Chapter Text
The phone never stopped ringing. Dipper eyed his buzzing cell with trepidation sludging through his veins. He knew what it would be. What they all were. He couldn't sleep anymore. Couldn't call anyone. Couldn't make the calls stop. Dipper Pines was slowly wearing down.
Months had passed since he had defied the 'almighty' dream demon known as Bill Cipher and killed the... entity that he only knew as Bright Eyes. The nightmarish blur of twisted time and muddled dreams had begun to scab over, but still the infection lingered. Every shadow was a twisted aberration, every light was his inevitable demise. Dipper didn't own clocks anymore. He could barely muster the will to go downstairs, or look out his window. The surge of confidence that came with regaining his most precious memories had faded into obscurity, and left him a shivering, self loathing wreck. To think that he was braver as a child than as a grown man, he mused bitterly.
As a result he'd poured himself into his work, words spilling onto paper and word documents, chapters materializing as if from thin air. But as time went on, everything grew bleak. His beloved characters met with terrible fates, heroic ventures ended in tragedy, happy endings were torn asunder. The tonal shift was drastic and abrupt, giving his stories a disjointed, juxtaposed flavor. He considered scrapping everything, but the thought of it was a new kind of terror. One that meant he wasn't capable of pursuing his one remaining purpose in life. That he was a failure before he could even try. So he began drawing away from his work as quickly as he had thrown himself at it.
Dipper enshrouded himself in solitude. His sister was the only one close enough to worry, and he managed to appease her with occasional ventures into the world beyond his four walls. His jokes fell flat and his laughter rang hollow, but he'd never been very funny in the first place. He sat in the dark, eyes red and twitching as he attempted to focus on something, anything other than his growing paranoia. He could still feel the presence of something locked in with him, and he could barely even convince himself that Bright Eyes was dead. The body had disappeared, left without a trace. But Dipper had kept the eyes. Preserved them in a jar and kept them on his desk, so he would always know. Even nightmares can bleed.
His isolation was both a blessing and a curse. He only truly felt safe when he was alone, unseen and ignored. But he felt painfully vulnerable as well, trapped in the house he'd been hunted in. He'd considered moving, but that was an expense he couldn't afford. There was only so much gold they could dig up in Gravity Falls, and his tentative steps back into employment had ceased altogether. He could barely look at his own reflection anymore, let alone hold a steady job. His severe lack of marketable skills and growing insomnia weren't helping either. So he sat, and he waited for... something.
And then the phone calls came. He'd only answered a few times, the first from ignorance and the rest from morbid curiosity. They changed every time. Threats of mutilation from monotone voices, endless laughter that blared in his ear, cosmic sounds that were beyond the comprehension of human beings; they all tormented him.
Dipper didn't dream anymore. On the rare few occasions he managed sleep, it was quick and light. Blissful nothing embraced him for all of a moment before he was blinking himself awake, eyes burning and head pounding. Even if he could, he didn't want to dream ever again, for he knew what awaited him in the prison of his own unconsciousness. Bill Cipher.
Dipper knew that everything was that triangle's fault. Every otherworldly phone call, every sleepless night, every dark thought that bled through his fingertips was due to the Eye of Providence. But he knew this was hardly the extent of Bill's ire. The lack of visitors to his fractured mindscape was a sign that the demon was busy with something else, something that would surely prove to be... unfavorable. But there was nothing he could do. Within the limited scope of Gravity Falls, he'd at least had familiarity on his side. But out here, in the vast nothing of the outside world, Dipper was lost. Tossed aside once his usefulness had dried up, left adrift upon an inky sea like the flotsam he was.
And so Dipper sat, and waited for his end to come.