Chapter Text
Summer was over, and work had slowed down.
Working in a grocery store had its perks, like both alleviating your social anxiety and skyrocketing your blood pressure, paradoxical in nature but possible according to your recent therapy appointment and doctor’s visit. Your therapist would have reprimanded that train of thought, but thinking was all you could do at your till.
You’d swept the front, cleaned your till and belts, dusted the shelves, stocked the impulse counters, at this point all that was left was to twiddle your thumbs and play hopscotch in your head. Good thing your break was due.
Your manager came and closed your till temporarily, so you could get in your fifteen somewhere far away but close enough to where if a shooter strolled in you’d be a sitting duck-
You couldn’t be on break fast enough. Stuck in a mundane life, in a mundane town, in a mundane body . Being trans in a small town meant even if you successfully transitioned (name and hormones at least), there’d be no denying your pre transition self, with a shotgun in the face to boot. Stuck with little money in a town you couldn’t run away from in a body you tried vigilantly to disassociate from (ignorance is bliss, amrite?), life wasn’t bad, but it could be better. And that knowledge, of what could be if you were just a little more determined in your studies, if you were just a little smarter to feel any hope in said pursuits, a little more confident in your life span from external and internal factors, maybe…
That knowledge, that maybe was killing you from the inside out. Your friends, if you could call them that, would occasionally text you during a major storm or holiday. No birthday visits, no after work shenanigans. You couldn’t remember your co-workers names, as you clocked in and clocked out in the blink of a yawn. Your reasoning was, no one reached out to you, and your social anxiety and general awkwardness made interaction with others a struggle and a third, so why bother? Not that you could blame the distance between ‘friends’ and co-workers, you made sure no one got close, a few nights drinking and many mistakes later made sure of that (do not trust anyonenamed after a wine brand).
Speaking of drinking, your acetaminophen was starting to become useless to your pounding onslaught of a headache, and a quick little ten-ish minute nap would help ease the rush of pain until you get back to the till to grab more from your stash (company had band-aids but not acetaminophen, go figure your paycheck went to medication).
Logging on to YouTube and setting a shifting subliminal (you’d tried for years but had no such luck as others ‘reported’), you scooted your chair back in order to lay your head in arms with buds plugged in to be in the land between dreams and consciousness.
In between distant beeping from your co-workers, you could hear a shrill voice whisper. What it said was up, up and away in the blink of a yawn, drifting ever further away. Until your headache went from soothed waves to a tsunami that is. Suddenly, instead of seeing the dull light beyond your eyelids, dark blue encased your vision. A lucid dream, as you knew who you were and where your body actually occupied, with your watch stopped and no legible numbers in sight. Something stopped your train of thought. Something in front of you.
What the f*ck was in front of you, is that-
“Wow, sure done your homework kid!” a glowing cool ranch Dorito yakked at you. Instantly, the headache turned into several ice picks stabbing into your skull, thoughts jumbled and memories scanned by Bill Cipher. Bill Cipher, the one recently (to you at least) revealed to be up and kicking in the Theaprism in the fictional universe of Gravity Falls. Bill Cipher, an illuminati Freddy Krueger-
“Ey, don’t compare me to that bozo!” Bill jeered at your stupefied form. So he’s reading your thoughts, and that explained why you had the sudden memory of slipping on concrete while jogging in front of your fifth grade crush-
“Yeah yeah, I’m in your head,” he butted, eye lidded in annoyance. He waved and the memory slipped away from you, as he summoned a chair underneath you and himself. “Now, no need for introductions, as you know a little,” he was floating above the chair, but as he glowered in red with his next words that was all you were able to further observe from him, “ too much about me, ey champ?”.
Guess he’s talking about what you’ve seen from all the Dipper-minds decoding and analyzing the Book of Bill and the website it led to. Of course, the narcissist would hate his past being unveiled, even if some was voluntary from the Dorito himself-
His red and white glow caused your stomach to unzip and spill your intestines. In sudden agony, you tried to pull your organs back into little avail, as they kept slipping out of your hands and into the pool of blood below. “Do NOT call me a Dorito, fleshbag.”
Lesson brutally learned, in a snap of Bill’s fingers, your intestines were zipped back into your body. Feeling your newly fixed self, you looked up at him as he settled back into his hover above the chair, “Take that as a warning kid.”
Bill finally looked at you, his intent clear but purpose not. You knew his games, he wanted something from you. You may be lucid, but you wanted to see how this played out. You’d finally watched Gravity Falls in full in over a decade, you grew up with the show but were never able from both circ*mstance and interest to watch all the episodes, or any of season two for that matter. The fandom got a boom from the Book of Bill’s release, and you finally had an interest to watch and read after all these years. It’s no wonder that your brain's first pickings was the triangle himself.
As you thought, Bill in either mercy, or more likely repurposed malevolence, let you think before he spoke. “I gotta deal of your lifetime kid.”
Bill flung his chair into the mindscape, as his duplicates surrounded you, his voice echoed, “Wellwellwellwell well, you’re a lonely freak, ain’tcha Slugger?”
Images flooded your mind, of your grade school days hiding in the bathrooms during pep rallies, as you had no one to sit next to in the overstimulation of yells and screams, or leaving after lunch to camp in behind the dumpster or football field away from prying eyes as you read and read smut. Of having several crushes, and impulsive thoughts and dreams, of thinking of pounding your fist through your fifth grade crush’s brains and making him eat it while he got himself off in a handheld meat grinder-
Bill whistled, and his clones were in your thoughts, poking and prodding for his eye (eyes?) to see. “If I was planning another party, I might invite you to make the internairy for my less creative Henchmaniacs, you know what a fun time is!”
The images and clones dissolved, as bile rose in your throat. You were not a violent person, not a saint and not a villain. Just human. Those were your intrusive thoughts, your dreams reflecting on finally having power when you had none in real life. It was less of the violence of hurting another and more of the control that you could, that you had the strength and power to do so. You were good, mom made sure to beat that in you with her furious words all those years ago. You were good, you didn’t have to have friends. You liked being alone, in your bubble of a room away from anyone but yourself and whatever creator you were watching on your screen. How dare your brain conjure this dream to confront you, it’s not like you spent every Sunday of your life since middle school dedicating yourself to your sins in order to be a good person throughout your school days, so you can be a good person.
More images flew by. Crying yourself to sleep on why you couldn’t have been born stronger, like your male friends. Crying on why your skin itched every time your parents called you their daughter, you were theirs, so why did you want to tear your skin off your bones? As your male friends grew up and distanced themselves from you, as your female friends either moved or ditched you for the ‘popular’ girls. How your mom made you wear skirts and dresses to church and you wanted to tear it off and wrap it around your face to suffocate, maybe then they’d finally listen to you even if it was your last breath. How you wish you could have defended her from her family, but had no power to do so. How she promised you, but she still did, she still did it -
How you watched your classmates get scholarships and tour college campuses as your mom pressured and stressed to write, to get the money, to leave . How you bought the rope after school, the tree outside your window was hidden in front of the forest and behind the fence so nosy neighbors wouldn’t know. How your As slipped to Fs, how you had to recover credits online, how teachers and parents bemoaned how you were such a good kid, what was going on, you weren’t abused, you had two loving parents, why couldn’t you just be normal .
Bill floated in front of you, both you and him gazing on her with him, when you hid. Hide, hide away, and no one will care. No one ever cares. Bill’s eye shifted behind to give you a once over. He snapped, and the mindscape resembled your childhood bedroom. Another snap, and the windows let sunset light trickle in through the tree outside.
“You ain’t normal, kid,” Bill shattered the silence, floating above the bed with an anime theme, sipping through his eye a bottle of your hidden vodka. He spit out the drink and reverse poured the rest into the air vent above, throwing the bottle against your headboard behind him. As glass spilled, he affirmed, “And you ain’t ever gonna be.”
He flipped through a book, and you could read that it said “✞︎□︎♓︎♎︎’s Memories”, “As those Tikki Tacs in your brain say, ‘womp womp’.”
The triangle shut the book, and laid in the glass on the bed, kicking his feet like a schoolgirl, “I can make yah better kid!”
A mirror formed from a waterfall from the previous air vent, sliding to be in front of you. The image shifted from you, in your work clothes, eyebags that stretched for days, and hips that could deceive, and with a snap the image shifted once again. You watched as an image of someone taller than you, with your hair and eyes and skin and mouth appeared. It had the same scars, but had stubble on its face. Its arms had a bulk, its hips were still there but combined with the broader shoulders and gut made an imposing figure compared to your short and plain chubby self. This image projected a you where you had strength, a character .
Bill snickered when you brought your hands on your chest. You felt them , but your image showed you touching a flat chest. “This could be you,” he glowered, popping beside you, “if we make a deal.”
You, who’d taken all of this triangle-handling, scoffed. This was Bill Cipher, there was always a catch. Assuming this was anything other than your subconscious brewing a mild nightmare that is.
You looked Bill in his eye, about to decline, before your surroundings shifted and you found yourself in someone else’s bedroom. There was a circular window, which with the moon’s light illuminated two beds with snoring lumps. The world looked off , too perfect, like it was painted instead of real. Not a bedroom, a boat’s interior. One lump’s (person?) snoring stalled, and as a hand shifted the blanket off of his person, you knew this was not a show of dominance from Bill. It was a presentation of what you could experience, if you’d just shake his hand .
Getting up, was an old man in a battered wife beater and heart boxers, and as he stretched his hairy arms to the sky and a loud crack reverberated throughout the room, you felt your heart pound. Ba-bump, ba-bump, and as the man you had only seen on a screen turned, your heart stopped as his eyes widened.
He saw you, was your final thought before the dream shifted and weaved back into your childhood bedroom. Bill appeared with a crackle, and he held his hand to you, blue flames ignited and ready to flare. “So kid, we gotta deal?”
This was just a dream. You’ve had semi-realistic dreams before, this was nothing new. You didn’t think about how you were able to read the digital clock in the boat, how you saw your reflection through the boat’s window, or how you felt the chill of the flame as you shook Bill’s hand.
“It’s a deal!”
