#<- tags before writing

[fallminlove]

[01:07]

c/w: little suggestive (making out, slight mentions of friends of benefit), mentions of alcohol, cursing, bad punctuation because i’m not going to edit this since I wrote this while tipsy

It was just another weekend night, you met up with Mingyu, you decided to invite him for a drink at the local bar near your house, just because you felt like having a couple of drinks yourself.

Mingyu wasn’t just any friends but, rather a special one. Usually on nights like these you would not have ask him to met up at a place other than you house, but tonight you just feel like you wanna get a little tipsy and maybe Mingyu will buy into it.

By the time Mingyu have gotten to the bar you’ve already had 2 drinks yourself. Not particularly being a heavy weight, you felt your mind already feeling fuzzy alrighty,

“Gyu!” you called out as you see him entered, “you’re late buddy, drink up” mentions to the beer you’ve ordered for him.

“buddy?! I’m just a buddy to you now?” Mingyu huffs as he chugs the beer, “I thought you were calling me up so we can have some fun again”

“Well I was,” you motioned to the bartender for another drink, “I’m just pregaming for what will happened later.” You took another sip of your drink, you don’t know why but you just felt like feeling drunk tonight.

“Dude I gotta tell you about this thing…” You started rambling about how you got your coffee order wrong earlier this week, and then about how good the company lunch was, then to the stray cat in your neighbor, basically, you were drunk rambling.

Mingyu gave the appropriate response, nodding or making a short comment, until you were just rambling and drank so much and tripped over yourself and fell in his lap.

“oh gosh, I’m sorry, I swear I’m usually not like this,” you said as you were trying to regain your balance.

Mingyu just looks at you, held you by the shoulders and he didn’t say much, or you couldn’t really tell because your mind was already kinda fuzzy from the alcohol.

You kept on apologizing and continue rambling on what you were saying, Mingyu stares for a bit and places his lips over yours to interrupt your intoxicated thoughts.

When Mingyu pulled away, he mutters “shit… I can’t tell if I like the taste of your lips or the taste of the alcohol…”

At this point of the night you couldn’t really hear him over the music and the dimmed lights of bar, you just pulled him in, to taste his lip over and over again.

[anna-scribbles]

old doodles from the archives 🫶

[xandrikart]

[ftmcollective]

a little chest binding/testosterone sticker sheet i did for fun :)

[egophiliac]

Your first initial impressions of any Twst character vs your current feelings about them?

honestly, my perception of pretty much every character went through some metamorphosis of "this guy looks like a jerk" to "oh, he's a stupid jerk? now hold on." it's all about that balancing act between a dark brooding asshole and a dark brooding asshole who is also totally ridiculous, and it really does make ALL the difference.

perhaps most ironically, I've mentioned before that I was absolutely not into the Diasomnias at first, because the impression the website gave pre-release was somehow even less favorable than for everyone else and I was mad at Lilia for getting my hopes up for a token girl). and then we got their stories and, well, I kind of just haven't stopped thinking about them since. 🤷

also, I went in thinking that Crowley was going to be. y'know. competent at his job. a helpful guide. a mysterious yet caring mentor figure, a fitting leader for this band of delicate young magic waifs with their fancy little magic outfits and their perfect, perfect hair. I've never been so glad to be wrong.

[ikiprian]

Mr. Fenton is a competent teacher. Almost too competent.

If Mr. Daniel Fenton had any more than a BS (with a minor in education), Tim would’ve flagged his profile as a potential Rogue. That’s the way of most charismatic academics, at least in Gotham. (Got a PhD? Instant watchlist.) Instead, he’s Gotham Academy’s newest celebrity, as a young, passionate, out-of-towner substitute while the chemistry teacher’s on maternity leave.

Tim gets the hype. Fenton seems to genuinely love teaching, and is invested in the welfare of the student body. He hands out bananas during exam week, hosts a “study habits seminar” each month to coach effective learning strategies, and the third time Tim falls asleep in his class, he even pulls Tim aside to ask if he’s doing okay. With all the late work he accepts and the protein bars he sneaks Tim, he’s every teen vigilante’s dream teacher. He could’ve been Tim’s favorite.

In fact, Mr. Fenton was Tim’s favorite. Up until Tim walks into Mr. Fenton’s chemistry classroom for a forgotten textbook, an hour after the final bell.

On the board where tallied scores for today’s review game had been kept, “THE CHEMISTRY BEHIND DR. CRANE’S FEAR GAS: ANXIOGENICS, NERI’S, & YOU,” is now scrawled. A detailed diagram of the human endocrine system projects in front of a small crowd of adoring and attentive students.

Fenton is wrist-deep in the skull cavity of an anatomical model. A short tug, and out pops the brain.

It’s plastic. It’s fake.

Tim identifies the nearest emergency exit.

Fenton turns to the door, and in the dark classroom with the projector illuminating half his face, his eyes almost seem to flash red. “What’s up, Tim?” he asks. His friendly grin is too big for his face. “I didn’t know you wanted to join the Just Science League!”

[OR: Danny’s a science teacher at Tim’s school. Gotham’s a pretty wild place, even for someone who grew up a superhero in a ghost-infested town, so he takes it upon himself to start a club teaching kids how to manage themselves in the event of a crisis. These Gothamites are pretty hardy, but a little extra training never hurt anybody! And he suspects one of his students might be a teen vigilante, like he’d been, back in the day. As a senior super, it's Danny’s duty look out for him! Surely, this is the subtlest and most appropriate way to give the kid pointers.]

[Tim immediately assumes supervillain.]

[ckret2]

Chapter 51 of human Bill Cipher is once more the Mystery Shack's prisoner: Dipper and Mabel try to figure out what the Axolotl's poem means; Dipper gets the hang of astral projection; and... whatever's going on up there happens.

####

Ford and Dipper came back into the shack through the gift shop; Ford didn't want to risk crossing paths with Bill. While Dipper went into the house, Ford went down—returning to the safety of his subterranean study.

Once Ford had put on the old black trench coat he'd worn during his multiversal travels and gotten comfortable at his desk, he pulled out Journal 5 to document the events of the last few days. In a cheap ballpoint pen, he wrote, I've lost my #1 Grunkle pen (and favorite coat) to the waters of Lake Gravity Falls. And then, deciding this didn't adequately express his feelings, he drew a small frown. That coat had served him well for decades, and he'd really liked that pen. It did write excellently, and it had reminded him of his gniece and gnephew.

He spent three pages documenting the eclipse—what happened, what readings he'd taken, what he and Dipper observed—and then another four pages talking about Bill. What he'd told them, why Ford had dismissed it; his claims about a trans-dimensional axolotl distorting gravity with its migration; the statue, the rescue, the breakdown.

The act of writing always helped Ford clarify his thoughts and untangle mysteries; it wasn't until he was writing that he realized the limbs Bill had said he couldn't feel were the ones that had broken off the statue.

He listed the rules of the chess variants he could remember Bill inventing. He drew Bill huddled in front of the board, grim, tear-streaked, exhausted; and then scratched out his face, embarrassed at the thought of immortalizing such a raw moment for his private viewing.

He wrote, There's still a slim possibility that the entire "eclipse," start to finish, was Bill's masterfully-orchestrated scheme to make us pity and trust him; but it's unlikely. Although Bill is fiendish enough, he isn't currently powerful enough, and his lies certainly aren't elaborate enough. If he could pull off such a byzantine ruse, then he could just as easily escape—and if he can escape, why hasn't he? Bill may be insane, but he's never been THAT irrational.

And so, even as twisted as Bill's idea of "friendship" is... for the very first time, I'm convinced that he was telling the truth all along when he said he wants me as his friend. It's not an act. He risked his life to save someone who's an active threat to him.

And at the end of it all—though I'm grateful to be alive in spite of my own stubbornness—do I like him any better for it?

Ford leaned back and shut his eyes, sifting through the inner tumult of anger and old hurt that defined most of his memories of Bill, looking to see if anything had changed.

There was a sore, tender spot in his emotions, a place beginning to rot with remorse; when he prodded at those emotions, he found that it was shame over his own harsh conduct of the last couple of days. But he was only ashamed of how cruelly he'd acted; he wasn't ashamed that Bill was the one he'd done it to.

Outside of that tender spot—regret over his own behavior—nothing else had changed.

No. I still hate him. I'm grateful to be alive, but I hate him. He hasn't undone anything he did to my family and me, and he never will. Forgiveness can't be purchased with favors.

I'm only relieved at the certainty of it. Bill has committed an act that can't possibly be a lie. I know, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that he's shown me the truth; and the truth is he'd rather see me alive than dead. Whatever other lies he may tell, I can hold on to that fact.

Bill's miserable eyes peered out at Ford between the scribbles he'd drawn across his face. It was truly a pity that Ford had to hate him. Pity that Bill hadn't been somebody better. He could have been better.

Ford couldn't find it in himself to be embarrassed that he'd filled four pages talking about the monster he'd already wasted so many more on. Bill had been right about him: You might hate me to my face, but behind my back you're as obsessed with me as ever. The only thing Bill didn't understand was that hatred and obsession weren't mutually incompatible.

####

"Hey, Dipper," Mabel said, unfolding the living room sofa bed. 

"Hey, Mabel," Dipper said, passing through living room on his way to the stairs. He climbed up to the attic.

He came back down from the attic. "Mabel. Why's Bill asleep in your bed."

"He really needed a nap," Mabel said.

"Okay but why on your bed?"

Mabel pouted. "Dipper, do you realize he's never slept on a real bed? Ever?"

Dipper tried to imagine sleeping on a couple couch cushions on the floor every night. "Yeah, okay, that does kinda suck." Even if it was Bill's own fault he wouldn't sleep in the living room.

By unspoken mutual agreement, having a Bill in the bedroom followed the same law as finding a centipede in the bathroom. The law was "that's the centipede's bathroom now." So once the folding bed was set up, they sat on it to serve as their hang-out spot for the evening and caught each other up on what they'd done the last couple of days.

After Dipper & Co. had left, Grenda had come over to take advantage of the low gravity to retrieve the kite that had been stuck in a tree near the Mystery Shack since last summer (it was, tragically, too tattered to salvage), and then they'd gone over to Candy's house to photograph each other performing feats of impossible strength. (Mabel would be sending some pictures to their parents to confuse them, and adding the rest to her summer scrapbook.) She'd spent the next day breaking the trampoline world record until Soos came outside and said gravity was probably too low for it to be safe to be up in the air anymore, if Bill's warnings about being off the ground when gravity hit zero were true; at which point Mabel had hung around inside air-swimming until she suddenly slammed against the ceiling, and then the ground. She was fine. She just had a couple of bruises. She showed Dipper her bruises.

In return, Dipper told Mabel about how their quest had gone: the checks for micro-rips, Bill's increasingly frantic warnings, the lake—

("You got to see a bajillion magical axolotls and I didn't?!")

—the cliff, the Axolotl, Dipper's near-death experience, and what he now knew about his out-of-body dreams.

"Seriously?" Mabel hissed, eyes bugging out. "And he had us looking up lucid dreaming books! What a jerk!"

"I know! He could have just ignored the whole thing, we didn't even think it was anything but dreams."

"And I'd thought he was being so helpful, too! Like he was really trying to make up for giving you 'nightmares'!" Mabel laughed in disbelief and flopped down on the flimsy mattress. "All that because he just didn't want us to know how it was really his fault? Biiill, ugh."

His fault. Dipper hesitated, wondering whether he should tell Mabel what Bill had said about Mabel's Fault; then decided against it. Bill had probably been telling the truth when he'd said he only wanted all the credit for Weirdmageddon.

But—Dipper did tell her about Bill saving their lives. He would have felt like a liar if he hadn't—like he was trying to trick his sister into thinking Bill was worse than he already was. He hoped Ford wouldn't mind; but how could he not tell Mabel?

"He could have just let you die and didn't?" Mabel turned that over in her head, processing this sudden shift in Bill's behavior. "Wow. I'm impressed."

He also told her about their previous encounter with the Axolotl. Considering the other lies Bill had told recently, anything he said about them meeting the Axolotl was dubious at best; but Dipper could remember the Axolotl, so maybe some of it was true, even if Bill had twisted as much as he could. ("The Axolotl said hi, by the way." "Aww. Tell him hi back!" "Yeah, I... don't know how to do that.")

Dipper laid out his journal between them on the folding bed, and Mabel read over the couplet a few times. "'Sixty degrees that come in threes, watches from within birch trees'..."

"It's got to be talking about Bill," Dipper said. "Equilateral triangles have three sixty-degree angles. I just don't know why the Axolotl wanted to talk to us about him."

Mabel frowned at the lines. "I think... I remember meeting him too," she said.

"You do?"

"Kinda. Like in a dream," she said. "We were in some kind of futury space race car. And he had a really comfortable beanbag chair."

"Yes! I remembered the beanbag chair, too!" And he hadn't mentioned it in his journal. "This is great! Talking about it must... must cause us to remember, somehow. Maybe since the universe where we met the Axolotl doesn't exist anymore, our memories of it are... detached or something? Psychically floating around between dimensions until we try to remember them?" He took in Mabel's skeptical frown and shrugged. "I don't know!"

She scrunched up her face. "Ugh. Last summer's first-grader time travel was complicated enough. This is like college-level time travel. Maybe we can ask Bill how it works?"

She said it so easily, like she thought it was actually a good idea. Right after she'd heard about the lucid dreaming thing, too. "I don't think he'd help." Dipper lowered his voice. "He really didn't want Grunkle Ford and me to find out about the Axolotl—and he kept telling me not to think about what the Axolotl told me. He's trying to cover something up."

"Oo-oo-ooh." Voice dropped to a whisper, Mabel said, "Do you think it's some kind of Space Axolotl conspiracy?"

"It could be," Dipper said. "All I know is he was trying to tell us something important about Bill. Some kind of prophecy, or... maybe a warning...?"

He trailed off. Mabel had stopped listening to Dipper. She was rereading the couplet Dipper had written, moving her lips like she was murmuring under her breath—but whatever she was saying, it was much longer than the couplet Dipper had written down. Distractedly, she said, "Do you have a pen?"

"Yeah, here." Dipper quickly handed over the pen he kept in his vest.

Mabel clicked it, went to the bottom of the page, and wrote: A different form, a different time.

Dipper sucked in a sharp breath as the words snapped into place in his mind. "That's it! That was the last line! What else do you remember?"

"That's it," Mabel said. "It was free form poetry with a bunch of rhyme pairs."

"I don't think free form poetry rhymes."

"Pbbbt." Mabel blew a raspberry and shoved Dipper's face. "Whatever! You know what I mean." She pointed at the last line. "Do you think the poem's about why Bill's here? He time traveled to the Mystery Shack in a new body..."

"Exactly! Bill must be back here for a reason. He's got all those powers—or, used to, anyway—and he knows more about the multiverse than anybody on Earth... Maybe there's some kind of big threat coming, and Bill's the only one who can stop it, and—and the Axolotl wanted us to know...?"

"I like the sound of that," Mabel said. "That'd basically make him a hero, right?"

Dipper grimaced. "I mean. I guess? But we're talking about Bill. If he does help us stop a threat, it'd be like if a serial killer picked up a hitchhiker and killed him, and then it turned out the hitchhiker was an even worse serial killer."

"That still sounds kinda heroic to me."

"Pfff, okay." He looked at his journal. "But... what is he here to do?"

Mabel considered what they'd already written. "Maybe we can use him to spy on our enemies through birch trees!"

"Thaaat's probably not it."

"No, I think I'm on to something. I can feel it."

There was a lot of empty space between his couplet and Mabel's line. "There's more we're missing, though. Maybe the rest of the poem describes the threat? Or what we need to get Bill to do?"

"I can't remember anything else, though."

"Me neither."

They stared at the page together, waiting for something to come to their blank minds. Mabel looked at the fish tank. "Hey, Primrose! Do you know anything?"

The pet axolotl in the tank ignored her serenely.

Dipper said, "'Primrose'?"

"Yeah, last summer Grunkle Stan said her name is Freakface, but I thought she deserved a cuter name. She's primrose color!"

"Ford says he originally named him Nikola."

Mabel gasped. "Nikki..."

Dipper twisted around to look at the axolotl. "Do you know anything? Do you... get messages from the Axolotl's heralds, or anything...?"

Nikola slowly opened his mouth, and slowly closed it.

Mabel said, "Hey. The Axolotl's one of those dimension-crossy time-travely guys, right? He probably wouldn't have given us a prophecy in the wrong timeline and then made us forget it unless he knew we'd remember it in time in the rightdimension!"

"I guess," Dipper said uncertainly.

"So we don't need to worry about it! We'll remember it when we need to."

"Unless this timeline's going to branch, and the only one where we survive is the one where we put all our effort into trying to remembering—"

"Shhh!" Mabel put a finger over Dipper's mouth. "Uh-uh. No college time travel. We'll be fine!"

Dipper pushed her over. "Okay, but we should at least try a little to remember what the Axolotl told us."

"What if we work on it separately?" Mabel propped herself up on an elbow. "Instead of just sitting around thinking about it. And whenever we remember a line, we can tell each other and see if it makes anything click."

"That might be faster," Dipper said, stroking his chin. "We're already remembering different lines."

"Yeah! And that lucid dreaming book said something about focusing on a problem before you sleep so you can figure it out in your dreams! We can just work on it in our sleep and we'll remember it all in no time!"

Dipper laughed. "What? No way, I think lucid dreaming is just one of those made up pop psychology things. I didn't get it to work at all." Either it didn't work or Bill had deliberately recommended a terrible book.

"I did! I can remember like... eighty percent more dreams. And I can tell when I'm dreaming a lot more often!"

"Huh." Or, maybe Dipper just wasn't doing it right. "Maybe I need to start over from step one. Do you know where the book we were using went?"

"Over here!" Mabel had set a couple library books on the end table next to the sofa bed; she pulled out the second one, which had a glittery pink bookmark with a cat on it stuck two-thirds of the way through. "Just don't lose my bookmark."

"Thanks." He'd reread the first step before bed. "We should probably be getting ready for bed anyway, huh?"

"Seriously?! It's barely bedtime!" And when the adults weren't watching, official bedtime was an hour and a half before Actual Bedtime.

"I'm exhausted. I just hiked up and down a mountain and faced down death."

Mabel pointed at Nikola. "You faced down a big salamander."

"Close enough."

They went upstairs, brushed their teeth, went to their bedroom...

And stopped in the door. Bill was still asleep. "Oh. Right," Dipper said.

He was curled into a ball on his left side, facing the wall, covered with only the zodiac blanket and his borrowed/stolen top hat sitting on the side of his head. He didn't use a pillow; he'd pushed Mabel's pillows and dolls behind himself to form a squishy makeshift fortress.

"Please don't wake him up," Mabel whispered. (She'd already set up the folding bed for herself; she'd clearly planned on this.) "He's had a really really hard time the last couple of days, and I think he needs as much sleep in a real bed as he can get, and it's just for one night, and I'm sure he'd rather sleep than do anything evil—"

"He said something, didn't he?"

Mabel paused. "Yeah. I think seeing his body really messed him up."

Dipper sighed. "We were trying to keep him away from it." He didn't want Mabel to think they'd forced him to stare his own death in the face. "But he did that... eye thing and looked through the trees, and..."

Mabel nodded.

Well. Dipper couldn't kick him out now. For Mabel's sake.

As children, occasionally when they got hotel rooms with a bed too few, their parents would stick them in one bed with a barrier of pillows in between them. At age thirteen and without two crabby parents trying to get them to just go to bed after a long plane flight, they unanimously vetoed that plan. Dipper decided against asking Stan if he could sleep in Ford's unoccupied bed, both because he suspected Stan would just go upstairs and drag Bill out of the room and because he didn't want Stan to think he was scared of Bill. He wasn't scared of Bill. Not anymore. He could handle one measly night in the same room as him. Anyway, somebody had to make sure he wasn't unsupervised in their bedroom all night, right?

Dipper and Mabel quietly set a floor mirror and old lamp next to Mabel's bed, draped a sheet between them, taped on a pink poster that said "WARNING! TRIANGLE ZONE!" and was covered in stickers of triangular objects, and decided Dipper was adequately shielded. If Bill did get up during the night, he'd probably trip through the sheet and wake half the house before he got anywhere near Dipper.

Dipper went to sleep with a baseball bat in his hands.

####

"Okay," Bill said, hands on his sides, "what am I looking at here?"

The feral band members of Sev'ral Timez turned toward Bill, eyes reflecting in the dim light. They were squatting around Bill's petrified corpse like a pack of apes examining a sleek black monolith.

"Hey girl," Creggy G. said.

"Hey," Bill said. He looked down at himself. His onyx black feet hovered over the ground and the yellow glow from his exoskeleton illuminated the clearing. "Lemme cut to the chase, is this gonna turn into a raunchy dream? My corporeal love life is about as cold and dry as Antarctica, I keep hoping one of my dreams will get a little hotter and wetter—"

"Nah, G," Deep Chris said. "Mr. Bratsman got us fixed."

"Aw."

"We're here to pay you reverence for freeing our minds from the chains of the conventional," Greggy C said, gesturing to Bill's corpse. Leggy P was kneeling and bowing to it and Chubby Z was posing for it. "We want to help free you like you tried to help free humanity."

Bill's eye narrowed. He tapped a finger against the edge of one brick as he considered this offer. Finally, skeptically, he said, "Fine. I'll bite. Why should I think you can help me?"

"Because we can give you the understanding your heart's been missing, girl. You're just like us," Chubby Z said. "A horror never meant to exist, born of a dream to construct the perfect golden idol, forced to dwell within an unnaturally-fabricated human shell."

Bill tilted his head thoughtfully. "I'm with you so far."

"We want you to join us," Deep Chris said. "Cavort with us in the silvan night, G. Shun the harsh light of the spotlight for the healing salve of moonbeams. We'll get drunk on the sweet fermented summer berries, uncaring of how the brambles prick our flesh. We'll dance in a frenzy of ecstasy and only sleep when the morning sun lifts the dew from the flowers and the sweat from our skin. It'll be straight Dionysian, boo."

"We can kiss the hot trees," Creggy G said.

Bill grabbed his shoulder. "Oh, you're the human that keeps making out with birch trees! I knew your face was familiar!" He paused. "So... are there any eligible ones around here?"

"Sure, girl, just downstream."

"If I'd known, I would've polished myself first."

"Say you'll join us, Bill girl," Deep Chris said. The band crowded around Bill to either side, posing around him—the backup dancers for the star singer. "You'd be one of us."

"We're already exactly the same," Creggy G said, holding up a mirror so that it reflected his and Bill's faces beside each other. In Bill's human face were two empty white eyes with pinprick pupils and pale blue irises, exactly the same as the eyes of the Sev'ral Timez boys.

He sat up with a gasp, hands flying to his face. There were still green boughs at the edges of his dreaming vision, blending into the wooden boards of the Mystery Shack's attic. Before sleep had fully fled his mind, he seized up the zodiac blanket draped over his body and stared into his embroidered eye.

The eye stared back at him. Through it, he could see his horrified sleepy face, and his normal slitted yellow eyes. His connection to the blanket's eye disappeared as he finished waking up.

He heaved a sigh of relief and flopped back down. He'd been lucid, but he hadn't been in control of that dream. He still needed practice.

He rolled toward the light of the window, groped around beneath it until he found his journal, grabbed up his crayons, and flipped pages blearily until he found the first blank one. He started writing down his dream, pausing only briefly as he tried to figure out how to translate "Sev'ral Timez" before settling on a sufficiently goofy way to misspell "several times" in Plaintext.

He made it halfway down the page before he stopped. Hold on. This wasn't his beautiful journal. These were not his beautiful crayons. He checked the cover and grimaced in displeasure when he saw a pine tree rather than a hand. Dipper's journal. Bill ripped out the page, ate it, and set the journal and Mabel's crayons back on the table  under the bedroom window.

"What was that," Dipper asked, "some kind of Morse code?"

Bill yelped and twisted around. Dipper's soul was hovering above Mabel's headboard, watching over Bill's shoulder.

"Hey! Back, foul ghost!" Bill snatched up Mabel's pillow and swung it at Dipper.

"Ow—Hey! How did you hit me, I'm in the mindscape—"

"I said back!" Bill swung again, chasing Dipper off the bed. "Back into your fleshy tomb!" He climbed off the bed, stumbled into Dipper and Mabel's trap, tripped through the sheet and probably woke up half the house.

He yanked the sheet off and flung the pillow at Dipper by its corner. "Now get back in your body, go to sleep, and leave me alone."

"I don't know how to get back in it. I just wait until it happens by itself," Dipper said, floating irritably over his sleeping body, arms crossed. "Why do you think I just wander around every time I have this dream?" He paused. "Right—it's not a dream, is it."

Bill sighed heavily. "Try putting your body on like..." He almost said like an exoskeleton, remembered his audience, and amended himself: "Like it's clothing. I usually start with the hands. Just like putting on gloves!"

Dipper looked at the cold fingers wrapped tightly around the baseball bat. "How do I put hands on like gloves? There's no opening or—"

"Just try it, would you?" Bill sat tiredly on the edge of Mabel's bed.

Dipper shot him an irritated look, but pressed his ghostly hands against his fleshly ones, passing through the skin until one set of fingers rested inside the other. A fingertip twitched. 

Bill gestured with one hand, continue. "Now the sleeves."

"I know how to get dressed." Dipper laid down in his body, forearm into forearm, shoulder into shoulder—until he was wholly back inside. He sat up, awake. "Huh."

"There, see?" Bill said. "And if you want to take it back off, just do the same thing in reverse. Like degloving your body from your soul!"

"Did you have to phrase it like that?" Still, Dipper tried it, peeling out of his body from the fingertips up. He left his body sitting upright as he hovered over it.

Bill chuckled tiredly. "Lookit your face, staring at nothing. Stupid looking."

"Shut up." He slid back into his body, more quickly now that he knew what he was doing.

"Great," Bill said. "Now that you know how to get back in your body, never do that again." He flopped back onto Mabel's bed and rolled over to face the wall. "It's a pain in my base having you wander around all night."

"Then you should've thought of that before you ripped my soul out of my body," Dipper grumbled. "Can you reattach me to my body?"

"Sure, easy." He lifted a hand to point down at his regrettably human form. "Not like this, though. Wanna help reattach me to my body?"

"Never in a million years."

"Then come back in a million years. There's nothing I can do for you until then." Bill dragged Mabel's zodiac blanket back over himself. "So sorry. Go to sleep. Leave me alone."

Dipper bet Bill could do it and was only saying he couldn't to try to trick Dipper into helping him. But he lay back down—clutching his bat again—and shut his eyes.

After a moment, Bill asked, "Where's Mabel? Sleepover?"

"Sofa bed in the living room."

"Right."

And then there was silence.

Several minutes passed. Dipper nearly fell back asleep. He heard Bill climbing out of bed and creeping across the room; but the footsteps didn't approach Dipper's bed, so he didn't open his eyes.

A few minutes after that, Dipper heard him come back, walking more heavily. He cracked open an eye to see what Bill was up to.

He was carrying Mabel, who was still asleep; his arms were trembling from her weight, but even at that Dipper hadn't known Bill was that strong. With a quiet grunt, he set her on her bed, then haphazardly tossed her sheet and zodiac blanket over her. He picked up his top hat from the bed and put it on; and then he wandered off, footsteps quiet as a ghost, and Dipper heard the creak of the door as he left the bedroom.

That was a lot nicer than Dipper had expected from Bill. Maybe he did care about Mabel in his own way.

Mabel rolled over and latched on to one of her dolls. Dipper shut his eye and fell back asleep.

####

(My favorite part of writing this was Bill dreaming about Sev'ral Timez saying the most absurdly flowery things imaginable. Anyway, let me know what y'all think about this week's chapter! And reminder that I MIGHT skip next week or the week after because the next couple chapters need heavier editing than usual.)

[aslyran]

Visions

[remxedmoon]

practicing self care (projecting my stims on my blorbos)

greyscale vers below the cut!

[fisherrprince]

I’ve been possessed. If anyone wants to know where Edgeworth is, he’s been watching kamen yaiba with the detective boys for 4 hours

[qcomicsy]

I think a thing that people get wrong about Jason's anger is that it's not explosive.

It's cold. Jason isn't the type of person who storms off at every little thing or goes throwing tantrums and setting things on fire blindfully.

He's the type of person who's very practical. He keeps to himself, always. You rarely see issues where Jason's anger is reactive at the moment where the trigger happens to him. If you see his character up close, most of the time when he's triggered his reaction is calm. Even cold.

He gets triggered -> He keeps to himself → He makes a plan → And then he reacts.

Jason's anger being something explosive and out of character and out of place is actually how other people (characters) see it, because they have no idea on how it's playing out on Jason's head.

And that's a thing you can see operating since he was a child.

Where the only exceptions about this effect is either when someone he believes needs his help is involved.

See Nightwing Annual (2021)

But In Batman #411 when Jason learns the fact that Two-Face was responsible for his father's death and Bruce was keeping that from him as a secret his first reaction isn't to blow up on him.

Was to seethe.

Bruce goes up home after dealing with a Two-Face case (in my field we call that poetic irony) and asks Alfred where Jason is, Alfred's answer is that he's been sleeping all day (which is a conclusion that Alfred drew probably after going to check on Jason and seeing him in fact on his bed all day).

But when you see the next panel, even though he is on the bed, He's fully awake and both his expression and his body language shows that he's in fact angry.

This is the first time he appears again in the comics after learning that Two Face killed his dad.

Jason doesn't go towards Bruce immediately to demand an explanation or ask why he did this, or even to throw the truth on his face.

(Which could be debatable that that's something the Dick would usually do, but I'm not that literate on Dick's comics)

His reaction wasn't immediate.

His reaction was to go to his bed and stay quiet. Jason stayed calm and collected the whole trip until meeting Two Face again.

But the moment Jason as Robin has the opportunity to get his hands on Two-Face he does this

From Bruce, and maybe Alfred's perspective it could be interpreted as out of place or him storming off.

But it isn't. Jason was able to keep his cool (even though he shut off), until he was face a face to Two Face.

Does that mean he planned that to happen?

That's debatable, in any moment of this issue it is shown that Jason was actually planning to get to Two Face and do this. I my personal opinion, other and much more plausible explanation is: That he was in fact trying to keep to himself but couldn't hold back the moment that he saw his dad's murder.

You can see the same thing happening as Jason learns that Batman got another Robin in Red Hood: Lost Days.

Talia asks "You all right?" and Jason's first answer is "Sure Why Wouldn't I Be Alright?"

When he's alone he finally has the moment to break down.

(Actually both Red Hood: The lost days and Batman: Under the Red Hood are great case studies on how that usually play out on Jason's head.)

Jason is way more in control of his emotions than people ever give him credit for. The thing is that Jason holds it back until he either blows off or is capable to throw it back in someone's face.

[ao3-crack]

(x)

[aghostsnail]

so-so there's this guy (@keferon 's tf mecha au)

[hootyhoowoo]

A little 15 min doodle but first post of the year has to be Bingqiu!

[annasofthe11thdimension]

Waltz

[tizzymcwizzy]

for my illustration final we had to make some spreads for a children's haiku book! my classmate wrote the first haiku and i wrote the second one,

im super proud of how these turned out!! maybe i should be a picture book artist.....