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.

Relief clears up Mabel's frown and she keeps tugging at him, gently.

"Yeah! I'm right here, brobro. Come on, let's go. Let's get out of here, okay?"

A pause. Then, because siblings are siblings, and because Dipper cares so strongly about understanding the truth of things that he was the only person who was able to see through her mindscape even when it tried to give him what he wanted, and Mabel can think of one thing that will really confirm that she herself is something true in this moment:

"You dork."

As soon as Dipper starts to become more lucid, Stan feels the tension immediately release. He can't help chuckling when Mabel calls him a dork, but in an affectionate, relieved sort of way.

"Alright, everybody out of the stupid cursed bedroom," he says, with the finality of a grown-up, even though it's basically what's already happening anyway. It just feels like the thing he should be doing.

Similarly, he gives both of them a nudge - but it's oddly light and gentle for him, as though he doesn't actually want to push Dipper too hard.

It's a little tenuous, but it looks like it's working. Ford's not quite ready to let himself feel anything resembling hope, but it's encouraging all the same. Stan stands inside the room and carefully ushers them forward, so Ford stays on the threshold and offers his hands out. He's not sure if Dipper actually needs that much help, or if Mabel even needs the extra assistance at all, but it's better than stepping into that room and risking that whatever's going on will get worse.

At least more help is on the way. A moment last Castor swoops through the door, Alcaid in tow - though it's a bit more like Castor is literally dragging Alcaid, and once they're both through the door she releases him and sends him tumbling right at Dipper.

... Well, he supposes he didn't clarify how she should bring him, so he can't do anything but offer her a silent thanks as she swoops back around to alight on his shoulder.

Between Mabel's affectionate name calling, Stan's nudge, and Ford's offered hands, more of the room's tension seems to edge away. Dipper reaches out just in time for Castor to come flying in, which is good because it means Dipper actually catches Alcaid before they hit the floor.

Alcaid burbles something startled and distressed before Dipper holds the omen close, and then moves them to his shoulder. He'll take one of Ford's outstretched hands and make his way out of the room entirely, finally.

Crossing the threshold gets a heavy sigh of relief out of Dipper. A giant bulk of the emotional pressure does not follow him out of there, and he already feels like he's coming back after being emotionally overloaded. There's a tiredness that clings to his bones that feels not unlike a hangover. Alcaid is more responsive now, too, and climbs onto his head.

Dipper regards the room with deep apprehension.

"I forgot October," He says, after a moment. "I opened this room and it all came back."

Dipper follows them. The tension eases, and her brother offers up a coherent explanation of things all on his own. With that, the moment Mabel needed to be really brave for has passed, and what's left as that fades away is the fear that was resting underneath. The tears that had been pricking at her eyes suddenly spill over, and she reels a little. What just happened was very big, and this close to it still, she has no idea where to even begin in processing it.

She squeezes her brother's hands tight for a moment, and then finally releases them in favor of throwing her arms around his neck, sobbing.

The word "forgot" carries a lot of weight in this family, and over their heads, Stan sends a concerned look Ford's way. They all forgot a lot, but...that was such a big thing for all of them. It's been a looming threat in the back of Stan's mind since they washed ashore.

But, they can't do much about that right now. He gives Dipper and Mabel a beat to have their crying hug by themselves, and then tugs the two of them close for a group hug, and gestures Ford over.

"You got it back now though," he says. "I mean, you probably didn't want it, but you got it back."

Stan knows exactly how that is, which isn't a thing most people can say.

'Forgot' does, indeed, carry a lot of uncomfortable weight for this family. And for Dipper to just forget something like last October? Yeah, he glances at Stan just as Stan glances at him, the concern in Stan's expression mirrored in his own.

But it'll have to wait. Making sure Dipper and Mabel are holding it together as well as can be expected is more important for the moment. Stan initiates the group hug and Ford doesn't hesitate to join this time. He doesn't have the same words of reassurance Stan does, but he's at least got something.

"And now we know what to look for in the future."

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

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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