Posted originally on the Archive_of_Our_Own at https://archiveofourown.org/
works/8141855.
  Rating:
      Explicit
  Archive Warning:
      Graphic_Depictions_Of_Violence, Major_Character_Death, Underage
  Category:
      M/M
  Fandom:
      Gravity_Falls
  Relationship:
      Bill_Cipher/Dipper_Pines
  Character:
      Dipper_Pines, Mabel_Pines, Bill_Cipher, The_Author_|_Original_Stanford
      Pines, Grunkle_Stan_|_Stanley_"Stanford"_Pines, Wendy_Corduroy, Jesus
      "Soos"_Alzamirano_Ramirez, Grenda_(Gravity_Falls), Candy_Chiu
  Additional Tags:
      Angst, Smut, Dark, Horror, Mystery, Romance, Human_Bill_Cipher
  Stats:
      Published: 2016-09-26 Chapters: 1/? Words: 3713
****** Madhouse ******
by shootingstarcipher
Summary
     Having been pit against those he loved the most, Dipper found himself
     contemplating whether surviving the nightmarish ordeal was really
     worth it. Mabel still managed to give him strength but only just, the
     knowledge that it could potentially boil down to the two of them
     being forced to fight against one another constantly lingering in the
     back of his mind.
     They didn’t have long to decide. Sooner or later, the bloodshed would
     have to start.
     The odd one out - the blond with one eye less than he should have had
     - said that the sooner it started, the better. It was kill or be
     killed, he told them, and that was all that mattered.
The light that invaded his vision as he blinked open his eyes proved to be too
bright and it took him a while to adjust to his new surroundings. Nothing was
familiar, he soon realised. He wasn’t where he was meant to be. Gone were the
cobwebs and the dust that had covered everything in the attic room he and his
twin sister were sharing for the summer and in their place was a clean, bright
expanse of white. He wasn’t lying on a bed like he’d first thought, but a
floor. A white, padded floor. The walls and ceiling were padded too, and the
only part of the room that wasn’t was the large metal door that was staring him
in the face.
For a moment or so, he lay there splayed out on the padded floor, unable to
comprehend what was happening and barely able to move before it started coming
back to him. He remembered being grabbed from behind whilst just outside the
Mystery Shack and hitting his head on something, and then blacking out. There
was nothing after that. Nothing but total blackness. And then he woke up here,
with no idea of where he was or who he was with, and he still didn’t have the
energy to move.
His initial thought was that, given all the padded surfaces (and despite the
absence of any straitjackets), someone must have thought he’d gone mad. Only
mad people ended up in padded cells. But he wasn’t mad. He was sane, and
possibly one of the few sane people in Gravity Falls, so who would have branded
him as deranged? And who, for that matter, would have had the power and
authority to do so? He certainly didn’t recall being assessed by any mental
health professionals, and surely only they were able to detain him if they
thought he needed to be.
Either way, he knew for a fact he was mentally sound. He’d never heard things
that weren’t there, seen things that didn’t exist, or experienced any delusions
or confusion that would lead someone to believing he was anything but sane.
Unless, of course, none of what he was experiencing now was real. Not a
hallucination, but not real either. A dream. A nightmare. And he knew of only
one being with the ability to create such a hellish fantasy.
If only he’d known then how wrong his assumptions were, that he’d later be
proven mistaken and be forced to apologise to the one being he’d hate to have
to show any sort of respect or sympathy to the most.
When the tall metal door in front of him opened with a clang, he hardly noticed
it. He was still laying on the floor, trying to convince himself to wake up
from his nightmare when it happened and - even after he’d sat up and noticed
it, alerted to the sudden change in his environment by the sound of the door
sliding open - he simply ignored it. If he didn’t interact with his environment
- which he was considering his dreamscape - then he wouldn’t get drawn into it
and it couldn’t hurt him.
Except that he didn’t wake up, even after a while, and nothing else happened
until eventually his curiosity got the better of him and he forced himself to
garner every ounce of strength he had left in his body and crawl over to the
door, poking his head out and peering down the hallway which now confronted
him.
No more white, no more padded surfaces, but a long shadowy corridor of
greyness. There was nothing across from the room he was in - just a blank wall
of grey - and the tiled greyscale floor paved a path in both left and right
directions from the doorway he was kneeling in. He glanced left and then right.
He couldn’t see much in either direction - nothing but shadows. After a brief
moment of hesitation, he crawled out into the corridor, flinched at the sudden
coldness of the tiled floor, stood up and went left.
As he staggered down the hallway, he kept his hand pressed against the wall so
that he never lost it when he wandered away from the light of the cell he’d
woken up in and lost himself in the shadows.
By the time the shadows had engulfed him, he’d closed his eyes automatically
out of fear. But when his hand - the one he ran along the wall as he walked -
grazed against something that wasn’t the cold solid wall he’d grown accustomed
to, he stopped and felt around for it. Whatever he was touching now was colder
than the wall, and metallic. He squinted, struggling to get a better look at
it, and then his hand collided with something even more surprising than the
metal surface: something softer, warmer, and plastic. He pressed it just a
little harder than he’d meant to and was suddenly almost blinded, a world of
bright whiteness opening up in front of him.
It was familiar, the room before him being so much like the one he’d crawled
out from that he wasn’t sure it was a different one. That is, of course, until
he saw that someone else was inside it. Lying on the padded floor, with her
back up against the wall behind her, was Mabel. Her eyes were closed, giving
her the appearance that she was still asleep or had lost consciousness, and she
looked peaceful. Her arms were raised above her head and her wrists were bound
together with a thin - but presumably sturdy - metallic wiring.
Without hesitation - and forgetting for a moment that as far as he was
concerned, none of this was real - he rushed over to her and untied the wire,
letting her arms drop to her sides. He repeated her name over and over again,
shaking her gently by the shoulders until she opened her eyes. She seemed dazed
for a short while and struggled to understand where she was. She knew who he
was immediately, however, and smiled when she saw him.
“Don’t worry,” Dipper assured her after she’d sat up straight and rubbed at her
wrists, noticing the bright red marks on her skin. “I’m pretty sure this is
just a dream - well, a nightmare,” he added, correcting himself. Mabel stopped
rubbing at her wrists, stretched out, and then stood up. He stood up with her,
having been crouched down on the floor while he tried to wake her up, and they
both turned to face the doorway.
“Where are we?” she asked, tilting her head as she stared out into the darkened
hallway before glancing back at her brother, confusion and fear in her eyes
even though her lips were still curled up into her trademark smile.
“Honestly, I have no idea.” Her smile faltered slightly when he said that but
she managed to force it to stay bright. They stood there in silence for a
minute or so, taking it all in, and then she grabbed his hand and suggested
that, even if it was just a dream, they searched the building they were in out
of pure curiosity. He couldn’t have put it better himself and said so.
As they walked hand in hand down the hallway, each of them keeping their free
hand on the wall closest to them, tracing it the entire way to the next door
they came to (which, again, was on the side nearest to Dipper - on his left).
He knew where the button was this time and pressed it the moment he realised
they’d come to another door, the light that suddenly exploded from the padded
cell they’d stumbled across now attracting his sister’s attention. This
discovery wasn’t a surprise to him. What neither of them were prepared for,
however, was who the metal door revealed as it slid across.
They didn’t understand at first. Just like the other two rooms which had
previously been occupied by each of the twins, every surface of this cell was
covered in padded white fabric, but a small portion of it - right beside the
boy who was sitting upright and staring at them with a wide, manic grin - was
splattered with a few droplets of crimson. Dipper blinked and then stared at
the boy with his wrists tied together and Mabel’s smile disappeared from her
face.
His single eye was just as golden as his long wavy hair and Dipper knew exactly
what golden eyes meant, at least in his world. When he’d been foolish enough to
make a deal with Bill Cipher and for that one day become the demon’s so called
“puppet”, his own irises had temporarily turned to gold. And so, it made
logical sense that the boy before him now, sitting with his legs pulled up to
his chest and his arms in front of him with the wire binding his wrists so
tightly it was cutting into his flesh and making him bleed, was Bill Cipher -
or at least, his body was being possessed by Bill Cipher.
But, unsure of the accuracy of his deduction, Dipper shook his head, still
lingering in the doorway with Mabel stood behind him. It didn’t make complete
sense. This was a figment of his imagination and Bill was likely to have
orchestrated it, but surely he only possessed a body in the real world. Then
again, anything could happen in a dream, couldn’t it?
The sound of the blond’s voice broke Dipper’s trance. “Good to see you again,
Pine Tree,” the boy grinned as he shifted his position so that he was kneeling
on the floor with his hands - still fastened together at the wrists - in front
of his chest. “You too, Star,” he added, nodding in Mabel’s direction. She
frowned in response and looked at her brother, whose gaze was firmly fixed on
the boy in front of them. “Oh come on, kid, you didn’t really think I wouldn’t
turn up around here some time?” the blond scoffed, his remark directed at
Dipper.
Trying to appear more confident than he actually felt, Dipper took a few -
albeit hesitant - steps forward and approached him without a word, only
speaking when he’d reached a point of about a metre away from where he was
kneeling. “Explain everything,” he demanded, his shaky voice betraying him.
“Explain why you brought us here or…” It was impossible to tell whether he was
the only one having the dream or whether Mabel was somehow sharing it with him,
so he trailed off and let the blond figure out his question for himself.
The boy’s grin only widened. “I didn’t bring you here, Pine Tree. Look around.
Use that brain of yours. I’m injured.” He waved his arms up and down, inviting
him to take a closer look at the blood dripping from the cuts in his wrists.
“Now why would I do this to myself?”
Dipper had to think for a moment. It was a difficult question to respond to but
he was sure he had the answer. “Because pain is hilarious.” Bill had said that
once, when he’d been abusing Dipper’s body for the sake of feeling as much
agony as possible during the few hours he’d possessed his body for.
But Bill even had an answer for that. “You’re not wrong, kid, but you know
what’s not hilarious? Being stuck somewhere you don’t want to be! Being the
most powerful entity in the universe and then having all taken away from you
and being left with nothing!” Then he suddenly went quiet and dropped his gaze
to the floor as if he’d said too much, lowering his hands as well. “I… They
took everything from me, Pine Tree. Can’t you see that?”
He could. Everything the blond was saying to him was true - possibly. But he
did look weak. He did look vulnerable. Dipper had never seen him in such a
state before - aside from the fact that he was possessing a human body that
wasn’t his, a body that looked so similar to what he would actually probably
look like if he were an actual human that it was difficult to believe he was
anything but. His hair was a mess and his face was littered with scars, a small
puddle of blood seeping out from under the eyepatch that was strapped around
his head. He was still grinning wildly, as Dipper would have expected him to
be, but his grin was weak and lacked malice as intense as he was used to.
After exchanging worried glances with Mabel (who had by this point wandered
into the room but was still keeping her distance from the demon) he took
another cautious step forward, pausing and crouching to the floor. It was even
more irritating than he’d predicted, how quickly the demon had managed to get
under his skin. Before he knew what he was doing, he leaned forward and began
untying the wire around the blond’s wrists. It was only when he’d released his
wrists entirely and was examining the wire that he realised just how much blood
he was losing. The cuts on his arms were much deeper than he’d first thought
they’d be and he looked up to study his face, searching for a sign that he
wasn’t enjoying the pain that came with his wounds. He found none.
“Thanks, Pine Tree,” he smirked as they stood up from the floor and turned back
to Mabel. “I like you even more now.” He rubbed at the cuts on his wrists as
spoke, smearing the blood up both his arms, and then lifted his hand up to his
mouth and started licking his fingers, humming in delight at the metallic taste
of his blood. Dipper narrowed his eyes in suspicion, sure that he was being
played for a fool. If he was so weak and vulnerable, why is it that he was
still happy doing sick, twisted things that he knew would only serve to disturb
the boy who had just helped him gain a little more power back?
It was Mabel who suggested that, whether Bill was to blame for them being there
or not, they carried on exploring their surroundings. The demon agreed her with
eagerly - much too eagerly for Dipper’s liking - although her brother was
reluctant to dismiss his presence so easily. He was now starting to doubt
whether he was actually in a dream - or a nightmare, to be more specific - or
whether Bill had brought them to another place, another world, even. And, for
that matter, why had both his sister and the blond had their wrists tied
together when he hadn’t, and who had tied them up?
From then on, he crept down the hallway even more carefully than he’d been
doing, merging in with the shadows in case he ever felt he was in danger. He
kept hold of Mabel’s hand throughout, urging her to keep quiet, and some time
before they reached the next door Dipper felt something touch his left arm and
he stifled a yelp, only to realise a moment later that Bill was the one
grabbing at his arm.
This time it was the demon who pressed the button to open the heavy metal door
and Dipper would have missed it if he hadn’t opened it. Bill stepped into the
cell first, dragging Dipper along with him who in turn pulled Mabel into the
room, a scowl on his face as the demon lowered his hand to grab his wrist.
While they had each awoken in their respective cells alone, each of Dipper and
Mabel’s uncles were slouched in opposite corners of the cell they had only
recently discovered, Stan to their left and Ford on their right. They both had
their hands tied together and, immediately recognising the demon’s presence,
Ford shifted his position and stood up, turning to glare at him.
Ignoring him, Bill turned away from him and gazed down at Dipper instead,
nudging him with his elbow. “I say we leave him here. What do you think?”
Without a word, Dipper grimaced and pushed passed him, moving to stand closer
to Ford whilst Mabel hurried over to Stan and woke him up before untying the
wire around his wrists. Dipper did the same for Ford but instead of responding
to him, his uncle did nothing but glare at the blond. “It’s okay,” Mabel called
over to him, sensing his suspicion. “It’s just a dream, right Dipper?”
Dipper nodded silently but Ford shook his head in disagreement. “No, it’s not a
dream. This is real. This is…” He froze and then fixed his gaze on Bill again.
“You did this. Where are we?” He raised his voice in such a way that it
resulted in Dipper feeling like he had no choice but to intervene.
Stepping in between his uncle and the blond, he glanced behind him at his
sister and Grunkle Stan before taking a deep breath as he prepared to speak up
in the demon’s defence (though “defence” may have not been the best word to
use, considering that he was still just as suspicious about him as his uncle
was, although Ford didn’t have as much information about their situation as he
did). “Wait, I don’t think he…” He trailed off as Ford’s gaze softened, their
eyes meeting for a moment. “I don’t trust him, but I don’t… Well, I don’t know.
He was in no better condition than any of us, so couldn’t we just-”
Mabel cut him off, interrupting him with a quick remark. “Just stop fighting!”
Dipper looked across at her and grinned. That’s exactly what he’d meant to say.
In the next cell - which didn’t take them long to find at all - were Wendy and
Soos. Wendy had almost chewed through the wire binding her wrists together by
the time they got there. But it was what they found in the next room - which
was nothing like the others they’d been in - that had all seven of them
(including Bill) completely lost for words.
They found themselves in what appeared to be the living room of an old
fashioned house. Dark red carpet ran under their feet and the walls were
painted cream. There was one very small, very old television set and two
cappuccino-coloured sofas were facing it, a small mahogany coffee table in the
middle of the room with a notepad and pen lying on top of it. Across the room
from them was a sideboard and hanging on the wall above it was a mirror in
which they could all see themselves.
Bill was the first to move. He sauntered over to one of the sofas and fell back
on it, smirking up at Dipper when he caught his eye. Then everyone else started
to move away from the entrance of the living room and wander the building in
smaller groups. Mabel and Stan went off together, Wendy and Soos made up
another group, and Ford gestured for Dipper to go with him but the blond took
it upon himself to interfere.
“Stick with me, kid,” he drawled as shifted in his seat to hang upside down
with his legs curling over the back of the sofa and beckoned to him, indicating
he should leave Ford to go off on his own and stay with him. In usual
circumstances, Dipper would have immediately turned him down and chosen to
search the rest of the building - or whatever it really was - with his uncle,
but this was different. While he knew he wouldn’t feel safe being alone with
Bill, he also thought that leaving him by himself would end in disaster.
He wound up staying but to the blond’s annoyance, Ford stayed as well. The
demon sat up properly when Dipper came over and sat next to him, gritting his
teeth as Ford pushed him out of the way and sat down between the two of them.
With his arms folded across his chest in an angry fashion, he nodded in the
direction of the coffee table, leaned forward so that his view of Dipper was no
longer obscured by the man in between them, and suggested he took a look at the
notepad on the table.
As soon as he did, he wished he hadn’t. It gave them more information than
they’d previously had about their predicament, but it was information Dipper
wasn’t sure he wanted. His gaze flickered upwards to inspect his uncle’s
reaction to the note they hadn’t previously realised was written on the first
page of the open notepad but he never got to see it.
Every light in the establishment seemed to go out at once, plunging them all
into total darkness. A short, high-pitched scream was heard from one of the
other rooms, probably in reaction to the sudden loss of light.
Before Dipper knew what was happening, he was grabbed by an oddly familiar hand
and another was placed over his mouth to muffle his cries, not that he was
making any noise. The heavy breathing in his ear seemed to get louder when he
was dragged away from the sofa and hidden behind the curtain that obscured the
window behind the television set and everything grew warmer. Beads of sweat
adorned his palms and his heart was working overtime. Fear and anxiety were
taking over but then the hand covering his mouth suddenly released its grip on
him and he started to relax - slightly.
“Calm down, kid.” He felt a wave of heat engulf the shell of his ear as the
demon whispered from behind him, but the realisation that he at least knew the
person who’d grabbed him was strangely comforting. “Just stay quiet. I’m trying
to save your life, you know, and you’re not making it easy.”
They stayed there on the carpeted floor, behind the curtain, Bill kneeling
behind him with an arm snaked around his waist, until eventually a beam of
light trickled in from underneath the gap between the floor and the hem of the
curtain and the demon pushed the fabric back, revealing a sight that took a
while for Dipper to take in. But what bothered him the most was how hard it was
going to be for Mabel.
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