Never in a Million Years (MaBill fanfic)

I Remember You

This magic keeps me alive,
but it's making me crazy
and I need to save you,
but who's going to save me?
Please forgive me for whatever I do
when I don't remember you.

Mabel continued walking down a long corridor. Unlike Stan's mind, this part of the mindscape was a starry place with fascinating television-like panels showing memories everywhere. Many of them were a triangle terrorising people with threats or teasing them and their punyness. Others had a human walking through the forest or messing around in the mindscape. However, Mabel picked out one interesting one - it was a garden with a house.  A man with blonde hair and a yellow coat was knelt down on the grass with his arms wide open beside a small boy, smiling, as a little girl tumbled into his arms. But this wasn't any old little girl. It was Mabel!

Bill hadn't loved her romantically, not back then, anyway; he loved her like a daughter.

But he wasn't related to her. The image stirred a vague memory. Mabel's imaginary friend. A man with wild blonde hair and a neat yellow suit, who wore a black bow tie and carried a cane, though he never really used it.

Mabel had been five when the man had left her. She had never saw him since - in fact, it was only now she realised that the man in question was indeed Bill.

But Bill hadn't just been but a dream. He was very real. Mabel stared back at the panel where the picture kept going, the man picking Mabel up and throwing her playfully into the air, then taking her into the house on his shoulders, calling her Maple-syrup. That was her Bill. He had once been a harmless man who mostly played with her in her imagination but visited her in dreams like the memory playing before her.

Mabel remembered this guy. But Bill couldn't. He wasn't the same man. This must have been what Bill had mean when he said he hadn't had emotions in a long time! Perhaps he had lost them when he had stopped stalking Mabel's mind.

She knew now what she had to do, and she was quite certain of how to do it. Mabel dashed back down the corridor,  skidding to a halt at a dreary looking door, which she threw open, making Bill (who was still in there) swing around. His face was still full of alarm as Mabel ran up and hugged her long-lost friend. Bill's eyes widened even more as memories of Mabel came flooding back.
'Maple-syrup!' Bill exclaimed in delight, picking Mabel up. Mabel giggled just as she had in her dream when she was five.

Silence.

Mabel gasped. She opened her eyes only to see darkness. Mabel turned her head but the only thing there was Dipper, fast asleep with no knowledge of where Mabel was but crying because he assumed she was dead. Mabel sighed sorrowfully. The whole thing was a dream.
'It's real as long as I remember you.' The voice whispered softly.