Archive of Our Own

The meadow danced under the sun's golden melody, a sea of swaying grasses stitched with wildflowers. The grass had grown wild and Eden-green this spring, rising thigh-high to a thrush. Neon-blue dragonflies darted above a secret ribbon of water sweetening soil. The morning air was mint-fresh to the lungs, carrying the caramel-soft scent of blooming flora. The wind, gentle-handed, combed the tall stalks, setting little dandelion ghosts adrift.

Dipper laid down, enjoying how the grasses and wildflowers would tickle his skin as they swayed with the spring breeze, and how the early morning sun gifted his aching muscles a temporary reprieve.

He outstretched his arms, letting his hands grasp at the stems of a group of wildflowers near him. Distantly, he thought that he should pick a handful to surprise Mabel with. He could imagine how excited she would be to hear that the meadow had bloomed a little earlier this year — a small apology from Mother nature for the onslaught of snow and rain they had endured the past few months. The day had just started and it was already a gift.

Well. Technically — and Dipper wanted to stress the word technically here, because context mattered and anyone who was going to come at him without considering the full context of the situation could frankly act as his stress-relief ball for the next month — the day hadn't "just started." Dipper was still, if anyone was counting, in yesterday. Which was fine. That was fine. People stayed up all night all the time, it was practically a rite of passage, Ford probably did it constantly back in his day and nobody gave him a hard time about it.

The point was, he had snuck out at 8pm. With good reason. The pink moon only came around once a century and both Ford and Bill had agreed it weakened the barriers on certain sections of the forest, which meant a once in a lifetime research opportunity had basically fallen into his lap and what was he supposed to do, sleep through it? He wasn't twelve. He could handle himself.

He had intended to be back by midnight.

It was 9am.

Dipper's journal lay somewhere in the grass beside him — it had apparently made its own escape attempt from his satchel at some point, which, fair enough honestly — and he didn't even need to pick it up to assess the damage. He could see it from here. The 8pm entries were neat. Color coded. The handwriting of a person with a future. By 2am the lines were slanting at an angle that suggested the concept of horizontal had become theoretical. By 5am it had stopped resembling English entirely and devolved into something that looked uncomfortably like the symbols Bill absentmindedly scratched into the gift shop counter when he was bored, which drove Ford insane and which Dipper had never once mentioned he found kind of —

Anyway.

So, there had also been some incidents. (So what! Was that not the expected cost of being on the forefront of discovery?) The cryptids, obviously, that was expected, he had prepared for that, but they still hurt. The barriers that had not weakened quite as much as the models suggested — less expected, noted for future reference. The cliff. He was categorically not thinking about the cliff. The cliff was a closed matter. The amount of blood currently enriching the forest floor somewhere behind him was also a closed matter and he would be addressing neither of these things until he had slept for approximately eleven hours and had time to prepare a convincing defense for why none of it was his fault, which it wasn't, he just needed to figure out how to explain that to four people who were going to be simultaneously and separately very loud about it.

But he didn't have to think about that right now. He took a deep breath of the sweet, sweet meadow air and let his eyes flutter closed, his hands go lax, and he felt his worries melt away as he let out a breath he hadn't realized he had been holding.

And yes, he tried to take a nap. He was going to address the nap preemptively because he could already hear four separate voices in his head gearing up to have opinions about it. Yes, he was taking a nap in what was probably the most dangerous forest in North America (yes he thought it was worse than the Appalachia, yes he had been banned from r/GhostHunters for saying so but they were all a bunch of lazy losers trying to make a quick buck on blurry, overexposed photos of Deer so who cares anyways, Dipper certainly didn't.). No, he was not being a "dum dum." He was being a rational adult human person who had been awake for — he did the math and then immediately decided not to think about the math — a completely normal amount of time, in a completely safe location, because unicorns had apparently lived here once and unicorn hair was a strong ward against cryptids and Mabel had told him that and Mabel was usually right about these things. He had also been stomping around these forests for almost ten years. He could sense danger. Right now the only thing his senses were telling him, loudly and repeatedly, was to please for the love of god lie down.

His thoughts went soft and loose the way they only did when he was too exhausted to police them properly, drifting toward—

Bill's laugh. Specifically the real one, not the performative cackle he deployed to annoy Ford, but the surprised one he let slip sometimes when Dipper said something that caught him off guard. The way he leaned in too close when he was curious about something, close enough that Dipper could — and this was purely observational — could count his eyelashes if he wanted to. Which he didn't. The way Bill sometimes looked at him like he was the most interesting thing in whatever room they happened to be standing in, which was insane because Bill had seen the actual universe, Bill had been to other dimensions, Bill had probably watched stars being born and yet somehow Dipper Pines, chronic disaster, was apparently deserving of that rare soft smile he'd gift Dipper with for —

Woah. Woah woah woah.

He needed to — okay. He needed to pump the brakes here. This was not — he wasn't —

Not this again.

Dipper's half-asleep brain cast around desperately for a culprit and landed on one almost immediately. The fae. Earlier, when he'd gotten too close to the thicket around mile three, one of them had gotten a clean slap directly to his left temple before he could back off, which at the time he'd written off as a minor occupational hazard but was now clearly — obviously — the source of whatever THIS was. Pixie-induced fever dreaming. A known phenomenon probably. He'd have to look it up when he was conscious.

Perfectly explainable. Not his fault. Closed matter.

His dreams of Bill's amber eyes and gold hair were just beginning to go blessedly, mercifully blank, replaced by a shadow. He watched a strange hooded figure press the blade of a knife slowly against his throat.

Oh thank god, finally, Dipper thought, with the complete serenity of a man whose brain had simply run out of road. A shadowy figure has come to kill me. A normal dream.

The pressure increased. Something pricked his skin. His eyes snapped open. Shit.

He was on his feet before he was fully awake, which was either impressive or a depressing indicator of how often his life required this particular skill set.

The knife she'd had at his throat was already gone, replaced by something worse: her hands, moving in sharp deliberate patterns that made the air taste like copper and burnt matches. A witch. Obviously. Great. Perfect. This was fine.

Dipper's hand was already in his satchel.

Anti-mimic charm — his fingers closed around it automatically, muscle memory from a very bad six hours ago — wait, not a mimic, useless, drop it—

She threw something at him that wasn't quite fire and wasn't quite lightning and was definitely going to leave a mark, and he threw himself sideways into the grass, which his body registered as an extremely rude thing to do to muscles that had already had a very long night thank you very much—

Fae charm, fae charm— he had it, he was holding it, he had absolutely no idea why he was holding it because she was demonstrably not a fae, she had no wings, she was the wrong height, this was embarrassing—

She advanced. Calm. Unhurried. The way a cat looked at a mouse it had already decided the outcome for.

Salt. Obviously. Right. He had salt. He always had salt. Salt was the great equalizer, salt was reliable, salt was—

He threw it.

She was a witch.

Witches were human.

Salt did absolutely nothing to humans.

It did, however, get directly in her eye.

There was a moment — genuinely one of the more surreal moments of a night that had contained several — where the cold, silent, calculating witch who had dropped on him from the trees simply. Stopped. Her hand came up to her face. She made a sound that was not particularly intimidating.

Oh, Dipper thought, already moving. Okay.

He had approximately four seconds of upper hand and he spent them getting to his feet, getting distance, getting his breathing under control, cataloguing exits — there, there, possibly there if he was willing to go through the thorns which he wasn't because he'd already bled enough tonight to make a compelling case for a transfusion—

She recovered.

Right. Of course she did. Four seconds wasn't a victory it was a recess, and she came back from it significantly less calm than she'd started, which turned out to be worse. The deliberate precision was gone, replaced with something that had an agenda. She was faster now. Angrier. The patterns her hands made were sharper and they were aimed specifically and personally at him and she had him backed against a dense wall of undergrowth within thirty seconds with nowhere left to go that wasn't directly through her—

Wait. Witches were still human though — annoyingly magically competent ones yes, but human nonetheless.

He processed this for approximately half a second and then punched her in the face.

It was not a good punch. He wanted to be honest with himself about that. It was the punch of a person running on no sleep and about thirty percent of his usual fine motor control. But it landed, which was frankly more than he could say for most of his decisions tonight, and it bought him the same four seconds the salt did when it caught her in the eye on the way down, which he was choosing to count as a bonus.

His hand closed around her wrist. Around the wand in her hand. She hadn't expected that, he could feel it in the way she went rigid, and he wrenched sideways with everything he had left, which was not much but was apparently enough—

And suddenly the wand was in his hand.

Okay, his brain said, firing on approximately one and a half cylinders. Spell. Latin. You know this. You've practiced this. Bill made fun of you for practicing this specifically, said you sounded like a—

Mutatio in— no wait— IN mutatio— it's mutatio first you idiot—FOCUS—

"In mu— mutatio—"

She cut him.

Not deeply. Deeply enough. He felt it across his left side as she wrenched for the wand and he wrenched back and won, staggering, and his brain which had been marshalling its very last resources toward the spell now had to split them between the spell and the new and urgent information that he was bleeding, which was fine, totally fine, he'd bled before, this was just more of it—

Two words. NOW.

"Mutatio— CONVERSO—"

The wand did something, and something did something back.

It hit him like a wall — invisible hands shoving hard at his chest — and he went down on one knee in the grass and stayed there, breathing very carefully, while the world rearranged itself.

The witch was a frog.

Dipper looked at the frog.

The frog looked at Dipper.

Bill, some traitorous part of his brain supplied immediately, is never going to let me live this down.

He was already mentally drafting the conversation — the cackle, the Victorian child comment deployed again with extreme prejudice, the weeks of insufferable—

"Sister—"

The voice came through the trees like cold water down his spine. Calm. Measured. Getting closer.

"Sister, we heard the recoil—"

Oh no.

"—are you hurt? We're coming—"

Oh no oh no oh no—

He looked at the frog. At the cloak. At the amulet. At his hands, one holding a stolen wand and one pressed to his bleeding side, and did the extremely rapid mental arithmetic of a man with twenty seconds and exactly zero good options and a brain that was currently running on fumes and spite and apparently an inexhaustible supply of bad decisions—

You have GOT to be kidding me, he thought, and grabbed the cloak.

The transformation was instantaneous and deeply unsettling, something cold sliding into place that he was not going to think about, and when he looked down at his hands they were not quite his hands and he added that to the pile of closed matters.

The coven broke through the tree line thirty seconds later — four of them, hooded, moving in formation, stopping when they saw him. He stood very still and tried to look like someone who had just won a fight on purpose.

There was a pause.

“Sister,” the one at the front said finally, her eyes moving to the grass, to the flattened circle where the fight had happened, to the wand in his hand. Something shifted in her expression. Something that looked almost like respect. “You finally got him.”

Dipper said nothing, which turned out to be exactly the right thing to say.

“You’re injured.” She was already moving toward him, the others fanning out around her. “Let us—”

“I’m fine,” he said, because he was Dipper Pines and this response was a universal constant.

She ignored him, which, also apparently universal. A few moments passed as she pressed her hands against his abdomen through the cloak, closing her eyes.

“You’re significantly hurt.” She was already moving. “We’ll take you back.”

“I’m—”

“Back,” she repeated, in a tone that foreclosed argument.

They moved through the meadow and then into the tree line, past a point where the air changed texture somehow, thickened, and Dipper realized with a distant sinking feeling that he had walked past this spot no fewer than three times tonight and had noticed nothing.

The meadow is a safe zone, he thought, with profound self-directed contempt. Unicorn hair ward. Very rational. Totally safe.

He let that sit for a second.

Bill is never going to let me live this one down either.

And then, because his brain had apparently decided that a near death experience was an appropriate time to start something, it added helpfully: the way Bill would look when he found out, that specific grin when Dipper did something that surprised even him—

He needed to stop.

He needed to genuinely, actively, stop thinking about Bill.

He was losing blood. He had priorities.

The frog, still on his boot, chose this moment to hop up his leg and install itself on his shoulder with the air of something making a real estate decision.

“Absolutely not,” Dipper said, under his breath.

It licked his ear.

“I will boil you.”

One of the witches turned around. He smiled. She made a soft sound. “Your familiar stayed with you through the fight?”

The frog licked his ear again.

“Yes,” Dipper said, through his teeth. “Loyal creature.”

The frog croaked and got some of its slimy mucus on his neck. He reached up very slowly and moved it six inches to the left. It moved back.

“What’s his name?” another one asked, with the reverent tone of someone asking about a beloved pet, which was insane because this creature had been trying to kill him eleven minutes ago—

“I don’t—” he started.

“You don’t share a familiar’s name,” the first one said approvingly, misreading his hesitation completely. “Wise.”

The hideout was invisible from outside — he’d walked through what felt like solid undergrowth and then was simply inside, a low-ceilinged space carved into the earth and reinforced with roots and old wood and something that hummed faintly when he got too close to the walls. Candles. Herbs hanging from the ceiling. A large pot in the center that he eyed with complicated feelings.

They sat him down. Two of them started on his side with herbs and something that smelled like pine resin and old books, their hands moving in careful patterns, and he watched the bleeding slow and stop with the detached interest of someone running entirely on spite.

It worked. He’d give them that. The pain dialed back and he wasn’t going to bleed out today which was more than he’d been confident about twenty minutes ago.

(It was still, he noted privately, not as good as Grunkle Stan’s vapor rub. These witches were annoying him more and more by the minute.)

He was sitting there, letting the one called Mira — they’d introduced themselves, he’d immediately lost track of all of it, didn’t matter — finish the last of the stitching, when he finally got a proper look at them.

At the hats specifically.

He stared.

Mabel, he thought, with a grief that had nothing to do with blood loss, owns that exact hat. He had watched her buy it. It was four dollars. There was a sale.

These women had nearly killed him. One of them had genuinely gotten the drop on him in a meadow. They had an invisible fortress in the woods and apparently a vendetta against him specifically and they were wearing hats from the same rack Mabel had impulse-bought from while they were waiting for Stan to finish arguing with a cashier about a coupon.

He needed to never tell Mabel this. She would be unbearable about it.

"So," Mira—he was pretty sure he heard the short one calling her that anyways—said, standing up abruptly with the energy of someone who had been waiting three hundred years for an audience, "I imagine you're wondering how we came to target the Pines boy."

"We should start from the beginning," the youngest one announced, also standing up.

"I was going to start from the beginning, Petra—"

"You always skip the context—"

"I do not skip the context, I condense the context, there's a difference—"

"You literally started the story of the Hargrove haunting with 'so he was already dead'—"

"He WAS already dead, that WAS the beginning—"

"ANYWAY," said a third sister, with the flat energy of someone who had been mediating this specific argument since the seventeenth century, shooting them both a look. Both of them sat back down. There was a brief loaded silence.

Mira smoothed her robes.

"It begins," she said, with recovered grandeur, "in Salem."

"Salem—"

"Oregon," the third one said, with the controlled dignity of someone who had made this clarification so many times it had become involuntary, like a twitch.

Dipper pressed his lips together extremely hard.

"We were FORCED," Mira continued, with a gesture that suggested the forcing had been dramatic and unjust, "from our ancestral home, the err, more well-known Salem. Driven out. Displaced. By a demon." She paused. Let it land. "A yellow demon. Triangular. One eye." Another pause, longer. "You may know of him."

"Vaguely," Dipper said.

"BILL CIPHER," Mira announced, like she was introducing a villain at the top of a very long opera, which apparently she was, because the other three made a collective sound — part groan, part hiss, part something that had been grief once and was now something older and more complicated.

The frog on his shoulder went very still.

Yeah, Dipper thought. Checks out.

Because here was the thing — and he was being honest with himself the way he occasionally made himself be about Bill, in the specific exhausted way of someone who had made a choice and was still making it daily — Bill had done demon shit. Significant demon shit. Sustained, creative, largely unrepentant demon shit across multiple centuries, and the axolotl situation had course-corrected some of it and Bill was better now, trying, in the way Bill tried at things which involved a lot of chaos and a kidnapped fae and approximately thirty percent follow-through, but still.

The ledger was not clean.

"He came to us in sixteen ninety two," Petra said, leaning forward with the gleam of someone who had memorized this story and loved telling it, "and he WANTED our seeing stone—"

"Petra I'm telling it—"

"You were doing the pauses again—"

"The pauses are ATMOSPHERE—"

"Sisters," the third one said.

They stopped.

"He wanted our seeing stone," Mira continued, with dignity. "Seven generations old. Incredibly powerful. And he—" she straightened, chin up, eyes bright with the particular fury of someone recounting a wrong that had not dimmed in three hundred years, "—he just TOOK it. No negotiation. No trade. He just—" she snapped her fingers.

"And then he laughed," Petra said, unable to help herself.

"And then he laughed," Mira confirmed grimly.

"He said," the fourth sister spoke for the first time, in the reverent tone of someone reciting sacred text, "'did you really think a bunch of humans playing dress-up were going to keep something this interesting away from me? Adorable. Genuinely.'"

The hideout went quiet.

Dipper said nothing.

Yeah, he thought. That's him.

He could hear it perfectly — the specific cadence, the way Bill weaponized the word adorable, the laugh underneath it — and then was immediately annoyed at himself for being able to hear it so perfectly, which went directly into the closed matters cabinet which was now so full it had basically developed its own structural integrity issues.

"And," Mira said, building again, "do you know what we found out later? When we asked around?"

Dipper waited.

"He didn't remember doing it." She let that sit. "It was a Tuesday for him."

Petra made a sound like a sob that had been refined through centuries of practice into something more like outrage.

The frog shifted on his shoulder. Dipper reached up without thinking and flicked it lightly. It grabbed a chunk of his hair with both sticky feet and pulled.

He went very still.

It went very still.

They stared at each other in peripheral vision, both pretending nothing had happened, while Mira gathered herself for the next movement of the opera.

"We tracked him for decades after that," she continued. "Lost him for a while during—" she waved a hand vaguely, "—the unpleasantness. But when we heard he'd taken human form and settled HERE—" another vague wave, implying Gravity Falls, implying Oregon, implying everything that had gone wrong geographically and historically that had led them here— "we began making a plan."

"We'd been planning for two years," the fourth sister said.

"Good things take time," Mira said.

"And that's when we got the idea to hire someone," Petra said, and gestured at Dipper, and for a split second he thought she meant him and then his brain caught up and realized she absolutely did mean him, or rather meant the witch he was currently wearing, and the bottom dropped out of his stomach slightly.

"You came very highly reviewed," Mira said, approvingly. "Excellent turnaround time. And loved note on your payment confirmation — a Maryse Condé quote, very classy."

Dipper looked at the frog.

The frog, for one single unguarded moment, looked almost embarrassed.

This is it, Dipper thought. This is my rock bottom. I was nearly killed by an etsy witch.

The frog looked away with great dignity. Dipper looked away with great dignity. A brief wordless agreement passed between them that this moment would never be acknowledged again.

"But anyways," Mira said, regaining momentum, "we knew that the boy was a human, which meant an easier target of course, and also important to Cipher. That was obvious from our surveillance. The way Cipher—" she paused, something shifting in her expression, and Dipper's stomach did something preemptive and unhelpful, "—well. Let's just say it was obvious."

"It was VERY obvious," Petra said, leaning forward again.

"Petra—"

"I'm just saying we all saw it—"

"We don't need to—"

"He's Bill Cipher's LOVER," Petra announced, with the energy of someone who had been physically holding those words in since they sat down and had simply run out of room for them.

The hideout erupted.

Not loudly. But in the specific way of four women who had been underground together for a very long time and had developed a rich internal culture around other people's business — a collective sharp intake of breath, a hand pressed to a chest, someone actually gripping someone else's arm, the fourth sister turning to Mira with an expression that said I KNOW, I KNOW—

"Greta saw it first," Petra announced, gesturing at the fourth sister, who nodded vigorously with the energy of someone who had been waiting to be credited for this discovery. "During the third week of surveillance. She said—"

"I said there's something going on there," Greta confirmed, sitting up straighter.

"And we all said—" Petra started.

"We're getting off track," Mira said.

"We said she was imagining it," Petra continued anyway, because Petra was constitutionally incapable of not finishing a sentence, "and then Greta said LOOK AT HOW HE STANDS NEAR HIM and we looked and—"

"Anyway," Mira said loudly.

"I've seen Cipher's relationship with the Pines boy up close and it's strictly — they're just—" he gestured vaguely, "proximate." Dipper said, with as much authoritative witch energy as he could muster, which was undermined slightly by the frog licking his ear. He moved it. It moved back.

All four of them looked at him.

"Proximate," Petra repeated.

"Yes, proximate. They're in the same place frequently, yes, but that doesn't mean—"

"Sister," Greta said, very gently, with the energy of someone about to deliver news to a person who did not know they needed it, "we've been watching for three weeks."

"I'm aware—"

"We have documentation," Mira said, and produced, from somewhere in her robes, an actual notebook, which she opened to a page that appeared to contain a log. An organized, dated, annotated log. Dipper stared at it. "Tuesday the fourteenth — Cipher redraws a warming sigil on the Pines boy's window without being asked. Doesn't mention it." She looked up. "Didn't mention it," she repeated, meaningfully.

Dipper said nothing.

"Thursday the sixteenth," she continued, "Cipher spends forty five minutes pretending to read a book while actually watching the Pines boy work. We timed it."

"He's nosy—"

"Saturday the eighteenth." She paused. "Cipher is seen arguing with the elder Pines twin in the kitchen. The elder twin says something about the boy being reckless. Cipher—" she stops, and something in her expression shifts into the knowing energy of someone who had turned this moment over many times since witnessing it, "—Cipher goes very quiet. Which apparently is not something he does."

Dipper kept his face very still.

"And then," Mira said, "there was the Mabel incident."

Something cold settled in Dipper's stomach.

"The sister," Petra clarified, in case he'd missed it, "the girl with the sweaters. She was teasing the Pines boy—"

"Ribbing him," Greta added, "affectionately, siblings, you know how it is—"

"And Cipher was joining in," Mira continued, "adding fuel, as he does, and then the girl said—" she checked her notes, "'okay but you have to admit my brother is kind of boring'—"

Dipper opened his mouth.

He closed it.

He was not Dipper Pines right now. He was a witch. He had no opinion on whether Dipper Pines was boring. He had no dog in this fight whatsoever—

"And Cipher said," Mira continued, with the precise deliberate energy of someone placing a card face up on a table, "'woah woah woah. You can call your brother a lot of things but—'" she paused, and looked up, and her eyes were very knowing, "'—I'll have to stop you there. He's the most interesting meatsack I've come across in a while. He makes this dimension—'" another pause, watching his face, "'—tolerable.'"

The hideout was very quiet.

Dipper stared at a fixed point on the earthen wall.

He makes this dimension.

The pause where the real sentence had lived, where Bill had caught himself and redirected and landed on tolerable, which was still true and still—

The frog wiped both feet down his cloak. Slowly. Deliberately. He didn't even register it.

"He said tolerable," Dipper said, and his voice came out extremely even, which took more effort than anything else he'd done tonight including the Latin. "That's not—"

"He caught himself," Mira said, simply. Not unkindly.

Dipper had nothing to say to that.

"You can call your brother boring," Petra said, apparently unable to let the original thread go, "that's basically a war crime in his books—"

"Anyway," Mira said, closing the notebook, "the evidence was rather conclusive. Which is why you were sent, of course, to eliminate the boy and send a message to that demon!"

Petra hummed, leaning too close to Dipper for comfort, "Speaking of…I didn't see a body. While I'd usually be impressed by a good cleanup job, you do have some sort of proof that the boy's a goner right?" Mira shoved foward and held out her hand.

Dipper looked at her hand.

He shrugged off his satchel from under his cloak.

And he handed it over.

On instinct. Purely on instinct, the move of someone whose higher reasoning had clocked out hours ago leaving only the autopilot of a person who had been improvising since he was twelve and occasionally it worked and occasionally—

Mira reached inside.

She pulled out the field notebook.

Dipper watched her open it to the first page where he had written in his neatest handwriting because he always wrote his name on the first page: Dipper Pines, Gravity Falls Research Division, Vol. 18.

Oh shit, he thought.

She set it aside and reached in again. A small cloth bag of salt. A folded page of star charts with annotations in two different handwritings — his, cramped and precise, and Bill's, which looked like a Victorian doctor having a personal crisis. She unfolded it. Looked at it. Set it with the notebook.

Oh no, he thought.

Reached in again. Something else. His emergency iron shavings. A spare compass. Another notebook, smaller, with FIELD OBSERVATIONS written on the cover in handwriting that got progressively worse as it went down the page, which he recognized as the night's documentation and which had his name on that page too, and the date, and the location—

Oh no oh no—

Mira's hand stilled inside the satchel.

She looked up at him once, briefly, with an unreadable expression.

She pulled out the photograph.

Dipper stopped breathing.

It was small. Slightly creased at one corner from living at the bottom of the bag for however long it had been living there, which he genuinely could not have told you because he had not put it there deliberately, it had just — it was just — he had found it one day in the outer pocket and he had meant to move it somewhere else and then he hadn't and then he'd forgotten about it and—

Mira turned it over.

Two people. One of them recognizably Bill Cipher in human form, caught mid laugh, head tilted back, completely unguarded in a way that Bill almost never was. The other one—

The other one was Dipper Pines.

Alive. Unambiguously, recognizably alive, leaning slightly into Bill's space in the specific way of someone who didn't know they were doing it, squinting against afternoon sun, the beginnings of a smile on his face that he probably thought he was hiding.

Mabel had taken it. Obviously Mabel had taken it. He could tell by the angle — she was shorter than both of them and had clearly been sneaky about it, which meant it had been deliberate, which meant she had been smug about it for months and he had never said anything and neither had Bill and it had just lived in the bottom of his satchel, under the salt packets and next to his half-empty anti-mimic charm.

Mira looked at the photograph for a long moment. Her expression had done something he hadn't expected — the theatrical grandeur entirely gone, replaced by something older and more human.

She placed it carefully on top of the pile.

"Well," she said, quietly. "That should do it."

Dipper said nothing.

He won't care that much, said the part of him that had spent a long time being careful about how much he assumed. He'll be destructive, he'll be angry, that's just Bill, that's not the same as—

But Mabel, his brain said, quieter.

Stan. Ford.

The satchel arriving at the Mystery Shack. Someone opening it. The notebook with his name on the first page. The photograph at the bottom. The blood soaking through everything.

Mabel opening it.

Okay, he thought, with the brisk efficiency of someone locking a door. I need to find a way out of here. Obviously. I need to get to the shack before—

"We'll send it tonight along with your emblem. Bill is quite the known demon among the underworld, slaying his lover will certainly put you in high demand. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if you made the front page of the Demonic Daily, dearest." Petra said, not unkindly, misreading his silence as satisfaction. "For now however, you should rest. You've earned it."

The hideout was quiet.

The cot was right there.

It was, he noted distantly, an extremely comfortable looking cot. He didn't know what witches stuffed their mattresses with but it looked significantly better than his bed at the shack which had a spring that had been threatening his lower back since 2013.

He would think. He would lie down and think. Horizontally. Just for a few minutes, with his eyes closed, and then he would absolutely formulate a plan because he was Dipper Pines and he had been in worse situations than—

Had he though.

The frog climbed from his shoulder to his chest as he lay back. Sat there looking at him with its large gold eyes, which still contained, even now, a very specific and personal animosity.

"I'll find a way out you know," Dipper told it.

It licked his nose.

He was asleep before he could object.

The frog sat on his chest for a long moment in the candlelight. Looked at the door. Looked at the satchel on the table, the photograph still on top where Mira had left it, two faces caught in an unguarded moment that neither of them had known was being captured.

Looked at Dipper's face.

Croaked once. Very quietly. In a tone that might, interpreted generously, in certain lights, have contained something almost like reluctant understanding.

Then it closed its eyes, and settled in for the long wait, and did not lick him again.

Not yet.

Dipper woke up to a frog on his face.

Specifically, on his nose, which was either a continuation of hostilities or a welfare check depending on how generously he was interpreting the situation. He chose not to interpret it at all, moved it six inches to the left, and spent approximately thirty seconds staring at the earthen ceiling of the hideout while his brain slowly and reluctantly reassembled itself into something functional.

The candles had burned down significantly. The light coming through the gaps in the root ceiling was different — later, warmer, afternoon maybe, which meant he had been asleep for—

He did the math.

He did not enjoy the math.

"You're awake," Mira said, from across the hideout, with the energy of someone who had been waiting.

All four of them were sitting in a loose semicircle, which was either coincidence or they had been watching him sleep, and he was choosing not to examine which. Petra had her notebook out. Greta was practically vibrating. Even the third sister — he still hadn't caught her name, had been thinking of her privately as Mediator — looked animated in a way she hadn't last night.

"How long have I been sleeping for?" Dipper — or rather, the younger-than-he-expected voice of the witch he was impersonating, said. Dipper huffed as he sat up on his cot, feeling unsettled by how…..well rested he felt.

Petra hummed. "About three days time. We burned some nightshade to help knock you out. Extended rest helps the healing magic work."

Three days— oh if Grunkle Ford was going to murder him (after he finds out Dipper is still alive.)

"We have updates," Petra announced, and the way she said it — the specific frequency of barely contained glee — made Dipper's stomach do something preemptive and unhelpful.

"Of course you do," he said.

Greta had the most detailed notes.

This surprised Dipper, who had clocked her as the quietest of the four — the one who watched rather than performed. It turned out this was precisely why her notes were better. While Mira had been composing dramatic narrative and Petra had been barely containing herself, Greta had been writing things down.

She produced a second notebook from somewhere in her robes. Smaller than Mira's. Filled, cover to cover, in handwriting so precise it looked typeset.

"The satchel arrived at three fourteen," she said, without preamble. "The girl found it on the porch at three twenty two. She had been watching from the window — our familiar observed her at the glass several times in the hour prior. She was expecting him home."

Dipper looked at his hands.

She was watching from the window, he thought. Mabel was watching from the window waiting for me to come home.

"She made a sound when she opened it," Greta continued, in the same careful tone. "Then she sat down on the porch steps. She didn't go inside for approximately four minutes. Our familiar said she appeared to be — preparing herself. For telling the others."

She sat on the porch steps, Dipper thought. Mabel sat on the porch steps alone for four minutes because she needed to—

He put it somewhere that wasn't the closed matters cabinet. The closed matters cabinet was for things he was avoiding. This was something else.

"The six-fingered twin came out first," Greta said. "He sat next to her. They went through the satchel together." A pause. "He recognized the second handwriting on the star charts immediately. Our familiar observed his expression change." Another pause, more careful. "He put the charts down very carefully. Like they were fragile."

Ford putting down the star charts, Dipper thought, carefully, like they were—

"The larger elder man came out third," Greta continued. "He looked at the notebook. At the name on the first page. He didn't say anything for a long time." She glanced up briefly.

Stan not saying anything, Dipper thought. Stan, who always has something to say, not saying anything—

"They recognized the second handwriting in the notebook." She looked up meaningfully. "That seemed to affect them."

Bill's handwriting in the margins, Dipper thought. Bill's handwriting next to his, on a page soaked in his blood, and Ford would've known immediately what that meant and—

"And then the photograph," Greta said.

The hideout went quiet.

"The girl held it for a long time," Greta said, and her voice had lost its clinical quality, replaced by something more human. "She didn't cry. She just looked at it. Our familiar said she seemed — very young, suddenly. Much younger than she usually appears."

Dipper said nothing.

The deflection machine was running very quietly now. Almost inaudible.

"And then Cipher arrived," Petra said, and even she was subdued now.

"He came through the front door," Greta said. "They told him together. Our familiar couldn't get close enough to hear the exact words but she saw his face when they told him." A beat. "He went very still."

"Different from his usual still," Petra added, quietly. "Not the thinking kind. The other kind."

Dipper knew the other kind. He'd seen it twice. Once during Weirdmageddon cleanup when something had gone wrong with Ford's equipment, and once when Dipper had come home with a broken wrist from a field excursion and hadn't mentioned it for three days. Both times Bill had gone very still and very cold and then very busy, the way he got when feeling something translated immediately into doing something about it.

"He remembered us immediately," Mira said. "When they showed him the emblem. You could see it — the recognition. He didn't say anything."

"And then," Petra said, with slightly less relish than she'd had at the beginning, as if even she was dimly aware the room had changed temperature, "they began organizing."

The search, apparently, had been thorough.

Ford had gone academic about it immediately — maps, known witch territories, documented coven activity in the Gravity Falls area — which Mira described with grudging respect and Dipper recognized as Ford's specific way of not falling apart. Stan had gone practical, which meant weapons, which meant the kind of weapons that suggested Stan had been paying more attention to the supernatural elements of their lives than he usually let on. Mabel had gone quiet in a way that everyone in the shack apparently found more alarming than the loud version.

And Bill—

"Cipher was—" Mira paused.

Petra, for once, didn't jump in.

"Terrifying," Greta said finally.

"He also searched the forest, separately from the other Pines in order to maximize the area covered" Mira continued. "Destroying anything that stood in his way. For most of the night. We kept our wards up, obviously, but he got — closer than we expected, several times. He's—" she looked at her notes and then closed the notebook, which felt significant, "—not someone who gives up."

"He's not someone who stops," Mediator said, which was the most she'd volunteered unprompted, and she said it with the flat affect of someone updating a threat assessment.

"No," Dipper whispered. "No he's not."

"He went to the boy's room," Greta said. "Stood in it for approximately twelve minutes. Didn't touch anything. Didn't say anything. Our familiar couldn't see his face from the window." A pause. "But she said he stood in front of the desk for most of it. There were things on the desk. Notes, she thought. Journals."

Bill standing in front of my desk, Dipper thought, looking at my notes, not touching anything, for twelve minutes—

"And the photograph," Greta said. "He has a copy. Our familiar saw him take it out of his coat." She paused. "He looked at it for a while. Then he put it away. Then he took it out again." Another pause. "He put it away again after that and didn't take it out again that our familiar saw."

He took it out twice, Dipper thought, and the deflection machine made no sound at all.

"And then," Mira said, "he went to the meadow."

The hideout was very quiet.

"This morning," she continued. "Early. Before sunrise. He stood there for—" she checked her notes and then closed them, "—a long time."

"What did he say," Dipper said.

Mira looked at him.

"He said—" she stopped. Started again. "He talked for a while. Our familiar kept her distance, as I said. But she heard most of it." A pause. "He said—" another stop, and Mira, who had narrated three centuries of grievance with considerable theatrical flair, seemed to be having trouble with this particular sentence, "he said that an Etsy witch." She looked up. "He said 'really kid, you got taken out by an Etsy witch, out of everything in this forest—'"

Dipper stared at the candle by the door in the distance.

The frog turned its head and looked at him very slowly.

He looked at the frog.

A beat passed between them that contained, among other things, the shared acknowledgment of the Etsy situation, and also something else, something that didn't have a name yet.

"He tried to cover it," Greta said, softly. "The joke. You could tell." She paused. "It didn't really work."

No, Dipper thought. It wouldn't.

Because that was the thing about Bill's jokes — the real ones, the ones that weren't performance, they only landed when there was someone there to receive them. A joke to an empty meadow wasn't a joke. It was something else wearing a joke's clothes. And Bill knew that. And he'd done it anyway.

"And then," Mira said, quieter, "he stopped making jokes." She looked at her hands briefly. "He said he was sorry. That he should have protected him." A pause that felt longer than it was. "He said goodbye."

The hideout was silent.

Outside, distantly, the meadow existed. Still beautiful. Still serene. Dandelion ghosts still drifting in the morning light. The same meadow Dipper had called a safe zone approximately a thousand years ago, which had been wrong in every practical sense and was somehow, standing here now, the most devastating detail of all.

Bill had stood there.

In the meadow.

And said sorry.

To flowers.

I need to get out of here, Dipper thought, and it wasn't brisk or efficient or organized. It was just — quiet and certain and underneath it, somewhere he was going to have to look at eventually: I need to get out of here because Bill stood in a meadow and said goodbye and I was forty feet away and asleep and I need to—

The shame sat down next to everything else and stayed.

He stood up.

The frog grabbed his shoulder with both feet.

"I need some air," he told the witches, who looked briefly startled. "I'll be just outside."

He made it to the edge of the ward.

Felt the air thicken — that particular texture that meant the boundary, the point past which the hideout became visible — and stopped there, breathing carefully, the frog a warm weight on his shoulder that was not actively hostile for the first time in their acquaintance.

He said goodbye, Dipper thought. He stood in the meadow and said—

The ward rippled.

Dipper went very still.

Something on the other side was pushing against it. Not hard. Methodically. The systematic quality of something that had been at this for a while and intended to keep being at it until it found a way through.

Oh no, Dipper thought, with a completely new quality of oh no. Oh no oh no oh—

The others from inside seemed to hear it too.

They were on their feet before Dipper fully registered what was happening, and then all four of them were moving, filing toward the entrance with an urgency that was distinctly different from their usual theatrical energy — this was the urgency of people who had just heard the thing they'd poked start moving toward them.

"We also placed a compulsion spell on you while you were sleeping," Mira said, grabbing Dipper's arm before he could follow them out, her voice low and quick, "It's a bit tacky yes but we don't know if we can trust you not to flee. You WILL be forced to fight alongside us unless all three of us are — incapacitated." She looked at him very directly. "Do you understand?"

Fuck.

Dipper nodded his head.

"Go," Mira said, releasing him, and approached the edge of the ward, the other three filing behind her.

The ward broke with a loud shatter.

Bill looked exactly like he always did and nothing like he always did.

Same human form. Same gold hair. Same everything, and also something around his eyes that Dipper had only seen a handful of times — the times Bill forgot to perform, the times the architecture came down — and it was worse up close than the witches' descriptions had prepared him for.

Bill's eyes moved across the scene. The witches. The hideout entrance. The wand in Dipper's hand. Back to the witches.

Then to Dipper.

Something moved through his expression — grief and fury assembling themselves into something operational, the wall going up in real time — and Bill's eyes went gold at the edges in the particular way that meant he was done being careful about things.

"There you are," Bill said, and his voice was very quiet, which was worse than loud, "you absolute—"

The compulsion spell closed around Dipper's spine like a fist.

His body stepped forward. His brain said no and his body said yes and they compromised on a lurching half-step that he converted into a fighting stance through sheer willpower, the spell pulling him toward engagement and Dipper pulling back toward anything that wasn't that—

Okay, Dipper thought, with the hysterical calm of someone who had run out of other options. Okay. I know how he fights. I just have to not lose. I just have to hold on until—

Bill threw something at him that made the air crackle and Dipper dove sideways — more from muscle memory than the spell, the spell wanted him forward, Dipper wanted him sideways, they compromised on a diagonal that was not elegant — and came up already moving because staying still against Bill was how you lost.

"You've got nerve," Bill said, and the theatrical register was back, the volume climbing, "showing up HERE, you've got ACTUAL NERVE, after what you—"

He threw something else. Bigger. Dipper felt it coming from the way Bill shifted his weight — he always overextended on the left when he was angry, always, Dipper had watched him spar with Ford enough times to have catalogued it without meaning to — and stepped into it instead of away, inside the arc of it, which was the only place it couldn't hit—

Bill's eyes narrowed.

Good, Dipper thought, fighting the spell's insistence that he attack, redirecting it into a block, get confused, get distracted, just don't—

"You're fast," Bill said, recalibrating, and the cold quality was bleeding through the theatrical now, the voice dropping, "for someone who managed to take out a twenty-two year old who'd been doing this since he was twelve." The coldness settled fully. "How'd you do it. I want to know exactly how you did it."

Dipper said nothing.

Couldn't.

The compulsion spell made another bid for his motor control and he wrestled it sideways into a deflection that looked, from the outside, like an offensive feint — Bill blocked it, smooth and automatic, the way you blocked things you'd seen before—

Bill's eyes narrowed.

Good, Dipper thought. Stay confused. Don't think about WHY—

"Where's the body," Bill said.

Dipper said nothing.

"I want to know where he is." The theatrical register was climbing now, the volume finding itself, the grief converting into something with forward momentum. "I want to know exactly what happened in that meadow. I want to know every single thing that—"

He threw something bigger. Angrier. Dipper felt it coming from the shift in his stance — Bill got wider when he was furious, planted his feet differently, the tells were everywhere if you'd been paying attention and Dipper had been paying attention for years without fully acknowledging that he was doing it — went under it, came up already moving—

"STOP THAT," Bill said, and the fury spiked, "stop MOVING like — where did you TRAIN, who trained you—"

He attacked again, faster, and Dipper blocked it, and again, and blocked that too, and the look on Bill's face was cycling through confused and furious and landing somewhere that would've been dangerous if Dipper had been anyone else—

"You think you can just—" Bill started, and then stopped, and the theatrical dropped out entirely for a moment, replaced by the cold quality, "I need to know where he is. You understand me? I need—" his voice stopped. Jaw setting. "There are people at that shack who need to — they need to be able to—"

Stan, Dipper thought, and the compulsion spell chose that moment to make another bid for his arm and he wrenched it sideways into something that looked like an offensive move—

Bill blocked it automatically, smooth and practiced, and then immediately got the expression again. The wrong calculation face.

The cold quality settled fully.

"You're going to tell me," Bill said, very quietly, "where he is. And then you're going to tell me who sent you. And then—"

"Bill—" Mira started, from somewhere behind Dipper.

"I'm not talking to you," Bill said, without looking away from Dipper. "I'm talking to the one who actually—" he stopped again. The jaw. "Where. Is. He."

Dipper said nothing.

Bill threw three in quick succession — the combination Dipper had watched him use twice in sparring, the one that looked like it was setting up a right but was actually coming from the center, the one that worked on everyone who hadn't seen it before—

Dipper blocked all three.

The silence that followed was extremely loud.

"He used to find velociraptor prints," Bill said, suddenly, to nobody in particular, and his voice had gone strange again, the cold and the grief trading places, "just — wander into them. Show them to me with that look on his face, like I was supposed to be as excited as he was, covered in mud, completely unaware there were three more behind him—" he stopped. "I had to redirect a river once. To keep them from disappearing under the mud." A pause. "He never knew that."

Bill, Dipper thought, and couldn't say it.

"He argued with me about coffee for forty five minutes once," Bill said, and threw something sideways that Dipper barely caught, "about whether it was objectively bad or whether I just had the wrong associations with it, he had a whole — he'd made notes, he showed me the notes, he was so—" his voice stopped. Started again, rougher. "He was so certain he was going to change my mind."

"Did he," Dipper said, and then immediately wanted to bite his own tongue off because the compulsion spell apparently allowed that one through and now Bill had gone completely still—

"What," Bill said, and the fury that overtook him was not the theatrical kind, not the animated grief-loud kind he'd been operating in — it was the other kind, the cold kind, the kind that had a very long history behind it, "is this FUNNY to you? You think this is a JOKE?"

The air temperature dropped.

Bill glitched.

The human form flickered — gold hair, coat, hands — and for one lurching second there was just the triangle, just the eye, just several thousand years of something that did not experience loss the way humans did and was experiencing it anyway and had no good container for it—

Dipper was completely, totally, absolutely fucked.

"He was twenty two years old," Bill said, and his voice was coming from somewhere that wasn't quite the human form and wasn't quite not it, flickering between registers, "he'd been doing this since he was TWELVE, he knew this forest better than anyone alive, he had notes on EVERYTHING, he had a system, he was — careful, he was always careful even when he pretended not to be, he always came home—"

The flickering intensified.

"You just got lucky and now you have the AUDACITY to taunt ME?!" Bill snapped his hands and Dipper could feel the ground trembling beneath him. "I'm BILL CIPHER in case you MISSED that. And you had the guts to go after what's MINE. Normally, I'd TORTURE YA for entirety but right now my instincts are telling me YOU GOTTA DIE."

Shit shit shit shit.

He threw something.

Dipper went left — the compulsion spell said forward, Dipper said absolutely not, they compromised badly — and felt it pass close enough to take heat with it.

"He was CAREFUL," Bill said, and threw something else, bigger, the air crackling around it, "he was always — he had SYSTEMS, he had NOTES on everything, he knew this forest better than anyone ALIVE, he had been doing this since he was TWELVE and he was—"

Dipper blocked something he felt coming from the shift in Bill's weight — always overextended on the left when the form was unstable, the tells got worse when he was losing control, Dipper had catalogued this without meaning to in the specific way he'd catalogued everything about Bill without meaning to—

Bill's eyes narrowed.

"Stop," Bill said, and the fury spiked, "stop MOVING like — who trained you, how are you—"

"WHERE IS HE," Bill said suddenly, abandoning the thread entirely, the volume climbing, "I want to know where he is, I want to know exactly what you did, I want—" his voice stopped, started again rougher, "there are people at that shack who need to — they need to be able to put him to rest properly, you understand me? His sister needs to be able to—"

He threw three in quick succession and Dipper blocked them all, the compulsion spell and his own instincts fighting each other into something that looked, from the outside, like competence—

His form flickered hard.

"He had a pressed flower in his journal," Bill said, and his voice was doing the distorted thing, too big and too small at the same time, "from the east meadow, he'd had it for YEARS, he thought I didn't know, he thought—" another stop, another throw, Dipper going under it, "—he thought I wasn't paying attention, he always thought I wasn't paying attention, but I was ALWAYS—"

He stopped himself.

Jaw setting.

The geometry pulsed.

"He trusted this forest," Bill said, quieter now, which was worse, "he trusted it because I let him trust it, I knew what was out here, I know EVERYTHING that's out here, I should have—I should have been—"

His voice broke. Came back wrong.

"I taught him half of what he knew," Bill said, and the rawness in it was total, unguarded, the performance completely gone, the triangle pulsing at the edges of the human form like it couldn't decide which one to be, "I WATCHED him figure out the other half, I watched him argue with Ford for three hours about things Ford had PhDs in and he was just — he was just some kid from California with a journal and he was RIGHT, he was always — he kept being RIGHT—"

He threw something that hit a tree.

The tree did not have a good time.

"He used to fall asleep at his desk," Bill said, and his voice cracked on it, distorted and wrong, "just — just fall asleep mid-sentence, pen still in his hand, and I'd—"

He stopped himself.

"I want to know where he IS," Bill said, and the cold quality was back, deadly and focused under the grief, "I want to know exactly what happened, I want every single detail and then I want—"

"Excuse me."

Bill stopped.

Turned.

Mira had stepped forward from the tree line, chin up, robes straight, with the full gravitational dignity of someone who had been waiting three hundred years for this exact moment and was not going to waste it on bad timing. Behind her, Petra had her notebook open, apparently prepared to present evidence. Greta stood slightly to one side with the expression of someone running threat assessment and not liking the results. Mediator stood at the back with the flat affect of someone who had already made peace with what was about to happen.

"Bill Cipher," Mira said, and her voice only shook slightly, which given the circumstances was genuinely impressive, "we have been waiting a very long time to—"

"You're the coven," Bill said. Flat. Immediate. The gold eye taking them in with the speed of something that had already processed the situation and reached a conclusion. "Salem. Sixteen ninety two. The seeing stone."

Mira blinked. "You — yes. You REMEMBER—"

"Tuesday," Bill said. "I remember now."

"We have been tracking you for TWO YEARS," Mira said, and the dignity cracked slightly into something that had been living under it for three centuries, "we have been PLANNING, we have DOCUMENTATION, we have waited THREE HUNDRED—"

Bill looked at them.

Stone.

All four simultaneously. Mira mid-sentence, mouth still open around the word preventing. Petra with her notebook raised. Greta with one hand already coming up in what might have been a ward or might have been surrender. Mediator with the expression of someone who had seen it coming and had made her peace and had gone anyway, because that was just who she was.

Silence.

The forest settled.

Bill turned back to Dipper.

The compulsion spell, with no casters left to sustain it, snapped like a thread pulled too tight.

Dipper felt it release — every muscle suddenly, completely his again — and stood there for one second just breathing, then shoved his hand into his robe—

The frog was already as flat and still as something that had decided to become a very small inanimate object. It looked up at him with one eye.

Stay there, Dipper thought at it, and unclasped the amulet.

The transformation reversed. Cold water draining. Borrowed face dissolving. And then just — Dipper. In a forest. With a frog in his pocket and the full weight of everything about to land.

Bill had his back to him.

Still facing the stone figures.

Very still.

The other kind.

"Bill," Dipper said.

Bill turned around.

The disbelief was complete.

"No," Bill said.

"Bill—"

"That's a — that's a glamour, that's some kind of trick, that's—" he stepped back, actually stepped back, which Dipper had never seen him do, "I know your face, I know exactly what you look like, I would know if—"

"You drink more coffee now," Dipper said.

Bill stopped.

"After the debate," Dipper said. "You acted like it changed nothing. You were very convincing about it. But three days later I saw you. And then a week after that. And then just — regularly. You never said a word. You would literally rather die than admit it but it changed your mind completely and you've been drinking coffee ever since and I never said anything because—"

His voice stopped.

Bill was staring at him.

"Because I liked knowing something about you that you didn't know I knew," Dipper said, quietly.

Bill crossed the distance between them in two steps — when had he turned back into his human form? — and grabbed his face in both hands and just stared. Those gold eyes close and searching and terribly, visibly hopeful in a way that Bill Cipher almost never allowed—

The moment he was certain, everything changed.

"You were HERE," Bill said, and the anger arrived, sudden and total, the relief curdling into something that needed somewhere to go, "you were HERE this whole time, I stood in that meadow and said — I said things I don't SAY, I don't say things like that, I've been holding it together for twenty four hours in front of your family, your SISTER, do you have any idea what Mabel—"

"I know—"

"I went through your ROOM," Bill said, and his voice was doing something that wasn't quite fury anymore, something rawer underneath it, "I stood there like an IDIOT for twelve minutes, I had the photograph out TWICE—"

"I know," Dipper said, softer.

"They TOLD you," Bill said, and it wasn't a question.

"All of it," Dipper said. "The room. The meadow. The—" he stopped. "All of it."

Something in Bill's expression cracked. Just slightly. Just at the edges. The anger still there but the thing underneath it pushing through, too heavy now for the anger to hold.

"How'd you even end up impersonating a cheap etsy witch anyways?" Bill huffed, raising an eyebrow.

"Listen, it was a very rushed and poorly executed plan. Basically, I got stabbed and—"

"You— WHAT—"

"It was more of a cut—"

Dipper felt Bill's hands graze his sides, hovering over where the wound had been before bouncing back up to grasp his face.

"PINE TREE—"

"Bill," Dipper said, and something in his voice made Bill stop.

They were very close. Bill's hands still on his face. The forest going quiet around them, late afternoon gold coming through the trees, dandelion ghosts drifting somewhere in the meadow beyond—

Bill looked at him. Dipper could see all of it, the whole twenty-four hours of it, right there on his face, all the things Bill had been holding together and what it had cost him to hold them.

"I thought you were gone," Bill said, and his voice came out stripped of everything, the performance and the fury and the architecture, just — the thing underneath, plain and exhausted , "I thought you were actually — I said goodbye, I meant it, I meant every word of it and I've been walking around since then with that in my chest and it's — it's been—"

He stopped.

Started again.

"I can't—" he said, and then stopped again, and Dipper watched him try to find the shape of what he was trying to say and not quite locate it, the words coming slightly wrong, slightly too fast, "—I know what I am and I know what that means and I've been very — I've been CAREFUL, about not — about keeping certain things a certain way, to keep you safe. But I stood in that meadow and said goodbye and everything I'd been careful about just—" he made a gesture that meant it all collapsed, "—I can't do that again. I can't say goodbye to you again, sapling. I'm not—" his voice cracked harder this time, "—I'm not DOING that again, do you understand me, not ever, I REFUSE to. Sapling, I-"

His voice cracked

"I love you," Bill said.

Not dramatically. Not performed. Just — said it. The way you said something that had been true for so long it had worn grooves into you, that came out not with a flourish but with the specific exhaustion of something you'd been not-saying for years finally just. Coming out.

"Bill," Dipper said.

"I love you and I have — I don't even know when it started, that's the thing, I don't know when it — and I know what that means coming from something like me." He stopped. Started again, rougher. "But I have been — I've been watching you walk into this forest for years with your journal and your terrible Latin and your absolute conviction that you could handle whatever was in here, and I—" his voice caught, "—I redirected a river once. Did I mention that? For velociraptor prints. For YOU. And I didn't say anything because—" he stopped. Jaw. The geometry threatening at the edges again. "Because I didn't know what to do with it. With any of it. With the pressed flower or the coffee or the photograph or — any of it. I've had eternity, Dipper. I've had eternity and I've spent most of it not particularly caring whether it continued or not and then you—" he made a gesture that was entirely Bill, frustrated and helpless and genuine all at once, "—you just. You're just HERE. Every day. With your notes and your arguments and that look you get when you find something new, like the world just got bigger, and I—"

He stopped.

"You make me want to be something worth keeping."

The forest was very quiet.

"That's—" Bill's voice came out smaller than usual, stripped of everything, "that's what I've got. That's the whole thing. I stood in a meadow this morning and said goodbye and that's the sentence I couldn't — that's the one I couldn't leave unsaid. So." He exhaled. "There it is."

"Bill," Dipper said again, softer, and reached up and put his hands over Bill's where they were still holding his face.

Bill stopped.

Breathing hard. Eyes too bright. The fury and the grief and the love all sitting on his face at once with nowhere left to hide.

And Dipper looked at him — at this impossible, ancient, disaster of a person who had redirected a river once and never mentioned it, who had noticed a pressed flower in a journal and never said so, who drank coffee now and would go to his grave before admitting why, who had stood in a meadow at sunrise and said sorry to flowers and meant every word—

And felt something in his chest that he'd been filing away for a very long time simply. Stop. Being filed.

"I love you too," Dipper said like it was the most obvious and true thing in the world. Because in that moment it was.

Bill went completely still.

"I have for — yeah," Dipper said, and his voice came out slightly unsteady, which felt fair, "a long time. Maybe this isn't how I imagined saying it but—" he looked at Bill, straight at him, no deflection, no closed matters, just the true thing plain and direct "—it's you. It's been you. Okay? That's all."

The forest was very quiet.

Bill looked at him for a long moment.

Something in his face did something Dipper didn't have a word for — every wall down, every defense gone, just Bill, just the thing underneath everything, looking at him like he was—

Bill kissed him.

And it wasn't — it wasn't neat, wasn't composed, wasn't the swoon-worthy choreographed thing Dipper might have imagined on a better day. It was desperate first, the way you grabbed something you'd thought you'd lost, Bill's hands moving from his face to the back of his head pulling him in close, and Dipper's hands finding the front of Bill's coat and holding on with both fists, and for a moment it was just — relief, just the physical fact of both of them here, alive, present, in a forest in Oregon in the late afternoon gold—

And then it shifted.

Slower. Bill's hand moving from the back of his head to his jaw, tilting it slightly, and suddenly it wasn't desperate anymore it was — deliberate. Careful. Like something being done properly after having been waited for long enough. Like Bill was making a point about the coffee, about the pressed flower, about every single thing he'd noticed and catalogued and never said — making it without words, which was, Dipper was dimly aware, extremely effective—

When they finally broke apart Dipper's brain had gone extremely quiet in a way it almost never did.

Bill's forehead dropped against his as they both panted.

"Hi," Dipper smiled.

Bill laughed. The real one — the surprised one, the one Dipper had memorized without meaning to. Close up it was even better.

"Hi," Bill said, tracing his fingers up and down Dipper's spine and pressed his lips to Dipper's forehead.

"Thank the Axolotl," he muttered, into Dipper's hair, low and unguarded and nothing like his usual register, "thank the Axolotl, thank — whatever is responsible for this, I'm thanking it—"

He pulled back just enough to look at Dipper's face. Read it again. Like he was still checking.

Then kissed him again, softer this time, and pulled back again—

"Never," Bill said, against his mouth, "pull that shit again—"

Kiss.

"Ever—"

Kiss.

"In your LIFE—"

"Bill—"

"I mean it," Bill said, and kissed him again, less soft this time, one hand cupping his jaw and the other finding the back of his coat, and Dipper stopped trying to respond because there wasn't really room for it and honestly he didn't have a compelling argument—

The kiss went longer this time. Deeper. Bill's hand moving from his jaw to the back of his neck, and Dipper's grip on the front of his coat tightening slightly, and the forest going very quiet around them, just the wind in the grasses and the dandelion ghosts drifting and—

Croak.

They didn't stop.

A pause.

CROAK.

Bill broke the kiss.

Looked down.

Looked at Dipper's pocket, from which the sound had come, with the expression of someone whose patience had just been located so it could be removed.

"I swear of COURSE it's an amphibian that ruins the moment, damn agent of Axolotl."

"That's my frog," Dipper said.

"Your….frog?"

"My new pet frog. That I found. In the forest." Dipper's hand moved over the pocket protectively. "Her name is—" he paused, realizing he hadn't named her, "—she doesn't have a name yet but she's mine and she stays."

Bill looked at the pocket for a long moment with an expression that was doing several things at once. "I….fine. Ugh dammit sapling, this is the most I'm letting you get away with. Now c'mere and kiss—"

"MY FAMILY," Dipper said.

Bill stopped.

"My family thinks I'm dead," Dipper said, with the dawning horror of someone whose brain had just finished rebooting, "Mabel thinks I'm dead, Stan thinks I'm dead, Ford thinks I'm dead, they've had the satchel all day, they've had the PHOTOGRAPH, Mabel has been — oh no, oh no oh no, we need to go, we need to go RIGHT NOW—"

"Dipper," Bill said, and something in his voice made Dipper stop.

Bill was looking at him with the soft unguarded expression that Dipper had catalogued as rare and was apparently going to have to recatalogue now.

"We're going," Bill said. "Right now. I just—" he squeezed Dipper's hand once, brief and certain, "—needed a second."

Dipper looked at him.

"Okay," Dipper said, softly. "Yeah. Okay."

The frog croaked once more, smaller this time, with the energy of something that had done its civic duty and was now prepared to be transported.

Bill looked at the pocket.

"It stays in the pocket," Bill said.

"She," Dipper said.

A beat.

"It," Bill said.

"She—"

"Pocket. Now. We're going."

They went

They heard Mabel before they saw her.

Specifically they heard "DIPPER PINES YOU ARE SO GROUNDED" from approximately fifty feet away, which meant she'd been watching from the window again, which meant she'd seen them coming across the meadow, which meant Dipper had approximately four seconds—

Mabel hit him like a freight train.

Both arms around his neck, full bodyweight, zero warning, and Dipper staggered and caught her and held on and she was shaking slightly which he was never going to mention ever, and for a moment neither of them said anything, just — held on, the way you held onto something you'd thought you'd lost—

Then Mabel pulled back, grabbed his face in both hands the way she had when they were twelve and she needed him to pay attention, and looked at him very directly.

"You," she said, "were dead."

"I wasn't actually—"

"You were DEAD, Dipper, I had the photograph, I sat on the porch steps for FOUR MINUTES—"

"I know, I'm so sorry—"

"I was going to dedicate an entire memorial sweater to you—"

"Mabel—"

"I had already started SKETCHING IT—"

"I'm alive—"

"You're SO grounded," she said, pulling him back in, holding tighter, "so grounded, indefinitely, you're never leaving this house again, I'm going to knit you a leash—"

"Please don't—"

"I'm going to knit you a very LOVING leash—"

"That doesn't make it better—"

She laughed, slightly wet, into his shoulder. He held on tighter.

They stayed like that for a moment.

Then Mabel pulled back just far enough to look over his shoulder at Bill, who was standing slightly behind Dipper with the specific energy of someone trying to look casual and absolutely failing, and her expression did the thing Dipper had been waiting for — the slow bloom of smug recognition that she had clearly been sitting on for the entire conversation—

She looked back at Dipper.

"So," she said, very quietly, with surgical precision, "anything you want to tell me?"

"Mabel—"

"Anything at ALL—"

"We are not doing this right now—"

"I'm just saying I've been saying this for TWO YEARS—"

"MABEL—"

"Okay, okay," she said, and held up both hands, and there was something in her face underneath the smug that was warm and genuine and very Mabel, "later. You tell me everything later. ALL of it." She pointed at him. "I want every single detail."

"Later," Dipper agreed.

She beamed. Grabbed his face again. Kissed him loudly on the cheek the way she had when they were twelve and he'd gotten hurt.

"I'm really glad you're not dead," she said.

"Me too," Dipper said.

She let go and straightened up. Turned to Bill with an expression that somehow combined genuine gratitude and absolute menace in equal measure.

"You," she said, pointing.

Bill raised an eyebrow.

"Good," Mabel said, which appeared to be a complete sentence, and then swept inside with the energy of someone who had approximately seventeen plans forming simultaneously.

Bill watched her go.

"She's definitely planning something" he said.

"I know," Dipper said. "It's very concerning."

Stan hit him on the shoulder hard enough to constitute assault in several states.

"Don't do that again, kid," he said, in a voice that was doing a lot of heavy lifting to sound like his normal voice and not quite getting there.

Dipper opened his mouth.

"Don't," Stan said. "Whatever you're gonna say. Don't." He looked at Dipper for a long moment, the way Stan looked at things he was choosing not to say anything about, which with Stan meant a very great deal. Then he hit him on the shoulder again, slightly less hard, which was Stan for I love you, and went inside to get everyone food because that was how Stan Pines processed things and Dipper was not going to say a single word about the fact that he'd had to turn away first.

Ford stood in the doorway.

He didn't say anything for a moment. Just looked at Dipper with the particular careful attention of someone who had spent three days looking at star charts with Bill's handwriting in the margins and had put them down very carefully like they were fragile.

"You're alright," Ford said finally.

"Mostly. The witches stitched me up, it's—"

"I know," Ford said. "Bill sent word through the mindscape the moment he— " he stopped. Something moved through his expression. "The moment he knew."

Dipper said nothing.

Ford looked at him for another moment. Then at the place just past Dipper's shoulder where Bill was standing.

"I recognized the handwriting," Ford said, quietly, which appeared to be a complete thought.

"Ford—"

"We'll debrief tomorrow," Ford said, with the brisk efficiency of someone closing a subject they'd opened further than intended, and crossed the porch in two steps and put both hands on Dipper's shoulders and looked at him one more time, close and careful, with an expression that had nothing to do with debriefs. "I'm glad you're home."

"Me too," Dipper said.

Ford nodded. Cleared his throat. Went inside.

Dipper watched him go.

Bill appeared at his shoulder.

"You sent him a mindscape update the second you knew," Dipper said.

"Someone had to tell them," Bill said, very casually, looking at the middle distance.

Dipper looked at him.

Bill looked at the middle distance.

"Yeah," Dipper said, softly. "Okay."

The shack settled into noise around him — Stan and Bill's argument migrating to the living room, Ford's quiet footsteps overhead, Mabel's voice carrying from somewhere down the hall, the particular warm chaos of everyone home and present and accounted for—

Dipper stood in the middle of it for a moment.

Just — stood there.

Then Bill appeared in the doorway, still slightly manic, still gleaming with the specific energy of someone who had processed three days of grief in approximately forty five minutes and come out the other side completely unhinged with relief—

He looked at Dipper.

Something in his expression softened. Just slightly. Just for a second. The manic happiness still there but underneath it, visible now, the thing that had been in his voice in the forest.

He crossed the room, not saying anything for once, and sat down next to Dipper on the couch and put his arm around him and pulled him in close, and Dipper went, and let his head fall against Bill's shoulder, and felt the accumulated weight of approximately thirty six hours of being awake and nearly dying and accidentally faking his own death and falling in love in a forest just — finally, completely, settling.

"Hey," Bill said, quietly.

"Hey," Dipper said.

Bill pressed his lips to the top of his head. Stayed there.

"Worth keeping," Dipper said, very quietly, into his shoulder.

Bill went still.

"Yeah," Bill said, after a moment. Rough. Quiet. Nothing performed about it. "Yeah. Something like that."

Dipper smiled.

Closed his eyes.

Distantly, he could hear the panicked croaks of a frog followed by various loud pig squeals.

He couldn't help but smile as he curled deeper into Bill.

Everyone got what they deserved in the end.