn't mean—"

"You, you stop defending him!" Now Dipper's voice was rising, though it still sounded painful and bruised. "He isn't yours! And he didn't just try to kill you!" There was a momentary lull, as the peace in the eye of a hurricane. What have I done? Bill's chest felt tight and painful, and his insides hurt, writhing like snakes. It was ridiculous that he should feel like that, when he had taken no new wounds. None that could be seen, anyway; his heart bled, surely.

"Dipper—" Bill began.

Dipper made a sharp throwaway gesture, scrambling back towards the door, one hand at his throat. Bill could see bruises beginning there, in a familiar splayed pattern of slender, almost spidery fingers. "You stay away from me!" Dipper said again, and there was gravel in his voice, gravel and hatred, grinding and grinding … "I wish I'd let you d-d— I wish I'd let you—" He seemed to have a little trouble with that word, now, and maybe the concept, maybe it was just meant to hurt Bill—

… But after a moment, the initial hesitation vanished into a throaty whisper of the purest hatred, slicing into Bill with a terrible surgical finesse, so sleek and so sharp that it would take him some time to fully realize the extent of the hidden, private injuries these words had wrought. "I do, I wish I'd let you die! Do everyone a favor and, and go back to Hell, where you belong!" Bill had no doubt, none whatsoever, that Dipper meant what he said.

When the door slammed, Mabel turned to look at Bill, bleakly, her face red and smeary with snot and tears. Bill simply put one hand up, over his face, as he breathed, his eyes half-closed, gazing pensively into nothing.

Everything hurt, somehow.

Even his eyelashes.