Korla's Gravity Falls blog

[stephreynaart]

Any headcanons for Dipper and Mabel as they grow older? Like, what will their careers will be?

Dipper, I truly believe follow’s his dream and goes on to a tech school to learn filmmaking and does independent studies on the paranormal and “oddology”.

He gets a comfortable income through his YouTube videos, Patreon, TikTok and such, where he travels to famous haunted locations like the Stanley Hotel or Queen Mary. He makes multi hour long specials about Gravity Falls. At some point he does a multi part series where he tagged along with Stan and Ford out to the Arctic.

Mabel starts a small business where she sells her knitted quilts, clothes, and accessories. She frequents trade shows which do alright, but her online shop keeps her lights on. She also gets a cut when she makes appearances in Dipper’s videos, makes art for his socials (cover art, thumbnails ect). But I like to think she pays her rent by job hopping. I feel like she wouldn’t be able to sit still employed in one place, and has worked just about every restaurant in Piedmont. Collecting and displaying all her name tags on a corkboard. She also volunteers at the local shelters to walk dogs and play with the kitties on her off time. She eventually goes on to her nursing assistant certificate to take care of an elderly Ford and Stan after they retire to the lake house

[ckret2]

Part 3 of 7-ish of the epic and not at all tragic love story of Bill Cipher and the howling void, in which Bill continues to be the best most loving boyfriend of all time

as long as you ignore all of the ways that he's the worst.

Also remember this??

[Love/Gravity] Will Tear Us Apart - ch 3

Parts 1 and 2 here, or on ao3 if you prefer.

####

They'd been dating for a couple of months before Yvonne told Bill what a "nothing day" was.

"It's stupid," she said. "I talk about it like it's a holiday to make it sound less sad—you know, 'yay, it's Nothing Day'—but it's just dumb."

"Hey, I'm a fan of any holiday! The dumber, the better! I'll mark it on my calendar."

"I'd rather not mark them," Yvonne mumbled. "Just tear that date out of the calendar."

"Wow, so we're talking an intense holiday. You're out of luck if you want to schedule a dental exam on the same day, huh?"

"That's just it, I can't do anything else," Yvonne said. "I—can't do anything at all. Because I'm in too much pain to move, or I'm stuck spiraling in my thoughts, or—or one causes the other; sometimes I just... can't. At all. So I just... sort of made it a thing. Because if I try to push myself through it, I'll feel even worse." (Bill listened silently—a rarity for him—not interrupting with any of his usual quick quips.) "If I push it, I still won't get anything done and then I'll feel guilty about it, so I'll keep trying to get something done... and it can last weeks when I do that. But if I just say 'it's a Nothing Day' and don't do anything, most of the time I feel better by the next day. At least enough to do stuff again."

"So, like what you did after the party?" he asked, gesturing toward the bathroom door. "When you got overwhelmed by it all and had to hide in the tub?"

"Yeah," she sighed. Not one of her most attractive moments, hiding behind a shower curtain while her boyfriend hovered outside banished from the room because he was too bright. "That's usually where I go, since it's darkest. Except Nothing Days are a lot worse."

"Okay," he said thoughtfully, turning that over. (And he hadn't even made fun of her for hiding in the tub. He could be so caring when it mattered.)

But then he asked, "So, what do you do while you're not doing anything? Listen to music?"

"No—"

"Make any special Nothing Day foods?"

"No!"

"C'mon, you've gotta have some kind of Nothing Day traditions!"

"No! It's not really a holiday, it's—it's just nothing."

"If you ask me, it sounds like a pretty lousy excuse to spend a day off work."

She snapped, "It's not an excuse! I can't help it when I'm that bad, it's not like I want to— You just don't get it!" And that hurt. He was usually so understanding, so on the same wavelength as her. And this was as important as it was embarrassing, and he thought it was just a reason to be lazy?

Bill floated back, raising his hands appeasingly. "Hey, whoa, I didn't mean it like that! I mean—sure, taking a whole day off to get the 24 hour malaise out of your system is a good idea! But doing nothing-nothing? Wouldn't it work better if you did something that'd help you feel better? Have a spa day? Watch a sappy movie with a bucket of ice cream?"

He did get it, after all; he just didn't get how extreme it was. "No," she sighed. "I wish I could do nice things on days like that. But it's just too hard. It makes me hurt more and feel worse."

Bill didn't have to say he didn't like that for Yvonne to tell. But he wasn't irritated at her, she was sure of that; he was mad at the situation. She knew he wanted her to be better—and she was so grateful. But she didn't know how to give him that.

Finally, he said, "Is there anything that makes you feel better?"

"Waiting," she said. "Trying to get through the day and hoping I feel better the next day."

He perked up a little at that. "Hey—would skipping to the next day help? Time technically doesn't exist here! You can just call me up and say you want to skip to the next day, it wouldn't be hard to..."

He petered off as she shook her head. (It occurred to her that she should be impressed that he could see her shake her head; she did it out of habit and usually forgot that that simply wasn't visible to other people now that her head was a featureless black void.)

"It's the waiting itself that helps," she said. "Nothing else works."

"Sounds boring."

She laughed ruefully. "Usually I'm too miserable to be bored. If I'm not just numb."

"Sounds fitting for the holiday," Bill said wryly. "A day that fills you up with the familiar, comforting feeling of absolutely nothing!"

"Yes. Exactly."

"Okay, I can get into the Nothing Day spirit," he said. "Well—next time you have one, feel free to call me up! I'll help out with the festivities!"

"By...?"

"Oh, you know—helping put up the Nothing Day decorations, whipping up a traditional Nothing Day meal, maybe renting a couple of Nothing Day movies..."

"So... doing nothing."

"As is befitting the season," Bill said grandly. He shook off the faux cheer. "But—seriously. If you need somebody—whether it's to talk or to pick up painkillers—call me up."

"It won't... bother you to see me like that? Just... in the dark? Doing nothing?"

"N—well, yeah, it will, but only because I want you to feel better! But it won't make me think any worse of you, if that's what you mean."

It was. And that was all she really wanted. 

####

The next time, she did call him.

Not for a Nothing Day, exactly; but for what he quickly dubbed "Nothing Eve." She could feel herself spiraling; and he was so good at making her feel better, and he understood what she was feeling like nobody else did or ever could; and she'd hoped that maybe he could help pull her back out of it.

He didn't. And she felt like an idiot, sobbing to him about the worlds lost because of her and the loved ones she knew she'd never see again. She was still heading for another emotional crash.

But it felt gentler, this time. Like this crash came with air bags. She would come out of it bruised instead of broken. It was a comfort, having him here, listening to her, staring at her so intently she could feel the concentrated beam of photons from his eye soaking into her. It was a little better to know she wasn't alone.

It would still be a Nothing Day—but a softer one.

####

Yvonne told Bill she had to ride out the rest of the day alone and asked him to leave. He hated to go when she was like this, curled up alone in the darkest corner of a dusty bathroom. He could see her most clearly in the dark like this, the light from his eye bending around her edges as they were sucked toward her event horizon to faintly trace her limbs' outlines. He could see her hugging her long tail to her chest, her head bent low over her body; and she was so beautiful, even at her lowest. He wondered if she knew that. He wondered if telling her now would be comforting, or just insensitive.

But once he'd been banished to the living room but before he had a chance to (slowly and reluctantly) make his way out, he heard her whisper from the ajar door shielding her from the light: 

"We're so alike." Her voice was so thin. Like the faraway rush of air escaping a broken airlock into a vacuum, a noise that if heard up close would be a howl of wind. "How did we end up so different? You're so kind and helpful, and you're like a god to your people; and if I'm anything at all, I'm just... a god of death."

(He hungrily filed away her praise like a man who'd lived through a famine being handed a loaf of bread, hoarding it for emergencies, to feed himself later.)

"You're not," he insisted. "You've never decided to destroy anything, have you?"

"Well, no, but... that doesn't mean I haven't—"

"I'm no better than you are. If I can be loved like a god, so can you!"

He was no better than she was. If she deserved to be loved like a god, maybe so did he.

####

The day after the next—once Nothing Day was over—Bill asked Yvonne whether she ever wanted her poetry to reach a wider audience.

She said sure, maybe someday, if she ever found an audience that would appreciate it and that needed to hear it.

Bill said great. Because he'd decided she should get to recite her poetry to his commune. He was starting her off with a small audience—only a few thousand people. He'd handled crowds like that as a kid, it'd be easy! He'd scheduled her for three days from now. Everyone had heard about it.

He spent the next hour helping her calm down from a panic attack.

It was fine, he reassured her. This would be good for her, he reassured her. He just wanted everyone to appreciate her the way he did.

####

"I can't do this," Yvonne whispered—either to keep anyone else from hearing, or because she was on the verge of hyperventilating and couldn't get her voice out properly. She and Bill were backstage behind a curtain separating them from the massive auditorium Bill had created. It was packed full of shapes waiting to see the act their Magister had dragged home.

The curtain, of course, was one molecule tall, and so it hid Bill and Yvonne from the crowd but did nothing to hide the crowd from them. Yvonne was cowering behind Bill, as if he'd do a better job of concealing her than the curtain. "I can't. All my poetry is too personal. They won't get it."

"And nobody ever will get it if you don't share it!" Bill said. "Come on, you're brilliant. Your stuff deserves an audience."

She appreciated that; and she knew that if she didn't do this, knowing that everyone had shown up for her just for her to cancel would probably be just as humiliating as actually reciting a poem could ever be; but she couldn't bring herself to move. "I can't do it," she said again. "I just can't get on stage."

"That's fine," Bill said. "You don't have to. The stage can get under you."

"What?"

With a flick of his wrist, Bill snapped up spacetime and folded the slack behind Yvonne, and suddenly she was ten feet closer to the audience, the curtain was behind her, and the microphone was in front of her. The first few rows of the audience flinched in surprise as she appeared, a hole in the stage that was suddenly pitch black with no sound and no transition. A few applauded, like this magic trick was part of the show.

For several seconds, she was completely paralyzed, staring out at the audience in terror; until she spotted Bill. He was way at the back of the auditorium—behind the impossibly short back wall, in fact, the only thing floating above the perfectly flat plane of his fortress—and he was holding up a gigantic neon pink poster board that said "GO YVONNE! ♡" She focused entirely on him.

She could do this. She'd be fine. She'd picked one of her lighter poems. "Um—hi," she said. "My name's Yvonne Torizon, and I'm reciting a poem called 'In Honor of the Screams of Terror They Would Have Made if They Had Seen Their Doom Coming but It Came for Them at the Speed of Light and So They Never Got the Chance.'" She steeled herself, looked at Bill—he gave her a thumbs up—and started howling.

None of the shapes would boo her, of course—she'd endured that before—because Bill had introduced her, and they wouldn't dare criticize anything he'd praised. But the shapes in the back rows (who apparently hadn't realized that Yvonne, like their illustrious Magister Mentium, could move through higher dimensions, and so was partially over their plane, and thus could see the back of the auditorium) started quietly edging toward the doors. Bill spotted a few escapees, teleported them back into their seats, and telekinetically locked the doors. A quiet but increasingly frantic crowd began to gather around the exits.

Yvonne began faltering when about half the audience had joined the very quiet stampede for the locked exits. She petered out, mumbled, "Thank you," and bolted off stage and between planes, heading in the direction she thought held the exit to Bill's 3D labyrinth.

He shot after her like an arrow. "Hey! Vonnie! What's wrong? You only got halfway through!"

"They hated it," she said, voice thick and shaky.

"Nooo," Bill said unconvincingly, "Whaaat? How can you tell, you didn't finish! You didn't even get to the part where the heartrending wailing of the trillions of children that will never get a chance to be born synchronize with the screeching of every support beam in every building in every city in the world collapsing at once!"

"I know."

"That's the best part! It ties it all together! The rest of it doesn't make sense without that part, it's like, 'hey, why does this screeching metal sound like it's coming through a baby monitor?' But then it's like, 'ohhhh, that's genius—'"

"I know," Yvonne said. "But I don't think they even got the part that represents the mirrored horror of consumer and consumed as their inevitable collision rushes closer and their screams echo off each other's faces. Do you?"

Bill was silent for a little too long. "It was probably just the acoustics in the auditorium," he said. "If it wasn't forming its own echoes and messing up yours, they would've gotten it, I'm sure!"

"No, no, this just isn't my crowd. They don't understand my work. I'm just..." A freak. A monster. She was trembling all over with anxiety and embarrassment. "I don't—I don't know how to make it make sense to anyone who hasn't experienced it. You know?"

Bill's glow faded as he gave up on trying to reassure her—and that just made her feel guilty on top of everything else. He put a comforting hand on her shoulder (and in her shoulder, and through her shoulder). Somberly, he said, "They have experienced it."

"They... what?"

"Every shape here went through the '2nd-Dimension Incident.'" His distaste for the sanitized phrase dripped like venom from his words. "Their realities were burning while I liberated the people that deserved to be here. They've seen exactly what your poem's about! Some were dying as I pulled them through!"

That explained a lot—because, Yvonne gathered, they were still dying. Half of the shapes in Bill's compound seemed trapped in an eternal state of dying but never dead, always bleeding, always burning. She figured that was one of the things that made outsiders assume the King of Dimension Zero was some sort of tyrant, imprisoning and tormenting his people.

She was trapped in an eternal state of collapsing inward on herself. She understood. Sometimes when you wanted to save someone, that was the best you could do. Sometimes you just died forever and it was better than being dead. Sometimes things never improved.

"I guess they're just too stupid to get it," Bill said. "I get it."

"Thanks for trying to get me an audience anyway," she said. "Even if no one liked me."

"They'll like you if they keep listening to you," Bill said insistently. "If we keep doing shows, they'll crack and appreciate your stuff eventually! They can't hold out forever."

Yvonne laughed. It came out a little strained, but it was nice to vent some of the tension. "Seriously, Bill."

"I am serious! I can make them listen, they'll do anything I say."

"Nooo, no thank you no. I don't want to get an audience like that."

"Fiiine. But you're brilliant, and you deserve fame and popularity, whether they give it to you or not."

"And that means the world to me. Really," she said. "But I don't know if I really want fame and popularity. My work's not for everyone—all I really want to do is express myself and reach the people who do get it. Like you. As long as you get me, I don't need anyone else."

He cast a resentful look back at his own people (who, incidentally, were still locked in the auditorium); but he said, "That's right. You don't need anybody but me."

####

"Okay, obviously the poetry recital wasn't the way to go," Bill said, floating back and forth across Yvonne's living room as he brainstormed. "And you're not up for parties yet. But there's gotta be some way for my people to get to know you."

"Do they have to get to know me?" Yvonne feared the question came out sounding whiny.

"Yes," Bill said, then quickly corrected himself. "I mean... no? They don't haaave to? But they should?" He snapped his fingers. "A meet and greet!"

"No!" The thought of that much attention was terrifying. Especially after her disaster of a poetry recital.

Bill's arms drooped. "Aww."

"I'm sorry. I wish I could be more fun or outgoing. You really do deserve to be with someone who can keep up with you..."

"Whoa, whoa, hold on! I didn't say any of that," Bill said. "I don't want you to be more fun. I want you to have more fun! This is for you!"

"I... I mean... thank you." She wasn't sure if that made her feel better or worse.

"You're already perfect to me, it's just..." He gestured toward her window; for a moment, the usual patch of space visible outside became instead the patch of space where his people's compound floated, "all of them that don't see it. I've been in this dimension millions of years, and you're the only good thing to ever happen to it! Everyone else should see that, too!"

"Come on, I can't be the only good thing to happen to Dimension Zero. You happened to it, right? You brought your people to your Dream Realm..."

"You're the only good thing to happen to me," Bill said. "Don't take this the wrong way, but—I'm so lucky you got stuck here with me."

"I'm the lucky one." How had she found the one person in the multiverse who could understand her soul through and through? The one person who'd never judged her for what she'd done, never been horrified? She was a black hole on every level—mentally, emotionally, medically, financially, and literally—and here he radiated all the light and happiness in the universe—again, both metaphorically and literally. He was pure life, all enthusiasm, all energy, thriving on socializing and friends and dancing and partying and always on the move. All she could do was drain him... and yet, any time he was across a room from her, she caught him looking at her like she was the sun in his sky.

All that without even mentioning that he was a king! Or a god! She felt like she'd fallen into a romance novel. "I don't know what I'd do without you."

"Me neither." He slid an arm around her to pull her closer.

And she gasped in pain. "Bill—"

Bill immediately let go and raised his hands up next to his wide eye. "Whoops! Bad time?"

"Y-yeah." She winced as the energy she'd absorbed crackled through her body and was sucked into her singular heart. "S... sorry."

"Hey, no harm done," he said. (Well—not to him, she thought. But she knew what he meant.) "You can't help it." He leaned away from her, giving her more space.

She tried to still her trembling as she waited for the initial surges of pain to die down. "I—wish I could be—better for you."

"Don't," he said. "You're perfect just the way you are."

"Depression and health issues and all?"

"Depression and health issues and all. I wouldn't have you any other way."

How had she ever gotten so lucky?

####

He knew something was wrong before she even called him. He could hear her howl from halfway across the Dream Realm.

He teleported straight to her apartment, checked her room, her neighbor's room, Zzub's room—none of them were pleased to see him invite himself in under the gaps in the doors—and then waited, fiddling with his flip phone in his hands and pacing the hallway until she found a phone and called him. He answered immediately. "What happened?"

"Bill." Her voice was hollower and echoey-er than usual. She sounded like she was crying. "I— I— m'sorry—"

"Where are you?"

"The library."

Bill knew which library she meant. She liked to go there because it had automatic doors and a very patient librarian who'd turn pages for her. He was there in five seconds.

Yvonne was huddled in a corner; there was blood on the floor and a ring of spectators giving her a very wide berth.

Bill could guess what happened. He hoped it wasn't the librarian she liked—but then, knowing her and how self-conscious she got about these little accidents, she was probably never coming back to this library again, so he supposed it didn't matter who had died.

He was used to the occasional fearful or hateful looks when he went out in public; but right now, he felt like he was getting a lot more glares than the situation warranted. Particularly since he wasn't the one who'd just killed somebody.

He didn't even ask what had happened. He just escorted her outside, shielding her from the onlookers and holding her as tightly as he could, arms embracing her multiple times over; but not half as tightly as she held him.

He got the whole story once they were back in her apartment: apparently, some paparazzi had gotten a shot of King Zero out on a coffee date with a mysterious void, found out from the baristas that he'd met her there several times recently, asked around until they found out her name and where she lived, and interviewed her neighbors. A tabloid, The Zero-D Inquirer, had published a whole story about Yvonne and everything they knew about her relationship with the king. Some sick freak had even used a space telescope and the strangeness of the spacetime in Dimension Zero to retroactively get pictures of them months ago on their first date, when they were engaged in—ahem—a tidal disruption event.

Bill's opinion on media attention had evolved over the eons. In his home dimension, he'd once seen them as remorseless mercenaries, sometimes eager to help him and sometimes out to discredit him based on whatever they thought would benefit them the most; now, he welcomed whatever attention he could get, on the off chance that it might be good. He'd rather clean up after bad publicity than not get publicity at all. 

Yvonne didn't feel the same. She thought getting any kind of public attention was humiliating. And that had been before people started recognizing her as the king's girlfriend.

Today an alien had confronted her at the library over rumors about something Bill had allegedly done. Something about a refugee camp that had been atomized? (Which he probably had done, but like, not in the last few decades at least, and really he'd done everyone else a favor by clearing up the space, so what was the big deal!)

Yvonne tried to tell them to stay away, don't touch her, it would kill them; but they'd just gotten more aggressive... and...

"Look on the bright side," Bill said. "At least they'll never bother you again!"

Yvonne started crying harder. Bill wasn't sure why she didn't find that more reassuring.

"I need to find them," she whispered.

"Who?"

"Their—their family. Their friends. I need to tell them what happened, and—and—and tell them I'm s-sorry—and—ask what I can d-do, and..."

"No, no, no. Shh." He wrapped the plane of his body around her. "Let that jerk's death be their problem, not yours. You didn't do anything wrong."

"I—! I killed—"

"They killed themself on you. Don't punish yourself for being the scene of a suicide."

She relented. "Please stay?" She pulled his embrace in.

"As long as you need."

####

The rest of the day was a Nothing Day. Bill stayed in the dark with Yvonne (boring though it was—hey, that was what a decent partner did, right?), fingers laced in ghostly fingers.

"How do you get used to this?" Yvonne whispered.

"Eh, it isn't that hard," Bill said gallantly. "Somewhere after the first hour in the dark, I think I started dissociating from the sensory deprivation, so now I'm trying to see how fast I can reach enlightenment—"

"No, I mean—" The bathroom's shadows shifted as Yvonne turned slightly, changing the trajectory of the light rays she was pulling off of Bill. "How do you get used to being a living graveyard?"

A chill crept over Bill's unheld hand.

"Because, everyone I knew—everyone in my whole solar system—got sucked into me, when..." She pulled in a shaky breath. "And, you said that—when your dimension..."

"Yeah." The chill crept up his arm. He curled his free hand into a fist. "Yep."

"I can't stand it. Knowing they're dead but they're not gone. They're all still trapped inside me. They're all with me. All the time."

"I know," Bill said. "I know, I know."

"S... sorry, I..."

"S'fine." He looked at his light dancing across the walls, golden streaks formed in pulsing ribbons like an aurora borealis.

No—it wasn't his light.

"Did you know that the white noise you get on TVs and radios are echoes from the Big Bang? In a normal dimension, I mean. Dimension Zero didn't have a Big Bang."

"Oh, yes—from the radiation. I was studying astronomy when..." She petered out, and Bill wasn't sure whether it was from the memories or from self-consciousness. "Sorry. You were saying?"

"Well, it's not just Big Bangs you can hear echoes of! Other big cosmic events can stir up the static, too! Supernovas, god battles..." He trailed off. "I—can still hear my dimension. When it—burned." (Yvonne sucked in a tiny gasp.) "And the... Nobody knew what was going on, but there were all these emergency broadcasts—not that they did any good—and people on the airwaves trying to find out what was happening... people just—screaming..." He shut his eye, immediately regretted it, and opened it again to stare at the streaks of light. He didn't know how Yvonne could stand the dark like this when her ghosts were haunting her. "And their broadcasts are still—still in the static. I can hear them. I can read their messages in the white noise. I don't know how nobody else hears them! It drives me crazy, having to hear them all screaming and screaming and everybody's acting like they don't hear a thing— Have you ever heard them?" He turned his pleading gaze on Yvonne. Somehow he knew that if anybody else could hear them, it would have to be her. She understood. She'd been there. She was like him. If anybody would be able to hear...

Her voice was small. "No. I'm... I'm sorry." As he sagged away from her in disappointment, she said, "But—I believe you."

"Thanks." Coming from her, that meant something.

"Do you think they're...? I mean, did your people have—souls?"

"You know? I never found out." He uncurled his fist and stared at his own palm. Was he the ghost left behind after the flesh burned up, or was he what you got when you transformed an entire body's worth of matter, E = mc², into pure energy? Did the distinction matter anymore? "I've tried to talk to them, though. Through the static? I've shouted at them, written to them, made my own broadcasts... And they never reply. They just keep screaming."

He'd had to force himself to start talking; but now that he had, he didn't know how to stop. There was a crack in the dam and he couldn't keep it from cracking open wider, spilling out: "And the worst part is, I don't know if it's because they're just echoes or if they're in eternal agony but they can't hear me or if they'd just rather scream than talk to me—or maybe I'm why they're screaming! Maybe that's why nobody else can hear them, it's not because of my weird powers, they just start screaming whenever they see me—!" It took a concerted psychic effort to shove the floodgate shut before any more could pour out. He pressed flat against the wall, reminding himself where he was: if he was feeling something beneath his down-but-not-south side, he wasn't in the second dimension. If he was feeling anything at all, he wasn't back in that awful day when everything had stopped existing.

"Oh, Bill. I'm so sorry." Yvonne rubbed his arm sympathetically. He braced himself against the sensation of part of himself ceasing to be—against the memory of his matter evaporating as he became pure energy—grounding himself with the tiles on his back. "It sounds awful."

"It sure makes it extra annoying when the TV signal's on the fritz."

"For so long, I've wished I could hear their voices again, but if I heard them like that—I don't know if I could handle it. How do you...?"

He didn't answer until he'd leaned up against her side, close enough that his eyelashes twisted away deep into her compressed aether—this was one of those answers meant for her and only her to hear—and he whispered, "Music drowns them out."

"Music?"

"The louder, the better. Music and lights to hide the static. And other people. So you don't think about it."

"A... a party?"

"More fun than setting off a car alarm and staring into the headlights."

She didn't reply for a long moment. "It's funny," she murmured. "When it's bad, I have Nothing Days; and you have Everything Days."

"I guess I do." Bill laughed wryly. "I don't think of it that way, though. It makes my parties sound like a bad thing. They're not, they're fun. They make people happy."

He never had answered her question, how do you get used to being a living graveyard. He didn't know if you could get used to it.

He stayed there with her, in the dark, holding her hand, until she said that even the slight trickle of absorbed matter from his palm into hers had grown so overstimulating that it hurt more than it helped and she needed to be alone.

And then Bill silently slipped out of the room and out of her apartment.

####

By the next morning, no traces remained of The Zero-D Inquirer, its offices, or any of its employees.

The space telescope that had photographed them was reduced to cosmic sand scattered across Dimension Zero.

He left her backstabbing, gossiping neighbors alone. She'd be horrified if he retaliated against them on her behalf.

He'd just have to wait until they weren't her neighbors anymore.

####

Bill never went out in public undisguised with Yvonne again.

####

"I'm making you a condo," Bill said.

"Oh—no, Bill, we talked about this. You don't have to, really. I don't want you doing something that big for me..."

"Then don't think of it as me doing something for you. I'm doing this for me," Bill said. "I can't stand thinking about you living here with the backstabbing creeps who blabbed about you to the Inquirer."

"We don't know for sure that it was someone here. And most of my neighbors are so nice..."

"Yeah, the ones that get your door for you? How long until one of 'em gets the door for some nosy reporter and lets them walk around your apartment while you're out?"

She paused. "I—I don't think they would..."

"But what if they did?" Bill lowered his voice. "Or, worse—what if they let someone while you're not out? What if you're having a Nothing Day, and some jerk with a camera walks right into the bathroom without knowing you're there?"

"Bill...!"

"Slurp! Paparazzi pasta surprise!"

"Bill! That's horrible!" She sounded genuinely distressed by the idea.

Good. Distress would get her where wanted her: somewhere safe. "If you ask me, it's just what a creep like that deserves." His voice softened just a touch. "But I know you don't want that to happen. But how can you prevent it if everyone knows where you live and anyone can just walk right into your apartment!"

She didn't answer for a long moment. He waited. She would.

"Okay." Her voice was barely louder than a whisper. "I—I guess that's safest."

"Great. I'm glad you're seeing sense." He took her hands, as loosely as he could—he wanted to comfort her, not overstimulate her. "Just tell me what you want it to look like and consider it done!"

"Anything's fine," she said distractedly. "I don't want to be any more of a bother to you."

"Vonnie, it'll be harder for me to guess what you'd like than it would be to just follow your instructions! You're not bothering me at all." He squeezed her hands a little tighter. "Now tell me what you want."

####

"Oh, wow," Yvonne said. "It's beautiful."

He'd outfitted it with the works. Doors that opened based on passing in front of an infrared sensor—and nothing disrupted a beam of infrared light like a black hole. A voice-activated TV and radio. A brand new couch and coffee table that guests would hopefully use someday, a tiny half bath with a tiny sink for said alleged guests but no space wasted on a tub, shower or kitchen; a small empty windowless "bedroom" where Yvonne could retreat on nothing days; voice activated lights and speakerphone; and it was all just so thoughtful that Yvonne hardly knew what to say.

(The problem with voice-activated everything, it would turn out, was that the TV and radio also activated everything, including themselves. The TV and radio would have their voice activation privileges revoked within a week. Which wouldn't stop them from messing with the lights and phone, but at least they couldn't tell themselves to get louder.)

"It's a little under decorated," Bill said, gesturing around at the blank walls—black, lit by recessed lighting. "But we can customize it more later! Whatever you want—"

"It's perfect just like this," Yvonne said.

"Hey, don't say that for my sake! Really, it's no problem to change things up—I don't want you living in a blank black box—"

"No, I love it," Yvonne gushed. "I prefer minimalist spaces! It doesn't distract from what's in them. I can set up all my art on the walls, lay out all my sculptures on the floor...

Bill's arms drooped in disappointment; but he said, "Hey, speaking of your sculptures—do you want me to make some pedestals for the tiny ones so you can actually see 'em?"

"Oh, that would be great! Thank you, Bill."

He was so good at this.

"There's just... one thing," Yvonne said.

"Sure! Name it!"

Yvonne gestured upward. "Could I get a roof?"

Bill looked up at the swirling starry nebula. Oh, right. "You sure? Lots of natural liiight!"

"I'd prefer privacy."

"Maybe a skylight?"

"Privacy."

Bill sighed; but with a wave, the room had a ceiling, featurelessly identical to walls and floor. "Feels kinda claustrophobic, don't you think?"

"It's perfect." Yvonne pulled a light kiss from Bill's edge, and for a moment he froze, luxuriating in feeling himself swirling around her and into her.

But he mumbled to himself, "Yeah, well—maybe I'll give it a retractable roof later."

####

(Okay, if you discovered this fic without reading my other writing and I've kept you around for three chapters, then I've probably got you hooked, time to start advertising my other fics.

If you're thinking "gee, this is great so far, I wish this writer had another 238,000 words of Bill Cipher-centric fic with like another 400k being edited," have I got the fic for you: the world's slowest post-canon Bill redemption fic! (Also available on tumblr but I recommend the AO3 version.) It's Bill stuck in a human body, but like if humanizing Bill irritates you, know that Bill himself is at least five times more pissed off about it. I've been told by people who aren't me that it's the human Bill fic for people who hate human Bill fics so maybe give it a shot??

Anyway this fic is actually part of that one, chapters 119 through ??125 probably??—before we can redeem him, first we've gotta look at just how bad he can get—so if you wanna see where this particular interpretation of Bill goes some trillion-odd years later, that's the fic for it.

But enough advertising!!! Let me know what y'all thought of this chapter!

And I hope you're ready for the honeymoon to start waning. :)

[artsymeeshee]

[donut-dragon-art]

I just rewatched gravity falls :p

[ckret2]

Bill Cipher and his first girlfriend, with whom things are going SO great and they're NOT discovering conflicts in their lifestyles, at all!

she's fine 👍

You're gonna read this chapter and think "wow! bill's being so considerate and understanding and supportive! how strange and unexpected!" Hold on to that feeling of unease, my friend.

If you wish to fully appreciate the vibes of the party scene, please play Tom Cardy's "Transcendental Cha Cha Cha," put it on loop, open up a second tab/music program, play "Macarena," also put it on loop, set them to top volume, and suffer.

[Love/Gravity] Will Tear Us Apart - ch 2

also available on ao3! and if you missed ch 1 it's here!

####

Bill waited in the coffee shop an hour after they were supposed to meet. It was the same coffee shop they'd had their first date in (it turned out Yvonne wasn't very adventurous with new places), so she had to know where it was. Sure, the asteroid it was on had drifted a little away from the nightclub—but not that far! Bill had found it! Sure, he was omnivident within Dimension Zero, but still. After an hour she should have found it, right?

He called the number she'd given him. A complete stranger answered. He hung up.

He informed the cashier that he wanted to get messed up and ordered four shots of their strongest tea. The cashier informed him that they didn't sell tea in shots and he'd just have to order a cup like everyone else. He ordered a cup. That was basically five shots. Maybe he'd die.

After another half hour, he got past the depression and worked up the irritation to call back the number and berate the stranger on the other end for not being the person he wanted to call. The stranger was baffled until Bill let Yvonne's name slip. "Oh, Yvonne Torizon! She's my neighbor!"

"—and furthermore if I ever see your chump-nugget face in the street, I'll— Oh, she is?"

"What did you just call me?"

"Forget it, I thought you were someone else! You said you know Yvonne?"

It turned out that, since Yvonne couldn't touch a telephone without destroying it, she'd gotten permission to give out her neighbor's number, and whenever the rare call came through for Yvonne her neighbor let her know and put it on speakerphone for her. Which was how, at last, Bill got her groggy voice on the line. "Hello?"

"Hey, Vonnie! It's Bill! What happened?! Our date was supposed to be an hour and a half ago, right?"

There was a long hiss of silence on the phone that made Bill's flesh crawl along his sides. "You're... actually there?"

"I—yeah? Was I not supposed to be?" She was about to laugh at him. She was gonna tell him she was way out of his league, she was a serious musician and artist and he was just a chintzy deadbeat who'd awarded himself a paper crown and she couldn't believe he was stupid enough to think she was actually interested in him, he was gonna burn down half this stupid dimension and eat the survivors alive—

"Oh—omigosh, I'm so, so, so sorry," Yvonne said.

He wasn't loathed! He relaxed. "What, did something come up?"

"No, I've been having a nothing day. I just thought—I thought you were going to stand me up."

"What?! What'd I do to make you think that!"

"Nothing! I... guess I just convinced myself. The last few people who asked me out didn't show up..."

Dubiously, he asked, "Didn't they? Or did you not show up and assumed they didn't either?"

There was a long silence; and then Yvonne's horrified whisper, "oh no..."

Bill burst out laughing. "I think we need to work on your self-esteem! Maaaybe over coffee?"

Voice small, Yvonne said, "Do you... still want to go out?"

"Yvonne Torizon, I have done nothing but long for your company for the past hour and a half, and I'll keep longing for it until you get here."

Faintly in the background, Yvonne's neighbor said, "Guy of extreme moods, huh," and was quickly shushed. Yvonne said, "Uhhh, I... I-I'm having a nothing day, and I can't really... stop. But—maybe tomorrow? If you still want to?"

He'd have to ask what the heck a nothing day was. "Sure! Breakfast?"

"Okay. What time?"

"As early as you want! I don't sleep!"

"Neither do I."

They met as soon as the cafe opened.

####

"What is it?" Yvonne asked.

She could see what it was, of course—Bill was so used to being the only one who could see in 3D that he still used 2D wrapping paper, which formed a little ribbon around the object he'd laid atop their usual cafe date table. She just couldn't tell what it was. Something rectangular with something ribbony spooled up inside.

"It iiiis..." Bill made a show of unwrapping the useless wrapping paper ribbon. "A mixtape! Ta-daaa! A little tenth date gift. You keep letting me hear your poetry, but you've never heard anything from my people. I'd play you something myself, but I haven't figured out how to reconstruct the keyboard we used in my universe, sooo..." He gestured extravagantly at the tape—in the process, letting go of it so it hovered in the air. "I figured this would be easier!"

"Oh." She studied the tape. "I... that's very sweet Bill, but... I can't..."

"Can't listen to it?" Bill said. "I thought of that! Which is why I also got you..." From underneath the table (maybe he did know how to hide things from 3D people), he pulled up some kind of 2D machine with an empty slot about the size of the tape. "A boombox!"

"Oh!"

"Aaaand gift number three..." Bill reached down again, "your own personal boombox operator!" He pulled himself out from underneath his chair and set himself on top of the table.

Yvonne stared where the original Bill had been. He was gone. If he hadn't been a king, he should have been a stage magician.

The new Bill leaned on one elbow, pulling out as seductive a pose as could be managed on a small cafe table with the barista shooting them dirty looks. "See? I thought of everything!"

"Oh, Bill, that's so sweet. I can't wait to listen to it."

Bill zoomed up, floating over the table. "Then don't wait! C'mon, let's blow this popsicle stand."

"Bl—? Why, where are we going?"

"Somewhere we can play this tape, duh!" His eye rolled out of the way so he could chuck the rest of his tea down his fang-lined throat, and he popped the lid off Yvonne's drink to dump it on/into her. "We can't just play it in the middle of a coffee shop! Think of the other customers!" His typical speaking volume suggested he'd never thought of the other customers in his life. "We wouldn't get any peace at my place, my subjects are always coming up and pestering me—'hey Magister, we can't agree whose turn it is on the GameSquare!' 'oh Magister, all the water separated into its component molecules, can you fix the shower?' blah blah blah—so I was thinkiiing maybe your place?"

"Oh." Her twisted core flipped nervously. So far she'd managed to avoid letting Bill see her home. "I... I don't know, it's... I never have guests over, and I haven't cleaned, and..."

"Vonnie, I'm keeping my expectations low. I know you can't clean for guests. You can't even hold a broom," Bill said. "I mean—I guess you can vaccuum the floor, but not without the downstairs neighbor losing his ceiling."

She giggled. "I guess that's true."

His eye curved in a mischievous smirk. "And you do wanna hear your tape, right?"

He was crafty.

####

"Could you get the door? It's unlocked."

"After you!" Bill held it open and gestured Yvonne in. "How do you get inside your apartment when you don't have guests?"

"My neighbor gets the door for me. The one you talked to on the phone?"

"What do you do when your neighbor's out?"

"I don't mind waiting in the hall. It doesn't really make a difference to me." As soon as they were inside, Yvonne scooted away from the door so she wouldn't accidentally tug it back open. "Don't latch it shut, please. Just push it up to the door frame. If it's not latched I can open it myself when I leave."

Bill eyed the hallway—the worn, stained carpet that probably hadn't been replaced since before the apartment building had tumbled into Dimension Zero, the cracked concrete walls that had been halfheartedly painted a color that he mentally dubbed landlord pea soup green—and said, "You don't mind this?" He followed her in, nudging the door nearly shut behind him, took in her apartment, and said, "Oh."

Her home was nearly barren. A small studio apartment with no furniture except an old sofa and coffee table kept in the hope of visitors who might make use of them; nothing in the kitchen; no TV, no radio, no books; no clothing, no purses or bags; nothing to write with or on; nowhere to sleep, nowhere to rest. The windows were cracked and dusty.

Most of the kitchen cabinets had had their doors pulled off; one was hanging on by a single hinge. Half of the kitchen sink was missing, and from the way the edge of what was left stretched out over the kitchen floor like a long strand of metal spaghetti it wasn't hard to guess where the rest had gone. 

The ceiling fan had been torn half out of the ceiling, all five of its arms broken off, and now it dangled precariously by a couple  of wires. It swayed in Yvonne's direction as she passed underneath.

Only the floor and the walls—buckling in places where she'd gotten too close to them—were decorated. The walls were covered in art other people had hung up and the floor was covered in sculptures and figurines other people had helped place, both because visual art was one of the only things she could enjoy without having to touch it and to remind herself not to absentmindedly rest on the floor or lean on the wall.

Bill hovered slowly over the statues, inspecting them curiously. Dread squeezed Yvonne's core as Bill's piercing gaze raised from the art to her kitchen. Why would he want to be around someone like her who lived somewhere like this? Someone who could do something like this to her home?

He pointed at the kitchen cabinets, and her heart dropped. "So is this an avant-garde art installation, or...?"

"No, it's—sometimes I get too close, when I'm not paying enough attention, and, um..."

"Okay, that's fine! Just wanted to make sure you aren't attached to this look." He snapped his fingers. The walls straightened out with a surprised creak. The dangling cabinet doors returned to their rightful places; the missing ones were replaced with infinitely thin, perfectly smooth plastic-like panels, the same color as the other doors. The strand of steel snapped back to the sink like a stretched rubber band that had just been let go and flattened itself out along the edge. It wasn't a functional sink—the front wall of the sink's bowl was missing, any water would more likely spill onto the floor than go down the drain—but it looked uniform and intentional enough that most people probably wouldn't notice at a casual glance. 

He turned his gaze toward the ceiling fan, and Yvonne quickly said, "Oh, no—no, don't put the fan back, please. My gravity makes the blades turn when I pass it, and it bothers me a lot when I'm overstimulated. Sorry, I know you're helping out and I shouldn't be picky, and I really am grateful, but—"

He snapped his fingers. The fan and its dangling wires disappeared entirely; the hole in the ceiling closed up. "How's that?"

She would have sighed in relief if she were capable of exhaling. "That's perfect. Thank you so much."

And just like that, her home was livable again. It had taken Bill less than ten seconds. It was so impossible for her and so effortless for him.

"Don't mention it." He floated across the living room, pointing at the floor. "You know, I've always wondered why more of you 3D people don't do that."

"What?"

"Use your floors like gigantic shelves! I mean, some do—but usually only for junk! But I guess most aliens would rather use their floors for 'walking.'" He scoffed.

He delicately set the boombox on her coffee table (to her fascination, it remained upright, balanced on one edge), and sat on the worn sofa. "So! Wanna hear your tape?"

####

Bill had been hovering next to her unmoving and unblinking for the last forty minutes. "Well?" he asked eagerly. "Whatja think?"

"It's weird!" she said. "Oh—s-sorry, that sounds mean. I didn't mean it that way, I like it, I think it sounds good—"

Bill burst out laughing. "Relax, I like weird! But tell me what parts you thought were weird! I want to know if the same things sound weird to both of us or not."

"Okay, um— A lot of the songs have that sound that seems like it just keeps going up...?"

"Oh, is that weird?" Bill said, pleased. "It's pretty common in our music!"

"And it's a lot faster than I would expect, from the romantic lyrics. Usually I think of love songs as slow?"

Bill laughed. "That's because this is party music! I mean—I picked out the ones with more romantic lyrics, yeah—but you're supposed to dance to this stuff!"

"Oh," Yvonne said. "Okay, I guess it does sound like dance music. It, um... has a beat...?"

 That was the only similarity she could come up with? "Is it that different from music at the parties you go to?"

"I don't know. I mean, I don't go to parties. Ever. I guess."

"Really?" Out of all the things he knew about her, that was the first that made him stare at her like she was an alien. "Were parties not normal on your world, or...?"

"No, they were, I just—was always kind of shy. And, no one really invited me out..."

He stared at her thoughtfully. "What do you do for fun, anyway? I mean, besides me."

(She let out a surprised giggle. "Bill—!")

"Seriously, do you just stare at the pictures on the walls? There's nothing else to do here." Bill gestured around her apartment, barren but for the art. "Are you out socializing? Hitting the town, tearing it up at poetry open mic nights?" He could understand that. It'd been the same for him when he started clubbing. He'd basically given up reading entirely once he discovered drinking.

"No, I—I actually barely ever go out. I spend most of my time here."

"Seriously? No wonder you're so gloomy, your life sounds boring as hell. No offense!"

"It is," Yvonne admitted. "But, I don't really... have friends. I get along with a couple of neighbors, I guess, but we don't hang out..."

Bill perked up. No friends? "Hey, that's nothing to be ashamed of! I didn't have any friends when I was a kid!"

"Really? But you seem so... likable."

"I know, right? The other kids were missing out! But hey, you've got nothing to worry about—I'll be all the friend you ever need! Promise!" He wrapped an arm around her. "In fact, I can expand your social life right now! I've got a party tonight at our place. You should come!"

"Oh," Yvonne said. "No, I couldn't. I don't... know how to party."

"You show up and have fun. What's there to know!"

"But I wouldn't know anybody there..."

"You'd know the party host," Bill pointed out. "And I've told everyone about how great you are—I'm sure they'd love to meet you!"

When she hesitated, he softened his voice and pressed on, "Hey—I just want to see you have some fun. I worry about you. Seems to me like you spend all your time hovering in the middle of a dark living room brooding over your mistakes."

"Not all the time," Yvonne mumbled. "Sometimes I brood in the bathroom."

"Just try it, okay? And if you hate it, you can go home!" Bill said. "But I just want you to be happy. I don't want to see you wallowing over what happened—I want you to move on with your life."

"How do you move on after something like what I did?"

Like what WE did. "One step at a time," Bill said simply. "But before you can take a step forward—you have to turn your back on the past."

####

"Have you seen the alien the Magister's been bringing around?" someone asked. "He's some kind of circle."

"Really? A circle?"

"That's what everyone thinks, anyway, but it's hard to tell. He's like... completely flat black. Doesn't reflect any light. It's freaky to run into him. He's just a floating dark void."

"Huh."

"And the Magister's got to escort him everywhere like a body guard. I hear if anyone touches him, they die. Just like that."

"What? That's stupid, there's no way."

"Well—just look at him."

They fell silent as a moving void floated through the room; amidst the colorful lights and reflective body paints of the party, the empty gap in reality was mesmerizing and terrifying. The Magister Mentium traveled beside the void, body distorted so he looked like an eyeless limbless line, one hand occasionally flickering in and out of existence as he gesticulated. It was the way he usually looked when he was communing with the third dimension.

The second shape had to concede that if anything looked like it could kill you with a touch, the featureless circle certainly qualified. But the second shape didn't want to think about that. "Didn't know the Magister was into circles."

Butting into the conversation as he passed, Kryptos said, "That just shows you how accepting he is of freaks, stupid." Loftily, he added, "Anyway, she's a higher dimensional circle. That's called a sphere."

The other two shapes contemplated the concept of a higher dimensional circle. "Like some kind of angel or something."

"An angel of death. Maybe that's why they call them 'spears.'"

"Yeah, if angels howl," Kryptos muttered, but stopped himself there before he could say anything worse. He wasn't about to insult Bill's taste in shapes—where people outside his inner friend circle could hear, anyway—even if his girlfriend's poetry was pretty awful.

"Angels howl?" the second shape repeated, somewhat alarmed. The first one just shrugged and said, "Eh, she's in the right place."

It was true: of all the words that could be used to describe the Magister Mentium's parties, "quiet" wasn't one of them. Were they in a dimension with normal laws of physics and biology, the volume would be deafening, with dance music from a dozen dimensions strung together indiscriminately. Sometimes multiple songs could be heard discordantly over each other when different DJs were working in different rooms—or when the spacetime continuum got snarled and Bill had decided to wait until after the party to untangle their cheap facsimile of linear chronology. You typically had to scream just to be heard over the music.

And Bill was screaming now as he leaned toward Yvonne: "Isn't this great?!" If the music felt like a solid steel sledgehammer driving through a skull, Bill's shrill voice was a sharp poker jammed through one eardrum and out the other. "The lights, the music, the people—it really makes you feel alive, doesn't it!"

It made her feel alive in the sense that, if she weren't alive, she wouldn't feel like she was being murdered. Dozens of lights flashed from every angle, their beams shotgunning her with photons; it wasn't just the lights that flashed, but the dancers, painted in colors that glittered and glowed and strobed on and off depending on how they turned; the music was pounding and throbbing and her broken core pounded and throbbed with it; and even Bill himself flickered brighter and dimmer as he spoke. It hurt to stare at him, he was so bright. Without eyelids—without eyes—she didn't even have the option to look away from him.

"Adding those extra strobe lights really took this party to the next level," Bill said. "And hey—did you check out the snack table? You should check out the snack table! We've got drinks strong enough to kill somebody! Or they would if I let them die, anyway. They don't do anything to me, though. They probably won't do anything for you either, but hey, try 'em anyway, at least they taste pretty—"

"I've got to leave," Yvonne said.

"What? Why, party's just started!"

"I can't— The lights are too—" She shuddered at a strobe flash that felt like lightning splitting a boulder in half. "It hurts."

"Ohhh," Bill said. "Yeah, go, get outside, I'll be right there. Just gotta pass off hosting duties—HEY!" Bill's sudden shout made Yvonne flinch again. "YOU, hept with the ugly body paint! Situational awareness! Outta the way!"

A heptagon whose body paint really wasn't that bad stopped dancing to look at Bill, noticed the void heading her way, and quickly scooted out of the danger path.

Bill zipped up over the party, scanned the crowd, and descended next to his target. "Hey, Krypt—"

Kryptos started and spilled his drink as Bill, to all appearances, teleported next to him. "Bill! Come on, stop doing that."

"Get used to it," Bill said. "Take over party host duties. I'll be back in a few minutes."

"Uh—sure. What's up, you never bail on a party."

"It's no big deal. Yvonne just needed a break, that's all." Bill wasn't looking at Kryptos; his attention was across the room, watching Yvonne as she headed out the door, both making sure she was okay and that everyone around her was okay too.

"Seriously? What's her problem, the party just started." Kryptos rolled his eye. "Talk about a wet blanket." He flinched when Bill abruptly rounded on him.

Bill double-checked to make sure Yvonne wasn't in hearing range, then snapped, voice low, "Lay off. She can't help it, all right? She's got health problems. Chronic pain issues, that kind of thing."

Kryptos had expected to be set on fire or something for his insolence. When the anticipated punishment didn't come, he said cautiously, "Yeah? Really? She looks fine."

"'She looks fine,' of all the stupid—she's a black hole. Imagine," Bill said, "if your entire body was crushed to the size of a marble."

"Oh," Kryptos said.

"And then a billion other people were crushed into you from every side. And all of them were compacted down into a marble. Around you."

"Oh."

"And then a whole planet was crushed around you," Bill said. "And then another ten or eleven planets."

"I think I get it."

"You can imagine how that might be painful."

"I... Yep. Yep, if I wasn't dead by that point, I guess that would be pretty painful."

"Yep," Bill said. "It would feel a little something like this!" He snapped his fingers. Kryptos's body crushed to the size of a marble. "Hey Krypt, who's the wet blanket now? I don't see you dancing."

The marble, predictably, didn't answer. See how he liked a couple hours of that.

Bill flicked Kryptos across the room with his thumb. "Where's Lynn—Lynn!"

Across the room, a heavily inebriated line asked, "Huhh?"

"I'm going out! You're in charge!"

"I caaan't. I already took... what'd I take..."

Bill snapped his fingers. Every intoxicating molecule in Lynn's body was ripped off her neurotransmitters and ejected from her digestive tract by the nearest possible exit. The surrounding partiers exclaimed in disgust.

"You're in charge," Bill repeated.

"Stop doing that!"

"You can have it back in a moment, just gimme five minutes!" He rushed out after Yvonne.

####

Even in bright spaces, Bill had gotten better at finding the outline of Yvonne's body based on the slight distortions it left on the space behind her; she was hunched over, ghostly hands cradling her head on either side of where her eye should have been. Still, when Bill came out, the first thing she said was, "I'm sorry."

"Hey, don't worry about it! It's not your fault." He hovered his hand behind her back, but didn't touch; whenever her pain flared up, consuming part of Bill hurt her even more than it hurt him—and unlike him, she didn't enjoy the pain. "Just overstimulated again?"

"Yeah," she said, voice tight and terse.

"Okay! That's fine. We can spend a few minutes out here to recover, and—"

"No," Yvonne said. "No, I-I need to leave. Staying out here won't help."

"What! Why not? It's perfectly calm out here!"

"Because the walls on your club are like, one atom tall."

Bill turned to look at the two-dimensional club with the one-atom-tall walls, which did absolutely nothing to prevent all the music and flashing lights from blaring out above and below the thin barrier. "Oh. Right," he said. "I keep forgetting I'm not the only one who can see over those anymore!"

Yvonne chuckled weakly.

"Let's just get you home." Bill floated away from Yvonne, giving himself a little space to work as he bent reality. The club didn't move; and the asteroid hosting the apartment building where Yvonne lived didn't move; but the space in between them bent, so that suddenly two buildings that used to be galaxies apart were now about ten seconds apart. Windows on the apartment started popping open to see where the abrupt musical cacophony and flashing lights were coming from.

Yvonne called into an already open window, "Zzot, it's me. Can you get the door?"

A hivemind of flying insects leaned out the window. They buzzed, "Oh, Yvonne. I thought you were staying out late?"

"It was too much for me."

"I'll let you in." Zzot almost swarmed back inside—but collectively froze, hundreds of eyes staring at the glowing yellow triangle near the corner of the building, fussing with a few threads on the fabric of reality that had gotten tangled when he'd folded it on itself. "Hey. Is that...?"

Yvonne followed their gazes. "Oh—that's Bill. The guy I told you about."

"Is that King Zero?"

"He... doesn't like being called that outside of official capacities, actually—"

"Isn't he some kind of tyrant—?"

"He's not! He's a good guy—nobody understands him, that's all."

"Yvonne, are you sure? Have you heard the things he's done to his people—"

"It's all just—just propaganda," she said heatedly. "Everything he does is for his people! He's so caring, and so helpful and generous with gifts, and—you've never met him! You don't know him like I do!"

Zzot sank back, several of their swarm landing contritely on the windowsill. "All right, all right," they said. "I'll be right out."

Bill gave the cloud of insects a dark, angry look as they withdrew inside.

Yvonne floated to the apartment's front steps and waited there, cradling her head in her hand. It throbbed with pain; she shouldn't have gotten so loud, she'd exacerbated her own headache.

"Hey!" Bill zipped to her side. "Why are you waiting around for someone else to get the door? I'm right here!"

"Oh," Yvonne said, "I didn't want to be a bother—"

"Either you bother me or you bother the neighbors, and I like being bothered! This is what I signed up for!" He pushed open the door, arm stretched double length to hold it. "After you."

"Thanks."

Zzot stopped dead on their way out of their room when they saw Bill coming into the lobby behind Yvonne. His cheerful voice at odds with his sharp glare, Bill told them, "Don't worry! I've got her." He arched his arm around her, ghosting his fingertips over her event horizon—showing off how he could get closer to her than anyone else.

(She winced; he must have forgotten being touched hurt her when she was overstimulated, but she didn't want to remind him when he was trying to be sweet.)

Zzot sank back with a noncommittal buzz, half of them landing on the wall, and left Yvonne to Bill.

As they floated up the stairwell to her room, Yvonne said, "Sorry I'm such a killjoy. Maybe I'm not just not very fun."

"Naaah, you're just outta practice," Bill said. "You've been miserable for so long that you've forgotten what fun is like! I'll help you learn again! We'll work you up to parties."

She hurt too much to laugh. "I hope you're right."

At her door, she said, "Oh. I left my key with Zzot—"

"I've got it." With a flick of a finger, like the lord of a manor silently gesturing for the servants to make themselves scarce, Bill made the door unlatch itself and swing open. "Tada! Just what you need: walls with ceilings! You're welcome!" He shut the door behind her after she came in.

Yvonne immediately made a beeline for the bathroom. She had no use for any of the equipment in there; but she kept the windows in the main room uncovered so that she could enjoy the view on her good days—so, on her bad days, the bathroom was the darkest room she could recover in. She'd hide over the tub, behind the half-closed curtain, until pulses of pain stopped lancing through her collapsed core.

From behind the curtain she could see the shift of faint gold light on the wall as Bill leaned in the doorway. "Hey," he called, "is everything alright? I mean—besides the obvious?"

It was nice that he was so worried, but even that faint shift in the light made her dizzier. She didn't have eyes to close and she couldn't turn away because she sucked in light from every side; she tried to sink down lower into the tub and meekly called, "M'fine, this is just—how I recover. Could you stay a little further from the door?"

He joked, "Don't tell me you're trying to get rid of me already." But he moved, and the shadows shifted bluer and deeper.

"Thanks," she said weakly.

"You know, being stuck here probably isn't helping your pain problems. This neighborhood's a real dump. You deserve to live somewhere way better," he said. "I'm gonna move you out of here."

"To where? Dimension Zero is a dump—literally. All we have to work with is whatever falls in: there's no new building materials, there's no undamaged planets to build on..."

"Hey, who needs planets? My people have always built in the sky! I can whip you up a luxury condo, no problem! It might even have walls taller than one atom."

She laughed weakly.

"As long as you get away from here," Bill said. "The neighbors seem like a nightmare."

"Would you really build a condo?"

"Sure!"

He really sounded serious. "No, that's—that's fine. You don't have to do that much for me."

"You sure? It'd be pretty easy! Just tell me how many rooms you want and what colors you want them—gold, blue, ultraviolet, plaid, ska, metric, maybe magentaaa...?"

She wished she could squeeze another laugh out. "No, really. I'd feel bad if you did all that just for me. But—I appreciate that you would." She'd have to tell him properly just how much that meant to her later. She was already starting to improve, but at the moment she was in too much pain to be enthusiastic. "I'm lucky I know you." 

"I know," Bill said; and she was grateful he understood her.

####

(don't worry about those red flags. it's fine. everything's fine. though i'm interested to hear which ones stand out to y'all!

looking forward to hearing y'all's thoughts so far!)

[ckret2]

hey do y'all remember the howling void? This one? From TBOB?

do you wanna read an entire fic about how Bill screwed things up with his first girlfriend? hahaha yeah you do!!

here's chapter 1 of 7-ish. no content warnings for Bill's behavior apply... yet; but he's already waving red flags before he even manages to ask her out.

also available on ao3 if you'd prefer to read it there!!

[Love/Gravity] Will Tear Us Apart - ch 1

####

When Dimension 2 Delta (posthumously named "Euclydia") as well as pieces of more than half a dozen adjoining 1D and 2D dimensions (posthumously named "Euclydia's least fortunate neighbors") had spontaneously combusted and collapsed into Dimension 0, reality's maintenance workers had had to get creative to keep the whole multiverse from destabilizing. They'd restructured D0's closest surviving neighboring dimensions to keep things propped up, in a manner similar to replacing a parking garage's crumbling concrete support column with a ladder balanced on a stack of flattened pizza boxes. They were operating on laws of physics held together with quantum bubblegum and electromagnetic duct tape.

The self-styled King Zero—who, for the sake of convenience, we'll call "Bill Cipher," even though he wouldn't adopt that moniker for hundreds of billions of years—did what he could to help stabilize Dimension Zero from the inside, in spite of having no diplomatic relationships with the people outside his "Dream Realm." But the efforts of an immortalized mortal with no training in cosmic civil engineering were—to borrow a phrase that also wouldn't exist for hundreds of billions of years—not exactly OSHA compliant.

As a consequence, Dimension Zero was far from watertight. It was riddled with wormholes and interdimensional rifts.

And all kinds of things were falling in.

####

Absolutely fuming, a quadrilateral we might as well call Kryptos barged into Bill's room. "The aliens built another slum on the edge of reality."

Bill was leaning on a wall, watching over a line. "That's great, Krypt," he said dismissively. "How's it feel?"

The line—whom we'll name Lynn Segment—had body paint that alternated between pitch black and glowing gold depending on the angle light hit it at, and at the moment she was shivering so hard that her paint seemed to flash on and off like a strobe light. She looked at Bill with an enormous pupil and mumbled, "I can taste the sounds colors make."

"Okay, fantastic! Then I got the chemical right! So why isn't it working?" Bill looked at a handful of spiral-shaped tablets—a pre-dimensional-liberation club drug that he'd spent the last couple of centuries painstakingly recreating from the molecular structure up. He extended his tongue and licked another one up. When it didn't do anything, he licked up half a dozen more, and incinerated the rest in frustration.

"Bill?" Kryptos tried again. "Magister Mentium? King Zero? Your majesty?"

"What! What?!"

"Slums," he repeated. "On the edge of reality."

Bill gave him a dead-eyed stare.

"They're in our Dream Realm. We didn't invite them to our eternal party—"

"I know, I know." He waved Kryptos off and returned his full attention to Lynn. "Maybe I only got the formula right on your pill?"

Without warning, Lynn's body inverted itself, intestines and veins splayed out in every direction like squirming thread-thick tentacles, blood vaporizing into a fine mist. Bill extracted the molecules that had once made up a tablet, re-verted Lynn's body, directed her blood back in around her eye in a stream, and swallowed the reformed spiral tablet.

Suddenly incredibly sober, Lynn shrieked, "What the hell was—!" She gagged, clapping a hand over her mouth.

Bill directed her stomach contents back where they belonged. "If you're gonna throw up, do it in your own room." She socked his arm.

"Biiill," Kryptos whined.

Bill sighed loudly to make sure he knew just what an inconvenience this was. "I heard you the first time." And then, to the other shapes, he seemed to momentarily vanish, flickering out of sight as he rotated in impossible directions (i.e., "up"), looking for the clumps of living matter cluttering up his empty void without his permission. "Ugh, I see them. When's the last time we had a pest problem, like fifty years ago? I can't catch a break for a minute..." He didn't feel like cleaning the dimension today; he tried to think of a compelling excuse to procrastinate. "All right, fine, let's go."

"Go where?"

Bill rotated back into view. "To see if there's anything worth taking from the aliens before we incinerate them." He stretched. (The other shapes pressed together to keep out of the way as his limbs filled up the room.) "So are you two losers coming or not?"

####

All the matter that belonged in Dimension Zero had either been brought in by the shapes—99% of which consisted of their own bodies—or had been created by Bill in the intervening ages since his dimension's liberation. All this matter was concentrated together in the byzantine, inescapable pleasure palace where the Magister Mentium ruled over his people. 

All the matter that didn't belong in Dimension Zero had fallen in through the leaks into the dimension and clumped together as space garbage. Loose change, lost socks, pocket lint, people, buildings, planets—if it was unlucky enough to be close enough to a big enough rip, it could fall into Dimension Zero.

Typically, Bill went around every few years to disintegrate the rubble and refugees and add their stored energy to his own reserves. It kept unworthy interlopers from invading their eternal party (which was what he told the others), and it ensured the shapes didn't have anywhere to escape to (which he'd never say out loud). But he had, admittedly, been slacking off for a few decades now. Long enough for some lucky aliens to fall in, survive, and try establishing civilization. The "slums" Kryptos had mentioned were located in a debris field accumulating near the intersection of several particularly active wormholes; no new planets had fallen through yet, but there were a few rocks big enough to support a small nation if their inhabitants were able to take advantage of their full three-dimensional surfaces.

Among other things, the rock they visited first happened to support a night club.

A night club with tables. For sitting at. What kind of a loser sat at a night club?

"This is the worst club I've ever seen," Bill griped. "No strobe lights, no dance music, no psychedelics being peddled in the restrooms..."

"Speaking of." Lynn nudged Bill. "If that pill's not doing anything for you, can I have it back?"

"No." If he didn't get to have fun, why should anyone else?

She grunted and turned from him to lethargically scan the club.

When Bill had started kidnapping shapes from neighboring burning dimensions to fill the emotional void left by the complete demise of his own liberating the shapes of his own dimension—who were so grateful and so alive—and haphazardly snatching up anybody he could reach choosing which of them were worthy of joining him in his nightmare dream realm, Lynn Segment had been one of his first and most eager converts. She had been just like him: embittered by her shallow world and its stifling social expectations that came with it; desperate to escape the pressures of reality into a dream world of endless leisure, pleasure, and parties; willing to risk burning it all down if it would show everyone just how close-minded and short-sighted they were, if only she'd had the means to do so.

She hadn't had the means. Bill had. And she was eternally grateful to him. She was a bit of a drag whenever she sobered up, but that wasn't often and Bill intended to ensure it would stay that way. He was one hundred percent certain that he and Lynn would remain besties until the end of time—or at least for the next, say, one trillion years—the same way he was one hundred percent certain that the core of his followers would always be his commune of several million 1D and 2D shapes, and there was no way it would ever dwindle to, say, a dozen-odd ragtag aliens who mainly pretended to like him because he kept the interdimensional cops away.

"I dunno. It's not that bad," Kryptos said. "It's kinda nice to get a break from the noise."

Kryptos, on the other hand, he didn't plan to keep around long.

Although Lynn and Kryptos couldn't see it, Bill had herded them to float over one of the unoccupied tables near the door. About half the tables had various aliens sitting at them; the nearest neighboring table had a pair of what looked like tarantulas with bear heads. One of them was squinting all eight eyes at Bill, as though trying to figure out whether he was who it thought he was; Bill turned to face the tarantula bear directly, showed it its own face mirrored in his eye, and then showed it its flesh mummifying and dissolving to dust. It quickly looked away.

Kryptos, who'd been following their king's advice to practice looking in the third dimension, carefully tilted upward and said, "This place has one of those anti-floors."

"Ceiling," Bill said.

"Sealing," Kryptos repeated. "Why's it called that, because it seals off the building?"

"Sure, why not." Bill didn't even need to deliberately "look upward" to see it. Since he'd been born, he'd always passively seen the stars in his peripheral vision. Aliens' three dimensional rooms, with their upward ceilings and downward floors, made him feel like he was trapped between two vast solid stones just waiting to crush him. He always felt a little claustrophobic under ceilings. (He always would.) 

The tables were oriented toward a low stage with a couple of bizarre contraptions that Bill suspected were alien instruments—one device with a keyboard looked sorta like a 3D reimagining of an instrument he'd learned to play as a small child—and a microphone, which was currently occupied by a 3D alien made up of weird fleshy tubes. It was poetry open mic night. Reading off a soggy notebook paper, the alien said somberly: "Summer never ends; the world spins out of control; my tea's overbrewed."

The audience applauded politely.

"Thank you."

Lynn mumbled, "This is aliens' idea of a night club?" She fake gagged, then coughed when she accidentally made herself actually gag.

"This is the worst." Bill elbowed Lynn. "Hey—which alien do you think would be the most fun to squeeze and pop like a meaty balloon?"

"Ooh, good question..." She turned on her side so she could scan the room from one side to the other, taking in each guest in cross sections.

Bill was just making plans to take the mic, announce he'd be performing a poem called "Fire Alarm," and set the whole club on fire; when something he'd never seen before floated onto the stage.

An eerie silence seem to fall over the club

Like a hand dragging through a lake and making the leaves on the surface part around the intrusion and merge back together behind it, the room seemed to bend around a perfectly circular void that had ripped in reality. Support beams and wooden boards visually warped in its path and then straightened out untouched after it passed. It was like a dark tunnel through spacetime—the exact opposite of the force that had created Bill. The red curtain at the back of the stage fluttered as it passed, pulled toward the void. The empty space stopped behind the microphone—then hovered toward it and said quietly, "Hello? Is this on? I—" The speakers squealed with feedback. "Oh."

"What the heck is that?" Bill asked.

"What?" Kryptos tried to tilt himself properly to see what Bill was looking at.

"There, whatever's on stage at the mic. It looks like some kind of... black hole in the fabric of reality?"

The bear tarantula that Bill hadn't terrified turned toward him to helpfully answer, "She's a black hole."

"Oh." Ask a stupid question... He'd heard of black holes before, he knew what those were. He'd thought they were bigger. Well, all right, who needed psychedelics? This view was trippy enough to keep him entertained the next couple of minutes.

He noted that the bear tarantulas were quickly packing up their things. He waited until they'd left the table; then stole one of their abandoned drinks for himself. (Trying to figure out how to drink a 3D beverage was a briefly interesting challenge; but unfortunately the substance itself had no more impact on his brain than the useless spiral tablet had.)

"Um, hi," the void said. "My name's Yvonne Torizon, and the name of this poem is 'The Bone-Crunching Pain Of Collapsing Into A Singularity Mingled With The Guilt And Grief Of Involuntarily Killing Everyone You Know And Love When They Came Closer To Try To Help You Which You Never Had Time To Emotionally Process Because Any Mass You Absorbed Expanded Your Event Horizon Until You'd Crushed Your Entire Solar System Into Your Soul.' Abridged version."

And then she shrieked into the microphone like a dying death metal vocalist for five minutes straight without pause.

When she finished, the night club was dead silent, and half as full.

The void awkwardly floated in the middle of the stage. She mumbled so quietly the mic barely picked it up, "thank you."

"Wow," Lynn said. "That was almost as bad as the time you tried to make entropy audible."

Kryptos said, "Can we burn this dump down already?"

"Yeah. I needa go find something strong enough to make me forget that." Lynn looked where Bill had been a minute ago. She just saw an equally-baffled Kryptos. "Bill?"

As Yvonne self-consciously slunk off the stage, Bill was zooming up to meet her. "Hiya oh wow that was amazing I've never heard anything like that it was so deep and profound and raw and honest it felt like you were screaming directly to me you're a true artist you really get it I mean nobody ever gets it but you get it I just don't know what to say that was genius!"

Yvonne was silent until Bill ran out of words. "Hi," she said. "Um—thanks. That's nice of you to say."

He floated a little closer. "Can I hear the unabridged version?"

She floated a little further. "Oh—you don't want to hear the unabridged version. It's six hours long."

Fervently, he said, "There is nothing I want more."

"No, I couldn't. It's—it's very personal. I can't imagine someone else listening to it."

For a moment, Bill's golden corona flashed red—no one said no to him—before quickly returning to gold. She was an alien, she didn't know she was talking to someone important. He didn't want to force her. He wanted her to like him. "Okay, okay, you win! At least let me buy you a drink."

"I... sorry, I... can't hold a glass. It gets sucked into my... me."

He processed that. "Okaaay... how about I hold the glass and pour it on you? Does that work?"

"I guess, but—why would you go to that much trouble?"

"Because," he wracked his brain for something clever-sounding, "your gravitational pull is irresistible."

"What?"

"I'm feeling a really strong force of attraction. Between us," he tried. "I wanna... wanna make... spaghetti. with you."

She stared at him. He was pretty sure that was staring. He floated there like an idiot as the awkward silence dragged on like the heat death of the universe. Where was the nearest wormhole he could dive eye-first into? He was never flirting again. First and last time. This was not one of his talents.

"Wait," she said. "Are you—asking me out?'

"Yes!" he said, relieved. "Yes, that's what I'm trying to do."

"Oh. Thank you, that's... I can't remember the last time somebody—I mean, sure."

"Great!" He tilted toward the bar. "Shall we?"

As she followed him, she said, "Sorry, I—didn't catch your name?"

He looked at her. "Oh. You don't know me."

His surprise must have been audible in his voice, because she immediately said, "I'm sorry—"

"No no, that's cool! It's cool." He'd momentarily expected himself to be infuriated; but, it actually was cool. This was the first time in millions of years that he'd met someone who didn't already know who he was. He'd almost forgotten it was possible.

He wasn't beholden to his reputation. He could start fresh with her.

So don't say King Zero, don't say the Magister Mentium. "Call me Bill," he said.

As they passed Lynn and Kryptos on the way to the bar, he gestured excitedly at Yvonne, as if to say, look what I caught!

Somewhat dubiously, Kryptos mouthed, "A circle?"

"Shh!" Bill hissed, "She's a point, she's a point that looks like a sphere—shut up, you don't know anything!" He waved them off and hurried to catch up with Yvonne.

Lynn—who had also discovered one of the bear tarantulas' abandoned drinks and downed it herself—blinked dazedly. "What's a sphere?"

"A higher dimensional circle," Kryptos said.

"Then just say that. There's no need to make up stupid new words for..." She shook her head, mumbling to herself, and turned to leave.

Kryptos watched her go, then turned to Bill, not sure what their instructions were now or if they were even allowed to leave without him.

But as far as Bill was concerned, Lynn and Kryptos had ceased to exist.

####

The Magister Mentium regularly assured his followers—millions of 2D shapes, nearly but not quite like himself—that they were all from the same world, a world he had liberated. But all the same, many of his followers had heard rumors that the Magister's home reality had been completely destroyed—destroyed so thoroughly, in fact, that the destruction had spread to neighboring 2D realities. It would explain why so many of the shapes had different understandings of history, or science; or why they looked so alien to each other, eyes and mouths in the wrong places, hands and feet the wrong shapes, skin the wrong texture, faces ranging from "strange" to "monstrous."

But the Magister said those rumors were spread by nonbelievers and saboteurs who hadn't deserved to be liberated and wanted to undermine their progress. The Magister said his followers looked so different from each other and remembered different histories because they were at different stages in their spiritual journeys, on higher and lower levels, and thus now that they were all united on a single level they could see how they'd all perceived reality differently. He never publicly explained what these spiritual "levels" consisted of except in broad strokes. He only told people how far along they were on their journeys in private. It made it harder for them to compare notes.

Most importantly, he assured them that they were all from the same reality, and that the reality was called Euclydia. The word sounded strange to them, as though it was a word some alien had assigned their home without ever seeing it. Sometimes, they thought the Magister said it like the word was alien to him, too.

All the same, they believed him. They had no choice but to believe him. There was nowhere else for them to go.

####

"So, that's how I accidentally devoured my whole solar system and everyone I've ever known and loved," Yvonne said. "What's your story?"

It was the most pitiable story Bill had ever heard, and he'd only paid attention to half of it as he tried to think of some safe, lighthearted conversation topics to bring up once it was his turn to speak again. Gossip he'd learned while eavesdropping on strangers; the interior decor in children's hospitals (considering the contents of her story, he gathered she'd had as many youthful opportunities to develop opinions on the topic as he'd had); dying; dyeing...

All of which he had to chuck out the window at Yvonne's question.  "Oh. Me."

They'd only stayed at the club for another half hour before Yvonne had gotten uncomfortable and suggested they go somewhere less crowded (there were maybe fifteen people in the whole building), and then they'd spent another hour at a coffee shop she knew until they were politely asked to leave after Yvonne accidentally sucked a stool into herself. It had been one of the most fascinating sights Bill had ever seen. He'd been tempted to start feeding other furniture into her singularity, but she was so embarrassed about the stool thing he figured it would ruin his chances for a second date. And now they were on a lone asteroid, with no other people or innocent furniture nearby, stargazing.

Inside, she'd looked like nothing but a vague floating black ball; but outside, free from the electric lights, lit only by faint and distant nebulas, she was faintly visible in a way she hadn't been indoors. She wasn't just a lightless ball; that was more like her "head." Beneath it, the rest of her translucent body hung down, like a dress—or a half-real black funeral shroud—and she had two faint arms and hands she didn't seem to use for much other than nervously wringing her fingers around each other.

And she was very pretty, in a funereal, surreal sort of way. Like a goth alien ghost. 

"Oh, me. I'm from the second dimension," Bill said.

"Which one?"

He grimaced; but after a reluctant pause, he said, "Euclydia." He said the word as though it had both the name and the flavor of a bitter medicine.

Yvonne flinched in surprise. "Oh. Isn't that...?" 

"Yeah." Bill laughed wryly. "It is."

"Then you know what it's like to lose your world, too. I'm so sorry."

Any attempts to say no, it wasn't like that, we're all fine, we were liberated died before he could get a syllable out. "It's not that bad," Bill lied. "I mean, sure, I lost one world, but gained another—and this one's great!"

"You're with them, right?" She bobbed toward the three-dimensional labyrinth glittering silver-white at the center of Dimension Zero like a vast crumpled wad of brittle, flaky marcasite, visible from anywhere in the dimension like the eye-heart of a panopticon.

Home.

Bill had built this eternal party palace for the poor suckers neighboring his home dimension who'd gotten trapped in here with—er, sorry—for the grateful followers from his own dimension whom he'd liberated alongside himself. For those who'd taken his teachings to heart and learned to tilt into the third dimension, it was clearly exposed to outer space above and below each level; but for those who hadn't learned, it was an endless maze of rooms and nightclubs and hedonistic pleasure dens with nowhere to step outside and catch a breath. He'd taken full advantage of his new access to the third dimension to arrange his labyrinth in strange, impossible geometries: several parallel realities stacked atop each other like pancakes, perpendicular realities tilted to intersect at 90° angles. These intersections were strange, terrifying places, where cross-sections of people and items you couldn't see might come hurtling through at any moment, revealing themselves in flashes of bone and internal organ before vanishing again—and they could no more see when you were coming than you could see when they were. It became the habit to let out little chirps or whistles or cries when approaching these intersections to ensure no one accidentally barreled through just in time to be T-boned into bisected halves by another shape.

Eons before the dimensions containing earths and humans came to be, eons before English speakers with a taste for the macabre began using the phrase "non-euclidean geometry" as a shorthand to describe environments unnatural, otherworldly, and hostile to sane and rational life, the shapes under King Zero's control began using the exact same phrase the exact same way. There was something viscerally wrong about these intersections. Their geometry was not of Euclydia.

(Which was ironic, since by human definitions of mathematics and geometry, these flat planes with their easily-mapped XYZ cartesian coordinates were perfectly euclidean. They just weren't 2D.)

(The shapes might not have known what human euclidean geometry was, but to be fair, they didn't really know what it was to be Euclidean, either.)

Before Bill could confirm that, yes, he was with them, Yvonne said, "I heard they were all prisoners who weren't allowed to leave their fortress."

Defensively, Bill said, "Hey, whoa, no one said leaving's illegal." (He hadn't outlawed it—he just tended to capture and torture anyone who tried to abandon him, that was all.) "We just don't want to leave. We're all here on purpose—we were trying to reach a higher dimension! Aaand landed in a lower one, but, pfff," he shrugged expansively. "Same end result. This is our Dream Realm. Our paradise!" He gestured at the rest of reality. "Anyway, there's not much to do in Dimension Zero outside our place, so, why leave?"

"I've never really thought of this place as a paradise." She curled up smaller, arms around her trailing body, looking half like she was hugging her knees to her chest and half like she was carrying an armload of laundry. "But—I kind of get it, I guess."

"Do you?" That was exciting to hear. Aliens typically didn't rate his Dream Realm highly. Probably because he hadn't made it for their needs. And tended to kill them.

"I ended up here after inverting out of existence—but, before I got here, I couldn't get within a solar system's distance of anybody without involuntarily pulling them in and crushing them with my gravity." She held herself tighter, as though she were trying to turn herself inside-out now. "But, for some reason, here I just... don't affect people as much until they touch my event horizon? And my event horizon's a lot smaller. I don't know why. The laws of physics here are just... odd, somehow."

"Oh, that's because I capped how strong gravity is."

"You—what?"

"Capped it," Bill said.

"The gravity."

"Yeah!"

She stared at him.

He elaborated, "Okay so once the force of gravity pulling on something reaches a certain strength, it just kinda... stops? See, whenever I let it get any higher, it started messing with all our stuff," he gestured to his distant glittering 2D compound, "so I just went, hey, why does it need to be any higher? So I capped it."

She stared at him.

"It's pretty complicated, I don't know all the fancy science terms for it—I had to DIY a couple of fundamental forces and exploit a loophole in physics—buuut now I can just slide the gravity up and down with my brain. Like a dimmer switch!"

She stared at him.

"You're welcome," he said cheerily.

"You can't affect gravity," she said, "what are you talking about?"

He paused. "Oh. Riiight. Didn't mention that part, did I." Because he'd been trying to hide his identity. Well—as long as he'd blown his cover, maybe he could at least salvage things by using it to convince her that he was cool. Chicks digged powerful guys, right? "Yeah, I control everything! This entire dimension!"

"No way." He couldn't see so much as feel that she was turning away from him, as though embarrassed to face such a ridiculous claim. "You're making fun of me."

"Hey, no no no, I wouldn't do that!" Not until he was sure she liked him enough to let him get away with it, anyway.

He was losing her. How could he convince her of his power without terrifying her? He blurted out, "What's your favorite color?"

"What?"

"Favorite color!"

"Uh—magenta...?"

"Ooh, tricky one. Not a big fan of magenta, personally—but okay! Here ya go!" He gestured with both hands out toward the wild, swirling, technicolor sky. "Bam!"

And just like that, the colors between the shimmering stars shifted. Shades of pink and purple and red-blue filled all of visible reality. Even Bill himself momentarily popped a deep pink as he focused on the feat, before he noticed and, with a noise of disgust, brushed the magic hue off his golden glow. "Okay, it coulda looked a little better—but in my defense, magenta's hard."

Yvonne was silent for a moment, taking in the view—the entire expanse of reality that had been changed on a whim at one word from her. "How did you do that," she asked, voice hushed. "You'd have to... You're the king of Dimension Zero?"

Giddily, he said, "Haha, yep! Guilty as charged!" He felt so cool. He was impressing the living daylights out of this black hole, he knew it—which was no mean feat, getting daylight out of a black hole—

Her voice took on a sharp edge he hadn't heard from her before. "You are making fun of me."

All his coolness evaporated in a panic. "What?" Stupid, he never should have told her! Why would she care about a couple dumb magic tricks? Everyone knew what King Zero had done, she thought he was a monster, she had to—"No, no way! Not even a little bit!"

"Why else would you be talking to me? Did you just ask me out because you pity me?"

"No, of course not!"

"But what do we have in common?! I'm just a loser—a-a monster that destroys worlds, all I've ever done is hurt the people I care about—" (he tried to reach out for her; she jerked back, away from his touch) "—and you've acted so kind, but why would you want anything to do with me when you're basically a god—"

"Come on, I don't believe in gods—"

"You created a dimension! You made a paradise for your people! You can make matter and control gravity, and all I can do is destroy—"

"How did you think I got that kind of power?" Bill demanded. "Do you think I woke up with it?"

Yvonne fell silent.

"Why do you think I'm still alive? Huh? I'm not from one of the neighboring dimensions that got caught up in the '2nd-Dimension Incident'! I'm from the Euclydia! Ground zero of the fire! If my entire dimension was destroyed, why do you think I'm here?"

She must have known the rumors. Any alien who'd heard the name "Euclydia" had also heard the story of the monster who'd singlehandedly destroyed it. To the higher dimensions, all the word "Euclydia" was was the name of the victim in a cosmic horror story.

She stared silently at him for a moment. Finally, she whispered, "Why... why did you... do it?"

"For the same reason you did." Please understand him.

"Oh." She understood. "Oh. I'm... sorry. I'm so sorry." She'd said sorry when she'd learned what dimension he was from. This one, somehow, felt more real. "How did it happen?" Not what did you do, but how did it happen. As if, in spite of his own role, it was just something that happened to him.

His instincts screamed no. But—she'd get it, wouldn't she? She'd done the same thing. She'd understand. He needed someone to understand. "I've never told anyone else. So—keep this to yourself, all right?" He leaned in closer—

—and she jerked back. "Don't touch me!" He could see her curling in on herself, her ghostly hands wringing each other below her hollow head. "Don't— You'll hurt yourself. I don't want to hurt you."

"You can't hurt me."

"Have you ever seen what a black hole—"

"Hold still," he said. "Look at this. I'll prove it." Before she could escape, he pressed his hand into her, as though he were trying to cup her face.

She let out a strangled shriek and jerked back from him, "No no no—!" But it was too late; his hand had passed through her event horizon. She burst into noisy, tearless sobs as his arm stetched out and spaghettified as more of him was pulled into her body—and more and more—and more and more, and more and more...

Around the time she'd devoured about five times more matter than his whole body should have contained, all in the form of arm, her confusion managed to break through her panic. Her sobs subsided to confused hitching hiccups as she croaked, "What?"

He pulled back his arm, stretching and snapping the spaghettified limb like it was a long string of taffy; and his arm regrew from his side. "See? Good as new!" He waved his new fingers at her. "You can't consume me! I don't think you'd be able to even if I shoved all of me in you on purpose. You've got nothing to..." He trailed off. "What's wrong?"

She was shaking all over; the view of space behind her distorted from her gravitational waves, like ripples around a stone dropped in a pool. Voice thin, she wheezed, "I thought—I thought I was going to kill you... I—"

"Oh. Hey, hey, I'm fine. See?" He spread his arms, letting her see his pristine shining shell. "Cheer up, you didn't kill me. I'm right here!"

She reached for him, then froze, fingers shaking, as though two opposing forces were trying to drag her forward and hold her back and she was trapped in the middle. He reached the rest of the way and caught her hands. His hands were instantly crushed, palms collapsed to a point and fingers dragged in after. He didn't pull back; she didn't let go.

"Still here," he repeated. "I'm still here. Say it."

"You're... still here." Her voice wasn't any stronger; but Bill was sure he felt her grip somehow, impossibly, tighten. "You're still here. You're still here."

"And I'm not going anywhere," Bill said. "You said you're made of, what—the matter of twelve planets? Not even a star? You're tiny. I'm not falling inside you; you..." he sprouted a third arm so he could gestured out at all of Dimension Zero, the whole Dream Realm, the distant swirling colors, "...are inside me."

She was silent as she processed that. Even though she had no visible face, Bill was beginning to be able to feel where she was looking; her attention was like a pressure that settled heavily wherever she was focused, not enough to crush but enough to make it hard to breathe. He could feel her dark gaze scanning the roiling nebulae above.

"Okay," she whispered. She tugged him closer and he wrapped an arm around her wispy, ghostly back; and she pulled his embrace infinitely inward.

He had a voice that could be heard from every part of Dimension Zero; but he confessed what had truly happened to his home in a whisper pressed up to her event horizon. Where the words would fall into her dimensionless heart and never escape.

####

To anyone close enough to see what was happening, what they did looked like an infinitely-regenerating fractal solar panel sliding an eyeball across its surfaces as it infinitely folded up into an infinitely small origami singularity around an infinitely black core.

But nobody could possibly be close enough to see what was happening. The view was sucked into Yvonne's horizon, never to be witnessed by anyone but her. 

When a black hole consumes a star, it pulls it in a little bit at a time, in a string of light, like a hand unravelling a ball of yarn by winding the yarn around its fingers. Because of the way light bends in the vicinity of a black hole, no matter what angle you see it from, the light seems to surround the black hole in a ring, like a halo.

From every point in Dimension Zero, it was possible to see a halo of golden-white light at the center of reality.

For six hours, the howl of the void echoed through the Dream Realm.

####

And from that moment on, Bill would always be a freak in bed.

A moment of silence for his capacity to enjoy boring vanilla shape-on-shape missionary sex, dead before it was born. Only freaks, aliens, and monsters would do it for him now.

But to be fair to Yvonne, he probably would have ended up that way regardless.

####

She was shivering; the optical illusion of distorted light surrounding her rippled like a heat mirage.

"Everything okay?" Bill asked.

"M'fine." Her voice was thick. "It's just— It's been a long time since anyone's been able to physically touch me."

"It's been a long time since anyone's been able to physically hurt me." He hadn't realized how badly he'd needed to hurt.

She terrified him. Nothing had ever shaken him to his core the way her voice did. When he gazed too long into her abyss, he could feel it gazing into him. It pulled him in. He wanted to fall into her and never come out. He wanted to be crushed into her core and...

He tried not to think about what he wanted to happen to him.

He loved her. He was going to spend the rest of eternity with her.

####

For their second date, she stood him up.

#####

(FINALLY I get to start posting this! I first thought up Bill's first girlfriend the black hole who screams into the mic as poetry in like November 2023 and I started writing this fic like a week before TBOB came out. And I know it was like a week before, because when TBOB came out and gave him a howling void ex-girlfriend I looked like a goddamn genius.

This is part 1 of a 7-ish chapter fic about Bill and Yvonne. My goal is weekly-ish updates on Fridays and/or maybe Saturdays; I've already written it, it just needs editing and arting, but I fear I'm about to be in for a hectic couple months so we'll see how editing actually goes.

If you're like "so what's with this commune thing Bill's got, is this an AU," the answer is no!! It's not an AU! By present day, his only followers are the Henchmaniacs! This cult is just another relationship that Bill will inevitably screw up due to who he is as a person. You'll learn everything you need to know about this group through the fic. (But if you WANT to learn more while you're waiting for the next chapter, want a fic about the Axolotl?)

Do not be fooled by how sweet Bill is to Yvonne in early chapters. Watch the waving red flags. He's still Bill. This is, ultimately, not a story about Bill in love; it's a story about how Bill treats even the people he loves most.

Anyway!! I've been sitting on this a LONG time so I'm very excited to share! I look forward to hearing y'all's thoughts!)

[ckret2]

Does modern-day Bill ever think about Yvonne? I sorta doubt he is 100% fully over her, but is she someone he avoids thinking about? Or maybe he is completely moved on from her and whatever happened?

He brings up the howling void unprompted three times during The Book of Bill. That's more than he mentions most Henchmaniacs.

[ckret2]

and I left out the line on the same page as the second image where he's like "asking if I've ever been in love is like asking if a black hole liked your mixtape," because we don't KNOW that this black hole is the howling void.

but I know she is. in my heart.

[ckret2]

Chapter 118 of human Bill Cipher eternally grappling with the horrors of having a human body:

this is it, folks.

but more importantly: Ford having the BEST time of his LIFE.

####

"Er—Bill?"

Bill looked at Ford, fake smile plastered on his face. "Yello?" Something about Ford's tone made Bill's stomach flip in a way he didn't like. What's with the acrobatics, Chumbo ol' pal? What do you know that Bill doesn't?

They all relocated outside and were milling about as Soos tried to remember how he'd latched down all the sound and lighting stuff in his truck bed so that it didn't shift around; when Ford had anxiously sidled up to Bill, journal clutched in one hand and fiddling with his pen in the other, in a manner similar to the way he approached waitresses he thought might want to yell at him.

Without making eye contact, Ford said, "I... want to thank you for intervening when you did. To ensure Dipper and I didn't ruin Mabel's presentation or harm the little monster." (There was the thinnest hint of uncharacteristic affection in Ford's voice as he said "little monster.")

There was that stomach flip again. Why? Did Bill's subconscious detect a trap? Why couldn't it just communicate in proper words? Bill narrowed his eye. "Did you just thank me?"

"Yes, I've been trying to do that more recently." With complete sincerity, Ford added, "I've read that it's a good way to encourage people to repeat actions you wish they'd do more often."

Which honestly was 90% of the reason Bill ever thanked anyone for anything, but it was charming that Ford was only just learning it. "All right, smart guy, but why are you thanking me? What are you trying to get?"

For a moment, irritation flashed across Ford's face. "All I'm trying to 'get' is—" He took a deep breath, calmed himself, and started again: "You went out of your way to help Mabel—and, indirectly, the rest of my family. Myself included. And I wish you'd do that more often." He amended himself: "I hope you will do it more often."

Chumbo was doing jumping jacks in Bill's stomach now, and he couldn't figure out why. He gave Ford a tense smile. "Sure. You got it, Sixer."

Ford flashed him a quick smile in return—it was uncertain, but it also looked sincere, which just made his guts twist into even more knots.

Then Mabel called, "Grunkle Fooord! Do you want to look after Choink for a minute?" and the look of elation that graced his face could have cured cancer and inspired birds to take up choir. Giddily, he replied, "Do I?!" and didn't wait for an answer.

And left Bill feeling like his intestines and diaphragm were trying to quietly trade places.

Mabel had joined in helping Soos rearrange the truck bed, though with the fancy egg pillow and Choink in her arms she couldn't do much more than give verbal directions. When Ford came up to her, face bright with anticipation, Mabel held Choink out to him.

His brows shot up. He dropped his journal and pen in the grass in his eagerness to accept the piglet. He'd never been a natural with animals, or babies, or baby animals; his posture was clumsy and awkward as he attempted to properly cradle Choink in his hands. All the same, his face lit up with glee as he looked at her like she was the most fascinating thing in the whole wide world.

Bill realized he hadn't seen Ford smile like that all summer.

He hadn't see Ford smile like that last summer, either. He didn't think Ford had smiled like that in over thirty years. He certainly hadn't smiled like that at Bill. No, all Bill merited was the scowl of Dr. Surly McGrumpypants. But now here Ford was off in his own little world full of cryptids to meet and secrets to discover, doing what he was passionate about—a little world where Bill didn't exist.

Ford carefully sat, crossing his legs, and shifted the piglet to one arm so he could open his journal across his lap. He pointed at the page, apparently explaining his artwork to Choink; she leaned closer to inspect the journal, pressing her tiny nose against the page. Bill had never such unmitigated delight grace Ford's face.

Past the wrinkles in his cheeks and around his eyes, past the graying hair and the silvery stubble—for a moment, Ford really did look thirty years younger. He looked just like the dorky, enthusiastic, oh-so-easily-awed young researcher Bill had first met, the one who unquestioningly trusted and adored his Muse.

There was a process occurring inside Bill's body. It felt like a drop of ink dripping into water: a little pellet of something potent and colorful plunging into a body and dissolving, unraveling, stretching out in swirls and ribbons to fill the space in every direction, staining its container from the inside.

Hormone, was the first thing Bill thought—he was feeling some unasked-for hormone hitting his blood stream. A hormone that made his lungs and stomach flutter and flip and made his brain and fingertips and lips buzz. A hormone that made him short of breath and queasy and hot and—

The second thing Bill thought was, oh.

The third thing Bill thought was, aw, fuck.

This had to be his human body's fault, he decided. It had to be some punishment, he decided. Because this was the worst possible time this could have happened.

####

"Grunkle Ford, you've had Choink long enough," Mabel griped. "Let Waddles have his baby back."

"Sorry! I can't help myself, this is just so exciting." Ford held out Choink where Waddles could reach her. (He did not actually put her down.) "Isn't it exciting? A real, flying pig! Well—presumably it can fly. It's winged, at least, but the wings could be vestigial. Like penguins! Although I suppose they'd only be 'vestigial' if they're vestiges of wings that were functional in earlier generations; but wings are a new addition to porcine anatomy, aren't they? We don't have a reliable fossil record of pigasi. If they're not functional, perhaps they're... ornamental? Maybe for mating displays—?"

Crabbily, Bill said, "They work, alright?" He'd relocated to the half-log stair steps in front of town hall, where he'd been sitting for the past several minutes—he didn't trust himself to stand back up without losing his balance.

Ford processed that, then hefted the piglet into the air (to Waddles's squeal of displeasure). "So you will fly!"

Bill suppressed a groan. This was gonna be hell, he could already tell.

Bill had been in—ugh, he wasn't ready to think the word, it would make this whole crisis too real—Bill had had crushes before; but the way human hormones translated that emotion into bodily sensations was a nasty piece of work. If he'd been handed these symptoms without any accompanying context clues about what had caused them and asked which human ailment he thought he was experiencing, his top guesses would have been food poisoning, alcohol withdrawal, a panic attack, or multiple sclerosis. How did humans manage to reproduce at all? If this had been Bill's first exposure to what infatuation felt like, he would have spent the past trillion years systematically murdering anyone he developed a crush on.

"Hey, dude," Soos said. "You okay?"

Bill looked up at Soos and Melody from his stair step. "What?" he croaked.

"You kinda look like you're about to hurl," Melody said.

Could look worse. Could look lovesick. "Oh! No, I'm fine! This body's just..." He tried to think of a crime he could frame his flesh prison for. "Hungry. With all the excitement today, I guess I forgot a couple of meals." He tried to remember when he'd last eaten. Breakfast? Had he actually had breakfast?

"Oh, dude, I'm sorry," Soos said. "I guess those nachos weren't much of a meal."

Right. They'd gotten fast food on the way to town hall. "Guess not."

"We'll heat something up as soon as we get home," Melody said.

"But it had better be something fast!" Ford said. "Right? So that we can rewatch the video as soon as we get home?" He had somehow been compelled to give up his hold on Choink, and now he and Waddles were following her around—and oh lucky day, she'd decided to make a beeline for Bill. She gazed up at him with eyes full of piggish trust and serenity.

So Ford did remember he'd offered to watch the video with Bill. Ugh. The thought of sitting a few inches away from Ford as he fanboyed over a hatching egg made Bill a little nauseous. And suddenly he couldn't stand the thought of spending the night under the same roof as Ford. "Sorry, smart guy, I already made other plans. You'll have to watch on your own."

"Oh. Alright." And just like that, Bill had lost Ford's attention completely. Choink's interest had been caught by a remarkable clump of grass near the other end of town hall, and Ford was once again wholly focused on his newest object of fascination as he and Waddles trailed after her.

Bill dragged his eye away from Ford. "I'm gonna be out late, Questiony." He stood unsteadily. "Don't wait up for me."

"Uh, sure," Soos said. "You got supervision?"

Bill glanced around to make sure Melody wasn't close enough to do annoying things like ask follow up questions or verify Bill's alibi—nope, she and Mabel had joined Choink's entourage. He confidently said, "Yep! Got supervision covered!"

Soos gave him a thumbs up. "Okay, dude. Have fun!"

Yeah, he'd have something like fun, alright.

He had no idea which set of nerves was responsible for the horrid sensation in his abdomen that humans meant when they used the phrase "butterflies in your stomach"—but he bet that a sufficiently fermented drink could drown them.

Tyler was unlocking his bike to head home when Bill grabbed his handlebars. "Hey! Ty, buddy!" Bill had the feeling that his smile was a little too wide and he hoped it didn't look as desperate as he felt. "You said you don't have any Saturday night plans, didn't you?"

Tyler's face lit up.

Some guys would love to spend a weekend night sitting on a couch covered in grandma's lace doilies watching home movies about pig births with a nerd who fantasized about how much cooler his trench coat would look with a leather pocket protector. Bill wasn't one of those guys. He was Bill Cipher. Party host extraordinaire. He belonged in the nearest, loudest club—slamming back neon-colored drinks, staring into neon-colored strobe lights calibrated to induce as many seizures as possible, and dancing til his feet wore away to nubs.

But in a pinch, the local biker bar would do.

####

An incomplete list of the activities engaged in by Bill Cipher on the night of Saturday, July 20th and early morning of Sunday, July 21st:

Drank.

Tried to figure out how to cheat at darts without anyone catching him so he could impress the tough guys. Failed.

Drank.

Wingmanned for Tyler by making out with him in front of Manly Dan and Ghost-Eyes in the hopes they'd get jealous enough that one of them would finally make a move on Tyler.

Drank.

Vowed to never again make out with a human who wasn't down for weird eyeball stuff.

Drank.

Told half of the Discount Auto Mart Warriors when and how they would die. Caused Killbone to call his mom for the first time in three years.

Drank.

Stole the massive American flag hanging behind the bar, just to feel something.

Drank.

Attempted to call Keyhole and was told by an automated voice that his data plan didn't cover interstellar calls. Agreed to return the "borrowed" cell phone to its rightful owner in exchange for not getting his nose caved in.

Drank.

Got in a bar fight.

Drank.

Poured out thirty years of woes and regrets about how stupid he'd been to drop the helpful Muse mask before he got through the portal and showed Ford how great conquering Earth would be, and stupid to trust Ford when he said he'd finally come around and was willing to give Bill the formula to break out of Gravity Falls' barrier, and he should have just kidnapped Ford while he was between dimensions rather than stubbornly insisting to himself that Ford would come around and join the Henchmaniacs on his own if Bill just waited long enough—

To his fortune, he was slurring and sobbing heavily enough that Tyler didn't understand a single thing he said.

Drank.

Traded a five foot long boa constrictor to someone in a dark alley for the Heavenly Jeweled Spear that ancient legends claimed had raised the first land from the endless sea.

Drank.

Found himself in the woods, half naked, with no memory of how he'd gotten there and only the vague recollection that he'd been searching for his eyebat ex-girlfriend Iris.

In lieu of anything else to drink, grabbed a handful of hallucinogenic moss and burned it so he could inhale the fumes.

Hallucinated.

Attempted to treat the burns on the palm of his hand from when he set the moss on fire.

Hallucinated.

Ran into his own doppelgänger, who tried to strangle him to death for no reason at all! Escaped by kicking the creep in the gut.

Hallucinated.

Ran into his doppelgänger again. In preemptive self defense, attempted to strangle him to death. The creep kicked him in the gut and escaped.

Hallucinated.

Confronted the horrors.

Hallucinated some more.

Woke at dawn with no recollection of the past few hours, fully clothed, at the Roamin' Holiday Motel, in bed with a cultist. It wasn't Sue. It was a completely different cultist. He hadn't met this one before. He had to find out her name from her driver's license before she woke up.

Tried to remember how he'd gotten here and where the hell he'd left the Heavenly Jeweled Spear.

Remembered why he'd gone out last night in the first place.

Considered just going back to the bar.

####

"Have you seen Bill?" Ford asked. "I had a few questions about the pigasus phenomenon"—a mere two or three pages—"but he isn't in his room." He'd already gone looking for the winged piglet and discovered she was still asleep with Waddles and the kids, and so now he was in search of the next best thing: esoteric knowledge about the winged piglet.

"Not since last night," Soos said. "He said he was going out? To do stuff? So maybe he's still out."

"Huh." Ford's mind was still so lost in the excitement of a groundbreaking new paranormal discovery that he completely missed the twirling red flags this statement raised. Soos was the only other person awake this early, so with no one else to ask about Bill's whereabouts, he shoved the question to the bottom of the list of Things He Was Curious About Today. "Welp! Tell him I left the tape in the TV. I'm going to Sprott's farm to ask for flying piglet care tips." On to the next-next best thing: mundane knowledge about the winged piglet.

Ford borrowed the keys to Stan's car and left.

And only after the car had pulled around the shack and was safely out of view did Bill trudge out of the woods and wearily knock on the back door to be let in.

####

In Bill's real body, in his real home, he could keep a bender going for decades if he wanted. Tapping out after one night was humiliating. If the gang could see him now, he'd never live it down.

But, there it was: out he was tapped. He'd drunk enough to last him a human lifetime. He was never drinking again. From now on, he was sticking exclusively to hallucinogens. And stimulants. And narcotics. And anesthetics. And anything that grew on a plant.

"Hey dude," Soos said. "You just missed Ford."

"Oh what a shame," Bill said flatly. He trudged into the kitchen, chugged whatever was left in the bottom of the coffee pot, and refilled it with tap water to chug that too. Hangover begone.

"He wanted to ask some questions about Choink, I think?" Soos said. "Heh. That's fun to say. Mabel really knows how to name a pig. Anyway, he says he left the tape in the TV for you—hey, where you going?"

"To my room," Bill said, trudging up the stairs. He muttered, "I need another drink before Sixer gets home."

####

The moment Ford had passed through the Sprott farm gate and stepped out of his car, he shouted, "Well, the pigasus hatched!"

Sprott tisked and shook his head. "I tried to warn you."

"Yes, I wanted to ask about that," he said, walking up to Sprott. "What was all that nonsense? You talked about the pigasus like she was some sort of monster."

"They are monsters!" Sprott said. "They squeal at the crack of dawn, they smack other nursing piglets aside with their wings, they try to roost in the feeding troughs, and have you ever had pig droppings hit your windshield from a hundred feet in the air?"

"Then why didn't you just say that! You said you dared not speak of the devilry the beast would rain down upon our heads!"

"Well of course," Sprott said. "You had your boy with you waving that camera around. I wasn't about to talk about pig droppings on camera! What if he was working on a school project? You know how immature children get around bathroom talk!"

Ford considered that. "Well. Yes. I suppose that's a prudent concern with most children."

"You see?" Sprott said. "All that trouble, and the winged pigs don't even produce good meat! It's like they got the worst features of chicken and pork combined. The bacon tastes like dry turkey and the wings taste like gristly ham." He shook his head. "No sir, they're not worth the trouble. Better to smash 'em in their eggs, or—better yet—take the eggs away before they turn into piglets."

Ford's irritation was washed away by the tantalizing hint of fresh knowledge. "What do you mean, 'turn into' piglets?"

"Well, if you find the egg early enough and take it away, it'll hatch into a chick the size of a chicken. And then it just gets larger from there! Lots of good meat on those jumbo chicken. Worth putting up with the crowing for that."

"So, it's not a flying pig unless a pig broods on it..." Ford said thoughtfully. "Is it a particular strain of pig that—" he nearly said lays eggs, until he remembered what Bill had said yesterday about Waddles being given the egg. "—receives eggs?"

"Nope, any of 'em could get one. I've bought all sorts of pigs from all over the state that had eggs. They just show up in the night."

"Do you know from where?"

"Nope!"

Hmm. The biggest mystery still remained. "Are the flying pigs fertile?"

"Good lord, I hope not," Sprott said. "I always butcher them before they have a chance to try. Speaking of which, it'll be typical butchering size at around six months, but if you do it at three the meat will be sweeter. Like a cross between chicken wings and pork chops. The meat's still tougher than it oughta be, but I've got some slow cooker recipes to... no?" (Ford was shaking his head firmly.) "You sure? Suit yourself."

"But if you have any care tips, I'd appreciate them," Ford said. "Oh—and do you have any fertilized chicken eggs for sale?"

####

"These look a lot better than the plastic Easter eggs we were using," Soos said as Ford carefully set a chicken egg down in the Mystery Shack's "baby dragons" display. One of the lizards with fake wings inspected the egg. "Do you think we could dye them? They'd look super dragony if they were, like, red and orange..."

"Can't risk it. This may be an informal experiment, but nevertheless we should try to control as many variables as we can," Ford said. "But if this works, you may soon have a very impressive addition to the Mystery Shack's menagerie."

"Sweet!"

Dipper said, "And if it doesn't work, I bet Mabel would love to dye some eggs for you later."

As they left Soos to rearrange his baby dragon display to best heat and highlight the eggs, Dipper asked Ford, "So, what do you expect to come out of these?"

"No idea! Possibly nothing. But it's worth trying." Ford flipped open his journal to the page where he'd written down everything he'd learned from Sprott. "Dipper, are you familiar with the cockatrice?"

"Ooh! Yeah, that's uh... a monster that you get when a snake hatches a chicken's egg, right?"

"Excellent. Hatched by a snake or a toad. It has the body of a wyvern, the head of a rooster, and eyes that can kill with a glare. The means by which it performs this feat aren't explained in mythology, but personally, I've always hoped they have laser vision." Ford pointed at a chart he'd started in his journal:

Chicken egg → Brooded by a snake/toad = Cockatrice

Chicken egg → Brooded by a pig = Flying pig/Pigasus (or, "Porkatrice"?)

Chicken egg → Brooded by other animals? = ?????

"This means we know of two different hybrid creatures that can be created by incubating a chicken egg with another species. Imagine what other undiscovered hybrids might be out there!"

"That's true," Dipper said, rubbing his chin thoughtfully. "Hey. If a chicken sits on a snake's egg—or a toad's, I guess—don't you get a basilisk?"

"Yes! Well done," Ford said proudly. He flipped to the next page, where he'd started another chart. "Thus far, we only know of one hybrid that results from letting a chicken incubate another species's egg. It's unfortunate that pigs don't lay eggs—but perhaps if we induce a chicken to ride around on a pregnant pig's back..."

"Does it need to be a specific kind of chicken?" Dipper asked. "Waddles's egg was huge. So, do normal chicken eggs grow gigantic if pigs sit on them, or is there a giant chicken out there?"

"A fantastic question," Ford said, writing it down. "And do we even know for sure a chicken lays it at all, or do giant chicken eggs spontaneously generate in pig pens?"

"And why do the pigs brood them?" Dipper asked. "Do they have secret brooding instincts, or is it some kind of... chicken cockatrice pig egg magic?"

"And does this happen everywhere, or is it a phenomenon unique to Gravity Falls? Fiddleford said he'd never seen a pig with an egg before, but..." He paused, tapping his pen thoughtfully on his lips. "I wonder if that could be something he'd forgotten?"

But there was someone much closer he could ask first.

Was Bill home yet?

####

When Ford reached the stairs, Choink had her front hooves on the bottom step, squealing. Waddles was a few steps higher, looking down at her as he patiently waited; but that had to be a big step for a baby. As hard as she flapped her scrawny newborn chicken wings, they seemed to be useless right now. Ford carefully scooped her up.

He set her down on the second floor landing just to see if this was what she wanted, but wasn't surprised when she immediately ran toward the next flight of stairs up to the attic. Probably wanted to get back to the kids' room. But when he set the piglet down on the attic floor, she made a beeline beneath the curtain to Bill's room. Oh, oops.

Voice muffled, Bill grumbled, "Hey. Don't you know how to knock?" Choink responded with a noise that sounded like a mix between squealing and cheeping. Waddles nosed through the curtain after her.

Ford could knock, at least. He rapped on the door frame, trying to ignore how the triangular Bill on Soos's zodiac blanket stared at him like an ineffective bouncer.

"What! What do you w— ohforfffsssyouagain."

Ford took that as permission to come in. "Sorry. Choink got away from..." He trailed off. "Bill?"

For a moment Ford thought Bill wasn't there (then what specter had been mimicking his voice?), until he sat up to give him a resentful look. Bill had separated the chaise from the rest of the couch so he could turn the main couch around, its back to the door and the edge of the seat pressed against the wall; and now Bill was lying on the backwards couch in front of the window. (The piglet also popped up to peer over the couch, standing on Bill.) "S'fine," Bill said. "I'm looking after the little cordon bleu, don'worry about it."

Ford took in the bleary look in Bill's eyes, the slight slur to his words, and asked, "Are you drunk? In the middle of the morning?"

"Hey, you know me, Fordsy: real ambitious, on the cutting edge. Always ahead of the crowd." Bill laughed bitterly.

"Rrright." It was possibly Bill had started the morning drunk. "Where were you last night?"

"Oh, you know, having a wild night out." He gestured vaguely. "Charming a bunch of flustered, swooning bikers; impressing everybody with my high alcohol tolerance and bar game expertise; generally being the life of the party. You probably wouldn't get it."

"Probably not," Ford agreed. On the one hand, Bill clearly wasn't at his peak—mentally or emotionally—and the polite (and probably safer) thing to do would be leave. But, on the other hand, maybe Bill's lips would be a little looser than usual. "So. The farmer didn't know as much as I'd hoped about pigasi and their origins."

"Oh wow. What a surprise," Bill said flatly.

"I was... wondering if you might fill in some gaps in my research?"

Bill managed to laugh without smiling. "Are you serious? After how you treated me yesterday when I tried to help you?"

"You weren't—" You weren't trying to help. You were just showing off how much more you knew than everyone else. You were just trying to hurt Dipper. It wasn't what you were doing, it was how you were doing it. It was why you were doing it. How far did Ford think he'd get arguing with a drunk Bill Cipher?

The venom in his voice only slightly diluted by the booze, Bill spat, "Beat it, Sixer. The day I help you is the day pigs fly."

"Ah." Ford stuffed his hands in his pockets awkwardly. "And... when is that, exactly?"

"Mmm... about a week, week and a half. Their flight feathers come in fast." Bill flopped down out of view again. "I'm just—not feeling it today. Okay?"

Ford nodded, even though Bill wasn't looking. "The alcohol probably isn't helping."

"I don't criticize your medicine, you don't criticize mine," Bill said. "Now beat it. I have a whole lot of unrestrained summer fun I need to sleep off."

Well. That was all Ford was getting. He supposed getting Bill to say he'd tell him anything at all, even if it was in a week in a half, was progress. He should be grateful for that. "Okay." He looked at Waddles—was he leaving too? 

Nope, Waddles had settled down on the floor behind Bill's couch. Just Ford, then. He awkwardly shuffled toward the curtain. "Thank you. Again. For... protecting Mabel's pigs." From Dipper and me, he decided not to add.

Bill grunted.

Ford left.

The piglet standing on Bill's hip trying to unsteadily walk up to his shoulder. He picked her up and set her on the window seat cushion and sighed in resignation when she immediately waddled back to his side.

When he was laying down, his face was pressed directly to the spot on the couch that smelled like Ford's "aftershave": the scent of burning hair. It was even stronger with the sunlight shining on the cushion, heating it up. Not even the nearby farm animals could cover it up How many nights had Bill slept on this spot lately? How long had he been acting this pathetic without even noticing? He tried to tell himself this was the worst possible place he could be moping—it was just making his mood worse, and anyway the scent combined with his hangover was starting to make him queasy.

But he couldn't bring himself to move away.

####

He mentally ran through what he'd say as he dragged himself to the kids' room. Hey Mabel, I need your love expert help. I'm crushing hard on someone who will never like me back, what treatment plan does the doctor recommend? And she'd probably say something like "sad movies and ice cream" and he'd get a couple hours of her undivided attention while she pitied him for his tragic fate the way he deserved.

But then she'd wonder who it was, and she'd ask herself what suspects he'd been around in the last twenty-four hours that could have caused this change, and then he'd be in hot water. He was already mad enough at his—what was he blaming this on, his hormones? His libido? Oxytocin? More like oxy-toxin, haha—and he didn't need her mad at him, too. He'd try another strategy.

He knocked on the door. She answered, and gasped in delight. "Choink! There you are!" She accepted the piglet from Bill's arms. "I was looking all over for you! It's You're late for your lunch." She shook a toy baby bottle that she'd elected to use like the real thing. The milky liquid inside was bright purple.

Bill decided not to worry about the piglet's nutrition. He waited until Mabel got the wiggly piglet situated in her arms and had convinced her to stop pecking at the bottle and start suckling on it, before he said, "I'm ready."

"For what?"

"Matchmake me."

For a moment, she stared at Bill in shock. And then a gleeful smile took over her face. She stepped back, gesturing grandly at the bedroom. "Come into my office!"

Bill took a deep breath, and crossed the threshold into what would probably be his doom.

####

(i have been WAITING. for SO LONG. SO LONG.

now you see why i didn't want that first scene at the end of last chapter.

anyway it was VERY important to me that bill's realization happen Like This, but i won't tell you why so that somebody's forced to come ask me lmao. but also, i wanna hear why y'all think it had to go down like this.

also also also i hope y'all think this fic's one and only F bomb was spent well 😌

ANYWAY, starting next week: none of this!!! y'all get another flashback arc for the next 2-3 months! yaaay!! it's not just to torment you though. the next flashback arc is about bill's howling void girlfriend, a.k.a. his first love, a.k.a. Yvonne Torizon. because it's very important, right now,

for all of you to learn

what bill is like

when he is in love.

hope you enjoy. :)

anyway!!! can't wait to hear your thoughts on this chapter, i have been WAITING to post this moment for TWO AND A HALF YEARSSSS)

[ckret2]

Chapter 117 of human Bill Cipher nearly, but not quite, going a whole chapter without angsting over being human:

Is Bill being a professional manipulator, projecting his own issues on someone else, or genuinely trying to help out a friend? spoilers: it's all three!

also, at long last: Waddles's egg hatches.

####

Ford said, "Just hand over the egg, Stanley."

"And hand out refunds to everyone in the audience? Are you nuts?" Stan asked. "We're making money hand over fist!"

Ford and Dipper had elected to come in the back door of town hall, hoping to avoid drawing too much attention and causing a panic. The back door couldn't be opened from the outside without a key; but to their fortune, Stan had been there to open the door when they knocked. To their misfortune, Stan had immediately realized they were up to something and blocked their way.

"We don't have time for this!" Dipper tucked his camera under his arm for protection and shoved his way through.

"Hey, hold on!" Stan tried to get an arm around him—and missed wildly, because he still had permanent marker covering his glasses lenses. Dipper pushed past him to the back door.

And ran right into Bill's arm instead. "Hey, kid!" Bill gripped the puffy collar of Dipper's vest, teeth gritted in an angry smile. "What's the rush?"

"Lemme go!" Dipper twisted in his grip. "We've gotta get inside before the egg hatches!"

"Oh, but you don't wanna ruin the show, do you?" He shoved Dipper back outside and took up a position next to Stan, feet spread, fists on what should have been his corners, forming an impenetrable barrier of uncooperative con artists. "You two look pretty wound up! Maybe you should take, oh, five minutes out here to calm down—"

Mabel's voice drifted out from the auditorium: "And in less than five minutes, we'll welcome a brand new baby alien to Gravity Falls!"

"We don't have time!" Ford said. "Get out of the way." He tried to shove his way past Stan and Bill.

To block him, Bill linked his arm with Stan's, which made both of them shudder with distaste and privately resolve to shower when they got home. "No," Bill said. "What the heck's gotten into you two! Why are you so determined to mess up Mabel's show?"

"We're protecting Mabel," Ford snapped back. "The thing in that egg is dangerous! Mabel and everyone else inside could get hurt!"

Bill blinked at him in amazement. "What?"

Stan tensed. After a second, he reluctantly tugged his arm from Bill's grip. "I mean... I'd rather give the stupid refunds than endanger Mabel." Thoughtfully, he said, "Or maybe we can convince the audience taking away the egg is part of the show...?"

"She's not in any danger! Where did you get that?!" Bill asked. "I can see what's in it and I can see what'll happen when it hatches! Mabel's got nothing to worry about and neither do any of you! Now relax."

"Is that so?" Ford crossed his arms, glaring Bill down. "Then what is it."

Bill froze, fighting a burst of panic, his gaze flashing to Dipper and back to Ford. He laughed angrily. "Oo-oo-oh, so after pitching a fit about spoilers earlier today, now you want all the answers? I thought yoo-oo-oou wanted to figure it out ALL BY YOURSELF!" His voice swung erratically between mocking singsong lilt and accusatory scream.

Dipper shouted, "Bill, this isn't the time!" and overlapping him Ford said, "This is different and you know it! Don't be petty!"

Who was being petty! He was just trying not to get in trouble! Now they were cranky he wouldn't talk, but he was sure they'd be just as cranky if he did. There was no winning this. "Does it matter what's in it?! The important thing is that it's harmless, and if you think I'm lying about that then you'd think I'm lying if I told you what it is, too! Either way, you'll just have to trust me!"

That got a laugh out of both the Stans. Which was far from the first time; but he was beginning to get tired of them treating his every attempt to ask for a little faith in him like it was a big joke. Like he couldn't possibly truly want somebody to believe him.

"Why should I trust you," Ford said.

Bill struggled to think of anything he could offer that couldn't be called another lie. He came up blank. "Please?"

"No." Ford pushed past Bill; this time, Stan stood aside to let him. Betrayer.

Bill desperately grabbed onto Ford's sleeve. Before he could shake him off, Bill said, "I don't know what you heard about that egg or what you think you'll do about it, but if you two idiots barge in there, you're barreling right into a future that ends with Mabel in tears, and I'm not letting you do that to her!" Finally the perfect argument clicked into place: "If it was dangerous, do you really think I'd leave Mabel alone with it?!"

They both knew Ford wouldn't trust a single word out of Bill's mouth—nobody did—but Ford himself had said he'd only let Bill live because he now had a sliver of hope for him, because of how he treated Mabel. If it made such a big difference, was it enough to sway Ford now?

It was. Ford stopped trying to pull away from Bill's grasp. He glanced back at him, uncertain, searching his face.

"If you don't trust anything else," Bill pressed, "can you at least trust that?"

Ford exchanged a glance with Stan, silently discussing the question.

Dipper said, "Well, I can't."

Bill had been too focused on Ford. He hadn't been watching what was happening just a few seconds in the future, a few inches to the side. He only glanced over in time to get a half second preview of Dipper bolting past the rest of them to the door. It didn't give Bill enough advanced warning to intercept him, only enough to let him slip inside before the door could fully swing shut behind Dipper.

But it was more advanced warning than the Stans had. The heavy emergency exit door slammed in their faces. Stan barked, "Hey!" They pounded on the door. Ford shouted, "Dipper! Bill! Let us in!"

Bill helplessly studied the impenetrable slab of door-ness. "How?!"

Stan muttered a curse under his breath, then shouted, "Never mind, just get Dipper!"

"We'll come in from the front!"

Fine. Bill chased after Dipper. "Get back here!"

"Screw you!"

"Ford wants you to!"

"Mabel's more important!"

"It's a flying pig!"

Dipper skidded to a stop. He wheeled around to stare at Bill in disbelief. "Are you fu—"

Bill bodyslammed into Dipper, knocking them both to the ground.

"Bill! Geddoff—"

"Knock it off! Your sister's been working hard on this all day! You're not ruining another thing for her with your selfishness!"

"Selfishness?!" Dipper protectively clutched his camera in one arm and tried to stick his other hand in Bill's eye to force him off, but had to jerk back when Bill nearly snapped his fingers between his teeth. "What are you talking about! When have I ever—"

"Hmm! Let me think," Bill grunted, the sarcasm in his tone somewhat undermined by the strain of trying to keep Dipper's limbs pinned. "How about all those times you thought spending slightly more time with Red was more important than letting Mabel meet the pig that'll be her best friend for the next decade of her life, or helping a scared, stranded kid get back to his mermaid family! Because your hopeless crush mattered more than other people's lives, right?"

"This isn't about a crush!" With one arm protectively clutching his camera to his chest, Dipper wriggled out of Bill's grasp.

Before he could scramble back to his feet, Bill wrapped his arms around Dipper's legs to hold him down. "No, it's about you!" How was this stupid kid so slippery! Sure, he was sweaty, but his leg hairs were finally coming in, that was supposed to increase the friction! "Just like the time you decided 'solving the town's mysteries' was so important you'd do anything to get the next clue right now—even ruin your sister's show!"

"Shut the hell up!"

"Ooh, big boy language."

"You don't even believe anything you're saying yourself! You're just saying whatever you think will make me do what you want!" Dipper kicked one leg free. "And you're the one who ruined her show last time!"

Bill dug his nails in his other leg. "Yeah! And now I'm trying to save her show! Can you say that?!"

"I'm trying to save her!" Dipper punctuated the sentence with a kick to Bill's chin.

He briefly saw stars; when they cleared up, Dipper was already on his feet and running again. Bill snarled, "And that's why you've got your camera, right?!"

Dipper skidded to a stop, staring at his camera like he'd never seen it before. (The camera that had made him delay leaving the shack for a couple more minutes, just so he could grab more film.)

"Planning to bludgeon the egg to pieces with that thing, kid?" Bill tried to get to his feet, and his head swam. Ow. Back on one knee. "This isn't about protecting Mabel, this is about your hero complex. You just want to make another stupid little episode for your stupid little unsuccessful vlog!" This time, he managed to stand. "You want to charge in there and be the biiig hero, save the whooole town from the dangerous beast and get it all on camera!"

And Dipper hadn't moved yet. That was the thing about saying whatever you think will make someone do what you want—if you say enough things, eventually you'll hit on the one that does get what you want. Like pounding the buttons on a game controller until you finally guessed the cheat code to unlock extra lives. Then all you have to do is keep spamming that combo— "But what'll that do to her. Here she is in the middle of a live performance—she did the script and costumes and everything! All in one day! You should've seen what a whirlwind she was!—and in charges her brother." He stalked up behind Dipper, seized his shoulder, and spun him to face Bill. "Who just has to prove he's the smart twin again—even if it means stealing her turn in the spotlight."

He could feel the cruel sneer twisting his face's muscles, feel the hate in his eyes, and he didn't care. He'd won this round and they both knew it. "Because this summer, she's the one who found a new source of secret knowledge about all the town's mysteries," he pointed at himself, "and you. can't. stand. that."

Bill had won this round, but apparently Dipper hadn't actually gotten the memo. His expression darkened. "I want to see Mabel succeed. I'm not jealous of her! Especially not her creepy friendship with you."

"Creepy?! Hey, I've been an angel!" Bill tried to get his hands around Dipper's neck—Mabel would understand if he strangled her brother, it was just to help her—but Dipper knocked his arms aside like they had the strength of pool noodles, seized Bill by the collar, somehow hooked a foot behind his ankle, and suddenly Bill was on the ground, looking at Dipper upside-down through a doorway. He'd knocked Bill into the meeting room they'd been using for backstage prep. "Hey, wait—!"

Dipper slammed the door shut between them.

"You little—!" Bill threw his full weight against the door—which, of course, did nothing. He pounded on the wood with both fists. "Get back here! You're making a mistake!"

Dipper didn't even slow down. All Bill could do was watch through the wood as he burst into the auditorium.

####

Mabel kept nervously glancing at the back of the auditorium. Bill had said he'd be here to signal her when the egg was ready to hatch, but he'd disappeared right after her performance started and hadn't been back since. What was taking him so long? Did something happen?

Or maybe she had been silly to take Bill Cipher at his word in the first place.

(She tried to push that thought aside. Bill was her friend, she didn't want to believe he'd treat her like that. Even if he treated his other friends like that... No. She'd find out what happened before passing judgment.)

But either way, he wasn't here and she was getting nervous. She was trying to keep track of when Bill had originally said the egg was supposed to hatch, watching the clock at the back of the auditorium, but she kept worrying she might have forgotten exactly when he'd said it was. She hadn't thought to write the time down on the sweaty script she'd stuffed in her pocket. She kept worrying she was talking too fast, and then she worried that she'd compensated by talking too slow, and usually she wasn't this nervous on stage but she hated when she had to give timed presentations, those were like the worst kinds of presentations ever, and after last summer's sock-tastrophe if she blew this performance too she'd never work in showbiz in this town again—

She was concluding the epic tale of how Waddles had survived the harsh deserts of Australia with the help of a mob of kangaroos and then rafted all the way across the Pacific Ocean to reach Oregon in time for the egg to land—when the heavy door "backstage" swung open and crashed into the wall so hard it sounded like one of those giant log thingies they used to break down castle doors in movies. Dipper barreled into the room, shouting, "STOP!"

Mabel froze mid-sentence, her mouth hanging open. Every face in the auditorium turned toward Dipper. His face was hardened with a fierce determination that made Mabel's stomach flip with anxiety. What was wrong? And did it have to be wrong right now, at the end of her big speech?

As he struggled to catch his breath, his eyes darted wildly around the stage until they fell on the egg. He took a deep breath and pointed at it.

And then he saw Mabel and his breath gushed back out. He took in her costume, and Waddles's, and the background studded with stars and planets; and then the audience (now staring expectantly at him instead of Mabel) and the rest of the shack gang at the back with the audio setup.

His face hardened again in determination and he sucked in another deep breath—to let it back out in a loud sigh. "Whew, I didn't miss it!"

Mabel groaned. "Dipperrr..."

"Sorry, sorry." The audience tittered as Dipper took a seat in the first row. He aimed his camera at Mabel and flashed her a thumbs up.

She rolled her eyes behind her sunglasses, but gave him a thumbs up back. He'd totally thrown off her speech and now she really didn't know how much time she had left—but with her brother right in the front row supporting her, she was suddenly a lot less nervous about flubbing it. Even if she messed up so badly the whole audience hated her, he wouldn't. She picked up where she'd left off, with two magic peacocks with rainbows trailing behind them finding Waddles half dead on his raft and helpfully pushing it the rest of the way to Oregon's shores. (A few tourists were dabbing at their eyes.)

Stan and Ford rushed in from Town Hall's front doors, albeit a lot more quietly than Dipper. Ford looked around frantically, saw Dipper giving him a small shy wave from the front row, and relaxed. The whole family was here to watch her big conclusion. She couldn't fail now!

"...and when he touched the force field with his cute little piggy snout, the meteor exploded into a million zillion tiny little sparkly pieces—" Mabel flung two handfuls of glitter out from her concealed pockets (suddenly Dipper looked less thrilled about being on the front row), "—and Waddles finally met... the egg."

Doing an admirable job of not laughing into her mic, Wendy dutifully whispered, "The eeegg..."

Mabel had a whole bit planned about how Waddles swore to guard the egg with his life until the stars aligned on its home world and it finally hatched; but the egg, which had been periodically trembling and making little cracking sounds for the past hour, chose that moment to shake so violently it almost fell of the pillow. A crack arced halfway around its circumference; and then another, a small chip falling away where they intersected. Mabel gasped and said all in a rush, "And that concludes the tale of the pig of destiny and his egg now let's watch as he meets his fated child ta-daaa!"

The audience sat on the edges of their seats, waiting to see what finally emerged from the egg. In the back, the shack gang abandoned their posts, standing and craning their necks so they could see too.

Mabel and Waddles watched the egg with wide eyes as another chip fell loose, then another. At last, the egg gave one last big wiggle and burst apart—

Mabel let out a shriek. "OH-EM-GEEEE it's so CUUUTE!" She reached out to scoop up the little piglet with fluffy golden wings, and only just caught herself in time to let Waddles greet it first. He sniffed it, snorted on it—it squinted its eyes and its feathers fluttered in the breeze—then nuzzled his cheek against it.

The audience members close enough to get a good look at the piglet cooed in appreciation. Dipper nearly fell out of his seat leaning closer to film. At the back of the auditorium, Ford barked, "What!"

Soos hit the piano key for a triumphant trumpet fanfare.

The audience applauded.

####

"It's obviously a hoax," one tourist said to another as they filed out of the auditorium. "I mean, come on—a flying pig? I'll believe those are real when pigs fly."

"I don't know," the other said thoughtfully. "The bit about the kangaroos was probably made up, but those wings did look awfully convincing..."

"It was very well done," the first tourist conceded. "The costumes were fantastic. Did you see those rainbow capes?"

"And that story was so fun."

Somebody behind them shouted, "Holy smokes, is that really a pigasus?!" They glanced back at a gray-haired man in a tan coat who was bending over the piglet with a look of absolute wonder. The first tourist muttered, "Some people will believe anything."

Ford went on, "I've only heard tales about these creatures! I didn't think I'd live to see one! Dipper, Dipper, you're filming right? Wow! This is the greatest thing I've ever seen!"

"It's alright. Kinda wrinkly," Stan said. "I think." (He'd taken off his markered glasses and was squinting at the piglet.) "I bet it'll make the shack a fortune, though. Hey Soos, you got room for another pet?"

"We can make room," Soos said. "A couple more weird critters, and maybe we can start a cryptid petting zoo!"

"Grunkle Stan, you can't put Waddles's baby in the Mystery Shack," Mabel said. "That's child labor!"

Offended, Stan said, "What are you talking about?" He put one arm around Soos's and Wendy's shoulders, scooped Dipper and Mabel into a hug with the other, and said, "The Mystery Shack was built on a long and proud tradition of child labor. Sometimes unpaid!"

Wendy shook off Stan's arm. "Hey, Mabel! Nice work on the show."

"Yeah, it was totally awesome," Soos said. "I had no idea Waddles lives such an adventurous life. I have a newfound respect for him."

"Thanks, guys. I kinda messed up the ending a little, though." Mabel's beam of pride melted away. "B—Goldie said he'd signal me when it was almost time for the egg to hatch, but he completely disappeared! What's with that?"

Dipper gasped. "Oops."

####

When Dipper opened the meeting room door, Bill was leaning against the door frame with one hand, already positioned perfectly to glare down at him. "We've got to stop meeting like this." He shoved past him.

"Ow. You're welcome," Dipper muttered.

"Oh! Where are my manners! Thank you for locking me up so you could enjoy Shooting Star's grand finale!" Bill shot Dipper a dirty, bloody look. "But why let the person who convinced you not to ruin it for her see?"

All right, he supposed he deserved that one. "What happened to your eye?" Bill's right eye was tinged pink with blood. It pooled along his waterline, only a couple of drops just beginning to roll down his cheek.

Bill grunted in annoyance, swiped away the blood tears, and irritably flipped down his eye patch to obscure the view. "Only way I could watch the show," he muttered. (Dipper hadn't exactly felt bad earlier—yeah, sure, he realized he was in the wrong, but that was different from feeling bad—but knowing Bill had made his eyeball bleed just because he wanted to see the show...)

By the time they emerged in the auditorium Bill had remembered how to slap on a fake smile. "Hey, star girl! What a performance! Looks like the audience liked it, too!" He studied the piglet. "And you... you were fine. Don't expect a 'supporting actress' trophy, though."

"Bill! Where..." Mabel stopped. "She's a girl pig?" She knelt to study its face.

"Sure! She's got girl guts!" Bill said cheerily. "And she probably doesn't have an opinion of her own on the matter yet."

Mabel nodded thoughtfully; and then remembered her earlier resentment. "Hey, you missed the whole show. Where were you?"

"Watching from backstage!"

She put on an exaggerated pout and planted her hands on her hips in a performance of faux hurt feelings, to cover the fact that her feelings actually were hurt. "You said you'd tell me when the egg was about to hatch."

Bill's grin only flickered for a second before he plastered it back in place. "Yeah, well, you know me. Notoriously unreliable."

Then Tyler waved from across the room and Bill immediately headed his way, cutting the conversation off. Mabel's shoulders slumped.

Dipper didn't get it. Why did Bill do that? This wasn't the first time he'd let Mabel believe something wrong about him that made him look even worse than he really was. He was more than happy to lie to make himself look better—why wouldn't he jump all over an opportunity to make himself look better when it was actually true?

####

"We had such a great turnout," Tyler gushed. "And on such short notice! I'll admit, I was a little worried when you wanted to schedule an event on the day of, but wow!" He cast a fond eye toward the piglet, flopped on her silver pillow and surrounded by an admiring crowd, like a napping princess flanked by her royal guard. "And what a cute little thing, too."

"Hey, that's what I'm good at! I'm a logistics guy! You want a project done, I'm the one who knows how to get the right people and the right stuff where and when they're supposed to be. Especially if the 'project' is a party. Wink."

Tyler giggled. "Is that so! Well, the next time we need a party planner, I'll keep you in mind."

"That's all I want! To be in people's minds!" Bill flashed him a finger gun; and let his hand and smile drop as he turned away. Ugh. He couldn't even enjoy this after the screw up at the end of the show.

Apparently Ford had gotten a little overeager in studying his newest favorite creature, because Waddles squealed in alarm and Mabel shooed him away. Bill muttered, "Oh, great." Ford and Stan were headed up the aisle toward Bill.

As soon as they were in conversation range and before Ford could start scolding Bill again for [explaining too much/not explaining enough], Bill said, "Hey. I blame both of you for making me miss the end, by the way." Ford couldn't attack if he was already on the defense.

Stan said, "Okay, I can get blaming Poindexter, but what did I do?"

"Backstabbed me at the last second and let the twerp get past our barrier."

"Dipper taped the ending," Ford said. "You can watch it with me when we get home."

Bill's next round of complaints derailed and gently rolled downhill to crash into a shallow river. "What?"

Ford wasn't even looking at him. He was writing away in his journal (it had been weeks since he'd let Bill get a glimpse of Journal 5), no doubt documenting as much about the day as he could while it was fresh on his mind. "I know I just saw it, but I want to see it again!" He finally glanced up, eyes shining, wearing a beaming smile that stretched all the way across his face. (He had so many teeth. Bill involuntarily swallowed. He could hear the squelching sound of saliva and contracting throat muscles in his ears.) "Dipper was closer to the stage! I want to see all the details I missed the first time!"

For a moment, he'd thought Ford was actually inviting him to watch TV together. What a silly thought! Clearly he was just nerding out toward anyone in a ten foot radius and hadn't even consciously realized he'd included Bill in his excitement. Best to take advantage of it before Ford noticed. "Okay! Movie night! It's a date!"

"Mm-hmm." His head was already back in his journal.

Stan shot Bill a disapproving frown. Bill muttered to him, as if he was a co-conspirator in the joke, "Look at him. He didn't even notice what I said." Stan snorted.

"There!" Ford finished off whatever he'd been writing with a flourish of his pen—probably a riveting diary entry on everything he'd done today and how it made him feel about himself—and said giddily, "I'm gonna get a closer look." He hurried up toward the group clustered around the stage, moving like a man with half his years and cynicism.

Bill asked, "Do you think he's already forgotten Mabel chased him off?"

"Probably." Stan sighed. "I'd better go get him."

"Aww, don't spoil his fun too much!" This evening might've been a disaster for Bill—but at least one of them had had fun tonight.

####

Tyler was sticking around so he could lock up town hall once everyone was out, but it was up to the Mystery Shack crew to clean up their own mess. Bill was trying to figure out which direction the stupid legs on Soos's stupid electric piano were supposed to fold up—and getting increasingly frustrated in the process—(they only bent back and forth in one direction, how hard could this be?!)—when Dipper hesitantly crept up to him. "Hey," he said, awkwardly rubbing his arm.

Bill gave him his best don't test me right now glare.

Oblivious to the subtle nuances of glares, Dipper said, "Uh... sorry for making you miss the show, man."

"Well you should be," Bill snarled, "since you're the reason I didn't get to see it." Dipper opened his mouth; Bill didn't give him a chance to retort. "And none of it would have happened if it wasn't for your stupid, stubborn little quest to be the most special, smart little boy in the whole wide world—"

"Whoa, hey! I'm trying to apologize, man," Dipper said. "What's your problem? So I'm trying to get a career going, so what, what's wrong with that!"

"When's it gonna be enough, kid?"

Dipper struggled for a second to decipher the question. "What?"

"When will you achieve enough? When'll you feel like you finally succeeded at cryptid cataloguing and won at life?"

"I—I don't know?" he said defensively. "I haven't even really gotten started."

"Exactly. You haven't even started! So quit before you've wasted your whole pathetic life on this." Bill jammed a finger against Dipper's camera. (He stepped back to shield it protectively.) "It's not too late for you to be just one more forgettable, mediocre guy out of billions!"

"No! Maybe you want me to be mediocre, but why would I want that?"

"Why would you want to be special," Bill sneered. "Wanna see what happens to the 'special' one in the class?" He pointed toward Ford. "Right there! Your hero! Dr. Supergenius Six-Fingers has been special his whole life! Always the freak with a spotlight on him, whether he's placed on a pedestal or pushed in the mud! And now he doesn't have the choice to quit! He'll never be content just being 'good enough.' He can't be happy with a normal life. You can be. The smartest thing you can do for yourself is give up on being the 'smart one.'"

That confused look on Dipper's face made Bill's boil. The smart ones were always so stupid—especially about their own smarts. "Why should I be content with being 'good enough'? Why would anybody want a normal life if they knew they could have a better one—"

"Did I say a 'better' life? No. A special one. You know all about your great-uncle's life story—he's a walking cautionary tale against hubris! Does he look like he's having fun? Do I look like I am?" He jabbed a finger in Dipper's chest. "Go underachieve, kid. Flunk a test! Or drop out! You don't want to have what it takes to keep up with the winners."

Dipper shoved Bill's hand away. "You don't know anything about what I want."

"Don't I? Who's been in whose head?" If Bill left right now, he was pretty sure he could win this argument before Dipper started pulling out all the times the Pines had caught him off-guard by not wanting what he expected them to want. He shoved the keyboard case and misfolded legs under his arms and spun away from Dipper to march off triumphantly.

Dipper said, "Anyway, Grunkle Ford does look like he's having fun."

Bill glanced over again, and wished he hadn't. Ford had been corralled a safe distance away, and from the looks of it Stan had been posted as his guard so he didn't disturb the new father and his baby—but his eyes were still bright with wonder and riveted on the piglet, only glancing away in quick flickers to draw in his journal. Right now, his life was all sunshine and rainbows.

Bill's stomach did a little flip. "You know what I mean." His voice came out rougher than he expected. "Now shut up and buzz off."

Dipper must've shut up and buzzed off, although Bill didn't notice him go. Look at Ford. What a nerd. If he kept up that big, stupid grin for much longer, his face would get stuck like that—

"HEY there!"

"Gah!" Bill whipped around, dropping the piano legs. "Kid! Don't sneak up on me like that, I could've thrown a piano at you."

Mabel blew a raspberry. "I'm wearing the crinkliest dress in the world," she said, flapping her arms to demonstrate. "Anyway, this is for you! Bop!" She smacked a sticker on his chest.

He set down the piano and pulled out his hoodie to inspect his new prize. It depicted a candy-pink ear. Bubble letters surrounding it read, "You're My HEARo!" Bill's heart leaped into his throat. "Huh! Already forgiven me for bailing on you?"

"Oh, stoppit," Mabel said. "Dipper told me what really happened. Thanks for saving Choink."

Bill would have liked to add this to his list of reasons to be irritated at Dipper, but it was hard to be annoyed when he'd just heard a word like that. "Is that her name?"

"Yeah, because she makes this cheep-oink sound."

"I like it, it's weird." Almost as weird as the ear sticker. Which she'd given to him because he'd actually earned it. Not on false pretenses, either. He had actually done the task, on purpose, with the exact motivation she probably expected.

And it felt wrong, for some reason. He felt less like he deserved this sticker than the sticker he'd "earned" by manipulating and cheating and lying to Mabel's face. He felt like he was gonna get in trouble for having it. Why was that?

"You could've just told me what happened yourself," Mabel said. "I would've believed you."

He hated that that made him feel something. "Sure you would've!" He awkwardly crouched to re-collect the dismembered piano and its limbs. "Hey, you wanna help me with these?"

She took the legs and—to Bill's consternation—successfully folded them flat in three seconds. "Hey, Bill?"

He didn't like that tone. That was a serious question tone. "Yeah?" She was gonna ask why he hadn't been the one to explain what happened behind stage, and he didn't have a good answer.

"Why didn't you see my warning about Weirdmageddon?" Mabel asked.

His stomach dropped. He'd already prepared a witty quip about Mabel being busy keeping the paparazzi off Choink and now he had to start over finding a quip. "What?"

"Dipper said you saw Grunkle Ford and him messing up the show; so, you must've been looking at the future to see how it went," Mabel said. "But you said you didn't see my warning. Right?"

"Oh." His stomach sank. "Well—I had to keep an eye on the future so I could cue you exactly when the egg was gonna hatch. At Weirdmageddon, I was living in the moment!"

"You didn't look at the future once?" Mabel asked skeptically.

"Nope!"

"Not even to make sure that nothing went wrong?"

"Nuh-uh!"

"Why not?"

"Be—cause... I didn't want to know what happened next." 

It took him too long to think of something else to add. Something to cancel out the dread he was sure he heard in his own reply. "I mean," he said, "I've waited this long to throw my eternal party. Wouldn't it be boring to get there and already know everything that'll happening?"

"I guess," Mabel said. "But you looked at the future of my show."

"Sure, but—I already knew how this show ends. You've got the script in your pocket," Bill said defensively. "That's not like a party. Parties get wild."

"Do you think there's maybe a timeline where you did?" she asked. "And maybe everything turned out okay there?"

She hadn't been trying to question his logic; she was just trying to find a way for her little warn-the-past trick to work out. "Oh—oh, yeah! Sure!" He smiled brightly. "There's more timelines than you can count out there! Everything can happen! There's bound to be a few where I saw your note and... What's that look for? What, don't you believe me?" She shouldn't. He was definitely lying.

"I don't know," she sighed, "I guess, I just—I feel bad that you saved my show but I can't save you from getting stuck in this body. I know it feels gross to you. Like a wetsuit full of applesauce and melted cheese."

Bill mentally saved that idea for the next time he needed to torture an enemy. "Hey, you already saved my life once this summer! I think we're even!" He rapped a knuckle on her noggin, "Anyway, remember the power of positive thinking! You're a problem solver! With both of us trying to figure this thing out, we'll find a way to get me out of this body, just you wait."

That finally perked her up. "Yeah! There's gotta be something that'll work."

Bill wondered if Mabel hadn't realized she'd just promised to help him return to his true, triangular, dangerous form. He wondered if she had realized, but cared about him enough that she was willing to take that risk.

He wrapped her up in a tight hug and she flinched in surprise. "Bill? What's this for?"

"Oh, I need an excuse to hug, now? It was for you being cool, but if you're not gonna be cool about it..."

"I'll be cool, I'll be cool!" She flung her arms around his neck. "I'm cool as a penguin."

"That's what I thought."

When he'd unleashed her, she asked, "Did people hug in your dimension, too?"

"Sure! Hugs are pan-universal!" They weren't, but he was sure Mabel wanted to believe in the kind of multiverse where they were.

"How? You can't cross over each other's arms in the second dimension. Did you have to take turns hugging each other?"

"Ha! No, we— Look, I'll show you." It was the least he could do for her.

####

(Least surprising thing that could possibly be in the egg. Kudos to everyone who guessed it, especially the anon who called it a pigasus, the greatest word i've ever heard.

Thanks for y'all's patience with the late chapter! I had to rewrite the last 1/3 of it because I wanted this chapter to remain focused on Dipper and Mabel; so to do that I had to move a very, very, VERY important scene... to the start of next chapter. 😎 You'll see.

In other news: next chapter is our last chapter in the present for a while! After that we're getting... another flashback plot!! This time, to Bill's first ever girlfriend: the howling void! I'm gonna be doing something a bit different this time and posting this plot on tumblr AND ao3 simultaneously, as its own separate fic. So I might be able to do weekly updates on it again! ... or, i might not, because i'm trying not to think about how many scenes i left half coherent with an "[***edit this later]" note to myself lmao.

But in the meantime: waddles! egg! choink! bill slipping up and saying too much about himself! applesauce and melted cheese! looking forward to y'all's thoughts this week.)

[pilotprojectvogelfrei]

Remembered wrong

A/N: more of the Backroom Falls AU.

I love that I can scan my traditional art now.

[truffle-worm]

Yes they had to buy gummy worms.

[summerweenzine]

Just in time for Summer! We present; Summerween zine!

Our contributors and mod team did such an amazing job to bring this to all of you!

🔗https://summerweenzine.itch.io/summerween-zine

@faneventstation @atozines @zine-scene

[ckret2]

I sent you an ask awhile back, but i think tumblr ate it, so ima ask again just in case

I recently taped 2 pens together and wanted to learn how to write in handwritten euclidian, and i was wondering if you had an alphabet set up? Id also love to know the rules you used for the formatting, like with morse code having e as . because it’s the most common letter, and i wanted to know what that would look like when using 2 colors. If you cant say because of spoiler reasons (eym) then i gotta say im exited

okay but keep this under your hat (I say like I'm not posting this publicly)

I'll put an explanation chart at the bottom that just lists all the letters, but first i'm gonna explain the logic. if the logic confuses you you can skip to the chart.

okay so here's how I came up with the system:

we only have two colors (dark and light; I've assigned them black and yellow)

we only have two shapes (short and long; dot and dash)

that gives us four combos: black-dot (1), yellow-dot (2), black-dash (3), yellow-dash(4).

start counting the letters of the alphabet using only these 4 digits. (A=1, B=2, C=3, D=4, E=11, F=12, G=13, H=14, I=21, J=22... etc.)

EXCEPT☝️

it's illegal to put two characters of the same color next to each other. ("why?" we'll get there.)

so it actually ends up being A=1, B=2, C=3, D=4, E=12, F=14, G=21, H=23, I=32, J=34... etc. (Basically skip all the numbers that have two odd digits touching or two even digits touching. at this point you might have an easier time just drawing the colored dots/dashes than using the numbers; i'm only using numbers to explain the logic.)

(in this post the "yellow" is orange bc that's what tumblr has available, and the black is either black or white depending on if you're reading this in light mode or dark mode. i'm still calling it yellow and black.)

(if you can't use color and need to improvise typing, use • for black-dot, . for yellow-dot, — for black-dash, and _ for yellow-dash. the dark colors are written higher than the low colors: • — . _ )

so there's the alphabet. Here's how to write words:

just spell 'em like normal in english. or in german or spanish or whatever, i'm not your boss.

when two letters are next to each other whose last character and first character are the same color, you can put them next to each other with no space. (for example, i is black-dash yellow-dot, and t is yellow-dot black-dash yellow-dash, so you can spell "it" as "—••——")

that's why no letters can have yellow & black touching: this way, if you see a string of dots and dashes that DO have two blacks or two yellows in a row, you automatically know that's a division between two letters

if two letters' last and first characters have different colors, you put a space between them. (for example, i is black-dash yellow-dot, and n is black-dot yellow-dot black-dash, so you spell "in" as "—•　••—")

Here's how to separate words:

the last character in a word is a color gradient

if it's a black dash, make a black-to-yellow gradient; if it's a yellow dash, make a yellow-to-black gradient.

if the last character is a dot, combine the last two characters to make a gradient. if they're the same color make a little "dip" in between the two characters(ex: yellow-dash yellow-dot is yellow-black-yellow); otherwise just kinda blur the characters into each other.

spacing between words follows the same rule as spacing between letters: if the last color of the first word and the first color of second word are the same, you can push them together; if the colors are different, put a space.

"since the word 'a' is only a single dot how do you indicate when it's being used as a whole word by itself?" uhhhh fuck you.

"how do you punctuate?" the same way as canon euclidean color code: you don't.

"if you can't use colors or draw a gradient, how do you indicate the end-of-word color gradients?"

black-to-yellow dash is \ 

yellow-to-black dash is /

if the transitional color is black use '

—e.g., yellow-dot yellow-dot is .'. but yellow-dot black-dot is .'

if the transitional color is yellow use ,

—e.g., black-dot black-dot is •,• but black-dot yellow-dot is •,

"Why," you ask, "why did you come up with these unnecessarily convoluted rules??" Two reasons!

this is basically the same principle as morse code (dots and dashes to represent letters), except it has 4 characters instead of 2. I wanted to take advantage of the addition of colors to compact the code in a way morse can't do: taking out some of the spaces between letters, and removing the necessity for extra long spaces between words.

this is obviously just a cipher for English—like, literally, we're just writing English words, we're not even spelling them weird, it's just the alphabet that looks strange—but in-universe this isn't supposed to be a super special secret code, it's supposed to be an alien language that can't be mapped to human phonemes. By spacing the words in a way that looks random, it's hard to easily visually map the coded letters/words to English letters/words, giving the illusion that this is indeed a different language rather than just coded English.

example: during the execution arc Bill signs his letter to Ford "•　—•——　——" which—without the colors, in morse—is, like you said, "EYM". several people theorized that might be Bill's name in his own language. nobody guessed that it literally says "B IL L".)

[jackyjackdraws]

I had this comic in the works for over a year before I finally decided to finish it

I have been regularly updating parts of it on Instagram before having to stop due to finals

Since I've never uploaded it here on Tumblr, I thought I might as well share part one here.

Part 2 is coming soon I promise 🙏🏻

[artsymeeshee]

That checks out

[kayiiin]

Babysit

[gfacrossthemultiversezine]

As we Complete our first week of preorders were happy to say that we are almost halfway to our second Goal!

ACHIEVED: Upgraded Stained Glass STANDEE

100 Orders - 2 Mystery Button Pins!

150 Orders - Mirror Finish Upgrade Get your Copy of the Across the Multiverse Zine Here