#AND i get to keep my tabs. thank fuck. i keep like seven wips open constantly

[neonganymede]

I handle change so well.

[skia-oura]

The Pros and Cons of Surviving an Unstable Pocket Dimension

A/N: I haven’t worked on any Bentley & Co stuff in almost a year. And yet, I found myself wiping the dust of an old WIP a few days ago. Enjoy.

Ao3

______________________________________________________________

         “All right, we’re going to need to take you aside for further investigation,” the security agent said, gently guiding Bentley to another room. “Your luggage will also have to be searched through.”

           The first time this had happened had been in a grocery store, and Bentley had just about fled the scene after they were done checking for stolen items. He and Torako had also decided to never go to that particular store again—not that it mattered much, because it was closed a week later. Dipper denied any involvement. Bentley knew Alcor better than to believe that particular declaration. Torako had been seen discreetly high-fiving the perpetrator. Bentley had pretended not to see it. Life went on.

The second time, he’d entered a museum exhibit on the rise and fall of civilizations and how their technology had influenced their lifespans and lifestyles. The alarms had blared, he’d been pulled aside and interrogated about what piece he’d just stolen from the museum. When he said he’d just come in, it took two hours and an extensive check of their inventory to decide that he was telling the truth. In all, he’d just been incredulous and frustrated.

Now, on the third major incident—he was just numb to it.

           “I have a doctor’s note,” Bentley said. He gestured back at the luggage checking terminal. “It’s on my phone, in my bag.” He’d gotten it after the museum incident.

           “We’ll bring it to you after we’ve checked everything out,” the security agent said, frilled ears fluttering. The door shut behind them, and Bentley pushed down hard on the nerves that it caused. His therapist, who had not been told nearly everything that had occurred and was under the strictest of non-disclosure agreements as concocted by Torako and Dipper, said that it was fine to react poorly to being shut in a room. Bentley understood that. So did Torako and Dipper, who often took to leaving the doors in their new home open. Sometimes they even took it a little too far. Unfortunately, understanding it was fine to react poorly didn’t really change the fact that he was reacting poorly—heartrate up, breathing short, patchwork hands gripping the fabric of his long skirt.

           The door opened. “Can I see some ID, please?”

           “Of course.” Bentley worked his fingers out of their stiff grip on his clothing. “It’s on my phone, however.”

           The agent squinted at him with her three eyes. “Why do you keep asking for your phone so much?”

           “All of my important information is on it,” Bentley said. He was really going to have to look into analogue options, apparently, if he wanted to have any kind of expediency in his life. “Usually I have my phone on me to clear up misunderstandings.”

           She continued to squint at him, but nodded and left the room. The door clicked shut behind her. He couldn’t tell whether or not it was locked. Bentley closed his eyes and tried to regulate his breathing. It actually halfway worked, which was pleasantly surprising. He opened his eyes, and looked at the room. The room which was bare, save for a lonely, somewhat drooping poster in the corner about alerting the authorities to suspicious behavior in the terminal. It was faded. The section visible behind the poster was darker than the surrounding wall.

           The door opened. Bentley turned his attention away from the sad poster to the agent, who passed his phone over. “Please pull up your identification.”

           Bentley complied, pulling up the code that would allow the agent to access his public ID. She passed a fancy new flat scanner over it, shimmering with magic, and it chirped before lighting up his ID in hologram form. He had a second to think everything will be fine before the next half-second, in which he saw his photo and thought oh right fuck.

           The agent squinted her already squinty eyes further. “…skin tone seems different.”

           “There was an accident.” Bentley made a mental note to get his photo updated. Soon. As soon as possible.

           “Face is also differently shaped.”

           “Accident included weight loss,” Bentley said, frowning. He’d been very comfortable at his previous weight, thank you, and putting it back in a healthy way was taking much more time than usual. The wardrobe situation was unideal. Over by the door, a corner of the poster suddenly gave up and drooped down. Bentley empathized.

           “One of your eyes is…gold now?”

           “Same accident. It’s very frustrating.”

           “I’m sorry, I’m not sure this is sufficient,” the agent said.

           She dug out an attachment to her scanner and passed it over to Bentley. “Please rest your right forefinger on the print scanner.”

           That should work. Maybe now he’d finally be on his way to his work conference, where he could take out his frustration by tearing apart presentations by people who made mistakes they should have known better than to make. Bentley pressed his forefinger to the screen. It played a jaunty, tinny tune while it analyzed the results, and then beeped ominously. Bentley stared at his finger in betrayal.

           The agent peered at the screen. “…fingerprint also seems slightly off the record.”

           Bentley tried one last time to turn her attention where it really belonged. “Can I please show you my doctor’s note?”

           She huffed and put away the scanner and its fingerprint reading attachment. Energy like dust motes trailed in its wake before fading into nothing. “Sir,” she said, folding both of her arms, “I’m going to need you to stay in here while I call terminal police to get to the bottom of this situation.”

           “Okay,” he said, screaming on the inside. “I understand.”

           It took him five hours, several phone calls, and a set of lackluster apologies from all parties involved before Bentley was through security. He had missed his transaction time by a long shot, but still managed to be on his way quickly thereafter.

           The fourth time a similar event happened was two days later, at the terminal he’d transacted into. It took him seven hours, that time, and three different translators who tried to disagree on fiddly translation bits.

           The following day, Bentley went down to the police station. He updated his biographics, his address (which had also been an issue), received analogue documents in duplicate, and endured a lot of awkward small talk from Officer Akuapem. There, he thought to himself. Nothing bad will happen now.

           Then he entered a nearby bookstore, having remembered Torako’s birthday coming up, and single-handedly sent the entire store into siren-blaring lockdown.

             One thing that Bentley hadn’t anticipated about constantly emanating magical energy was that his phone never lost charge as long as it was in his hand. He noticed this a week after they’d moved into their new house, having confused and possibly terrified the poor realtor in charge of their case.

           “Huh,” he said aloud in the living room, lounging about after work with Torako—who was not lounging around, and instead was researching leads into her very first case as a private investigator. She’d moaned about the piles of paperwork the whole time, but had done it anyways. Such were the perils of working for yourself.

           “Huh?” Torako echoed absentmindedly. She twirled the tablet stylus between her fingers, energy become solid. Bentley knew that if he lifted his special reading glasses, it would be shimmering with magic more than it already was.

           “How long have we been sitting down here again?”

           “About two hours, I think?” Torako underlined something, then slid the tab out into thin air to interact with the 3-D image attachment. She mumbled something to herself about plausible cause and environmental influences and then worried at her lips.

           Bentley stared at his phone battery. It was at 97%. He’d been doing some heavy-duty stuff on his phone, like watching dumb videos between watching relevant TADtalk clips about things like the impact of magic on people’s lives or one argument against non-disclosure agreements. He was currently paused on a video discussing Alcor the Dreambender. It had some very strange ideas about how many souls Alcor consisted of.

           “Huh,” he said again. Then he opened his mouth and said, “You know, I think I’ve actually charged my phone sitting here.”

           If it had been one of his coworkers, they might have challenged that notion, or laughed it off as a joke. Torako, on the other hand, paused, turned her attention away from her case, and raised an eyebrow. “Charged your phone? Where’s your charging pad?”

           “In our room.” Bentley frowned at his phone. The percentage ticked up from 97% to 98%. “It…literally went up just now.”

           Torako gasped and rocked up from sitting to standing. “You’re the charger!”

           Bentley pursed his lips. “The phone is a bit on the old side, the software might be going buggy. I doubt it’s me.”

           Instead of seeing sense, Torako thrust her tablet into his face. He leaned back a little and blinked the brightness out of his eyes. “Do mine next!”

           He looked at the display. 11%. “You should really charge this more often, you know,” he said, like a person who put his phone on its charging stand every night before bed.

           “It runs until it dies,” said Torako, who often forgot to charge hers and therefore had a stash of portable energy clips stashed in odd places around the house. Why she needed two in the bathroom was a mystery. “Or rather, it runs until it is resurrected by your literally magic hands.”

           Bentley sighed. He took her tablet in his ‘literally magic’ hands and stared at her with the most deadpan expression he could muster. In response, Torako stared very intently at the percentage icon in the top right corner. In the space above the tablet, an image of a fairly normal looking townhouse loomed over them, apathetic to the tension of the moment.

           Two minutes later—Bentley kept an eye on the clock as well—Bentley sighed. “Look, Torako. Nothing has happened.”

           “Keep holding it, buddy,” Torako said.

           “But nothing has happened. I told you, it’s a quirk of faulty software on my phone.”

           He’d just shut his mouth when Torako let out a whoop of victory and punched a fist into the air. “Take that, it went up!”

           Sure enough, when Bentley glanced over to check, the battery icon was displaying a damning 12%.

           “Your software is bad too,” Bentley said, weakly.

           “My tablet is seven months old,” Torako cackled.

           “It’s faulty,” he tried. “Bad tech. You should get a refund.”

           Torako ruffled his hair. “It’s top of the line and you know it. I ain’t afraid to spend money on quality things.”

           “Good things sometimes don’t work right?” he said, knowing he had lost and still unwilling to face reality. The gleam in Torako’s eye scared him.

           “Give it up, sucker. Your magic hands are magic charging hands now.” She sat down on the couch right next to him and turned the tablet around in his hands. “Now, keep still so I can keep working longer.”

           Bentley dropped the tablet and felt vindicated by the way she squawked. “Can’t have my hands if I’m using them,” he said, and promptly walked away to go take a shower.

           The next day, he came home having mostly forgotten about the incident and felt tired enough to take a nap on the couch. When he woke up, Torako’s tablet was propped up against his bare stomach, and she was working again.

           “You’ll be pleased to know,” she said, grinning and scribbling down some notes in a tab laying across her legs, “that the more direct contact a magitech device has against your skin, the quicker it charges.”

           Bentley smacked her with the couch cushion. She cackled, smacked him back, and very soon the tablet was forgotten on the couch as they hurled pillows at each other like children.

             Lucas Onderon was a smart person. Very smart; it’s why he had a job in the thinktank of one of the first viable sigils research centers. He churned out ideas and made connections at a speed that sometimes made Bentley feel jealous. Unfortunately, whenever he tried to apply his theories, things inevitably went wrong.

           Bentley, glasses perched on his forehead, pointed at a sigil combination that was sparking dangerously to his left eye. “That’s going to explode in your face if you don’t change it.”

           Lucas rolled his eyes and flapped his hand in Bentley’s face. “I get it, you think you’re all hot stuff with your special face and your special eyes, but I know what I’m doing! Everything’s fine. Go pay attention to your own souped-up basic shit.”

           Across the room, very far away, Ziyi flicked her very large, very sensitive ears and looked up from her own work. “Uh, you might actually want to listen to Bentley? The Bentley Farkas? Who literally has a magic eye now and therefore is extra listenable to?”

           Bentley very carefully did not react to the thought that he was surrounded by people who called his body parts magical. Torako had very suddenly wondered aloud at how the magic affected his reproductive system was before freezing and hiding her face in her hands. The fact that it had embarrassed her as much as it had embarrassed him was the only thing that saved her from some nasty prank later on.

On the other hand, Dipper had cackled for all of five seconds before Bentley snapped that he had Dipper’s sister’s soul, and did Dipper really want to think about that? Dipper shut up very quickly after that. Dipper had also woken up in the middle of the night to ice-cubes being slipped down the back of his neck. The screech was very satisfying.

           “Who even cares?” Lucas said, consulting his notes for reference as to where he planned to set the severance line. He drummed his painted nails against the surface of the table next to the special sigils testing paper before him.

           Bentley sighed. It was his job as supervisor, he told himself. He had no room to judge right now, he told himself. “Seriously. It’s going to explode, and you will not be happy. At least move your notes to a safer range so that you can review them later?”

           Instead of listening to Bentley’s very good advice, Lucas stuck out his tongue and started to draw the line.  Bentley, because he wasn’t a saint, shut up and moved to a safe distance as he watched the magic spark higher and more violently with every other second. Ziyi groaned and slid one four-fingered hand up her face. Lucas faltered right before crossing the problematic sigil combo, but then continued. Incompletely cut sigils had even odds of either just going dead or exploding with energy, so Bentley felt it was a pretty fair call. Except for the part that, you know, he had told Lucas not to in the first place.

           As he thought, the moment the line cut through the sigil combo, the magic pulsed, Bentley closed his eyes, and there was an explosion that shook the room. Bentley felt the hum of the room’s containment sigils as they absorbed most of the shock and prevented structural damage. He counted to two, then opened his eyes.

           Lucas blinked, eyes wide, freckled face red from heat exposure and pink-dyed hair blown into disarray. He looked so utterly surprised that Bentley couldn’t help snorting in laughter. When Lucas’s attention snapped over to him, Bentley turned around and tried to muffle his amusement in his hand.

           “Stop laughing!” Lucas said. “This was—this was—this was terrible! A disaster!! My work is all gone!” The explosion had damaged his notes, as well, and Bentley wouldn’t be surprised if they were largely illegible now.

           “He warned you, you know,” Ziyi said.

           “He probably made it worse by standing so close!” Lucas said. Bentley’s laughter faded in his chest. “If he wasn’t here, it probably wouldn’t have even exploded.”

           “Holy shit, dude,” Ziyi said. Bentley’s hand stayed over his mouth. Guilt roiled in his gut—what if it had been his fault? What if he’d influenced an already unsteady sigil combination into instability? “Stop blaming your explosion on the dude who tried to help out?”

           “You know he’s throwing magic out everywhere, all the time,” Lucas argued.

           Ziyi scoffed. Bentley wondered how fast he could make it out the door. “And you know that you have a tendency to think too fast and overlook important factors! You should check over your own damn work after letting it sit for a while.”

           This was true, Bentley thought. Lucas did think too fast, and he didn’t proofread nearly enough for his own projects. From his sputtering, Lucas was also aware of this shortcoming, and that gave Bentley enough strength to compose himself and turn around. And not head straight for the door like he wanted to. Anyways, that was behind Lucas, and he didn’t want to go past Lucas at this point.

           “Hopefully,” Bentley said, burying his insecurity and slipping his glasses back down onto his nose, “this finally teaches you to take a bit more time with your work. You really are smart, Lucas. Just take more time.”

           Lucas blinked, and then his youthful face clouded over with resentment even under the exposing white lights of the sterile room around them. “That’s easy for you to say,” he sneered. “You’re already established and important.”

           “And it took time to get there,” Bentley said. He held his hands behind his back to hide how they were trembling. “Time, and care, and a lot of frustration.”

           “Lucas has got that last one pinned down,” Ziyi snarked. Bentley threw an exasperated look over to her, and she ducked her face with a sheepish grin. The white lights of the room slid over her single giraffe-like horn, dulled by the overlying coating of stubbly fur.

           In response, Lucas threw up his hands and stood. “I’m done! You have what you want! I’m leaving the practical testing room and going back to where I belong, on the drawing board.”

           “Okay,” Bentley said, because there was no reasoning with Lucas when he was acting like this. “You go do that.”

           Lucas swiped the remains of his notes up and glowered at Bentley on his way out. If the door hadn’t hissed shut, he might have slammed it. There was silence for a long moment, during which Bentley stared over at the wisps of burned paper, ashes spread over the table and the floor. He didn’t want to see whether or not they glittered with magic.

           “I’ll go get a vacuum,” Ziyi said, finally.

           “No, no, I’ll go,” Bentley said. He smiled over at her. She didn’t look like she thought it was sincere, which was unfortunate because he was trying very hard to seem sincere. “I have to…think,” he said.

           Ziyi leaned back in her seat and folded her arms. Scales glittered iridescent along the curve of her cheekbone and down the bridge of her nose. “He doesn’t actually hate you, you know,” she said. “He’s just…frustrated and jealous. Don’t stitch what he said into your soul, yanno? It’ll just give your reincarnations inferiority issues or something.”

           Bentley smiled again at her. “I think my reincarnations are already screwed,” he said, thinking of Alcor.

           “Hey, I know plenty of people who think having a magic eye would be cool,” she said, unfolding her arms and leaning forward. “Your reincarnations aren’t screwed for that, silly.”

           “I don’t think that’s how reincarnations work,” Bentley said dryly. Otherwise, he’d be a lot more like the Original Mable Pines (or whoever was first, if there was a first). “I’m going to go get that vacuum, okay?”

           If it took him twenty minutes and a fifteen minute rapid text exchange with Torako in a supply closet several doors down, then that was clearly a lie and never happened. No, his eyes were not red and he wasn’t suddenly congested, thank you very much. And yes, he was wearing gloves because he was just conscientious about keeping his hands clean, not for any other reason.

           He couldn’t resist lifting his glasses and glancing at Ziyi’s current project, though, trying to make something that shrinked and unshrinked on command. “Ah,” he said, pointing his finger. “You sure you want to make that combination there?”

           “Is it going to explode?” she asked, peering at the combination in question. “It’s just longevity and size, you know. It won’t stick it there, will it?”

           “But linking it to that change sign might not be the best idea—look, that change is also the one used for instability, isn’t it? It might make something that’s been made small suddenly become large again.” Bentley stayed very carefully as far away as he could while still looking at the sigils.

  ��        Ziyi groaned and slapped her hands on her face. “Nooo, no you’re right, I completely forgot about that change sigil.”

“You might want to combo fluctuation up with a standard kind of sigil with a mid-level small sigil, and then link it to longevity.” Bentley suggested.

“That’s so many though,” Ziyi said, fingers dragging down on her cheeks enough that Bentley could see the pink skin under her eyes. For a moment she was silent, staring down at her sketchpad. Then she jerked up straight, dragged her sketchpad towards herself, and started scribbling down unbroken sigils and ideas. “But if I—Bentley you’re a lifesaver—if I set the combo up concentrically, then—”

He grinned a little. “I’ll leave you to it,” he said. Bentley turned around, tiny vacuum in his hands, and narrowed his eyes at his worktable a few steps away.

Time to wrestle with the basics again.

 One quiet Sunday evening, when Torako was gone to speak with a client, Bentley sat in the living room on the couch they’d had since college and stared down at his hands. Ostensibly, he was supposed to be relaxing, or cooking, or getting the garden outside started as Torako and he had planned. That obviously wasn’t happening. Instead, he sat in the golden-orange light filtering in past the translucent inner curtains hung over the French doors leading outside and stared down at his hands.

They were patchworked in different tones, in slightly different textures that didn’t quite blend into each other seamlessly. When he turned his palms over the patchwork wrapped around, crossed his palmar creases and rounded through the whorls of his fingerpads. His fingerprints weren’t the same as before, he remembered. How deep down did the changes really go? How far had the pocket dimension embedded itself in him, in his DNA, to change the smallest parts of his body so subtly? The doctors had said there was nothing physically wrong with him but—he was so cold, and his fingerprints were different, and his eyes were different his skin was different he could feel magic—

He curled and uncurled his hands, slowly, watching the light slide over his skin, watching the shadows bloom before creeping away. Bentley bent his head closer, brought his hands up, and inspected the beds of his fingernails, ran his thumbnails over the surfaces of them. He’d never paid this much attention to his hands before, he thought. That being said, he was—pretty sure that they had never glittered before. When he shut his left eye, the glittering disappeared. A sudden lump in his throat, Bentley closed both his eyes and leaned back. The sun shone dim through his eyelids until he squeezed his eyes shut and counted the seconds for each inhale and exhale.

There was a sudden thrum of energy, like friction skittering over the exposed skin of his arms and setting his hair to stand on end. Bentley opened his eyes just as an arm settled slowly over his shoulder. Only the knowledge that it was Dipper stopped him from jumping, and even then he couldn’t not stiffen just a little.

“Hey Ben,” Dipper said. “It’s been a while?”

“It’s been seven hours,” Bentley drawled. “How was it at Batoor’s new place?”

“Peaceful,” Dipper said. “He’s doing well, excited about college life next month and all that. Haji says to say hello. I also stopped to say hello to the Pines, and they were wondering when you and Torako were going to come out next. Lata especially.”

Bentley pursed his lips. He flexed his fingers, then gripped his legs with his hands and stood. Dipper’s arm slid off him in a rasp of not-quite-real fabric. “I’m going to take a shower.”

“Bentley?”

He threw a quick smile over his shoulder, but Dipper looked far from convinced. “It’s fine, I just was reminded I needed one.”

“Bentley…”

Fortunately, Dipper didn’t follow him into the bathroom. He didn’t protest when the door shut, or the lights turned on, or when Bentley said nothing else. Bentley chewed at the inside of his lip and looked at himself in the mirror.

Haji had never apologized, he remembered. Not in words, at least. Bentley leaned forward, putting his weight on his arms, and traced the contours of his face’s reflection. Haji didn’t seem to want to look at Bentley for very long, the two times that Bentley had interacted with him after the pocket dimension incident. Not that Bentley blamed him for that, he thought. His face wasn’t exactly his anymore.

The thought struck his breath in his chest for a few seconds before Bentley gritted his teeth and shoved it away. He thought he’d been over this. He’d thought that he’d come to terms with his new look. With the new needs that came with it, in the forms of two kinds of moisturizer and an extra delicate facewash. His gaze flicked between both of his eyes, the dark eye he had inherited from his parents, the light eye he had inherited from his trauma. Magic sparkled over nearly everything he saw. He suddenly wanted his glasses, wanted to try to forget that his body was no longer one he recognized. Bentley stared at himself in the mirror and was hit by a longing for the him of last year that had him biting his lip and ducking his head against the tears in his eyes.

Bentley sunk to the cold tile floor, the heels of his palms digging into the wells of his eyes and wiping away the water springing forth from them. He curled his body into itself, bare feet dragging against ceramic patterned like ocean waves.  Torako had loved them when they’d first looked at the house. The breath sucked into him was almost immediately dispelled. He ran his fingers through his short hair and tugged as hard as he could, baring his teeth against the pain in his chest. “I’m still me,” he whispered into the stillness of the bathroom. His heart beat out, no you’re not, no you’re not, no you’re not, and he curled in tighter on himself.

“Bentley just—let me in, please.”

“No,” Bentley just managed to say. “I’m taking a shower.”

“No you’re not,” Dipper said. The door opened, and Bentley did his best to hide his face, but it didn’t help. “I can read auras, you know.”

Bentley hated Dipper, very suddenly. It wasn’t right to, but he did. “Go away!”

“No,” Dipper said. He slid down the wall to sit next to Bentley, close enough that Bentley could feel the heat of him but far enough that they weren’t actually touching. Bentley wasn’t sure what he would do if Dipper touched him right now. “You need somebody. You don’t need to be left alone with your thoughts.”

“You wouldn’t understand,” Bentley said like an absolute child.

“Try me,” Dipper said, echoing that age-old reply. “I’ve lived for like, millennia, I’ve experienced a lot. Maybe it’ll help.”

Bentley sniffled loud and wet and tried to calm down by counting breaths again. “I don’t like talking about it,” he said.

“Take your time,” Dipper said. He shifted. When Bentley sneaked a glance, Dipper had stretched out his legs, one ankle crossed over the other, the hems of his pants cut a few centimeters above his ankles and tailored tight around his calves. The fabric shimmered blue—not with magic, but because Dipper was a showboat.

So Bentley nodded, pressed his face into his knees and covered his ears, and just tried to be. He counted his breaths—one to three in, one two three out, over and over. He focused on the pressure of his knees against his forehead, the coolness of the tile against the soles of his feet, the subtle hum against his skin that he always got now when Dipper was around. He was there. He was alive.

It was strange to think that, all those months ago, he had planned to never be alive again. It was even stranger to think that he’d made it out of that death hole. He never managed to talk about this with his therapist for obvious reasons. Maybe he should have, just—in the barest terms.

“Better?” Dipper asked.

He sighed. “Don’t just read my aura, will you?”

“Can’t help it,” Dipper said. “I barely remember when I couldn’t.”

The thought that Dipper wasn’t able to at one point shocked Bentley just enough that he lifted his face and looked Dipper in the eye for the first time since that morning. “You couldn’t?”

Dipper grinned, shark-teeth sharp. “You know I was human once, back before the Transcendence. Even fewer humans could read auras then, and I certainly wasn’t one of them.”

That’s right, Bentley thought. He looked over Dipper’s features again, eternally young and smooth. Dipper was human once, too. He’d had a human sister, human parents and friends and relatives. He hadn’t had sharp teeth, or black sclera, or brown hair—or maybe he had? How much of his appearance was rooted in reality? Had he had brown eyes, back when he was human?

Bentley sniffled again. Maybe Dipper could understand. “Remind me how you became Alcor again?”

“That old story?” Dipper’s eyebrows raised up a bit higher than most human eyebrows did. “There’s not much to it.”

“Humor me.” Bentley crossed his arms over his knees and rested his head there, face turned towards Dipper. “If you want.”

“I mean,” Dipper said, bending a knee and slinging one arm over it. “It wasn’t on purpose. We—my sister, my friends, my Grunkles and I—were trying to stop a demon from starting the apocalypse. It eventually became the Transcendence, but it was better than it would have ended up. Long story short, I got into a tussle with Bill, the demon, and—somehow, I won. Then everything changed.”

When Dipper didn’t continue immediately, Bentley pressed on gently. “How? Did it change, I mean. For you.”

Dipper hummed and tilted his head. “I guess the best way to describe it is that things stopped and happened all at once to me. Time was—I was always going to look thirteen unless I took it upon myself to look different, for one. The eyes and the wings and the teeth were definitely different. I didn’t used to have gold blood, obviously. I was also just…mentally different.”

Bentley blinked, slow, eyes tired. “Oh.”

“Parts of me were changed completely,” Dipper said. He looked down at the tile at Bentley’s feet. “Bill became part of me even as his soul was excised from the energy that made me become a demon. His proclivity towards formal clothing, the knowledge he had of the universes, his masochistic and sadistic streaks, his disregard for life and his desire for chaos are all a part of me, now. Demons are not kind, and I’m no different.”

“Yes you are,” Bentley found himself saying. “Because otherwise you wouldn’t be in here, helping me.”

“Would I?” Dipper asked. He smiled at Bentley. His face became just a little rounder, eyes just a little wider in his features. “I’m not sure. You are Mizar, after all.”

“Would you care about Mizar if you were just Bill?”

Dipper laughed a little. “Not in any good way, so I guess no. I guess you’re right. Why are you asking, anyways?”

Bentley worried at the inside of his cheek. “Would you say that you’re trapped in a body that isn’t…isn’t yours? That you don’t recognize yourself in the mirror anymore?”

After a second, understanding bloomed over Dipper’s face like the summer sunset outside. “Not often, no,” Dipper said. “Maybe once every few years, at most. But I’ve also had a long time to get used to my situation. It was much worse at the beginning.”

When Bentley didn’t respond apart from looking away, Dipper reached out to slide his hand over Bentley’s cheek, slow enough that Bentley could move away if he wanted to. Instead, Bentley leaned into the warmth of his palm and closed his eyes.

“But it got better,” Dipper said into the quiet of the bathroom. “It got better, and it will get better for you too.”

Bentley tugged his lip inside of his mouth and found himself blinking back more tears. “Sometimes it doesn’t feel that way. I feel like I was stolen from me, you know?”

“I did,” Dipper said. He shifted closer, and Bentley turned to press his face into Dipper’s chest almost eagerly. “And you have a right to feel angry. But it will get better. I promise, it will.”

Bentley wrapped his arms around Dipper, and tried his best to believe that it would.

 The sun beat down warm on his skin through his gauzy overshirt and the wide-brimmed sunhat on his head. His hands dug down into the rich earth, moist and cool from the previous day’s summer storm. Bentley pulled away more loose soil from the hole he’d just dug, before tugging the decomposable plastic from the base of the tomato plant and setting it into the ground. He piled cool soil back around it and patted it down just firm enough to hold without restricting. The plant was barely tall enough for the cage—which he picked up and snapped into three-dimensions before setting it down into the ground. It ground, metal against dirt until the lowest ring of it was a mere seven centimeters above the earth. Bentley smiled down at it, then shuffled past a basil plant over to the next spot—the last spot for their tomatoes—and dug in his spade.

“How’s it going over there, Ben?” Torako called from the other side of the house with Dipper.

“Fine!” he said, pushing up his glasses. “How about you?

“It’s going peachy!”

“But you’re planting apples?” He dug a well big enough and deep enough into the ground, and then set the spade aside. He couldn’t help touching the earth with his bare hands, feeling the natural energy of it thrum up into him. It was like he was all the more alive for it. It was—it was rejuvenating.

“Exactly!” Dipper yelled, which either meant that things weren’t going nearly as well, or that they were settling for a weak pun on the basis that peaches were fruits too. There was a clang, and Torako cursed. Bentley set the tomato plant in the ground and piled the dirt over it, shaking his head. Standing, he winced at the crack of his knees before shaking out another cage and setting it down.

“How has it even taken you this long to get that taken care of?” he yelled over. Squinting his eyes against the glare of the sun, he set his dirty hands on his hips and surveyed the small plot they’d just developed. Basil interspersed between tomato, beyond them two lines of carrots. Peppers and chives just beyond those, all the vegetables ringed by a protective barrier of nasturtiums and marigolds. “You just had three trees!”

“Don’t sound so high-horsed, you only planted the tomatoes and nasturtiums today,” Torako hollered back. “Don’t think I don’t see you standing over there like you’re surveying all of your work.”

Bentley laughed, heart light in his chest. A pleasant breeze blew by, sweeping the hem of his overshirt up. He turned around. “Do you need my help over there?”

“Sure,” Torako said, wiping her brow with the back of her arm. She grinned at him, dark eyes warm under the shadow of her arm. “You’ll do more good than Mr. Dipper himself here.”

“Hey!” Dipper protested, feet flat on the ground, eyes white and brown and black and ears rounded. He stuck out his tongue past (slightly too sharp) human teeth at Torako and leaned on the shovel he’d shoved into the ground, gardening glove thick on his hand. “I’m plenty helpful. This casing is just being more difficult than the others.”

“Let me see,” Bentley said, walking over and wiping his hands off on the apron he had on.

Behind him, though he didn’t know it and hadn’t seen it, the magic from inside of him had seeped into the ground. It would travel slowly up into the roots of those plants, soft and imbued with care, the desire to grow and grow well. Those plants would grow into abundance, tomatoes ripening sweeter despite being planted just a little too late, chives taller, peppers longer than they would have otherwise—if only by a little. The marigolds and nasturtiums would bloom brighter and longer. The carrots would dig into the ground, greedy for more until they were pulled up in the fall. The apple tree Bentley helped plant would be just a little hardier than the other two. Torako would look at him slyly, tell him that his green thumb had certainly improved in leaps and bounds and was he sure his hands weren’t magic, before getting a pillow to the face and falling down to the floor laughing. Dipper would cackle and join in, and they would fight until the morning, when Bentley would get up and go to work for his first full day since being kidnapped.

But he didn’t know all that yet, so Bentley went over to Dipper and Torako, took the apple seedling by its base, and tugged the wrapping off in a couple quick motions.

Torako stared. “You really do have magic hands.”

“Oh shut it,” he said, reaching out and smearing his dirty hand down the side of her cheek. She gasped in false affront, hand on her chest. Dipper laughed, Bentley crouched down to set the seedling in the ground and cover it, cool dirt on his hands and the life of the earth trembling up into his skin.