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Coffee from the overpriced, perpetually crowded campus cafe that seemingly had no understanding of how little money its haggard clientele had to work with cost an arm and a leg.
Dipper hadn’t slept in a little over thirty-six hours.
That was reason enough to go against his better judgment, which was impaired by sleep deprivation anyway, and spend almost six bucks on a black coffee loaded with so many shots of espresso that the barista who took his order actually made him sign a waiver absolving the cafe of guilt if he had a heart attack before handing him his coffee.
The same cup of coffee that was now staining the tiles in front of him in a sad, dark brown pool.
A little over ten feet away his dream demon boyfriend was staring through the shop window like a creeper, smirking at him and his plight.
Dipper stared down at his spilled coffee, then looked up at Bill. Back down at the coffee. Behind him the barista drawled “You wanna buy another?” in a voice that oozed disinterest.
Dipper didn’t want to buy another cup of coffee, so he politely declined (told her to shove it), cleaned up the mess (stepped over it), peacefully departed (stormed out of the cafe) and proceeded to engage in pleasant conversation with his significant other by suggesting that the dream demon go back to the Mindscape and get bent, albeit not necessarily in that order.
Thus Dipper’s long week of midterm exams as a first semester freshman drew to a close.
-
“I’m busy. This is due at midnight."
It was the third time that night that he’d been forced to repeat himself, and Dipper was beginning to get annoyed, coupled with the fact that he still had close to a thousand words of sociology to churn out with only an hour and a half left to submit it.
"It’s not the apocalypse if it’s a few minutes late, is it?"
"Yes!” Dipper snapped, whirling around to glare at the demon lounging on his bed, attempting to coax him into it as he had been for the past two hours. “Yes it is! I can’t submit late assignments for this class!"
Bill blinked at him, as if he didn’t understand. ”…but it’s not the actual apocalypse.“
Dipper threw a dictionary at him. It was a paperback, and his aim had never improved so he missed by a long shot, but it seemed to get the point across.
Bill stuck out his tongue at him like a whiny child and rolled over, sulking, but at least he shut the hell up so Dipper could get back to work.
Mabel had warned him about taking the maximum amount of hours his first semester, well aware of his limitations, but he’d dismissed her advice as a reflection of her own insecurity and signed up for seven classes anyway. It was a hubris-driven mistake, as was allowing Drop Day to pass without unloading at least one of them, and now he was locked into 21 hours of hell a week until he either died of exhaustion or reached December with at least a quarter of his sanity intact, whichever came first.
At first his course load hadn’t seemed like an impending nightmare. Calculus and Chemistry were pretty easy (if a bit time-consuming), the mandatory health and public speaking classes were mostly busy work, the English class needed to kick off his major was being taught with an emphasis on science fiction, and even though they required a little more effort Psychology and Sociology were at least interesting. Even better, if he managed to get his core classes out of the way quickly then he could start in on the electives, some of which looked pretty awesome.
That was the first week. By the second week he had a better understanding of why Mabel had advised him as she did. Even when the material wasn’t difficult it still added up to a lot of time spent in class and a lot of time spent outside of class working on stuff for class.
The fact that Bill was being ridiculously clingy didn’t help at all.
Granted, Dipper hadn’t had much free time to devote to anything aside from school, homework, and helping Stan with the reduced hours at the Mystery Shack, so he could understand where the demon was coming from, but he was only human and could only do so much. Bill either didn’t have any concept of or little to no respect for higher education, so he’d spent the first half of the semester being an unmitigated ass whenever the mood struck, hiding Dipper’s books or draping himself around him and refusing to let go while he was working on something or popping up on campus in weird places to screw with him. Sometimes it was amusing, and for the most part it provided a much needed momentary distraction, but it was crunch time now and Dipper had no time for a needy dream demon trying to lure him into the woods for potentially nefarious purposes.
It had occurred to Dipper that perhaps the demon was simply lonely and too full of himself to admit that, but he didn’t have time to worry about that either. If Bill had spent however long he’d existed without him he could deal with a single week.
He resumed working on his sociology paper, lamenting the fact that it was only Monday and he had four days left of papers, exams, and projects left to slog through.
As the week progressed and his energy level plummeted, Bill continued to be no help at all, popping in while he was trying to study and either commenting on the pointlessness of it all or criticizing the source material for whatever he was working on. No matter how often Dipper blew up at him he seemed to enjoy any amount of attention whatsoever, especially if it resulted in things being awkward.
Tuesday’s list of assignments included a seven minute speech in Public Speaking. This would have gone without incident if he hadn’t looked up halfway during his speech about the scientific community’s bias against cryptozoology to see Bill seated in the back of the room, leering at him. He was apparently invisible to his classmates, who didn’t understand why Dipper stopped mid-sentence and immediately shifted into an angry rant about demonology. They seemed to enjoy the increased passion with which he infused his revised speech, though, and it earned him a high B in the end, losing a few points only because he went over the time limit while describing the various methods of obtaining holy water. It also gained him a potential new friend, a pale looking kid that may or may not have been a vampire that found Dipper’s speech very interesting.
Afterwards his professor applauded him on his ability to maintain eye contact with the class, unaware of just who he was making eye contact with the entire time.
He declined to tell Bill, knowing the demon wouldn’t shut up about it if he did.
He had health and Calculus midterms on Wednesday, and ended up studying for them for several hours out on the ledge after walking in on a stark naked dream demon just chilling on his bed offering to help him study for both of them. He looked both bewildered and put out when Dipper informed him that he didn’t need help with the former and didn’t understand how Bill proposed to help with the latter, ignoring the decidedly lewd explanation that followed.
Thursday marked the descent into hell itself, as well as the hours of unrest. With two actual exams and two papers due by the end of the night there was no time to sleep at all. He ran through the entire supply of coffee in the Mystery Shack, rolling his eyes at Stan’s jokes about how Dipper looked closer to the grave than he was and stopping himself when he realized he was chewing on his shirt collar in a haze of exhaustion. At this point Bill seemed to be just as irritated with Dipper as Dipper was with him, but that didn’t stop him from hanging around messing with things, disregarding Dipper’s fervent requests for him to stop touching that and leave that alone.
By the time Friday afternoon rolled around the fight that had been brewing for the past few days boiled over when Dipper confronted him in front of the coffee shop, red in the face and too mad to care about possibly causing a scene.
Thankfully there weren’t too many other students milling around but the couple that were turned to look at him when he yelled "What’s your problem?”
Bill looked at him impassively, as if he were the mature party in the situation. “Whatever do you mean, Pine Tree?”
The nickname only served to make Dipper angrier. “You know exactly what I mean! I told you I had midterms this week and you’ve spent the entire time bothering me and being a jerk!”
The wounded expression on the demon’s face only lasted for a split second before fading. “Bothering you? I’ve been trying to help!”
“How does distracting me help? Do you have any idea how hard it is to study for calculus with someone poking you in the back of the head?”
Bill shrugged. “I’ve never studied for calculus. It’ll be obsolete in about a century anyway.”
Dipper wanted to ask him how he knew that or if he was just talking out of his ass, but he filed it away for later.
Bill sighed dramatically. “You know, I just wanted to spend time with you, Pine Tree, and honestly I’m feeling a little unappreciated right now.”
“Good,” Dipper retorted. “Because you aren’t.”
That may have been a low blow. The flippant expression remained but it flickered once again. “Am I really bothering you that much, Pine Tree?”
“Yes!” Somewhere in the rational part of his mind Dipper knew he was being just a little harsh but that part was also too tired to exert itself much. “I know you don’t care or understand but this,” he gestured towards the campus buildings, “is important to me!”
The demon stared at him critically for a moment before responding. “Humans place value on the most trivial things.”
“Then maybe you shouldn’t be involved with one!” Dipper growled, shoving past him and heading off to his next class with a raging headache and an unpleasant feeling in his stomach. He forced himself not to look back.
-
For the first time in awhile his room was dark and empty when Dipper dragged himself home, and it continued to be when he flopped over on his bed and stared up at the ceiling drearily. He’d gotten used to being pounced on whenever he did so, and as stressed out and unhappy as he was having someone warm to curl up against for a few minutes before finishing the terrible week up would have been nice.
That small part of him from earlier was now asserting itself a little more strongly, and Dipper resisted the urge to to give in to the fear that he might have broken something he couldn’t fix. Granted, Bill had deserved it, but maybe he really couldn’t expect the demon to understand what he was going through or what learning and eventually graduating meant to him. It wasn’t the first time that he’d worried about or been faced with the fact that Bill wasn’t human and didn’t hold a very high opinion of his species anyway, but the issue hadn’t raised its ugly head so violently before. Had they ever had an actual fight, something real instead of the consistent stream of bickering that was essentially a staple of their relationship? Aside from the couple of times earlier on where the demon had tried to kill him, of course, but that was water under the bridge by now. Dipper couldn’t remember if there was anything other than that, and it didn’t make him feel any better.
After a good half hour of expecting Bill to show up he sat up, sighing, and headed over his desk to finish up and submit his last psychology assignment before passing out. His notes were spread out all over the place, thorough but completely useless to his tired eyes, and he struggled to recall the various functions of the structures comprising the human brain. Having an open note quiz didn’t help much when your body was too worn out to read.
“You’ve got those mixed up. This one’s motor control, not memory."
Dipper started, glancing up at the man standing over him and inspecting the diagram he was working on. Several questions floated through his head, but the only one that managed to make it through was an incredulous "How do you know?”
Bill tapped the crown of his head. “I’m a dream demon, kid. Your brain’s like a playground to me. Of course I know my way around.”
Dipper watched in surprise as he pulled up the other chair and sat down next to him, placing a steaming cup with the name of the campus cafe printed on the side on the desk next to his laptop. In the space where the barista would have written his name there was a tiny, crudely drawn pine tree in green Sharpie. Dipper wasted no time in taking a sip, equally surprised to find that it was exactly what he always ordered, the way he liked it. He looked over at Bill gratefully; the demon folded his arms over his chest with feigned indifference and took another look at the screen.
“Only because it’s important to you,” he said; it went unspoken that the you in question was reserved for Dipper and only Dipper with the rest of humanity excluded. “The one in red interprets speech. It helps you meatbags form all the stupid sounds that you make, and the one in green recognizes those stupid sounds."
"What about this one?”
“Emotional responses. Like fear. Especially fear.” The demon’s eye gleamed in a manner that would have been unnerving to anyone else but Dipper, who smiled (tired but suddenly perfectly content), sipped his coffee, and sat back to listen to the strangest lecture on the human brain ever delivered by an incredibly powerful being that hijacked them on a regular basis.