Roleplay

"Ok I'll the restraints off, you check him over, especially his head," Pacifica told Dipper briskly, "And just forget about Dr. Pines. He's not worthy any of our time. We both said our piece, which I loved by the way serves him right, and at that point all we can do is keep a closer eye on him." Her eyes flickered over to Stan and Pi and added softly, "I think we all will be. If he's even allowed to stay."

She shook her head, "Anyways that would be easiest for you on the table right? And would make you feel better if you were closer to him right?" She linked her hands together to give him a boost up. "Come on then nerd, go snuggle your demon."

Her eyes flickered to Bill next, and softly added, "You're going to be alright Bill. We'll make you alright."

Dipper flashed her a small worried smile, then accepted her offer and used her boost to climb up onto the table. The restraints around Bill's arms and chest at least had been removed. This allowed Dipper to sit on the table and prop Bill's shoulders across his lap.

"You're gonna be fine, Bill, we're gonna take you someplace comfortable and you're gonna go nowhere and I'm gonna be with you the whole time, right next to you. Okay?" As he spoke gently, softly, he carefully ran a hand over the back of Bill's head. A bloody goose egg was present on the back of his head, skin having been split from the blunt blows. He kept a hand over the wound, knowing injuries to the head tended to bleed a lot. His other arm he simply wrapped around Bill in comfort.

"I'm right here." And he kissed him on the forehead.

"That's my name don't wear it out," Stan muttered wearily, and went back to the tech that would keep his demon alive. "You're gonna be fine you idiot because my age gets to catch up before yours does." He was so goddamn tired of all of this, but he couldn't bring himself to give up on them, couldn't stomach the alternative.

The tech whirled slightly as it set about fixing the injuries and Stan sighed, brushing the hair out of her eyes. "I love you too goddamn much to lose you Pi. It goes both ways."




"Stay still Sigh," Ford said softly, laying the demon out to check the progress of his demon's healing injuries. The tech was working quickly thankfully, and he estimated only fifteen minutes before Sigh was back to full health. "You-" He blinked rapidly, and shook his head. "You got hurt rather badly but I can take care of it." His hands gripped the demon tightly, "Please. Let me be the one to take care of you for once."

She hummed lazily, basking in his touch for the moment. Warmth was slowly coming back to her and she could already move her fingers, albeit slightly.

"...love ya, too....dear heart...always....."

Sense trickled back in frequent droplets and it made her blink languidly. She took a shaky breath.

"...Wha....'appened?"





He (They?) frowned slightly, the healing cut on his cheek stinging a little.

Why was he here in the ink-void-black? What had transpired?

He breathed in again, smoother this time as his strength began to seep back in. He blinked, once, twice, an unfamiliar liquid building up in the corners of his eyes.

"...thought you don't.....want me..."

He hated how his deep voice came out pathetically.

"Well," Stan said dryly, "You challenged the fuzzball to a fight, deliberate lost yourself to the past if the feelings from the bond were correct, and got rather badly hurt. Predictably. On the bright side, we know that if we throw all of us at Sigh we could probably take him."

His hands moved to help her shift to a more comfortable position, propping her up against himself and running a hand through her hair. "You scared the hell outta me is what happened."




"Oh Sigh," Ford said softly, "I want you to think about what my greatest fear was." He brushed at the shadowy hair lightly, hesitatingly, unsure of how welcome he was. He had ruined things with Stan after all, could still see the betrayal in his brother's eyes. "You leaving me." His lips twisted into a bitter smirk, "I mean I fell apart pretty much as soon as you stepped away. I- I'm sorry Sigh. I shouldn't have said those things to you."

He fingered Sigh's sunglasses, and then retracted his hand from his demon's face to go back to focusing on the injuries that riddled their body. "You're so important to me Sigh," he said not looking his demon in the eyes, or at least where the eyes should be. "My mouth may get away from me, and I say stupid things. And I put too much emphasis on my own pride and intelligence, but I will never not want you. Even when I make you not want me."

And really some part of him wanted to go back and reassure Stan. Because there was no way that his brother could hate him more than he hated himself at that moment.

"T-That bad, huh?"

It still hurt to chuckle, so it came out as a raspy gasp instead. Her fingers brushed the left side of her neck and she hissed at the three puncture wounds there.

Holy sh*t. They were f*cking deep.

How the hell is she still alive?

"Ohmygods," she breathed out in one go. "What the actual - "

Then she remembered.

The ruthless man, the hunter grinning at her, at his prey.

Except she wasn't just prey.

She could still feel Maverick in her hands.

".....that...that wasn't Sigh. That was.....something else."

Her hand clamped over the wounds.

"The villain in kid's books. One of the many reasons demon kind has been scorned one too many times."

She buried her face in his chest, smirking wryly as she shuddered.

"A nightmare. I just had to counter it with one of my own."






"...I will...always want you."

He pushed himself up, wincing as the mending hole in his abdomen pulsed. Teeth gritting, he got into a sitting position. It left him panting, the sickly sweet of his blood on his tongue.

"....I will always need you."

He got closer to him, his slender fingers and pale palms finding their place on either side of his face. He didn't lean in yet, didn't know if it was right for the time being.

"....nothing will ever change that."

Behind silver-framed shades, sightless eyes focused on where they knew his human would be.

Bill drifted through a black, starless void; memories, flickers of the colors of the precious souls around him, images and words and snatches of song all sluiced through his mind—


"Dipper! Dipper, you need to calm down, Bill is—"

a terrible pause, fraught with significance, then:

"... still alive, and I need help to make sure he stays that way—"

and his boy, his charge, more precious to him than any amount of gold or knowledge: "oh, thank god, thank god"


Across the bond, an image flashed, an impression of darkness and cold, a crazed urgency to not be here, to not be TRAPPED, raging like a tiger against—

screams and fire, the splintering of bone and the exquisite spurt of blood in his mouth, Stanley—no, it wasn't Dipper's Grunkle Stan, it was the mobster that had murdered Pacifica's parents, Stetson—

slivers of Stan's mind, fleeing before him, and he felt so ALIVE—


The demon's hands, released at last, clenched into painful-looking fists, his fingers stiffened into claws by the deep, seeping burns; blue fire burst like a cyst, roiling over his knuckles, the long, slender fingers—

The single pupil dilated, the feral yellow glow of the iris intensifying, the eye of a savage predator unchained—

"... and I'm gonna be with you the whole time, right next to you. Okay?"

No. No, you won't, you're dead, you're dead and it's MY FAULT—

The demon whined, low in his ravaged, bloodied throat, too weak to wail. Rend and tear and kill kill because he, Stanford, Stanford and his ancient Betrayer, they hurt him and they hurt his boy

(stop it he HATES BLOOD STOP)

and he would make them PAY—

"I'm right here."

Oh, he was—

the touch of lips to his too-cold forehead, the gentle, warm breath in his hair, and

Dipper was there—


The blue flames around Bill's clenched fists flickered, dimmed, and went out. That deathly, white-knuckled grip uncoiled slowly, the fingers relaxing, loosely held.

And the demon relaxed, too—not into that terrible, death-like stillness, but into something like real rest—he shifted, his head heavy in Dipper's lap, and coughed once, threadily, grimacing at the taste of old pennies at the back of his tongue.

His eye did not quite track Dipper's face, although he tried; the pupil dilated and contracted, seeming to breathe in the too-bright light overhead.

"Pb vxqvklqh," Bill breathed, vaguely. "Grq'w wdnh pb vxqvklqh dzdb ..."

He lifted one hand, wracked with tremors at this exertion, to brush the backs of his fingers along Dipper's cheekbone, just beneath his eye—as gently as he had ever handled Dipper's body—the lightest caress, almost tentative, as though he were assuring himself of Dipper's reality.

Then—

a flicker of blue flame, the stench of ozone—

and Bill yipped, in startlement and indignant protest, "Can't! Won't let me teleport! Can't!"

With a choked little laugh, Dipper gathered up as much of the demon as he could manage into a... Well, not exactly a fierce hug, due to him being, well, Dipper, but his intent was there, and the love behind the gesture held the strength and ferocity of ten lions.

"It wasn't your fault," he said gently. "It's never, ever gonna be your fault." For he'd felt that through the bond, and he had to answer as he lightly patted Bill's back.

"I saw everything." Unknown to the demon, his eyes flickered ruefully to the stomach contents on the floor nearby, but only briefly. "And nothing was your fault. He dared separate a demon and his charge."

He pulled back to look at Bill's eye. "He tried again and look how well that went. I lost it this time."

With heartbreaking effort, Bill focused on Dipper's face, Dipper's words, clinging to them as a drowning man would a shred of flotsam. Those words—

"It wasn't your fault. It's never, ever gonna be your fault."

Those words provided Bill an anchor in the midst of his feverish delirium, a beacon in this swirling maelstrom of lunacy and uncertainty and oh, God, pain—

His muscles ached, his bones hurt—everything hurt, down to his teeth and the roots of his hair—but his heart was the very worst of all. Bill curled around it, weakly, as best as he could, with a soft little sound of bewilderment, like an animal that has been hurt but doesn't understand why.

The ferocity of that embrace was not lost on him, though, even in the grip of that terrible fever; he drank it in like sunlight, slipping his arms around his boy's waist and hiding his face against Dipper's abdomen.

And with that single, nuzzling gesture, Dipper would realize that the responsibility of the bond cut two ways—Bill was trusting him now, in this moment of complete vulnerability, to keep him safe.

"I'm sorry," the demon cried suddenly, his voice cracking as he clung tighter to Dipper, in a wild paroxysm of grief. "I'm s-so goddamn sorry, so sorry that you, you had to go through tha-at—" Still nuzzling Dipper's stomach, Bill remembered—

his lower half was nothing but a gaping hole, steaming with blood and so scrambled that no organs were discernible

—and began to tremble, intermittently, all over: equal parts physical reaction, and horror at the unstoppable cascade of memories, and that awful blazing fever, the shiny new head wound ...

"I should've—should've been a-able t— to protect ... s'my j-job—" He laughed abruptly, a wretched, mirthless bark. "You needed a, an ancient demon, l-like—like the Betrayer. Somebody ... who knew what they were doing."

And there it was, one of his greatest fears laid open to Dipper at last, a dark and festering wound lying exposed in his demon's soft despairing voice—

That Bill might have been able to prevent it, and saved his boy all the agony and devastation that had followed, if only he'd known more. If only he had been more experienced, or more sure, or less chaotic—

If he hadn't been Bill Cipher.

Dipper had to bite down on a laugh at Bill's gentle gesture that tickled his stomach. He didn't want the demon thinking he was laughing at him. He just hung on tighter and looked up a little, making sure no one was going to rob them of their moment.

At Bill's words, Dipper stiffened for half a second, muscles going rigid before he relaxed. "Ah but Bill, you forgot the most important factor in this. I don't want anyone else. I want you to be my demon, all stubbornness and never giving up and all the love you've given me... Do you think an ancient demon would have gone and told off Death itself to get me back?" Though he didn't know it, he had a point. Sigh had first tried to talk Ford out of his new 'dark' ideas.

"And... Sometimes fate can't be cheated. I think... Something would have happened no matter what, but.... You yourself said I won. Because I did." One hand ran over the part of his own stomach that Bill wasn't hiding his face in. Dipper could feel the scar beneath his shirt.

"You said my scars would be a badge of honor, a sign that you guys loved me so much you'd do all that just to get me back. How could I ever, ever want a new demon after what you did for me?"

"Our ties were forged in your blood."

Wrong.

My ties were revealed through my blood.

"I never knew how loved I was till that moment. The bad part is over now. I'm living, Bill. For you. And I'm not leaving again."

So he sat, one hand clutching Bill as close as he could, the other resting on his own stomach, and tried to coax out those words he'd carelessly shoved aside in his worry for Bill. "And.... When we get somewhere more comfortable... I might have a small present for you."