deercountry | I don't like walking around this old and empty house

It had been an unexpected surprise to find the house. When they all came out of the ocean, Dipper had assumed they'd be starting from scratch, but coming across the dilapidated, bone laden home they'd made in Deerington had been welcomed good fortune. It looked like it'd weathered decades here without them and yet, most of their things were still intact, minus some items here and there that did not survive time.

After settling in for a few days and attempting to fix up what they could, Dipper took note of something that seemed off. There was a room upstairs that no one went near. Strangely, Dipper could not recall why, or even if the room had been here before at all. It was ...an odd blank in his memory. Probably that is what drove his curiosity one day, early in September.

Approaching the room had been easy enough, but even as he stood with his hand hovering above the doorknob, he grew more and more uneasy. Like a presence surrounded it, something tangible and sinister was behind that door. Despite his instincts screaming at him to turn around, he pressed on, grabbing the doorknob and pushing the door open.

He should have stopped there, really. Images rushed into his mind, and something like cold fear gripped his heart. His whole vision flashed red and for a moment he thought maybe he saw himself. Saw broken glass, a terrible blood shot eye. It passed almost as fast as it came and he's left for a moment, disoriented, mind reeling from things he couldn't quite grasp.

Despite the fear and anxiety running under his skin, Dipper crosses the threshold. Whatever evil this room held, he needed to know. It's just a shame that determination alone would not be enough to prepare him for the memories his awakening had been kind enough to tuck away.

The scream that echoes through the peeling halls of the house are haunting in a way that should ring familiar for Stan and Ford. It's reminiscent of a scream they heard in this house almost a year ago.

It frankly doesn't matter what Stan was doing prior to this. The moment Dipper screams whatever Stan was holding slips from his hand and crashes to the floor. His blood runs cold - no pun intended - and he sprints upstairs.

It's not even October yet. He was so sure he had more time to get ready, to make sure something like this didn't happen again. The kid's only got one eye left to lose, and he almost didn't survive it the first time around.

He's uncharacteristically stuck in his own thoughts as he rushes down the hall. Did he miss something while they were all settling in? Had Dipper been jabbing himself with forks again? Did they need to go back to putting a lock on the silverware drawer and eating mostly soup and pudding?

If anyone's followed him, he hasn't noticed. He catches himself with a shaking hand on the doorframe of the one room in the house no one goes in, half-expecting to see Dipper surrounded by glass again, or Dipper dying again, or any number of awful things that could have caused a scream like that.

"Dipper?!"

Ford isn't consciously - or even really subconsciously - thinking about last October. Though he's paranoid like he had been last time the similarities don't go much deeper than that. Even so, it's not like he's forgotten. He has just, in his latest obsession with creating an anti-scrying charm, not had cause to actively think about it.

Than Dipper screams, and Ford can think of nothing else.

Instead of being shut up in his room he's out in the living room this time around, painstakingly abusing a soldering iron by using it to burn runes into a piece of wood. Both of them are forgotten the second that scream pierces the muddled silence of the Pines household. He jolts, shocked, then throws both of them down and dashes out of the room, half a dozen steps behind Stan. The sight of the bedroom door - or rather, that bedroom door - open wide has ice sliding through his veins.

He skitters to a stop behind Stan. He doesn't speak up or try to push past him, but he does rest a hand on his shoulder to steady himself while he peers inside. His thoughts are filled with blood and glass and hideous red moonlight streaming through the windows and the desperate hope that he won't need to go for the first aid kit again.

Mabel, too, had been tending her own business, quietly sorting through her clothing in the bedroom she shares again with her brother. Her sweaters, to everyone's surprise, are mostly intact -- her habit of knitting them up quickly with cheap acrylics to save money meant the moths and things had overlooked them. Certainly with a good wash they'll still be wearable. But the aggressive brightness of them somehow seems even more childish against the backdrop of gloom and blood they've found themselves in, and the intricate ruffles and baubles some of the locals wear has caught Mabel's attention. She would like to wear things like that, she thinks, and perhaps feel more grown up in them. So although she still loves her sweaters, she's packing them away, making room for new things in her new life.

She is considering whether any of these could be buried to make a flower or if she should choose something else when Dipper's scream tears through her so intensely she can't tell if the sound is in her head or out.

It's a painful sensation, and disorienting enough that she reels from it for a few long moments, before sheer instinct drives her to find her feet and go. She doesn't have to question where her brother is. She's been weirdly attuned to him these last few days, for whatever mysterious reason, and she aims herself straight for the cursed room at the end of the hallway without questioning it. She barely notices each of her Grunkles there at the door, even going so far as to shove the closest one out of the way if he's blocking her path too much, and barrels right on inside in a flurry of skirt and ribbon.

"Dipper!"

Mabel wasn't present for last October, but if she knew the full scale of what there is to be afraid of here, it wouldn't stop her from running into this room anyway. This is her brother upset enough that the backlash from it has her own eyes tearing up in response to him, and she skids to a stop in front of him and grabs his hands in hers right away. In part it's because she knows the story, was told by Dipper himself her very first night in Deerington, and has watched her brother closely ever since to make sure nothing makes him crazy enough to hurt himself ever again. If he's screaming like that -- Mabel will think later that if she never has to hear a sound like that again everything will be okay -- she won't let him have his own hands, just in case. But mostly it's that contact helps, and both twins have always reached out to one another when they're frightened, and both of them clearly need that now.

"Dipper, what's wrong? Brobro!"

Oh, it hurts. It hurts in ways that Dipper can't grasp, can't put to words. It's a pain that feels so deeply routed within himself that he might go so far to say it's his very core that's crying out with pain. It's like the room itself had attacked him with every nasty, negative emotion that's ever come to fester here. It swallowed him up and dragged him under until he couldn't find his own thoughts anymore.

Instead, memories rip free of him, sending a harsh ripple through the air. The space around him, around the room, shifts like that of reality giving way to something else. Something floaty. Something reminiscent of Deerington. A feeling only different if one had made the transition from a nightmare to the real world recently.

Red overtakes everything. Broken windows flicker in and off the walls. The oppressing feeling of that blood-red eye staring down on them from outside is only out done by the horrible, shrill laughter of Bill Cipher echoing around them at all sides.

Dipper flickers, too. Shifting between the Dipper they walked in on to a haunting visage of the past. Younger, surrounded by broken glass. One eye staring at them wildly while the other is obscured by blood and gore. In his hand is a large shard of broken glass, despite the fact that Mabel will feel both his hands in hers very solidly.

His hands tighten on hers like an iron grip.

"You have to go! He's here!"

His voice is desperate, harsh, and choked. An urgent warning through a crying breakdown. In the moments he flickers back into the Dipper his family knows, his eyes aren't on Mabel, they're glossy and unfocused, tears streaming down his face.

Edited 2021-09-11 22:25 (UTC)

Oh. Oh, this is -- this is something new, and Mabel glances around with genuine fear that the room really is changing. What gives the game away is the image of her brother superimposed on himself, old wounds she's known about but never seen falsely reopened, and glass she can't feel at all that should be slicing into her own hand, too. If it was real. She hates everything she's seeing but it isn't real.

But her brother clearly thinks it is and the real problem, Mabel knows from confronting her own phobias, is that Dipper's fear is rational.

They can't tell him Bill isn't really there when they killed Bill once and then he showed up in Deerington anyway. They can't tell him there's nothing here to hurt him when there shouldn't have been anything there to hurt him before, and in the end it was Dipper's own hand that left those scars, because Deerington made him do it. None of them can make him the promise that these things won't ever happen again because they might and Dipper is right to be afraid of that and even if they can stop whatever's happening now he's still going to know that.

But that just means the promise he really needs is that if it does happen, they can handle it. Mabel's expression settles into a ferocious frown, and she begins pulling insistently on her brother's hands.

"Then we'll just kick his butt again," she says firmly. "Really heck him up! Come on, Dipper, let's go find Grunkle Ford and Grunkle Stan! Everybody's here. We'll call Sailor Moon if we have to!"

The first step is just to get him out of this room.

Mabel nearly runs Stan over, and then the whole room goes red.

It looks alarmingly like how Stan remembers. Glass litters the floor and Dipper is in hysterics. For a moment, Stan looks far away too. He looks scared for Dipper all over again, pained and worried that he'll actually lose the kid this time. It's all incredibly real for him in a way that it couldn't be for Mabel.

But...then Dipper gives his warning. He finally registers Bill's laughter, which-- that couldn't have been part of it. It couldn't have because Bill wasn't there.

Stan blinks and shakes his head. He can still see what Dipper is projecting at them, but he's not being sucked in anymore. He steels himself, and walks right into the room.

"We're already here, Pumpkin," he says. He spares a glance back at Ford, gesturing for him to come in too. "We're both here."

Then, he places a cold hand on Dipper's shoulder - a grounding gesture that's stuck since last October. He goes for almost the complete opposite approach as Mabel, but he hopes it'll work. The kid likes things that appeal to his logic.

"Dipper, Bill's not here. Remember?" he tries. "All this? The glass and the windows and blood and junk? This all happened already. But he wasn't here then and he's not here now. He's not here 'cause that's not what happened."

And maybe-- maybe if Dipper remembers what actually happened, it'll make a difference here.

Ford thoughts were filled with blood and glass and hideous red moonlight streaming through the windows - and then all of those things are here, along with familiar and equally hideous laughter floating through the air. Ford is slower to react than Stan or Mabel; when Stan starts forward all Ford can do is let his hand slip from his shoulder.

Mabel words are reassuring, but it's Stan's that actually snap Ford out of it. Right, that's right, Bill isn't here, just like he wasn't in October, and even if he can't prove that Stan wouldn't say it if it wasn't true. But just as Stan's words work where Mabel's don't, the opposite is also true: Stan's reassurances start him on the right path, but it's Mabel's that make the path easier to navigate.

"Mabel's right, Dipper." Mentally he calls for Castor, telling her to seek out Alcaid and bring him upstairs, and he feels more than hears her launch herself from her perch above his desk and tear off through the house. "Even if Bill is back we've dealt with him before - and you're the one who found out that the deal we made with him isn't binding us anymore, remember?"

Mabel's right.

Everything screeches to a halt as those words finally breech through. They land where everything else had been lost in the torrents of thoughts and memories. Mabel wasn't apart of this mess. He searches through the chaos to reconcile this, but he comes up short. She's not supposed to be here.

But she is. Finally, everything starts to catch up with him. He gasps like he suddenly remembered how to breathe. Like he broke the surface of very deep water. None of this could be happening because it'd already happened, that's right. Stan was right. They already came out of this once, a long time ago. Bill was gone and Mabel was here. None of this could be real.

The images start to ease, flickering less often, and Dipper finally looks lucid enough to really see his sister for the first time. Legs start to shift, start to move in the way she's urging him.

"Mabel?"

He still feels everything with such an intensity that he thinks he might burst, but at least he's aware.

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He slept like a rock, probably for the first time since he came out of the ocean. The drama, the memories, the weird implication that half, if not all of that had some from his own Blood magic, all of it took way more out of him than he was prepared for. He slept well into the next day, through to the afternoon.

When he does finally come around, he feels what he actually knows to be a hangover (Thanks Eddie's party). He can be found in one of two places around the house. Either scavenging in the kitchen for something to eat or drink or in bed with his journal, writing notes.

Mabel has been particularly fussed over him, so he is actually behaving and staying home to recover.

So while Dipper hadn't replied to her query, it had taken some talking down from Varian and Fern for her to stay put and wait until later to visit the Pine family. Luz, who had NOT had a good night's sleep, waited until daybreak and then promptly put on her little cowboy hat to go into bird form.

She flew over to where she'd been told Dipper was and waited a few hours before flying into the room, cawing at Dipper irritably before using her wing to knock the hat off...promptly falling onto her chin.

"Good to see you're OK, Dipper. What happened last night?"

That was probably for the best, since he needed to recover first. Dipper looks up when a bird just straight up flies in. He first thinks it's Qrow, but then. That would be weird, right? For Qrow to just turn up like this? No, it's-

Oh, it's Luz. Dipper sits up, cycling through a number of facial expressions before he settles on baffled.

"Luz! I- wait. How do you know about last night?"

Did Oscar say something? Does Luz even know Oscar?

"I heard-hold on," Luz took a moment to spit out some feathers, acting as if that were the most normal thing in the world (she was used to it). "I HEARD you. Not with my ears, but, like, in my head. I thought that was pretty weird until I remembered that we're both pale bloods. Most of our powers are all intuitive stuff, right?"

And yes she DOES know Oscar, and will be getting to THAT issue once the important stuff was taken care of.

"So why were you yelling in the first place?"

Ah...

Dipper's ears burn a little red. When all of that happened he didn't realize him freaking out could get broadcast to other people. He wonders with growing dread if others heard him. That's probably what Oscar had heard, too, thinking back on it.

"Geez, Luz, I'm sorry." Because having someone screaming in your head couldn't have been fun. "It's ...kind of a long story. My, um-"

It still feels weird to say this.

"My powers went kind of out of control thanks to getting back some memories I'd lost when we washed up here."

"Dipper, you don't have to apologize! It's not like you went and stubbed your toe and I came running! Obviously our weird powers work way more focused than that. I just need to know that you're alright and nothing's torturing you! If anything, I'm glad that this power exists like that, just in case!"

She imagined that couldn't be fun for Dipper, but in an extreme situation? Luz didn't mind getting startled like that if it meant she could do something about one of her friends in trouble.

"So you had some memories come back, and your powers went crazy? Sheesh. I'd hoped we all got our memories back intact. What did you remember?"

It's true. If he'd been in real danger and his family wasn't as close, it would have been a great way to alert someone he was in trouble. It's still mortifying, though, since he did it without realizing.

"I'm fine, I promise," He tries to reassure her. It's not a lie either, not entirely. He definitely looks tired and like the night before had been rough, but he's not hurt or anything, and his family is close by.

"It was October," he answers. Luz was one of the few people that knew the extent of what had happened to him during his first month in Deerington. Probably, if she'd picked up on it, it makes sense now why he hadn't been wearing his eyepatch all this time. Without the trauma it turns out he had no reason to be self-conscious of his injury. "It was ...really crazy. I think I soaked up all the emotion in the room where all the bad stuff happened and then its like it burst out of me."

She could only imagine that Dipper didn't like finding out about this new power this way: he hadn't been in any danger, and it had basically made people worried about him, his family likely right at the top of that list.

"I can see that," Luz said, "but being physically fine and mentally and emotionally fine are all different things. That's the things I'm really asking about."

Ah. October. That explained things.

"So it was like you were experiencing a PSTD moment. No wonder your scream was so raw. Man. I'm sorry Dipper. That couldn't have been a good thing to have to deal with. At least you were at home, where people could help you though."

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One day the Pines might have another week where everything is relatively normal and nothing horrible and dramatic happens, but this week apparently isn't it. Dipper had his own difficulties with his powers running wild, and then when Stan accidentally showed his own off Ford nearly bolted from the room is sheer, reflexive terror.

So yeah, it hasn't been great. But, as is always the case when Ford comes up against something he doesn't totally understand, he's been throwing himself at the task over and over again. His progress has been... questionable, sure, but he's been making some progress. Not much, but enough that he thinks he finally has something worth sharing.

He's not expecting to run into Dipper when he drags himself into the kitchen to engage in his newfound ritual of gazing mournfully at their long-depleted coffee supply, rummaging through the cupboards, and finally settling on water, but he does - but run into him he does and, fortunately, he has his own journal in hand when it happens.

"Oh-- Dipper. How are you feeling?"

Besides, you know, awful.

"Awful," He replies on instinct. He yawns and stares balefully at their dusty, defunct Señor Coffee. He wonders idly if he could jam the plug into a lunar orb and it would work.

Not that it matters because they still don't have coffee.

Anyway.

"But, better. I slept three times longer than I usually do, so I'm a little disoriented." He looks up at his uncle, glancing at his journal. His curiosity piques. "What are you up to?"

Ford doesn't have the social savvy to put to words why, but it actually strikes him as a good thing that Dipper responds to quickly in the negative. If he's feeling well enough to grouse, he's definitely doing better than he was before.

And he's definitely doing better if he takes such immediate notice of the journal. He gives Dipper a smile and slides himself into one of the kitchen chairs.

"That's actually why I came up here. I've been doing some research into out altered blood and thought you might be interested in what I've found so far."

Dipper's mood switches immediately. He still looks groggy, but now he's super interested in whatever Ford's found, especially after last night. He will abandon the coffee maker and sit in the chair across for him.

"Definitely! What did you find out?"

Excellent. Ford has no doubt that Dipper would normally be all over this, but with the harrowing week they've had a rejection would be concerning, but unsurprising.

"Nothing definitive, but a few things that are intriguing."

He flips his journal - a new one, just for Trench - open to a page labeled BLOOD in block capitals. There are the Ford typical doodles and notes scribbled down. There are five sets of doodles and notes, and once Ford has turned the journal so Dipper can read he taps on the one that's an ice cube next to a ball of fire.

"I'm sure you've already heard that there seem to be certain quirks or abilities associated with out altered blood. Stanley is cold to the touch, now, and his blood freezes when I extract it - but earlier we learned he has the ability to create and control fire as well."

Ford nearly ran from the room when they learned it, but they did in fact learn it!

Oh, look. It is so nice to see Ford on his usual, familiar bullshit. Making a new journal had been something Dipper had been excited to do, the moment they got settled in Trench. Putting the big 2 on the cover had been a moment of bittersweet triumph, realizing he was closing the chapter on the Dream the moment he’d shelve volume 1.

Anyway, that is neither here nor there, not when there is proper theorizing to do.

“Right! I made a post a few days ago to try and collect some data, and it looks like that blood has strong elemental properties. Someone reported lightning as an ability and someone else pointed out that all of the current affinities were elements that could cause some kind of burn, which I thought was interesting.”

This is good, theorizing like this. It has not occurred to Dipper just what implications Stan with fire might have, yet. He’s just woke up, after all.

The implications are lost on Dipper for the moment, and Ford certainly isn't going to point them out. They can just brush right over that and get back to the matter at hand, especially because he's pleased (though not surprised) that Dipper has also caught onto the burn association.

"Precisely. Given the degree of influence Deerington seems to have had on Trench - or vice versa, as it may be - I believe that sort of categorical association may exist for all of the blood types. You remember that the Dog Keeper had strong associations with both fire and snow as well, correct?"

I don't like walking around this old and empty house

DIPPER

Cursed Bedroom | Early September | Locked to The Family

CURSED CURSED CURSED

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Cw: reference to self-injury

eye gore, traumatic hallucinations, failing grip on reality

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Cursed Bedroom Aftermath [Semi-cloised]

Luz flew into the cuckoo's nest, haha

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