Ordering the headstone was like a punch in the gut.

One minute Anna was fine – drifting through a dreamlike day by day life, perhaps, but at least able to face her family and friends' condolences with dry eyes and a vaguely grateful smile – the next she could barely catch her breath as she struggled to finish writing her son's name.

Her son, her baby boy, and here she was commissioning someone to engrave his name and dates and a short message on a granite slab.

He's not really dead, she tried to remind herself. She thought of Mabel conversing with thin air, cold spots in the house, the occasional levitating item as he sought to control his sporadic grasp on reality. He's still here.

But organizing a funeral – empty casket, with nothing to bury save a picture and a scorched blue and white hat – steadily yanked at every thought and instinct to the contrary. No parent should have to make these arrangements, not after a mere twelve years of happiness that now seemed too mundane and full of wasted moments.

For a moment Anna contemplated cancelling everything and just telling everybody…

What? The truth?

My son actually isn't dead – you see, when all this supernatural stuff, this 'Transcendence' happened, he fought off the demon responsible for it and became…

No. No, before the Transcendence that would just be a quick ticket to a psychiatrist's office. Now? Anna wasn't sure what it would be now, with gnomes rooting through restaurant dumpsters and real live fairies pulling faces at gardeners, but it almost certainly wouldn't be good. Visions of priests and holy men lining up at her door with bells and candles and vats of holy water filled her mind.

Would those things even work on demons? On Dipper?

The holy water turned to acid in her imagination and she shuddered.

No. He was alive, but he was changed. Totally, irrevocably, permanently changed.

And to the law, to humanity, and for all intents and purposes…he was dead.

Anna Pines placed her order and left the engraver's shop with bleary eyes.

Mark hadn't reacted much to the idea of his son being a demon…not at first.

It was such a big thing, he supposed. It was like being hit over the head by something heavy; he hadn't been entirely sure what had happened, but he was still standing, so he staggered onward. Sure, half of the back seat had been empty on the drive home, but as long as he kept his eyes on the road and pretended that the one-sided nature of Mabel's conversation was due to Dipper burying himself in a book and mumbling under the constant highway hum of the car…well, it was manageable in an odd way. And if he didn't really see much of his son anymore, couldn't it be because the boy was on the cusp of adolescence?

But while his subconscious could pretend and mostly ignore or overlook the big things (the invisibility, the funeral arrangements, even the memory of those alien eyes in his child's face, peering up from the blue-lit summoning circle scribbled on the floor of the Mystery Shack) the little ones continued to trip him up every day.

He'd catch himself thinking of his twins and how soon it would be that they would enter high school and realize, no, only one now. His mind would casually glance over the possibilities of the future, as it had done since before they were even born, and he'd stumble over the sudden realization that Dipper wouldn't be attending prom (however grudgingly it may have been). He wouldn't bring home a girlfriend or a fiancé years down the road (would he? How did demons and romance work, if at all?). Hell, unless demons went through puberty – Mark realized one morning as he scraped the night's stubble from his chin – he wouldn't even be teaching Dipper how to shave.

All his little plans, all the things he had been looking forward to seeing Dipper experience for the first time, all the tidbits of advice and knowledge he had stored over the years…gone. Just mental stumbling blocks, reminding him over and over of what had been lost.

And he had no idea how to build new plans, no idea what the future had in store now. A human life, marked by human puberty and human schooling and human careers and love and growth – that he understood. Demons were a blank spot, and no matter what he tried to research (quietly, and only in the safety of his home while praying Mabel or, worse, Dipper wouldn't find out and see how woefully ignorant their father really was) he couldn't find anything more than rank speculation on names and natures and powers and it was all frightening without giving him so much as an inkling as to whether or not pre-teen Dream Demons needed the birds and the bees explained and warnings about irresponsible actions issued (lest unexpected demon or half-demon infants result and oh god was that even possible either?).

Little by little his uncertainties and confusions piled up on him until one day he broke down in near-hysterics at work. He couldn't speak. He could barely breathe. And while his coworkers and boss bundled him into a private office and got him coffee and offered the rest of the day off and a ride home ("This is a difficult time for you, we understand. If there's anything you need, time or space, just let us know and we'll help you get back on your feet. We are so sorry for your loss.") he drowned in the silent desperation of a man who had seen all his preparations fall apart and had no idea which way to turn now.

He had no idea what to do, how to help his son.

What kind of father was he?

There was a child-sized figure in a black suit in her kitchen. Anna stopped short in the doorway, mind scrambling to make sense of what she was seeing. Just then Dipper turned around, wide eyed, caught literally with his hand in the cookie jar.

"Oh. Um…hi, mom?" he said. His voice was off, almost as though it carried a faint buzz of static, or as if he were speaking into a whirring fan.

"You're…solid," she said, unable to think of anything else.

"Uh, yeah. Getting better at it. Mabel wanted some cookies, so…"

"Dinner's in a couple of hours," Anna said automatically. Dipper's dark eyes darted between her and the cookie jar and she immediately wondered if perhaps Mabel had struck some sort of bargain for this errand and what, caught between a deal and his mother's orders, Dipper would now choose to obey—"but I suppose just a couple wouldn't hurt."

Two cookies were withdrawn and wrapped in a napkin. Dipper's eyes never quite met Anna's. The silence grew stifling; she had to break it somehow, it was too strange to live with.

"I haven't seen you in a suit since you were six."

Dipper looked down at himself. His free hand drifted up to fidget with the triangular button holding the tailcoat closed.

"Grandma Ruth's funeral?" he guessed.

"Yes." She smiled, bittersweet. "You hated it. I'm surprised you're wearing one now."

His twisting fingers froze.

Anna reached desperately for something to spark an actual conversation, something that would get a response from him.

"It suits you."

That got a reaction, though not one she was hoping for. Dipper shot her a half-terrified glance; she wondered what she had said wrong. Before she could make another grasping attempt at salvaging the moment, her son raised the cookies he held and gestured vaguely upwards, towards the second floor.

"Mabel's waiting…"

"Oh…of course…"

She moved aside, and Dipper hurried past. Before he could reach the staircase she found her voice again.

"Will you be joining us? For dinner?"

Dipper paused, one foot on the first step, and glanced back over his shoulder.

"I won't be corporeal much longer."

"Oh. All right, then."

It wasn't until he was long upstairs and Anna had their meal started that she wondered if she should have thought of something, offered some deal or other, so he could be solid for that time.

She had no idea how she could have phrased the question, or if Dipper would even have accepted given his reaction to what she had intended as a compliment.

She just didn't know.

Dipper's funeral had been a numb, confusing affair. The extended family in attendance had, of course, believed in full trust that their little book devouring sleuth had died in a terrible and tragic accident during the moment of Transcendence. They had spoken in hushed voices about their memories of him, brought flowers to the grave and cards and letters of sympathy to Mark and Anna and a sullen Mabel.

"It's all right if you need to cry."

"You don't have to be strong for anyone; he was your son, your brother."

"We will all miss him."

"I can't imagine what you're going through right now…"

No, you can't, Mark wanted to agree. Instead he solemnly thanked his wife's sister, shook her hand, and carried on to the next well-meaning relation.

He wanted to cry. He wanted to mourn and break down in grief – but could he when the only thing that really 'died' was Dipper's humanity? He knew his son was there. There was a cold spot in the corner that people shivered and avoided. What would Dipper think, seeing his father cry for him when he wasn't really dead?

Oh, but he wanted to.

And he probably should.

To everyone in here save his wife and daughter (and his invisible demon son) he had lost a child. None of them should have a dry eye.

Rumors had been spreading across the internet and in the street, suggestions of fiction made real, of cults and summonings and the power of a True Name in compelling any person – any being – to do another's will.

If the rumors were true, Dipper Pines couldn't exist in this world anymore – not while being safe.

Yet the thought of that sort of duplicity – of crying for Dipper at his funeral and then pretending that it had been just a convincing show – was wrong on so many levels. He wanted to cry, but he couldn't because Dipper was still alive, as Mabel insisted even now, muffled by the black-lace shoulder of an elderly aunt. He probably should cry for the sake of believability, but he couldn't because doing so for that reason alone would cheapen the tears and the moment, and even with the world turned upside down he loved his son too much to do that to him.

So he gave another sad, solemn not-quite-smile to yet another sympathetic face, shook their hand, and pressed onward.

The school office called.

"We're concerned about your daughter," they said, and while they acknowledged that Mabel had always been a bit of an odd duck – in the best possible way of course – her behavior since the beginning of the school year had been…bizarre, to say the least.

"She carries conversations with thin air and openly introduces empty seats as her brother. Now we understand the circumstances, but it is causing both her and her classmates some distress, and we would rather not see this give rise to any sort of altercation."

They had recommended a laundry list of therapists and grief counsellors, both associated with the school and private practitioners in the area. Anna thanked them for their concern and promised to discuss this with her husband, and with Mabel herself.

Dinner that night had been…tense.

"I'm not pretending my brother is dead!"

"Mabel, sweetie, we're not asking you to—"

"Yes, you are! You want me to ignore him, like he isn't even there!"

"Only while you're in public, people are…well, we got a phone call today from the school, and…"

In short, it hadn't gone well.

Late that night they lay awake and whispered, faintly conscious of the very real possibility that Dipper could well be listening, invisible, to report back to Mabel for all they knew.

"The supernatural is everywhere now, there's no denying it," Mark tried to reason. "Maybe they'll just accept that Dipper's a…a ghost now, and Mabel can see him? It doesn't have to mean therapy if we can convince them of that."

"But what if the next thing they recommend is some sort of ghost buster, or an exorcist?" Anna twisted the edge of the sheet. "How do we convince them to leave Mabel be then? And what about her friends and classmates? Children that age can be cruel."

"I don't know. Annie, I don't know what to do. How do you raise a boy you can't even see most days? A boy who isn't even human anymore? I just. Don't. Know…"

In the end, they agreed that all they could do was try to be there for Mabel at least.

By the next week the school insisted on placing Mabel in counselling.

Mark and Anna dutifully sent her to her after school appointments, though they didn't expect it to change anything.

They were right.

A year passed, and another, and they were used to living with an invisible demon son in the house – or at least, as used to it as they could come to be. They still hardly ever saw him, and when they did glimpse each other in the kitchen or the hallway it was almost impossible to speak much more than a slightly startled greeting before Dipper ducked his head and scooted past or else faded back into invisibility. When he did stick around it only got more awkward, both parties grasping for something to say but not knowing where to start until someone came up with an excuse to break the small-talk standoff.

Mark kept up his research on the sly; he worked with computers, and he knew how to search discretely and without leaving a trace. The more time that passed since Transcendence, the more information became available – wikis, forums, blogs and more, all freely available to sift through in hopes of pulling fact from fiction.

He was starting to wonder if this was such a good idea.

There were no mentions of a demon called Dipper, or Pines, or any variation thereof – a good thing, since that whole True Name rumor had strengthened to the point of scientific hypothesis already and the last thing he wanted was for his child to be forced to do anything he didn't want to through some form of supernatural coercion. On the other hand, it left him uncertain if Dipper was a complete unknown (not necessarily a bad thing either, since the thought of his baby boy being summoned to candles and blood sacrifices gave him the willies) or if he was operating by an alias…and by the looks of things, there were only a scant handful of recently discovered demons who didn't seem to have any counterpart in previous myth or lore.

By the same token, he still hadn't found any mention of demon-human romances or offspring either (aside from blatantly fictional accounts by some amateur writers on questionable blogs), so the jury was still out on the Talk as well.

The scary part was, out of everything he'd read about actual encounters with demons…well, there wasn't much good to be said. Accounts of flesh and blood and lifespan and even souls being taken, deals twisted, prices deliberately misconstrued and then exacted as the demon willed…why anybody would want to summon one against such a backdrop of pain and misery was beyond Mark.

How Dipper could be the same sort of being as these…supernatural conmen, these predators…he couldn't fathom it.

He soothed the discord by choosing to believe Dipper was different. He had been human once. He had a conscience. His eyes were terrifying and his voice unsettling and okay, so his inherent invisibility could be slightly creepy if you let yourself think too much about it, but he was Mark's son, who devoured mysteries and whodunnits with a pen and notebook in hand. He still had a video file somewhere on his laptop of a tiny Dipper in a lamb costume singing and dancing to a tune of Anna's own creation.

Surely he wasn't something a cultist would summon.

Mark clung to this belief until late one Saturday, when Dipper came down the stairs solid and nervous-looking.

"Have you seen Mabel?"

"She went to the store with your mom," Mark said, looking up from his laptop on the coffee table. "Why?"

Dipper shrugged, and that's when Mark caught sight of the dark, wet splotch staining the front of his white dress shirt.

"Are you hurt?" Mark twitched forward, wondering if a human first aid kit had supplies that would work on a demon and damn those wikis for having more info on the summoning and appeasement of demons than on their care and physical/emotional development.

Dipper looked confused, then followed Mark's gaze down to his torso, where he stared as though he'd never seen a bloodstain before.

"Oh. No. It's not mine."

Mark's brain stuttered to a halt. Try as he might, he couldn't come up with a good response to that.

"Um, not…not anybody else's either, I mean…um. Not a human's."

He wasn't sure he wanted to ask. Dipper shifted, looked away, and offered an answer anyhow.

"Look, some guy got a little…overzealous…and, well, either he had really good aim or I was just standing in the wrong spot, so when he…uh, he had a goat with him and I guess he thought that was the thing to do? And then a lot happened after so I sort of forgot and…um, sorry."

"Oh." His voice broke. Mark cleared his throat and tried again. "Oh. Uh. I didn't…didn't know you were being…that is, doing business?"

Part of his brain flinched, because it sounded like he was dancing around a discussion about his son joining the mob or something. Doing business…but what else was he supposed to call it?

"Um, yeah, I guess."

"Been long? I mean, since you…started."

Dipper shrugged and made a so-so gesture with his hand. Mark noticed the gloves, the suit, the entire ensemble and wished his stupid brain hadn't made any sort of mafia reference because now it was stuck on that comparison and he was trying to have a conversation with his son, not with someone his overactive imagination was quickly trying to build up into some kind of crime boss.

He was fourteen, barely about to turn fifteen. These thoughts shouldn't even be happening.

"Not with your real name I hope?" And now he just needed that conversation to distract him from his own traitorous thoughts, and he needed to hope it would turn into something normal if only he could carry it far enough, if he could just get Dipper to cooperate…

"No. No, I got a fake. For safety, you know?"

Mark nodded solemnly while his brain searched for a safe new topic and a way to switch tracks onto it. 'But enough about demons; how 'bout those football games' certainly wouldn't work. Dipper had never cared much for football, and if he did now…well, Mark wouldn't know.

"It's – you remember that time you took me and Mabel and showed us the constellations, and told us about the twin stars in the Big Dipper?" a faint smile tugged at Dipper's face. "I guess I sort of took inspiration from that."

Twin stars? Oh, Mizar and –

Mark felt like something had closed around his throat. He swallowed hard and scrambled to backtrack in his thoughts. Possibly he had misread, or misremembered, something somewhere down the line. After all, he hadn't really been paying that much attention to the summoning horror stories; he'd been more interested in any hints of…well, growing-up stuff, parenting tips, that sort of thing.

Alcor the Dreambender, a wiki entry whispered in the back of his memory. No known lore prior to Transcendence at this time. Estimated level: S. Summoning circle. Approximate incantations. Description…

That couldn't be his little Dipper.

Some guy summoned him once. Wanted one full day completely alone with the girl of his dreams. Got trapped in a nightmare that lasted twenty-four hours. Said he'd paid by agreeing to develop hearing problems a year earlier in life than he would have otherwise.

It couldn't.

Another wanted revenge on the "jerk who stole his girlfriend." Alcor cursed the summoner instead, distorting his appearance and corrupting his presence so that few tolerated him, let alone loved him.

Not his sweet little boy.

And then some big name cult in the underground, rumor had it, had been planning to summon Alcor to see what he could do for them. Details were scarce, but the supposed date of summoning had passed a week ago, and none of those known to be in the group had been seen or heard from since…

Enough!

Mark shoved the litany of half-remembered information down, squashing it into a mental box even as stray bits tried to escape and recapture his attention. So his son was a demon, so maybe he was striking deals and twisting words, so…so what could he say?

Forget sex ed, how does an entirely ordinary human dad discuss undesirable career paths with his demonic son?

His demonic son who was starting to look nervous and uncertain again and was picking at the splotch of goat blood (really goat—yes really goat blood!) on his shirt.

"Uh, I think I'm running out of time again. And I should really get this cleaned up. But, uh, thanks, dad. For talking." Another tiny smile tugged at his mouth. "You know, I kind of missed it."

Mark smiled back, still feeling as though he was choking on something, nodded, and just barely managed a fairly normal-sounding "no problem" before Dipper blipped out of existence. He waited a moment for the heavy feel of the air to dissipate before tugging his laptop closer and repeating his former searches, this time with a name to attach.

By the time he was done he didn't know what to think anymore.

On the one hand, no human sacrifices recorded anywhere, virgin or otherwise. No reported bloodlust. Actually a few fair deals.

On the other, Mark's illusions of having a pretty much still human despite being a demon son were handily cracked if not shattered. It was a little hard to reconcile 'human' with 'summon via this circle with proper Latin chant, at least five candles and appropriate sacrifice; word deal carefully and do not underestimate or presume safety, subject is a demon and can screw you over, see examples below."

But what did he really expect? Hadn't he given up all expectations of Dipper living a normal life by now?

Mark tried to imagine Dipper flipping burgers somewhere – a nice, normal teenage job – and had to bite his knuckles to keep from snorting uncontrollably. Yes, Dipper in his nice suit with an apron thrown over top, shuffling fries into cartons and tossing re-heated hamburgers onto buns. He'd take his payment in sacrificed foodstuff, just so he could be corporeal long enough to work. And goodness help them if he ever had to man the drive through speakers – no customer would be able to understand him between the static of the system and the subtle reverberation always present in his voice.

His laughter turned to a sob, a sniffle, and a couple of tears which he rubbed away.

What did he expect?

He couldn't do this. He wasn't right for this job. Dipper didn't need a computer geek to show him the way to adulthood. He didn't need someone from a mild middle class background, someone who knew of nothing but humanity, without any more supernatural understanding than what could be gleaned from google searches and the paltry experience brought by having to gnome-proof the trash cans.

Dipper needed a supernatural expert. A conman. Someone who had skirted on the edge of the law and stayed a step ahead the whole time, someone who understood thin lines and hard consequences and the tough reality of the dark side of humanity.

He heard the car pull up in the driveway, two doors slammed and the trunk popped open.

He had to talk to his wife, and then to his kids.

The twins didn't need Piedmont anymore. They didn't need their parents. They needed Gravity Falls and their Grunkle Stan.

Mark knew he loved them, and he knew Anna did as well.

He also knew that sometimes, love alone wasn't enough.