"Hey there, Pine Tree. Got a moment?" said an astringent voice with an otherworldly echo. The icons on Dipper's laptop monitor had gone black and white and the air pulled thick and syrupy through his nostrils. Dipper didn't need to turn around to know that a glowing yellow triangle in a top hat would be floating behind his desk chair.

"Bill, I'm in the middle of writing a grant application," Dipper said. Such was his life. One moment, justifying the Pine Lab's research budget to the National Science Foundation, the next, being visited by an awfully persistent dream demon.

"Seems pretty boring," Bill Cipher said, shrinking to nacho size and looking up at Dipper's laptop screen like a billboard. "You know, I could get you all the money you need to keep this place running. In solid gold too, not this paper junk." Bill Cipher's body flashed an image of an acorn. Seed funding. Dipper got it.

"It's not like I'm in danger of being defunded," Dipper said. The return of Stanley Pines during that fateful summer had rocked the world of physics. Now the Pines Lab was a world-leader in the study of Einstein-Rosen bridges. Although Dipper was technically a lowly post-doc, he pretty much ran the the place. Or at least he did most of the paperwork. "It's just that I have enough trouble with Grunkle Stan's tax evasion as it is. I don't need the men in suits to come knocking at the door about mysterious revenue sources. What do you want, anyway?"

"Just dropping in to chat with my favorite flesh bag. How's the folks?" Great, so Bill was looking to be entertained. Somehow, as the years went by and the Mystery Twins kept defeating Bill's plans to bring about the apocalypse, Bill Cipher had gotten a lot less scary. His last plot had been almost five years ago. It was some crazy scheme to fuse the dreams of all humans with a nightmare realm of Bill's creation. The twins had distracted Bill just long enough with a riddle for the planets to go out of alignment and the dimension-merging ritual to fizzle out. Frankly, the easiest way to defeat Bill was to take advantage of his distractible nature and shove a puzzle in front of him.

"Grunkle Stan had a fall and he's in a motorized scooter now. He's still a terror with a cane though." Dipper rubbed a bruise on his arm where he'd suffered a drubbing over the last pancake. "I've been working with Dr. Stanley to come up with a theory behind the portal measurements we've been getting. It might be time to hire some more grad students." Speaking of which, he needed to respond to Dr. Foster's email about a visiting scholar exchange. He heard New Mexico was lovely this time of year.

"And Shooting Star?"

"She's traveling in France right now with her boyfriend. I think they got engaged? Hopefully, it goes through this time. The last guy had a secret wife who crashed the wedding. I think Mabel knew the whole time though, and just wanted the experience of being interrupted at the altar."

"So that just leaves you. You're all grown up now, huh?" Bill sprouted leaves from his top hat. "Is being grown up everything it was cracked up to be?"

"Well, I guess I never thought I'd have to do all this paperwork," Dipper waved at the incredibly boring grant proposal he'd been writing, "and run both the lab and the Mystery Shack. Plus there's ordering all the parts and supplies we need, wrangling the grad students, feeding the goat. It's a lot of hassle." Dipper flopped back in his beat-up office chair.

"So, do you ever wish you were a kid again? With no troubles at all?" Bill drifted down on the table like a sheet of paper.

"Heck no. Show me a person who talks about high school prom like it was their 'glory days' and I'll show you a person who got hit in the head by a football one too many times."

"No, earlier than that, like he summer you met me. You remember that time we were in Stanford's head, and the other time I took over your body, and then I tried to destroy the world-"

"And we stopped you. Like we always do." Dipper eyed Bill, wondering if he was trying to bring on the apocalypse again for shits and giggles. Shiggles. It would be very Bill-like to leave a trail of radioactive breadcrumbs to his "secret plans."

"Yeah. Good times." Bill reminisced, with a half-lidded eye. "What if you could go back? Live it all over again?" Dipper frowned, and crossed his arms.

"Are you trying to strike a deal with me, like 'go back in time and undo all of your mistakes, win the girl, and save the world'? Because I swore off making any more contracts with supernatural beings." Especially after that one with the succubus. Bill held out his hands in a placating gesture.

"You know time travel is more Time Baby's thing. I'm just speaking hypothetically. Idle chitchat. No significance whatsoever. What if you could just stay a kid forever? Never have to worry about all these boring adult responsibilities. Play cowboys and Indians until the heat death of the universe." The black top hat on Bill's head morphed into a ten gallon hat. Bill shot off a pop-gun in each hand. Dipper grinned at that juvenile display.

"I guess that would be fun, not having to worry about bills and taxes." Dipper spun around in his chair, to Bill's delight as he rode on the chair's back. Then he caught himself abruptly on the desk, sending Bill flying into the air. "But I don't wanna goof off for my entire life. I have plans! I'm going to make something of myself. And people listen to me now that I got a degree from Stanford. I even have a girlfriend now." Stella was an archeology major he'd met in college, currently camping in the woods next to a big dig. "Being an adult is great."

"Oh, I should have known better than to talk to you about it," Bill muttered. He started pacing on the desk. "You were always racing to grow up anyway." Dipper had never seen Bill in such a mood before. Normally, he'd either be all jokes or red with rage.

"What's eating you? Brick termites?" The joke fell flat.

"You!" Bill yelled, in a sudden temper tantrum. "You've changed, Pine Tree!" Bill rose up into the air. His body flashed an image of an oak tree on fire. Dipper readied a mental shield in case Bill went flying with the lasers again. But Bill just filled the room with his arms, knotted into intricate patterns.

"I've been watching you," Bill said, expanding his eye until it filled the entirety of his body. "When was the last time you went into the woods? When was the last time you opened the journal?"

"Dude, chill out. It's not like I threw it out or anything." Dipper grabbed the book he kept in his lab coat. True, the heavy journal were more of a good-luck charm than an actual reference these days. He'd spent so long carrying it around that he felt naked without it by his side.

"You used to be all about the magic and adventure." Bill continued to rant. "And now, I find you babysitting lab techs who wouldn't know a summoning circle from a sewing circle!"

"Hey, I'll have you know that each and every employee is highly qualified. Even Soos." Who was actually running the Mystery Shack more and more these days, come to think of it. "And it's not like I sit around twiddling my thumbs all day either. I do research, Bill. Research takes time. And if my work is successful, it'll revolutionize the world. That sure beats trying to get a conversation out of a human-faced squash." That had been a waste of a perfectly good summer day.

"Think about what you lose! As time races forward, the you of the now kills the you of the moment before, only to be killed by the you of the future. Each slice replaces the one before, until you finally get to the end, like the heel of a loaf of bread." Bill floated, radient in the air. His body focused on a leaf in the rain. At the tip, water gathered until its weight broke the surface tension. A drop the size of a tear fell down and out of the triangular frame.

"I wouldn't say 12-year-old Dipper is dead." Dipper said slowly, sounding out his phrases. "He's just … sleeping inside 28-year-old Dipper. And it's not like I'm a completely different person. You know, Mabel and I watch old Ducktective movies on vidchat together. And I have a copy of the newest Sachetmon game, even if I don't have time to play it. Being an adult just means you get to make your own choices."

"I guess you're right." Bill turned back to opaque yellow and straightened his hat. "Sorry to bother you. Good luck with your life."

"Uhh, thanks."

"Remember, the universe is expanding faster than humans can travel, invest in diapers, the key to your problems can be found on page forty-two, bye!" After his characteristic farewell, Bill slowly faded from view.

That was the last time anyone saw Bill Cipher again.

One minute later, Dipper woke up, with an imprint of his keyboard on his face.

Two minutes later, he noticed that his half-finished grant application had been replaced by gibberish.

An hour later, Stanley Pines yelled at Dipper for not turning in the grant application the last night.

One week later, Dipper finally cracked the coded message on his laptop, revealing a complicated equation described in iambic tretrameter.

Two weeks later, Dipper's laptop finally crunched through the equation, revealing a graph that matched the portal readings to an 0.01 p-value.

One month later, Lisa called to say she was pregnant.

Four months later, the Pines Lab published a paper in the journal Nature describing a model of wormhole formation that suggested stable portals could be formed between any two points in space.

Six months later, Dipper and Mabel got married in a double wedding. Grunkle Stan was their best man.

Eight months later, Stella gave birth to a son.

Two years later, the Pines Lab patented an experimental portal machine that could be used to transport small objects across a foot of space.

Five years later, Stanford Pines died. As per his will, Stanford was buried in a stack of cash and got a statue in his likeness.

Five years and one week later, Stanford's grave had been looted, and his statue dismantled for its gold teeth.

Six years later, Stanley Pines died. As per his will, his ashes were scattered into the ocean.

Ten years later, Pines-Northwest Ventures was mining the moon for helium-3, rare-earth elements, and platinum.

Twenty-five years later, Dipper got a call saying he'd won the Nobel Prize in Physics for his discovery of the Law of Portal Stabilization, otherwise known as Cipher's Law.

Twenty-nine years later, Dipper's son moved to the new subdivisions on Mars.

Thirty years later, Dipper became a grand-uncle to twins.

Forty two years later, two girls stepped out of a portal at the front door of the Mystery Shack. One girl had brown hair tied back in a ponytail and clutched a thick book. She gasped at the sight of the enormous laboratory in gleaming silver and polished glass behind the wood building. The other had twin braids tied with rainbow scrunchies. The tips of her hair bounced around as she jumped to test the strength of Earth's gravity. The door opened to reveal an old man clad only in boxers and a dirty lab coat. On his chest was a tattoo of a triangle with an eye inside, surrounded by a mathematical formula. His thinning hair revealed a mark in the shape of a ladle on his forehead.

"Welcome to the Mystery Shack, kids! Are you ready to spend the summer with your Grunkle Dipper?"

A/N: Yeah, so I had the weird theory that the entity known as "Bill Cipher" is actually the "larval form" of something else. So, in this fic, entities known as "demons" grow into fundamental forces of nature, thus explaining scientific progress and also the world's current lack of demons.

The title is a reference to "Peter Pan."

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