When the words weigh heavy on the heart

[ghostharasser]

Who: Dipper and CR
What: Dipper is back from the dead! Everything sucks
When: mid-to-late December
Where: Mostly around the Pines House.

Content Warnings: post-death trauma, possession, PTSD, mentions of child death




Revival [CLOSED TO PINES FAMILY]

Death this time around, is so starkly different, that any of it hardly feels real. In fact, it's just one long disjointed nightmare until consciousness is finally able to grab him from the void.

He remembers very little for a long time, just bits and pieces here and there. He remembers the words he spoke before it all went black and the subsequent glimpses afterwards. His sister screaming at him, mingled in with flashes of Oscar's face, followed by bursts of searing pain and red. He thinks he can pinpoint the moment it all ends; when the sound, the images, all of it just goes dead silent, and he's basked in nothing but inky darkness, letting the nightmare fade away into nothing. It feels floaty, like he's bobbing about in an endless ocean.

Awareness jolts through him a moment later. The ocean is no longer endless, it's actually very small and cramped. He's got to get out, and that is how he finds himself writhing on the ground of the living-room, a mass of awkward teen boy and tentacles. It then that the weight of the entire past two months really hit him, with the sudden, suffocating feeling of clarity that comes with waking up from the dead.


Visitation: Winter Mourning [OPEN]

Dipper's first day alive was kind of a mess. Turns out, dying violently and then reviving out of a squid tank sort of scrambles your brain and motor-functions. He's doing much better by the second day, though he's opted to stay in bed for the most part. While he does have a great deal of his journals and notes out, it's probably pretty telling that he has just spent most of the time watching TV on his Omni.

He will not turn down company, of course. Especially since he knows he's given people a fright when everything spectacularly blew up in his face. Just mind the ...remarkable amount of Winter Mourning ornaments laying around the place. Mabel has been coping in the way she knows how, which is to say, their bedroom is covered in bones and glitter.



Winter Mourning Options

Canon Flavored:
- Dipper fist-fighting a giant robot and winning.
- Bill Cipher, possessing Dipper's body, getting the shit kicked out of him by Mabel while on a stage full of sock puppets.
- Defeating the Shapeshifter in the bunker. (complete with horrible AND THIS IS THE LAST FACE YOU'LL EVER MAKE taunt from said Shapeshifter)
- Catching the Lumberjack Ghost
- Getting chased by a two-story-high nightmare version of Bill Cipher through the Fearamid.

Deerington Flavored:
- October, and old but fun classic.
- Fighting some bullies with Syaoran.
- The Contract with Bill
- Standing up to Bill and then dying in the portal event
- Mercy Killing Cynthia

ooc: These are suggestions! If you have another idea in mind, just let me know!

Comments

[payingfordeliverance]

"Oh, yes, we have those. I had a friend who owned one. He took a photograph of all of us together with it, once."

This was a big deal! There was no sense owning a camera back then if you didn't have the means to develop your photographs. But, Oscar Vessalius was unconventional in a great many ways.

"It was a box that stood on a little pedestal all its own, with a hole in the very center. The photographer would bend over behind it with a big cloth over him, to keep the light from getting at the important bits. And then, he would squeeze a little bulb, and poof! An image would be captured on a special slab inside. I'm afraid I couldn't tell you how they got it off of that and onto paper, though."

Break gestures wildly while he speaks, outlining the rough size of the camera he's thinking of and so on. He is referring, of course, to a plate camera. But he won't be able to tell Dipper if the plates were metal or glass or other such details, and even if he could, Oscar's camera was at least ten years old. Still, this should narrow down the rough era quite readily.

[ghostharasser]

Yeah, that tells him pretty much what he needed to know, and basically just confirms what he'd already theorized. He grins.

"That sounds like a plate camera! Those slabs were usually made of metal or glass, treated with a silver solution. I've gotten use one of those once, for a class project. Early camera technology is really cool."

Before he goes on a tangent, he gets back around to his point.

"So, if our worlds are close enough developmentally, that would put you at about two-hundred years behind me, give or take a few decades, which lines up with some other things I've learned from you guys.

[payingfordeliverance]

"That long? Or, mm. That short."

He won't say as much to Dipper -- not right this second, anyway -- but a part of why he wants to know this is that the souls in his own world are reborn on a hundred year cycle. Gilbert will be waiting that long for everyone to make their way back to him -- and a bit longer, no doubt, given that they'll have to grow up a while first. Then, unless those few decades are off in the right direction, he probably won't quite live to see the sort of world Dipper lives in. But, the ones who are reborn just might.

Thinking of it this way adds a solidity to it all that's weirdly comforting, even if Break isn't convinced his own soul is ever going to make it back there.

But, n is not the time to talk about people dying and coming back to life. That business will have to wait for another day, if Break ever finds a reason to explain it at all. For now, he'll tease the kid a little with a secret he keeps much closer -- one he never dropped until the end of things at home, but something he's more open about here, given that there's no elegant way to explain how he and White Alice first crossed paths otherwise.

"A few decades can make a great deal of difference, however. I inadvertently jumped that far ahead, once."

His own kids are around Dipper's age, and he likes to think they'll be friendly outside of Break's influence. Then, too, he knows White Alice has been a little chatty about what she really is. Since that's the case, better to take control of the narrative early, on his end.

[ghostharasser]

He's about to ask what Break means by that. The guy is prone to speaking whimsically in ways Dipper is not yet adept at desciphering, but he explains himself soon enough, and Dipper's eyebrows fly up into his hair.

"Like, you mean you time traveled into the future? And this was before Trench?"

Well, now that he's said so much, Dipper has to know the details, or however much Break is willing to share. Dipper is reaching for a journal, and incredible normal Dipper thing to do. Perhaps that speaks well of him feeling better.

[payingfordeliverance]

Hook, line, and sinker. Boredom is an absolute plague to the clever, an issue Break himself is well-acquainted with. He himself only stays properly bedridden when he's either massively depressed or straight-up unconscious, regardless of whether he should be up or not, so even without knowing the full extent of Dipper's condition he can imagine the boy is ready to gnaw through the wall. He's seen him in action while researching his household's ghosts often enough.

"Does your world have stories of faerie rings and the like, where some poor fool wanders into a party for a night and comes out of it a hundred years later? I was one such fool. Lost thirty years, that way."

He can't entertain Dipper all afternoon, of course. And no way in hell is he telling the kid everything. He doesn't know exactly what other details his own kids are dropping that may allow Dipper to put two and two together about his past. But he gives him a basic rundown of the Abyss as a concept -- how it's a parallel dimension that contains all possible timelines, infinite timelines, and because of that time doesn't flow normally there. Break got there by way of having red eyes, he says, a gift from the Abyss itself that no one ever bothered to explain to him properly, which is just true enough that it isn't a lie.

After all, without them, he's pretty sure he would have died upon arrival and been warped into a Chain. That's what happens to all the other Illegal Contractors.

There are two moments in all this talk that betray a certain change in him that he hasn't bothered to tell Dipper about just yet. One is when he pauses to bicker with his omen, informing Baltus in no uncertain terms that he is not allowed in the bed until he gets the glitter off his paws and getting a lot of offended dog noises in response. The other comes at the end of the conversation, after Break has had plenty of time to notice that Dipper is writing a lot slower than usual, and has to keep readjusting his grip on his pen.

"...you'll want to get some lotion, by the way. For your hands," he offers, as their talk slows down. "It'll help the scars to remain supple as they heal."