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It’s been an eventful day, to say the least. Ford leans back against the rickety wooden chair, peering at his great-nephew from across the kitchen table. The kid handled things well today, he thinks, the warm ball of pride in his chest negated only by the memory of fear in Dipper’s eyes. The memory gun had trembled in Dipper’s grasp as the boy backed up, voice shaking violently as he accused Ford of being possessed by Bill— and it was Ford’s fault, anyway, for not sharing that history sooner, for letting his guard down and falling asleep in the lab, for being tricked in the first place.
Telling Dipper about his history with Bill had hurt. His words kept feeling like they were getting stuck in his throat. He’d pared it down to the basics: the summoning, the flattery, the portal, the deal. Fiddleford. The confrontation. It’d be fun to watch you try. Cute, even! He’d left out how furious Bill had been at his attempts to hide the journals; the nights he’d spent fending off sleep by any means necessary only to slip and lose consciousness and wake up in a heap at the bottom of the stairs with fresh wounds and blood pooling in his eye. Dipper didn’t need to know all the sordid details, not that Ford could have mustered up the courage to tell him. And besides, the kid had read his third journal— Ford’s pretty sure he got the picture.
For now, Dipper is sitting opposite him, still a little pale from the events of the day, wringing his hands in silence. Ford can’t imagine he looks any better— not after seeing his betrayer in his dreams for the first time in thirty years, and then talking about his follies for the first time since… however long it’s been since he spoke to Jheselbraum the Unswerving, he’s almost certain. But the sun casts a warm glow on the kitchen table and the soda the kid grabs from the fridge for them tastes sort of like the soup from Dimension 12@&, and Ford is maybe 70% sure that they’re going to be okay, which is more than he usually is.
Dipper breaks the silence with a groan. “I’m so embarrassed about earlier. I'm such an idiot.” He brings his head down to his soda can, hiding his face.
Ford frowns. It’s not Dipper’s fault— it’s his, for not telling him about his history with Bill. Dipper knows that, right?
“From now on, no more secrets between us. We're not the first two idiots to be tricked by Bill, boy. But if we work together, we could be the last.” He reaches out and lifts Dipper’s hat up a little. It has the intended effect— the kid raises his head to meet Ford’s eyes, and Ford can’t help but smile.
His smile fades, however, into what he hopes is a calm, reassuring expression when he begins to speak again.
“Dipper… if I may…”
He doesn’t want to ask but he does, he has to. It’s been eating at him since the kids recognized Bill at the family meeting that morning and said they’d come across him before. A living sock puppet, Mabel had said, and the phrasing makes Ford feel sick.
He clears his throat. Dipper is watching him attentively. “How did Bill trick you?”
Dipper breaks eye contact with him almost immediately, shifting uncomfortably in his seat. “Does it matter?”
“Does it— yes, it matters!” Ford snaps instinctively, all heat and no anger, and he takes a breath to calm himself when he sees Dipper still refusing to meet his gaze. “It’s not your fault, kid. He’s been manipulating minds for millennia. But if we’re to beat him… the more information we have, the better.” It’s true— if Ford knows how his great-nephew was tricked, he can lessen the chances of it happening to him or another kid. It wouldn’t hurt to know how much Bill has on Dipper anyway— if the boy is the demon’s new favourite plaything, Ford needs to know about it so he can stop it.
“I won’t force you to share what happened,” he continues, “but you heard about how Bill tricked me, and I was a grown man. I’m certain you have nothing to be ashamed of.”
It takes a moment, and Ford doesn’t quite understand how he got through all that without his voice trembling, and then suddenly Dipper is nodding, jerkily and repetitively.
“You told me, so I should tell you,” Dipper says, still not meeting his eyes. It’s not what Ford was aiming for, but he’ll take it.
Ford tries to sound as gentle as possible. “Mabel said he turned you into … a sock puppet?”
As soon as the words leave his mouth, they sound wrong. Dipper flinches before nodding again and beginning to ramble.
“She was putting on a sock opera and she’d made all these puppets and she promised me she would help me figure out the password to the laptop but she got distracted—“
“Wait,” Ford says, holding out his hand in a six-fingered gesture for the kid to stop. “What laptop? Do you mean the one from the bunker? You went in the bunker?”
Fear grips his heart. Dipper at least has the decency to look ashamed.
“I thought it would have answers,” he mumbles. “You know, about the author.”
His terror regarding the shapeshifter and the sudden realization this is his fault hits Ford like a one-two punch, and he gapes for a second, reeling, before trying to contain his emotions.
“I suppose that’s fair,” he chokes out, pushing down his fears about the shapeshifter getting loose. That can wait. What’s important, now, is the scared kid in front of him. “So you were trying to guess the password?”
Dipper looks at the table. “I stayed up for hours every night that week trying to crack it. Bill…” The name hangs in the air for a moment before Dipper swallows hard and looks back up at his great-uncle with newfound confidence. “He showed up once when I fell asleep on the roof. He said he’d been watching me. That he liked me. He offered his help in exchange for a favour. I didn’t take it. I didn’t trust him.”
Ford nods, processing. “That wasn’t the first time you met him, then.”
“This kid Gideon summoned him earlier this summer. He was trying to steal the Shack and wanted Bill to steal the code to the safe from Grunkle Stan’s mind,” Dipper explains, almost casually.
Ford’s heart drops to his feet. Horror constricts around his throat. “He was in Stan’s mind?” He breathes out, suddenly aware of the tension in his body.
“We stopped him,” Dipper says quickly, as if to reassure his great-uncle, but it doesn’t do much to quell Ford’s anxiety. “I mean, Gideon stole the Shack anyway, but it’s like Mabel said. We defeated him with kittens and the power of imagination.”
Kittens and the power of imagination. Ford feels a little hysterical. His worst enemy was in his brother’s mind, and as much as he’s angry at his brother, as much as he wants his name and his life back, he wouldn’t wish that on anyone. Especially Stan. But the kids saved him. They beat Bill twice. (Even if Ford doesn’t have an explanation for the second time yet.)
He presses a hand on the table to steady himself, finding his words again. “I’m… impressed,” he says finally, and then hates how that throws him back into his high school principal’s office, hates how much he sounds like Pa. He shakes it off. “So he offered to help you and you said no. What then?”
It’s Dipper’s turn to pause. Ford can almost feel the panic surging within him, and he reaches out towards the kid, placing his hand on his shoulder in a non-verbal gesture of you’re okay.
When Dipper speaks, it’s quiet, and he doesn’t meet Ford’s eyes. “I kept trying to guess the password. The day of the sock opera, I fell asleep at the laptop and when I woke up it said it was going to self-destruct in five minutes and I only had one attempt left and then—”
“Bill swooped in and said he could help,” Ford finishes easily, cutting off the boy’s anxious ramble. He peers at Dipper. Tries to imagine the kid’s small hand engulfed in blue flames. “You made a deal.”
Dipper swallows, shrugging Ford’s hand off his shoulder and drawing his knees up to his chest despite still sitting on the kitchen chair. That can’t be comfortable, Ford thinks, but he doesn’t question it. “I… yeah.” His voice breaks. “I made a deal.”
They sit in that silence for a moment, and Ford is considering saying something like I understand or what happened next or what did he want when Dipper speaks again, his voice pitched with panic.
“I was sleep-deprived and cornered and panicking and I knew I shouldn’t trust him but the timer was running out and he said — he said— he said all he wanted was a puppet.”
That, Ford knows all too well.
“I didn’t even want to give him one,” Dipper continues tearfully. “Mabel worked so hard on them, but I was desperate so I gave in and I asked him which one he wanted and he said—”
“You.”
Ford takes in a shuddering breath after the word leaves his mouth. This child — his great-nephew, his blood — got used by the most cruel entity Ford has ever encountered in all his years researching weirdness and travelling the multiverse. Dipper isn’t even thirteen and yet he knows firsthand the horrors of possession.
“I’m sorry, Dipper,” Ford speaks quietly, watching the kid stare at the table between them. “I know … intimately what it’s like to lose your body like that. To not know what’s happened or what you’ve done until you’re finally yourself again, it’s …”
He trails off, unable to find the words, but Dipper is looking at him again, and he’s … frowning?
“What? No, it wasn’t like that. I was there,” the kid says, voice shaking but sounding certain. “He yanked me out of my body and I was in the mindscape. I— I watched him take a joyride in my body. I had to use a sock puppet as a vessel to talk to Mabel so she would keep the journal away from him and get him out of my body.”
A wave of nausea crashes over Ford and he can’t help but swipe his hand over his face, hiding for a moment as he processes exactly what this means. “He… I…” None of his words are working. He thinks he might throw up. Finally, he chokes out: “He wanted the journal?”
“He wanted to destroy it,” Dipper admits, shifting in his seat. “Said I was ‘getting too close to figuring things out.’ I guess it was about the portal, and, well, you.”
Him. Ford’s heart keeps a rapid beat of yourfault yourfault yourfault. “Right,” he says, unsure of how he’s still managing to speak when he’s pretty sure he’s dying. He forces himself to take in a breath. Focus. He knows it’s his fault now; he can wait until later to beat himself up for it. What matters is Dipper. Dipper, who was possessed by Bill. Dipper, who was so terrified of the dream demon that he tried to wipe Ford’s memory. Dipper, who is looking at him tentatively from across the table, and the only thing Ford can place in his eyes is anxiety.
He blurts it out before he can think the question through. “Did he hurt you?”
Dipper squirms at the question. That’s a yes. Ford feels sick. He knows, firsthand, what Bill is capable of. He has the scars to prove it. Waking up to a gash on his forehead dripping blood and asking his friend if he could please be more careful with his body, and Bill laughed, pitchy and jovial, and said sorry, IQ, I just need more practice piloting this thing! And then the injuries kept building, accidental stab wound after accidental burn, and after Fiddleford fell through the portal and he’d confronted his muse in the mindscape he woke up covered in blood, triangle-shaped cuts littering his skin and his ankle twisted at a grossly unnatural angle, and he could hear Bill echoing in his head: geez, Fordsy, you fleshbags are so fragile! It makes you all the more fun to play with. Pain is hilarious! The injuries had grown in severity, Bill discovering new ways to hurt him without having to hide it as a ‘research accident’, and Ford’s insistence on not sleeping only slowed the healing of his wounds.
Ford blinks hard against the phantom pains that crop up across his body as he remembers, vividly, the injuries Bill had inflicted. Across the table, Dipper averts his eyes, twisting his mouth in a knot and rubbing at his left arm.
“I…” the kid starts and Ford focuses his sharp gaze on him. “… kind of? But I’m fine, it’s not a big deal, just a couple of scratches and stab wounds and stuff.”
The world goes dark around the edges. All of a sudden, Ford can’t breathe. “You were stabbed?”
“Lightly!” Dipper squeaks, like that makes it all better. “With some forks! Don’t freak out, it’s fine, it wasn’t that bad!”
Ford presses his palms into his eyes and breathes. Dipper was stabbed. Bill stabbed Dipper. Bill stabbed Dipper using his own body and Dipper had to watch. Ford feels all sorts of nauseous, but one fact hovers above his churning stomach and spinning mind: this is his fault.
“Dipper,” he says, removing his hands from his face, “I’m sorry. You should never have gotten involved in any of this. If I hadn’t— if I hadn’t been foolish enough to summon him, you wouldn’t have gotten hurt. We wouldn’t all be in danger.”
Dipper frowns. “That’s kind of stupid,” he says and then makes a noise that’s half-shriek and half-groan. “Sorry! I just, I mean—“ the kid stammers over himself a few times before taking a breath and trying again. “You said that you summoned him because you thought it would help you learn more about the weirdness of Gravity Falls, right?”
“Yes,” Ford says slowly, not sure where he’s going with this. “But there was writing on the cave wall, warning me of the danger. I shouldn’t have—”
“But you’re a scientist,” Dipper insists, and Ford can’t help but admire the kid’s gumption to cut him off. “Scientists stop at nothing to get answers, even when it’s dangerous or scary. You couldn’t have known that your research would have led to this. I was so desperate for answers about the laptop and the journal that I made a deal. If I was you and I found those incantations… I would have summoned him too. It’s not your fault that he took advantage of your curiosity and desperation, Great-Uncle Ford.”
His gaze is steady on Ford, his words sincere. Ford doesn’t exactly agree with what he’s saying, but is totally unprepared for what he says next. “It’s not my fault either.”
“Of course it’s not!” Ford exclaims immediately, shocked that the thought would cross Dipper’s mind. “But Dipper, my boy, you have to understand the difference here. You’re a child. You got involved with something greater than you could comprehend because of my journals and a laptop you found in my bunker.” Ford swallows. “It’s not your fault for getting hurt or getting tricked. It’s mine.”
Dipper looks at him, a little confused, and says: “I thought you got it for a second until the end.”
Ford frowns. “What?”
“It’s not my fault,” Dipper says, sounding sure, even though he’s still folded in on himself and rubbing away at his left arm. “It’s not yours either. It’s his. It’s Bill’s. He chose to trick you. He chose to hurt you. He’s an all-knowing dream demon and you’re just … what could you do?”
Ford gets the sense that Dipper stopped talking about him by the way the kid curls up in his chair even further, gaze fixed on his Pitt Cola can like it personally wronged him. He’s hurting, Ford realizes, and he’s known this all along but it’s starkly clear to him now as the kid talks about blame and demons and scratches away at what Ford is pretty sure are puncture wounds, which makes him feel sick all over again. He could continue this conversation all day, insist it’s his fault, he was warned and didn’t listen, he was too easily flattered and should have known that he wasn’t special — but that won’t help Dipper. And what Ford wants more than anything is to help Dipper.
“You’re right.”
His concession is forced, but Dipper’s head snaps up, wide brown eyes meeting his.
“It’s his fault,” Ford says. “Not yours.” He pauses, for a moment, breathes through what feels like an obvious lie. “Not mine.”
Dipper smiles a little at that, and the heavy weight on Ford’s heart starts to lift. Ford leans forward, like he’s sharing a secret, and tries to imbue his voice with confidence. “And we’re going to make sure he doesn’t trick anyone else.”
The kid’s face lights up for a moment before settling quickly into a frown. “But how? I broke the machine! Now we have no way to protect the Shack.”
“Did someone say unicorn hair?!” Mabel shouts, barreling towards the table in a blur of rainbow and glitter. She smacks down unicorn hair on the kitchen table and Ford can’t help but gasp. She looks a little worse for wear, as do her friends behind her, but she did it.
Ford exchanges a brief, fond glance with Dipper as the girls pour out their haul on the table, chattering about the unicorns. The relief in his nephew’s eyes is palpable. Mabel came through, because of course she did. They’re safe. And Ford is going to make sure Dipper never has to worry about Bill ever again.