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car9723-t · 9 days ago

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Chapter 15 of Bill's a human prisoner and everybody's grumpy about it, featuring: NIGHTMARES NIGHTMARES NIGHTMARES NIGHTM

Remember these? We're getting 'em both in one chapter. Plus: FORD! Also: a little bit of human gore, a lot of bizarre alien gore.

This is a shorter chapter, but it's the first one with a direct glimpse into Bill's backstory and home dimension. I hope you enjoy! And are deeply horrified!

####

"You have to stop spouting this nonsense." A golden line slithered around him, weaving back and forth, her furious eye focused on him as she paced. "Nobody comes to your services for deranged muttering about points of light in darkness. They don't want to hear about things that are above-but-not-north of us! What does that mean, above-but-not-north?"

"It means what it says, Mom." Above him—above, but not north, in an endless void outside the plane of the world—countless stars twinkled in an unending dark. "That's where the third dimension is. And that's what it looks like! I don't know how else to explain it to someone who hasn't seen it!"

"Then why explain it at all? They don't want to hear it! It's a surprise you aren't already losing congregants. I know you can tell you're losing their interest."

He could tell. Sullenly, he said, "Maybe we just—just need smarter congregants. If they weren't too stupid to understand—"

"People are stupid, sweetie. That's why they follow you. You don't want the smart ones anyway, or they'd be smart enough to see through all the lies you make up about the third dimension—"

"I'm not making it up!"

"Every week you talk about impossible places that can't exist! Either you're lying or insane—which is it?"

How could he answer that? He looked up into space, as if the distant stars only he saw could help him.

"Oh, don't do that, I hate when your eye goes white like that. It might impress your worshipers but it doesn't work on your mother, young triangle." She paced around him faster, coiling tighter, surrounding him on all sides in gold, her eye peering straight into his. "I don't care whether you're a liar or a lunatic—you're still my golden child, and everyone else will see that too as long as you tell them what we say. Nobody wants to hear that the third dimension is a dark, empty void! Tell them it's full of color and life! Tell them it's filled with the spirits of departed shapes, or messengers, divine guides, muses—"

"But it isn't! I don't care what they want it to be, it's not true! I'm trying to make them understand!" He had to make them understand, he needed somebody to understand. He thought he'd go insane if he was the only one who could see how empty and awful space was.

"I've listened to your gibberish about points of light and up-not-north for months and I don't understand it, so how can anyone else—"

"You're not trying to understand!" Space and all its vast emptiness was oh, so close, so achingly close. Pressing against everyone's bodies, breathing over their organs, lighting up those tight-coiled fibers beneath everyone's skin, shining on the bloody bones and thin muscles. "Either you're not listening or you're stupid!" How couldn't anyone else see space?

"How dare you—!"

How could they be close enough to touch it and still deny what it was?

Why was he the only freak who could bend up into it?

Her sharp tail cracked like a whip behind his base. "I'll teach you to talk back to me like that!"

His mind was feverish with anger, pulsing and roiling behind his eye—and for a moment, he wasn't afraid of anything.

She could bend and flex and coil, she was the most flexible line he'd ever seen. The doctors thought he might have inherited his ability to bend up-not-north from her, some genetic predisposition to flexibility. If he could bend UP, so could she. He'd make her. He'd force her. He'd show her.

He jammed his corner into her side. She shrieked, uncoiling from around him to scrunch around her wound. "Watch your— What are you—"

"You'll see," he said, shoving her against the wall, shoving her into a corner. "You'll see if it's the last thing you do!" It was like cramming a long rope into a short box; each time he shoved, she bent and curved and bent again.

"Stop—stop, it HURTS—"

He could see it in his mind's eye: if he kept pushing and pushing eventually there'd be no more room in two dimensional space for her to fill, and then she'd be forced to bend UP, up into the third dimension, all that open free space. Then she'dsee the dark, she'd see the far points of light—

"STOP!" She howled in pain. He kept pushing. She was out of room.

She didn't bend up.

He shoved—and she splintered. Bone snapping, cartilage tearing, he could see inside her thin body as things broke and ruptured.

He didn't know what to do.

And for several long, long seconds—he couldn't remember what was happening. The world seemed to bend wrong, rippling up-but-not-north and down-but-not-south, and his head swam and his vision blurred, and he couldn't remember.

Her skin fractured and peeled off, strand after strand. He’d seen grotesque injuries and rotting bodies before—he’d been in hospitals and seen through the bandages, been in graveyards and seen into the coffins, unable not to see though the doors and walls and tombs. He’d seen the way the skin came off, the way it split into hairy filaments as it loosened from the body, bristly around injuries or sloughed off whole from the long dead. But he'd never seen dead skin curl like his mother's, loosely zig-zagging back and forth and wrapping into spirals like the centers of flowers. It filled the spaces between his fingertips, wrapped up his arms. He could shut his eye but he still saw it through his eyelid, still felt it tickling at the corners of his mouth.

Irrationally, wildly, hysterically, watching his mother die, he wondered—when he died, when he was a corpse, when he rotted—when his body split open in half from his burst eye, as the labyrinth of his guts bloated and unwound and inverted themselves to spill in sick threads from his mouth, and his skin peeled free, layer by hairy layer, from his eyelid out—would his rotting golden skin curl like his mother's had?

He knew it would. He knew it would. He knew it would.

####

He woke to moonlight streaming through curls upon curls of golden skin dangling in his eye, choking him on rot.

He squeezed his eyes shut, batted the hair aside, and forced himself to breathe until the nausea subsided.

He hated how humans dreamt.

He decided he didn't want any more sleep tonight.

He dragged himself upright, shambled downstairs, and tried to ignore the coils of his internal organs spilling out of his head and dangling around his face.

He needed a drink.

####

Ford woke up standing over a bed and a body.

He couldn't identify the shape or size of the body under the sheets, due to how badly it was contorted and the way the dark pools of blood in the bedsheets distorted the shadows. All he could see was the head: a flash of a pale cheek turned away, and the unmistakeable Pines hair curls. The hair was matted with blood.

Ford's hands were coated in hot blood and cold blue flames. There was a nauseating metallic taste in his mouth and something thick and warm dripping down his chin.

He heard a quiet chuckle. He whipped around to face it—

And saw himself reflected in a triangular window, a gray shade. He was smiling so widely he could see moonlight glinting off his molars. His slitted eyes glowed a sickly yellow.

Ford woke up staring at the ceiling. He licked his lips; reassuringly dry. He held up his hands; clean.

He sighed.

Ford could roll over and go back to sleep. He'd gotten used to dreams like this decades ago; these days he hardly even had them. But he was already awake and irritated. He might as well pick up where he'd left his research at dinner time—do something that felt productive. He got up, fished a crumpled paper that said "Downstairs" out of his bedside stand and set it next to Stan's glasses, and crept out of the guest room to head for the vending machine.

Bill was in the kitchen.

Ford stopped in the next room, staring through the doorway. Bill was sitting in the dark, only his silhouette visible in the light through the window. He was hunched over the kitchen table, supported on his elbows, unmoving. Ford couldn't see Bill's reflection in the window. Not even his eyes.

Ford wondered what he dreamed about. Perhaps the thrill of possessing people.

He was half tempted to confront Bill—demand to know what he was up to—but, Ford told himself, there was nothing to confront Bill for. They'd given him permission to use the kitchen freely. Bill wasn't up to anything. It was well within his rights to sit silently at the table in the dark.

Ford just didn't like it.

He crept into the living room. Bill never noticed him.

####

Dipper divided the nightmares he'd been having since last summer into two categories: the Bill nightmares; and the Bipper nightmares—which were, in a way, also Bill nightmares.

The Bill nightmares were just his regular nightmares, except that Bill was also in them. For Dipper, regular nightmares were a mishmash of fears, insecurities, chaos, and random weirdness. It was natural that Bill, the most terrifying entity Dipper had ever met, occasionally guest starred in his dreams. The problem was that, since Bill actually could invade dreams and always brought chaos and random weirdness in his wake, it was that much harder for Dipper to realize he was dreaming rather than actually facing Bill—and, once he woke up, harder for him to reassure himself it really was only a dream.

(Mabel told him she had similar problems, and it wasn't even limited to nightmares. Sometimes, no matter how sweet or unthreatening her dream was—and sometimes because it was so sweet—their erratic scene-changing logic-breaking wish-making nature gave her the creeping sense that she was trapped back in Mabeland. Not often, she said. But occasionally, when Dipper couldn't sleep either, he could hear her wake herself repeating "—I wanna go back to reality—I want to go back—go back to the real world," and then meow herself back to sleep.)

On the other hand, the Bipper nightmares were like no dreams he'd ever had before.

They might start out as normal nightmares—dreaming of a near death experience, or a monster charging at him, or some humiliation too deep to endure further sleeping through—until he jolted awake. Or he'd think he'd jolted awake—in truth, he'd just woken up into another dream, so realistic he thought he was awake until he realized he was hovering over his bed, and the world looked hazy and false, and his body was still beneath the covers. Just like when Bill had ripped him free of his body.

The first time he'd had the Bipper nightmare, Dipper thought Bill had taken over him again, and that at any moment his body would open its eyes and laugh at him. When that didn't happen, he thought he'd died. He'd flown to Mabel's room, to his parents', to Waddles, to the neighbors' houses, trying desperately to get someone's attention—and when nothing worked, he returned to his still body in despair and waited there, sure that in a few hours his parents would come to get him for school and find him dead...

But then he'd woken up. For real, this time. And then he woke the rest of the house with his screaming.

He learned to cope with these nightmares, both the Bill ones and the Bipper ones. He talked about them with Mabel during the day or went to her for reassurance at night. Sometimes he called Ford, if he and Stan were in a time zone where they'd still be awake. (Ford said he'd had nightmares for years about Bill invading his dreams—and almost none of them had been real. He said that his visits from Bill were usually less chaotic than a normal dream. Bill liked his weirdness but he liked being the center of attention more; he liked to stage his dreams like a movie director, keeping a firm grip on the setting and the narrative flow, snapping from location to location and moment to moment with an artistry that natural dreams didn't have. The muddled mundanity of your average nightmare was beneath Bill.)

And Dipper learned to wait out his Bipper nightmares. Sometimes he wandered the hallways, but he found that engaging with the dream tended to prolong it; instead, if he stayed by his body and didn't do anything, eventually he'd drift back into deep sleep and wake back up. He started keeping a radio on at night—he could hear it in his sleep—and listening to the weird 3 a.m. broadcasts kept him entertained enough until he woke.

####

But since returning to Gravity Falls, Dipper had found a new way to deal with his nightmares:

Yelling at Bill about them.

Tonight, he was having his guilt-dream about his dad asking why he'd given up kickboxing; until the dream was interrupted by Bill emerging from the refrigerator to announce that Weirdmageddon was opening a second location in Piedmont and then throw a rabid skunk at Dipper's face. Dipper had woken up too angry to think straight, stomped to Bill's empty window seat, and then stomped downstairs.

He found Bill sitting in the kitchen in the dark, washing down a bag of cookies with a pack of hard cider and staring out at the night. Dipper stopped in the doorway. "You!"

Bill turned to give Dipper a bleary-eyed look. "Me?"

"Stop messing with my dreams and stay out of my head!"

"Beg pardon?" Bill's eyelids were desynchronized as he slowly blinked. "I'm just..." He gestured vaguely around the kitchen with a mostly-empty cider can. "I am just—sitting here."

"You've been in my nightmares all year," Dipper said hotly, even as he was waking up enough to realize that Bill, down here in the kitchen, probably wasn't influencing his dreams. "So just—just..." This was stupid. "Cut it out, man."

"You've been dreaming about me? How sweet." Bill gave Dipper a mocking grin, propped his chin in his hand, propped his elbow on the table, actually missed putting his elbow on the table by at least six inches, and fell to the ground with a yelp.

Dipper stared tiredly at Bill cackling on the floor, and turned around and trudged upstairs.

Dipper found that, whenever he had nightmares about golden geometric apocalypses, it was reassuring to get an instant reminder that Bill had been nowhere near his head. Even if he thought Bill was laying on the "helpless human" act a little thick.

####

(I'm still recovering from Health Junk, so if you've got any comments, I'd deeply appreciate them now even more than I usually do. Thank you, y'all readers and commenters and friends are really keeping me going during this time of feeling like a pile of half-sentient gunk. 🙏✨)

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