I was watching this video and couldn’t help but imagine the boy in it being Toby. Could Toby please please please have an AMAZING singing voice, but is always too scared to sing in front of others in fear of annoying others!
Blame demo-ness for tagging my Toby Pines Death HC ficlet thing with a request for a painful Dipper POV of the event. At least I did not write out the funeral scene also requested because I couldn’t think of what to cover there which was not covered in what I did write plus the Maddie POV snippet in that previous fic…so. Here we go.
Tyrone
Pines was “sleeping” when the call came. It was the merest tug, powered by
little more than a drop of blood and a pocket-sized circle and a whisper of the
demon’s name – nothing like the big shebangs that usually got him out of bed, the
ones with a circle painted across the floor of an entire basement with two
dozen candles and extensive Latin chanting and a small farm animal for a
sacrifice. Normally such a paltry little pull would be ignored by a demon, but
there were three things about this one that had Alcor up and following it
within seconds.
It was
from Toby. It was past midnight. And the blood he had used, the sound of his
voice, screamed of mortal fear.
Because cults and cultists and people summoning demons with blood sacrifices are not the only danger in the world, Transcendence or no. Because sometimes – often – an untimely death is not the result of bold sacrifice but of an accident of time and place. Because even Alcor can’t save his loved ones from everything.
It starts with toilet paper, of all things. Rather, it starts with a lack thereof.
A woman
in a dark suit was speaking, but Maddie couldn’t hear her. She didn’t need to;
she knew that the words would be pretty, but ultimately meaningless. She hadn’t
known him, after all. To her, he was just another name on a sheet of paper, a
list of personal details to touch on, a memory belonging to other people. A
box, a speech, and a stone.
Maddie
couldn’t feel the fingers on her right hand anymore. Sophie had squeezed them
to tingles. She was still squeezing them. Sam was on her other side; Maddie
could hear the tremor in his breathing as he tried to control himself for the
sake of little Delia and the even tinier Andel, who sat between his new
siblings and his adoptive grandpa, watching everything with a vaguely
bewildered solemnity that didn’t belong on his six-year-old face.
Maddie
tried not to look his way, because whenever she did she saw “Tyrone Pines” at
the end of their row, black-suited and straight-faced, staring at the speaker
and the box and the hole in the ground as if none of it even mattered.
“…beloved
son, brother, father and friend…”
Well, Maddie thought, bitter ice
spreading with every breath she took and numbing her heart and mind, there’s three out of four, at least.
Another
day, another summoning, another self-centered little gang of humans who got the
short end of the stick for not abiding by the schedule Alcor had made it quite
known he preferred for the last decade and a half. Seriously, three in the afternoon
Pacific Time? No summoner who had done any research beyond his name, circle,
and incantation would dare call him unless the sun had well set on the western
edge of North America. Unfortunately, not all summoners were careful enough in
their research, and of course
midnight local time was always the best time to call a demon up! Why ever
should you bother abiding by the schedule of the almighty entity you were
trying to get something from?
He’d
really only gone because they’d been bugging him all day and he was afraid they’d
get desperate. Thankfully they hadn’t gone quite so far, but he’d had the
feeling that one more iteration of the answering machine might have pushed them
to lengths they would not have lived very long to regret.
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