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ckret2 · 3 months ago

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Chapter 63 of human Bill Cipher trying to debate his way out of still being the Mystery Shack's prisoner. Soos has found the stolen Journal 4 in Bill's possession and has to decide what to do about it in light of everything else he's learned about Bill lately.

[*you may notice chapter 61 is missing! This plot was done sooner, so I'll be posting chapter 61 sometime after 64. It's not chronological so you're not missing anything!]

Soos stared dumbfounded at the journal with a 4 on the cover that he'd pulled from Bill's hiding place. Ford had lost Journal 4 last fall—he'd said gnomes had stolen it. How in the world had Bill gotten it?

Soos sat in the attic window seat and flipped through it. The first few pages were Ford's journal entries—his observations of the dimensional rips they were glueing shut in Gravity Falls post-Weirdmageddon, a hand-drawn map highlighting various places around the globe he wanted to investigate, a few drawings and observations of paranormal beings he hadn't seen his first time in town, half a sketch of a gnome that ended with a jagged scribble across the page followed by a page that said "Shmebulock" over and over.

And then a page that said, in an unfamiliar handwriting of jagged, narrow gray letters: "CURSED BOOK! If your name is Mabon Mason Pines, STOP READING NOW or ENJOY YOUR HEX!"

Bill had written page after page of some weird code of gray and yellow-green dots and dashes. A few sentences in English—every one of them was a threatening message to Ford. "Everything would have been fantastic if you'd just helped me finish, Fordsy." "You'll regret not siding with me when you had the chance." "You should have known better than to let your idiot brother turn you against me." "Sixer, you're lying to yourself every time you say you never worshiped me, and you know it. You spent the first third of your life running away from the god you were raised with and the second third chasing after me. Don't waste your last third denying it. YOU'RE MINE." A small, worrying diagram of what looked like the interdimensional portal. And a sticker.

Wait, hold on.

A sticker. One of Mabel's. The rest of the page was the same as the others, the two-tone dots and dashes, except for the sticker, and an arrow drawn from one paragraph to the sticker.

A yellow smiley, its round edges filled in with black marker to make a triangle, over the words "Good job!"

Soos stared at the sticker.

####

A couple of weeks ago, Melody had texted to let Soos know that there was a mess in the upstairs bathroom, and the kids said they'd been fighting a werewolf ghost.

When Soos had gotten home the next morning, Melody had pulled him aside and quietly told him she hadn't wanted to worry him and the Stans, but she did not think it was a werewolf ghost.

When Soos saw the bathroom, he didn't think it was a werewolf ghost either.

It was a scene from a horror movie. Menacing magical sigils painted all over the walls in blood and toothpaste, Bill's zodiac painted on one mirror, the other mirror broken, glass and water all over the floor. It looked like the site of a really wet demon summoning. This contained none of the hallmarks of ghostly or werewolfish activity. Why would Bill do this?

Soos was kind of reluctant to ask Bill. Bill still sorta scared him sometimes. Sure, he looked like a lost 18-year-old, but Soos knew what teens were like in a fight. So he asked Mabel instead.

Mabel pursed her lips uncomfortably. "Ask Dipper."

So Soos asked Dipper.

Dipper winced and. "Promise you won't get mad."

Soos considered that. "Yeah, I guess that's a fair deal."

Dipper confessed that Bill got accidentally locked in the upstairs bathroom for like a whole day, because he and Mabel didn't hear him yelling. Not because they were out of the house when they shouldn't have been. They were just... somewhere else in the house. Doing something loud. For the whole day.

While Bill was trapped alone.

####

Soos had vented to Abuelita about cleaning the bathroom. Like sure, he got Bill was annoyed about being stuck, but that seemed excessive.

Abuelita had made the observation that sometimes people in profoundly bleak and oppressive situations would just... destroy whatever was around them. Like punching a hole in the wall or snapping a pencil when you were angry, but much more so. Not because they wanted their surroundings to be destroyed, but because that was the last and only thing they had power over, and they needed to feel like they were in control of something. Even if that thing was merely changing their environment from ordered to chaotic.

Bill didn't have control over very much. He probably hadn't since he died. Soos didn't know what kind of space triangle afterlife Bill had been in before he showed up as Toga Lady, but it couldn't have been great if he'd come straight back here.

Soos could remember the one time weeks ago he'd let Bill into the bathroom to shower and forgotten to come back and let him out. How Bill had screamed so all the Mystery Shack's tourists could hear; how he'd seethed in Soos's face, how he'd said he'd rather blow their collective cover and throw them all on the mercy of the town's law enforcement than remain locked in the bathroom a second longer than they'd agreed upon. Soos had thought Bill was just impatient and hotheaded.

Standing in the bathroom, looking at the material evidence of Bill's claustrophobic terror—the broken glass, the spilled blood—he wondered.

####

The same day, he had felt a breeze in the gift shop and found the trap doors to the roof left open. He'd climbed up, shut them, and in between tours he'd visited his office to check yesterday's security tapes.

He saw Wendy coming into the shack to hang out the morning before. That was fine. Soos had discovered she did that from time to time on days the shack was closed, but she wasn't doing anything bad and she hadn't brought it up yet, so Soos didn't bring it up either. Maybe she just needed a private place to hang. Teen stuff. He was just glad Wendy felt that safe at the Mystery Shack. Maybe she'd just gone up to hang out on the roof and forgot to shut the trap doors...

And then, right there on screen, Soos saw Bill letting himself into the gift shop, through the door, which he shouldn't be able to open. A chill shot up Soos's back. The door curse was their only real means of containing Bill. If he could use doors now, he was out, there was no way they could trap him without doing something crazy like locking him in the bunker and hoping he didn't kill himself.

Or could he use doors? Soos thought back to the frantic messages on the bathroom wall, written in Bill's own blood—his desperation over being unable to escape. Maybe he could use doors but not doorknobs. That was okay, maybe?

On tape, he saw Wendy run into Bill. He saw Wendy take Bill onto the roof. Out in the open air, where he could just... do whatever. But he didn't do whatever. Soos fast-forwarded the tape until Wendy and Bill came back down, and Bill simply returned to the living room.

He'd had the perfect opportunity to shove Wendy off the roof or escape. He didn't take it.

If all Bill was using his new door skills for was ducking into the gift shop and hanging out on the roof with Wendy, Soos thought maybe it would be kinda mean to take that away from him. There weren't a lot of other places Bill could go in the shack. (Soos kept seeing the blood on the bathroom wall. He kept trying to imagine what kind of helplessness would drive someone that far.) Maybe Bill needed the open air.

So Soos had put the security tape on his desk, not sure what to do about it.

####

A couple of day after that, while Soos was restocking the gift shop in between waves of tourists, he'd seen Wendy reading an oddly dull-looking booklet instead of one of her usual magazines. He tilted his head to glance at the cover. The Oregon state driving manual. "Aw dude, gonna get your learner's permit?"

"Think so," Wendy said. "Don't tell my dad."

Soos remembered Wendy groaning about her dad wrangling her into doing errands if she ever got her license. "Your secret is safe with me."

"Thanks."

"What made you change your mind? You were totally against getting a license a week ago."

"It's probably those stupid Gleeful Auto commercials that have been worming into my dreams." Wendy laughed. "I'm just waking up in the morning like, neeeed caaar."

"Oh yeah! Heh, funny coincidence, Melody says she had a dream like that too. Sometimes she gets these like, dreams about monsters watching her in bed? But one time, the monster was Bud Gleeful, whispering in her ear about a big car sale. She totally woke up laughing!"

"Ha! Annoying car commercials should be banned, man. Why do we need to be told multiple times a day to spend thousands of dollars?"

"You make a salient point."

They fell silent for a moment as Wendy read a couple more paragraphs. Then she said, "That, plus... I was talking to Goldie the other day."

Soos looked up from the t-shirt he'd been putting on a clothes hanger. "Oh. Yeah?"

"About where we wanna go when we get out of town."

"Huh." Very casually, Soos asked, "What did Goldie say?"

"He wants to go on some big vacation. Like a world cruise or something, I dunno."

"Huh." Soos wondered if that was true. He tried to imagine Bill Cipher as a tourist. Floating triangle in a Hawaiian shirt with a camera hanging from a strap and a fanny pack. What kind of places would he even visit? Soos bet he wanted to visit the pyramids. Heh. (Was that stereotyping? Maybe that was stereotyping.)

"And I told him I'm moving to Portland for college."

"Oh, hey, I didn't know you were thinking about college."

"I... actually, never told anybody else before," Wendy said. "I've been thinking about it for years, but part of me felt like it's just a fantasy? But Goldie said when he got out of high school, he did the same thing—moved to another town, made a new group of friends, all that. And... I don't know, actually talking to him out loud about it just... made it feel real, you know? So I thought, if I'm gonna move to Portland, I should probably start planning for it. Starting with how I'm getting there." She held up the driving manual.

Soos nodded slowly. "Huh. Yeah. That's a pretty mature way to look at it."

And that was what Bill was talking to Wendy about on the roof? Just... listening to a teen vent and helping her figure out her future?

And so, Soos took the security tape off his desk and put it in a drawer.

####

A few days later, Soos had heard the downstairs bathroom sink running for several minutes, assumed someone had forgotten to turn it off, and went to turn it off himself—and had caught Bill, in the dark, half undressed, washing himself in the sink.

After Soos had backed out and profusely apologized, he'd asked, "But—how come you're washing in the sink? I can let you in the upstairs bathroom if you need—"

"Worry about your own grooming habits and leave mine alone," Bill snapped. "As long as I don't smell, what do you humans care how I do it. Soap is soap and water is water."

It took Soos several days to realize he didn't think Bill had had a shower since he got locked in the bathroom. And nobody had noticed, because Bill made sure nobody noticed, because he'd been keeping himself clean in the bathroom he couldn't get locked in.

####

Dipper would go all summer without showering if he could get away with it; Stan showered like once a week and had constant old man smell; Abuelita also showered weekly and had a more refined old lady smell; Soos didn't know when Ford showered, but he'd never caught him doing it and Ford always smelled weirdly like burned hair. Soos showered almost daily during tourist season—that Mr. Mystery suit was hot—but outside that might go three days at a time. Mabel showered near daily.

From what Soos had observed, Bill was showering like, at least twice a week. He didn't know how often Bill cleaned himself in the sink in between.

That meant he was showering more often than two-thirds of the house.

Yet he was the only one in the house living under the threat of being thrown in the tub at 3 a.m. if someone decided he hadn't bathed enough for their tastes.

The reason Bill had refused to shower during his first week of imprisonment was so he could use the condition of his body as a bargaining chip—with no physical possessions in the world, his own body was the only bargaining chip he had—to try to buy a little more dignity. In return, his captors had taken more dignity away. They permitted Bill less autonomy over how to take care of his body than the household's children had.

Dipper had never gotten forced into a bathroom he couldn't let himself out of.

####

The day after the eclipse, Ford had pulled Soos aside and said quietly, "Soos, as soon as you have some time—could you repair the door to the kids' room? Before the end of the day? The latch has been broken since the tooth fairy's attack."

"Uh, sure, I can probably do that," Soos said. "How come?" The latch had been broken for a couple weeks, and the Pines hadn't been worried about it before.

"Right now, the door can swing freely with just a push," Ford said. "I think Bill's figured out how to use that to get in. Which is worrisome, since he shouldn't be able to use any doors..."

"O-oh." Soos thought about the swinging door into the gift shop. "Yeah, uh... sounds bad. Byyy the way—how'd you figure out he knows how to use the door?"

"Dipper says Bill somehow got in and out of the room last night," Ford said. "Mabel fell asleep in the living room and Bill carried her upstairs. I really don't like the thought of Bill being able to get his hands on the kids while they're asleep and defenseless."

Ford was mad at Bill for tucking a kid into bed? That was the big red flag? "No problem! I'll fix the door right after work."

The next time Soos visited his office, he took the security tape out of his drawer, rewound it, stuck it back into the tape recorder, and let that day's security camera footage overwrite and erase the evidence of Bill's visit to the gift shop.

####

And now, today, carrying Journal 4 in both hands, Soos trudged downstairs, trying to figure out what to do with it. He had to return it to Ford, obviously—but Bill and the Stans were already in the middle of a discussion that sounded a lot more like an argument. Flinging a stolen journal into the middle of the proceedings would just make it worse. Maybe he should wait until they were finished and everyone had cooled down a little—?

While Soos was upstairs, the discussion had apparently moved into the kitchen. He hovered awkwardly at the bottom of the stairs, watching.

"What do you mean, you need kitchen access," Stan was asking, "you already have kitchen access. It's never been off-limits! Even after you peed in the sink!"

"It's not kitchen access if I need to ask someone else for permission to eat anything but snacks."

"No one's making you ask for permission! You can take what you want!"

"Okay, fine. So what can I eat?" Bill gestures at the shelves. "Go on. List anything you can think of. Anything."

Stan grimaced, and glanced at Ford to see if he was willing to walk into the obvious trap first.

Ford looked at the nearby shelves. "Cereal."

"One point for Stanford Pines! Cereal! So am I supposed to eat dry cereal for every single meal, or—?"

"No, of course not."

"All right, then what else?"

"Brown meat," Stan said. "We've got plenty of brown meat. It's good for you!"

"You didn't give me can opener rights," Bill said.

"Huh."

"So no brown meat," Bill said. "No canned soup, no canned chili, no canned fruit, no canned vegetables—"

Ford cut in, "Some of the cans have pull tabs, you don't need a can opener for those."

"Terrific observation! As soon as you realized I could open those cans myself, you moved them all under the counter because you thought I'd use the sharp edges as weapons!"

"It's... possible to open cans without a can opener, I did it sometimes while roughing it in other dimensions—"

"Yeah, wearing off the metal rim with a rock, right? Lemme just go outside and grab a rock—oh wait." Bill crossed his arms.

Ford sighed, and turned to Stan to suggest something else.

Stan surveyed the available supplies, spotted the bread, and said, "You could make sandwiches!"

"With what filling?"

"Uh..." Stan kept looking.

Meats and cheeses, of course, were kept in the fridge. Along with jelly, condiments, most vegetables... tuna or spam weren't options, they were canned... "Hey, we leave out some meats that don't need refrigeration. Sausages and stuff."

"Right, right. The ones that don't need refrigeration because they're wrapped in plastic you need a knife to cut," Bill said. "Sometimes I bite the plastic open with my teeth and rip off chunks of sausage with my fingernails, that's always fun! Then you put the leftovers in the fridge, and I'm out of luck until we buy another sausage."

"You could put... peanut butter on your sandwiches?" Ford tried. "Peanut butter's nutritious."

Bill fixed him with a hard look. "For the past five weeks, every time I've gotten a meal without asking someone else to help feed me like a baby, I've had nothing but peanut butter and banana sandwiches, peanut butter and jerky sandwiches, peanut butter and raisin sandwiches, and peanut butter and potato chip sandwiches. And we're out of bananas, jerky, and raisins." He pointed at the tortillas. "Once I decided to get creative and made myself a cold peanut butter quesadilla! I can't even add spices, because guess where the breakable glass spice jars are kept?"

"Pasta," Ford tried. "We could keep the pasta out."

"Oh, wow, that'd be great! I just love pasta! But I can't open the microwave and I can't turn on the stove! How do I heat the water, Stanford?"

Ford frowned. "Hm."

"I can cook, you know—not that any of you bothered to ask! It might not suit your tastes, but it suits mine! I wouldn't need your help to eat if you didn't make me need help! I am sick to death—" his voice went thick and took on an uncharacteristic waver, "—of having to beg to... eat." He cleared his throat, squeezed his eyes shut, and rubbed his eyelids with one hand. "Sh-shouldn't even—need to eat." He clenched his jaw to keep it from trembling.

Stan and Ford exchanged a guilty look. Stan said, "You don't have to beg— I mean, we know the, uh... position you're in..."

Bill was silent for a moment as he tried to get a tough face back on. His voice came out as a rough whisper—too thick to get any louder without breaking. "I had to negotiate to get burnt eggs."

Ford winced.

Soos was dumbfounded.

When had Bill had to negotiate for food? He could all too easily understand how it might have happened—Bill was an annoying guy, sometimes they had to pull out dumb bargains to get him to do stuff. But bargaining for food should never be on that list. Meeting Bill's basic nutritional needs couldn't be dependent on whether he was annoying that day. If it was, he'd starve.

It sounded like he was starving. Right under Soos's roof. He hadn't even noticed.

He thought about the piles of junk food trash upstairs and the bag of chips Bill had hurled across the room.

Ford said, "We'll... discuss it."

"We'll figure something out," Stan said. "I mean it."

Bill nodded silently. Head down, without uncovering his eyes, he hurried out of the kitchen and toward the stairs.

He nearly bumped into Soos's chest without noticing him. Soos backed up a step, tucking Journal 4 under his arm. "Whoa, hey!"

Bill froze, head jerking up. "You." His voice was thick and his glare was watery and poisonous. "Don't you have anything better to do than eavesdrop?" He tried to elbow past Soos, smacking his leg with his umbrella. "Move."

Soos realized uneasily that Bill's face looked a little slimmer than it had when he'd arrived.

He stepped in Bill's way. "Can't go upstairs right now. Attic's being cleaned."

"I didn't ask you to clean!"

"I'm not cleaning for you, dawg. It's just gotta be cleaned."

"Fine! Whatever!" Bill veered around the staircase and stomped down the hall, muttering, "Can't decide when I eat, can't decide when I shower, why should I get to choose when my hovel's swept..."

Soos's leg hurt where Bill had smacked it. (Bill couldn't even control whether or not he cried; all he had control over was making someone else hurt.)

In the kitchen, Stan murmured, "Didn't even realize we don't keep anything decent out on the counters. They're so crowded..."

"Chip bags take up a lot of space." Ford sighed. "I assumed he'd get a serving with everyone else whenever Mrs. Ramirez cooks."

"He does, but she only does dinners. And he'll only eat it if he watched her cook it. I've seen him get lunch with Mabel, but I don't know what he does when she's not..." Stan spotted Soos on the stairs. He tiredly called, "Soos? You need something?"

"Uhhh..." Soos hid the journal behind his back. "Nope! I just thought I'd come downstairs! For no reason." He awkwardly walked up the stairs backwards, journal still tucked behind him. "And—and now I'm going up again." He stopped at the landing and scooted sideways up the next flight of stairs. "See ya."

He pressed the journal to his chest and returned to the attic.

####

When Soos and Abuelita moved into the shack, the first thing Soos had done was turn Ford's ground-floor study into a bedroom for Abuelita. Because she was a little old lady, and not quite as steady as she used to be, so Soos didn't want her constantly going up and down the stairs—because falling once, just ONCE, could send her to the hospital or worse. That was how serious it was! You don't mess around with that!

Bill tripped and fell on the stairs so often that they could use it to tell when he was awake. And nobody had thought to offer him a cane? Did anybody even ask if he was alright?

When Bill first arrived and tried to murder everyone, naturally, he came out of it pretty banged up and bruised. That was to be expected. It was self-defense. They'd gotten used to seeing Bill with scrapes on his arms and legs, rope burns around his ankles, and the angry purple-black bruises of chain links over his arms. But in all the weeks since then, Soos hadn't seen Bill bruise-free once. Bruises on his shins and arms, scrapes on his elbows and knees. Soos had seen him with a four-inch burn on his forearm. Bill had brushed it off.

In Bill's first few days in the shack, he'd resorted to peeing in the kitchen sink because nobody had bothered to give a guy who couldn't open doors a way to use the bathroom. And they were the reason he couldn't open doors in the first place!

He threw up in the living room in the middle of the night and went upstairs to sleep on couch cushions on the floor and nobody had talked about it.

He burned off all his hair and was so upset about it that he stole Soos's zodiac blanket and hid under it for half a week, and everyone but Mabel just ignored him.

In less than a month in the Mystery Shack, Bill had lost a tooth.

He had been dragged out of the house during a weird weather phenomenon while terrified out of his mind. Soos had seen Bill cowering on the ground in fear, Ford looming over him, grabbing him by the collar and snarling in rage. Bill had been pleading with everyone in hearing range not to make him go, and had come back in such a state of shock he could hardly walk.

And yet, he'd protected the whole town from getting hurt in zero gravity—and he'd brought a pet for Soos.

They'd tried to execute Bill two days later.

####

Soos sat in the window seat, flipping through the remaining filled-in pages in Journal 4. The last few pages were packed with stickers. A cat that said PURRFECT! A smiling fish that said A REEL PAL! Bill had started a little collection of pizza slice stickers for some reason. A couple of holographic rainbows, a smiling scratch-and-sniff sun. (Apparently, the sun smelled like lemons and oranges. Astronomy facts!)

Soos reached the current page. Bill was using several pieces of paper—regular printer paper and notebook paper, folded in half—like a bookmark. Soos unfolded them. A list of animals ranked by fuzziness. (Soos was satisfied that he'd been placed under the "smooth and squishy" category, but wondered whether he should be bothered by the fact that he shared the category with pigs and slugs.) A drawing of Bill riding a looping rocket ship and waving a fishbowl helmet above him. A drawing of a blue house with a couple of kids and a pig in the window. Several drawings of shape people kinda like Bill: a pink heart person labeled "Me in Flatworld," a stern-looking red stop sign wearing sunglasses labeled "Bill's parole officer," Bill dancing, the pink heart protecting Bill from some villainous-looking shapes—all clearly Mabel's art.

Several notebook pages in someone else's handwriting detailing names, addresses, and contact information, with statements Soos couldn't make sense of—as if maybe someone had been asking somebody else questions and writing down their answers. He thought the questions might be about how some people had reacted to the end of Weirdmageddon. He got the impression the people being discussed had known that Weirdmageddon was coming. He got the impression they were disappointed it hadn't happened. There were several questions at the end: How will we rendes-vouz? (Whoever was writing didn't know how to spell rendezvous, but to be fair Soos wasn't 100% sure either.) What supplies do you need? What are your interim orders?

Soos stared at the notebook papers.

He flipped back through the journal again, looking at each page more closely.

Sometimes the two-tone dot-and-dash segments had a stray human word: a few characters he recognized from his Teach Yourself Japanese workbooks, sometimes words Soos thought might be Arabic but honestly he didn't have a clue. At one point he listed half a dozen human names that Soos didn't recognize. The most common character was a stretched-out letter M (Mabel?), followed by a 6 knocked on its side (Sixer?).

The dot-and-dash segments had occasional amateurish illustrations. Sometimes they were human stick figures; sometimes the stick figures' heads had symbols off of Bill's zodiac wheel. He saw Stan's fish symbol, Gideon's star symbol, and Mabel's shooting star symbol. Ford's stick figures were the only ones with hands; Bill consistently gave them six fingers. The doodles were like particularly esoteric cave drawings; they were so bad that Soos couldn't tell what most of them were supposed to illustrate.

Except for one featuring Bill (as a triangle) and Mabel and some other inscrutable figures in a really awesome car with flames on the side, its coolness limited only by the fact that it was all in gray and yellow-green crayon. When Soos had been in high school, there had always been a couple of kids who didn't know how to draw anything except expensive cars or name-brand sports shoes, but they drew them in extreme realistic detail. Apparently, Bill was that kind of artist. Nothing but stick figures and the sickest crayon car Soos had ever seen.

It didn't do anything to dispel Soos's impression of Bill as a lost alien 18-year-old.

On one page, in sloppy lines of handwriting that meandered drunkenly up and down the paper, Bill had written, "I don't get why you won't give me a second shot. I asked you to join my gang. I serenaded you in a pyramid. I got a fantastic makeover. I offered you godhood. I showed you my dimension. I didn't torture you until I had to. I even made you a skin couch! I know how much you've always wanted a leather furniture set! I've given you everything from chicken zombification magic to jelly beans, what does it take? What am I missing?"

Soos reread Bill's other messages to Ford. All that "you'll regret not siding with me" junk wasn't threats. It was the impotent rage of a socially inept teenager who didn't understand his own creepiness had driven his friends away. It was the whiny moan of some guy going "Why doesn't she like me anymore" about an ex-girlfriend who had told him five times she didn't like him anymore because he didn't listen to her. Like that guy Wendy dated last summer. So like, a jerk, but not a terrifying world-ending monster jerk, just an annoying creep jerk. A regular jerk. A human jerk.

Soos stood, gave one last look at this journal—clearly stolen, definitely a violation of Bill's "no writing materials" restriction, completely stuffed full of mysterious messages to outsiders and some kind of weird alien code that could say anything at all and might have been super dangerous—and he slid it back into the ripped seam in the attic seat cushion where he'd found it.

He finished vacuuming up the potato chips Bill had flung across the room, thinking about how offended Bill had been that Soos had given him any food except what he'd asked for, remembering what Abuelita had said about people who destroy the things around them when they feel like that's the last and only thing they still have power over.

Enough was enough.

####

(Hope y'all enjoyed! Next week we may interrupt our regularly-scheduled programming to post a TBOB-based chapter I'm inserting early into the fic—it depends on if I get it done by next Friday. In the meantime, I'm looking forward to hearing y'all's thoughts on this chapter!)

#bill cipher #human bill cipher #soos ramirez #gravity falls #gravity falls fic #gravity falls fanart #fanart #my art #my writing #bill goldilocks cipher

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mistxmood · 3 months ago

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i hope he never finds inner peace

[Image Description: The first drawing focuses on Stanford Pines, one arm braced on a table surface and the other rubbing his temple. He looks irritant. Besides him, Bill Cipher floats behind him with both hands clasped together, cheerfully held up as he kicks up a leg in whimsy. There's doodles of flowers around him highlighting his delight in Stanford's misery.]

[The second drawing are two doodles of Bill Cipher. The first has his shape upright, but he's posed as if he's lying down on his front with the way his leg kicks behind him and his arms are braced before him. His hands are posed as if he's cupping his metaphorical face, and he looks gleeful as he looks at something off screen. Text besides him details: Drama alert!]

[The second doodle besides him has Bill Cipher, except hes got his arms dangling from his lower side with his legs. He's floating in the air and he's looking the other way, as if his attention has been drawn somewhere else.]

[The final picture has a screencap of Bill Cipher from Gravity Falls, doing the same pose as the doodle just described. The original poster's persona, a ambiguous thing with a heart-shaped horn that wraps around its one visible large ear, is staring wide-eyed at the viewer while it points at the screencap of Bill Cipher. End image description.]

#gravity falls #stanford pines #bill cipher #mood's art #i remember having so much fun drawing him yet hes also strangely really hard for us to draw #edit: added image description

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elemom · 2 months ago

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i have a gravity falls au but it’s like… a combination of a bunch of AUs and my own ideas? it has like… weirdmageddon bad end, evil cipher parents au, a little bit of whatever the au where the young stan bros find baby bill is…. and then i throw in a bunch of stuff about time travel and alternate timelines and euclydia and how bill’s parents reacted after he seemingly disappeared out of thin air and some existentialism (because none of my ideas are complete without a little bit of existentialism) etc etc. and i have been rotating it in my brain and now i love it.

to summarize the idea:

This is a story with three sides, from three angles. From one perspective, weirdmageddon has gone global, and Ford and Dipper form a plan to avenge their now-dead siblings.

From another perspective, the young Stan twins find a lifelong friend in a mysterious, triangular creature that washed ashore on a new jersey beach.

From the third perspective, two Euclydian parents are charged with murder after their son seemingly vanishes into thin air.

Chat, I wish i could draw.

#gravity falls #gravity falls au #bill cipher #stanford pines #stanley pines #is it disrespectful to get inspiration from a bunch of other AUs and make ur own…… i accidentally fell in love w this idea 😭#calling this the three sides au for now #three sides au

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itsthesinbin · 1 month ago

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Sins in Stardust [Chapter 3: Fresh Start] (Bill Cipher/Reader)

Gonna try smth new. I'll actually post chapters both here and to AO3. If I end up not liking it, I'll go back to just posting the AO3 link.

Genuinely this fic is all I can think about.

Read the fic on AO3 here!

If you like it, reblog it and leave a comment!

----------------------

You managed to get a disguise for Bill, using a hoodie and a face mask that you tied behind his stupid triangle head. You had him walk behind you, saying he was your shy younger brother. Thankfully, he actually kept his mouth shut until you could get into the hotel room. You guessed he had enough self preservation to follow your lead when it came to people.

You dropped your bags onto the floor of your room, and set the to-go boxes on the room’s desk. Both of you flopped onto the bed, tired. Apparently he wasn’t used to having to walk everywhere. You were exhausted from running for both of your lives and carrying your bags and walking the two hours to town. It took everything in you to roll over onto your back. Your stomachs growled in unison and Bill groaned in annoyance.

“How often do I have to eat in this vessel? This shit sucks.” Even though he was face down, you could hear his voice clearly as his body lit up with each word. Like he projected his own thoughts outward instead of actively speaking. Cool in one way, but god damn you wished he’d shut up just a little bit.

You handed him the box with his so-rare-it’s-almost-raw burger and fries, and you grabbed your fried fish. You both shoveled food into your empty stomachs. You didn’t even flinch when he threw fries into his eye-mouth this time. You were too hungry to care.

“So,” you started after you were halfway through your fish. Bill had slowed down his eating as well, burger sauce dripping down his… cheeks, you guessed. Weird. A forked tongue came out to swipe the sauce away. That time you shivered.

“What… DO you remember, Bill?” He swallowed, eye returning as he thought. He rubbed under his eyelid, squeezing the lid shut in an attempt to draw out any memories.

“Well, I remember that night your mom invited me over!” He cackled, nearly doubling over at his own joke. You closed your eyes, trying not to get pissed off all over again. You had just calmed down. He wiped a tear, still tinged with pink, from the corner of his eye.

“Really, though, it’s hazy,” he finally answered, completely snapping out of his mirth. It was unsettling how fast he changed moods. It made you feel a little sick. You picked at your fish as he continued.

“I remember me and the Henchmaniacs were dragging that one guy through the blood ocean…” He half mumbled, trying to sort through the fog of vague visions in his mind. He listed off various memories that grew worse as he went on. Feeding someone their own skin. Stapling a guy’s eyelids open and making him watch his family be murdered for a few hundred years. Making a couch out of flesh as a “pet project”. You held a hand up before he could continue.

“Enlightening, but I more meant… closer to the whole stone thing and the appearing in front of me thing.” He snapped his fingers, as if just now remembering that part of the story. You rubbed your temple as he hummed to himself. His air of confidence and humor dissipated slightly. His “brow” furrowed, hand going to the side of his head like it hurt to try and remember. It made your annoyance soften. He was irritating, sure, but the guy was suffering major amnesia. And also apparently he didn’t have any powers that he had before. You wanted to know more about that, but felt it was inappropriate to ask at the moment.

“I was… I remember being pissed off? There was… a lot of fire…” He trailed off. His expression grew unsettled as he went silent for a long moment. A hand trailed along one of the cracks lining his body. You wanted to reach out, ask if he was alright. Then it was like a flip switched.

“Oh well! If it’s important, I’m sure it’ll come back to me!” He laughed with a wave of the hand. He drowned the remainder of fries in the ketchup packet that came with his meal. You rose a brow, but didn’t argue with him.

“What about you, kid? What’re you out in the middle of nowhere for?” You honestly didn’t expect him to ask about you whatsoever, so that was a pleasant surprise. You washed the breading stuck in your throat away with a swig of pitt as you thought about what to tell him.

“... Just needed a new start, honestly. I was… stifled, back home, for a few reasons. I had to get out.” He seemingly grinned, coming over and throwing an arm around your shoulders.

“I knew I liked you, Stardust! You and I are kindred spirits- meant for greater things than what our homes could give!” You gave him a look at the sudden spiel, and the nickname. He stood on your legs, so you were eye to eye, and placed his hands on your shoulders. You were not as excited as he seemed to be.

“Stardust?” “Yeah, you walking organs are made from the stuff right? And we met on that romantic starry night,” he all but purred, fluttering his lashes at you. You tensed, let out a disgruntled noise and pushed him away. He snickered as he moved back to his spot on the bed.

“Anyway, howzabout a deal? I got big plans for this dimension, and I’m not about to let a little knock to the noggin set me back! You help me bring my friends out here- get my memories and powers back- and I’ll make it so you reach your REAL potential!” The speech seemed too practiced. Too smooth. Then you remembered he had introduced himself as a “dream demon” earlier today. His practiced pitch made sense with that bit of context. You frowned. You figure a proper deal with a demon would be a bad idea. You didn’t even know if it’d be binding with his powers gone- if he was telling the truth- but you chose not to risk it at the moment. You weren’t in the mood to be tied to an egomaniac at the moment.

“Dunno about a deal. I’ll help you find the friends you got in town, but I don’t plan on sticking around too long. A week or two at most.” He blinked, clearly having expected you to be stupid enough to go for the deal right away. The hand he had stuck out to shake fell to his side again. He wagged his finger at you, amused.

“Smart cookie! Don’t trust strangers that easily, kids!” There was a bite to his tone. He was a little angry that you didn’t fall for it. Good. You weren’t gonna just be used by some asshole you were supposed to be helping. You both finished your food, satisfied and full. You broke down the styrofoam boxes before shoving the pieces into the tiny hotel trash can. Your legs protested the movement as you looked for clean clothes to change into, after your upcoming shower.

“Can you remember anything about these friends of yours? Any leads at all?” you asked as you rummaged through your meager bags. Bill hopped off the bed. He paced for a moment, seemingly in thought. The short demon climbed up onto the padded bench under the window and took a peek outside.

He watched the people walk by. You walked up behind him, leaning on the windowsill to stare out with him. It seemed like a charming little town. People waved to each other on the streets, kids ran around relatively unsupervised. You caught two cops kissing on the bench out in public, so at least you knew this place wasn’t openly homophobic. That was fun.

He sighed, annoyed, as he leaned on a hand. He continued to scan people, hoping that SOMETHING would click. You saw the top of him start to turn red in annoyance. As frustrating as the little asshole has been in the few hours you’ve known him, you felt bad for the guy. Even if he was a horrible tyrant and criminal if any of his escapades were true. He just needed some help.

“Hey,” you said carefully, placing a hand on his back to get his attention. He jerked, giving you a frustrated side eye. You flinched slightly at the sudden glare and removed your hand. Swallowing, you continued.

“Don’t try to force it. You just got… free? And we’ve both been through a lot this morning. Let’s just… take the day to rest, okay? We can work on finding your friends in the next couple days.” He huffed, hat drooping as he crossed his arms and pouted like a child. You almost patted his back, but remembered the glare he gave you. You kept your hands to yourself.

“After my shower, we’ll see what’s on tv for a bit and then I’ll get dinner later. I’ll look up takeout places nearby,” you offered. He didn’t look at you, just pouted at the window.

“I want a silly straw to drink with,” he grumbled. “And pizza. With mushrooms.”

You blinked, slightly startled by the odd request of a silly straw. Man, when was the last time you used one of those? You smiled. Maybe a little bit of whimsy was what you both needed.

“I’ll get us matching straws,” you promised. He looked over his shoulder at you like an angry kitten. His lower eyelid seemed to poke out in an actual pout. It was endearing in a kinda gross way. He let out a small grunt and turned back to the window when he saw you were serious.

You left the tv remote next to him, telling him to look for something mind numbing to watch for when you got out of the shower. You left him alone to clean up.

As soon as you were in the shower, Bill’s shoulders drooped. He dragged a hand over his eye, the lower lid pulling slightly in exasperation. He dropped his head against the window, banging it against the glass a few times for good measure. He didn’t like not being in control of the situation. Not one fucking bit. He was Bill FUCKING Cipher and he wouldn’t be reduced to… this… for long.

He just had to get you on his side, and build him his ticket out of here. Or at least build his henchmaniacs’ ticket INTO here. Even without his powers, it should be a piece of cake. Humans were stupid!

His bad mood vanished quickly, and he grinned as he watched a raccoon jump out of a trash can at an unsuspecting child. He couldn’t help but laugh as it knocked the kid to the ground. Suffering was funny when it was someone else. He leaned back on the side of the bench, watching the show with his arms behind his uppermost point. Yeah, he’d be back to his old self in no time.

#gravity falls #bill cipher #bill cipher x reader #sins in stardust

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nokonomi · 2 months ago

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What if Bill Cipher had a little sister? + Bonus Reverse! Gravity Falls Bally

What if Bill Cipher had a little sibling, yes I know he destroyed his home dimension but like what if he formed a version of him into his little sister and make them instantly related? I would imagine them having like some kind of chaos junkie older brother and younger sister calmer girl relationship with each other. Bally knows she can’t scold Bill because well, for one, he formed her, and two! She is the younger sibling here so yeah no. But technically she can still scold him even if it results in a sibling fight. They express their platonic love for each other like that way.

Bally is more mature and calmer for a 12-year old triangular entity that has one eye as well, except she doesn’t have a top hat nor is yellow, she’s purplish-blue and has a dark purple bow on top of her pointy head. Eyelashes are more downwards and soft. Carries a little book around with her universal spells and all that little sh!t. She’s a nerd and she likes to study things about the cosmos.

Did I mention whenever she sings she has a very loud voice it can erupt an entire earthquake in just 3 seconds? Yeah so rule number one, no singing (bill said) Honestly she is very powerful but not as powerful as Bill, she can control matter and space, but not time. So she can basically form whatever she wants (an imaginary boyfriend)

Her spells usually come out in a bluish hue, indicating her rather calmer and insignificant side. She’s more exposed to nature then anything in the entire Galaxy. She’s never killed anyone! Not yet… but she is a well-behaved kid, even if she is billions of years old.

Now since she was formed by Bill, she doesn’t know what happened to her parents, well, not really her parents. But she wishes she had parents. She knows what they look like since she shares an individual mind with Bill. And trust me the clean-up process for her to forget all these memories was not pretty.

Sometimes she’ll make a dimension of her own and maybe spend time in it and remorse about lonely times, sit in a corner and draw her and her brother with their presumed dead parents hugging them both. Sometimes she wishes they could maybe hug her too if she was ever apart of the family when her older brother was younger. She misses them. She misses when she was just a little speck of dust in the universe for some reason before getting formed into a real Euclydian.

Now she doesn’t really talk with Bill much, since he’s too busy with much other sh!t he has to deal with anyways. Sometimes she wishes he had the time to spend time with her, but no! THAT never happened. She knows he’s got “big plans” coming up soon. But she can’t just stop time and make him hangout with her. It’s beyond her control. He formed her because he wanted someone to call “family” since he misses his parents.

But she doesn’t think that he wants her as family. He just didn’t care and formed her to clean up his own messes, which she always ends up doing. Part of that is true, some of it is not. She knows the trauma he has.

Fast forward a billions years later to the near 80s. It had been a long time ever since she saw her brother. Distant and alone and hungry for brotherly bonds and relationship, but they never seemed to happen in the end. That is until her mind peaked at a glimpse of Bill’s plans on Earth. Stanford Pines. A genius. Yes. She could finally find someone to connect to. So she headed down to Earth in a human form of herself to maybe see what her brother was up to. She could’ve done this any time, any day, any century, but no. She didn’t want to disturb her brother. After stumbling across Gravity Falls, Oregon. She mentally located the site Stanford was located at and found it, carefully wandering about it. She noticed that Ford was asleep and she decided to enter the Mindscape and see what his brain was filled with. Man, a genius. He was like her. She saw Bill and Ford playing chess, and once Bill detected her, he rushed over to her and said, “Heya sis! It’s been MILLIONS OF YEARS ever since I last saw ‘ya! How ya been?” He acts as if he had seen her last month. She got frustrated and stormed off, Stanford looked at her in sympathy, poor girl was lost.

Now she got angry because he acted as if he had seen her just last week, and he pretended to actually care when in reality he didn’t. This made her very frustrated, screaming at the top of her lungs as she ripped out pages of books that floated inside of The Mindscape. Bill tries to calm her down, which soothes her. What a fool she was for believing he actually cared for her in the end. She smiled and hugged him gently. Bill introduced Bally to Stanford, “Bally, Stanford! Stanford, Bally!”

Bally looked at Stanford in a curious way and smiled. He might be connected to her in some way in the near future. But when she found that portal they were planning, it ruined her. She knew something. She knew connecting The Mindscape with Earth would result in destruction. She tried stopping Bill. It didn’t work. He manipulated her. She ended up crying and storming off, she never saw Bill and Stanford ever again, assuming they were at their worst points.

Authors note: Man this was a very long lore story to go to! Anyways here’s a drawing of her and Reverse!Gravity Falls AU her! I’m hoping you all enjoyed the lore reading. She might be a bit tad out and cringe but I like her for that. I might change her up later!

Some facts about Sally and Bally. -Bally likes reading books and using her books to make spells or summon random things. She glows blue whenever she does something incredibly powerful.

-Bally believes Bill didn’t actually care for her, which he didn’t care for her actually. He manipulated her and why should she trust him? -She got cheated out of her own childhood.

SALLY

-Sally is an ENTP, silly and more extroverted, honestly had no care in the world whatsoever and a chaos junkie like Bill. -Makes fun of Will (Reverse!gravity falls AU Bill Cipher) for being so easily depressed and cries easily. She thinks he’s weak, she actually cares for her older brother.

-Literally the type to say “ROFLMAO!” “LMAO” “LOL XD” “<3” Gen Z type.

-Honestly does not care about Earth or any other dimension. WORKS FOR NOBODY. NOBODY. NOBODY NOBODY NOBODY.

#Bill cipher #Will cipher #gravity falls AU #gravity falls #Dipper pines #mabel pines #gideon gleeful #soos Ramirez #stanley pines #stanford pines #bill cipher #sibling dynamics #gravity falls fanart #gravity falls oc lore

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eagle-shadows-nest-of-stories · 2 months ago

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Gravity Falls au

Mabel and Dipper are Ford and Bill's children.

After the breakup Bill is is just drinking his sorrows, it's all fun and games until he wakes up a massive headache and sees a new timeline unfold before his eye but he ignores it. Because it shows him crying and begging like all those sheep he's slaughtered before.

He finds the twins inside of a pocket dimension with in himself. Their weird human biology has made them adapt to his godly form and powers. He could see their weird human flesh color and they were in a newer perfect replica of a womb but he suffers no draw back. At first Bill leaves them alone not knowing the full extent of their connection. Bill spends more time in the pocket dimension enjoying the silence that washes over him, it's almost peaceful full. The little shrimps listen to his rambling some times they react to him or so he likes to think they don't do much. At first he is worried that they haven't changed at all so he looks for information on human reproduction. He learns about the development of the shrimps, they are behind it should be nine months and he should be able to spit them out or something.

A year passes according to human time and the shrimp now are the equivalent of a month old. Bill wonders if it's the Nightmare realm or his powers. As years go by Bill watches as they become less shrimp like and more sharp and triangular. Time goes on, and he grows attached to the shrimps.

One day he returns instead of the shrimps he sees two right triangle.

For the first time in all the trillions of years he's been alive he feels fear. Not fear for himself but for his little spawns. This long forgotten fear and repressed memories come to the surface. The need to hide them to keep them away from the ones who always takes the irregular children away. Its like an itch that he can't scratch, They can't have his children they are gods like him not bound by an old society long dead! His children will never know the pain and suffering that he went through!

For he is free and so will his spawns!

In time grow into their power!

If only the universe knew how far Bill would go for his spawn. Not that anyone would believe he could ever love let alone care for anyone. Some say everyone can have children, but not everyone can be a parent.

Bill will prove everyone wrong as he burns dimensions for the sake of his children, his little pine tree and shooting star.

Even if Gravity Fails

Single parent Bill Cipher who loves his kids! He is still hell bent on getting out of the Nightmare realm even more so that he can rule it along side his brats. Basically Human biology prevailed and Bill is technically pregnant but he can't truly get pregnant so his body creates a pocket dimension into a womb and keeps the twins inside. But the twist is they age like Bill not like humans, so it will take a while for them to grow, but Bill keeps getting a weird timeline information, he ignores it until that day when Ford shoots Bill's hat.

Bill like any parent freaks out, watching as his spawn begin to fade so he prays the the Axolotl to save his children, he will pay the price just help his children.

There is nothing the Axolotl can do.

For their birth would never come to be and so they never existed not now nor ever. This was the one timeline they were conceived. In every other one they never existed

Bill brakes, searching for another timeline any other way to save them, but the Axolotl is right. So Bill floods the timeline/dimension, far greater nightmare power collapsing the earth into the nightmare realm. With this boost of power he again searches, he finds a new dimension one where the og Dipper and Mabel are stillborns. So he goes and puts the remaining souls of his children into their new vessels.

Mother Pines knows her children are dead it's just her Mr pines got stuck in traffic waiting for his uncles, the doctors shuffle around her as they bring the twins closer. Then they all fall, standing up like dolls, and a voice speaks

"Be honored flesh bag! For your stillborns will give life to mine"

She watches as two spirits float into her children their eyes open revealing thin black slits for pupils and pale yellow eyes. She faints, when she wakes up her husband and his family are holding the children. The doctors all stare at her with bright knowing eyes and tooth filled smiles.

Think horror movie where children is possessed from Mrs Pines pov, Mr Pines is worried as the children don't develop normally and thinks they maybe autistic and thinks his wife is suffering from postpartum depression or something while single dad Bill pov who can only interact with his kids via Mindscape where they are developing nicely. Although he doesn't trust the flesh bags.

#gravity falls #gravity falls au #bill cipher #stanford pines #billford #Gravity Fails au

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samfrodot4t · 2 months ago

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IMAGE DESCRIPTION: A four-panel (three section) comic featuring Mabel Pines and Bill Cipher from the show Gravity Falls. There are four images, three with one section each, and the final image with all three sections put together. Panel one is Bill floating against a blue background, his hand out to the side and his eye contorted to give the appearance of one eyebrow up, one eyebrow down. There is a speech bubble next to him which, in very angular letters, reads: “SHOOTING STAR! what is a “le-dollar-bean”?” Panels two and three are Mabel Pines against a lavender background, wearing a light blue sweater with hearts on it. In the second panel she’s looking at the audience making a flat expression with raised eyebrows, and to the left of her is an ellipsis. In the third panel, she’s looking up at Bill, one eyebrow raised in slight confusion, and her speech bubbles read: “it’s like” “a dumb tiktok censor word for lesbians”. The fourth panel is Bill against a blue background again; there is a form of him talking, a form of him pointing at an american 1-dollar note (on which the pyramid section is circled in red and features Bill again), and a form of him in the corner, colored in the lesbian flag, with the caption “LIVE BILL REACTION”. The talking Bill has an angry eye, a red coloring to his upper point, and his fists in the air, and is saying: “WHAT! I should be le-dollar-bean!” and “I am LITERALLY le bean on the dollar!” Mabel replies “ok” from out of frame. In each section, there is a rectangle containing a little drawing of a bee and the year “2024”; this is the artist’s watermark. END ID.

i thought of this bc i made a joke about bill being so high he’s green like the dollar bill

#gravity falls #gravity falls fanart #mabel pines #mabel pines fanart #bill cipher #bill cipher fanart #sorry I thought of that dumb joke and I had to commit it to the record

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nenoname · 3 months ago

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20th century toy i wanna be your boy

got inspired by this cover art

#neno draws #silas birchtree #bill cipher #stan pines #stanley pines #something something cults and the end of the world and masks....#also giant mechs!!!#au ideas have also been bouncing around in my head but enough!! i already got other stuff to think about #gravity falls #two sides of the same dollar bill

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eldragon-x · 2 years ago

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[ID: Five colored drawings of Bill Cipher from the show Gravity Falls, drawn in differently Flatland-like forms. He is always in the shape of an equillateral triangle, with a brick-like pattern criss-crossing his lower wide section, and a single eye.

From top to bottom and left to right they are:

A "kelly" green, with his eye on his thin top side, where his tophat floats, with his bowtie on the bottom side. His mouth is a curved line starting at his point to below his eye. His bricks are outlined in pale green.

The second is a yellow-green version with the same sort of configuration, with yellow outlined bricks. This time, he has simple floating hands with three pointed fingers, with his right hand, which we see on the left, holding a simple black cane with a curved handle.

The third is a yellow triangle with his eye now on the facing side, and arms with claws, holding up a hand of blue fire.

The last two are much smaller, black with white outlined bricks.

The first has the curved mouth at the point, the second has an eye poking up from the thin side.

End ID.]

more of post-arson, pre-nightmare realm bill (and bonus flatland bills)

#I wish more Bill backstories explored him getting adjusted to higher dimensions with his appearance tbh #most stick close to his canon design and ignore how the 2D world works instead #to be fair my flattie Bill isn't entirely accurate either bc you'd just see the inside of a 2D being #but to my defense I stuck with his brick pattern bc in the art I drew of him burning his dimension I wanted to let his parents stick out-#- bc J3 specifies that they also died. and we know he hated them. so I gave his dad brick pattern to make him stand out. anyway.#art #gf #bill tag #bill cipher #post-arson bill #ID by accessible-flatland-art

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kismetmoon · 1 year ago

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whenever i listen to my embarrassingly gigantic playlist filled with just completely random songs that i like and have been thrown in there, it likes to play ‘Taurnado’ from Centaur World every time without missing a beat

and every time i hear it i immediately think about how the Nightmare Realm might just be built on top of Bill’s home dimension with all of the burnt second dimensional corpses

and what if they could manifest themselves (via ‘left-over’ Nightmare Realm madness magic whatever) into a giant ghost or spirit type creature (akin to the Taurnado) - all working together as one giant organism - to just fuck with Bill for killing them. roaming around the waste of a dimension or appearing during storms (if they even have those there) or just randomly to scare the shit outta ppl

[Plain text ID: two digital drawings of an original Gravity Falls / Flatland crossover character named The Mosaic.

In the first photo, The Mosaic is depicted in it’s ‘line form’. It is a humanoid creature made up from various, small, monochrome shapes and lines and has a large glowing red eye for a head with a point on top and no pupil. It is holding out two of it’s hands to each side, while it's legs hang down loosely as though suspended in the air. A small depiction of Bill Cipher, a yellow triangle with a black top hat, and Kryptos, a teal rhombus, can be seen above The Mosaic’s right hand. The background is a very dark grey with a white circle that contains a light grey hexagon, a dark grey upside down triangle and an even darker grey line behind The Mosaic.

In the second photo, The Mosaic is depicted in one of it’s various ‘shape forms’ - as an isosceles triangle creature with limbs and a large centre yellow glowing eye made from smaller and monochrome shapes and lines. They are holding one arm slightly raised and a tiny depiction of Bill Cipher can be seen between their loosely pinched claws. The background is dark grey with lighter grey swirling patterns.

End ID.]

#it’s basically just a massive mosaic of dead flatlanders / second dimensional beings #a massive sentient mosaic #and it’s just their empty exoskeletons left over from the fire #that can switch into whatever shape it wants #but it’ll usually just stick to an isosceles or a line for the fear factor #i’ll just call it The Mosaic for any future posts about it #it speaks like a massive crowd in unison #with both male and female voices peeking through at different volumes randomly #just like the taurnado #bill cipher #kryptos #gravity falls #flatland #the mosaic #drew shapes without tails someone call me an ambulance

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videogamelover99 · 2 months ago

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[Gravity Falls] Waking Days Ch. 3: The Master of the Mind

Summary: Bill Cipher is reborn, but not in the way he would have wanted. Stuck as a mortal and relying on those who brought his downfall, he realizes that maybe he didn't lie as hard as he should have. [AO3 Link] Characters: Bill Cipher, Mabel Pines, Dipper Pines, Stanford Pines, Stanley Pines, Jheselbraum the Unswerving, The Axolotl Pairings: past BillFord Rating: T

A/N: Hope you like this new chapter! Thank you to @megxolotl and @nexstage for beta-reading. Enjoy!

---

The mindscape opened up around Bill, casting the Mystery Shack’s living room in fuzzy greyscale. Bill’s human prison lay beneath him, fast asleep on the couch. Human astral projection wasn’t exactly rocket science, but the cute little speck of power he’d retrieved from the rift gave him access to something far better: the squealing minds of others. His projected consciousness could take any form he wished, and it was a blast to have his snazzy three-sided form back, if temporarily.

Ha! Couldn’t have predicted this, Frills?

He had some housekeeping to do. The mindscape let him interact with his mind, and Bill spent the first night eagerly sorting through the scraps of information his memory was trying desperately to hold on to. A human mind was not meant for trillions of years’ worth of memories, and it had a pesky habit of prioritizing things that it deemed “important”, and throwing the rest out with the garbage. Bill had to dig stuff up from a pile of discarded and disintegrating memories and cram it into corners it couldn’t escape from. It was like lying about cleaning your room, only to shove everything under the bed and hope Mom wouldn’t notice.

Once he was sure he wouldn’t lose whatever remains of his infinite knowledge left to him, Bill finally got to the real fun. He poked around the town, invading sleeping heads and only causing minor chaos in his wake. He didn’t want to give himself away that easily.

Well. Lazy Susan sure liked cats.

Dipper’s nightmare of fighting parents and disintegrating nuclear families took a backseat to one about twelve-headed pigs.

One peek into Sheriff Blub’s brain: it was a play-by-play of Mabel’s trashy romance novels.

One peek in Deputy Durland’s brain, and he had to pour caustic soda in his eye. Humans were such freaks.

There were two minds Bill had to keep from, if only for now. Sixer was too likely to recognize his presence. As for Stanley…

He didn’t want to see Stanley’s mind ever again.

Bill kept searching. One of these small-town hicks was bound to find another rift, another crumb of his power. All he had to do was play nice.

It was only a matter of time.

—

Learning to play nice, however, was harder than it looked.

"So, anyway, this is why-" Mabel Pines' cheerful voice grated on him as she prattled about something one of her little friends did. They sat on the floor in the attic, surrounded by a pillow fort the twins had constructed, and Bill attempted to look like he was listening. He noticed the stained-glass window that used to hold his face had been replaced by some boring plexiglass. Boo.

"Hey, Billy-"

"I told you not to call me that," he snapped. "What?"

“I’ve decided,” she said it like it was a monumental announcement. “I’m going to help you!”

Well, that was easier than expected. “Finally got a taste for world domination?”

“Nope, try again!”

“You’ve come to your senses and realized replacing all the eggs in the fridge with baby heads is the most hilarious thing ever?”

“Wrong again! I’m gonna help you…” Mabel stood up on her bed and struck a dramatic pose. “Be a better person!”

That sent him into sudden fits of hysterical laughter.

“You might not believe it now, but I do!” she jumped off the bed, her face deathly serious. “Being a good person is like sports, you get better at it if you practice. All you need is the right coach!”

“You lost me at ‘person’.”

“You’re a person, silly!”

“That’s the problem.”

“No, it isn’t!” She flung open one of the drawers and took out a sketchbook. “Here.” She flipped to the right page and pointed at a drawing of a triangle with an eye and a big angry eyebrow. Pretty good. The flames were a nice touch. “This is you, and this…” She drew a line through his face and colored everything below in red. “Is your badness level.”

“I’m not a fluffy marketable blue alien created by a gaslighting, monopolistic entertainment company.”

Mabel learned to ignore his asides. She looked him up and down and pursed her lips like she was conspiring something. It was kind of adorable, but Bill was pretty sure that whatever it was would occupy the rest of the day with pointless side quests, and he needed to get a move on if he wanted to find more rifts.

“Oh wow, would you look at the time! Catch ya on the flip side, kid-” He made it to the door before Mabel appeared before him, blocking his only escape.

“Not so fast, mister. Hey!” He picked her up and deposited her out of the way. Weight was still an annoying concept, and she was heavy for her size.

He was halfway down the stairs when she said: “I’ll get Grunkle Stan to drop that grudge he’s been carrying!”

That made him pause. Walking around the shack without worrying about the old geezer’s retaliation for those pranks would be nice.

He climbed back up and plopped down on the pillow fort. Mabel looked way too smug for someone who was just picked up like a delivery package, so he flipped her hair over her face. “You’ve got one hour,” he said as she sputtered and coughed up hair.

—

Lesson 1: Apologies. Know how to admit you’re wrong!

“Hey, Fez.”

“What do you want?”

“My bad about the glue shoes.”

“Is this some kinda trick?”

“Me? No way, never. By the way, you might wanna check your bed for blood-sucking gnomes. Not for any particular reason.”

He got away before the rolling pin Stan tossed could hit him. Mabel facepalmed.

—

Lesson 2: Good Deeds. Do something without expecting anything in return.

“Why, thank you. Such a nice young man. My sight had been bad ever since my cataracts set in.”

“Sure. Woah, this weighs a ton!”

“Oh! I brought cookies, my secret recipe. I can only bake them once a year, and I wanted to give something to the grandkids.”

…

“My, this bag weighs a lot less than I remember.”

“Look at you, so strong from all that heavy lifting!”

“Oh, I suppose so!”

The old lady left, and Bill held out his armful of cookies. “Want one?”

Mabel angrily munched on the stolen treat.

—

Lesson 3: Compliments! Say something nice about someone else!

“Hey, what a haircut!”

“Oh, thank you!”

“Reminds me of this one guy I met from Dimension 323. Had tentacles for teeth and teeth for eyes. Great guy, he’d make this crazy cocktail out of pineapple juice, vodka, and fingernails…”

They watched as the man shuddered and scrambled away, his face turning green by the second.

“Can’t handle a compliment. This guy’s got issues.”

Mabel groaned into her notepad.

—

“So, how’s it going?” Dipper trailed off when his sister let out a moan of pure anguish. “I’m guessing not good.”

“This was awful, Dipper!” Mabel leaped to her feet from her sad curl on the pavement and paced back and forth. “I’ve tried everything! Compliments, apologies, acts of kindness, it’s like he can’t do anything unless he gets something out of it or makes someone miserable because he thinks it’s funny! Who lives like that?!”

“Bill.”

“Aaaagh!” Mabel tugged on her hair in frustration.

“Hey, maybe it’s time for a change of plans,” Dipper offered. “I mean, I told you. The guy is the worst. Maybe you have to accept that he’s terrible, with or without your help, and move on.”

“I can’t."

“Why?”

“Because I brought him back!”

Dipper frowned. “Mabel…”

“I shook his hand, right? So I’m responsible for him.” Mabel stopped pacing and scowled at the ground. “I don’t want him to end up hurting anyone because of me.” She looked at the bench some twenty feet away, where Bill lay sprawled on the seat, fast asleep. “And now he’s napping.” She said, a little bitterly.

“He’s been doing that a lot lately.” Dipper sent the ex-demon a suspicious glance.

“Yeah,” Mabel went quiet.

“Let’s go wake him up and give him a piece of our mind.”

Mabel yanked him back by the arm. “Dipper, wait! Just…just let him sleep, okay? He probably needs it.”

Confusion, exasperation, and a fond sort of pride all fought inside Dipper. “He doesn’t deserve your sympathy, Mabel.”

“Well, I’m giving it anyway,” she huffed. “Because I’m a good person!”

—

He didn’t have a lot of time, out in the open like this, but hey, he worked with what he got. Bill peeked through a dozen minds or so, no sign of a rift or anything like it. The guy with the haircut was still crying in the bathroom. Nice.

“Come on, give me something.”

He knew there was more than one rift. He knew, because this town had a habit of attracting chaos and entropy and because a calamity of this size wouldn’t stop at one little crack.

A calamity of this size would destroy you, too.

Ugh, not him.

You invoked me. I am always here.

Oh yeah? Ever heard of privacy? Boundaries? Not being a creep?

This is coming from someone whose main occupation was watching everyone and everything.

…Touché.

Even you cannot escape what’s to come.

They’ll see about that, won’t they? Once he had his powers back, some multidimensional rip in the fabric of the universe wouldn’t be much of a problem.

You are a fool.

“And you’re an irritating, holier-than-thou waste of space!”

He didn’t realize that he’d yelled it out loud, into the mindscape. But he had, and the Axolotl was silent for a moment before he once again spoke: Pursue this for as long as you wish. It is fruitless. You cannot escape your vow to me.

“Yeah yeah. Get lost.”

And he did. Not really, Bill could still feel the Axolotl’s presence hovering somewhere nearby, and it drove him crazy to know everything he did was being scrutinized by some huge, ugly, annoying-

Huh, that was weird.

The mind he found nearby, well, there was something off about it. It was hard to notice, like a hiccup in space-time, but Bill has done this song and dance for eons. The girl herself was fast asleep, her head on the storefront counter. Bill vaguely recognized her as that enthusiastic cashier girl who vowed to destroy all clothing without pockets. Heh, fun times.

He floated up next to her and poked the distortion with a finger.

There it was again. Sparks, glitching for a split second before fading out. It was a lot like the static aura surrounding Mabel’s pet pig.

Bill stared at it for a few moments. Then he laughed. Weeks of mind-numbing human boredom and now finally, something interesting.

He hesitated, for a moment, on whether or not to enter the cashier girl’s mind. It wasn’t like anything could happen to him in the mindscape, not really, but-

Scoffing at the idea, Bill let himself right in.

“Woah!”

Cashier Girl’s exterior sure matched her interior. A dark hallway of a nightclub filled with punk rock posters by groups from the 90s, complete with DOWN WITH THE SYSTEM graffiti was about what Bill had expected. And hey, he could respect consistency and vision, if anything. Anarchy was still his wheelhouse, even if it was packaged in outdated punk rock aesthetics.

What he was pretty sure didn’t belong there were the tendrils of white static, crawling around corners like a glitched-out video game screen.

A sharp, colorful tendril reached out toward him. Bill swatted it away. “Back off, pal. You’re picking a fight you can’t win.”

The tendril quickly retreated, cowering in the corner. Man, it felt good to be back.

“What are you supposed to be?”

Bill didn’t jump. He definitely didn’t screech, and summon a handful of flames he quickly snuffed out. Because he wasn’t startled, Bill couldn’t startle, he was the All-Seeing-Eye!

“Hey, man, you ok?”

That was when he realized the posters weren’t rock bands, but memories. On the poster behind him, Cashier Girl was looking at him as she sat under a large willow tree, on top of a black and white colored picnic blanket.

So maybe spending so much time trapped in an awkward meat sack made him rusty. Bill straightened his tie and pretended none of that had happened. Because it didn’t. “Heya. Nice digs. Great decor. The fluorescent lighting really brings the whole eye-sore together.”

“You’re a triangle,” said the girl.

“Yup,” said Bill.

“How does that, like, work?”

It was awkward, having a conversation through the metaphysical representation of the border between someone’s memory and their mind, so Bill let himself in, settling on the other corner of the picnic blanket, one leg crossed over the other. “Hey, not my fault humanity’s dimensional awareness started and ended at the number three! You think your pencil drawings don’t watch you while you sleep?”

Cashier Girl reached out a finger toward his side, which Bill slapped away lightly. “Yeesh, what’s with all the unwarranted touching in here? You got a problem or something?”

“Sorry, it’s just-” She angled her neck around him as if checking if he was actually flat.

“Hey, kid, my eye’s up here.”

“Uh-huh.” She looked at him up and down again, “Are you like, the Hat Man or something?”

“Did you seriously compare me to that miserable gangly hack?” Bill rolled his eye. “He can’t even manifest without allergy pills! Nah, kid, I’m the dream demon real deal, your good old pal Bill-”

Wait.

“Demon, huh? Cool,” the girl frowned. “You kinda look like all that graffiti in the town I work in. Gravity Falls?”

“Wow, what a crazy coincidence. DON’T WORRY ABOUT IT!”

He took in his surroundings a bit more. It was pitch black, with a small, cool breeze blowing through the grass underneath the blanket and shifting the strands of willow above them. Behind the tree was a small clearing filled with gravestones, green and mossy with age. A plaque on the rusted-up wire fence read FAIRVIEW CEMETERY.

Fairview wasn’t far from Gravity Falls. So this kid was an out-of-towner. Luckily, she didn’t recognize him.

Cashier Girl shrugged. “I come here all the time.”

Ding! Another point for manic pixie dream girl! Three more and we might even find a sad, mediocre boy to attach!

He didn’t say that out loud, obviously. “Gotta respect your gusto, kid! Say, how’s about you tell your old pal Bill about whatever’s going on there.” He pointed at the window to the rest of the mindscape. From this side of things, it looked like there was a poster floating in the air.

“Oh, that,” Cashier Girl frowned. “That started a while ago. Ever since I got that job at the mall.”

“And did you see anything… weird?”

“Yeah, I mean…” She shook her head, looking frustrated. “There was this like, multicolored light?”

Now they were getting somewhere. Lemme guess, a tear in space-time did some damage to your psyche. Bill extended his arm until it was three times as long, looping it around the girl’s shoulders. “Lay it on me! Consider it a free consultation: you’re talking to the Master of the Mind, you know,” he winked and manifested two cups of tea in front of them.

The girl tentatively reached for hers. “Well, there was this like, tear. I think? In a wall. Inside it were these oil-spill lights?”

She was gonna lead him straight to the jackpot. After days of frustration and nothing, Bill felt like cackling. “And lemme guess, you touched it, and it backfired?”

She shrugged. She looked down at the tea and made a face.

Bill floated toward her until his eye was inches away from hers. “Where did you see it?”

“Oh, um,” she put her finger to her chin, frowning. “I don’t remember.”

“Ha! Obviously, I should’ve-” Bill’s excited speech stopped short. “What do you mean, you don’t remember?”

She shrugged again. “Sorry. It’s like there’s this static.” She pointed to her head.

Bill rubbed his eye in frustration. “Do you remember anything? At all?”

“Well, it was dark.”

“ And?”

“And…I think my boss was there.” Cashier Girl frowned in thought. “Wait, why would she be there?”

“...Great!” He threw his hands up. The teacup fell onto the blanket, tea spilling and staining the cloth. “Okay! Sure! I can work with this! Who’s your boss, kid?”

“So how do I get rid of it?”

“What?”

“You said it’s a ‘free consultation’,” said Cashier Girl. “So how do I get rid of the gross staticky stuff?”

Bill looked back through the poster at the rest of the mindscape. The Cashier Girls in the other memories were watching them curiously. The spiderweb, static-like tendrils wiggled around like maggots. “How’s about this: I’ll know how to get rid of it if you tell me where I can find your boss.”

“Really?”

“Yeah!” He floated up to her eye level. “See, this kinda stuff is hard to get rid of. It’s like a curse, it eats away at you, body and mind and all until you’re nothing but a big sad pile of madness in a white-padded cell!”

“Oh.”

“So, the only way to clear the gunk: find the origin point. Capiche?” He waved his hand in the air. “We’ll do a little cleansing ritual, you know, nothing fancy, get all the tough stains out, and voila! Brand new mindscape! Madness-free! How’s that sound?”

“Yes?”

“Great! It’s a deal!” He reached out a hand, expecting the familiar crackle of blue flame to appear. But it was just his hand, and for a moment Bill simply stared at it, momentarily forgetting the last few weeks. Right. Can’t make binding deals anymore. That frilly bastard took that, too.

The girl hesitantly shook his hand. “Deal.” She paused. “I’m not, like, gonna find out I owe my firstborn to you, right?”

“Psh, why would I want your firstborn? Babies are smelly tyrants with too much time on their hands. Just help me find that rift, kid. The rest’s on the house.”

“Okay,” she said hesitantly. “By the way, is there an eyeball in this tea?”

—

“Look at you,” said Jheselbraum as she knelt by the translucent barrier that held Waddles. The monstrous, corrupted pig oinked in several different voices.

“Mabel is convinced that’s him demanding treats,” Ford said.

“Of course, it is. I speak pig.”

“You do?”

Jheselbraum held his gaze for a good moment before laughing. “No. But I’m flattered you would think so.” She took a carrot from a nearby bucket of treats Mabel started keeping in Ford’s study and pressed a button to lower the barrier enough to toss it in. The carrot landed between three hungry, gaping pig mouths, and they fought each other as they devoured it.

“Is there a way to fix him?” Ford asked.

“Maybe. The energy that did this to him came from Bill’s dimension, but it’s more than that. It’s the same energy that’s feeding those cracks.”

“So if we find a cure for Waddles….”

“We will find a cure for the rift.”

Stanford watched the pig blink at him as if expecting more treats. For the first time in a long while, he felt the glimmer of optimism rear its head in his heart. “Let’s get to work, then.”

—

Stan walked past Greasy’s, noticing the unusual crowd at the door. That ratty little diner never got this much traction, even during tourist season.

He was tempted to snoop around, if only to find out what they were doing and how to steal whatever new gimmick got those people through the doors. Shrugging off the mantle of Mr. Mystery was harder than he realized.

Maybe later. As he reached the general store, he tried the handle. It didn't budge.

Huh. The store had pretty damn consistent working hours for 30 straight years. He peered through the window.

“They’re not in,” said a voice. Stan turned and saw one of Wendy’s teen friends. She didn’t look up from her phone as she said: “Everyone’s been holed up at Greasy’s.”

“Oh yeah? What’s at Greasy’s?”

“Beats me, some kinda town meeting. It’s been crowded all afternoon.”

Stan swallowed nervously and looked back down Main Street at the bustling diner. His first worry was that their attempt at hiding Bill had turned out pretty lousy, and the thought of a parade of justifiably scared town citizens filling their yard, carrying pitchforks and torches, did not make him any less nervous.

“Guess I should check it out,” he said.

“I literally don’t care,” said the teen.

—

“There are a few materials we could try,” Jheselbraum stood in front of the chalkboard and scribbled out a formula while Stanford watched from his desk chair. He hadn’t slept well, but that hadn’t been unusual for the past few weeks. He did his best to focus as his interdimensional friend dropped the chalk and picked up something she’d brought with her: a purple, semi-translucent scarf. “Imagine the fabric of existence as a tightly interwoven net. It’s hard to break, but with enough torn strings it can come apart easily. And strings are most easily torn at the seams,” With that, Ford watched, surprised, as she tore the scarf in half with her hands.

“Er, that wasn’t anything valuable, I hope?”

Jheselbraum stared at the torn pieces in her hands, realizing what she’d just done. “...I’ll make a new one.” She tossed the pieces aside. “The rift is a tear in space-time, most likely to be found at the seams of a dimension, where reality is the weakest. And the more they appear, the more likely it is for the entire fabric to come undone.” She gestured to the chalkboard. “The fabric of reality is made of logic and systems, not cloth, but the principle is the same.”

“And the tear was made by a high concentration of weirdness?”

“Yes. Weirdness, chaos, entropy, whatever you wish to call it.” Jheselbraum pointed at the first half of the formula. “Chaos is an imbalance, a surplus of energy. Without Bill Cipher as an agent to channel it, the Nightmare Realm is overflowing with that energy. Your dimension will be the most affected, having been the one directly in contact with the Nightmare Realm a year ago. But there are ways to channel that energy, ground it, using magically made materials. If we create some of them, and test them-”

“We can sew the hole in reality back together.”

“You’re catching on.” The Oracle smiled.

But Ford was busy thinking of something she’d said. “‘Without Bill Cipher’. You mean he’s been preventing this?”

Jheselbraum’s smile instantly vanished, replaced by mild annoyance. “Yes and no. Technically, he caused this a year ago when he tried to take over your dimension. But he was made of that energy, and energy doesn’t just go away. When he died, all the power that he wielded got stuck in between this world and his.”

“It’s either Bill or the universe ending?” Stanford swallowed. “Doesn’t seem fair.”

Jheselbraum just shrugged. “The universe doesn’t exactly care about fair.” She stared at the chalkboard for a moment, brow furrowed. It was much easier to read her expressions now that she had a human face. “There’s something that’s been bothering me.”

“What is it?”

She tapped the numbers she’d scribbled down. “Even with the surplus of energy, it shouldn’t be… altering matter. Not at such a rate anyway. It takes millions of years for a lifeform to be corrupted like that. But with Waddles, it seemed to happen within minutes, if not seconds.” She shook her head. “Entropy is inevitable, but it’s not instantaneous. It’s almost as if whatever corrupted Waddles pushed it forward.”

Ford shuddered. “You’re implying it was done deliberately? By someone?”

“…I wouldn’t jump to that conclusion just yet.”

“Bill,” Ford said immediately. “If it was anyone-”

“It wasn’t him,” she said calmly. “He’s powerless.”

“Or he wants us to think that!” Ford ran a hand through his hair, thinking of all the worst possible scenarios. Had Bill been playing them all for fools? Had he really been at their mercy this whole time? Or had he just been waiting for the right moment?

The Oracle regarded him with an unwavering gaze, almost like she knew exactly what he was thinking. “Ford, he’s a drama queen. And horribly impatient. Do you really think he’s spent so long pretending and putting himself in humiliating situations on purpose?”

Ford breathed out slowly. “Alright, I see your point. But J-…” he suddenly remembered that she’d gone by a different name at some point, and felt a rush of shame that he’d forgotten it. “Nora? Forgive me, I’m not sure what you prefer.”

Her gaze softened momentarily. “I’ve gone by many names. The one you know me by is just the latest. The other one…is very old.” She looked past him. “Call me whatever you like.”

“Nora,” he amended. He felt a little thrill at addressing such a renowned creature by a name he assumed not many knew. “If it’s not Bill…”

Then what could have done this?

---

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#gravity falls #bill cipher #flat dreams #pengychan #human bill au #fanfiction #the book of bill #vee's writing #a different form a different time #waking days reboot #doodledrawsthings

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