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Chapter 102 of human Bill Cipher being a very uncooperative guest-prisoner: Ford and Melody try to discuss her sleep paralysis demon, but instead they start nerding out over research projects. Bill refuses to help out of spite... for now.

####

Mabel waltzed into Bill's room and flopped down on his couch. "Heyyy Bill."

"Sup, kid? Breakfast?"

She lifted her head to glance over at his hot plate. "What's on the menu?"

Bill showed her the frying pan he'd swiped from the downstairs stove when no one was looking. "Ectoplasm omelet. I won a few tablespoons' worth in a poker game."

Mabel gave a dubious look at the egg swirled with glowing mold-blue light. "How's it taste?"

"Sour, with the consistency of snot. Kind of like leftover anxiety that's been unevenly microwaved back to life."

"Gag. Pass."

"You sure? It's good for you! It'll improve your psychic powers."

"My psychic powers are already good enough! I can look at people and just know who their soulmate is! Plus, what they'd look like as a cat."

"Fair enough! More for me." Bill dumped a handful of Lucky Leprechaun cereal and some nacho cheese into the omelet. Man, it was a relief to finally be able to cook properly.

Mabel sat atop the back of the couch and started kicking her heels against the cushion. "Sooo... I heard a rumor that Melody's been having some weird dreams, and that you might know something about them," she said, quite casually. "That sounds interesting? What's the dealio with that?"

Bill fought back a grin. No subtlety at all. "Who put you up to this."

She didn't even hesitate before caving. "Grunkle Ford asked me because Soos and Melody asked him," she said sheepishly.

"Is this because you're the only person in the house I tell things to?"

####

Five minutes ago

"Mabel," Ford said, "could I ask you to ask Bill something?"

"I guess? But why can't you ask him?"

"Because you're the only person in the house he tells things to."

####

Mabel nodded. "Yup."

"And how does that make you feel?"

"Kiiinda weeeird," she said, tilting her head as she examined the feeling. "Not quite used, but sort of like the peasant hired to carry messages between two castles that keep almost going to war?"

"And that's a terrible position to be in," Bill said, giving her shoulder a sympathetic pat. He badly folded his omelet, slid it on a paper plate, and hopped up to sit on the back of the couch with Mabel. "And if I give you the dirt they're digging for, they'll know this little trick works and they'll keep trying to use you in the future. So, as a favor to you, because I like you so much, I'm not telling you a thing."

"Gee, thanks."

Bill ruffled her hair. "You're so welcome!"

Of course, this meant he couldn't vent about the issue to Mabel. But hey, he didn't need to talk to her about everything, right?

This wasn't a problem for humans, anyway. This was nightmare business.

####

Ford opened the book on medieval demonology he'd just happened to have lying around in his study, and set it on the kitchen table to flip through it. "I know a bit about 'sleep paralysis demons,' as they're colloquially called in modern days; but I've never looked deeply into them. People have variously claimed they're just dreams you see as you're waking, ghosts, or even actual demons. I've seen a theory that sleep paralysis and its demons are naturally-occurring dreams, but sometimes malevolent spirits can invade and hijack these periods to torment the half-asleep—ah, here we are."

He stopped on a page that showed a woodcut print of an implike monster sitting on a sleeping woman's chest. "The nightmare, or Nachtmahr if you prefer. Which—I do, but only because I studied Folk German, it doesn't really make a difference." He cleared his throat. "I think you'll find medieval beliefs about the Nachtmahr and incubi resemble the creature you've been dealing with."

Melody leaned over to study the picture. "And I guess we're pretty sure they're real now, huh?"

"I'm afraid so," Ford said with a rueful shrug. "If Bill can see them."

Earlier that morning, when Melody had first told Ford about her nightmares, they'd wondered whether it was possible Bill was causing them. Ford thought it should be well within the scope of Bill's dream manipulation powers; he could do it, no question.

But they'd ruled it out as unlikely. Melody had been having these nightmares all her life, and they'd run in her family (or, they'd stalked her family?) for as far back as anyone could recall, and Ford couldn't think of any way that torturing one random family for generations could advance Bill's objectives. According to Ford, Bill may have been a vindictive bully to anyone he thought had crossed him; and he may apathetically let strangers get swept up in his anarchic carnage; but—one of his few saving graces—he didn't tend to target random people for bullying for no reason.

Plus, Melody's nightmares hadn't started featuring "Bill" (or something impersonating him) until after Weirdmageddon and Bill's brief death—the one time he was least likely to be involved.

And the most damning evidence against Bill being involved was the fact that he was incensed that this thing was impersonating him.

"But if it were a demon that affects dreams," Ford flipped a few pages forward, "then the unicorn hair barrier around the shack should have kept it out. It blocks beings that exist in the mindscape—ghosts, demons, energy beings, astral-projected souls, and so on—while letting anything in the physical world pass through. It's possible that the legends are wrong, but—if the barrier managed to block Bill in his true form, it should certainly block a sleep paralysis demon."

"So, what does it mean if I'm having these dreams even with the unicorn hair barrier?"

"There's three possibilities. One: it really was just a dream—although that doesn't explain how Bill saw it without entering your mind. Two: I don't know enough about how unicorn hair works. But I think that's unlikely." Ford sighed, "Or, three: something happened to the unicorn hair barrier. Which I think is the most likely possibility. A ghost got into the house the night before last, which is just more proof that something's wrong with the barrier. I meant to go inspect it yesterday, but then I got caught up with Wyoming, and we had to see a movie... I'll get to it today."

Melody nodded, but hesitated at the claim Ford had to see a movie. "How did that work out, anyway? Did you get Bill to admit he's wrong?"

Ford hesitated before nodding. "He admitted he's wrong about something," he said unconvincingly, and cleared his throat. "But that's not important."

Melody's gaze caught on an image on the page Ford had flipped to. She leaned forward to study it. Speaking of the devil— "Oh—I've seen this before." The book displayed a black-and-white picture of a medieval tapestry depicting Bill Cipher sitting on the back of a fenced-in unicorn and wielding a sword.

"The tapestry?" Ford said, surprised. "Really, you're sure? It's not very well-known. Most people are more familiar with the other tapestries in the series—"

"The Hunt of the Unicorn, yeah," Melody cut in—and then, because she knew he was a Smart Guy who Knew Stuff, felt compelled to prove she knew what she was talking about: "Created around 1500, lost during the French Revolution, rediscovered in... I wanna say around the 1850s? Except this one." She tapped on the picture of Bill's eye. "The Bastard Triangle Cuts the Unicorn's Hair. It was found buried on the same property during World War 2—years after the rest of the series was sold to Rockefeller, which is why it's so much more obscure."

Ford blinked at her in amazement. "I—yes, that's it, but—how...?"

She couldn't help laughing. "I learned about the tapestry while I was starting research for my senior thesis project. I was majoring in folklore and mythology. And the Bastard Triangle came up in a course on late medieval fairy tales—as in like, tales about actual fairies." The Bastard Triangle stories they'd read in class were about a bizarre fairy king—only visible by his eye framed in a triangle of gold—who struck deals with evil wizards, led knights astray, tried to trick people into constructing fairy circles to his fae realm, and cursed humans with nightmares. Aside from the fairy king's unusual physical description, she hadn't thought the tales were anything that would've been too out of place in A Midsummer Night's Dream.

"The Bastard Triangle is a relatively obscure folk figure in this day," Ford mused. "I hadn't heard of him until I specifically started searching for tales of evil triangles in the wake of Bill's betrayal."

"Oh?" From the possibly hyperbolic things she'd heard about Ford from Soos, Melody took it that it was supposed to be impressive that she knew about a folktale Ford hadn't. "I just got lucky, I guess."

"I should say. Then—you must have actually recognized Bill during Weirdmageddon? I don't think I heard that." He smiled wanly. "Of course, I was probably more occupied with Stan's well-being at the time..."

"Yeah, it was a few weeks before we were properly introduced, wasn't it? And I don't even know if I mentioned it to anyone at the time." She'd made the mistake of coming to town to see Soos for the weekend, just in time for the invasion; and after the town was unpetrified, she'd been more preoccupied with finding her aunt than her boyfriend. It was almost midnight before she managed to get a call through to Soos, and he didn't blame her at all for already being halfway back to Portland with her aunt in tow.

"And I kinda found out the Bastard Triangle was real at the same time I learned gnomes, minotaurs, fairies, and living T-rexes were real. Honestly, he ranked somewhere under the T-rex." Discovering the Bastard Triangle had been behind everything had been kind of like being told the Big Bad Wolf had tried to take over the world. Weird, but once you got over the gnomes, it might as well happen.

"Really?" Ford chuckled. "I think I would have been far more stricken to see the subject of one of my thesis projects in the flesh, particularly if I thought he was a legend."

"Oh—no, he wasn't my actual research topic. I was writing about medieval unicorn folklore."

"Ahhh."

"Yeah. He honestly didn't really interest me before then? Fairies weren't my thing. But until I saw that tapestry, I'd never heard about a connection between England's Bastard Triangle superstitions and unicorns—which is weird, if there was enough of a connection for an English superstition to get featured on a tapestry made in France, right?" She was surprised at how quickly she was getting excited about the topic again. She'd been utterly miserable when she left school; it was somewhat of a relief to realize that that hadn't spoiled the topic entirely for her. "So, I thought I'd dig deeper into the Bastard Triangle myths to see if there was any more connection to unicorns beyond the tapestry."

"What did you find?"

"Nothing. I never got a chance to look." Melody shrugged ruefully. "That was about the time the stress of college caught up to me, and..." She trailed off self-consciously. She had no trouble admitting to having burned out and dropped out at the end of her junior year when she was talking to other people her age, all of whom either hadn't gone to college or had freshly struggled through it themselves; it was a bit more embarrassing to admit it to a man almost her grandparents' age with 12 Ph.D.s.

But Ford nodded sympathetically. "Soos mentioned that you were taking a sabbatical from your studies for your health." (That was more tactful than she'd come expect out of either of the Stan twins. She appreciated that.) "It's wise of you to prioritize your well-being. I wonder sometimes if I would have been better off slowing down, too. I was so driven to achieve as much as I could as fast as possible, that I fear it may have made me more susceptible to... research shortcuts offered with sinister intents." He glanced toward the ceiling. Bill's voice was impossible to hear this far from the attic, but every once in a while Mabel let out a laugh or indignant squeal that carried down the stairs in response to something he must have said.

"Honestly, I think if the mythological Bastard Triangle had come to me in my dreams to offer research assistance, I would have quit school even faster."

Ford muttered, "Maybe I should have taken a course on late medieval fairy tales."

"Honestly, yeah, it might've been helpful. The stories went super hard on the 'don't make a deal with the Bastard Triangle' message." The tales had said he came to wizards and scholars in their sleep to offers in exchange for services; but if you take his bargains, you'll either get spirited away to a fae realm or driven to madness by demons, unless you have a plan to outsmart him. And sometimes even when you do. She remembered wondering what the tales were supposed to be a metaphor for—a mythical explanation for the onset of schizophrenia or psychosis? A slightly altered Christian parable about resisting temptation from the devil? A "stranger danger" story for kids? It hadn't occurred to Melody that maybe the warnings were literal.

"I think I'd still like to finish my thesis someday." Melody studied the picture in the book. "Once Soos and I are settled, we've talked about maybe spending a couple semesters with my parents during the shack's off-season so I can reach the university."

"I'm sure you've heard about the unicorns living near Gravity Falls?" Ford asked. "Have you thought about interviewing them for your thesis?"

Melody grimaced uncertainly. "Do you think that's a good idea? Wendy told me all about what jerks they are."

"Ehhh..." Ford made a wiggly hand gesture. "I don't know if I'd recommend it—humans aren't exactly on diplomatic terms with the local unicorns. But, if you want to give it a shot anyway and you need a map to their glade..."

For a split second, Melody let herself get lost in a childish fantasy of stepping into a sun-dappled, flowering forest clearing and being approached by a half dozen graceful, gleaming white unicorns, who welcomed her as graciously as though she were a princess; but then she shook her head to dispel the thought. "Nah, I kinda wanna keep the mental image I have of unicorns from the stories. Never meet your heroes."

Ford nodded. "That's probably wise. They really are huge jerks. And rude, and cliquish, and hostile to outsiders. Especially researchers," he said. "When I asked them for a sample of their hair and they told me to leave because I wasn't pure of heart, I asked them by what criteria they judged cardiac purity. They chased me out at hornpoint."

"Yeah, no, I don't think they'd be excited about helping out with my thesis."

"At the least, I could dig out some of my field notes for you, if you'd like," Ford said. "I lost most of it when I threw out my old journals, but I know I've got some notes on information I couldn't fit in the journals. I don't know if any of it would be useful with your research topic—it's all field observations about living, modern unicorns, not historical myths and folktales..."

"No way to know until I read it, I guess," Melody said. "Either way, I'd love to see your notes, thanks." Even if it wasn't useful, she did still love unicorns. Reading about the real thing would be cool.

"Coincidentally, I'm... actually dipping my toes back into academia myself," Ford said. "This past year, Fiddleford and I started to work on a paper about my theory of weirdness. I'm actually going over to his place for the next few days to work on it. We hope we'll be ready to start reaching out to journals this fall."

"Oh yeah? That sounds awesome, good luck."

"I—yes, thank you—I certainly hope it will be 'awesome,'" he said, with the poorly-suppressed half-smile of someone who knew it was awesome but was attempting to practice this "humility" thing everyone thought he should have more of. "But, what I really wanted to say is—it's nice to find another young mind living in this house pursuing some of the same academic interests I had. Legends about the magical and supernatural, mythical beasts and cryptids." He stuffed his hands in his coat pockets self-consciously. "And, I—well, I'm not a professor, I can't offer to serve as a thesis advisor; but if there's any way I could help you with your paper—whether it's finding research materials or just serving as a sounding board for your ideas—my office door is open. And located a convenient elevator ride away."

Melody's brows shot up. Honestly, she'd never been sure what Ford thought of her.

Everyone else in Soos's family—both real and honorary—she had a good sense of. Abuelita glowed when she saw Melody with Soos or heard her talking about their future plans. She'd met Soos's cousin Reggie and his new wife at their wedding last year, and although she didn't have much in common with them, they'd enthusiastically forwarded her all their recent wedding planning research and recommendations on which services to hire. When she and Soos had announced their engagement, Stan had taken her aside to give her the shovel talk, and from then on treated her like she was already part of the family. Dipper and Mabel had hid from a homicidal lovesick video game with her, which is the kind of thing that bonds you for life.

But Ford, while always polite, had also always seemed... grim.

Granted, she supposed she'd never really gotten to know him outside of grim (mostly Bill-related) circumstances. The most casual setting she'd seen him in was Anime Night, which she'd retroactively realized had probably doubled as execution planning meetings for him and Fiddleford. But she and Ford had butted heads over how to handle Bill at the start of summer, and she'd sort of assumed he didn't like her much but was too polite to show it.

Maybe she'd been wrong. "Wow. Thank you, Dr. Pines, I'd love that."

"Please," he said, with a slight smile that was almost shy, "'Ford' is fine."

####

If the unicorn hair barrier was intact, then Melody's dreams had to be just dreams, or else Ford didn't know enough about unicorn hair barriers. But he was pretty sure those weren't just dreams; and if there was anything he was confident in, it was his own knowledge of the paranormal, mythical, and unnatural.

So he spent the afternoon with a pocketful of unicorn hair, a magnifying glass, and a bottle of glue, circling the perimeter of the Mystery Shack and inspecting every millimeter of the barrier.

He'd almost circled the entire house before he found it: a minuscule break in the barrier. One hair had snapped and peeled away from the wood just to the left of the back porch, leaving a couple of millimeters open in the barrier. Something must have knocked into the hair—no telling what, with all the abuse this shack took. It was possible it had been broken since the shack's conversion back from giant combat mech to house. Was that little break enough to deactivate the entire barrier?

Ford pressed the broken hair back into place, then took a new strand of unicorn hair and glued it across the break. The new hair momentarily glowed, and the glow stretched a few feet to either side of the new addition before fading back out. He'd obviously repaired this portion, but did that mean the barrier was working again? Or not, since the glow had only stretched a few feet? Maybe the whole thing only glowed the first time it was activated?

He should have gotten this problem solved yesterday, as soon as he got up—he knew the kids had been visited by a Category 9 ghost, that was reason enough to make the barrier top priority, even before he'd known about Melody's dream demon. But no, what had he spent yesterday doing? Playing chess! Going to a movie he hadn't even wanted to see! Arguing about whether Wyoming existed, of all things! A complete waste of a day!

And the worst part was he'd enjoyed it.

For the first time since Bill's return, Ford was beginning to fear that this recovering Cipherholic might be in real danger of relapsing. The tension had been there, and he and Bill hadn't agreed on anything all day except for the single stupidest thing imaginable—but yesterday had almost felt comfortable. Certainly far too comfortable for comfort.

It was a good thing he'd made plans to spend a couple days with Fiddleford. He needed to get out of the house and get Bill out of his head.

He pocketed his glue and the remaining unicorn hair. Well, if these nightmares were a problem that unicorn hair could solve, then Ford had done what he could to stop them. He'd do what else he could to help prepare Melody before he left for the night.

####

A frustrated tourist tried for the fourth time to feed a dollar into the vending machine while his young son watched; and when it didn't accept it and his hungry son let out a whine, he scowled and muttered, "Why won't this darn thing work?"

The two tourists gasped in surprise as, with a hydraulic hiss and a mechanical whir, the vending machine swung away from the wall. They and Ford stared blankly at each other.

"Oh, right," Ford said. "Business hours."

"What's back there?" the boy asked, voice hushed with wonder.

Ford tried to summon up a lie, considered claiming it was the staff break room, remembered the "staff only" door was right next to him, and gave up. "Er—a secret lab."

The tourists oohed appreciatively. "Can I see?" the boy asked.

"No." After a moment's hesitation, he added, "It's staff only." Nailed it.

The father said, "Hey, while you're back there—the machine won't take my dollar, do you think you could...?"

"O-oh." Ford took the hook from the door. "Yes, of course. What did you want?"

Once he'd dealt with the tourists and shut the vending machine, he announced toward Melody, "There was a break in the unicorn hair barrier," heedless of all the other tourists in the gift shop. Which happened to be the exact kind of thing they all came to the Mystery Shack hoping to hear, so they tittered appreciatively.

"Oh, yeah?" Melody stifled a yawn. The half night of sleep was catching up with her. She'd almost considered taking the day off to try to recover her strength, but she'd done that less than a week ago and didn't want to leave Soos short-staffed again.

"I've repaired it. Hopefully, that should be enough to keep your sleep paralysis demon out. I suppose we'll find out tonight." He offered her the book on demonology they'd been looking at earlier. "I realized we got completely sidetracked talking about unicorns and folklore instead of the Nachtmahr, so I thought you might want to read up on the subject yourself."

"Oh—yeah, thanks." She accepted the book. There were several yellowed notebook papers bookmarking the pages they'd been looking at earlier. She saw the word "Unicorns" at the top of one paper; Ford must have found his field notes, too.

There was also a large orange envelope on top of the book, with something hard inside it. "What's this?"

"Ah, that, well." Ford shrugged abashedly. "I thought, since you might not have a chance to meet a friendly unicorn yourself, you... might want a consolation prize?"

She opened the unsealed envelope, to find a golden horseshoe with glowing pink gems. Her eyes widened. "A—are you serious? Is this a real unicorn horseshoe?" Too stunned (and sleep deprived) to think of something more fitting to say, she blurted out the next question that came to mind: "Unicorns don't have cloven hooves?"

"Yes, yes, and—no. Not in Gravity Falls, anyway—I don't know if there are other unicorn varieties."

Pity, Melody had always liked the more deer-like artistic depictions of unicorns. But having a real horseshoe more than made up for it. "Wow, thank you." She beamed at Ford. "This is really sweet."

"Ahh," Ford waved off the gratitude, "all it's doing is sitting in a drawer collecting sparkly dust, you'd appreciate it more than me."

She drew it out of its envelope tentatively. It was unexpectedly warm and made her fingertips slightly buzz. "Does it have any magic powers, what's it do?"

"If you're playing horseshoes with it, it always gets a ringer. It makes for a boring game—unless you really want to humiliate your opponent," Ford said. "And there's a chance that it might have some power over creatures in the mindscape, just like their hair—but I've never tested that theory. Anyway, it can't hurt to try."

####

"Bill—"

"What's the barometric pressure doing?"

Ford paused. "What?"

He'd found Bill at the kitchen table with a teapot, elbows on the table and eyes shut with both thumbs pressed to the spot in between his eyebrows. "My face bones have been aching for the last hour," Bill griped. "Like there's something pressing on them. It came out of nowhere. Is the air pressure doing anything weird?"

"Er—a heatwave is pushing the last of the rain and humidity out of the area, so it should be dropping."

Bill groaned. "Great," he muttered. "If this stupid thing is predisposed to sinus headaches, I'm writing such an angry letter to..." To Ford's disappointment, Bill trailed off into mumbles before Ford could hear who, exactly, Bill considered responsible for the condition his human body had been created in; and instead he poured himself a cup of tea and chugged it like it wasn't billowing enough steam to power a 19th century locomotive.

Bill hadn't even flinched, so Ford decided not to wonder about what was happening to the inside of his throat right now and tried to focus on what he'd come over here for. He cleared his throat while he prepared for the daunting task of initiating a conversation. "I... had a question for you."

Bill looked up at Ford from over the brim of his teacup. "I probably have answers, but maybe not for you.

He hadn't said Ford couldn't attempt to ask. "What do you know about sleep paralysis demons?"

"Figured out you can't use Mabel to do your dirty work, huh?" He glanced across the table, where there was a second unoccupied chair, and slouched down as far as he could so he could kick up his feet and use the chair as a footrest.

Message received and ignored. "Bill, I'm serious." Ford had even brought a notebook to take notes. Not his journal—he still wasn't leaving that anywhere Bill could potentially see it—but even so.

Bill let out an exaggerated sigh that sank him another inch lower into his seat. "I think we've been over this before! Are you my student?"

"Oh, knock it off, Cipher. You were more than happy to tell me all about your thoughts on Wyoming yesterday."

"Only because you didn't want me to!" Bill gave him a mischievous smirk that was somewhat marred by the way his brow flinched in pain. "So, are you my student?"

For a moment, Ford wondered if it really was that easy. If all Bill wanted was one tiny, meaningless little victory he could hold over Ford's head, and then the floodgates of information would open again. Wouldn't swallowing his pride and enduring a little gloating be worth it in order to get information that would help his family? All he had to do was say yes.

But it wouldn't stop there, would it. Stop drooling over these 'floodgates of information.' Ford should be less concerned about finding a way to crack the dam on Bill's stored-up cosmic trivia, and more concerned about letting Bill make a crack in Ford's dam. He was afraid Bill might have taken a few chips out of the concrete yesterday.

Wasn't the fact that he'd even considered saying yes proof enough?

"No."

Bill's smile faded away like a ghost in sunlight. "Then I don't see why I should tell you anything."

"To redeem yourself after getting caught spying on Soos and Melody's room in the middle of the night?"

Bill considered that, a frown tugging at the corners of his mouth; and then he flung a hand out dismissively. "I can't help that your third-dimensional idea of 'walls' is about as opaque as cling-wrap to me! I just happened to be passing by at the wrong time, you can't hold that against me."

Ford sighed in frustration. "Fine. If you decide you want to be helpful, you know where to find me."

"Always. And if you ever want to be my student again, you know where to find me!" And with that parting shot delivered, Bill sat up in his seat properly again so he could enjoy his tea.

But Ford stopped mid-exit and asked, "Why?"

Bill froze with his teacup halfway to his mouth. He hadn't expected his parting shot to restart the gunfight. "What?"

"Why would you offer to 'teach' me again? What would you get out of it?" Ford asked. "I suppose I wouldn't find out what you were after until I was in too deep to get out, would I?"

"Sheesh, Dr. Paranoid! Don't read too much into it! I said it because you were a good student once—and you could be again if you ever got over yourself." Ford had said only a few days ago that Bill was already the muse he pretended to be—was it so strange for Bill to say the same back?

"Well, the question still stands: what would you get out of my being a 'good student' for you? What do you have to gain?"

The wheels in Bill's mind cranked uselessly as he tried to think of an answer. His first instinctive response was portal—but no, at long last, after hundreds of billions of years of trying, he had a portal (half-disassembled), a working set of blueprints, and a full-time body he could use to do the work itself. If Ford found out about Bill's work, he'd just disassemble it again. Bill didn't need him. For the first time, he didn't need anybody.

So there was no good reason for the idea of "teaching" Ford again to tug at him. "Fine, offer revoked! No secrets of the universe for you. You're welcome. Buzz off." Bill decided he'd probably just wanted the attention. Even when he didn't need manual labor, he always needed an audience, he knew that much about himself—and Ford had been such a good audience.

"Fine," Ford grumbled. "But—if you won't talk to me, talk to someone. Melody, ideally. The poor girl's miserable—and whether you care or not, you're the only one in a position to do more for her than wave unicorn hair at the problem and hope it goes away."

Bill stared into his teacup, considering that, as Ford left.

####

"Headache?"

Melody looked up tiredly. While there weren't any tourists in the gift shop, she'd been resting her eyes behind the cash register—which had, without her full awareness, evolved into crossing her arms on the counter and cradling her forehead in her arms. She'd told herself she'd hear if any customers came in; but she hadn't heard Bill until he was leaning back against the other side of the counter.

"Mrphg." Melody scrubbed her eyes, trying to wake herself. "Something like that."

"Same," Bill said. His one un-eyepatched eye squinted in pain as he said, "I think my sinuses are trying to pop like over-swollen balloons. No idea why! But I'm guessing yours has more to do with a bad night's sleep."

Bill's always slightly-too-strident voice was like a hammer gently pounding nails into her eardrums, but at least it was waking her back up. Before her common sense had a chance to catch up, she mumbled, "Ugh, yeeeah. I haven't had nightmares this awful since I was working on my thesis project."

"Unicorn myths, right?" Bill said. "Were those nightmares about me, too?"

She gave him a dirty look.

"Just asking! I know you were looking into the zany shenanigans I got up to back in England."

"No, the nightmares weren't about you." She should have just told him to get out; but she was distracted by a thought that, if she'd been a little less sleep-deprived, she should have realized much earlier today.

If the nightmare that had visited her last night was real, then they all might have been real. Every nighttime visit since she was a little girl; the hunched shapes of leering, sneering thesis advisors that stalked through her dorm room at night while she struggled to focus on research during the day.

She had thought the stress had made her have those nightmares. She'd quit school, right before her final year, because she thought she was burnt out.

No. Some nighttime stalker had driven her out of school. And her blood boiled with fury at the realization.

But why? And what made the nightmares—the harassment—get worse?

She tried to remember if it really had gotten worse right after she'd discovered The Bastard Triangle Cuts the Unicorn's Hair.

She added, "Not until after Weirdmageddon."

"Huh." He considered that with a deep frown of concentration, not looking at her; and then suddenly offered her a teacup she hadn't noticed he was holding. "Tea? It'll help with your headache. It's got medicinal herbs!"

She gave the cup a suspicious look—Bill didn't do nice things just to be nice, what was he up to?—(what did he have to do with all of this?)—and in reply Bill lifted his second cup demonstratively and asked, "What, do you want to trade with mine to make sure I didn't poison it? Come on, it's just tea."

"Fine." She didn't think he was dumb enough to try to poison her so obviously. (And she didn't think he had access to the poisons.) She grudgingly accepted the cup, took a sip, and screwed up her face. "Ew, it's bitter. What kind of herbs are in this?"

"Willow tree bark," Bill said. "I ground up a few painkillers!"

She didn't think he was supposed to have access to those, either. But probably more helpful than herbs, truth be told. She braced herself for the taste and took another sip.

Bill pushed off from the counter and wandered around the gift shop, inspecting the clothing on the racks: the deep green question mark t-shirts, the yellow-beige shirt with a spindly pine on it like the shirt they'd given Bill until the Pines had had a chance to take him shopping, the rack of unicorn hide belts Soos had made from cutting up rugs from the Northwest Manor garage sale.

As Bill fiddled with a pale sky blue belt, he said, almost contemplatively, "Spend tonight in the shack."

This time her grimace wasn't from the taste. She'd been bouncing back and forth between the shack and her aunt's place for the past month while she tried to find a sleeping arrangement that minimized her nightmares; after discovering Bill spying through the bedroom door last night, she'd made up her mind to spend tonight with her aunt. "I've tried that," Melody said, "and it used to help and now it doesn't—"

"No." Bill turned to meet her gaze directly with his one exposed eye; from this angle, his slitted pupil looked as sharp as a knife. "I mean spend tonight in the shack."

Bill was up to something. She didn't trust him on the best of days, and that was before she'd realized she'd been bullied out of school by literal demons around the same time she saw his stupid tapestry... and that he knew about it.

But then, he'd also been furious about the sleep paralysis demon using his face.

Melody could find out how deeply Bill was involved in this harassment campaign later. First, she needed to get a full night's sleep. And tonight, Bill was after the demon instead of her.

What did she have to lose? "Fine," she sighed. "I'll try it."

####

(TBOB changes! i got the name of lucky leprechaun cereal from TBOB. and added the Folk German reference due to TBOB.

And although the day mare & nightmare tapestry came from This Is Not A Website Dot Com, everything that makes it relevant here—Bill taking something of a leadership position among nightmares, Melody having a focus on unicorn mythology around the time/place the tapestry was made—was part of this arc's plans pre-TBOB.

And then the tapestry just gently fluttered down right smack dab in the middle of what i was already doing. the bastard triangle tapestry actually forced me to introduce the "day mares vs nightmares" pun several chapters earlier than I originally planned, since I figured I couldn't justify Melody not having seen the tapestry before. You'll just have to take my word for it that I came up with that pun independently and was gonna reveal it as a deeply ridiculous punchline.

Anyway, looking forward to y'all's thoughts on this chapter!)

#bill cipher #human bill cipher #gravity falls melody #(← she may not be in the art but by god she's a main character this chapter)#(before this arc is over I'll do SOME kind of art with her)#gravity falls #gravity falls fic #gravity falls fanart #fanart #my art #my writing #bill goldilocks cipher

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