Chapter Text
Drink up one more time
And I'll make you mine
Keep you apart,
Deep in my heart
Separate from the rest,
Where I like you the best
And keep the things you forgot
All that glitters is not gold; cider is, perhaps, but cider does not taste like the final breath of a star and fire and its dying fumes. Dipper is sure of it, but it is smooth all the same and smolders in the pit of his stomach just like any alcohol would. He's repulsed by the fact that he likes the taste, and even further by himself when he tips the glass back to catch any lingering droplets.
"Don't look so sour, Pine Tree. It's supposed to be sweet! It is, isn't it?" A hand clasped in cashmere sweeps past his cheek to steal away the devil's nectar that Dipper so badly craves. The glass is empty like a honeycomb, all the golden spice gone. It had been sweet.
"No. It tastes worse than Grunkle Stan's socks. It's gross." He's lying. "Can I have a Pitt Cola instead or are you going to deny me that too?" He licks his lips. Tastes like stardust and sugar.
Maybe Bill's laughter is what's golden and glittering. Dipper doesn't trust gold anymore though and venom drips drains into his glare when Bill doubles over, balancing against the bars of his cell. "Aw, Pine Tree, it cracks me up when you think you can lie to me. ME, of all people. Well, demons and immortal beings technically." A casual flick of his wrist waves away all the nonsense. His ichor iris bore into the boy's with a startling intensity. "I am a God, after all."
Dipper would have cowered if he wasn't entranced by that sole eye - the colour that is so much like thievery and beauty and deceit. It is the colour of stars, if the stars had been snatched from the sockets of the night and slathered in alluring honey. It is the colour of lies and a ticking time bomb, the lifespan of a honeyed star soon to erupt in a rage of fire and chaos. It is a colour that he loathes yet is drawn to, same as the golden liquid he drank and yearns for.
What the fuck was in that drink, he thinks. But he doesn't have time to think, because Bill's yanking the collar of his shirt and kissing his lips with words and bruises between the cell bars.
"I am your God, Pine Tree. And you can only love me," Bill coos, "Not anyone else. All mine. You're all mine~"
Funny how Dipper gets drunk off his lips instead of the (perhaps) cider.
-⋆-
"If I was going to create a figment of my imagination to talk to it'd probably be Mabel." Talking to himself is drawing a pretty fine line, isn't it? "It would probably be the same if I started hallucinating too. How long is it until you start to see hallucinations from dehydration and starvation?" He counts off his fingers, one, two, three, all too blurry to see.
"Can't remember." Dipper also doesn't remember when addiction replaced the marrow of his bones and the beating of his heart. One, two, three glasses in three days too blurry to think of, and he was hooked.
He needs that cider (as he thought of it), needs it as much as oxygen and Vitamin C and A and his sister and his family. If he can't have those, then the cider will be plenty enough for his malnourished body and fuzzy, cotton ball brain. However, Bill hasn't visited in days. He's pretty sure at least a week has passed, all without the necessities of Dipper Pines. That can't be healthy.
"Oh my God. I'm going to die." Panic would have seized every individual blood cell in his veins at that realization but Dipper's skeleton eyes are already sliding shut, like a lid over a coffin before it's lowered into its grave. "...Fuck you, Bill."
That would show him.
At least Cipher won't win this time.
"You called, my beloved Pine Tree?" Cashmere fingers sweetly crush his rose petal dreams of funerals and the possibility of an afterlife, caressing along the line of his jaw and chapped lips. "Whoops! Looks like I forgot that you need something of sustenance to actually survive! My Pine Tree," He sighs, "So fragile. Here kid. I'll kiss it better."
In a state of delirium while teetering between death's embrace and a God's kiss Dipper furrows his brow and says, "I'm not a kid." He would have added "I'm twenty three and just let me die, asshole" but a cashmere hand ghosts across his cheek and then cashmere lips are upon his own.
Dipper figures this is what life and death tastes like: wine and cream and and wild honey fresh from a beehive, and blood and sea water and the death that comes with autumn. He can taste it as Bill Cipher kisses him, tangling his fingers in his thicket hair.
Hunger has strange effects, Dipper discovers, because he's kissing him back, not because he wants to but because his hunger demands it. From this kiss the rhythm returns to his pulse, his bones strengthen, his chewed up, bitten cheeks numb, and his hatred for Cipher returns tenfold.
But Bill must have the elixir of life in his veins, otherwise Dipper wouldn't deepen their kiss and breathe in his breath until he can muster the energy to shove at the demon's chest. Bill chuckles, low and throaty and satisfied, and vanishes.
Fucking magic.
He wishes he felt awful, like he'd just drowned in the abyss of the deep blue sea, at the very bottom of the ocean floor with salt in his lungs; instead, his lungs might as well be honey combs and his blood honey bees. Vitality hums throughout his body and Dipper is sickened by it - his body may feel sugar-coated, but his mind knows better.
Unable to do anything though, same as it has been for the past month, Dipper simply remains curled up in a corner of his cell. He wonders how he ended up here.
How everything went wrong. He's not sure.