"Mason?"
"Yeah, mom?"
"I had this weird dream yesterday, at least," Mrs. Pines paused, "what I think was a dream."
They'd been sitting on the couch in the living room with hot chocolate, just watching TV in the early morning just because they could. They used to do this all the time and now they had the time to just chill for a bit before everyone else woke up.
She really didn't remember? She thought it was a dream. We've been hiding the monster stuff from our parents for way too long, Dipper thought. It may be time to break the news. I don't know what to expect.
Dipper muted the TV and faced his mother. She looked alarmed. Here goes nothing, "Monsters are real."
She blinked and stiffened. She didn't move for a whole minute and a half until Dipper interjected softly, "Mom? Are you okay?"
Leah's barely even there wrinkles seemed stark against her face. She blinked a few times at his voice. Dipper noticed that her hands were shaking so he slowly took the hot chocolate out of her hands and set it on the end table, careful not to startle her.
She looked down at the couch, her hands fidgeting. "I-I don't know, I don't know how to feel about this. I hope you're joking," she looked up at him again but quickly turned her eyes away. "Of course you wouldn't be joking with me, your jokes are terrible," Dipper made an offended sound at the back of his throat. His mother started stuttering and Dipper touched her shoulder.
"Mom, it's okay," He said soothingly. "We've been dealing with monsters and stuff for years. We took care of that monster from yesterday easily."
Her dark eyes snapped up, startling Dipper this time. "We?"
Dipper frowned. There was no backing out of this...and he couldn't lie to his mother. "Yeah. Me, Mabel, the Stans, and Bill."
"All of you?"
Dipper fidgeted uncomfortably. "Yeah..."
Leah scoffed. "And to think my family would tell me everything." But she had a ghost of a smile on her lips.
Dipper shrugged, unsure. "We didn't know if you'd believe us or not."
Mrs. Pines looked up at him again. "I know where you're coming from. I wouldn't believe me either. Awkward parent hug?"
"N-no, that's o-okay--oh, there it is..." Dipper pats his mother on the back awkwardly when she put an arm around his side, but Dipper smiled nonetheless. Leah and Timothy Pines made up the awkward parent hug, the awkward sibling hug, the awkward glitter hug (courtesy of Mabel), you name it.
"YO YO YO YO YO WHAT TIME IS IT? SHOWTIME—oh, I'm interrupting a tender moment. I'll go back upstairs."
Dipper jumped when Mabel suddenly came down the stairs. "The time is 6 AM, Mabel, for your information. Are you serious?!"
His sister shrugged, jumping down the stairs all the way to the floor, why would she do that?! She sprinted over to them and squeezed both him and their mom. Dipper said, "Why do you have to yell Hamilton lyrics at 6 AM?"
He felt Mabel frown darkly against his neck. "Then stand, Dipper. Weehawken. Dawn. Guns. Drawn."
Dipper groaned put pat her back. "Why do I even love you."
Mrs. Pines squeezed them. "We all love each other."
"That's true!" Bill piped up—wait—
"When did you get here?" Dipper near-screamed. The women chuckled and let go of Dipper. Bill was standing next to the bottom of the stairs.
Bill shrugged. "I heard Mabel and she woke me up. Might as well get up, right?" He sat on the couch next to Dipper and slung his arm over the back of the couch, almost touching Dipper's shoulders. If his mother and sister weren't in here with them, he probably wouldn't have minded it.
"Haha, sure," said Dipper, trying to maintain his calm.
His mom got up from the couch. "Well, I'm going to get ready for the day. Why don't you all make some breakfast? You're dad's about to leave for work."
Mabel grinned. "I'll go wake up Paz," she said and practically jumped off the couch. But Dipper stood and grabbed her arm. She shot him a confused glance. "Yeah?"
"Sooo?" Dipper's eyebrows waggled suggestively.
"What? Oh—heh. Yeah." She rubbed her neck in embarrassment. "So, it's official, I guess. We talked about it last night," Mabel told him.
Dipper pulled her into a hug. "Congratulations!"
"Thanks, bro!" She looked at Bill over Dipper shoulder, who was still sitting on the couch. She grabbed his arm this time and dragged him into the kitchen, much to Dipper's confusion. He raised an eyebrow. Mabel said quietly, "Something's going on between you and Bill and I want to know about it?"
Dipper opened his mouth to protest but immediately closed it. He couldn't lie to Mabel. He took a deep breath and said, "Yeah. Bill...kissed me yesterday. I might have kissed back. I'm not entirely sure what it means yet...I might tell him today."
Mabel broke apart from him and squealed quietly. "Oh my gosh!"
Dipper just awkwardly stood there.
She turned to him with a serious look a Dipper suddenly turned afraid. "We are going to get you to confess right when we walk into that living room, understand me?" She pushed him into the living room where Bill was waiting patiently and said to them, "I'm going to go wake up Pacifica. Okay, bye!"
Then she took off.
Bill raised a groomed eyebrow. "What did Shooting Star need from you?"
Dipper took a deep breath and sat on the couch. "So, yesterday."
"What about it?" Bill asked.
Dipper fiddled with his fingers. "The—uh, kiss." He didn't look up to see Bill's reaction. "Y-you see, I think I've liked you ever since we had that car trip here, but I just hid it, maybe. I felt like I got to see a part of you that no one else saw because you don't have very many friends," a choked hey from Bill, "and I just denied my feelings for you. Like, I think the time I knew for sure was two days before the carnival, the night when we had the snowball fight with Mabes, Paz, and Stan. You asked me—"
"Why your head was written in stars," Bill finished. He had a kind of glazed look in his eyes as he brought his arm up and carefully brushed Dipper's bangs out of the way to the Big Dipper was visible.
"I—then I began to fall for you some more and when you called me Pine Tree, I didn't know how to feel," Dipper shook his head and Bill's thumb brushed against his shoulder soothingly. "I thought maybe that I should hate you, but my mom said that I should find you and I decided to hear you out. Now...now I know why you did all the things you did—it wasn't really you, but it was. And I forgive you." Bill's shoulders shook and he ducked his head. "And then I realized that I shouldn't just throw my feelings away—I thought, this is the same Bill that I've been dealing with all winter break. I shouldn't discard my feelings. And then I—I fell in love with you all over again." Dipper took a deep breath again. He was finished. He carefully dragged his eyes back up to see Bill's final reaction.
Bill brought his head back up. His brilliant hazel eyes glistened with tears and he smiled wide. Before Dipper knew it, Bill threw his arms around him tightly. Dipper smiled warmly and wrapped his arms around Bill's slim waist.
"Soo," Bill said after a few seconds. "You love me?"
Dipper laughed. "Duh, you jerk."
"Okay, good, because I love you too."
Before Dipper could say anything, Bill pulled back and kissed him right on the lips. Dipper sighed out through his nose, finally feeling the most content that he has ever felt on this trip.
___
They sat on that couch for a while, just kissing each other and cuddling on the couch while they waited for the rest of the family to wake up and for Mabel and Pacifica to be done with the breakfast in the kitchen, which their noisiness blocked out the sounds of their confessions and the...other things.
Around half an hour later, they heard heavy footsteps down the stairs. Dipper and Bill quickly broke away and looked at a particularly interesting stain on the end table.
"Good-morning' kiddos. The smell of bacon woke me up!" Stan grumbled. "Is it done yet?"
Dipper shrugged. "Mabel and Pacifica are making breakfast now. Is dad up yet?" He asked.
"Yeah, yeah, he's getting ready right now." Then he zoomed into the kitchen.
Ford stood awkwardly on the stairs and he could feel Bill stiffening beside him. "Hey Grunkle Ford," Dipper said carefully. "There's a spot next to me if you want it while we wait for breakfast to be ready."
Ford smiled and nodded and his posture relaxed. "Yesterday was quite the day, huh?" Dipper hummed in agreement. "Now, how do you think the wyvern got in California in the first place?"
They began to share their theories for a few minutes, excitedly waving their hands and big smiles on their faces.
Home, Dipper thought. This is home.
When breakfast was ready, so were the rest of the Pines family. They quietly ate their breakfast, sharing conversations from time to time and laughing when the coffee fogged up Stan and Ford's glasses.
"So," Dipper said, finishing the last bite of his pancake. "Who wants to walk outside for a while?"
That's when the parents stood up. Timothy took his plate to the sink and said, "Sorry, son. Your mother and I have work that we need to do. Maybe next time!" Then the parents waved goodbye and left the house.
"Looks like it's us now," said Mabel mischievously. "You all know you have nothing else going on in your lives, now put your plates in the sink, get some jackets on, and let's go!"
Stan groaned. "Do I have to put pants on?"
"Ew, yes you do!"
That was a good end to a perfect morning.
But once they were all ready to go outside, it turned out to be snowing.
Bill sighed and Dipper linked arms with him, desperate for more warmth. But Dipper kept on a neutral face as if this was the most normal thing to do and didn't return his family's odd glances.
"I'm not a heater, Pine T--Pines."
Dipper released an exasperated breath. "Where do you think you're from?" He whispered.
"Good point."
"So...where are we even going?" Pacifica asked, the only one who was wearing a coat lined with warm fur.
Dipper lit up. "Further out into the forest, there was this hidden cave I found and I wanna go check it out!"
Ford said, "You don't think there will be anything weird, don't you? Remember that this is California, not Gravity Falls."
"What about that wyvern?"
"Good point."
Dipper made a lot of good points that day, he'd realized.
Later, they had finally found it.
Pacifica released a breath that they could see and looked around. "How far are we from the house or...any civilization? I can't feel my feet out here."
Ford repositioned his square-framed glasses on his big nose, redder than normal in the cold. "I would say about a few miles from the house, and I'm pretty sure the nearest main road is about another few miles away."
"I should've stayed inside and watched Ducktective," Stan grumbled.
"Alright then," Dipper took his arm out of Bill's and rubbed his hands together, making them warm. "Now let's explore this cave," he said, pulling two flashlights out of his pocket, keeping one for himself and giving the other to Bill, who beamed proudly.
"Yes, I get my own flashlight!" He boasted.
Mabel stuck her tongue out. "No fair," but she still looked happy to explore this cave nonetheless. She linked her fingers with Pacifica's and they all set off into the cave.
The cave wasn't that roomy, but they all could fit. It was cold but warmer than outside. Dipper took the lead, flicking on his flashlight and scanning all around for anything abnormal or something mildly interesting.
A few minutes later, they found some really cool rocks and Dipper had put some in his pocket, but they didn't find anything out of the ordinary, however.
Dipper sighed and said, "Well I guess we just wasted a good trip to the park or whatever."
The rest of them hummed disappointedly in agreement.
"I actually wanted to hunt something," Pacifica said, straying near Mabel as they made their way back out of the cave. "And I don't normally like this stuff."
Stan shrugged, "I just wanted to fight something."
Mabel snatched Dipper's flashlight from his hands and began vigorously turning it on and off at the dark walls, making everyone strain their eyes. "At least we can make up for it with a party!"
"I'd rather not," said her brother, stealing his flashlight back. That's when Bill pointed his own flashlight at Dipper and did the same thing Mabel was doing.
"Lighten the fuck up, Pines!"
"Fuck off."
"Hey, watch your profanity," Ford scolded them.
"Oh, you certainly should," purred an unfamiliar voice so quiet that Dipper thought he imagined it if it weren't for the rest of his family stopping in their tracks as well as he.
"Look up," the sweet voice said. Dipper did indeed look up and he swallowed his scream as he saw the creature.
He saw the legs first—long, black legs that extended almost to the other side of the tunnel they were in. The claws scraped the rock as she moved. Its body was bigger than a horse and it was black with splotches of gray and white, but mostly back. But what made Dipper really balk was the upper-half body—it was human, but the skin was a grayish-white. Her ebony hair covered her breasts and hung low to just above her navel. She had pointed ears and two slits for a nose and, worst of all in his opinion, was the 6 eyes of emerging blackness.
"What do you want with us?" Ford demanded, seemingly unfazed—but Dipper knew that he was afraid as well as him—he let no one see it.
"A delicious meal," she said and dropped to the floor.
Dipper snapped out of his trance and threw his flashlight at her face to buy himself time to get an actual weapon out of his backpack. He was breathing heavily when he grabbed a dagger and pointed it warningly at the creature. He felt Bill hustle to his side, and Bill was holding the flashlight as a weapon. He could hear the rest of his family and Pacifica behind him, readying for an attack.
"You'll have to get through the Pines first."
The spider-lady flashed her gleaming white teeth at the challenge—something dark dropped from those sharp points—poison. Dipper blanched but readied himself. Three, two, one—!
Dipper threw the dagger at one of her eyes with brilliant accuracy, which made the creature appear blind, but it could still smell. He saw his sister raise her own weapon that she put in the waistband of her skirt before they left just in case. She nodded to Stan and Ford and Dipper knew what they were planning—they were going to be distractions so Mabel could do the final blow.
The spider-lady screeched once as she regained her footing from being blind and launched herself at Bill—who was closest, but he jumped quickly out of the way and made it hurl head-first into the wall. Her entire face was now covered in red blood and her face scrunched up in pain, but she bared her teeth. The venom.
That's when Mabel struck, a brutal slash from her own dagger, the same as Dipper's.
The creature bellowed and dove her teeth headfirst into her arm.
Mabel shrieked and it was the most terrible noise that he'd ever heard.
"Mabel!" Pacifica cried, reaching out for her. She scooped her up into her arms and yelled to no one in particular, "I need to drive her to the hospital!" And left. It was just him, Bill, and the Stans.
Dipper turned to Bill's direction, his eyes were glowing. His face shown pure anger and he used his hand to slash a great wave of blue magic toward the creature, which dissolved it completely. It was defeated. It felt like forever, but it was only just a minute or two.
Dipper almost spat on the creature's limp and bloody body if he hadn't seen Stan and Ford react to the magic.
But they all seemed to forget about the spider-lady as Ford darted toward him and pushed Bill to the wall by his neck, choking him. "Cipher! I knew it was you!" He snarled.
Bill looked so pathetic under his hands—his nose was bloody, his hair looked unusually untamed, his clothes askew. He looked like he was about to pass out. "Sixer," he wheezed. "You have to listen to me!"
"Why should we listen to you," Stan scurried beside his brother and held up his fist menacingly. "You almost tore this world and our family apart all those years ago!"
Bill only closed his eyes, pained tears coming out of them. Maybe those tears were something else—Stan did say that Bill was a part of the family, Dipper remembered. Now he felt betrayed—
"Stop!" Dipper cried, dashing up to him and pulling on one of Ford's arms. He felt pathetic acting like this, but he needed to save Bill. "Please, let Bill go!"
Ford whipped his head around to him. "Do you realize who this is, boy?"
"Yes! Now let—"
"You knew all this time?! Why didn't you tell us? Do you seriously not get what kind of threat he poses to us and this entire universe?"
"He's not like that anymore! Please, believe me!" He pleaded. "You can trust me." His voice broke. Bill met his eye. In them, a promise. I will get out of here, he seemed to say. It'll be alright.
"I'm your nephew," Dipper persuaded. "You've always trusted me." He saw Stan's eyes falter, looking hesitant. He took a step back. "Please," Dipper whispered. Dipper felt the tears trying to burn through his eyes.
Stan finally took a step back and laid a hand on Ford's shoulder. "We should listen to the kid," he said.
Ford growled and glared a warning at Bill before letting him go. Bill dropped to the ground wheezing, but Dipper ran over to help him up.
"Hey, you gonna be alright?" Dipper asked.
"Yeah. Maybe I will." He turned a wary eye up at the grunkles.
Dipper stood up with his arm around Bill's waist and Bill's arm over his shoulder. "Bill isn't evil anymore," he finalized. "There was this thing that corrupted him. It was like a parasite—it made him terrible and crazy." He held Bill tighter. "Mabel and Paz already know about him. Believe all of us when I say that Bill is to be trusted and should still be a part of our family."
He could feel Bill trying to hold in a sob.
Stan glared daggers at Bill and picked up their supplies. "Fine. For Mabel's sake," he said, then left.
"We'll talk about this later," Ford promised and followed Ford.
"Thanks for savin' me," Bill whispered.
"Anytime," Dipper answered, but Bill wasn't listening. He fell asleep on him. Dipper sighed and hauled him over his shoulder like a sack of potatoes. Monster hunting's better than working out.
Once they got back, Dipper cleaned up his and Bill's wounds and gave Bill a warm glass of hot chocolate to drink. He watched him drink it and Dipper took out his phone and called Pacifica.
"Dipper! Mabel's in the ER, they're taking the poison out of her," she said before Dipper could even ask what was going on. "She's fine. It was almost into her system when we actually made it."
"T-that's good to hear," he responded. He sighed deeply in relief. Bill looked questioningly at him and mouthed, "Mabel's fine." Bill grinned and went back to his hot chocolate.
"Thank, Paz. Thank you for taking her to the hospital to quickly. We really owe you."
"You don't need to owe me," Pacifica answered, her voice quiet. "Thank Mabel. She did stun the creature enough for Bill to...I felt the magic."
"Oh."
"Did...did they find out?"
"Yeah..." Dipper shifted uncomfortably on the couch. "They're really pissed off about it. They're old, they'll get over it."
She snorted. "Yeah. You're right. Bye, Dipper!"
"Bye!"
Dipper bent over to put his phone on the end table and looked over at Bill, who was asleep again. Dipper sighed and lent over to kiss Bill's cheek meaningfully. "We'll get your situation sort out tomorrow, I promise."