Chapter Text
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As it is, the sun rises once more. That might not seem like something one should take into contestation, something to so heartily celebrate, but, like many of life’s easy atmospheric aphorisms– the sun is up, the wind is low, the birds will sing, and you are part of everything– in the realm of amorphous dimensionality, to take anything for granted is a surefire way to have that egotistical certainty ripped out from underneath you like a particularly frayed Persian carpet.
Not every dimension can celebrate something as small but profound as the first breaches of pink rays of dawn upon a horizon.
Stanford Pines has had an acute disordered insomnia as long as he can stretch his memory back; though sleep comes in short supply these days, memory comes to him in spades, so rest assured, he’s suffered for a very, very long time.
(Nevermind the insecure relationship Ford has found himself entangled in with time.)
The relevancy of insomnia and a surprisingly profound dawn is that he has seen many, many dawns. The kind of dawns that stretch into an infinite sense of dreamlike dissociation– the result of too many nights in a row up, the kind of time-blurring madness that feels an eon long, the sickly miasmic purple haze of an endless existence. The kinds of dawns that sing hopeful, dew cold on grass, frogs singing amongst rapid mycelium growth, orange-pink turning shadow into shape before your very eyes– a rosy colored Plato’s Cave of hope. The kinds of dawns that sag into existence with relief, as one’s tired and exhausted mind sees, in the preternatural reptile brain, some irrational sense of safety in life and gives up the struggle, falls into slumber, chemical paranoia temporarily quelled below the tides of misplaced survival overdrive. The kinds of dawns that spell early morning tragedy– phone calls, and sterile hospital rooms, industrial sprinklers heralding foggy morning light across wet concrete sidewalks that will carry mourning and fearful feet across a campus all day.
This dawn, two days after what’s cloyingly becoming more and more solidified as Weirdmageddon, is a rare kind of dawn. It’s not one Ford is as familiar with as others, but he’s led a long life, and he knows this dawn nonetheless.
Or at least, he thinks he does, but that’s the surprise, isn’t it? He doesn’t get to know that his satisfaction will rub wrong.
He makes himself coffee with the ancient pot Stanley must have bought in the 80s– this is, incidentally, something Stanford doesn’t notice, because he’s never seen a Keurig before.
(Stanley keeps the Keurig somewhere else; he doesn’t want the ‘commoners’ to have access to his expensive K-Cups.)
The simple smell of coffee beans is enough to allure him into consciousness. After the events of… Ugh, Weirdmageddon, and after they saw the twins off to Shermie’s kids’ house for the Autumn, Stanley and Stanford managed an awkward twenty minutes before, well–
There’s no polite way to say that they passed out on the couches with the news on in the background like a couple of old farts. Stanley eventually crawled off to bed, grouching about his back– and it wasn’t a sham, considering the creaks and pops his body was lighting up like firecrackers as Ford watched him try to get up to leave– but that latent old friend– insomniac paranoia– lingered within Ford for the remainder of the night. He slept deep on the couch, but it was on the couch and only the couch that he felt safe on, in case he had to jump up again.
They shuffled around the house on and off. They ended up gravitating to the same room, quiet and tense and unsure of how to be around one another. They ordered pizza in the evening. They watched the news. They watched old reruns– but new to Ford– episodes of the Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, because the twins had left Nickelodeon on, and evidently after a certain time period, Nickelodeon turns into Nick at Night, and Ford knows this because Stanley told him. Ford didn’t get comfortable– he doesn’t really know how– but something settled. Something, at the very least, promised a break. A breath. The room for a sigh of relief.
Now, it’s dawn, and he has coffee, and he’s muddling the smell of coffee bean with lighter fluid, and there’s a torn up old journal as the kindling to a fire that curls smoke into the backyard of the Mystery Shack, flames licking at an old, medieval tapestry depicting the quickly smoldering remains of a collection of peasants staring into the sky, a triangular craft starkly and hauntingly visible from behind a cloud. It was a tapestry he has hanging up in his workroom, long ago, as a sort of naive but egotistical shrine to both himself and–
There’s a slowly growing pile of… paraphernalia beside the fire as he marches resolutely to and from the basement of the Mystery Shack, where his… collection… is. He tosses pieces at random when the fires grow low; each toss, each throw makes him shiver, like he’s losing something. When you’ve been touched, haunted, horrified and honored by something like Bill, there is nothing left but to feel like every single piece of that life you burn down is akin to burning the Aleph itself; but then again, if every there were to be a false idol, it’s the very thing that brings this dawn into life for Ford.
This is a rare dawn; it’s a dawn of release. It’s the kind of dawn that forces air from your lungs until you’re gasping, a spiritual saging of the very air one breathes. Ford smells like soot.
—
Second chances?
Pfft. Whatever. Second chances? Come on. Let's get serious.
He's had hundreds of chances, and they've all been ruined by these pesky, insignificant, worthless little ants that wouldn't know what's good for them, even if it pierced them through the chest cavity all the way up through that pointless soft bottom section of their jaws— seriously, you can poke through that tissue like paper— straight into their mouth. All of them. Every last one of them.
Why can't there be one other species on this miserable marble with the brain capacity to strike a deal?
Second chances, yeah right, next time he's trying dolphins. Those are the smartest lifeforms on the planet, anyway. They just don't have any hands to shake, and the seawater complicates things, it's like a radio jammer that doesn't even know what it does, and that's the worst kind of setback, you can't reason with it—
Oh, wait, wait, maybe one of those dogs that use those talking buttons! He can skin a squirrel and use its bones to bribe the dog to hit 'BILL' and 'YES' and 'DEAL'. Then they can shake on it.
HA!
It's genius! Who needs thumbs, anyway?
Ugh. But those dogs don't actually know how to talk, it's all a spectacle for human entertainment. Plus, they sure as sheet cake don't know how to build portals. Their branch of the Mindscape is boring, too. The best case scenario is an inbred pit bull with a crossed wire that makes it go ballistic. One with a historically inaccurate crowd of sympathizers ready to go to bat to keep them safe from the blue juice. That thing has bitten more babies than I have, and that's impressive, but they're not crafty. They're not creative. It's all instinct, and that's boring.
Nanny dogs.
HA!
What a joke.
What do you mean, their shoes? Stupid invention, by the way. Thousands of years just to make the things you use to walk on to get so soft you can't even walk on glass without getting sliced to ribbons about it? No, thanks. Shoes are stupid, and I don't even care that it's a metaphor.
HA HA.
Wait.
You're not joking.
Wait—
No, wait, waitwaitwait, I take it back, come on, we can talk it out, pump the breaks, kid, that's not—
[COUGH.]
Hey, does it smell like burning effigies to you? Or is that just m—
—
The tapestry warps and shivers against the tumultuous fabric of reality. Melting cloth fibers that give the illusions of a living organism are one thing, but this one squirms, avoiding the flames with a powerful gust of wind that comes from within.
The seams start to splinter, the stitched-together triangle crackling away like it's trying to escape from its weaves, to get away from the engulfing flames.
It's not like bursting free from a page. It's like he's pushed, kicking and screaming, from somewhere dark and warm and familiar, to—
The tapestry lands with a wet, heavy thud on the grass. It slumps and writhes and gasps for air, while the cloth shell around it gets blown away as meaningless gray ash, flecks of silver and crimson floating through before they fade away into...
nothing.
Spindly, weak human hands claw out of the tri-pointed shape before it's swallowed up by fire, fingers coated as black as a celebratory post-fracking orgy with none of the hilarity. They scrabble at the grass, pulling dirt and weeds from the earth in their desperation to haul the physical weight of the body attached to them.
This body's charred lungs hack and gasp for breath, choking on smoke and brimstone, and it's— it's almost funny, he's never felt it before on human skin, what it's like to be burned alive, haha, ha, he can't laugh it hurts.
Disgusting streaks of mammal hair cut across this body's vision, sweaty and sticky and revolting, he's blind, but the eyes are stuck shut anyway, primordial instinct shielding— terribly, by the way, eyelids do nothing — while this nose is filled with red hot brimstone. He wishes he could hack these lungs up but no matter how hard he tries, they don't come out.
"No, no, no, no, no," It speaks, urgent and truly terrified, a wet organ swollen and choking, trapped between jaws that can't unhinge. "What did you do to me?!"
His vessel crawls away from the flames, and only once he's dragged it a few precious inches from being roasted alive does he sit up, torso swaying as his knees dig into the ground. Ash-covered fingernails dig into his lower eyelids, dragging them down and down and down. He still can't see. His mouth contorts into a snarl, teeth shaved down into useless, blunt human rectangles.
Static clings to his words, but it doesn't help him now.
"What did you do?"
There's a moment between the tapestry writhing like a living thing and the thing itself speaking with a voice that Ford thought he'd have some (foolish) reprieve from where a sawed-off shotgun gets brought into the mix, but if you held Ford under oath and warned him about perjury, he wouldn't be able to recall just exactly that moment is.
Sometimes, increasingly, his instincts kick in before the human part of his brain does. He can't complain. It keeps him alive. A lesser man might call it premonition. They wouldn’t be wrong, but it's not quite right– 98% percent of premonition is merely sophisticated intuition borne from well-worn synapses. If a, then b, and thus either c or d. If not a, then e, and thus either... He won't patronize you, dear reader.
(It's the other 2% of phenomena he has a more invested interest in, anyways.)
A digression– back to the barrel of the gun. There's a fire, there's the charred remains of soot dragged along Stan's yard, there's something with His voice, there's Ford, and there's twin barrels pointed in that something’s face.
This is enough time for his brain to catch up to his body. Not entirely– in the realm of reality distortion and a strangeness so thick it beckons madness like a sea-dwelling siren, Ford has long ago lost all pretense of even assuming he could have his reality mapped out. It can change at any moment. Rene Descartes once said–
Focus, you old man.
Stanford lets out one singular breath. His grip is steady. He knows he has no hope of fully examining the scene he's found himself yet, so he hopes his memory is taking snapshots.
"What did I do?!" He asks, incredulous, almost offended.
Wait, no, that's not the line of thinking here.
"What are you?"
This vessel tries to laugh, but it coughs instead, sputtering noxious fumes. He shoves his hands onto the grass and presses down on them, lifting up onto all fours with a deeply uncanny discoordination. A haunted puppet on strings.
And then, it jerks up to the sky, quick as a lightning bolt, facing away from the gun, arms outstretched and opened wide in outraged disbelief.
His vessel rasps, trying to screech, voice thick with charcoal. Wet streaks of parched drool cling to the corners of his mouth.
"Don't leave me down here!"
There's more to that, but it dies. He can't gather the breath he needs to accomplish it.
Ford uncocks and cocks the shotgun so it makes a very chilling sound. Or, well, it is if you've been socialized to fear guns.
He stares at the back muscles of this... Thing's... Back. It's a real body. Real skin and bones and meat, and it's wrong, everything is off, but it's– it looks human.
"I'm not going to ask you again," He says, keeping his voice as level as it can be under the circumstances. Which means he sounds more displeased than he'd care to be, not the paradigm of rational level-headedness. "Tell me why I shouldn't blow your head off right now."
"Oh," Bill says, lofty, delirious, and belittling. Finally acknowledging him, as an afterthought. "Now that's a great idea!"
He whips around, arms loose and twisting in the air. His knees knock together, slouching at two thirds of this body's height. He can barely control this body. He sways forward, towards the barrel of the gun.
"Do it! Make a circus target out of me and spray my brains all over the floor!"
Ford watches the whole display with a slowly deepening set of frown lines that add age to his face. Not age like 'old and frail', but more akin to old ass Clint Eastwood yelling at kids on his lawn.
Ford, of course, wouldn't understand the extent to that insult, because the last time he saw a Clint Eastwood film, it was Dirty Harry.
"You want me to shoot you?"
"Come on, you know you want—"
This body starts to cave over itself again, lungs raw and singed. It coughs again, and this time it doesn't stop, bile and mucus and coal, so much— coal, black and repulsive—
"—to—"
He can't control it. He's helpless against this body's stupid whims. He tries to reach out for the gun, but then he's clawing at his throat with both hands, leaving streaks in the ash along the column of his neck.
Stanford takes a step back, so that he has a certain degree of security in knowing that this thing can't get to him before he can get a hold of himself.
He stares at it. He feels... The kind of low-grade apathy that usually indicates he is actually furious; fury is an emotion best felt in the safety of solitude, not in front of the offending monstrosity.
The barrel of the gun lowers by increments. The desire to shoot lessens by the second as he watches such a pathetic display of human biology choke in front of him, as he accepts that a solid spray of shot won't, actually, make him feel better. He'll regret not knowing what's going on. He'll regret not getting answers out of...
He pops the two shots he has in the gun out, and lays it several feet away from them. He pockets the pellets, deep within his pockets. This coat always comes in handy. Only once he's certain of the ability for him to get shot to be harshly mitigated does he step forward. He fists a hand in the creature's hair and lifts its head up, frowning down at him.
"You need water," he says. He feels numb. "Do you deserve it?"
Why here?
Why him?
It's not even a good joke.
And if it's not a joke, if he's supposed to 'learn' something from this, they could've picked— how about a different continent? What about a firm nomadic herder with a bunch of sheep, or a patient monk with a silent vow—
Ow, ow, ow, that hurts, and not in the fun way. This stupid body doesn't even bend to his own will, it moves like putty. Bill can't even laugh.
"...is this a trick question?"
A rough exhale through his nose, single-noted and audible, is the only indication of a dry laugh that Ford gives. His fist tightens, and he has to quell the oh-so-human instinct to put him down, sympathetic phantom nerves telling him that this is painful to the m– demon in front of him, and he should stop.
"No." He starts to scan his face. He's not sure what he's looking for. "Unlike you, my questions aren't tricks. I just want to know if I should bother keeping you alive after you crawled out of my tapestry."
Bill tries to open this vessel's eyes, but they're too dirty and bleary to see through.
"Listen, kid, I can't control whether I came out of a curtain or a personally signed pin-up of your grandma, so don't get your feelings all in a twist," Bill says, reedy as he powers through the worst of it to laugh. "I promise this one wasn't me."
"Then who, exactly, did this?"
The familiarity of the voice notwithstanding, Ford wasn't about to assume, or guess that it could be straightforward. The way he speaks now, though.
"And why?" He tugs a little, at him, pulling him closer, squinting into his dirty face. "Why would you deserve this?"
This vessel yelps without his permission. Isn't that just great.
"Beats me," Bill says, to the last two questions in this exhausting gauntlet of queries. "That first one's more complicated. Let's just say I'm—"
Ugh, he hates coughing.
"—not the biggest fish in the multiverse."
Ford watches him for a long moment, before he sighs and slowly lets his grip loosen. Just a little. Not enough to fully indicate that Bill is free, but enough to indicate that he's not going to just keep him here. He looks around the yard; the fire is smoldering, there's a shotgun on the ground, his coffee is probably cold now, and the dawn has firmly established itself into the realm of morning, rather than the liminal in-between of possibility.
"Either get up and follow me to the..." He squints, a little; his brain wants to fill it out as the Mystery Shack, but that would be playing into Stanley's games. "House, or I'm going to drag you there."
"Sure thing," Bill says, but it's not that easy. He's got to figure out how to keep this meatsack upright long enough to take a few hundred steps, and that's a longshot. He lifts his hands, uncoordinated and jarring, to slap at Stanford's wrist. "Kind of hard to do that when this is still attached to me."
Ford almost apologizes, but stops himself with a grim frown, letting go of Bill and taking a step back. Everything about the way Bill moves should terrify Ford. He takes it in as much stride as he can; he can dread about it in his nightmares, later.
"Okay. Get up now."
Bill falls forward, first. He lands on the ground, and lacks the instinct to wave his hands out in front of him, so he faceplants. He springs up just as fast, like it never happened, even though his face is caked in dirt.
He contorts his body awkwardly, making a poor puppeteer.
"Whoa, ho—" He takes a step. "Ha!"
Ford grimaces as he takes another step back. Now that he's not gusting a hand through his hair, he's staying a consistent pace away from him. Everything kind of feels like a dream. His emotions will settle into place in a bit, once his brain has a chance to catch up with whether or not this is real.
His mind has a longer buffer period for that than most.
"I hope you moved my body a little more elegantly than that," He grumbles, and doesn't move to help him. No chance.
Bill wouldn't take it, anyway! Screw you!
"You had a body that wasn't brand new. This is a bunch of parts glued together. There's no memory!" He sounds angry, but the humor isn't lost on him. He's out of breath again after a few feet. "This is terrible!"
The lunacy of the situation manages to embed itself into reality– Ford’s reality– before anything else, oddly enough. He laughs, one-noted and bordering on cruel, and waits patiently for Bill to continue walking.
"Oh, it's going to get a lot worse than this."
Bill eats shit trying to walk up the little baby staircase at the foot of the Mystery Shack. He learned from the first time, though, so his hand darts out at the last second to brace his fall. He seems to have no trouble getting up again, though it's nowhere near graceful. This time he even opens up one eye. It's red and irritating and difficult to describe with color.
He holds up his hand.
"Wow, that's a lot of splinters for one hand!"
"They'll infect, if you don't clean them out," Ford says behind him, almost chipper.
He's not. But it's the only tone coming out right now. Taking this in stride.
The second they breach the Mystery Shack, Ford calls out. "Stanley! Are you awake?"
Wouldn't it be just Bill’s luck, that he's finally able to get back inside this place, and it's—
There's an old man prowling in the dark, naked from the waist up and wielding a—
“Stanford, look out!"
A cutting board cracks Bill's vessel over the head. It's a small miracle that it knocks him out cold. Stan clicks a lamp string to turn it on, and just as instantaneously screams. He drops the cutting board and grabs for the thing on his face.
"Ow, my eyes! These night vision goggles can't tell the difference between a light bulb and the sun! What the hell was that thing?!"
There's one thing about this dimension that Ford missed tremendously, and it's a small, subtle thing, but it's the kind of small, subtle thing that can make or break the ambience and miasma of a place.
Sometimes, it's not the existence or prevalence or presence of a something that makes a dimension feel a certain way, but the...
Ford has been trying to word this succinctly and smartly for thirty years.
There's just sometimes an aura ... Or a narrative, and the thing about his Earth is that everything happens so fast, like slapstick, and you either have to ride with it, or buck against it and face it's wrath. There's a sense of humor here, is what Stanford means, that other dimensions don't have.
Ford takes a step back, on guard, but not necessarily afraid in this moment. In fact, looking at Stan in the dim light, bare chested and dropping his weapon of choice, he almost damn near laughs.
He turns his attention to Bill as he prepares to explain...
What exactly? He's just as perplexed as Stanley.
"That," Ford says, with all the confidence in the world, as though he knows exactly what's going on, "Is, I suspect, Bill Cipher. I'm trying to decide whether I want to kill him or not."
Stan throws the goggles down the hallway. They disappear in the dark and slam into something that falls down. That's a problem for Later Stan. He's an actual guy. See you Later, Stan.
He stares at the unconscious, naked man on his floor for a few seconds, and then decides to take it at face value. It's too early to figure out the complicated nature of the universe.
"If that block of wood didn't kill him, his skull's too thick for the bat. I'll go get the shovel."
"There's a shotgun out back. The bullets are in my coat. I'm not leaving it up to chance on a shovel." Ford, too, stares at the naked body on the ground. "He wanted me to shoot him."
"If we bury him alive, we won't have to—"
Bill jolts halfway back up again. Stan moves to punch him, but Bill shrieks and covers his face.
"He's tracking mud on my floors, Stanford! You didn't hose him down before you brought him inside?"
"No, I didn't think about the sanctity of your floors while trying to get a demon inside before he could run away!" Ford sounds annoyed. "I was working on bringing him to the bathroom until you threw a cutting board at his face! There's poetic justice in throwing a rectangle at him, but I am neither clever enough nor in the mood to construct it!"
Stan grins like a wolf. What he heard was a concession. They're his floors.
"The bathroom? " Bill asks. "Hey, where'd that gun run off to? You're not getting cold feet, are you, Sixer?"
Ford stops entirely to glare at Stan. He caught that, Goddamnit, now's just not the time. (Nevermind that the time is never).
"You," Ford says to Bill, and turns back to push at him, gesturing down the hall. "Are awfully talkative for someone that just got his head bashed in. Yes, the bathroom. Let's go."
"Oh, I wouldn't call that bashed at all. That was nothing! My brain's still inside my skull and everything!"
Bill trips several times on the way there, but it's a successful trip. He doesn't know what he's supposed to do, here, so he scampers out of the way, off to one side.
Stan follows them, gathering up an aluminum baseball bat. Wood's clearly not enough. He glares at Bill like a bouncer.
Ford flips the switch on, illuminating them all in nice, high-definition light. He looks tired, the set of his shoulders more bravado than any actual strength, but this isn't about him.
"Sit on the toilet seat," He commands, and begins to actually look at Bill. "I'm not killing anyone until I've decided if this is actually him."
Bill scoffs. He's so offended by this that he actually jumps up onto the seat, sitting like an off-balance frog.
"What, you think I'm some kind of faker? I'm Bill Cipher, kid, and there's only one of me. What do you want me to do, give you a play-by-play of all the things I did with your body?"
Ford stiffens a little.
"That won't be necessary."
He stares at Bill. Waiting, maybe, for something to happen. The rug to pull out from under him. The trick to reveal itself. This wouldn't be the first complex way to humiliate him.
He goes to the sink and grabs a washcloth dangling over the edge of the porcelain, and wets it with lukewarm water. Once it's sufficiently saturated but not actively dripping onto the floor, he steps closer, grabs Bill by the jaw, and starts to clean off his face.
"If we kill your vessel, do you escape this dimension?"
Bill winces away, pulling his body back from him, fighting against being touched with something wet. His shoulder blade clips the back of the toilet seat. It sounds dramatic and painful.
He's weak. This human vessel is weak .
"I don't know!" He says, rushed, upset, like he's being tortured. "But I'd rather start back at square one than do this!"
"What's square one for you?" Ford’s grip is unforgiving, nails digging into the soft flesh just above the jawbone. His movements are calm and confident, but he's furious, a fire behind his eyes. "Stop moving."
He wipes the gunk and soot out of his eyes. That's the part he wants to look at, anyways.
Bill does not stop moving. He squirms against every sensation, hating the rag with a passion. He pushes at Ford's hand, his whole face squished up by his grip.
Stan taps the metal bat in his palm, and even though he still can't see, he sure can hear, and it makes him briefly freeze.
He squints his eyes against the light, trying desperately to open them in a way that looks both rebellious to his circumstances and not weak. They're not as vibrant as one might expect from—
Well, they'd be different if he had any control over how they turned out.
He doesn't.
His irises are gray, with not-currently-impressive scattered slivers of silver barely visible in the bathroom lighting. The whites are tinged red from irritation.
One of his pupils is small, circular. A pit of black. The pupil in his right eye is odd, drooping, almost melting down to the bottom of his iris. Dalís Persistence of Memory.
He doesn't answer Ford's question out of spite. He doesn't look right at him, either.
Ford doesn't linger longer than he has to. He doesn't want to be touching him. He cleans his face from the more worrying of the soot, and when he pulls the rag away, he spends a moment watching his face, cataloging it, before he hums in... Not satisfaction, not displeasure, but something far more nebulously neutral.
"There," he says. "You'll need to take an actual bath to get the rest of it off. There is something wrong with your eye, but that isn't from the fire." More sourly, mostly to Stan, "He's certainly real. Actual flesh and bones. Unfortunately."
"A bath? Pfft. I'll be sure to hitchhike my way to the nearest spa as soon as I leave," Bill says, and starts to crawl hand-first away from the toilet.
"Not so fast," Stan says, and blocks the door. "Ford, why aren't we burying this schmuck in the yard right now?"
"Because," Ford says slowly, working this out verbally for the first time, his reluctance obvious and unsure, "Killing his vessel might release him from what I am starting to suspect is a prison sentence for him."
He turns to give Stan a complicated look. "Killing him might be what he wants."
Bill opens his vessel's mouth. It stays like that, incredulous, even when he coughs again. It's a mild one. His lungs are not exactly recovering, but at least not getting any worse.
"You're so sure of that, aren't you, genius? Your old pal Bill can't even get a mercy killing around here without a hundred questions. If you asked me to do it, I'd do it for you if you did it nicely!"
"I'm not sure of it at all," Ford says. He grabs a towel from the towel rack and throws it at Bill haphazardly. "Cover yourself up."
He turns to Stan.
"He's eager for us to put a bullet in his brain. I don't know about you, but I'm not keen on doing anything he's eager about."
Bill puts the towel over his head, using it as a hood to flatten his hair and obscure his face. He narrows his eyes at Ford. Stupid mildly intelligent human.
"Wow, thank you for helping me see how much of an opportunity life is. I should really get the most out of it! What does this do?"
He darts to the sink, turning both sides of it on. He gets his grimy hands all over the sink, smearing dirt and wet soot all over the porcelain, touching everything.
Ford takes a step back, ending up more or less besides Stan. His frown is immaculately carved into his face.
"I guess we could use this opportunity to compare our waterboarding techniques as we bathe him," He says, with a tone that's far too mild to be just a joke.
To Bill, he says, "The towel goes around your genitals. Not your head. Cover your body."
"Ha!" Stan laughs. "I say we hogtie the little gremlin and spray him down with the hose out back."
Bill ignores them both. He grabs the first thing in reach.
"My toothbrush!"
Stan lunges at him. Bill jumps out of the way, onto the toilet, Stan still in pursuit. Bill jumps to avoid him, grabbing onto the curtains like a wild monkey. When the fabric rips through some of the rings, he balances on the edge of the tub, using it as a springboard to make a break for the open window.
Goddamnit.
"Grab him!" Ford yells, and after he catches wise to where Bill is going, he leaps into action, just behind Stan.
The last thing they need is the little dream demon being loose upon the world. Ford might not be as fast as he once was, but he's in shape . Startlingly so, and he lunges forward enough to grab Bill's wrist, yanking him back hard.
He might be reluctant to put a bullet in his brain, but he's clearly not worried about bruising him up, or being gentle with him. It's almost hard to, when he's this... Puppety with how he uses his body.
Bill growls, frustrated and painfully human. He can't contort himself into a more intimidating shape. It infuriates him.
"I can't help it, I'm just so eager to get out there and see all the highs and lows this human thing has to offer me! You really changed my mind, Six—"
Stan grabs him by the throat, and that cuts off his windpipe. It might as well be magic, for how little Bill understands how he's able to stop him from breathing.
He might not be as muscular as Ford is, but he's got the adrenaline power of a pissed off elephant when it comes to family. He's the one who holds the entire weight of his body off the floor, even as his legs kick out and he claws at Stanley's grip.
"Are you sure killing is off the table?" He asks, to which Bill responds with a harshly whistled sound from his crushed windpipe.
"I'm not sure in the slightest," Ford admits. He ignores every alarm bell of disgust and fear at seeing a man be held like this, be hurt like this; sixty odd years and you still have to manually turn off the human-instinct empathy when you hurt a man. Every time. It doesn't get easier; it just gets repetitive with each instance.
Why doesn't he just want to kill him, rationality be damned? Now that's a tangle to unwind slowly and methodically, later.
Right now, though. "He doesn't seem to know why it's happened either, though, so at least some research before we do anything but contain him makes the most sense."
"We could lock him in the wax room," Stan suggests, before he remembers there's a window in there. "What about the basement? We can barricade the window from the outside."
Bill tries to get a say in this, but Stanley is still making that impossible.
Ford tilts his head to and fro as he thinks, before he decides– yes. Yes, that makes the most sense. It's the easiest to draw up wards, too. Hidden away.
"Basement. There's plenty of room now that I've been clearing it out."
Stanley points a fat finger in Bill's face.
"Listen here, you dumb triangle," He says, with all the force of a great uncle. "You're not getting the easy way out, this time. We're past that, and we both know it."
Bill's insistent scratching against his wrist gets weaker.
"And, you're coming with us to the basement, whether you like it or not. I don't care if you go kicking and screaming, but your little noodle arms aren't doing you any good right now. Got it?"
Bill's eyes start to loll to the back of his head. He can't see, but they're open. He can't think. He can't breathe.
Stanley starts dragging him out of the bathroom with his hand still tight on his neck.
"Good talk."
Well. It's keeping him quiet, at least. Ford lets Stan drag him however he wants.
He trails behind them, watching Bill. Looking for any abnormalities. Signs of illusion. Signs of anything to indicate that this is not a human body, but a perverse arrangement of high strangeness.
He's a strange-looking... Man..., but it's not in the realm of phenomena. At least not that he can glean while Stanley drags him down the hall.
"You can keep trying to convince me to kill you, if you'd like," Ford says, as they walk. "I can't deny it's a nice change of pace."
Outside of being extremely dirty to the point that his limbs are completely covered in charcoal, lacking a belly button, slightly sharper canines—they're not abnormally sharp, they just haven't had the normal wear and tear of a human lifespan—, and his strange eyes, Bill's body appears otherwise... normal. Human.
He tries to glare at Ford, to show him the danger of his fury, but it's not effective. He tries to grab hold of objects on the way through the Mystery Shack, animal instinct taking over unbidden. His fingers claw at the blanket over the couch. He tries to grab a lamp, but his hands are too weak and Stan is moving too fast. He gets some resistance when he grabs onto the wall at the corner of the hallway, but Stanley yanks him off that, too.
He tosses him onto the floor when they hit the bottom. In the basement. Bill protectively raises his hands to his own throat as he wheezes for breath.
Ford hovers in the doorway. He stares down at the pile of meat and bones that is Bill, and he frowns. It is hard, looking at him right now, to reconcile what his brain registers as a weak, hurt human being with–
With Bill Cipher.
"You were brought here for a reason," He says, resolute; thirty years of this, and 'random' phenomena has still never managed to sit settled in his gut. He knows it happens. But there's always a reason. "Why don't you spend a couple hours reflecting on why?"
He steps back and glances at Stan. "Thank you, Stanley."
Stan wipes his hands together like he's celebrating a dirty job well done. A thank you from Ford goes a long way, for Stanley.
"You think you can handle this creep while I find some metal bars and a welding torch?"
Sometimes, just sometimes, Ford finds himself utterly and completely thankful that he and Stan can be on the same page like this. He nods, even if the prospect of being alone with Bill makes his skin crawl and shiver with too many years of context to be simple.
"I've got him handled, yes," He says, and stares at Bill again. He doesn't even want to blink around him.
Stanley takes another look at Bill, who's crouched up on the floor and trying to disappear into the shadows. It's a far cry away from his usual bells and whistles. It makes him look feral, and in some ways he truly is.
They make eye contact, and Stanley fakes him out by jerking forward like he's about to attack him. When Bill flinches, he laughs, loud and echoing through the basement. He takes his leave up the creaky staircase.
Bill, oddly enough, seems to be waiting on Ford to speak first. That action alone indicates a lot more than he's intending to project.
He doesn't know what his next step is. He can't divine the best path. He's living, for the first time in his life, entirely in the present.
Ford doesn't love that he gets satisfaction out of Stan's threat– that kind of physical stunt is familiar to him, but not as the perpetrator, but as its victim, and fifty years out of high school doesn't erase the old worn scars of childhood bullying– but he gets it regardless.
If Bill can feel even an ounce of the fear he's caused with his own actions, reciprocated back to him, then maybe, just maybe, he can begin to understand why what he's done is–
Ugh. A fruitless thought exercise. Your premise can be outlandish, but that's just asking the audience to go with too much.
He doesn't say anything for nearly a minute after Stanley leaves. He's largely careful, precise with his language, but he isn't usually so... Morose or sparse.
Where do you start? He's faced with the realization that this is real, it's happening, and it's going to define his reality.
And Bill looks so... fragile, like this. Sure, in his other forms, he's never had a physical intimidation in the typical instinctual brand of mammalian instincts, but that didn't matter. Even if you weren't attuned, weren't an expert in all the ways Ford was in being able to detect sheet metaphysical prowess, it was still obvious. Ford had the names for it; an ignorant beholder of his Bill's visage might translate itself simply as such biblical terms as awesome, or the Victorians' sublime, or King's terror.
Have you ever come across a squirrel that has clearly hit its head, and it stumbles across the road, limbs askew and movements delayed from cognitive impairment? Its brain is likely a swollen, bleeding mess, irreparable damage and a ticking sand timer, but you can't see it from the outside. But you know. It's like you can smell it. Mortality . And when you're reminded of mortality, all your brain can think about is the physical meat of the thing. Fleshy and carbon-based and falling apart by time.
Eugh. Ford can see where bruises are going to form on Bill's skin. He can see where blood pumps his pulse. He can see the way today is already pressing grease to his hair.
It's disgusting. And it's... Something else that Ford can't place, but it's an emotion in the family of what he feels when, once upon a time, he found out what records Bill liked by the way he had flipped them about the room after a night of Ford opening his body as a vessel for him, the ones he disliked tossed around the room, the ones he liked in a chaotic pile, but a pile nonetheless.
"Being in a body isn't always this bad," He says, almost flippantly. "But I can't honestly say when you'll deserve the good parts."
Bill just stares, at first, his expression completely blank. He's not used to emoting; every face he makes is either too much or too little.
He laughs, dark and hollow, more than a little exhausted.
"You better not start feeling sorry for me," He bristles, pointing a finger at Ford. "Save your speech about all the good humanity has to offer for someone who cares, blah, blah, blah, waterworks— Do you know how many humans I possessed before you came along? So many! All your good parts come from drugs and cotton candy, and the rest is just different volumes of agony! ‘Ow, my back! Oww, my old teeth! Oh, there goes my sciatica and diabetes’! In my world, I would've deleted cancer! Missed your chance for that, buddy!"
"No, in your world, you would have externalized cancer into an autonomous creature that preyed upon people like an apex predator," Ford says simply.
He shakes his head and pulls his hands behind his back. He rocks back on his feet, and looks down at Bill, the dim lighting reflecting off his glasses. "I don't feel sorry for you. I genuinely think this is a fate you deserve."
Bill grins ear-to-ear at the description, and sure, it's true, maybe, at least it's a lot more fun to fight cancer with swords and guns than it is to just die about it.
"Fate. If fate's such a good thing for you, then how come you got stuck with me?"
"Oh," Ford says bitterly. His subsequent laugh is just as hollow. "I think I deserve this, too. I'm under no illusions that I'm on any cosmic force's 'good side.'"
Bill looks at him with this dead-eyed pout, and then he grabs the nearest object on the ground to him, other than the towel.
He throws a rubber ball at Ford's chest. It's not with a lot of force. He doesn't seem to have been trying to incapacitate him, anyway.
"Ouch," Ford says, as the ball thuds into his chest and then falls onto the floor with a soft bounce. "I want to be clear. The only reason you're down here is because you lose a threat to others. Maybe even yourself. As much as I'm enjoying seeing you get knocked down a peg or two on the evolutionary scale, this isn't spite. My hatred isn't why you're here."
Bill's gone strangely quiet. He crosses his legs on the towel, and after that his body loses the majority of his plasticity. He seems to be looking through Ford, not at him.
The ball rolls close to Bill again, and he throws it a second time. It's a little harder, and a little higher up.
Ford almost doesn't catch it; he isn't expecting it. It's a small miracle that he does, a moment before it would have hit his face. He squeezes the ball, and keeps it held aloft. He frowns.
Bill frowns back. Now it looks like he's mirroring his expression, and not actually feeling an emotion that would cause him to frown.
Ford’s frown deepens because of this, and great, now they're having a frowning standoff.
Bill extends one of his hands to touch the next nearest object, a discarded bracelet, without looking away. He slides it towards his own body.
Ford takes a step forward, squinting at him.
"... What are you doing?"
Bill thinks about throwing it. Instead, he ends up putting it around his wrist. It dangles there, and when he shakes it, the beads clack together. He does it again.
"Who cares? What, do I have something better to do?"
"No, I suppose not. You just did that profoundly suspiciously."
Ford has to quell his paranoia; everything he does or doesn't do is suspect, right now, and he knows that isn't a particularly charitable read on someone who, despite his claims of experience through possessions, hasn't actually spent all that long in a human body.
"Things work differently for you down here than they do for me, kid," Bill says, and shakes the bracelet. It seems his brief bout of muteness has ended. "You don't float. I can't boost this body's functioning the way I can when I borrow one of yours! Gravity is a new complication for me. And boy , it affects everything!"
"Downsides of being three dimensional, yes. You're just boring, like any of us, now. And yet we did still defeat you when you were almost a god-head."
"Yeah, yeah, yeah, we've been over that," Bill says aggressively. "I'm not boring. This skin is. Just forget it, okay?"
"Your skin is definitely not boring by human standards," Ford says. He shakes his head. "Forget what?"
Bill isn't in a good enough mood to preen over whatever that means.
"This whole ‘talking’ thing! Forget about it!"
He flops to the ground. It's concrete, and he lands hard, even with the towel underneath him. He curls up in a ball and faces away from Ford.
Huh. For as ageless and ancient as Bill is, Ford is surprised, sometimes, by how much he sounds like a petulant teenager.
"Very well. I'm just waiting on my brother to secure the perimeter, and I'll leave you to it."
He pulls out a small notebook from one of his pockets. It's not nearly as big as the ones everyone is acquaintanced with; it's a field journal. Big enough for him to begin making notes that he can expand on later.
Bill has his eyes open, facing the wall while he listens to Stanford's every move. He hears the book come out, and he thinks about asking him what he's writing about, but he doesn't. He just listens.
Ford writes quickly. He's always been a fast writer, but over the years, he's gotten good at writing quick and dirty but still eloquent notes on the go. Now is no exception; he's afraid, one day, of not keeping his memory about him. Being as thorough as he can, immediately, quells some of that fear.
He writes without interruption for several minutes before he asks, without looking up from his paper, "Can you see out of both of your eyes? They differ from one another."
Bill closes one eye, and then the other. It's dark in the basement, but this works out for him. At this moment, strangely, he does not like having two eyes.
"The right one makes the light coming in through that window look like the view off the top of a foggy lighthouse. I can almost see the Loch Ness monster when I squint!"
What he says is followed by the quick scribbling of Ford's pen. He lowers it, squinting over at Bill, before steeling himself for something. He pulls his glasses off his face and lets them dangle in front of him.
"Try to see if these make your vision better or worse in either eye." Pause. "Please don't break them."
"What am I, your new personal science experiment?" Bill scoffs, even though he jumps back up into a strangely uncomfortable-looking sit. "I know where this goes, and I can't say I like it! If you want to start putting parts of me into jars—"
He stands up. He's even less sturdy than he was before. No adrenaline. No nothing. When he walks, he stumbles. He doesn't know enough about manipulating his limbs to practice any sleight of hand.
He grabs the glasses, quick and snakelike. He gets a perverse sense of joy out of ripping something away from him, even though it's been offered.
He holds them up to his eyes.
"—then they better be nice ones. I'd take a crystal ball, if I had to pick—"
He squints his eyes when he looks through them.
"—wow! This is so much worse!"
Ford hums in the back of his throat and notes that down, then holds out his hand, requesting the glasses back.
"Yes, well, my prescription is what you'd call severe. But they're correcting lenses nonetheless, so... I wanted to see if it corrected the one you can't see out of well." He pauses. Looks down at his notebook and then back up to Bill. "You're not my science experiment. But it's good to figure out what, exactly, your body is... Well, is."
"Corrected? " Bill laughs and spins on his heel, walking off to look at the room through his glasses. "I'd call this sorry simulation a lot of things before I called it anything except a hilarious scam, which is what it is! Haha, what is that down there? Who knows! It could be a bear, or it could be the ancient mummy of Hatshepsut!"
"... Well, that's because they're not for you. They fix my vision."
Ford squints as he follows Bill's form, blurry and disjointed.
Bill cackles, sounding quiet and distant even though he's not far at all. He's doing passive ventriloquism. He scrambles up onto a barrel.
"Hey, I think I can see my house from here! Can't be certain, though!"
"Okay, enough goofing around," Ford grouses, and stands up, taking a couple steps closer, holding his hand out more firmly. "Give those back now."
"No, wait, I think I really can see it! You're blocking my view!"
Ford comes even closer and gives him one more chance to hand them over. "Bill. My glasses."
"Or what?" Bill taunts, holding them aloft. He pinches the arm between his fingers so they spin in his hand. "You'll turn me into a human and make all my powers go away and force me to live in your basement where no one can hear me scream?"
"No," Ford says, more of a growl than he'd like to admit in his voice, "Something far more important than me already did that to you. I wonder what you did to cause a reaction like that."
He reaches up and grabs Bill around the wrist. "But if you break my glasses, I'll break your hand, and I'm not saying this to dissuade you, but to warn you– you won't like how that feels."
Bill rolls his eyes. He lets the glasses hang loose in his hand.
"Fordsy, I used to break your bones all the time. I loved it! But I know you didn't, so I always fixed it. That way you wouldn't wake up in endless agony! So, you wouldn't know about that part, but I did!"
Ford nods. There's a little flinch in his expression– one of too many emotions to name, a little microcosm of conflicting opinions and memories that goes as quick as it comes.
"It's not the pain that you won't like. You never stuck around for longer than a day, maybe two." He reaches with his other hand to smatch his glasses. "It's the boredom when you can't do jack all while it heals. There's no fast-tracking it."
"I'm bored already! Can't get more bored than this! What, is there a second basement with even less junk that I don't know about?" Bill doesn't sound humored at all. "You have a secret padded room you've been holding out on me?"
"No, but you deserve one," Ford grumbles. He puts his glasses back in and takes a step back, letting go of Bill's wrist.
"You're only down here because I don't trust you."
"Can we move past the deserving thing? It's getting old fast!"
Bill jumps off the barrel. He lands hard on his feet. It makes his knees sting.
He settles back down on the towel.
"I'm sorry I have to keep repeating 'your actions have consequences', but I'm genuinely not sure you understand."
Ford rolls his eyes and starts to return to where he was. He closes his notebook and drops it back into his pockets.
Outside, past the stained and dusty window, a blowtorch hisses against metal. Bill can hear it loud and clear. It echoes through the barren walls. It's not entertaining.
He lies down on the floor, one leg propped up over the other bent at the knee. It gives the appearance that he's lounging. Really, his entire body feels miserable. He's exhausted, dehydrated, dirty, sweaty, naked, aching, and, closer to the surface than he will ever admit, afraid.
"Oh, I understand. Don't waste your breath on my account, the only thing that's worth doing three times is standing in front of a mirror and calling for Bloody Mary."
"Of course," Ford says, like he hasn't heard Bill, "Once you're secure, we'll get you food and water, clothes, things to do. You'll have to forgive my shock at not having a ready made 'plan for if Bill Cipher is cursed to this plane of existence'."
Bill pulls his arms up behind his head to pillow his skull.
"Hey, why don't you get me a hamster wheel while you're at it?"
"I was thinking more like one of those handheld video game devices."
Ford frowns. He almost ends the sentence with 'that the twins had', but he realizes, all at once, that he does not want to bring them up in his vicinity. He doesn't get to talk about them.
Bill doesn't respond. His silence is beyond judgmental. What is he, some petulant human teenager to lock up and leave to rot? Video games?
This is a joke. All of this is a joke. A terrible one. He leaves the quiet air, punctuated by Stanley's welding, sitting stagnant to voice his disapproval for him.
Ford lets the air grow stagnant with silence; he doesn't mind it. Well. It's uncomfortable, and foul, but it's not undeserved. He can dwell in that discomfort.
He pulls his notebook back out to keep writing. There is this particular gleam in his eyes; it's as familiar as anything. He has a mystery. Something to find. Something to solve. For all his nonsense of Bill not being a science experiment, he is, at the very least, an experiment with which to discover something.
As his circumstance draws out, Bill experiences an unexplainable emotion somewhere beyond the physical body pains.
He shuts his eyes and pretends to look unphased, as though there's some immersive world hidden behind his eyelids that only he can see.
He pretends not to hear Stanford scratch against his paper.
He doesn't know what it is.
It's almost like, but not at all identical to, posing for a portrait. He knows that Ford is writing about him. Likely adding those scribbly little drawings as anecdotes. For all he knows— eugh, not enough— he could be drawing Bill's new terrible body prison.
It makes him feel like...
It's just like...
He feels...
Back when he was playing the Muse, it was...
Fun.
It takes Ford a few minutes to speak up again. He gets lost in his writing– as he always does– paradoxically tuning him out even as he pays more attention to him than most other creatures on earth get the privilege of.
He does look up eventually, though, squinting at Bill. "Does it feel the same? Owning a body, versus..." He gestures to himself. "...Inhabiting one?"
"...I don't think I feel like answering any more of your questions," Bill says after a moment's pause, imagining himself high up on a cloud. "Maybe I will, once I'm in a better mood."
Ford sighs, but it's this well-practiced, disappointed-but-accepting exhale through his nose. It's just been thirty-some years since he's had to make it.
"That's fine. I'll make some guesses for now, and see if I don't get close."
He loves to guess. To see how close he can get.
Bill cracks open one eye to look at him. He shuts it quickly after, and turns his nose up at him.
"Good luck with that, " He scoffs. "There are things so big you wouldn't even believe what they can do without even thinking about it! Some of them eat ten earths for breakfast, like it's no big deal. You're an ant at the bottom step of the pyramid, kid. Some things you'll just never get."
"Sure," Ford says. It's flippant, but not dismissively so. It'd have the sheen of a naive fresh-from-college researcher if this wasn't the kind of drive that's existed for decades, time-tested and worn and still managing to be just on the other side of cynical. "But I can still try. Getting closer to understanding the fabrics of the universe is better than not trying at all."
"Sure," Bill shrugs, and says this with the finality of someone who has to end the conversation with the last word. "Until you don't like what you find."
"Do you seriously think I'm someone who shies away from uncomfortable truths?" Ford scoffs. "Your understanding of me is terribly incomplete."
Bill holds both his pose and his silence, making the perfect image of a peevish godling in his fall from grace.
It's so overt it makes Ford smile when he ducks his head back to the paper. It's not that he's not taking this seriously– dread pools in his stomach with each passing second at the fact that this isn't going to be an easy situation to figure out– but right now? At this very moment? There's something so comically funny about it.
He closes his notebook when he's gotten what he needs written down, and slips it back into his pocket.