A/N: In which Philip and Alcor have a talk.

Two days after the disaster with Bentley, Alcor was summoned again. He did not fight this summoning, recognizing it as one of the two circles he had given Bentley and his father.

He wished that he had resisted it when he saw the look on Philip Farkas's face and the privacy wards set up all over the room.

"What is wrong with my son?"

Alcor played with his fingers and looked anywhere but Philip's face. "He…hasn't told you?"

"No, he hasn't," Philip said. "All he told me and his friend was that it 'had to be done' and that 'there was a cult and things went south' but that 'he made it out okay.' Then he turns around and can't sleep, can't eat, has nightmares whenever he tries to shut his eyes. He can't stand to be in a dark room and I want to know what's wrong."

Alcor fidgeted. He had spent the last two days alternatively fretting over the bond between himself and Bentley and trying to ignore the pain coming from it because Bentley did not want to see him. "I think it's something he should tell you."

Philip's expression went even stonier, and he took a step forward. "Maybe. What I also want to know, however, is why you haven't done anything about it."

"Huh?" Alcor looked down at the little man. "What are you—"

"Are you really asking me that?" Philip jabbed a finger in Alcor's face, and he went cross-eyed trying to follow it. "Me, one of the best-read Alcorian scholars in my time?"

"Uh."

Philip, thankfully, moved out of Alcor's personal space and threw his hands in the air. "And even beyond that, I know how much you care for Bentley! Yes, sometimes you can't express it very well, and sometimes it moves into the bizarre and creepy, but you care for him. So why," he rounded back on Alcor, "aren't you eating his nightmares?"

Alcor pursed his lips and hunched in on himself, crossing his arms. "He said he doesn't wanna see me."

There was a sort of dumbfounded silence. When Alcor looked back up at Philip, it was to see the man dragging a hand over his face, his holographic lenses fizzing and sputtering at the interruption. "You—are you actually twelve?"

Alcor frowned. "What's that supposed to mean?"

Philip pulled his hand far enough down that his eyes were visible. "Nevermind. Just…just sit down with me, will you?"

As Bentley's father collapsed back into their old couch, Alcor hesitated. Should he make a run for it? He hadn't been offered a deal to stay, and he really should insist on one just for ceremony's sake. It would also be a good excuse to get out of this awkward situation.

Then a package smacked him in the face, and he only just caught it as it fell. It was for some kind of weird cuttlefish-flavored chip, and Alcor couldn't help but raise his eyebrows at Philip.

"Those in exchange for sitting and hearing me out," the man said, looking tired. Alcor realized, suddenly, that Philip must have been sitting up with Bentley, must have been watching his child as he slept.

Slowly, Alcor opened the bag and sat down on the couch beside Philip. When the man made no move to speak, he pulled one of the chips out and put it in his mouth. It tasted odd, but not awful.

"Bentley said he didn't want to see you, right?"

He nodded and ate another chip. The urge to pull his legs up onto the couch was great, but he resisted it in an effort to not seem completely helpless.

Philip exhaled through his nose. "Okay. And you've been honoring that."

"Well, yeah," Alcor said, not realizing the snotty tone the phrase held until it was already out of his mouth. He coughed. "Um. Yeah. Of course."

The look Philip gave him seemed more appropriate of Alcor's second human father, Lio—Liondale? It didn't sound quite right, but it was close, even though not remembering made something in him ache. "That is good. But were you planning on ignoring Bentley until he called you back?"

Alcor would have gnawed on the side of his mouth if his teeth weren't so sharp. He turned away from Philip Farkas and fidgeted with the bag of chips in his hands. Eventually, he said, "He was really upset."

And it was all his fault, it was all because of his stupid inability to actually pay attention to Bentley's feelings and opinions and he hated himself. The thin material of the package of chips crinkled and tore between his claws.

This time, Philip sighed and placed a hand on Alcor's shoulder. He tensed, but did nothing as Philip spoke. "Then it was good to give him space. However, if he was hurting, then you should have come back and at least asked permission to help."

Alcor scowled and shrugged Philip's hand off his shoulder. "That wouldn't help anything."

"Are you sure?"

He stuffed a handful of shredded carbon aerogel and chip crumbs in his mouth. "Yes," he said around his hand, trying to not bite himself but recognizing the odd tang of his own blood. Laughter bubbled up in his chest, and it came out in a short, high-pitched burst that rang in his ears and was too foreign and too familiar all at once.

See? He told himself, repeating that old, hated conversation. You're just like him. You say you're not but you're just like him. You hurt everybody around you and you should stop, you should keep away from everybody so that you can't fuck them over the way you did Bentley. You're the worst you're the worst you're the worst.

Alcor was only half aware of the remains of his payment falling from his hands, of his knees being pulled up to his chest and the air beginning to thrum with the force of his emotions. Can't even remember the names of those important to you, he thought. Is this what Philip will become? What Bentley will be? Another Lionda—Leonai—my second father, whose name I can't even have the decency to recall? How had this not bothered him? He reached into the depths of his memory and pieced together only a handful of names. His arms wrapped around his knees, and there was an insane pressure on his shoulders that made him want to whimper and laugh and cry all at the same time.

He stuffed his face in his knees and tried to forget how small Bentley had looked doing the same, how his aura reeked of fear and his body spoke of terror and how much Alcor had fucked up, as per fucking usual. He tried to forget feeling that way when he was twelve and looking up at Bill's engorged form, Mabel's hand being ripped away from his sweaty palm and knowing that he was going to die and there was nothing he could do about it.

The pressure on his shoulders lightened, and then came back in spurts. His wings just wrapped around him, right and comforting but not what he needed, more than he even deserved. All he'd earned over the course of his mistake-riddled existence was the recently broken Shack in the Mindscape and the tree that bore only bitter fruit since yesterday.

There was white noise around him, like static that spiked and dipped in volume and tone. Alcor tried to ignore it.

It rose higher and louder than ever before, and then there was pain blooming across the side of his head and spreading needle-thin fingers through the rest of his scalp. Alcor was suddenly aware of the anger and fear pushing into the guilt in the air and the danger inherent in such a thing. His head snapped up and his wings raised up behind him, edges curling menacingly.

There was a figure in front of him, smeared with something tarry and taking a step back. Its hands were held up in front of him in a pose that Alcor did not kn—

Wait. He did know it. Alcor blinked, and then he saw Philip, eyes wide and arms held in an awkward 'please don't hurt me' stance. His wings started to droop behind him.

Philip didn't say anything for a moment. Alcor looked away from the man and towards the rest of the room. He saw oil-slick ooze dripping in thin tendrils down from the ceiling, puddles of dark red sliding down the fabric of the couch, and thin, translucent gold smeared over his hands and staining the white cuffs of his Transcendence-era formalwear.

"I—" His voice caught in his throat, and he looked back up from his hands at Philip, horrified at the lack of control and feeling a dull pain when he remembered that neither Mabel nor Henry nor the triplets were there to help clean this up the way they had in his demonic youth. What was he even doing here? Who wanted to take care of a demon that just made a mess of your house and a mess of your life and a mess of your soul?

"It…It's okay. Um. It'll clean up, right?" Philip slowly put down his hands and set his feet even. The look on his face wasn't quite Henry's, and his words were wrong and his face was wrong and his soul wasn't any that Alcor had ever paid attention to before, but the sentiment was so familiar that it hurt.

Alcor turned his head to the side and dipped it down to hide it from view. "Yeah," he said, and part of him was horrified at how choked and young and vulnerable it sounded. It's weak. It's deceiving. Why am I calling attention to this? I'm not the one having nightmares, I'm not the one hurting worst, I'm not his son, I ate his son and expected him to come out fine.

At first, he thought that Philip had left. Then the couch dipped down next to him again, and Philip spoke in a soft voice. "I didn't mean twelve literally, you know."

He was thrown out of his self-hatred for a moment at the odd admission, enough that he looked at Philip out of the corner of his eye. "What?"

The man gestured to all of Alcor, and still puzzled, Alcor looked down at himself. For a moment, he saw nothing wrong. But the longer he studied his hands, the younger and smaller and softer they seemed. He raised a hand and traced the side of his cheek, which was rounder than he remembered.

"Oh. Sorry." Despite his words, part of him purred in approval Set him off guard by looking younger, you can take more advantage of him when he least expects it.

He shoved the idea out of his mind and hated himself for even thinking about it. The silence was heavy as he waited for Philip to speak, and he began to wonder if this counted as ending the deal; Philip only wanted Alcor to hear him out, and Alcor was ready to remove himself from the environment. All you are is poison, is radiation, making those around you sicker and sicker the longer you're there.

He wondered about his brother and sister and niblings, how they had lived long, happy lives. Not Henry, he remembered. Henry had died far before his time, tainted by blue fire and dead hands swinging from branching antlers that he hadn't had before meeting Alcor.

"Why did you approach Bentley?"

Alcor raised his eyes from where he'd been staring at his knees, small and knobbly under black fabric, to look at Philip's chin. "What do you mean?"

There was a rash of stubble there that hadn't been the entire time Alcor had known Philip, and it moved as the man spoke. "We know that there have been several Mizars over the years—the original Mizar the Gleeful in the early years after the Transcendence, Mizar the Silent a few centuries later, Mizar the Ferocious somewhere inbetween. While I didn't list them all, there are maybe seven overall that we know of, and souls do not take that much time to reincarnate. So there have to be Mizars that you didn't know of or didn't approach for some reason."

"Maybe you just don't remember them," Alcor said, looking away and pulling at the fabric of his pants with his claws. It unraveled, but the moment he let the strands go, they wove together again.

"Undoubtedly," Philip said. "Nevertheless, there have to be Mizars you never connected with, for some reason or another. Why, after this period of cruelty, did you choose to try again with Bentley?"

Alcor looked up at the ceiling, took note of the spiderwebbing hairline cracks in the plaster. "He wasn't afraid of me."

"…I think that you and Bentley have very different ideas about your initial meeting, then, and that you need to talk it out."

He looked over at Philip, confused. "What do you mean?"

Philip's expression, if Alcor remembered right, did not speak well of Philip's opinion of Alcor's state of mind. " Two years ago? Bentley was a niner and had just entered the public school system?"

"But that's the second time we met." Alcor frowned and scraped his claws together. "The first was when he was nine. He was…he was dreaming, he was in my territory of the Mindscape."

"He was in the Mindscape? Where demons usually reside?" Philip's face, when Alcor glanced up from his claws, was drawn. His aura didn't look very relieved at all.

"Yes," Alcor said. He opened his mouth to continue, then thought about what Philip had just said. "And it's unlikely that he would have gone anywhere else because I—"

He remembered the feeling of slipping his will into another's body, of forcing muscles to relax and heart-rate to lower and respiration to slow. He remembered Bentley's panic and fear and anger welling up and building with no outlet to take advantage of. He remembered enjoying the rush of power, the knowledge that he could make Bentley do anything, and he only just avoided throwing up.

"Own his soul." Philip sounded relieved, at least. He shouldn't have been. "So he visited you in a dream?"

Alcor nodded and bit back his self-loathing and guilt.. "I was still…not very nice. And he didn't care. He was…bright. Unafraid. Accepting." Like Mabel.

"Mabel?"

He hadn't realized he said her name aloud. Fear gripped his chest until he told himself that Philip Farkas didn't know, he wouldn't know, that Mabel Pines was Mizar unless he actually dug into it. "Mabel," he repeated, and it had been so long since he'd heard her name. It was painful and heartening all at once.

"What were they like?"

Alcor stared down at his palms. He imagined that they were hers. "She was…she was the sun. She was the stars. She was everything." The words hurt and they healed as they came out. "She was the most important person in my life. She will always be the most important. I would do anything for her."

"…she was Mizar. She was your sister."

His vision blurred yellow, and he closed his eyes. Her face was burned into the back of his eyelids from centuries of staring at her scrapbooks, at her face, of tracing her cheek on laminated paper and trying not to lash out. "Yes."

"So you talked to Bentley because he's like this 'Mabel' person." Philip pronounced her name oddly, the 'a' just a bit too flat and the 'e' almost too long.

Alcor swallowed the lump in his throat. "I—I guess. Because he was familiar, because part of me realized that I needed that."

Philip hummed. "There have been hypotheses that the Mizars we know typically come between close periods of your more demonic behavior, but there are too many contradictions and not enough support for these theories. Would you say that Mizars are your rock, your anchor?"

He had needed Mizar so much. He still needed Mizar. He needed their humanity, their goodness and challenging natures. He needed them to remind him of his own weak, crippled human nature. But all he said to Philip was, "Yes."

The man could have said anything, but what he chose to say was, "Is there anybody else?"

Alcor looked over at Philip. The holographic lenses were almost invisible. "What do you mean?"

"Well," Philip leaned over and placed his forearms on his knees, fingers folded over one another. "In the stories, there are others. The Woodsman, for example. Gliese. Wanda. Are they real? Do they have reincarnations?"

He nodded.

"Were they close to you?"

His brother, his nibbling, his friend. The others Philip didn't know, whose names had been lost to misplaced records and ill-timed fires. Soos and Grunkle Stan and Pacifica and…and Mabel's friends, Granda and Canda (whose names did not sound right), and everybody else he had somehow forgotten over the course of time. He was reminded, with a strong burst of self-hatred, how much he had neglected to remember "Of course."

"But you only look for Mizar."

Alcor clenched his jaw and looked away from Philip again. "They're not so easy to find."

Philip hesitated before speaking. "May I say something very direct?"

He dragged a hand down his face and waved the other in a 'go ahead' motion.

"You need to learn that relationships aren't easy."

His hand fell down to his lap, and he looked at nothing in particular. It took him a few moments to process the words, and once he did, he was understanding and defensive and angry all at once. "E͝x̸ç̵ú̶̴se̵ m̴͜e?"

Philip crossed his arms. "Relationships aren't easy. You have to put effort into them. You have to be open and honest and understand that you aren't the center of the cosmos. Moreover, you can't just hang onto Bentley; he's sixteen. He can't handle that kind of pressure."

"How do you know that?" Alcor bristled and leaned forward into Philip's space, pushing down stray thoughts of agreement in his anger. "Mizars are strong!"

Philip leaned right back in, even though Alcor could see the terror climbing up through his shoulders and into his eyes. "And my son came home with a dislocated shoulder and an infected cut on his hand. He came back from supporting you, apparently, and cannot sleep more than five minutes at a time. He has not been to school. He has not interacted with almost anybody. He sits in his room and stares at the wall and cannot stand to be in an unlit space. He's sixteen."

A few heartbeats later, Alcor backed off and growled, still-small hands sliding through his hair and digging into his scalp, dangerously close to breaking the skin. "Then what do I do?"

"Help him," Philip said, voice still laced with frustration and fear. "Help him. Give him space. Look for others."

Mizar had always been just enough, Alcor thought. He closed his eyes and hunched over his knees.

"Alcor," Philip said, a bit softer. "Bentley cannot be your everything. And you cannot be his."

Alcor grit his teeth. He inhaled, processed the statement, then exhaled. He reached out, slowly and carefully as to not alert Bentley to his presence, and took a good look at the bond between them.

Bentley was still terrified. He was sending distress signals and stay-away signals one right after the other, and Alcor knew that being around Bentley would only make the situation worse, even if he could eat nightmares. He readied himself to blip out of the apartment for the last time. "Okay. I understand."

Philip inhaled to say something, and then didn't say it. Right before Alcor made to tesser, he said, "I didn't mean that you couldn't have a healthy relationship with Bentley. Just that…" he met Alcor's eyes as the latter turned to face him, "that you should reach out to others too. For Bentley, yes, but also for yourself."

Alcor opened his mouth. He shut it. He opened it again. "I—I'll just hurt him."

"And he'll hurt you." Philip hesitated, then slid an arm all the way across Alcor's shoulders. "But if you're honest and if you try to explain, if you give him space but show him that you're there for him, then you'll have a better relationship than you've had in the past."

It was comfortable there. Alcor felt like crying again, but he just drew his knees up and slid an arm across his eyes. "I don't deserve it," he said.

"Maybe not. That's up to Bentley to decide though, not you." Philip squeezed his shoulder, and then stood. "Now come on, my son needs to sleep sometime this week, and I'd rather it be sooner than later."

Alcor stared up at the man, who was taller now that Alcor was physically twelve, and tried to tell himself that Philip was right. He wasn't allowed to decide if he was worthy of Bentley or not. He wasn't allowed to back out now that the going was tough.

It didn't quite work. He still remembered vicious joy in possession and the sly temptation of a life's worth of energy, he remembered anger so hot it was cold when he realized that Bentley was going to mess up his plan, his genius plan, and he remembered how he'd come so close to pulling Bentley's soul out of his chest just for the look on his face. He knew that wasn't human. He knew that was despicable.

But Bentley, even if he hated and was afraid of Alcor, needed him. So Dipper reached up and took Philip's outstretched hand.