Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

If you walked into the room, the first and only thing you’d see would be white. Just white. White, padded floors and walls, white air mattresses and white duvets and white fluorescent lights that made your brain buzz when you looked at them. Some things broke up the white, but they had been added to the room by someone else; ripped bits of paper with poetry on them, drawings of seemingly unconnected things— a portal, a pine tree, a bag of ice (?). There was nothing else in the room apart from a massive stack of paper (presumably the same type as had been plastered on the walls) and crayons. Oh, yes, and a god.

The god in question had a feeling that he was going insane, which was a fair assumption to make. When you’re in a confined space where there’s hardly any differentiation in colour and the only sensory experiences you have are bouncy and soft, it’s pretty easy to go crazy.

He also found it was eerily easy to forget things. Like what the stars were. Like what he was alive for. Like his family. And like how long he’d been here.

It had been years, for sure. That he knew. He just couldn’t recall how many.

All the gods, this shit was driving him mad! He normally had– had perfect recall! From the start of his trillions of years of life to now! Now when it all was wasted and he was sitting in a STUPID place trying to remember his goddamn name!

Bill. It was Bill; he knew his own name.

But he couldn't remember his last name!!!

He had drawn what his stupid boss/therapist/oh my gods I don’t even care anymore/Axolotl had told him to, and he had been looking at the picture before he had lost consciousness. Another thing he had had to get used to was the concept of slipping into unconsciousness, not his own volition.

It felt a little too mortal, and he didn’t like it one bit.

He glanced down at the paper in his hands. The background was hastily scribbled, but the subject was clear enough. It was, quite obviously, an image of the stars. Every flaming ball of gas was detailed, as if drawn from up close. There was no colour to the image, except for two small dots of red and blue sitting complacently in the middle. 

They made his head hurt when he thought about them. He was pretty sure that had always been the case. They made up so much of him, and he didn’t like thinking about himself either. The name Bill Cipher was kind of wasted on him. He felt like just a shell.

CIPHER! THAT WAS HIS LAST NAME!
HAHAHAHAHAHAHA! TAKE THAT, AMNESIA!

And he was tired now, so he closed his eyes and felt consciousness slipping away from him in the way he hated was familiar. What wasn’t familiar now, what was different now, was the weight of the stars falling on his chest as he fell away. He knew it wasn’t him, couldn’t be him forcefully drying his tears, softly crushing his spine, killing him so he felt nothing. 

Nothing 

at 

all, 

and he would never feel again, just float and be DEPRIVED without a dryness in your mouth without a need to blink to moisturise your e y e and meditation never felt like this, but neither did 'normal' sleep, and it was all... oddly... different... but not unpleasant.

Just

gone.

And then something appeared from the blissful nothingness, and it hurt to see, to look at it, it was awful AWFUL awfulawfulawfulawful in comparison to the relieving nothingness he had felt just before. But it was there, and it wasn't going away.

As far away from the object as he was, Bill could see an edge, a reflective surface and yellow in it. A mirror. He hadn't seen those since

Ẅ̸͖́ȩ̷̨͖͍͝i̵̜̥̲͒r̴͇̺͑̊͘͠ḑ̴̥̰̒͋m̶̺̝͗̅̕a̶̘̗͗̑g̶͈̯̭͊̈ḡ̷̢͈̳̰̄̉̕e̶̬̲͍͉̔͒ḑ̶͕̈́̽̏͜͝ͅo̴̦̺͊ň̶̘̩̟̱̎̾̿

and being in one of many universes widely populated by mortals. With those people he had been so well acquainted with, who had bent to his whims. 

Fuck. That didn't narrow it down in the slightest
Hell, he had amnesia! Give him a break, for Axolotl's sake!

He moved closer to the mirror, and he could feel each step he took and it was AWFUL is was UNENDING AGONY to FEEL and THINK and TASTE and SEE and it hurt so fucking bad to walk and talk the weight of his legs increasing every second and it felt just like being back learning to walk his first days in the Theraprism and it felt like
The ground was knives beneath his soles beneath the balls of his feet and how was he not bleeding... and his ankles... he had ankles?

He looked down but the only thing his eyes would let himself see was the mirror, he couldn’t feel the light pressure on his feet that was making him want to stab himself in the stomach, to feel pain, to distract himself with something far more drastic, with death death death death death

The mirror was getting closer and the feeling, the shock of the pressure burying into the balls of his feet like knife blades piercing through the skin (that he didn’t HAVE), though maybe not stopped, had slowed its intensification and he ventured moving faster.

He reached the reflective surface now. What looked back was not him. It was how he remembered humans—that’s what those mortals were—looking. He remembered now, and he wasn't cracked— HE WASN’T SPLIT DOWN THE MIDDLE—
Blond hair not hidden by any top hat that he knew would make him feel safer, safer than he felt without it. Blue eyes, eyes that stared through himself in the glass, the only thing holding him down one golden earring. A suit, a black suit, a yellow undershirt. Rings. A lot of rings.

This was not good not good not good not good not good not good not good oh no no no no no no no no no NO NO NO NO NO NO NO

This couldn’t be happening he knew it couldn’t impossible it was impossible IT WAS IMPOSSIBLE IMPOSSIBLEIMPOSSIBLEIMPOSSIBLEIMPROBABLEimPrOBaBlEiMpRObAbLEhappening
It was happening

His eyes never closed, but it felt like they were opening. All the blackness disappeared, escaping at the top and bottom of his vision, the void retreating from view as he awoke .

Familiar sounds, smells, sights— they were all within an arm’s reach. Polished pine wood in planks on the floor, rays of sun filtering in through a window behind him and gracing his back with light and with warmth, his blond hair practically lighting up as he breathed in strongly.

This place was beautiful. It felt like home.

Then he recognised it.

No no no NO NOT THE MYSTERY SHACK
IT HAD BEEN FOUR YEARS

...four years. He had spent four years in the Theraprism. Having a clear mind for once sure was nice.

BUT NOT THE MYSTERY SHACK
AND WHY WAS IT BEAUTIFUL AND HOMEY AND
HOW WAS HE HERE and
oh SHIT what was he gonna do and

This was all that FUCKING Axolotl's doing. That STUPID DEITY HAD PLACED HIM HERE! IT WAS ALL THEIR FAULT BILL WAS HERE! Oh, GOD WHAT wsA giONg ON hwY sWA iHS NiMD sPiNNInG

He turned around and they hadn't noticed and everyone was there, it was everyone he'd hurt and tortured and put through all those struggles that made them want to kill themselves and he was going undetected. Thank fuck thank fuck

The girl—Shooting Star—was in yet another stupid sweater like the one that had made her part of the zodiac. She looked different, though, certainly older and far taller than when the demon had last seen her.
Her twin, Pine Tree, had gone through far fewer changes, wearing the same dumb hat and standing a little shorter than his sister. This time, he was clutching a journal of his own making, with a pine tree insignia on the cover, which Bill thought was fitting.

They weren't the only people in the room. Though Question Mark wasn't there at the moment, the elder set of twins was.
The other one—whom he had to admit he didn't care about as much—had the same red fez hat on and was laughing about something or other. He hadn't changed, hunched posture and general demeanour much the same.

Then the one he was reeeeeeally interested in.
Stanford.
Axolotl, he looked good.
His hair was less grey, and noticeably too, without the stress. He was wearing a grayish blackish overcoat, which Bill had come to think of as another staple of his Sixer, aside from the obvious one. His bruises, singed-at-the-edges hair and worried expression, which were probably the only other things he associated with Ford, were gone. He was smiling, sharing in a joke with his brother, and everyone looked happy!
Looked being the key word.

Speaking of looked.

Shooting Star dragged her gaze upward from the kitchen table and over towards the demon flung on the floor. And screamed.

Bill covered his ears with painfully sensitive hands covered thinly with skin, the screech painfully harsh in comparison to the mindless chatter and ambience of the kitchen, which he had just spent all of five seconds taking in. Pine Tree screamed too, even higher a pitch than his twin, and Fez did a double take.

The only one who moved a muscle towards Bill was his Fordsy, immediately running at Bill like a sleeper agent, causing him to scream and take his hands off his ears and he was horrified and what was his chest doing?! Moving out of proportion, his head spinning and his lungs not processing enough air as he panicked, the tall man in the overcoat towering over the demon, who had a small frame as a human and was curled up in a ball.

The ex-deity was panicked and heart racing, beating, reminding him of something he couldn't quite grasp as Stanford reached into his pocket, swiftly pulling out that clunky gun with its overcomplicated name he always carried around and pressing the barrel against Bill's head.

" Nononononono, " he cried, the sound hissing out of his mouth as he struggled to breathe. He pressed the palms of his hands onto the wooden floor (why was it so cold ) and picked himself up, beginning to scamper away backwards on all fours, away from the cold black sheen of the gun, from the man he had hurt so badly, from the screams, from the twin behind Ford who was practically pouncing to get at him and he had never felt like this and he thought

CAN I DIE?! IS THAT ALLOWED?! I SEEM PRETTY FUCKING MORTAL RIGHT NOW!

Everybody was horrified, most of all himself, and the rays of light he had basked in mere moments ago—and they were moments, they were, even though they felt lifetimes away—were beating down upon him, hurting him, burning him, it was so hot now, and he was in a suit, which made it worse and

"Bill?! How the heck did you get here?! Aren’t you dead?! I—I–?!"

These questions, which he could hardly bring himself to answer, were shouted at him by a wild-eyed Dipper, who had quickly recovered from his scream and, being the aggravatingly oblivious pine tree he was, had started on scribbling in that stupid journal in his hands, and it reminded him of Ford too much, the kid documenting every tear he choked out, every tremble in his bones, every thought running through his head as he was face to face with a lethal weapon, the barrel against his forehead, everything being too much.

backoffbackoffgetthefuckawayfrommepleaseIdidn’tmeantoripthefabrictoriptheholeinthedimensiontobefloatingalonewiththeirbloodallovermyhandswithMother’sbloodFather’sbloodDoctor’sbloodFordsy’sbloodandthebloodofthepersonasking

"WHAT ARE YOU DOING HERE?! " Stanley roared. Bill was surprised he 

"I don't know, " sobbed the demon.

" I don’t know ."

Chapter Text

All his greatest fears had been confirmed. Everything the deepest darkest corners of his mind had come up with while he'd been in a bad place had come true, and here he was facing everything he'd ever dreaded curled up in a weak, crying ball on the floor in a human form he'd never seen it wear before.

Bill-because of course this was Bill-looked weak and awful and was having a panic attack. Ford didn't know what questions to ask.

"I don't know!" he was screaming in response to Dipper's endless questions. He just kept repeating it over and over. Ford had ever so much more to ask than his nephew, but he couldn't say anything.

Stan was trying to lunge at the demon, and Stanford was trying his hardest to hold him back from tearing the ex-deity in half. Mabel, no less naive and trusting than she was four years ago, before this whole thing started, was edging closer to the huddled, crying mess, and Dipper wouldn't stop asking questions. Ford was trying to stop them all, to shut them all up, but they wouldn't pay attention.

Bill swatted away Mabel's comforting hand on his shoulder, ignoring her soft 'hey' like he was everything else, shutting the loud out, and Stanford recognized his stress.

"STOP IT!" commanded the man in the trench coat, and everybody finally shut up. Stan still looked utterly homicidal, and Dipper was practically tearing his hair out in an effort not to ask things, but there was no noise anymore apart from Bill's rapid breathing and barely disguised sobs.

"I want you all to get out," Ford ordered, "Now. I'll take care of the... um..."
"The Bill on the floor?" prompted his niece.
"The Bill on the floor. Get out."

Stanford's twin stormed out angrily, and Dipper looked like he was about to interject. Mabel went without another word; she had always been good at reading social situations.
The member of the Pines family with the most reasons to hate him was now looking down upon the demon who had tortured him for so long.

And he hated it, hated it to his very core. But all he felt was pity.

Bill was definitely not used to this. He was hardly breathing and making no effort to slow his gasping. He was weak, and panicked, and tired, and Ford couldn't be mad at him. And he hated that, hated the fact that he couldn't be angry! Bill had caused him so much pain and had never apologized, and why would he have any reason to feel bad for the stupid demon?! But he did feel bad, and he couldn't help it.

"I- ca- can't bre- breathe-" Bill stuttered between shaky breaths before going right back to sobbing in the mid-morning light filtering through the window, the awful expression of human emotion (wow, Bill was human. This wasn't possession. That was different) bathed in the sun and being lit up. Without touching the shaking morsel of humanity, Ford sat next to him.

"You can," insisted Stanford.
"No, I- I- I- ca- CAN'T!" screamed the man that had previously been a triangle. "Tha- that's the- the poi- poi- point!"
Bill's chest was rising and falling rapidly, and Ford ventured tapping his hand softly.

"Yes you can. I promise. You are getting enough air. Just try to slow your breathing. Like me, okay?" he said, demonstrating for the demon.
In and out, in and out, in and out....
Bill wasn't cooperating, he was still struggling to calm down. He looked almost small, smaller than he ever was as a demon, even when he was the size of a nacho (long story).

Ford grabbed his hand impatiently, and Bill's breathing finally began to slow.

They sat on the floor like this for about thirty seconds when Sixer stood up abruptly and looked down on the man he once considered a muse.
"Do you actually know what the fuck is going on here?"
"Potty mouth, Sixer," replied the demon. He was trying and failing to be funny and laugh it off. It was just like him, wasn't it?

"I'm being serious."
"Right. I... I have no idea why I'm here. I just wok-"
"Didn't ask for the full story, Bill."
"Right," the now-human said sheepishly.

Ford sighed. What the hell was he meant to do? Cipher was standing up, clearly embarrassed, and fiddling with that dumb little bow tie he had somehow brought with him into this world. At least he didn't have the top hat or cane, those would be a bit of a stretch.

The triangle in a human body smiled slightly and fluttered his eyelashes. Apparently he was already getting used to having two eyes.
"You're going to stay here," Stanford decided on the spot.
"Mhm."
"You're gonna not kill my family."
"Mhm."
"Or Wendy, or Soos."
"Oh, come on! Not even Question Mark?! He's barely a part of this place!" Bill complained.
"Actually," Sixer corrected, "Stan retired. Soos took over the place. We visit during the summer just like the kids."

"...Oh."
Bill nodded and looked as though he wanted to say something.
"Yes?"
"How... um, where will I be staying?" asked the demon, which was perfectly reasonable, and which Ford had no proper answer to.

"I'll sleep in the basement. I do that most nights anyway."
"You're still researching this stupid place?" Bill genuinely giggled.
"I'm helping my nephew, since he'd like to take over soon. And I've almost filled out my third journal," Ford shoved in his face stoically.

"Oh."

Ford loved seeing him speechless like that.

"You'll take my room. You know where it is."
"Sure do, Sixer!"
Stupid fucking triangle. Fuck him, bringing that shit up again! 35 years ago for God's sake, and it still managed to get him! I mean, if Disco Girl did it, why wouldn't talking to the now-man himself?
Fuck him though.

The demon giggled again.
"Go to my room, Cipher."
"Sure, Sixer. Bye!"
He skipped off upstairs and the rest of the Pines (plus Wendy, but Soos was out), who had been waiting just outside, burst in again.

"YOU LET THAT STUPID FUCKING DEMON STAY?!" Stan, if you couldn't tell.
"How did he come back?! Who brought him here?!" Dipper.
"Is Bill okay?" Nobody but Mabel could ask that. And Wendy was just in shocked silence.

Ford sighed.

"Yes, I let the triangle stay, don't swear, Stanley. Dipper, I have no idea and neither does he. And he's fine, Mabel, I calmed him down."
"How has he seen your bedroom before?" Wendy said, getting over her shock.

Sixer had no response. What response could he give? Not the full truth, not in front of anyone in Gravity Falls. He couldn't just lie, though.

"Look, I'm going down to the basement. I need a break, and, you know, to document this."
"Right!" agreed Dipper, following his uncle into the living room. Ford turned around to him irritatedly.
"Alone, Dipper," he snapped.

"Oh. Sorry, Grunkle Ford."

Stanford turned around, punched the code into the vending machine, went downstairs and promptly began screaming.

Chapter Text

Uggggggggggggggggggh. He hated himself so so so so so so so much. Why did he act that way?! Why did he joke around about this?! Was it just because it was familiar?!
What was familiar wasn't necessarily good.
Actually, it wasn't good, full stop.

Bill lay down on Ford's bed... again... oh, shit...
The demon was face down into the pillow and seriously considering screaming directly into it. Sixer was probably getting to deal with all the odd remarks and interrogations, which Cipher appreciated. Oddly enough, he also felt bad about it.

Ew! What the fuck?! Why was there a pit in his stomach and why did he hate himself?! He never did this as... uh, concentratedly... as now, even in the Theraprism, where he hated himself every moment of every day! He never wanted to murder the birds outside (because there weren't any birds outside) or obliterate the blankets (but these ones rustled) or cry himself to sleep.
Actually, he had done that last one a lot.

He sighed and pulled the insanely rustle-y blankets over his head. He didn't want to talk to anyone or ever go out of this room ever again. When he woke up, it would all be over.

Sadly, the door opened before he could get into unconsciousness.

"Uh, Bill?" asked Shooting Star's voice tentatively. The ex-demon just groaned loudly in response. His annoyingly human throat hurt.
"I just came to check if you were okay," she said again, and Bill heard the door close behind her. He pulled the sheets off his head and threw it at the sixteen-year-old in an effort to repel her or slow her down.

"Get out, you thing!" he screamed. The stupid girl actually giggled, discarding the duvet and sitting down on the foot of the bed. Bill had scampered to the farthest corner from her, threateningly holding a finger gun out to Mabel, who was looking at him like he was a helpless kitten.

"Bill, I'm trying to be nice. I wanted to make sure you're alright. I know my grunkle-"
"Just get out!!!"
The girl in the sweater, which Bill now saw had a mixtape on the front, sighed heavily, but never lost her patient smile with rainbow braces still gleaming. Bill wanted to ask how the hell they were still on after almost a half decade, but decided against it.

"I'm just worried. It's my nature, I guess." Shooting Star laughed softly and Bill unclenched a little from his tight ball of abject fear as she moved closer.
"D'you wanna say anything, Mister Triangle?"
"I- why do you still have the braces?" Bill asked hesitantly, expecting a defensive reaction. The demon wasn't meant to be asking questions, for axolotl's sake, he was meant to be being interrogated! But Shooting Star obliged diligently.

"Oh, I didn't listen to Dipper. Like, I know I never do, but about, uh two years ago, he was telling me not to take off my braces because my teeth still weren't straight. Obviously I ignored him and took them off and it was fine for a while!
Uh, but then I ate popcorn and my teeth really started to hurt, and I looked into the mirror and my teeth were all wonky and Waddles was really scared! And I had to go get another set of braces on and I must've reeeeeally wrecked 'em coz I can't take these off for the next three years!"

The ex-triangle had been listening intently, and now risked a little laugh at Mabel's anecdote. She giggled too and hit him on the arm softly.
"Aagh!"
"HAHAH- Sorry!"
The two laughed some more, but the pain in Bill's arm still remained.

Was this what pain felt like to them?

Was this what he had caused to them tenfold?

Was this all his fault?

-----------------------------------------------------------------

Shit.

Bill was back. He was back, and he could hurt someone again and that was terrifying to think about.

Ford was good at thinking about scary things. He was good at drowning in a spiderweb of thoughts full of numbers, the sticky strings latching onto them like a spider would a bug, ensnaring them onto itself until something worse came to gobble it up. His thoughts felt like that sometimes. They were drowning sometimes.

And it was particularly awful at the moment.

Bill, voice loud and expressive and joking but painfully hard to read, was back. He was back in all his flushed, running, awful glory.

Ford didn't know what to think.

Sure, he and the triangle were friends at one point, sure, said triangle would stare into nothing sometimes, doing nothing, feeling nothing and Ford was still so worried for him, but still! Bill was dangerous. Dangerous and scared. He was shaky and overconfident all at once, grinning while tears bled through his false demeanor, and Ford wanted to know why he was trying so hard to hide it.

Even when his breathing cut out and he banged his head against the wall behind him helplessly, as he shivered because he knew how awful a human body must feel for the first time.

Ford was confused on how to feel.

He was confused on how to think.

He couldn't be feeling bad for that stupid triangle that had hurt him, hurt all the Pines, not even considering all the other members of Gravity Falls! Surely Bill deserved the pain, deserved the terrifying feeling of not being yourself!

But then Ford was thrust into the memory of being possessed by the stupid demon, of being not in his actual body, of seeing the triangle possess him, hurt him, but he couldn't feel any of it. And though this was obviously different, it must be the same feeling of weirdness and vertigo and disorientating

And Bill had only possessed him for a little while, but he was now stuck in this human form forever. Presumably.

But then the demon had still possessed him! Just because it must feel weird for that stupid little fucked up masochist of a triangle to be something he's not, doesn't make all the awful things said fucked up masochist of a triangle has done to people any less fucked up and masochistic!

And so Ford sat in an endless state on contradicting himself on his stance on that stupid triangle and practically tearing his hair out on the dark metal floor of the basement, muttering casual phrases he plucked to express from his train of thought.

It felt like he was going insane. Wouldn't be the first time.

Chapter Text

What was most interesting to Bill was the fact that Mabel Pines, arguably someone he had psychologically tortured a lot, had been the one to come up and check if he was okay. Mabel Pines had wasted a thought on him. Of all people! Bill could hardly believe ANYONE - well, anyone that he hadn't manipulated into doing so - would think to check on him, let alone any member of the Pines family!

When Mabel had left (after a decidedly friendly chat, far too much gigging and laughing for what it was and a promise to paint Bill's nails and take him shopping), she had given him a book.

It was the same type of book Bill had seen Dipper holding/scribbling in/obsessing over back in the kitchen. Naturally, the demon was confused. He had no use for a book.
"Why are you giving me this?"
The sixteen-year-old with the rainbow braced had grinned at Bill and looked at him like he was an endearingly oblivious little kid. Which, he supposed, he kind of was in comparison to her. She was used to her stupid human body with stupid amplified emotions and stupidly bad pain tolerance, and he most certainly was not.

"You weren't alright before, Billy." The demon immediately began to regret telling Mabel she could call him that. "This is for whenever you feel like that and I'm not around. Write down your ~feelings~. Or just write whatever. Just don't tell Dipper I stole one of his, like, fifteen books!"

Bill had laughed, but he was still a little shaky on the whole book thing. He only knew how to use it from
From

From watching his Fordsy writing beautiful words about him, he admired the demon

Three books full of information, a lot of which about the triangle himself

Writing with shaky hands as he possessed Sixer, Cipher was much better at drawing

A poster that he could see now, still on the wall after years, "DO NOT SUMMON" behind a little drawing of himself

Ford had kept it.

...
Bill was definitely gonna need this book, wasn't he?

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------

The demon had laid down on the bed and closed his eyes to be alone with his thoughts. He was confused and tired, so it was perfectly plausible that he would just want to sit and think for a while.

But then the thoughts, they got all muddled and cloudy... and what was... happening...

The demon had no idea how it happened. He was genuinely terrified when he sat up from the bed to discover it was late afternoon, and far easier to control his stupid human emotions.

What the fuck had happened?!

There was a kind of desperate knocking on the door across from Ford's— well, temporarily, Bill's bed. The demon sat for a moment in his own confusion before rushing to the door. Maybe whoever was on the other side could shed some light on this stupid human shit.

Stanford Pines's face greeted him. The man did not look happy.
"Uh... hi?" the ex-triangle managed to squeak. "Please don't kill me."
"If I wanted to do that, Cipher, I would've blown out your brains in that kitchen."
"In front of the kids...?"

Bill was trying. He was failing miserably. And Ford seemed more than annoyed with him by this point.
"Yes."
"Ah."
"Now let me in."

Bill stepped to the side to allow Ford in immediately, the man in the trench coat stepping forward and motioning to the bed.
"Whoo... already? Okay!"
"Stop trying, Bill," Stanford advised.
Bill sat down on the bed again feeling vaguely insulted, Ford sitting beside him with a gruff expression.

"So, uh, what's up, Sixer?" asked the ex-triangle, cocking his head.
"We need to set ground rules, William."
"Oooooh, full name! What'd I do?"
"Try to kill my entire family four years ago."

nonononononoONONONONONONONONONONONONO
he wasnt going through this AGAiN
it was never had never ever been

his

idea

that stupid stupid god and he remembered, remembered the conversation
"I found a really cool guy, he's nice"
"KILL HIM."
and what the fuck?!?! like WHY?!?!

he missed ford he had always always missed ford he had never

WANTED to hurt him, to send 500 volts through his body and leaving him

WANTED to lead him on, to make him only believe he loved the demon when Bill wanted it so desperately to be true so DESPERATELY

but he had to he had to because of that goddamn reptile fish thing god demon whatever it was!

and now here his Sixer was, and Bill could hear could hear the hurt in his voice and see the worried expression because he thought he would ever WANT to hurt him again

where was that stupid fucking journal?!

"-and finally, I'm going to add to the information I have on and from you. Your thing will be added to if you want to stay in this house. Got it?"

Bill wasn't listening. He had an insanely bank expression as all the fucked up things that god had done to him flashed through his head, and everything he'd done to his Fordsy. And it wasn't all his fault, but it also definitely was his fault.

The demon's irritatingly human head hurt, more than it ever had as a triangle, which was the stage he was at when Sixer started yelling.

"BILL!"
"AAGH!"
"Have you been listening to me?"

Bill looked with his now two eyes into Ford's.
Was... was he the man's version of the Axolotl? Had he hurt him that much? Had he manipulated him as much as they had the demon?

"...Bill?"
"Yes. I've been listening, and I'll respect your rules. I also have a little information for you."

Sixer did a double take. He had assumed Bill hadn't been listening- which, to be fair, he hadn't, but he had never expected for him to both be listening and on board with this. And willing to give information.

All Stanford had really gathered from this was that Bill had become very suggestible.

"Oh. Oh?" asked Ford, questioning what information the demon could have.
"You're gonna live longer than you think. You spent thirty-one years in the mindscape, and you sure look sixty something-"
"HEY!"
"I'm telling the truth, Fordsy," Bill giggled, "but that's not my point. Time is slower in the mindscape. You're gonna live to, like, about a hundred unless something kills you before then. Which is likely."

Stanford smiled just for a second before regaining his stoicism. It was like he was repressing any bit of happiness associated with Cipher, or at least that's what it looked like to the ex-triangle.

"So I'm only really in my late forties?"
"Yup."
Ford risked a laugh and Bill, being smaller than him (at least in this form), had to stand on his tiptoes to ruffle his hair in a gesture of friendship.

Ford coughed a little and motioned he wanted to leave now, Bill letting him off with a little salute as his Sixer closed the door on him.

axolotl WHAT DID YOU DO you could've fought back WHY DIDN'T YOU wHy HaVe'Nt YoU

apologised

explained yourself

what the fuck cipher why?

ugh he doesnt know the pain youve gone through

its not his fault though!

And then suddenly all the voices stopped because he had written them all with a pencil Shooting Star gave him (pink with a smiling rainbow cat eraser on the end).
This diary shit really worked. Huh. Time to spill all his life secrets to an inanimate object, he guessed.

Chapter Text

It had been a week since the confused little no-longer-a-triangle had crash landed in the Pines family's kitchen, and somehow everyone had gotten used to the having the demon in the house. Of course, it was especially awkward those first few days, but Bill was learning more and more about etiquette and routines, which was commendable for a being who had never been taught them.

For example, the first morning with Bill had consisted of Mabel practically forcing him to come down to the table to eat, which the demon staunchly insisted he did not need to do and that he felt sick. Mabel had to physically drag him down the staircase and keep an eye on him to make sure he ate.

Somehow he was a lot more agreeable after that meal. Stanford just couldn't think why!

Now he would come down of his own accord, and even ask for food when he got hungry. It was almost funny watching the formerly all-powerful dream demon Bill Cipher come up to you timidly and ask for some trail mix. Endearing, even.

Mabel and Bill had been spending an awful lot of time together. Ford assumed the girl would be a good influence on him, and let her do this even after Stan's many objections. The girl had taken him shopping ("You can't wear that suit all the time! It needs ironing and we don't have the money for an iron!") and given him a handknit brown sweater with the words "CERTIFIED TRIANGLE" woven into the front. Stanford had actually never seen Bill without it on since it had been given to him.

The scene as it was laid out in the kitchen had Mabel on the floor with about fifty different colors of nail polish surrounding her and the demon sitting beside her, applying little drawings to each of the demon's nails, including but not limited to rainbows, puppies and smiley faces.

Sixer sat at a table, fourth journal by his side (it had been started only a few weeks ago), mildly interested in the conversation going on below him, and Dipper situated at the same table, completely ignoring everyone else in favor of listening to whatever music was playing in his earbuds and getting his diagram of a gremloblin perfect.

"You look AWESOME, Billy!" squealed Mabel after she had finished all the nails. Bill studied them contentedly and blew on them so they would dry faster.
"They make my fingers pretty. Now every part of me is," the demon smiled, particularly focused on one picture of his old triangle form.

"These will look awesome at the party! It'll be awesome," preached the sixteen-year-old.
"Party?"
Ford took the liberty of answering Bill's question from Mabel.
"We have one every year since the zombie incident I'm sure our girl has told you all about. Partly to commemorate that and partly to spite Pacifica Northwest. Even though Mabel makes an effort to invite her every year anyway."
"'Our girl'? She's not our kid, Stanford," the demon laughed.

"Well, we're sharing her now, might as well get used to it, hey?"
"Also, for the record I only invite Pacifica because she's nice now," defended Mabel, at which Bill immediately started teasing her.
Dipper began muttering the first few bars of 'Disco Girl,' finally giving away his taste in music. Bill giggled a little and noticed that all his nails had dried now.

"Ford, Ford, look! I'm so pretty now! Ready to hit the town, you know."
"And who would you... 'hit the town' with?" asked Sixer, trying not to be interested. "Can't go alone."
"Oh, I'd pick up a few boys along the way," Bill teased. "You of all people know how much they love me. Unless, uh, you wanna come?"

"Oh. I don't usually do the whole party thing. It's not for me. More of the kids' thing," Ford grumbled.
"But you come every year, Grunkle Ford!" counterpointed Mabel. "Are you... *theatrical gasp* LYING?!"
Bill gasped along with the girl and pretended to faint, looking at Ford with his one open eye.

"Ya gonna break the cycle, Fordsy? Would you do that to Mabel? To yourself? To meEeEeE~?"
"No," Ford admitted, opening his journal to its last page, which seemed to be a calendar. As he jotted something down furiously, he kept talking.
"It's a date, Bill."

The demon practically had an aneurysm. He spluttered and coughed into his hand and his throat became hoarse and dry.
"Sorry, what- what did you say?!"
"Said it's a date, Cipher," Stanford repeated cooly as the ex-triangle did another double take. Mabel was laughing, but kind of quizzically. The girl rushed out of the room with a 'be back in a second', almost tripping over the wall of nail polish she'd surrounded herself.

Dipper finally looked up contentedly from his finished diagram to a thoroughly confused and embarrassed Bill facing deliberately away from Ford, who sat with a smug smile on his face.
"Uh, did I miss... several things? And where's Mabel?"
"I'm HERE!!!"
Mabel wheeled in a fully-blown corkboard that resided in the twins' room, one side stull full of a red-string conspiracy about Ford's journals, but Mabel turned it around to the other side to reveal a glitter-covered, extremely complex board with a picture of Ford working connected to everything.

"I need to add more to the Bill section," Mabel muttered.
It was Ford's turn to look incredibly mortified and Bill's to laugh his brains out. The title posted in big bubble letters read "GRUNKLE FORD'S POTENTIAL PARTNERS" and most of the choices were in no way female.
Bill and Dipper died of laughter extremely loudly in the corner as Ford groaned. Mabel giggled and left, taking the corkboard and her twin with her.

"Shut it, Bill."
"Never, Mr. BOYFRIEND!"
Stanford stood up and left. He wouldn't humor the demon, especially while he had so much against the man- and while he couldn't deny anything the turned-human triangle said.

He was a charmer. He was pretty. And happy. And going to go on a date with Sixer.
Well, not really, and unofficially and they were just going to go to a party both of them would've been at anyway, and it was kind of a joke? Maybe? Did Bill think of it that way?

Why was Ford so invested now? Bill was just someone the man had known before and had now placed himself firmly back in Sixer's life. Why was he spiraling over it?

It was at this point he realized he was writing his thoughts in his journal. And that his niece was breathing down his neck, squealing a little.
"Mabel!" he barked, the sixteen-year-old giggling and running off. He looked up to see Bill had also gone somewhere. He was alone in the kitchen.

Or not.

"This is a bad idea, Ford."

Chapter Text

Bill had found the suit he had worn the first day in the Mystery Shack, and went shopping with Mabel for a cheap iron as she insisted he needed accessories, and oh this little hairclip is so cute, and ooh can I have a little purse, please, I need it!

Long story short, Stanley shouldn't have trusted the pair with any more than a hundred dollars. But he did. Wrongly.

The two returned with more stuff for the sixteen-year-old than the demon. But at least they had an iron.

Mabel had spent three days in the massive room with the high roof party planning and setting up, hardly taking breaks to eat or sleep. Bill had convinced her to lay down for about two minutes once, and that was about as close the girl had gotten to stopping. A day before the annual party started, she loudly announced she was finished and promptly collapsed on the floor.

Now Bill stood finding all his faults in a full-body mirror with three hours to get ready, a just-awoken Shooting Star fiddling with his bowtie, and him starting to become very anxious.

"Mabel? Do you think the inside of the suit is a bit too much? I mean, it's a very, um bright yellow."
"Just breathe, Billy. You look awesome." And he trusted her, so he said nothing.

"Right, right," he agreed absentmindedly. He didn't honestly think he looked that great. He kept imagining how much better the other people at the party would look compared to him. Damn, humans had annoyingly good imaginations.
"My hair looks wrong. I don't like it," he declared finally.

"Bill, I have a proposition."

The demon sighed. He could already tell he was going to regret this. He regretted following through with most of Mabel's plans. But he trusted her.
"What?"
"I want to dye your hair."

Bill paused.
"What now."
"Dye your hair! Not that it doesn't look great, it just doesn't give off your really nice ~I'm a demon and I'm here to slay~ vibes!"
"Like, my entire head? Dye it, I dunno, completely pink? I kinda like the yellow!" he protested.
"No, like a half-and-half thing! Plus, it'd be black. That would kinda be the only option for your outfit, and, you know, you in general," Mabel rambled. Bill looked at her in general shock, resisting the urge to laugh out loud.

About an hour later, a whole half of his hair was dyed black.

"I hate you."

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Ford was nitpicking everything right now. He was nervous, and rightfully, because not only Mabel would be counting on him, but...

He was pretty sure that Bill might be too.

"Shit," he muttered out loud to himself, tugging at a lock of dark brown hair.
"You look fine, Ford. And I still think this is a bad idea!"
"Shut it, Stanley."
"Don't start getting all defensive on me now, Sixer," Stan warned him. "You chose this, and I can't be blamed for any trauma in the aftermath, got it?"

"Did I not say shut it?!" asked Ford angrily.
"Okay, okay," said Stanley, not quite admitting defeat but letting his brother calm down a bit. He had learnt a few things from his niece about people, apparently.

Ford had gone out and bought an entirely new pair of glasses for the event, and rented a tux, and actually brushed his hair for what Stan was pretty sure was the first time since he had gotten out of the mindscape. And somehow he still found time to find faults in everything. It was actually getting on Stan's nerves.

"You've done this so many times now, Ford," he reminded his twin.
"I know!" he snapped back.
"Then why the hell are you so nervous?!"

Ford flinched. He knew why, somewhere, but he was certainly ignoring it, burying it in layers of pain and trauma. He paused for a second to regain his thoughts and his composure.
"Ford?" Stanley asked tentatively.

He turned around to his brother smiling slightly.
"I'm fine now," he claimed. "Let's go."

--------------------------------------------------------

Mabel really had a knack for parties, it seemed. Bunting was strung up everywhere, fairy lights adorning the walls and a massive disco ball reflecting about five thousand and seven different colors of light and making them dance around the room. There were three tables, one with drinks that someone would certainly have spiked by the end of the night, one with sweet food and one with savory and spicy food.

It. Looked. Awesome.

Bill was certainly excited, if not actually rejuvenated by the sight of it, Mabel with glowsticks for earrings doing jazz hands to present everything to the others. He practically giggled and ran up onto the stage in disbelief. Ford and Dipper's reactions were much the same, quietly observing in a kind of awe as the other five (because Soos and Wendy were there as well) were doing cartwheels and such across the stage and laughing manically.

When all the guests showed up, the picture changed quite a bit.

People. People everywhere. There was karaoke on and Mabel's group plus Pacifica screamed 80s rock ballads on stage as Wendy and Dipper cheered them on from the side. Stan looked slightly disapproving of all the frivolity, probably because he wasn't making any money from it, but joined most of the crowd on the dance floor. Ford stood awkwardly in a corner. He never knew quite what to do with himself at these parties.

And Bill was in his element.

Every chance he got, he'd get up on stage with a different act. Stand-up, joining the girls in karaoke, rallying the crowd whenever the party got in any danger of calming down, slapstick- his gift came on giving! He was laughing and joking with everyone, and nobody knew who he really was. So he was fine.

-------------------------------------------------------------

Right now Bill'd just finished a dramatic recreation of Romeo and Juliet with some random lady up on the stage and he was surrounded by people. Oddly enough, the group had moved very close to the introverted Ford, so much that he could hear every word they said.

"You were so good up there!" one girl squealed.
"I just LOVE your hair." Was that Bud Gleeful?
"You weren't awful at all," marveled one.

Bill looked increasingly uncomfortable. Ford saw but couldn't think of a way to help. He looked overwhelmed, which the demon was, what with the light and the crowd and shouting to be heard over the music.

"People, people!" he declared, almost unheard to half the people clamoring to get at him. "Sadly, I am ~taken~."

Ford had no idea where he was going with this, since the demon had no proof. He hadn't brought anyone with him, certainly, and-

Bill walked over to the man, practically hiding behind his arm.
"Sorry!" he giggled as the crowd dissipated. He continued to grab onto the larger man's arm as he came out from behind him.

"Uh, thanks, Fordsy. Saved my hide, I guess. Are- Are you alright?"

No.

No he wasn't.

Ford had been screaming internally since Bill had grabbed his arm, if he was being honest. The man was red-faced, open-mouthed and frankly mortified. I mean, he had a pretty good reason! And I mean- they were on a date. Kind of. Maybe. But it was a joke. He thought.

He could see, out of the corner of his eye, a Mabel who had stopped singing for a second to squeal as loud as her lungs would allow, and Stan glaring at the pair from the sidelines. Dipper and Wendy were nowhere to be found, thankfully. Ford didn't think he could deal with the reactions of those two.

Well, this was just great.

Bill brought him back to a terrifying, very flustered reality with a light punch on the arm.
"Uh, I'ma go do some stuff. If that's alright," the demon asked. Sixer physically couldn't speak, so just nodded.
"Might have to come back here later. Know I can count on you, Fordsy."

The demon leant up and kissed his cheek.

Well. That was Ford's night ruined.

The fuck did Bill think he was pulling?

Chapter Text

Mabel's pencil, the one she had given him at the very start of their relationship, was too small for Bill to properly hold anymore. The eraser was worn down to a nubbin. The book itself looked like it had been through several wars.

Bill didn't see this as an issue, as such. He still actually had a pencil and a way to write- writing was pretty and made him feel good. But when he took out the book and pencil while having a chat with Mabel at the dining table, she gasped theatrically.

"Bill! There's practically nothing left of that!" she wailed, more to the world than the demon-turned-man himself. "You need to get something else, oh my god!"

The sixteen-year-old immediately launched into a rant about different designs, colors, mechanical pencils, art, and Bill sat patiently listening.

It was good to hear Mabel talk. Very good.

Bill had been thinking, and he had felt more at home in the Mystery Shack these past- what, six weeks? -than he ever had... well, anywhere else. And Mabel's being there was certainly one of many factors, if not the main one. She was a breath of fresh air in the smoggy skies Bill had been living in these past one billion and twelve years (or forty, as his human form roughly seemed to suggest).

So when she suggested they go out and buy stationary ("Ooh! And art supplies! And you know we have to get snacks! And... And..."), Bill could hardly refuse.

It felt nice to have a friend.

-------------------------------------

Dipper walked into a deserted kitchen, hoping to find himself a snack after having a particularly draining talk with Schmebulock (also known as driving himself crazy trying to teach the gnome any semblance of English).

He looked into the pantry blankly for a little while before abruptly deciding there was nothing small to eat and slamming the doors frustratedly because Ford, while showing him all the secrets of the universe, had somehow forgotten to show him how to make a decent meal.

He turned around swiftly, bashing his fist softly against his head to relieve some tension, before he opened his eyes.

Sitting on the dining table was one of his (admittedly many) notebooks, the pine tree symbol boldly engraved in a thin layer of faux gold.

Dipper hadn't put it there. Someone had been touching his stuff! 
Probably Mabel, he thought cynically as he moved towards the tome. He checked around the cover and the back for any marks, finding only a red herring- Bill's name doodled jovially at the top. He only knew it was a trick because it was distinctly Mabel's handwriting adorning the binding.

The twin sighed at his sibling's antics, lazily turning a few pages, just to see how much his sister had actually been using the notebook. Who knew, Dipper might even let her keep it!

Mason "Dipper" Pines could never have been prepared for what was almost illegibly scrawled on the page of the 'borrowed' (stolen) notebook that he happened to turn to.
Not if he had been sat down and briefed, not if he had already known the information the sheaf contained, not in any universe. And there were a lot.

There was a hastily written date at the top, about a week or so ago. The paper was slightly ripped in some areas, and the words on the page had been scribbled over, but not so much that Dipper couldn't read it.

Oh, how he wished he couldn't read it.

"The Pines are reeeeeeeeally weird," said inconsistent writing. some of it was in cursive and some was printed, which made it a practical nightmare to read.

"Not that I'm any better, and certainly not that that's a bad thing. If it was a bad thing, I wouldn't be it.
Like Mabel is really sweet. She gave me this notebook and all, and she might be my favorite. Dipper's alright. I still think of him as Pine Tree sometimes, and he's annoyingly interrogative (thank you for the spelling of that Mabel) but he's alright. And Stan can be excused. In some areas.

Ah, but then we have

FORD

Oh my axolotl oh my GOD i missed him why why why why why why whyyyy did i ever even try to hurt him UGH I SHOULD'VE JUST BEEN HONEST

i cant change the past. :(

he's pretty still and he seems better like mentally which is always a plus. hes my nerd and my sixer and he probably stil hates me HAHAHAH

this is depressing.

i love him :(((

FUCK"

-----------

Bill opened the door, laughing, with Mabel by his side holding a big bag full of stationary and art supplies. She had promised to teach him how to draw (he didn't tell her he already knew) and had now begun rambling about grip strength and hand cramps.

The heavy wooden door to the mystery shack creaked open with a croaking sound. The hinges probably hadn't been treated with any form of lubricant in ages, which actually helped sell the idea of the creepy tourist trap in the woods.

Mabel ran off to Bill's room to find a spot for the stuff they had bought- a perilous task, considering his room was already full of other things the pair had acquired together.

He walked into the kitchen. He had abandoned breakfast that morning and was hungry now, so playing around with pencils could wait. Plus, he had left his notebook out on the table before leaving, so it was partly to correct that too.

Dipper sat wide-eyed at the table, looking as though he'd been hit upside the head multiple times with a foam brick and then told his mother had died.
The notebook was open in front of him.

"HEY!" Bill yelled, scrambling to wrench the book from the table before Dipper could wreck his brain anymore. The twin didn't even flinch when Bill fell over the chair nearest to him trying to reach the book, nor when he grabbed the spine and clutched the book to his chest tightly like it was a lifeline.

"You... uh... don't... don't read that, please."

Dipper finally looked like he was back on earth.

He laughed weirdly. He didn't laugh often, and he didn't sound accustomed to doing it.

"I need to tell Ford-"
"NO!"

Bill bashed his fist against his head like Dipper had done earlier, but it was much more panicked and frantic. His breathing was uneven as the twin got up swiftly, meaning to walk away. The ex-demon grabbed his wrist.

"Please don't."
It was like Bill was pleading with him.

Dipper looked at him.

whyyyy did i ever even try to hurt him UGH I SHOULD'VE JUST BEEN HONEST

He nodded and walked away.

Mabel bounced back into the room, smiling like it was still a normal day. She walked in to Bill breathing heavily and laughing with relief, the notebook open on the table. She closed it (thank you for respecting the dream demon's privacy, Mabel) and put a hand on his shoulder.

"I put away the pencils and stuff. Ya wanna come see?"

"I do. Thanks."

Chapter Text

"So," Mabel began cautiously. "Uh... What was goin' on when I came into the room earlier on?"

Bill stopped admiring a mechanical pencil with pink stickers on it in favor of freezing up immediately and trying very hard to get his thoughts in order to try and make up a lie. It wasn't easy, at least not for a demon who could never think straight in the first place.

"Uh, nothing."
"Wasn't Dipper there before?"
"...no!"

Mabel sighed and turned to Bill, looking at him motherly and almost laughing to herself.
"Bill. What's in the notebook?"

The demon said nothing, hurriedly looking back at the pencil and pretending to figure out how putting lead into it worked. 
"C'mon! Tell me!" Mabel coaxed, trying her hardest not to laugh. He kept silent as she persisted and pushed, getting him to crack and give in, but...

I mean, that notebook was Bill's now. His thoughts were in there. All of the private ones, all of the ones people would call him insane for having, everything that pretty much made him him. There were things in that book that he wouldn't-couldn't-tell Mabel.

And that included what Dipper had seen.

God, Pine Tree knew. This was going to be a problem.

"Come on, Biiiiill!!!" said an impatient Mabel, bouncing her leg like she was ADHD poster child of the year.

Bill held his tongue. He was thinking.

----------------------------------------------------

Dipper sat on the couch with earbuds in, blocking every other sound out but what was playing in them. He wasn't really listening to the music of course, too wrapped up in his own internal screaming to really pay attention to anything. The only reason he really had music on was because if any sound brought him back to reality, he was pretty sure that screaming of his wouldn't be so internal anymore.

This was a lot of information to process.

Like, a LOT.

So Dipper waited it out surrounded by naught but Vienna by Billy Joel and his own thoughts. It was like torment to be trapped in this knowledge, and even the fact he couldn't tell anyone. It was insane. 

He needed to tell someone.

Thankfully, that someone walked into the room at the very same moment this need became apparent wearing combat boots, an flannel jacket and a dark brown lumberjack hat.

"Wendy!" Dipper sighed, relieved. He took out the earbuds immediately and buried his head in his hands.
"What's up, dork? You look down," the nineteen-year-old commented.

There were a number of reasons Dipper shouldn't have told her anything. Number one was to respect Bill (but honestly he didn't really care about how the demon felt, he didn't trust Bill yet), and then there was the matter of what the hell would happen if Ford knew...

"I have seen things, Wendy."
"I know. I saw them too, dummy," she laughed.
"Different things. Newer things. Arguably much worse things."

Wendy looked concerned at this point, which was fair. She had no idea what was going on.

Was Dipper allowed to tell her? Probably not.

Was Dipper going to tell her? Abso-fucking-lutely.

"So, Bill's been here a while."
"Oh yeah. I can't believe he isn't a triangle anymore. So weird, man."
Dipper took a deep breath in and held it.

"So Bill kinda stole one of my notebooks with Mabel's help, I opened it because I thought it was mine and it was left unattended on the table, I also thought it might be Mabel's because Bill's name was written at the top in her handwriting, so I thought she might've placed a red herring. Shame on me for thinking she knew what one of those is I guess."

Wendy processed for a moment, looking at Dipper with some confusion.

"So, what's so horrible about that?"

Dipper hesitated for a moment.

----------------------------------------------

Bill hadn't spoken for a full five minutes. Mabel was still trying to get something out of him and had resorted to petty forms of torment, including but not limited to:

• The silent treatment
• Making annoying stimming sounds
• Purposefully ignoring Bill's very well-established personal bubble 
• Prodding him in the back, a lot

Et cetera.

She was currently playing annoying music turned up way too loud and feigning deafness whenever Bill asked her to turn the shitty overrated pop songs off or leave the room.

He wasn't even that mad. He just wanted to think, and Mabel, for all her annoying tactics that would've made Wendy Corduroy proud, was still doing just that.

"MABEL!" he yelled to be heard over 'Shape Of You' at 89% volume.
"WHAT?!" she yelled back. Bill knew she was genuinely a little mad because she would've accompanied her raised voice with a little giggle- her way of saying she was joking.

"I WANT TO TALK TO YOU! TURN THE DAMN MUSIC DOWN!"

Mabel reluctantly lowered the volume to just below speaking level and looked at Bill with all the sass (and spite) someone with wavy brown hair and sparkly eyes could possibly muster.

"Ready to talk to me now, Bill?" she asked as though the ex-demon was nothing but a child who was 'just being stubborn'.

He did feel like a child. A lot.

Bill put that thought to the side. His notebook, and/or a therapist, would hear about that later.

"Mabel.

"I didn't want Dipper to see... whatever he saw. I'm going to have to talk to him about that actually.

"Point is, there are things in there that I don't want anybody to see. Unfortunately, including you. Look, most of those- ahem- entries, are something I would gladly share with you, Mabe babe. But judging from what Dipper said just after, he probably said one of the ones I'd rather not."

Mabel was still pouting but looked a bit more forgiving by this point.
"Weeeeell, what did Dipper say then? Am I allowed to know that?"

"Er- sure. He said 'I've got to tell Ford'. Yeah."

Mabel looked at Bill all weird for a second, before inexplicably gasping, covering her own ears and laughing like a madwoman, occasionally punctuating the peals with an 'I knew it' or a gasp for air.

Now, he thought, This is JUST SPECULATORY, but I think- MAYBE- Mabel knows. Maybe.

Welp, he was dead.

---------------------------

"Sorry, let me get this straight."
"Yeah?"
"So the interdimensional masochistic geometric demon who tried to kill us all four years ago and has now come back with a message of peace that is now living with us rent-free... has a big fat crush on the respectable award-winning basement-dwelling scientist?"

"Yesssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssss."

It was like you could practically see Wendy's cogs turning in her head. Dipper half expected steam to start coming out of her ears. He couldn't judge, of course, he had probably looked like that when he first got the news as well.

"Sorry, what?" asked Melody.

Dipper jumped and almost hit his head on the low ceiling, Wendy not even computing the sudden appearance of ~another human~. Melody stood in the kitchen with a bag of Jasmine rice and a flabbergasted expression on her face.

"...any chance you'll be forgetting what you just heard?"
"Can I tell Soos?"
"Absolutely NOT," Wendy said before Dipper could even object. "Soos will tell everyone by tomorrow. No."

"Stan?"
"NO," said the others in sync.

"Fine," said Melody, caving. "So, we were definitely talking about Bill and-"
"SHH!"
"Sorry! But... yeah?"
"Yes! Who else?!"

The middle-aged woman sighed and simply walked off somewhere.

"Welp. I hope Bill doesn't kill me for telling anyone," concluded Dipper.
"Tell us what?" Wendy asked, zipping her lips.

Chapter Text

It was late. How late, he didn't know. The lab had no clocks. Clocks were a distraction from work. But Ford was tired, he hadn't eaten in what felt like a long time and the notes he had taken were starting to look very jumbly and blurry.

He got up sluggishly, dragging heavy limbs upstairs and getting the passcode for the door wrong more times than he'd like to admit. When it finally swung open, Ford almost felt he could fall on the floor.

First order of business: coffee.

As the drink brewed, he absentmindedly took a glance at the clock in the dark. It was around two in the morning. Everybody should be asleep by now, including him. But here he was, waiting to drink caffeine.

He wished he had a normal sleep schedule like the others. He wished he still had his room, to be honest. Maybe then he could glance at the clock and see an anywhere near reasonable sleeping hour. Unfortunately, he really couldn't.

Not only because he had had so many late nights he was practically nocturnal by this point, but because Bill, infernal demon, had invaded his space.

But then again, Ford had to say he didn't really mind. He mightn't have talked to the dream demon in a while or anything but even his presence in the house was so... indescribable. Almost blissful.

He could never say that to his face though. The man had a big enough ego as-is.

There was a susurrus from the other room, which almost made Ford drop his coffee.
Nobody should be awake. It's two in the morning. Where is the gun. I'm going to die maybe.

He put down the mug harshly, almost surprised it didn't break from the force of being slammed onto the kitchen counter. He was awake now, to say the least, grabbing his go-to gun from the wall and swiftly but quietly rounding the corner to peer into the living room.

It was a comical sight Ford came across as he stumbled into the room. Giggling like a schoolgirl with both eyes closed and kneeling on the floor sat Bill Cipher.

He put down the gun before his instincts to shoot the bitch in the forehead kicked in.

"Don't... go to space. You make the stars quiet," Bill murmured, the giggling having stopped and his expression replaced with one of solemnity.

"I'm cold," he continued. "No. What do you mean?" 

Ford almost laughed at the sight of the demon so vulnerable, but it didn't seem so funny now. Almost sad. 

Bill was asleep, obviously. Of course he was, he was sleeptalking and he had sleepwalked down here. But it still felt wrong for Ford to be watching this, like it was something he wasn't meant to see. 

"Don't do it. Don't do it again. Please. Stay with me instead. Please."
And now Bill was sobbing.
"Don't leave me! I know it-it's my fault- but do-don't do it!"

"Bill," Ford said softly, walking closer to the hunched-over shaking ex-being of pure power. He didn't stop crying. "Bill."

"Fuck you," he said between sobs.
He's asleep, right? 
Ford forced open one of his eyes. It was darting all over the place. Asleep AND dreaming, it seemed.

"I'm here," he said, placing a hand on Bill's shoulder.
He stopped crying immediately.

"You smell like ozone," he muttered, sounding almost annoyed. Ford stifled a laugh and sat down next to him.
"Oh?"
"Yeah. And paper. Piece of shit."

Stanford could hardly stop himself from snickering this time.

"Don't throw that motherfucking duck at me. I'm allergic to Wednesdays, you know that! Fuck youuuu!"
"I won't throw the duck at you Bill."
"THANK you! Finally, someone who gets it."

"Right. I'm gonna go now," Ford told him. Bill's expression turned to one of slight annoyance as he grabbed onto the scientist's wrist firmly, forcing him to stay.
"No you don't. Stay. Bitch!"

Ford was too tired to argue, and fell asleep on the floor beside him.

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Bill awoke with the sun having barely risen itself. The floor he was sitting on was cold as all get out. His neck hurt like hell.
He was sitting on the floor? That wasn't where he had fallen asleep. Where the hell was he? And what was that strange heaviness on his shoulder?

Then it came to him. What would give him the answer to all these questions at once?

Bill opened his eyes properly and was assaulted with the full power of the morning sun. He whined and did a quick scan of his surroundings, having to open and close his eyes constantly to get accustomed to the light.

He was in the living room, on the only area of the floor not covered by carpet (it was freezing!) and he had Ford draped over his shoulder like a human blanket.

Wait.

He had Ford draped over his shoulder like a human blanket.

Oh God oh God oh AXOLOTL-

He needed to get Ford off him oh golly gosh gee oh mother of pearl oh dear oh heavens oh WOW

He tentatively but without hesitation prodded Ford in the face and frantically whispered: "Hey! Nerd! Sixer! WAKE UP!"

Ford blinked himself awake and looked up at Bill, who was sure his face was more red than it had been in the entire time he had been human. His Sixer yelped like a puppy dog and hurriedly pushed off of him, avoiding his eye once he was sat up.

"Uh... how did you get here?" Bill asked.
"IwasawakeandcameupstairsandyouwereTHERE," Ford spluttered, pushing his glasses up his nose in a futile attempt to appear more professional.

"Still doesn't explain why you fell asleep on me. Can I get an explanation?"
Ford sighed. He seemed embarrassed.

"I think you were sleepwalking, unless you fell asleep here-"
"I didn't."
"Oh. I thought not. In any case, you were mumbling something about stars and... somebody leaving you? I naturally came over..."

Bill wasn't listening here. He was filled with a sense of dread. He remembered that dream.

Ford was going to leave him again. He had cried.

"...in any case, at least it's pretty much over and done with now. I do have a question, though. Bill. Bill?"
"Huh?" he grunted, coming back to consciousness.

"What were you dreaming about?"
Bill didn't answer him.
"...Specifically, who? You were begging someone not to leave."

It was you.

"It was nobody special. I'm leaving," he said after a few seconds, getting up and crossing the room.

He didn't know where he was going, but it wasn't anywhere near Ford. Not for a while.

Chapter Text

There were two weeks left of summer.

This fact had not stopped pestering Bill since he had woken up this morning, and so he had felt like actual crap the entire day. But at least it was day. Even though he felt like the weight of the world was crushing his skull like a soda can, he could fake it in the day.

He couldn't fake it at night. And it was getting dangerously dark, almost as much as the pit where his stomach used to be.

No. You are NOT crying in the  middle of the fucking gift shop. Get ahold of yourself.

He looked around a little to see if anybody was there, because he potentially could cry in the middle of the gift shop- if there was nobody around. Unfortunately, Wendy stood manning the till (aka doomscrolling like she had been for hours in an annoyingly close place).

Bill hurried to hold his breath, as if that could ever keep anything down as big as this pain he felt.

He looked at the ladder in front of him. It looked like it lead to the roof. Wendy looked over (THIS WAS WHY BILL DIDN'T CRY! NOBODY RESPECTED HIS PRIVACY!) at him.
"You wanna go up there?" she asked him, catching him off guard. "There's a spot up there with, like, a chair. There's always a bunch of stars out this time of year..."

She trailed off, studying Bill like she was about to make a scientific diagram on a study of declining mental health in ex-deities.
"Are you al-"
Bill scampered up the ladder like a feral raccoon in order to get away from the questioning.

His head popped out of the stuffy room to a canopy of stars. He genuinely paused for a minute for before hoisting himself up the rest of the way, because it was remarkably clear, like every dot had been strategically placed in the most beautiful way imaginable.

Like it was just for him.

He still felt like shit, like this wasn't meant for him, he was the wrong recipient, and someone-a far nicer person than him-on the other side of the world was severely missing out. The imposter syndrome was insane. Jesus, he had picked up rather a lot of Ford's vocabulary.

He hadn't talked to Ford in a while. He should talk to Ford. Ford made things better. His Fordsy always came through for him.

But pretty soon he wouldn't be able to.

There were two weeks left of summer, and Bill had gathered enough information by a special blend of pestering and eavesdropping that Ford and Stan were going to go to yet another stupidly exotic place and leave him behind. And maybe he was prepared for Mabel's departure, because that was always a given, and because he'd only been her friend for a little while.

But now he had two weeks before everyone-at least everyone he actually talked to-left him alone to rot in his own stewing pile of loneliness and crushing depression.

And it was horrible. It was horrible to be sitting here on a portion of the world that felt heavenly to be in, to be stealing this experience from someone more deserving, to be so selfish as to want more from this and to see

faintly

off in the... distance...

two little dots so close they were almost one.

and bill swore he could see a difference in their colour.

one was red

one was blue

they were crying

and now Bill was the stars, the star watching them- mother, father -from above

watching them burn

and it was all a mistake and he was yelling

screaming losing his voice

it was going hoarse as they were losing their minds with the pain

AND THIS WAS NEVER MEANT TO HAPPEN 

HE JUST WANTED TO

to show them

show them the stars...

-----------------------------------

Ford knew it was late, but the later it got, the more insane or lucky things happened to him. He hadn't been in the lab today much, apart from when he was getting up in the morning (obviously), which was a nice change of pace.

He hadn't seen Bill that much today. He was probably messing around in his room.

Not that Ford cared.

Why would he?

Bill was a nuisance at best and downright annoying at worst, and even so he was often at his worst.

But it was late now, the clock on the wall reading a quarter past eleven. Stan had already gone to bed, and Ford supposed he wouldn't let Wendy off shift any earlier than necessary, so it was his turn to tell her to go to bed.

He strode into the gift shop, tapped Wendy on the shoulder and waved her out of the room. He was about to turn to leave when he heard something.

A choked sob, like it was being suppressed. It was coming from above his head. He paused in his tracks. Wendy assumed that nobody else knew about the ladder, which of course wasn't true as only Stan remained oblivious. Ford gently took it to the skylight/trapdoor, leaning it against the ceiling and pushing the trapdoor open quietly.

Peeking out on the roof, he saw a ball of yellow and black misery crying into his hands softly, murmuring incoherently to himself and gasping for air every few minutes. Bill was perched on the edge of the flattened platform, hugging his legs, his feet halfway off the roof and the ex-demon himself making his knees wet.

He mumbled something about an axolotl, sniffed and wiped his eyes with his sleeve. He looked up from his knees to the stars and fell silent, but Ford had a feeling he was still crying.

"Bill," he said automatically, a lot louder than he wanted it to come out. Bill swiveled his head around immediately, almost falling off the roof in the process with his brown eyes wide and watery.

"Go away!" he croaked, not exactly angry but almost trying to push Ford away from him. He wasn't meant to see this, this side of him that was more real than anything else he had seen. The side of him that could cry.

Ford opened his mouth to speak, but decided against it, opting to hold his hands up in surrender and move forward slightly. Bill glanced at the lack of space behind him and scowled, but it wasn't as though he could stop Ford from coming over.

Stanford sat down next to him, annoyingly close.
"Did I do or say anything ever to make you think that this is okay?" the ex-demon spat.
"No."
"So why are you here?"

"Because," Ford began, gently taking one of Bill's hands from his knees and placing one of his over it, "you're clearly not okay, even if you deny it vehemently."

All the wind was knocked out of Bill's lungs, the color draining from his face and returning a much pinker shade than it had been before.

"....I'm FINE," he insisted, but was only met with Ford squeezing his hand just a little tighter and finally turning to face the demon.

"Bill."
He said nothing as Ford wrapped an arm around him in an attempt to comfort him.
Don't cry, don't cry, don't cry...

Bill folded like a cheap suit into Ford's arms, dry sobbing into his chest.
"You-" he choked, "have no goddamn right to be nice to me."
"I can do what I want, and I want to help you," Ford preached.

"Ugh," he said, sniffling. "I can't believe you. Sap."
"Yeah, yeah, I love you too."

A beat.

Bill pulled back slightly with  a starstruck expression, looking into a mortified Ford's eyes.

He ran away.

-------------------

He discarded the ladder so he could jump through the hole.

no feelings NONONONONO get away from pretty guy

He ran past the till, almost falling on his very flushed face about three times, running up a flight of wooden stairs (stubbed toe count: 43) and collapsing on the floor of his room, breathing heavily.

The egg chair that lay in the center of the room swiveled around dramatically, revealing Mabel looking down to the Bill on the floor and stroking Waddles like he was a white furry cat purring in her lap.

"Well, well, well," she said in her best Bond villain voice. "I've been expecting you Mr. Cipher."

"Oh, no."

Chapter Text

Ford didn't come down from the roof for a full twenty minutes after Bill jumped down. He had been replaying the entire situation over and over in his head and trying to justify it all, trying to find a solution, an explanation.

WHY HAD HE SAID IT?! WHAT THE FUCK WAS WRONG WITH HIM?! HE COULD HAVE SAID ANYTHING ELSE!

Anything else.

whywhywhywhywhywhywhy

With no pause or interruptions for twenty minutes straight. This was awful. This was an awful mistake. If to err is human, Ford didn't want to be.

Bill wasn't. Maybe that was why he never erred in Ford's eyes.

Why was he thinking like this? What the hell was going on?! This was the yellow triangle demon who had hurt everyone, threatened everyone, and here he was making excuses for him, like an idiot. It was like he wanted to get used again or something.

He was fucked. He was almost more fucked than he was at the very start of their relationship.

The very beginning was brilliant. Literally euphoric, idealized, especially for Ford who had been pushed to the side so much. Bill put him in the spotlight, and he was admired. He was Ford's muse, his home when all was lost.

But he was lying the whole time. Potentially he hadn't liked Ford at all. He didn't know because he had never asked, but it was easy to see on Ford's face at least, from those early moments, through (regrettably) Weirdmaggedon, through to now-

That he had loved Bill. That it was awful, pain incarnate in fact, and his head hurt all the time because he had no reason to still be thinking that way.

But he was. And -ugh, this argument AGAIN- Bill had changed. He couldn't be destructive even if he tried, he was limited, and vulnerable now, Ford had seen that. He was a different person, a better one, but...

Ford was scared. He had every right to be, after all. Not even just of Bill being out to hurt him, but that if he wasn't, if they could talk, if he could do anything he'd been wanting to do for years on end... His family would be terrified. Dipper would kill him. Anybody who had a brain would never be supportive.

No matter what way Ford sliced it, this was not a good situation. And now Bill had been made aware of it, and everything was only gonna get worse from now on.

Twenty minutes. Thankfully, Wendy had never really gone to bed.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

"Well?" asked Mabel with authority in her tone.
"What?" Bill laughed defensively.

"What happened? You look like a train wreck, babe," she said offhandedly, gesturing at him. He almost giggled.

But what could he say? It was hard to explain. He knew Mabel would want to know all the details, but Bill could hardly remember anything anyway. Hardly even what he was upset over anymore. It was just the line replaying over and over in his head...

"Yeah, yeah, I love you too."

Bill put his head in his hands and laughed bitterly.
"Long fucking story, Mabes. Potentially life-threatening. Definitely mine, if not his too."

"HIS?!" she squealed, grabbing at Bills hands, forcing him to lift his head up and shaking them wildly.
"DID YOU TALK TO GRUNKLE FORD?!?!? DID YOU FINALLY DO ANYTHING EVER? I'VE BEEN WAITING FOR THIS MOMENT SINCE YOU WERE STUPID!"

Well, that was a way of putting it. Mabel had in fact been waiting with decidedly bated breath since Bill had let slip his entries might've had anything to do with Ford and she had jumped to every conclusion imaginable. Also known as: she had told him that if he ever kept anything from her again, they'd find his body in a ditch behind O'Sadleys.

Which was a comforting thought, certainly.

"Well, not me..." he admitted quietly, as if that would make Mabel any less excited or less able to hear him in the otherwise silent room. She paused for a second, looked at him with wide eyes and clamped her hands over her eyes, letting go of Bill's. She had the biggest smile on her face, and when she next spoke it was very softly.

"Bill. WHAT did Ford say to you?????"
"Nothing!" he insisted, giggling like a schoolgirl. Mabel grabbed him by the shoulders and shook his frame back and forth violently.
"TELL ME!!!" she screeched like a goblin, and Bill desperately tried to stop himself from dying of laughter.

"Okay. You really wanna know?" he asked.
"OF COURSE I DO, BABE. YOU TWO ARE MY LIFE."
"You said that two days ago about a five-year-old Tumblr post. And again yesterday about a pack of Halloween stickers, and it's the middle of summer."
"Irrelevant. And summer's almost over, so there."

Bill's face fell for a second, but only that, and while Mabel was distracted again. He regained composure and asked again:
"Are you super super sure??? Your head might explode, Mabel."
"It's really that juicy??? Waow. Obviously I want to know, Biiiiiiiill, c'moooooooooon!!!!!"

"Ready?"
"Yes!!"

"He said he loved me."

Mabel proceeded to gasp very hard and dramatically fall backwards like she was fainting. Unfortunately, the joke was at her expense. She was winded and couldn't speak (or breathe) for a full eight minutes.

------------------------------------------------

Ford went downstairs eventually.

Yes, I know, it's surprising, but he did have some semblance of where he was, perhaps unlike Bill did. The triangle often lost sight of where he was. Ford may have been paranoid, but he was also concerned. Bill might not have been taking this so well, especially not if this was how Ford reacted. God, he was selfish for this.

He sighed and decided to make for the 'boring' exit (going down the ladder like a normal person instead of jumping and praying you didn't break anything).

Unfortunately, there was someone waiting for him.

"Hey, old man," said an unmistakable voice that scared Ford out of his wits. Thankfully he was on the floor already, so he didn't fall. He whipped around suddenly, now very on edge, and was greeted with Wendy glaring at him like he had personally offended her.

"Wendy!" he spluttered, clearly embarrassed. "I- thought I told you to go home?"
"I stayed for a while. Wanted to see what was going on. Bill went up there a while before you came down. I was worried about the stupid triangle. He needed to snap out of it.

From what I heard, you helped with that."

"You heard- ?" Ford whispered hoarsely, before cutting himself off and bashing his wrist against his forehead. Ugh. He was such a fool. Of course someone would be listening.
"Pretty much everything," Wendy confirmed. "You're a fucking idiot, by the way. For more than one reason."

"I am inclined to agree," the man said reluctantly. "What's the other reason? Insensitivity?"
"No," Wendy said. It felt, somehow, that she knew something Ford didn't, which of course was endlessly infuriating, and terrifying for that matter.

He almost told her to go home, but hesitated.

"Is this, um-" he began awkwardly. He really shouldn't be asking a nineteen-year-old with no self control about this, but who else? She was honestly the only safe one.

"Do you think this whole thing is....?"
"Stupid? Yes. Weird as fuck? Of course. But not exactly hopeless."

Ford blinked.

"But what does that mean?! Wendy, that could have any interpretation, I- I need data! What do you mean?!"

Wendy zipped her lips and left Ford in suspense.

She was a fucking smartass. He would have to talk to her more often.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

"No- fucking- WAY!" Mabel wheezed eventually, using her still short breath to explode into a fit of giggles.

Bill was also laughing now. This was fun. Talking to Mabel often made things better- at least when they were lighthearted or romantic. She didn't really know how to handle anything else, and who would want to contaminate a girl so pure with their bad experiences anyway?

You'd probably want Dipper for that, and maybe Bill should do that. Dipper had been a bit nicer to Bill recently, probably out of mortified respect or just plain terror. He should probably clear things up for the kid.

Hmm. He had stopped calling the kid Pine Tree.

In any case, this was wildly off topic. They were laughing now, real belly laughing, which was a much more enjoyable experience as a human than it ever was as a demon.

So this was nice. Bill should feel nice.

But there was only two weeks left of summer.

Suddenly he wasn't really laughing anymore. He kind of felt lonely. It was colder.

The pit in his stomach was back, and he really hoped the tears that had returned so quickly would dry quickly. Unfortunately they weren't fast enough, and the way Bill wiped his eyes with his sleeve wasn't exactly inconspicuous.

Mabel suddenly fell silent.

"...Bill?"

He had no answer to her concerned prompt. He was crying now.

Mabel didn't know what to say, but speaking didn't seem right anyway, and so she let the demon cry into her shoulder without an explanation.

Bill had changed his mind, maybe. Mabel was alright at comforting people when she tried.

He cried himself to sleep.

Chapter Text

Dipper Pines woke up thoroughly disoriented. It felt so early, but the light pouring into the room through the slightest gap in the curtains told a far different story. He could barely recall what had happened the day before, or the night for that matter.

Oh. Oh, wait. That had happened last night. How brilliant.

For future reference, the series of events went as follows:

Mabel, after walking around aimlessly in the Shack for an hour (this was why she wasn't allowed to stay up past twelve), burst into their shared bedroom with the kind of drama only present in people about to stop a wedding, toxic exes, narcissists and sixteen-year-olds- though maybe those last ones were a bit too similar.

Dipper hadn't woken up from the slamming of the door closing behind her, but instead to his twin shaking him backwards and forwards and repeating his name over and over.

She had talked about a code red, WHICH HAD PREVIOUSLY BEEN ESTABLISHED AS A UNICORN SIGHTING, and proceeded to 'spill the tea' (which Dipper did not agree to hearing)

Apparently Ford loves Bill. Fucking.... Great.

He forced her to go to sleep.

Fading back into the room, Dipper could hear Mabel waking up from the bed across the room, stretching in that way she did every morning and yawning like a foghorn. The rotting frame beneath her creaked, threatening like it did every day to break beneath her.

"Dipper!" she said immediately, albeit sluggishly. "We're going to talk to Wendy."

"Wendy?" he asked. "Why?"

"She was on shift last night, like, late last night. The coffee pot in the kitchen was still warm at one in the morning, and she always takes a cup with her when she leaves for the night. It should've been cold. She probably left a little after midnight judging by the precise temperature, which was 107 degrees, fahrenheit."

"You should get into forensics," Dipper said, hoisting himself out of bed, throwing on the nearest t-shirt he could find (it said 'Get In The Van', he was pretty sure it was Mabel's, he didn't get the joke) and fervently trying to convince himself that somehow Ford had meant what he had said platonically.

He had already had his worldview shattered by that stupid journal entry. Please let it be one-sided, he begged silently. For his sanity.

"C'mon, c'mon, c'mooooon!!!!" Mabel wailed, practically bouncing up and down in anticipation. "We gotta goOoO!!!"

It was funny. Mabel could've been Sherlock Holmes if it hadn't been for her genuinely debilitating ADHD.

"I'm coming, Mabel," Dipper said hurriedly, whacking on some random sweatpants and tripping over his feet as he ran towards her awkwardly.

She clapped twice, a sweet smile plastered on her face to distract any onlooker from realising her full potential as a private detective. Dipper was on the receiving end of her interrogations once, and never wanted to be again.

"Come now, brother, we have places to be!" she beamed.

Downstairs felt as if an empty warzone had been condensed into one room. The kitchen felt smaller than usual, Stan flipping pancakes- badly, mind you, he dropped most of them and saved the last one for himself- and Wendy, thankfully, leaning against the wall, doomscrolling once again.

Dipper could only watch in abject fear as Mabel loosened the collar of her self-knitted sweater, cleared her throat and tapped the elder girl on the shoulder.

"Unless this is a murder situation or you brought me food, I'm not available for comment until noon," she prefaced, barely bothering to look up at Mabel's barely faltering smile. There was a small 'oh, no' from the old man cooking breakfast in the corner.

"Well," the younger girl said slowly and spitefully, crossing her arms. "It's not a murder, Corduroy, but it might as damn well be."

Wendy glanced up at Mabel slightly and tilted her head confusedly. To her at least, this was out of character. To the two men in the room, the way she was acting was unfortunately recognizable on sight.

"I'm gonna need you to put that phone down and answer my questions, because what I've heard so far is emotionally compromising- to say the least- and I don't even know that much. SO. Gather all your memories up in that sick fucking head of yours and strap. The. Fuck. In. Corduroy."

Needless to say, Wendy put the phone down and shut up. She was proud of the kid, and as a reward was now required to give her full attention to whatever the hell she had to ask.

"Now. You were on shift last night. I know you left sometime after midnight because the coffee pot was still warm at 1AM and only you make the dumb vanilla caramel monstrosity with oat milk and cinnamon sprinkles. So... don't lie to me.

First point of interest: the triangle in the room. But- not a triangle anymore. In any case, did you see Bill? Was he acting weird? Like... more weird than usual? More emo? Did he say anything cryptic?"

"Well he wasn't exactly the point of interest. He jumped down from the rooftop and ran into his room."

Mabel took a mental note of this. Times like this were almost proof that genius ran in the family. Even Dipper wrote pretty much everything down, and this was how you knew the Pines were special. And brilliant.

"Well, then. What was, if you don't mind me asking, this main point of interest you've referenced?"

"Talked to Ford, 'bout twenty minutes after everything went down. He looked thoroughly shaken up and all. I had seen Bill going up in the first place and he was crying or something. Did you know the walls are really thin? Even the ceiling? So much so, I could hear the convo perfectly. It was awesome rubbing it in the old man's face."

"And what was the conversation?!" Dipper interrupted, on edge. He needed to know.

"Basically, Ford was being all nice and soft and stupid and they were both being dipshits 'n' all. Then that idiot let slip he was in love with the triangle and everything blew up. Guy hasn't come out of his hobbit hole since," answered Wendy, gesturing to the vending machine passageway that led to the basement.

Dipper put his head in his hands and Mabel went speechless.

"Called it," yelled a voice from the kitchen.

"Oh yeah?" Wendy asked, facing Stan now. "When'd you guess?"

"Three days ago."

"Shame on you for assuming they'd figure anything out. They're emotionally constipated, dude."

"What- what is this new conversation about?" the other man in the room asked tentatively.

"You haven't put down a date of when they'd kiss yet? 'S always coming, Dip Dop."

This was worse than torture.

Chapter Text

Bill blinked his bleary eyes awake. It was weird having two of them. He still hadn't gotten used to it. He smooshed his palm into his cheek as he sat up in bed, possibly bruising his cheekbone, but the pain is what kept him awake in the morning. Though the pain was a whole lot less pleasurable than it used to be as a demon, he was getting used to it. To the human experience as a whole in fact.

It was deeply unsettling.

There was something he was meant to remember. Damn, it was hard to remember shit after he slept. Maybe he should stop waiting until he passed out from overexertion to sleep.

It all came back to him in a rush of weird fEeLiNgS. They didn't suit him. Sadness, then more sadness, then a glimmer of hope and a rush of.... something that he almost recognized. But it was still kind of foreign, and he didn't want to think about it in any case.

Then fear. But not terrified-fear, more like 'oh wow everything is very real now'-fear. And then he remembered the actual proceedings instead of the emotions.

The ex-demon paused completely, even his breathing, clutched a pillow close to his chest and squealed into it.
Ford loved him. He had verbal proof. Did the spoken word count as a legally binding contract in the state of Oregon???? Probably not. And Ford had probably meant it platonically or something.

but still. yay!

Mabel burst in, apparently using her sixth sense of Meaningless Drama to sense whether the demon was awake. Bill yelped and automatically fled backwards at the sight of the teenager. Her expression was emotionless , a terrified Dipper trailing behind her, who said "Bye," softly before running off somewhere, presumably to get away from his sister. She looked intimidating for some reason.

"Bill?!" she yelled.
"Yes, ma'am?!" he yelled back automatically, clearly startled.
She looked around for a second, closing the door behind her before darting across the room to Bill, thankfully with a smile on her face, and giggling uncontrollably.

"You should go talk to Grunkle Ford!"

Bill involuntarily flushed red at the mention of his name. He hated this, he haaaaated this, this was not how it worked in his original form, his emotions were not constantly on display-

 He groaned into the pillow theatrically as Mabel practically screeched with laughter.

"I'm not doing that!!" the ex-triangle protested whinily, Mabel putting a hand on his shoulder automatically as he flinched away from the touch. He still hadn't gotten used to stuff like this, but that was besides the point.

"C'mon. You know for sure he likes you back now, don't you?"

Bill had no argument against that.

----------------------------------------------

Dipper had known his Grunkle long enough to know the combination for the "broken" vending machine off by heart. A-B-1-C-3.

The door slid into the wall mechanically and opened. Even from the stairwell, Dipper could hear shuddery breaths and the click of pacing shoes on a concrete floor. As he walked down, he heard glass shatter and something metal clank, which of course made the teen worry.

"Grunkle Ford..?" he asked cautiously, all the noises stopping at once, including the ragged drawing of breath. It was almost silent. There was no reply.

The boy hurried down the stairs (oh god he probably looked so stupid and girly) and popped his head out from a corner.

Ford was sat down on his knees, head in hands, back facing Dipper. And he wasn't breathing.

"HEY!" he said, realizing, running around to face Ford and waving a hand in front of his eyes.

There was a smashed beaker on the floor laying next to where the boy decided to kneel (probably what Dipper had heard as he descended the stairwell). Thankfully none of the shards dug into his knees or anything as he frantically racked his brain for anything he could possibly do to rectify this.

Ford's hair fell onto his hands which completely covered his face. Now that Dipper was slightly closer to him, he could hear short, sharp, quiet breaths that he was fairly sure had only just started.

"Please talk to me," he begged, making sure he wasn't standing too close to his guardian. As someone who had dealt with these kinds of episodes before, he knew imposing wouldn't help much. In fact, it would probably escalate the situation a whole lot more.

"Leave," he replied in such a small voice that his nephew was almost inclined to. Dipper mentally kicked himself for even thinking like that.
"I'm not going to do that, because you obviously can't get ahold of the situation at hand."

The elder of the two scientists removed his hands from his face, obviously confused.
"I think I have a very good grasp of the situation, Dipper. I just completely fucked everything up."
"No," he sighed. "Unfortunately, you haven't."

"I have."
"Nope."
"I have."
"You... ugh, you really haven't," the teen conceded.

"Look, if I can admit this shit, you can get a grip."
"Excuse me?" Stanford said, obviously offended. "And what are you talking about? And who gave you any information about-? Well, clearly Wendy, but my other question still stands!"

"I swear to god," and he rubbed his eye, "I can't believe I even have to say this.

Since you idiotic dipshits are so obnoxiously perfect for one another, you both share the emotional range of a fucking grain of salt and so cannot see that both of you are clearly just as infatuated with the other! Bill has a whole third of his diary dedicated to describing your every interaction with the tiny cockalorum! So pick yourself the FUCK UP AND GO AND HAVE CONVERSATION WITH THE PIECE OF SHIT!"

Ford kind of blinked in genuine shock, eyes blown wide.
Silence rang in the room for a good few seconds before, in a small voice, the elder man with a bashful and embarrassed expression asked, "He does that?"

"Yes," Dipper breathed, "And I swear to fuck, I need you to get out of this room and have a conversation with him right now or I will break out the world-ending shit that I know is in this room and tamper with it."

"I- I- sure," Ford stammered, picking himself up from the concrete.
"Of course," and gesturing to the glass smashed on the floor, "I can do that myself, apparently." He laughed but stopped as he saw his nephew's face.

"Right. Goodbye, I suppose."

------------------------------------

Bill and Mabel sat in a pretty comfortable silence, all things considered. Mabel scrolled on her phone, seeking out tricks to manipulate people into falling in love with you. Though Bill usually would have at least laughed at stuff like this, he was taking it a bit too seriously today.

UGHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH.

This was awful. This was torment in the form of starvation. He couldn't go out of this room at all, let alone go to the kitchen, where Ford had every right to be! Probably- probably grabbing trail mix or an entire bag of oats with that stupid annoying face of his that Bill just couldn't face.

But he had so many questions. Oh so many. Did he mean it? In what context was this supposed to be taken? Did he know how fucking beautiful he looked in starlight???

It was torture either way he put it, torture not knowing the answers and torture of having to think of something clever to say when he eventually did ask these questions. He groaned audibly and flopped back on the bed, a slightly concerned Mabel hovering over him.

"Hey, do you want food?"
Bill practically lit up, but couldn't bring himself to lift his head off the pillow.
"Yes, please," he croaked. "Something filling, I haven't eaten in ages. And also I kinda want fruit. But like a whole plate of fruit salad. I could kill to just snap my fingers and have a plate full of grapes appear right now."

Mabel nodded and diligently skipped up to the door, opened it and unfortunately was faced with the stunned face of Stanford Pines, who had been just about to knock.

"I.... Hello, Mabel," he said awkwardly, eyes fixed behind her.
"Grunkle, uh, Grunkle Ford!" she wheezed, looking behind her at Bill helplessly. He had buried himself under blankets.

"....Bill?" he called, voice soft and almost coaxing. The demon tentatively peered out of his duvet, immediately regretting it as he saw the elder man's face.
"Hi," he said. Oh my God. If I were him, I'd hate me too.

"Hmm!" he hummed in surprise. "Er, I- Could I talk to you outside? For- for just a while?"
Bill looked him directly in the eyes.

"Can this wait until I'm not malnourished?"

Chapter Text

Bill spent about an hour unmoving apart from to occasionally pick at the beautifully presented plate of fruit. He only ate occasionally- when the pressure of what he knew for a fact he would have to face very soon, and in fact it was completely up to the other person in this equation, and oh almighty axolotl this shit was terrifying- yes, when the pressure from that died down slightly.

It did not do so very often.

The events of the last hour went as follows:

- Mabel pushed Ford out of the room
- Bill had panic attacks, plural
- She went out and came back in with the fruit platter for her pet Bill
- Bill was a coward, and apparently, so was Ford coz he hadn't come in since

There were no words in any human language to describe the- uh, anguish Bill was going through. Anguish was the closest word to whatever this was.

Another way to phrase it was that the demon was finally realizing why they called it 'lovesick', the hard way. He wanted to throw up. And potentially snap his fingers and turn everyone here into dust, even though that probably wouldn't make him feel any better.

It was up to Ford when they would talk, really, because Bill sure as hell wasn't going out there. It would be a war zone, and for a minor chaos deity - dream demon, whatever, Bill didn't really want that very much. Maybe it was a human thing, but the now-man actually had some self-preservation instincts.

He missed Ford. He hated Ford. He loved Ford, and that was fucking terrifying really. Ford probably really did hate him, and those STUPID words were only said out of pity, and of course Bill couldn't handle that truth, but he couldn't go back to therapy now, could he?

It had been an hour.

Either Ford was going to come into the room soon, or they would probably not talk about this again, ever.

Come on...

----------------

He had been so ready.

He was not ready anymore. At all. He was terrified now. To think only an hour ago he was totally prepared to barge in there all willy-nilly and say-

And what the hell was he even going to say?! Oh, God, he was surely not in his right mind after his nephew had screamed at him. Dipper didn't usually do that, ever. The boy was mild-mannered, always. It was a commendable way to act.

He thought about that exchange again.

"...a whole third of his diary dedicated to describing your every interaction..."

Bill had a diary, possibly a mirroring behavior. Interesting. And for a moment he wondered exactly what the demon had written about him.

Dipper had made it sound quite nice, and it had to be, after all, to contribute towards his point of...
"...obnoxiously perfect for one another..."
Ugh. He could hardly stop himself from thinking about this, but he hated it when he got all hot and bothered.

What if this works out?

What if we can put everything behind us?

What if... what if... what if...

Ford was trying very hard to wreck the blueprints he had spent months meticulously designing for his Muse. This was awful. The revelation he had just gotten, the visions from whatever merciful entity wanted to spare him from this betrayal and frankly heartbreak were enlightening. In the worst way possible.

Because Bill had been lying to him. For months.

"Oh Sixer~?" his Muse called from somewhere in his psyche, possibly sensing the man's strong emotions. The demon manifested in Ford's office, clearly surprised by the wreckage surrounding him. A bookshelf had been knocked over, an especially important instrument in the construction of what the man now knew was a PORTAL broken on the floor, and Stanford himself trying to rip out the blueprints from his final journal, the other three nowhere to be found.

"IQ? What's happening?" Bill asked, his tone a lot more serious than usual and less... well, promiscuous than normal.
"I know what you tricked me into doing my m- Bill," Ford hissed, mad at himself for reflexively using the nickname. It was all so clear, even that stupid display of twisted affection gave the demon, because that was what Bill was after all, power over the man.

The triangle noticeably paused, even freezing. This was probably just something he had copied from Ford, deities- ugh, DEMONS- definitely couldn't feel like that, and as he kept replaying moments from their history in his head, Stanford noticed he had never felt strongly, never acted involved, never shared his interests in the random little things Ford thought made life worth it.

And still. Somehow. Ford had managed to fall for it, and by extension Bill, hook, line and sinker.

Fuck, he was weak.

In any case, the demon pretended to falter.
"Fordsy, I-"
"I'm leaving."
"NO!"

And somehow it all went downhill from there.

...Maybe it wouldn't work out after all.

-------------------------------------------------

One and a half hours. Two. Three...

Three and a half hours Bill spent being a nervous wreck before he finally recovered and got his shit together. And even then the amount of wallowing time didn't hit him until Mabel came in again.

"Did you guys talk yet?! I'm bored! I knitted an entire jumper and I'm bored! I need drama to keep me stimulated!!!"
"Oh. No. He didn't come back in."

The teen was genuinely silent in shock for a second, clasping hands with many rings and bangles over her mouth like someone had committed a felony before her eyes. The silence was genuinely weird. Being with Mabel was always loud, and this was off-putting.

"Bill, it has been three hourssssss. What the hell has Grunkle Ford-?! UGH! I swear, sometimes I think Grunkle STAN is better than that man!"
The teenager launched right into a rant about all the stupid things Ford had done over the years, constantly restating that these were only the things she had seen, and that Dipper probably had far more stories, and...

Three hours?  That motherfucker had initiated all this, and now left him sinking into the floor in a pool of his own self-deprecation for three HOURS?!

...why?

Bill got up, Mabel still talking his ear off.
"and I cannot believe the NERVE- Billy?"
"I'm leaving."
"Huh- what?"
"I want to talk to Ford."

Mabel went to say something, remembered her insatiable hunger for drama, and stepped out of Bill's way.

-------------

He had gone into the basement again. It was sort of comforting. Familiar at the very least, more so than the rest of the shack.

Beeping from upstairs, of course. He knew someone was coming in. He didn't move. It was probably Dipper again, and he could just tell the kid he'd already talked to Bill, and hopefully it'd be a quick fix.

There was no concerned words, which checked out. Dipper would know he'd be alright. Ford just waited for him to get into the room, unmoving as he stared at the desk.

"You can't dictate my emotions anymore, Bill," he had said, silently cheering himself for not using the name he still called his Muse in his own thoughts.
The demon, though he had no determinable gauge of emotion, seemed as though he was hurt, dropping his arms from where they had rested on either side of his form, where any human's hips would be.

He couldn't read the infernal triangle's mind, but it seemed to Ford the air had changed, that Bill looked almost guilty or... regretful...
MANIPULATION, something inside him said. It wasn't his usual thoughts. ALL OF THIS IS MANIPULATION. HE FEELS NO REMORSE. HE IS INHUMAN.

It was true. Ford had reached these conclusions himself. His Muse- Bill! Bill was selfish and awful, and he knew that.

"...Who says I can't?" the demon laughed, after giving his response some considerable thought. Damn. Ford should have remembered the damn triangle could read his mind. He probably knew exactly what was going on. It all felt so violating now.

Shit. He wasn't going to cry. He wasn't going to waver. 

"I say  you can't. Now I'm leaving. I'm not doing shit with that portal. I'm not letting you through."
"Wow, IQ! Finally wizened up enough to know what I've been doing all this time?" Bill laughed. He was fucking rubbing it in his face now, wasn't he?! This was infuriating!

This was awful. This was betrayal.

What had he expected, after all, when he had made a deal with a triangle? For him to be civil? For him to be kind?

For him to love him back?

Because he didn't.

"FORD!" yelled that voice he had been remembering only moments ago. For a moment the man truly believed this was in his head too before a hand landed on his shoulder.

"Fuck!" He jumped  at the contact, double taking as the face of the new- and supposedly improved- Bill Cipher came into view.

One of the nice things about him being human was that Ford finally had a way to tell what Bill was thinking.

Bill looked mad. Very mad.

"It's been three hours. You son of a bitch."
"Look, I don't care what you think," Stanford said spitefully, earning an offended gasp.
"Look you can't leave me to wallow in anxiety and self-loathing for THREE FUCKING HOURS and then act this shittily when I come down after having waited for you to be a normal FUCKING PERSON and TALK TO ME!"

"You can't talk to me about being a shitty person! Do you know what you've done to me over the years?! The shit you put me through?! Hatred, fucking betrayal, and then you genuinely ruined my life so much I went through a FUCKING PORTAL!"

"It has been years, and none of that has anything to do with this situation! Do I need to apologize over and over again for the rest of forever?!"
"That's better than you having not apologized for it since you've gotten here!"
"Well, I'm fucking SORRY! But NONE of that was my fault! I swear, if you ever grew a pair and had a regular conversation with me, you'd know this!"

"I don't want to talk to you right now."
"I don't want to talk to you either."

"You're not leaving."

"No. I'm not."

"Why?"

Chapter Text

The argument didn't end with some kind of massive resolution. Nobody hit anybody. Nobody confessed anything. Nothing happened. At some point, Bill just walked out, mid-sentence. It just wasn't worth it.

The man was obviously too emotionally constipated to recognize what his feelings were. And maybe Bill wasn't emotionally mature either, but he knew when to give up.

This had been happening from the moment they had met. From the moment the banter had devolved into flirting. From the moment they had first kissed. And from the moment everything had gone to shit. Because Bill could never have nice things.

It wasn't his fault. It wasn't. 

He remembered the conversation he'd had with the Axolotl perfectly. They had always been something akin to Bill's higher-up. He had to report pretty much everything he did to them to ensure that he could go on using his powers freely. If he didn't express honesty, they could just extract the information from him another way and kill him.

He lived in fear and in freedom.

It had been the day(s) he had met Stanford. Watching him through the 'eyes' of the trees that resembled his as he napped had gotten boring. Ford had woken up, Bill had been his naturally charming self, the two had created a sort of rapport, and...

Why, Bill couldn't stop thinking about him if he tried. He was the most infuriatingly competent human he had ever met. Actually, that was a low bar. But he was on par with some of the deities the demon hung out with on a regular, and he would so anything for  knowledge.

And by extension, anything for Bill.

But it was the end of the Multiversal Standard Day- about a week in humanity's time. And he had to report.

"BILL," they had said as the demon walked into the nightmare dimension where most entities were kept trapped, powerless- this included Bill. He only had power thanks to Axy, and he still wasn't fully at liberty of what he could do.
"In the flesh," he had replied casually. Under the facade, he was terrified. He kept the facade up at all times, so this wasn't much of an issue.

"MAY I HAVE A SYNOPSIS OF WHAT YOU HAVE BEEN DOING WITH YOUR TIME?" they asked, but it really wasn't a question. It was a demand. 
"I visited some friends from a few dimensions over," he said coyly, which was true. Ford was a friend, and Time Baby had hung out in Dimension 46 a few times.

Fordsy...

Anyway.

"RIGHT," they hummed skeptically. "ANYTHING ELSE, OR SHOULD I PRY FOR MORE INFORMATION ABOUT THIS EVENT?"
"Well, not much else. Some travel, obviously," he answered.

"WHO WERE YOU VISITING, BILL?" they sighed. He didn't think they liked him, like, at all, but they had an acquaintanceship of sorts. Old Axy wouldn't kill him if they didn't have to. Of course, this was probably only because it'd be a lot of paperwork to go through, but still.

"Went to 46. Looked for Time Baby. They screamed at me."
"YOU SAID FRIENDS. PLUS, YOU DON'T HAVE THE PATIENCE TO BE YELLED AT FOR AN ENTIRE DAY."
"Found someone on some planet... pretty cool... a human, actually, and not an idiot... not much to say about him... six fingers-"
"SIX FINGERS?!"

Bill flinched. He had been somewhat expecting this. Ford was technically considered an anomaly. And nobody was meant to interact with anomalies, apart from destroying them. He said nothing, waiting for the Axolotl's reaction.
"...YOU SAY THIS HUMAN IS NOT AS MENTALLY IMPAIRED AS MOST?"

"No. He's about as smart as any of us deities."
Axy hummed, unconvinced.
"AND DIMENSTION 42 IS NOT NEARLY AS DEPLETED OF MATERIALS AS MOST, YES?
"Well, yes, their resources are quite abundant."

"BRILLIANT. THIS ANOMALY IS GOING TO MAKE YOU A PORTAL OUT OF HERE. AND THEN YOU'RE GOING TO KILL HIM."

Obviously that reality never came about. But Ford didn't trust him now.

And maybe Bill didn't want that anyway.

Didn't stop him from crying himself to sleep that night.

--------------------------------------------------------------------

Stark white ceilings. Cold floors. Sterile lights shining in his eyes.

This wasn't the Shack.

Bill was half-asleep, eyes still mildly red from the heartache that apparently plagued him even unconscious. He blinked his bleary eyes open to see a long, liminal hallway with no visible end. It was hauntingly familiar. Nauseating.

But it hadn't clocked. It hadn't clocked because there was a light glowing from himself that was blue. It came from the crack, etched somehow back into his body, his body that was once more geometrical, that once more had sharp angles and edges.

He couldn't think properly. He couldn't think about the Theraprism, where he obviously was, couldn't think about anything but the one name that rang true in his mind.

Stanford.

And he had never been more sure. More sure that he loved this man. And that he always had.

From behind, a voice rang out horrifyingly crisp and clear. 

"GOOD TO SEE THAT YOU WILL NOT STOOP TOO LOW FOR APPROVAL, BILL," chimed the Axolotl, the smile present in their voice, though the dream demon couldn't see them.
He turned around with awful lethargy, blinking drowsily at the other deity.

"Why... why am I here?" he asked, disoriented.
"YOU'VE BEEN HERE FOUR YEARS, BILL. IT'S THE THERAPRISM," they said. It was patronizing. It was awful. It made Bill want to be sick.

"I know what the Theraprism is, Axy. Why am I back here?! I was at the Shack-"
"THAT WAS A DREAM, BILL," they said like they were speaking to a child.

that was a dream

thatwasadream

t̷͇͝h̶̜͐a̴͉͋t̴̯̐ŵ̴̯a̵͊ͅș̶͝a̸̼͗ḍ̸̈́r̸̯̈́e̶̩͂a̶̹̒m̵̗̕

t̴̮̳͔͗̈́ḩ̷̢̝͐̑a̴̹̳̘̅̂̎t̸̰̿͌w̷̲̑́͝a̴̟͇͐͆s̴͕͐͆a̸͉̱̘͐d̴̯̐r̶̛̬͜͝ȩ̷̘̞͑̓a̷͖̓̈́m̶̯̊

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no

no

no

NO

NO

NO

NO

"No."
"NO?"
"No... no, no, no..." Bill said weakly, looking down at his hands like someone on drugs. They were gloved again. He was a triangle again, he had a massive crack running through him again, and nothing was normal.

They laughed as he threw up ectoplasm and promptly passed out.

Chapter Text

Unfortunately, Bill dreamt. Again.

Flashing lights and colours and too many sounds flooded his vision, clouding his judgement and sending him out of his own body like fucking astral projection shit.

He laid there on the ground, suddenly himself again, but not himself all the same. It was sickening. Everything was sickening. The light his sleeping body gave off turned a sickly bile green.

The Axolotl smiled to themselves, the motherfucker, picking up the pyramid and carrying him to another room.

Fuck. He couldn't remember who he shared the cell with. This stupid crack. His head hurt, and he wasn't even in his head.

He missed Mabel. She'd know what to do in this situation. He missed Dipper. Through all his faults, the kid was the only honestly grounded one in the entire bloody family. He missed Soos and Melody and Stan as well, though he has less attachment to them. They were all part of a morning ambience. It made everything seem that much lighter.

Most of all, he missed Ford. Fuck, he missed Ford- he always knew he had of course, even before all this business came about, but now his chest hurt suspiciously whenever he thought about the man.

He could still remember the glint at the rim of his glasses, the exact cologne he always used, his lucky paper that smelled like old woman.

He never got to say goodbye.

But it wasn't real anyway, was it?

He couldn't see his own body anymore, but he was sure it was crying. Speaking of which, where was he? Everything had gone so fuzzy and dark all of a sudden, and now-

A memory. He remembered this one.

" You asked to speak with me, my muse?" Ford stated warily. The two of them  talked  one-on-one all the time, but Bill supposed he still hadn't gotten used to it. The man could hardly be expected to, now a mentee, and later victim, of an  otherworldly  entity.

Bill always found his simple presence comforting. Not even just for his reverence, which was well-established by this point. For his entire being. Stanford was a fellow intellectual, also with his talents wasted on whatever others told him to do.

They were similar in that way, and Bill suspected they'd be similar in many more ways if they only talked a while.

God, what was he talking about? Old Frills'd kill him if they ever found out he was attached to 'that human who'll build you a portal'. Axy didn't like anyone showing  emotion . It was almost a pet peeve.

Fuck them sometimes.

"Bill?" Ford asked tentatively, tugging at the geometrical shape's gloved finger.

Oh, right. He was  in the  middle of a conversation.

"Sorry," he apologised, something that didn't happen often. "I got caught up in my own  thoughts . Regular occurrence when you have so many great ones to sort through, hey?"

"Yes," Ford agreed, relaxing slightly at his  muse's  assurance he was fine. "Good. I was worried. You mean a lot."

Something about being a deity let the  triangle  almost read minds mildly. When you  thought  loud enough. And weren't taking precautions. Or thinking about not thinking too  hard . His powers were weak in the Nightmare Realm, alright?

What the fuck am I saying?!  stressed Ford.

Bill was ashamed to realise that the bricks on either side of his neatly tied  bow tie  were growing a little hot. He suspected they were almost orange by now.

"I- well, I-" he stuttered. Not a good look. Save face. "Thank you very much, IQ. I already knew you needed me."

Good thing his default setting was 'flirty motherfucker'. It was Ford's turn to stammer. The man couldn't even get  his  words out properly.

Bill was a bad person for this. He was messing with the man's feeling. The deity didn't- didn't  love  him.  That  was ridiculous. And besides, he wasn't allowed to get attached.

STAY DISTANT, Frills' voice rang out like muscle memory in his nonexisent ears.

"I just..." Bill began. What could he say? 'I just wanted to talk to you, I thought you could use some company'? Lame.

Ford looked nervous.  Very  nervous. It showed. He fiddled furiously with the hem of his sweater vest and held direct eye contact,  which  Bill knew was hard.

Fuck.

Don't get attached, Bill. DON'T. IT WILL ONLY END BADLY.
END BADLY.
END BADLY.
END BADLY.
END BADLY.
END BADLY.
END BADLY.
END BADLY.
END BADLY.
END BADLY.
END BADLY.
END BADLY.
END BADLY.
END BADLY.
END BADLY.
END BADLY.

"I wanted to check up on the plans for the portal."
"Oh! Everything's running smoothly. We have  about  five months left to  gather  resources and build the thing. I could  make  it less, or it could  be  more. It depends."

"Right," Bill said solemnly. "I  have  to attend a meeting with some other  deities , okay? I promise. I'll be back soon."

The triangle leaned in for an affectionate kiss on the  forehead , closing his eye to form sickeningly sweetly smiling lips.

The forehead wasn't where they ended up.

Who... why? Why was this happening to him?!

That was real. That happened. Who was reminding him of it all? It was a brilliant comfort to him, and a curse. It hurt him and healed itself too quickly to get mad at.

This was weird and disorienting. This was grounding. This was sadness and euphoria. This was... Well, Ford. This was their relationship.

Surely Axy couldn't be influencing all this. Maybe they had been monitoring how Bill felt inside the

JUST A DREAM
JUST A DREAM
JUST A DREAM
JUST A DREAM
JUST A DREAM
JUST A DREAM
JUST A DREAM
JUST A DREAM
JUST A DREAM

and had somehow known that last memory? It didn't make sense. Bill never told Frills about any of those 'weak' feelings.

They didn't feel weak. They were actually pretty damn strong.

He wasn't going to say it. He wasn't going to think it. He was never going to admit it. Because either wasn't true. It never had been, never would be, it couldn't.

NononononononononononononononononononononononononononononononononononononononononononononononononononononononononononononoNO

He woke up with a tight chest, having to breathe deeply to feel a thing. He rapped on his own abdomen and felt only hard brick beneath his knuckles.

It was only ever just a dream.

There was no crying like he thought there would be. Only an empty ache which took over his very spirit and drained him dry of everything.

It was a stronger feeling than unhappiness by far, and it was hardly a numbness. Maybe this was acceptance. Was this what the final stage of grief was for humans?

It was shit. He preferred the 572 stages back on Euclydia.

Actually, don't think about Euclydia. That'll add to the ""acceptance"" thing. The ""acceptance"" thing isn't something we wanna add to.

His eye was red from crying in his sleep. There were sure to be bags underneath it by now. He rubbed it, not sleepily, but as though he was trying to rectify everything by smudging his already horrifically running mascara.

He'd definitely have to redo that sometime.

"Hmm?" Came a sleepy mutter from the opposite side of the room. Oh, right. Room-mate. Who was that again?

"Why the fuck were you dreaming about that one guy you wouldn't shut up about a few years ago?" Asked the same, decidedly feminine voice. They - whoever they were - had been somehow watching their dream. And they had known him when he first met Ford three decades ago.

Who were they? He didn't know too many people. He decided to actually look at them.

He turned on his side, cautious not to poke a hole in the bedsheets, only to see the pissed off, many-eyed face of Jheselbraum. Or, as many people who weren't close with her knew her as, the Oracle.

Oh.
Her.

Chapter Text

"Bill," she repeated. He didn't want to dignify her with a response, but his somehow still very much intact ego told him she was probably worried, so he grunted in acknowledgement. Jhezelbraum hummed disapprovingly, strode across the room with padded walls and poked him less than softly in the ribs. Well, where his ribs would be if he were still human.

If he was ever human to begin with.

No, he wasn't.

"FUCK!" he yelled in pain, finally peeling himself off the mattress and exposing a bloodshot eye, red around the rim from crying. "The fuck was that for?!"

"For wallowing," the Oracle stated matter-of-factly. "It's unprofessional."
"Oh, who cares about professionalism?" Bill sighed, deflated in many senses of the word.

Jhezelbraum looked him up and down again with her seven eyes so used to scrutinising. She was always very much the business type. Which was fair. What Frills was running and all that other jazz (Bill didn't know if other people did shit like this or not) could certainly be classified as a business. There were a lot of contracts, at least.

Bill groaned again. "Look, what do you even fucking want from me?! I'm exhausted-"
"You just woke up."
"-MENTALLY! MENTALLY EXHAUSTED! DO YOU EVER LET ME FUCKING FINISH?!"
"That phrase has connotations you should probably save for talking to your little IQ."

It took a few seconds for Bill to realise exactly what she meant.
"Hey! I didn't mean it that way," he hissed, "and besides. What the hell do you know about.... about him?"

"Not too much. I met him once, you know. Naturally, when he started gushing about you I could hardly listen, so, just mildly tuned him out and told him to watch himself getting close to people."
"You met.... how did you....?"
Bill had nothing to say to that. He had never told any entity that had access to multiple dimensions about this.

God, this was so pointless. Still, his bricks turned orange all too familiarly.
"Gushing about me...." he pondered briefly before quickly snapping out of it. "I- look, you told nobody about this, yes?"
"Of course not. That would get you fired. And as much as I think you're a shit guy, I don't want you to lose your living privileges."

Bill stayed silent for a few seconds longer. Jhez looked at him judgmentally.
"Look, you shouldn't be getting stuck on anybody like this, let alone anybody who can't travel dimensions freely. For Axolotl's sake, couldn't you have picked, uh, Pyronica or something?"
"No!" Bill snapped, admittedly a little harshly.

The Oracle sighed and sat down on her side of the room now, sharp eyes piercing the triangle's very essence.
"What are you even in here for?!" Bill asked. Last time he saw Jhezelbraum was not in here. She must have come in overnight.

It was just one night?

Yup. That made him feel sick. Brilliant!

"That is none of your business," the Oracle snapped. "The only thing you should be concerned about is yourself. This isn't you, William."

Heh. Not himself. He was more himself than he had ever been. She didn't know who he was.

He looked away swiftly.
"This place is a prison, William. Surely you know this. The worst part of being in a prison is that it makes you worse."

"I'm not a worse person because of this, Jhezelbraum," Bill protested bitterly. He swore, this was so fucking stupid!

"You are," she assured him matter-of-factly. "Though admittedly The Axolotl has a lot to do with all this."
"Don't say their name like that."
"Like what?"

"You know what I mean, Jhez! Like they command any sort of fucking respect after putting me through this shit and locking me in a jail cell with you!"

"Bill, they're my- OUR- boss! I'm not going to treat Them with any less respect than They demand of me," she said calmly. "And I suspect you keep your treason silent, you insolent fuckwad."

Bill almost growled. He knew she was right, of course she was, she was practically omnipotent. That didn't make the truth any less....

Why, he didn't know the name for what he felt.

Ah, yes. Soul-crushing.

The truth was no less soul-crushing than if it had been a lie.

"Look, I need to get out of here," he muttered, finally standing up. He chose to keep his feet on the ground as he paced. Jhezelbraum looked worried.

"Bill," she said with mild concern creeping into her voice, something the dream demon had never really expected to come from her, and especially not towards him.

"What?!" He barked.
"You're acting very mortal."
"And so what if I am?!"

He looked at her dead in the eyes, and for a second it became very clear to him what he needed to do. Like God himself had been fiddling with the light system for millennia, and only now had figured out how to illuminate the truth.

"I'd rather be mortal than here. I'd rather be mortal than a lot of things. I think being mortal would do me some fucking good."
"Bill-"

"I might have a shot at actual redemption. I might have a shot at getting some people- people who hate me- to put the fuck up with me. I might be able to try, Jhez. Right now I can't even try to do anything, I'm trapped in this place!

Like you said, it's a prison. I don't want to be here. I want to go back."
"Back where, Bill? To a dimension where you betrayed everyone and they all hate you?"

"Yeah."

The Oracle didn't say anything. Bill stood down. If he had been mortal, he would have been panting. But he wasn't, instead facing his bed again and sitting down.

He glanced back up at Jhez, who had closed most of her eyes apart from the middle one, which was on the bottom-most row of them. In fact, the only row that had three eyes instead of two. Stupid Seven-eyes.

He knew what she was doing. They had worked together once. It was why she was termed the Oracle. No use being called that if you couldn't see the future.

"I don't like it when you do that in front of me," Bill said irritably. "Especially not after that conversation."

Jhezelbraum stayed silent, which was to be expected of somebody looking into the future.

After about 96 seconds (no, Bill did not count!) She snapped all her eyes open, stood up and walked over to Bill, taking away his hat.

"Hey! What the fuck?!"
The Oracle threw the hat on the ground and stomped on it, whatever shoes she had on suitably covered by a floor-length purple robe.

"What the fuck?!" Bill repeated, gesturing to his now very crumpled top hat laying discarded on the floor.

"You won't need it where you're going," Jhez said very quickly, almost out of breath.
"WHAT are you talking about?!"
"I'm getting you out of here. You're going back to that stupid dimension.

And thank God I know how."

Chapter Text

Today had been an alright day. That is to say that it had been no more odd than usual. The twins had been settling back into the attic for the past two days, their arrival an annual thing. Stan had driven himself to Mexico today and only the gods knew when he'd be back.

Ford himself had spent the day inside. He hadn't gotten much work done on the few anomalies he'd wanted to investigate, but he had been thinking. Just generally.

In the last four years, there had been a surprising lack of breaks on the rhythm that now ran everyone's daily life. Of course, he and Stan had gone to the Arctic for a period, but that hadn't last. The Arctic was no Gravity Falls, that was for sure. They had fallen back into their ways quickly once they returned.

Ford studied his findings, both old and new, and researched more about the Weirdness formulas and the way entities operated, but he hadn't seen one in person for a while. Which was good. Entities only brought chaos, and if there was one thing that would ruin this little setup of his, it was chaos.

The life he had now was comfortable. Nothing was disruptive. It was all just peaceful. For now, he could focus on getting back in touch with his family, on repairing his relationship with his brother, hell, learning how to interact with people in a friendly manner without being prompted was a big thing for him!

Ford was thinking. Thinking about a lot of things. Little details about his life he had maybe missed. The concept of love. Whether Stan was going to be alright. Whether he should ask the kids if they wanted supper. He was thinking about how his life was a fucking train wreck, start to finish.

But most of all, oddly, he was thinking about Bill Cipher.

He hadn't thought about that minx of a demon since his defeat. Of course, the deity haunted his thoughts for about 3 months after that, but it was nothing like what would happen in the dreamscape. He had spent thirty years in there, unable to sleep or taste things properly. Of course, he didn't need rest or food, he was naught but a concept in his mind back then, but it would've been nice. And in any case, Bill made an appearance every few minutes to spite his happy thoughts.

Ford remembered being miserable. He also remembered Bill often seeming 'wrong'. He wouldn't have a bow tie, or his top hat, or his eye would have any colour at all. Usually it was-

'black as coal,' he read. 'No, darker. It is interesting what you can see of it when you get close to it. The pupils are mildly stretched into something that much more resembles a rounded oblong than anything else, considering an oval blows out on the side. He is subhuman. And fascinating.'

One of the first entries he had written in the diaries he kept secret. Thank the gods he didn't think to label these so extravagantly as the other three. These entail pretty much everything he knew about Bill. One might think it was all written down in the third journal.

It was not. As the man himself said on the last pages of the black bound book, 'I am ever so excited. There is so much more to learn from Bill- not just about Gravity Falls, but about other entities, dimension-hopping (achievable with human technology? Not naturally gifted), even something so alien and abstract as magic. I have a whole book filled here, though I feel this is only a fraction of the first chapter.'

Ford looked down at these notes in disdain. How naïve of him to write this. He should have kept his thoughts to himself as he wrote. Reading it now, it all seemed so sad.

Ford remembered being happy with Bill. His muse was endlessly intelligent and quippy, and there when he needed him most. He knew now it was all an act, but being reminded of all this was probably not good for him. It made him feel almost sick. Hit him right in the inferiority complex.

"Grunkle Ford?" Called a sweet voice from the stairwell. You could hear the smile in it. Ford shut the book quickly and turned around, grasping it.
"Yes, Mabel? He spluttered. He hadn't expected to be interrupted.

"I just came down to check up on you. It's about ten now and Dipper and I were gonna watch a movie before bed. Apparently, they made a live-action remake-" here she made a retching sound "-of Ducktective, and we wanted to see how bad it was. You wanna join in?"

Ford paused, but not for long. He knew what would happen, he'd be all distracted thinking about his muse and he wouldn't pay attention at all and the twins would make jokes he wouldn't get the next day and they'd know he wasn't paying attention. This had happened more than once. It was not a new concept.

When did he start calling Bill...?
Never mind.

"I'm tired, Mabel. Any other day and I would, you know that. I'm sorry."
The girl's face fell, but she returned to a positive state within a second. "That's fine! I can watch it twice, and I'm sure if I can blackmail Dipper once, I can do it again! We'll watch it now and with you when you have the time."

Ford smiled. Mabel was always very thoughtful like that. It left a queer little ache in his chest.
"Right. Thank you."
"Now go to bed! Otherwise, I'm going to think you're just avoiding me! And then I'll cry!"

She looked him dead in the eyes.

"You know I will."

"Okay, okay," he said, setting the book down and raising both hands in a gesture of surrender. "I'll sleep. Goodnight, Mabel."
His great-niece practically attacked him with a hug. He was surprised he didn't fall over.
"Love you, Grunkle Ford."

"Love you too."

-------------------------

Ford fell asleep surprisingly quickly. Most nights it was incredibly hard to do so. Most nights weren't tonight, he supposed. Tonight was off. The air was wrong. Or right. Or whatever the opposite of what the air usually felt like was.

When he slept, all he saw was a series of flashing colours and indecipherable symbols and memories and blueprints. But he got the message.

He woke up with a tight chest and a hacking cough. It took him a moment to remember where he was, and a longer moment to remember what he knew.

Through all the epilepsy-inducing chaos flashing on the underside of his eyelids, he had managed to gain a message. It was The Oracle. He had met her once before, in the mindscape. She had been nice enough and had offered him a break from the torment Bill was putting him through.

So he recognised her, of course. She was an old friend. Which made the message she sent even more confusing. It was as follows:

BILL NOT GUILTY, BLACKMAILED
CONTRACTS ARE NOT CENTRIC TO HIM
PROBLEMS (indecipherable)
BIG PROBLEMS, AXOLOTL (indecipherable) THERAPY
HE NEEDS YOUR HELP
BUILD THE PORTAL OR HE DIES
HE (indecipherable)
-JHEZ, THE ORACLE & BILL CIPHER

Well. It was confirmed now. He had completely gone insane. Too many years of living alone and studying useless snail shells and tiny anomalies in a pine forest in Oregon had somehow given him terminal schizophrenia, which he had never gotten medication for in the 30 years he spent here.

Because there was no other reason this should be happening. Because Bill was long dead. Because Ford had a normal life.

Did he want that life?

Build the portal. Again. A simple request, he knew how to do it. He and Stanley had only half dismantled it anyway, and all the materials were plausibly recoverable. It wouldn't take long.

He looked at his hands. Thought back to the black book. Thought back to the electrocution torture, saw himself in chains. Saw himself on the verge of sleep, so happy to be there because he could see his muse again.

Saw Bill plotting his death.

He was going to do this. That didn't mean he had to like it.

Chapter Text

The portal was finished. It had only taken a few hours. It's funny what you could get done under the threat of having your dysfunctional ex killed at the hands of... why, an Axolotl or some shit like that, based on what The Oracle had told him.

Or maybe it was just the hyperactivity. Either way, the portal, in all its glory, was rebuilt. Ford took some form of comfort in seeing his handiwork, but it was short-lived and had a bitter sting to it. He wasn't sure what was going to happen after all the tests were rerun and it was switched on yet again.

The last time the portal was built, it still had a few kinks that needed to be worked out. But what was thirty years spent in the hellish Nightmare Realm for, if not calculations? And not even to mention the countless lonely nights Stanford had spent staring at the ceiling and envisioning an idealised version of Bill.

Gods. He was still just a child. So naïve. What was wrong with him?

But the calculations were far easier to solve than they were at thirty-one. Ford's thoughts vaguely drifted to all the great minds of the time.
Vincent van Gogh. He had chronic depression, didn't he?
Nikola Tesla went nuts.
Isaac Newton was loopy.

And now here he sat. Building an interdimensional portal to save a triangle's life. And he may or may not be hallucinating.

There was no other way to find out, he supposed.

He flipped the switch.

---------------------------------

The bad thing about having a contract with a dimension-hopping entity is that they never really have time for you. The Axolotl was one of the busiest entities on this side of the multiverse. They had a whole waiting room and everything.

Bill Cipher sat in a stiff chair (how was it this hard?! It had fucking cushioned seats!) idly but infuriatedly flicking through a magazine that he was pretty sure was gaslighting him. It kept saying the Theraprism was a lovely place.

He looked up from the idiotic reading material and scanned the hellhole he sat in. Hospital-grade liminal walls, the screams of a thousand tortured sounds echoing down the hallway, and a receptionist with no light behind their eyes. Probably why they had blinked not one of their horrifyingly many eyes at an escapee mental patient requesting to see the boss.

'The Axolotl? Oh, They'll be right out
They have a little business to attend to," she had claimed. Bill had considered correcting her on the whole 'respect' thing, but he could not be more apathetic anymore.

He had sat in the empty, but somehow still too crowded little waiting room for hours. He supposed this gave Jhez more time to get the message to his Fordsy and his Fordsy to build the portal, but still. It was mind-numbing.

There was a massive clatter behind the front desk as the practically Cthulu Mythos-esque receptionist raised themselves from where they had collapsed on the floor after disengaging their last conversation with Bill. They peered at him judgmentally.

"The Axolotl says They are ready to receive you now."
"Great. Thanks, Bud. This is gonna be the best day of my life."
"Would you like to rate us five stars on Help?" the dead-eyed receptionist prompted, pulling out a tablet with the rating system displayed proudly upon it.

Bill pushed it out of their hand and onto the floor. They didn't blink as he walked past into the office of the Axolotl, only collapsing into a heap after he strolled to his doom.

----------------

The portal crackled to life, blue electricity sparking its way down the sides of the smooth metal. Anything could plausibly come through it if they knew where it was. They didn't know, thankfully. Only Bill and The Oracle.

Why was he doing this again? Last time this portal and Bill had been involved, it had ended in heartbreak. And wasn't this portal meant to provide an escape from the Nightmare Realm? Didn't that place nullify his powers somewhat?

Questions, questions.

Ones that should have been answered a damn long time ago.

At least the fucker worked. The portal was on, and tension was building. All Ford could do was wait now. For an interdimensional triangle who was going to bust out of therapy or whatever that weird message had said.

He hated getting it right first try. It made it all seem trivial. He hated this. He hated to do anything he was told in the first place if he was being truthful. Something about obedience settled wrong in his stomach.

He silently begged that something was wrong with the contraption as the zodiac spun and the inner circle glew calmly, almost content with itself. Mocking him. Cruelly.

Not long yet, something told him (his intuition? he didn't think it was). Not long at all until Bill comes through.

Sickening and thrilling. All Ford could do was wait. Sitting on the shelf like a doll to be thrown around. For a second it didn't matter. Everything was a little clearer, and he saw that without being toyed with like this, he had no purpose.

This was thrilling, literally electrifying, definitely much more so than sitting and cataloguing the many intricacies of the Multi-bear. He loved this- it was his fucking job, after all- but there was something about this type of nauseousness that he loved.

Maybe he was a masochist, but the want was too much to ignore. He had missed this. The excitement. He loved it. He hated it. He couldn't wait to see—
couldn't stand seeing—
couldn't stop himself from thinking about—

Bill.
Again.

He sat down and threw his head into his hands.
The thrill of the wait.

---------------------------------

Bill walked into the office. Actually walked. Didn't glide. Didn't strut. It wasn't for fun. It wasn't an imitation thing. He did it to feel more human. He would have to get used to that experience if this plan were to work.

He didn't want to think about what would happen if it didn't.

Probably permadeath.

Death is a nice concept.

In any case, he now looked up, intending to face the entity who had so graciously blessed him with deep-rooted psychological trauma and trust issues. They didn't even turn to him as he walked into the room, only thrashing their tail in acknowledgement and muttering "SPEAK, IF YOU MUST."

"I must," Bill said simply, waiting for them to turn now, which they did not, clearly fiddling with some paperwork. The entity found it mildly disrespectful that his boss could hardly even be bothered to turn around in their swivel chair and pay attention.

Soon to be ex-boss, he reminded himself.

"GO ON, BILL. WHAT IS THE POINT OF THIS MEETING? I AM A BUSY ENTITY, YOU KNOW."
"I am well aware," Bill hissed. He tried not to do so noticeably lest the Axolotl take offence at his tone of voice.

"Look, I've been meaning to talk to you recently."
"MMM," they agreed absentmindedly, flicking through paperwork.
"There's been a few changes in the way I've seen certain people recently—certain concepts looking a lot more appealing and stuff like that."
"MMM."

"Look," Bill sighed sharply, finally reaching his point. "I'm breaking off our contract. It isn't worth it anymore."

The Axolotl finally stopped fiddling with other things. They visibly froze in the middle of signing things for a full three seconds. They placed down their pen calmly and swivelled around to the entity once under their employ.

"WHAT?" they asked drily.
"I said what I said. You know me, Frills, I don't like to repeat myself," Bill passed, regaining some signature melodrama.

They moved in a little, wheeling the office chair towards him and speaking quietly.
"BILL, IF YOU'RE EXPERIENCING SUICIDAL IDEATION, WE HAVE ACTUAL LICENSED PROFESSIONALS HERE WHO WILL WORK YOU THROUGH IT. THAT'S WHAT THE THERAPRISM IS ABOUT. IT ISN'T A CAGE."

You're making it one, the other deity in the equation thought bitterly.

"It isn't THAT," Bill assured them, now resorting to meaningless human hand gestures to get his point across.
"Look, I just can hardly be here anymore. I know it's for my own good, 'oH rEfOrM aNd CoMe OuT oF tHe ExPeRiEnCe A bEtTeR pErSoN, wOrThY oF hAvInG yOuR pOwErS', but I don't think I can be here much longer."

"BILL, IF I REVOKE YOUR POWERS FULLY– IN OTHER WORDS, IF YOU TERMINATE OUR CONTRACT– YOU'LL BECOME THE TYPE OF MORTAL YOU MOST RESONATE WITH. IT IS MY UNDERSTANDING THAT HUMANS CANNOT BREATHE THE AIR OF OTHER PLANETS, LET ALONE OTHER DIMENSIONS."

"I know, but—"
"BILL, THERE IS HARDLY ANY DOUBT. YOUR DEATH WILL COME ABOUT IF YOU BREAK THIS OFF."
He turned silent for a second.

"I am aware, and I still choose to break this off."
"WE CAN HELP YOU THROUGH THI—"
"My decision is final."

Everything went numb again.

-----------------------------------------------

The portal flashed with a concerning light, turning suddenly a hot red colour and scaring Ford out of his fucking mind. He scrambled to his feet to check his journals for notes. He was a genius, sure, but he didn't always have perfect recall.

He was pretty sure this wasn't normal, though. He reviewed each of the portal pages in each journal for an answer and found naught.

This was new.

It occurred to him he should probably document this. He grabbed a pencil from the desk beside him and scrawled everything down in a fresh page of the newest journal he had adopted. He had given the third up to Dipper in the end, and hadn't yet finished the fourth. He had a feeling his findings would be getting a lot more interesting from now on.

He breathed in sharply as a bolt of the once calm electric current thrashed out of its place and struck the floor near where Ford was sitting. It left a very noticeable scorch mark. He hardly reacted except to write it all down.

He was stuck in his ways. He hated he was used to it. He hated a lot of things about himself. Most of all, he hated the stupid hope that filled his system as a discarded bow-tie flung itself out of the shimmering lightning.

He rushed to pick it up, almost tripping over his own feet at he scrambled for purchase on it, clinging to the floor with static for some reason. It was black and weirdly soft. And it was real.

Ford paused.

Bill would be coming, very soon.

He looked around the room. Saw nothing that related to his thought process. He patted himself down and found what he was looking for. He stood up (when did he get down on his knees?) and pulled a gun out of the concealed pocket sewn into his trenchcoat. Old reliable.

It took another two minutes of waiting, poised, with a gun in hand, for someone to tumble head first out of the electric portal.

They landed on their back and began coughing furiously, groaning slightly in what must have been agony. They were clearly winded, clutching the back of their head, which they hadn't thought to tuck into their body when they had fallen.

Ford was now tired of waiting. He walked over to the figure lying on the ground. He couldn't see their face very well, it being mildly obscured by insanely messy blonde hair. It looked like it was thinning. They wore a beanie to cover some spots that must have been worse to look at.

They wore a brown sweater with a small yellow insignia, a triangle, on its front. Their bottom half was covered by silky track pants. They wore no shoes, only mismatched socks in neon colours.

He tentatively moved over to them, keeping about two metres of space between them both. His shaking hands loosely gripped the gun, pointing it at the coughing intruder's head as they heaved themselves up.

At first they weren't facing him as they almost doubled over yet again in pain. Ford heard their bones crack audibly, to which they groaned like it was the worst thing in the world. They stretched an arm up, heard a few more cracks and tutted.

They looked around at their surroundings like a lost puppy dog before finally having enough sense to turn around and face Ford.

They had a pleasantly wrinkled face, one of those ones which looked old, sure, but kindly. Their skin crinkled mainly at their eyes and at a few deep lines in their forehead. They were otherwise decently attractive, golden skin and vibrant blue eyes. Those eyes blinked disbelievingly at the armed man before them.

Ford's gun still pointed firmly, if shakily, at their forehead.

They looked up at him remorsefully. They also looked half-disappointed at the fact a weapon was being pointed at them. The fact didn't seem to faze or even surprise them, though. They looked up at Ford, and when they spoke it was using a voice unmistakably Bill's.

"....Ford."

He fumbled and dropped the gun.

Chapter Text

Dipper knew he had gone insane when electric crackling sounds came from the basement, and he didn't even think of it as weird. It was like background noise when your great-uncle was the mad scientist type. It was, what, midnight now? That train wreck of a film was over. Mabel was moaning about it. He was half-listening.

"OH MY GOD, THAT WAS TORTURE. Whoever played Ducktective couldn't even act! And they removed the romantic plotline!! I miss Darryl and Tommy; they were so sweet."
"Yeah, yeah, I..." Dipper began to try to fill the silence his twin had left. She would have expected him to fill it; she did often. He had trailed off.

The other thing the sixteen-year-old had been listening out for was any sign of injury from the basement. He had a decidedly bad feeling about whatever Ford was doing. He hadn't been let in on it this time, which was, sadly, to be expected. After Dipper had thrown the mentorship offer back in his great-uncle's face, the two genii had grown apart.

"Dip Dop?" Mabel asked warily, bringing the boy back to reality for a moment. "Are you alright? Is it the thing again? What's the matter?"
"No, I'm not dissociating, Mabel. I'm alright," he assured her quickly. She knew how to deal with him when he got like that, which was awesome, but he didn't need help right now. "I'm just—can you hear that?"

His twin paused, went eerily quiet for how loud of a person she was, and immediately went: "No."

"Right. Because you listened so hard."
"Mhm!"
"Look, does—does it not feel off to you?" Dipper sighed. He buried his head in his hands. It was almost a sizzling sound that he could hear, and it didn't seem right. It was weirdly nauseating and even more weirdly familiar. He couldn't put his finger on it. But something was happening.

"Not particularly, Dip," Mabel conceded. "Look, it's late. Should we not just go to bed and sort all this out in the morning? If it's something massive, we'll get woken up anyway."
"Yeah, by the sounds of people screaming as the apocalypse happens again! Mabel, c'mon!"
"Okay, when has the apocalypse ever happened when we weren't awake to cause it?"
"Mabel!"

"Look," she laughed, "Just to ease your silly little nerves, let's go down to the basement. Besides, I needed to yell at Ford for not going to bed when I asked him to. That man's too caught up in his words sometimes."
"Thank you," Dipper said, breathing a sigh of relief. He grabbed her hand and dragged her to the vending machine. AB1C3, and they were in.

Immediately, Dipper was proven right.

The grey concrete stairs, which, as always, led down to Ford's lab, seemed to be bathed in an overpoweringly bright blue light. It reflected off grey walls and looked like the shallow end of a pool. The crackling, sizzling noises got only louder and louder the further the twins descended into the basement. And descend they did, because the colour was one they remembered. It was the portal.

Dipper cursed under his breath multiple times as he ran down the stairs, careful not to skip any lest he fall. His sister was far more reckless, bolting down the staircase as if for her life. He didn't know if she was cursing, too, or not, but it seemed likely. What in the FUCK was Ford thinking? God, he felt sick, god...

Mabel tripped and fell on the last few steps, catching herself with her hands, which were subsequently bloodied by the gritty floor. Her knees were probably grazed, too. She hissed painfully and clutched at her knees with one hand, the other checking to make sure nothing had happened to her face (thank god it hadn't). Dipper didn't have time to register that, to register anything in fact, before a voice spoke.

"Oh. Kids! Heh, if two's company and three's a crowd, what does that make four? An auditorium or something?"

Unmistakable in accent, in mannerisms, in banterishness. Unrecognisable in nervous tone, in awkward laugh, in remorse and pain seeping through cracks. 

Bill.

"Four's even," said Ford. Dipper could see them both now. It was incredibly eerie. His great-uncle didn't seem to register what Bill was talking about, responding with facts instinctively. Bill looked like- well, just like a normal human person. A normal, kind-of-a-lot-older-than-he-expected-him-to-be person. 

If he hadn't come through that stupid interdimensional portal and if he didn't have that stupid, memorable voice, Dipper genuinely wouldn't have known the difference between the stupid entity and one of his great-uncle's stupid research friends. Partners. Things. Dipper didn't know anymore.

Speaking of his great-uncle, WHAT THE FUCK?!

"From the extended version. Two's company, three's a crowd, four's even, but five's a bit loud."
Ford sounded breathless, like he was winded or something. Maybe he was just processing. Maybe it wasn't he who had rebuilt the portal. Maybe it was somebody else. Maybe this whole playing along with Bill thing was just Ford's master plan somehow. Maybe it was all a massive trauma response.

Apart from that last one, which had a fair point, Dipper was grasping at straws. Desperately grasping at them. And they were infuriatingly brittle. They kept snapping off in his hand and uprooting, and they weren't going to save him at all. A last-ditch attempt. To save himself. And more specifically, his sanity.

Scratch that, he'd lost that a long time ago.

He'd lost that when Bill had looked him up and down and smiled fondly. 

He'd lost that when Mabel had started screaming.

When Mabel had started..... wait, what?

He looked over at Mabel, her horrified face turned towards Bill, wide, fearful eyes scanning every inch of his new form (was he possessing someone? Was it his own manufactured body? HOW WAS ANY OF THIS WORKING?!?!?!) and screaming into her hand. She looked like she was re-remembering everything, which DIpper would know wasn't a good experience. He remembered too much every time he came back here.

It was weird, but Bill also looked mildly horrified at the sight of Mabel's horror. Either he was sympathising with her (which was decidedly unlikely) or he wasn't expecting her reaction. Maybe he didn't even think he'd done anything wrong. How twisted could you get?

He looked over at Ford, who would usually be doing something- anything- in this scenario, and saw only stillness. Like he was paralysed. It was incredibly eerie. He wasn't moving even now that his great-niece was screaming.

"Is– Is– Are you–" Dipper managed to force out. He physically couldn't say anything else, save for chronically stuttering. It only got worse.

Bill looked a little confused, almost. He kept scanning everyone's faces; Ford's completely blank, Mabel's covered by her hands, and Dipper's still trying and failing to ask a simple question.
"Yeah, I'm who you think I am," he assured Dipper, saving the boy from the torture of having to say what he meant.

Speaking of him, he immediately fell backwards onto his hands. Thankfully, he knew how to catch himself so that he was in minimal amounts of pain. Here, Mabel stopped screaming immediately, rushing over to help Dipper up even with her bloodied hands.

Bill watched complacently as this happened. Not exactly happily or unbothered, though. He seemed almost uneasy. Just from the way he was all tucked in. Or maybe because he kept tugging at the hair (ew ew ew he had hair ewwwwww) at the back of his head, dislodging his beanie.

Mabel graciously helped her twin to his feet, tinting his hands a lovely shade of brownish red in the process, and turned to face the ex-demonic entity splayed on the ground. She looked down at him, and clearly on him, from the look of her expression. Like he was a minor inconvenience.

"You," she spat spitefully, glaring down.
"Me?" Bill asked tentatively, looking up remorsefully.
"You're back. I can't believe you. I swear you're made of- of pure NERVE and no brain! The audacity of you! I- I- you!"
Mabel sighed, infuriated. Her words weren't coming out right, that was pretty clear.

"I didn't want to.... come here....." Bill protested, but it was an obvious lie. He looked towards the ground, even, as he said that. And just his hesitant tone was enough of a tip-off.
Mabel physically tutted, which was both out of character and mildly funny. To nobody.

"Look, I swear if anyone lets you back into our lives, I'm shoving a glitter bomb down their pants. They'll never be able to get all the microplastics out of their organs."
"Wo-hoah there, visceral image!"
"It was meant to be."
"Ah."

"How did you get out of dying?" She sighed, as though it was a perfectly normal question to ask and today was just an ordinary day.
Bill averted his eyes and didn't answer her.

"....Do you know," Mabel asked, "how much intolerable pain you have caused EVERYONE in this family?! DO YOU HAVE ANY GODDAMN IDEA WHAT IT'S LIKE TO HAVE YOU CRASH-LAND BACK INTO OUR MISERABLE LIVES?! YOU MAKE EVERYTHING WORSE! I CAN'T EVEN BELIEVE YOU'RE BACK YOU– YOU WORTHLESS LITTLE SLIMEBALL!"

Bill had flinched at every word Mabel had stressed, still refusing to look her in the eye as yet. Dipper couldn't get a clear view of his face either, but he suspected from the fact that he kept dragging his sleeve across said face and shaking softly that he was crying.

And weirdly enough, Dipper didn't find any sort of satisfaction in that. No comfort was given knowing that Bill felt less now. It didn't feel as good as it should've, there was no satisfaction. All he felt was pity. Raging pity for the sad writhing man in front of him.

It was weird being in the driver's seat after lolling around in the back so long.

Bill didn't talk. Mabel had quietened down. Ford hadn't done shit the entire time, just stared and presumably had insanely gory flashbacks. And the two people (using that with a grain of salt, Dipper didn't know if Bill counted) who were present and in their right mind were looking at him like he was meant to do something.

He did nothing, figuring they could scream the walls down without his explicit involvement. That wasn't what he got.
The once screaming pair devolved into a dramatic silence and not a word was spoken.
Until.

"I thought coming here would make me feel better," Bill laughed, sniffing bitterly.

"You thought wrong," and it was the second thing Ford had said since the twins had come down.

Chapter Text

He was upstairs now. Upstairs looked just like how he'd envisioned it, just a whole lot darker. It also smelled less like homey foodstuffs and more like road kill and a faint, faint hint of pine sap. Also, pig. It smelled like a pighouse.

He was on the couch now. It was just like how he'd envisioned it, just a whole lot stiffer and colder. It also dug into his spine more and was just slightly too short for him to fit his legs fully onto it. Also, he was pretty short anyway, so it wasn't like his legs hung comfortably off it.

His thighs were being attacked. They felt sore.

He felt fucking miserable. This wasn't how any of them were meant to react. Mabel was meant to be all forgiving hugs and soft blankets and sticker packets right off the get-go. Dipper was meant to be calculating, sure, but still willing to let Bill live and stay. Ford was- Ford was meant to do ANYTHING.

He tucked into himself again, clutching at the scratchy felted blanket he had draped over himself in the absence of anything else. He felt wrong. He didn't feel this wrong in the dream. Everything was where it was supposed to be, and it all fit perfectly. This wasn't the case anymore.

He wanted to pull off his skin, which was concerning. Normally it was other people he wanted to flay alive. All semblance of anger had left him at this point. He just felt...

Well. Sad.

No words pronounceable or understandable by mortals were good enough to describe it. Sad got the closest, so he went with that. He paused for a second.

Was he human now? Fully? How did this even work? Did he still have his powers? Probably not.

It was so hard to tell what was happening to him anymore. It was so hard to stay living. Maybe death was better than life, maybe he should've broken off the deal without a portal he knew-thought-would save him from death.

His chest felt heavy. There was something in his throat for some reason. He couldn't breathe properly. At least, not as well, not as smoothly as he used to. Stay alive, his newfound human biology told him. Kill yourself, his newfound suicidal ideation replied.

So he lay, having fallen from grace, on a couch that felt way too soft and kept sinking below him, wrapped up in a stupid thin scratchy blanket. Hating.

He wasn't angry. Just hateful. And sorrowful. And it felt wrong to be both of those. It wasn't the Bill Cipher brand, or whatever.

He didn't want to hate.
He figured he'd much rather love.
And maybe he loved too.
Not as much as he used to.
People change.
Eyes close.
His eyes...

-----------------

"Bill," someone said. He was too tired to differentiate between voices, let alone respond. The same person nudged his shoulder softly.
"Bill. Could you get up?"
Voices, voices, voices. Bill literally couldn't open his eyes. Who was talking to him?
"Ugh. Bill, come on!"
Their voice cracked. Never mind, he knew who this was.

"Mmm. Hey, Dipstick."
"Oh thank god," Dipper sighed in relief. "I didn't know you could sleep. You could have been dead or something. Also, don't call me that. Mabel's bad enough as is."
Bill forced his heavy eyelids open to look the kid in the eye. He would have had to anyway, he figured, it must be morning.

It was not morning. By the looks of things, it was the middle of the goddamn night.

"Dipper," he sighed, "why have you woken me up at whatever time this is. And why have you done it so weirdly cordial-like?"
The teenager huffed a little at the last remark. "What, is human decency foreign to you?"
"Pretty much, yeah."
"Oh."

"And even besides that, I expected you of all people to be more wary of me. YOU dunno what I could do. I could kill you or something, numbskull! Especially after you wake me up from a long sleep!"
Dipper looked at him funny.
"You're talking weird."

"Look, circling back to the freaken point," Bill said, ignoring the comment,
"Why am I awake at stupid o'clock?!"
"Don't yell!" Dipper yelled. "Mabel's still asleep and so is Ford and- well, Stan's trying to get back past the Mexican border at the minute, but he's probably asleep too. I don't need any of them to know I'm doing this."

"Sheesh, kid, surely I'm not so horrible you can't talk to me."
Dipper looked away pointedly. Bill, unfortunately, got the message.
"Look, is there a point to this conversation or are you just trying to find a way to argue with me?"
"Er..." the teen hesitated, "a bit of both?"

Bill sighed, rubbed his eyes, which were full of sleep, and sat up.
"I don't know what you want from me."
"Bill, you don't seem like the demon we killed."
"I'm not, kid. Not really. Not anymore, at least," he muttered, gesturing to himself, to his new icky WRONG not HIS human body.

"I don't know why I'm talking to you," Dipper admitted after a short silence. "Probably out of pity. Heh. I don't know how to say this either, uh...?"
"Everyone hates me."
"Mm! Well, uh, now that you say it-"
"Everyone fucking hates me and probably wants me dead and you feel bad about it because of your crippling hero's complex."
"Pretty much yeah."

"Look, if you have no questions to ask, then I sure as hell do."
"Uh, shoot. I'll try to answer," Dipper offered. "I don't know a lot about all this, by the way. If anything's wrong, not my fault."
Bill quietened for a moment. There were a lot of questions he wanted answers, the top two being 'why the fuck am I alive' and 'does Ford miss me'.

Needless to say, he went with the latter.

"Weird question," he prefaced, "but does Ford talk about me often, or?"
"Ohhhh.... that."
"Whatever 'that' is, it doesn't sound promising."
"I wouldn't really know, Bill," Dipper groaned. He sounded almost betrayed, his tone of voice spiteful. "I don't talk to him much anymore."

Bill cocked his head to the side. It was animalistic but it was just the natural reaction his STUPID NEW BODY provided.
"Why? Last I saw, you two were inseparable. You were the apple, he was the tree, and you hadn't fallen far from him."
"Things. Didn't take up his offer to be schooled by him in favour of going home with Mabel back to California."

"Oh, shit," Bill scrambled, remembering something, "what day is it??"
"Uh, like, third day of summer? I can't remember very well."
The ex-demon buried his head in his hands and huffed into them.
"I don't know whether to be thankful or horrifically saddened."
"Why would you even feel one way or another? It's just summer," Dipper shrugged.

"Eurgh...." Bill stalled, reasoning with himself. He finally decided that it would be really fucking weird to tell a kid about a manipulative ass dream he had where he was back at the Mystery Shack and in the process of courting his great-uncle.

"Reasons. And either way, I'm glad you're here, kid. It's really nice talking to you, and you did a really good thing, coming down here to check on me and all. We should do this again soon. Under less weird as fuck circumstances."
"I'd cheers to that if I was old enough to drink champagne."
"I always thought you'd be a wine guy."

-------------------------------------------------------------

Mabel had gone to bed in a fury and dragged her twin with her. She had ranted for about thirty minutes about how insanely stupid anyone would have to be to put trust in the stupid chaos entity that had almost killed them all and them promptly passed out mid-sentence, as she often did when she was passionate about a topic at a late hour.

She was fairly sure Dipper had fallen asleep just on the other side of the room from her.

As she looked up at the plaster peeling on the ceiling, she heard no breathing beside her. Her eyes adjusted so much to the darkened room by the time she decided to check on him that she could see every splinter in the wooden beams supporting the walls.

Mabel got up weirdly fast for a teenager who usually slept in until noon, rushing over to the other bed and hitting whatever was under the covers really hard in its midsection.

As she suspected, it was pillows.

God, Dipper was an idiot. Where had he even gone?

The teenage girl crept down the staircase with the stealth of someone who had had one too many midnight snack runs, whether at a sleepover or alone. She knew where the creaky spots were and how to avoid them without making any sound. She probably knew the layout of this place better than her non-summer house.

Dipper was talking. That she could hear.
"....look, I think if he wanted to, he'd have done it by now. Or maybe all his time's taken up being his superhero alter ego. Emphasis on the EGO."
Then, a laugh that sent to many emotions rushing through Mabel she couldn't comprehend them all.

More than half of them were anger.

Dipper wasn't only badmouthing someone, but badmouthing someone to Bill Cipher.

She was going to fucking kill him.

------------------------------------------------------

Bill laughed. It wasn't full-bodied, his heart wasn't really in it. It was nice to talk with someone for once. Dipper was talking about the sheer amount of time his great-uncle spent locked up in the basement nowadays. How he should have expected all this.

Bill considered telling him that his great-uncle Clark Kent down there was probably the only reason he was alive right now.
He decided against it, wisely.

"BITCH," the pair suddenly heard from the stairwell. Dipper completely froze up, looking as though he had been caught sinning in church or something. Which he might well have been. It was Mabel's voice.

"You fucking IDIOT."
"....language?" Bill offered timidly to the great disembodied voice of Mabel Pines.
"And you're no better you dirty RAT."

A flash of handmade jumper, flowing brown hair and misplaced anger flew past the two men and towards the vending machine. She input the code (how the hell did she even remember that thing? She never paid attention) lightning fast and made her way swiftly down the stone staircase, the door shutting behind her with a slam, like the thing itself was angry.

Bill tried to diffuse and failed miserably, again.
"Hey."

"Hey," Dipper groaned.
"We're fucked, right?"
"Yep."
"Cool, just checking."

Chapter Text

Mabel Pines had never run so fast, nor with as much righteous anger, as she was doing at this moment. The stupid stairs were freaking steep, and she COULDN'T fall right now; her hands still hurt from last time.

How stupid did Dipper have to be? Why the hell was he tolerating Bill, let alone actively seeking his presence?! Did he not remember what he'd done to her, to both of them?!

She felt sick. All she could see in her mind's eye was what she'd done so many years prior. She had treated Dipper like something disposable, she had shown off his replacement right in front of him, she had refused to leave the delusional fantasy that had been built up around her. She had almost wrecked her relationship with her brother, and it turned out to be all for nothing. 

She couldn't forgive Bill. It wasn't in the cards for him; he didn't deserve it, and there was no evidence he was trying to change. He could have just found another way to get people on his side. Why was Dipper falling for it!? Even when they were in the middle of it all, it was Mabel who had been tricked, Mabel who had fallen for everything because she was just too trusting.

What had that triangle demon done to her brother?

She reached the bottom of the staircase, miraculously having not fallen, and looked around frantically for her great-uncle. He would get where she was coming from; he knew not to trust Bill. He knew nothing good came of letting the demon in the house. He knew they should all just kick him out and leave him in the woods to die.

"Great Uncle Ford?" she called to no avail. He clearly wasn't in the main area of the basement, which struck Mabel as a little odd. It was the most spacious bit of it, after all, and the place where her great-uncle most often passed out from exhaustion. He couldn't be hiding somewhere in the control area; the passageway was a bit too narrow for that. Besides, even if he was trying to hide under the desks, he would be in a very uncomfortable position and make at least a little sound.

Mabel, by process of elimination, figured out where he was eventually.

He was in the portal room.

The behemoth metal contraption looked heavy and dead, the faintest shimmer of static hanging onto its last thread of life, making its rounds along the circular edge. The rest of it was silent, a harsh difference from the incredible light that had blinded them all not six hours ago.

Underneath the portal, looking just as lifeless as the thing itself, sat Stanford Filbrick Pines.
He was silent. Which was a little out of character, Mabel knew for a fact that whenever he was stressed or angry, he'd mutter under his breath about something or other very fast and trip over his words. He wasn't doing that. He just looked so blank.

"Grunkle Ford..?" Mabel called again, hesitancy showing now. She would have rushed to his side were he in any better shape, but she felt there was something off about him. She wasn't as experienced as Dipper in the realm of dealing with him, but she knew enough to figure out this was probably not a good time to be near him.

"Mabel," he replied, looking up from the ground at a decidedly leisurely pace. He looked blank still. Something about his eyes: maybe it was to do with his glasses, but the teenage girl kind of suspected otherwise.

"So usually I wouldn't come down here 'coz it's late and stuff but I woke up and Dipper wasn't in the room and I was scared so I went downstairs to see where he was and he was just talking to Bill like, NICELY, and I got so mad I don't know I had to come down here because OH MY GOD how thick is he?!"
Ford didn't react as much. Mabel, wrongfully, took this as a sign that she was allowed to rant now.

"I just don't think we should trust him. At all. He hasn't even apologised for anything, which would be the FIRST thing I would do in this situation if I truly had reform-"
"Bill isn't you, Mabel," Ford sighed, interrupting his great-niece in the middle of a word. "He doesn't think like that. He's scared."

The girl fell silent for a moment, opening and closing her mouth with no sound coming out other than offended gasps. 
"I- Why the heck are you defending him?! Do you not remember what he-"
"I remember Mabel. I'm painfully aware. This isn't his fault," her great-uncle insisted, refusing to meet her eyes fully.
"I thought you were a scientist!" Mabel protested. "Methodical! Where is your evidence?!"

"You sound like your brother," Ford sighed. "This is exactly the type of thing he would have thrown in my face. I don't need to explain myself to you, Mabel."
"But you do! You can't just say something with nothing to back it up and expect me not to ask about it! Grunkle Ford, what the hell? I'm trying to be reasonable. He shouldn't be trusted! Everything about him is untrustworthy! There are so many questions that he hasn't answered!"

"Mabel Pines, he's been here for five fucking hours, and asleep for most of them. He has time to answer your questions. I just want you to trust me. He has no ill intention."

"How do you know?"
"I just do!"
"Grunkle Ford. That's the excuse five-year-olds use."
"Stop trying to get something out of me, Mabel, there's nothing for me to tell you. Give the guy a chance. He just got thrust onto concrete, probably has a badly bruised shoulder and an even more bruised ego from all of this. He didn't want to come back; it wasn't a choice of his, it was this or death."

"HOW?! HOW DO YOU KNOW THIS?! YOU SAID IT YOURSELF, HE HASN'T BEEN BACK LONG ENOUGH TO ANSWER ANY QUESTIONS! WHERE ARE YOU GETTING ALL THIS FROM?! WHY ARE YOU HIDING IT FROM ME?!"
Mabel started pacing here, grabbing a fistful of hair and tugging on it as she walked. Ford sighed. He looked almost guilty. She knew he was hiding something from her. What was the point?!
"Don't shout, Mabel. Please."

"I'll shout as much as I like," she said, though she lowered her voice to a dull roar. "Look, there's no reason you have to hide anything from me. This whole argument is stupid."
"I know," Ford said, but he didn't say anything more.
"I'm mad at you."
"I know that, too."

"Look, are you going to tell me what's up, or will I have to play guessing games?" she asked with the air of a fed-up babysitter around her. Her caretaker fell silent, so she sighed.
"Uh, did you get a chance to talk to him after we left?"
"No. I hardly moved. Just told him he could sleep on the couch."

"Right. Er, I can't think of anything else. Do you like him or something?"
"MABEL!"
"What?" the teenager laughed. "It's the only other thing I can think of at this point. You seem so sure he's innocent, and you don't want to tell me why.
If you do like him, that's fine. I just think he might not be all that. I'm just a little scared of him. He's shown he doesn't like us. I-"

"Lovely sentiment, Mabel, but really, that's not it," Ford insisted. "I just..."
He looked his niece in the eye, finally, something he hadn't done since she had come to check on him.

"Before all this happened, I got a sort of premonition of sorts, a message. An entity I ran into before was the sender. She said Bill had been blackmailed, that he needed my help. I needed to build the portal again, or he'd die. It was why all this happened. I still need clarification for some of it, but I have to believe he's good. Or at least that he means well. Okay? There's your answer," he finished, rather lamely.

"....you know you could have just told me," Mabel sighed. "I get it. I... hate that I get it, and I hate that I agree with you a little. I should-"
"Probably getting the little sleep you'll be able to get tonight," Ford finished. "You've barely had two hours, and we all know that if you don't get at least eight, you'll wake up pissy."
"I'm not pissy!"
"Go to bed, Mabel."

Chapter Text

He runs his gloved hand over the smooth walls that enclose the space. The room is small, very small, with nothing in it in terms of furniture. He can't have the sensory experience properly, thanks to the black material encasing his digits. He never bothered to learn what his gloves were made from.

He can hear them again, the voices. Mainly the one that is most attached to it all, the one that weighs heavily on his psyche. Their voice is there, lodged in the side of his hand. He can't explain it, but he knows it's there. It prickles.

"THIS IS WHAT YOU ALWAYS DESERVED, BILL," the voice says, and of course, it's entirely correct. It's laughable to assume the deity would ever get anything wrong. They simply wouldn't stand for it, and neither will their voice, the one echoing from his hand.

He can feel its presence far more easily now, feel the way it burrows beneath his skin like a maggot, like disease sinking into his flesh. He tries to speak, to cry, to his his hand against the wall, to do anything, but none of it works. All he knows is dragging his fingers along the wall. All he knows is the Axolotl's stress-inducing voice emanating from somewhere deep in his dermis.

"TRY AND FEEL. EMOTION AND SENSORY ALIKE, JUST TRY. IT WON'T WORK, BILL. YOU'RE DOOMED TO THIS. YOU CANNOT FEEL ANYMORE, AND I HAVE NO PART IN IT. IT IS YOUR FAULT.'
He continues to run his hand along white pads, though he doesn't want to. It's just what he does, what he has been doing forever, and what he will be doing forever. He isn't breathing, he realises. His hand hurts. He wants to fall asleep.

Asleep? He thinks. He can think now. He couldn't do so a few eternities prior. Why do I want to fall asleep? I am asleep-

Bill shot upwards, folded in on himself, and pressed his forehead to his knees. His thighs were aching from being propped up on the arm of the sofa. His hair was sticking to his forehead and neck. He was breathing, but jaggedly so, eyes shut tight. He could feel every inch of the fabric covering his skin, and the hat stretched comfortably over his head.

Oh, yeah. He was insanely fucking sweaty. He wasn't warm, though, so it was rather like being rained on. If you could rain on yourself, that was.

"Woah," he said, out loud, to nobody in particular. "What the fuck."

He sat up, and what immediately hit him was the light. It was daytime now, wasn't it? Gods. It felt exceedingly crisp. Excessively crisp. The morning air could have afforded to be a little more stuffy. Bill rubbed sleep out of one of his eyes that was currently being attacked by the power of the sun.

The demon hadn't had to tell time for four years, give or take, let alone tell it by the angle of the light as it hits the ground. He was out of practice, but from what he could see, it was about seven in the morning. And also, rather warm. Gosh, being awake was disorienting.

Warm, warm, why was he warm? He was freezing last night; he would have given anything to feel like this then. He glanced down briefly at his torso to see a sort of dark greenish-blue covering draped over his body that certainly wasn't there last night. Somebody had put a blanket over him, whatever ulterior motive they might have had for doing so.

He let himself draw breath smoothly, chest rising and falling with the air. Why did it have to be so crisp? Dewy. You know, real. The kind of air that he knew could never have been a thing back in the... dream? Simulation? UGH! IT WAS SO HARD TO TELL! Not to mention the Axolotl could very well have been lying to him, not to mention the entire experience could have been real.

It wasn't real. He didn't need the voice of some stupid ex-employer to tell him that. Notably, their voice was absent from Bill's head. What a comforting thought, never having to hear that infernal creature's tones again.

As he thought now, there had been a lot of things he hadn't experienced in the dream that he was experiencing here. The pain was one of them. He rectified that by swinging his legs down off the couch, sitting up, the wall behind him and the television facing him. The blanket fell off in the natural swing of things, taking something the now very much ex-triangle demon hadn't noticed before.

A small, folded piece of paper. The paper itself was eerily white, almost fluorescent or something. As Bill opened it out, he could see the handwriting- scrawlish but still neat, written in blue pen. The message read as follows.

"To Bill,

Good morning! By now, I suppose you will have woken up. Just wanted to pen this and say I hope you aren't losing hope. You can come and talk to me at any time, and we can discuss anything. I'd advise you not to go near Mabel, though; I'll take the brunt of all that for us.

Have a nice day and come around whenever. Also, be careful. Please.

-Dipper"

The ex-demon smiled to himself, folding the note back up and checking all his clothing for a pocket. He found one in his track pants. Well, two, but he found a pocket. He shoved the little paper scrap into it and sat back for a moment. He figured he wanted to think. About what, he didn't know.

"He's a good kid," Bill said to nobody in particular.
Speaking of that kid...

----------------------------

The night before, Dipper had stayed awake for too long. Although he was always awake for too long, this time, he had stayed awake too long doing bad things. Of course, this was worse than doing the same at a normal hour because it inspires an ungodly fear of being caught when something creaks and you worry you might be discovered. Plus, you're more prone to actually getting caught.

Which is why Dipper was pretending to be sound asleep when his twin sister came into the room, even though his heart was beating like a jackhammer and he kept accidentally breathing in a whole bunch of dust and having to suppress a massive sneeze. Stupud dusty attic.

He didn't think Mabel fell for it, but it wasn't like he could open his eyes to confirm or deny.

When next he did open those eyes of his, a glimpse of sunlight was what he was greeted with as he cracked them open. A strip of glowy brightness ran along the hardwood floors. If he looked hard enough at the right angle, Dipper could see every airborne speck of dust in the path of the ray.

It was peaceful. The boy found it weird. Mornings were never this peaceful. He was running on about three hours of sleep, so how the hell was he finding the willpower to enjoy life?

Across the room, Mabel stretched a hand straight up towards the sky without opening her eyes, waved it around a little, sat up, eyes still shut tight and rubbed her face awake.

Ohhhhh. Fear. That's what was motivating him.

"Dipper," his sister said hoarsely, earning a flinch, "if you try to run now I will catch you and kill you. Stay put, I want to talk to you. I'm just trying to open my eyes."
The boy, wisely, did not move an inch from where he lay watching his sibling in mild fascination. Mabel's morning routine was an anomaly in and of itself.

When the girl finally opened her eyes, her twin had already propped himself upright and was now leaning against the headboard like he would fall if it weren't there. He grinned sheepishly as she glared at him.

"I'm not mad at you, by the way, so you can stop... acting all funny," Mabel said, waving her hand in her brother's general direction.
"I know, and I- what?"
"Not angry, Bro-bro."

Dipper fell silent for a moment, counting his lucky stars. He hated having Mabel cross with him.
"Well, two questions," he said simply. "Number one, what do you mean acting funny-?"
"I mean you look like you've got a stick up your bum."
"I'll have you know, I look perfectly normal! There's nothing different about the way I'm acting now than any other day."

Mabel just raised her eyebrows like she had all the answers. Her brother gritted his teeth and bore it.
"That's irrelevant now. Exactly why aren't you mad at me?" He asked. It was a fair question; his sister had every right to be furious, not to mention that Dipper knew how upset she was last night. She never got over things this fast, it was rather out of character.

"Well..." she began. She had her apologetic face on. The boy took this as a bad sign. "I kind of talked to Ford about everything. He put things into perspective a little. I mean, I had to get past the fact that he was going to be staying here indefinitely at SOME point. Better to get it over with quickly, hey."

Dipper sighed.
"Stop acting like you can't talk about him, Mabel. You can say his name, for goodness's sakes."
"But I can't, I literally can't! At least not without you looking like a kicked puppy dog! It's uncanny, Dipper, whenever I mention him, you act like Stan did the first few days after he came back through the portal! You never even told me what happened, Dipper!"

"I don't even know what happened! Look, I can only GUESS-"
Dipper never got to tell his sister what he guessed had happened, because at that very moment, the forceful sound of someone rapping on the door knocker rang throughout the whole cabin (the walls were very, very thin.)

The twins locked eyes and had a full conversation.
'Stan's back.'
'Bill is in the living room looking like a sad old man who listens to Mitski.'
'We are irrevocably screwed.'

And they were, because Bill, the reformed once-demon he was, had gone to open the door. Unbeknownst to him, his death in brass knuckles was on the other side.

Chapter Text

Stanley had been driving in a cramped rental car that smelled faintly of chilli. For five. Straight. Days. It was fair to say that the first breath of fresh air he got after being cooped up in the stupid Ford Taurus for thirty-seven hours one way and the next, not including breaks for sleeping and eating, felt like inhaling heaven. His back was out to kill him. Every time he moved it, it cracked about fifty times.

God, he loved driving.

The shack was a welcome sight after so long out on the road, though every time Stan looked at it since Weirdmaggedon, the triangle iconography had worried him. He didn't want that fuck ass triangle any nearer to his family than it needed to be. Still, the smell of pine never failed to calm him down, and he traced the path leading up to the door as he always did, with a smile on his face.

He rapped on the wooden door with the knocker, realised he had his spare front door key in his pocket, and fumbled with the massive ring of keys it was surely strung on. He hardly knew what half the damn things were for. Must've been about forty of them all lined up in a row, and only one of them was the real key. He couldn't even remember what it looked like.

There was a blissful moment when the door began to open, in which Stan thought everything was going right. He was home, he was going to sit down on the couch and re-watch all of Ducktective (or pass out for a full day, whichever came first), he was so happy that someone in his family had opened the door for him so that he didn't have to fuck around with keys for a solid quarter of an hour.

But it was only a moment, unfortunately for both parties. Speak of the fuck ass triangle and he shall appear, as they say.

Stan looked up and was met with someone he didn't know. He had never seen this guy's face before in his life. He wasn't a resident of Gravity Falls, surely. Stanley would have seen him around at least once. From the looks of him, the guy was just a little younger than him. Short. Weird blue eyes that hurt to look at. Nice beanie, though.

Okay, moving on from the general description: what the fuck was someone he didn't know doing in his house? And an out-of-towner for that matter!

The guy took one look at Stanley and completely froze up. Didn't move an inch from where he stood, half-obscured by the door. The conman decided that he must have heard about him, been told stories by his family or something like that.

"Hello?" Stan asked, suppressing the urge to wave a hand in front of his face. The guy breathed out once, and both of them heard thumping footsteps coming from the stairwell behind the out-of-towner. Sounded like the kids. You know, maybe it was a bad thing that Stan could recognise them by the sound of their footsteps. No matter.

Dipper came rushing into the doorway first, pushed the guy out of Stan's line of sight, and immediately crumpled in on himself, hands on his knees. The kid really wasn't used to running, was he? Stan made a mental note to help the kid with that later.
"HihellogrunkleStanohgodthisisgoingtobesohardtoexplainIdon'tknowifI'lldoasgoodajobofitasMABELmaybecouldbutIguessIhavetotrybecauseshe'snotDOWNTHEGOSHDARNSTAIRCASEYET!!!"

"I'M COMING, CALM DOWN!" yelled his great-niece from the stairwell. "I DON'T WANT TO SPLIT OPEN MY HANDS AGAIN, DIPPER!"
Again? What the hell had happened while he was away?

Mabel ran into the doorframe, visibly less frazzled than her twin brother. She smiled that winning grin of hers and hugged her great-uncle.
"I- look," Stan began, deciding not to hug back, "Who's that guy in there?"

Someone out of view whispered 'fuck,' presumably the guy himself. His nephew's eyes widened, and he looked once more to his sister. Mabel finally took some initiative.
"He kind of... showed up? He didn't have another place to go," she told him. He could see just from her tone of voice that it was a half-truth. You couldn't be a conman without knowing whether people were bluffing. It was also why Stan excelled at poker.

"Uh-huh. Name?" he asked, craning his neck around to try and catch another glimpse of the man who had "just showed up".
"William," Dipper answered for his sister. "His name's William."
The boy never sounded confident in himself unless he was talking about facts. Stanley figured that at least this bit of the story was fully true.

"Does Ford even know he's here?" the conman asked. Maybe his brother had regressed into a hermit so much that he hadn't even seen the guy yet. Sounds like him.
"Oh, no, he definitely knows." This was coming from Mabel. Full truth. Good.
"So he just showed up on our doorstep?" Stan asked, stopping trying to see this "William" as he realised the guy would have walked off by now.

"Uhhh... kind of?" answered Dipper hesitantly.
"Why's there a question mark on the end of that sentence? What happened?"
Neither twin answered him this time, Mabel looking at him blankly while her twin nervously glanced behind him to see whether this 'William" was still there.
"Kids," Stan began hesitantly, "are you keeping things from me?"

"No," said Dipper immediately.
"No!" his sister followed a second after.

Liars.

Stan should really have talked to the kids more. They had more of him in them than he thought. Proud of 'em.

"Who is he?" the conman sighed, looking at his great-niece and nephew. Dipper looked mildly guilty but said nothing.
"I- ugh, Grunkle Stan, PROMISE you won't be mad!" pressed Mabel, though she hardly even paused to let him agree that he wouldn't. 
"I won't," he somehow managed to slip in. 

"Okay well look just before I say it we only decided to keep him here because he had no other place to go and everyone in Gravity Falls OBVIOUSLY- hah- would have kicked him out and this town is rural and he has no way of getting around and also I was mad when he showed up and I insulted him and he was all sad boy and beanie and I felt kind of bad but my anger kind of just overpowered that but DIPPER was- was nicer and-"
"He's Bill," Dipper interrupted. "That guy in there is Bill Cipher."

Stan said nothing. His fingers clenched around his right hand as his left reached into his pocket, wherein lay a set of brass knuckles.
"Let me inside, please, kids."

Chapter Text

Dipper and Mabel both decided to block their great-uncle's way without giving it much thought. Of course, Dipper always overthought, but no more than usual.  Speaking of which, he took up the left side of the doorway, Mabel taking the right, as the two of them began rapidly talking over one another.

"Grunkle Stan, this is why I didn't want to tell you I knew you'd have this reaction, oh gosh just-"
"Oh my gods, this is so stupid! You're acting like a child; it's not like he's going to hurt us! Just-"
The old man remained stoic through his niblings' protestations, a frown very present. This, ironically enough, as he seemed not to be at all, was his thinking face.

Specifically, whether to punch his great-nephew in the head or the guts.

He decided against it altogether. Thank fuck.

He did, however, push the twins backwards to get through the door. Mabel fell on her tail end (one man down), whereas Dipper only stumbled, not rendered helpless per se, more like powerless to stop his grunkle. Bill, in all his revealed glory, was standing in the doorway that led to the living room. It wasn't as though the gift shop was cramped, but it was a small space. 

The elder man crossed the floor in hardly any time at all, long strides towards the manipulative fucking COWARD TRIANGLE currently twinkified and hunched in the entrance to the rest of the Shack.

He was stopped directly in his tracks as the vending machine door slammed open, and he was immediately tackled to the ground by what seemed to be a living trench coat. A very heavy living trench coat. With a person inside it.

-----------------------------------------------------

Ford Pines had been mulling all this over since Mabel left. He was mildly ashamed at how much he trusted Bill. Many times more ashamed at how irrational he had been towards Mabel. And he felt the worst about keeping things from her.

He had been thinking about it for the past, what, 3 hours? 4? He hadn't slept; he knew that. He was too unmotivated to look up and check the time. I mean, give him a break. He could hardly remember what day it was. 

If I had just told Mabel about all this, he thought, she wouldn't care, would she? I mean, Dipper would never trust me again, but she's Mabel. She's forgiving. That's her. And I don't even think she'd see anything wrong with it. 
He hugged his legs to his chest, feet practically numb from the cold of the portal room. But he didn't want to move.

There was also another part of what Mabel had said that was weighing on him, just a little. If 'just a little' meant a whole fucking lot.
"Do you like him or something?
If you do like him, that's fine."

Half his life had been spent in a hellhole, falling in and out of bubbles that were just different nightmares. Most of them involved Bill, that dick being almost the only thing he had thought about for around a year before this unpleasantness. And even if the torture wasn't about Bill, he'd often show up, either to intrude upon him and see how his pain was going, or...

He hadn't remembered this for a long time. It was insane to remember it right now, and it was stupid to think about it. Ford had a very strong feeling that if he didn't try very hard not to, he'd forget all of it soon enough. 

He hadn't moved from the spot for around six hours, but it was as though something had possessed him to leave the portal room behind. He ran, actually ran, to the slim doorway, opened and closed the entrance as fast as he could, and practically flung himself at the desk where a blank page of his third journal lay waiting for him, along with a neatly placed pencil.

Stanford's handwriting deteriorated the longer he stayed awake. Forty-eight hours, though nowhere close to his record, was enough to make the writing nigh on illegible to anyone but himself. Regardless, he scrawled manically on the page the following memory as it came to him.

"Hey, Sixer," Stanley said, his smile warm. He looked just as he had the last time the pair had spoken, bark brown mullet, tired eyes, unshaved face. He clapped his twin on the shoulder and pulled him in for a hug. Ford struggled to retain his lucidity, leaning into his brother's embrace and closing his own eyes.

"I missed you," he admitted softly and involuntarily as Stan's hair pressed into his jaw. "I thought it was unfair of Mom and Dad to do that to you. I... I'm so sorry for not saying anything about it back then."
He felt a chuckle, and the outline of a smile against his shoulder.

"Don't worry your big brain about that, IQ. I forgive you."

All lucidity forgotten, Ford gave in fully, squeezing his brother back and choking out a sob. The ghost of a hand patted his back, but it wasn't real, was it? He opened his eyes slowly to find his brother gone. His arms flew down from hugging some nonexistent family member, but the tears refused to stop.

The space around him was hardly better than any of the nightmares within it, a void without gravity, full of orbs that looked like stars the further in the distance they got. There was, naturally, no ground to this place, but Stanford keeled over and pressed his hands into his knees, sobbing uncontrollably.

There was a sudden feeling of presence behind him, a wind blowing or whatever, but he hardly noticed. Gods, this place was so cruel. Putting his brother in front of him. Fuck...

"Fordsy?" a hauntingly familiar voice called. The hairs on the back of his neck stood on end as he heard the nickname. Quickly, he set about removing his hands from his knees and swivelling around to face, of course, Bill.

The triangle demon flinched when Ford moved. His eye, unblinking, didn't move from his tear-stricken face, which the man was hasty to cover. He didn't want to look at the lying fucker any longer than he had to. He could feel himself heating up. He supposed he had gone red by now. 

He hated doing this, hated that every time Bill looked at him, talked to him, whether in nightmares or the space in between, he saw the person he had trusted for so long, and not the one who had betrayed him. The sweet someone who had given him so much knowledge of the world around him, and not the one who had driven a nail through his hand.

The one who kissed him to calm him down, and not the one who had only used him for power.

"Leave, Bill," he said, trying to keep any semblance of emotion out of his voice. He didn't suppose it worked, since he practically heard the demon blink and look him up and down. The arm he kept over his red eyes also probably wasn't doing him any favours. 

"Are you okay..?" Bill asked tentatively. He almost put his hands on Ford's shoulders, but pulled away at the last second, clutching his hands close to his chest for a moment before apparently forgetting what to do with them. The scientist sniffed, took down his arm, and looked towards the floor. 

Don't look at him. Don't look at him. Don't-
Bill touched his hand softly, earning a frankly shocked look. He interlocked their fingers. He was warm, which caught Ford off guard. Of course, he knew Bill was warm, but he was warm like a heater. This was warmth like another human being.

He squinted a little, which the scientist knew from the past year or so of seeing his face meant he was smiling. This was far less exaggerated than usual, though. Almost soft. The type of smile he'd only seen a few times, only when-

Bill's other hand reached up to cup his face.
"I... saw what happened. I didn't want it to happen; I'm not telling this place what to make. I hate seeing you cry, Sixer. I'm so sorry."
'I'm so sorry,' Ford replayed over and over in his mind. 'I'm so sorry. I'm so sorry.'

And Bill leaned in so close, and he didn't push him away. No matter how firmly convinced he was that he hated the demon, he didn't. Gods, he would do anything to have the Bill he knew come back into his life. The one that was kind and smart. The one that he thought just maybe loved him. Ford was selfish, insanely indulgent for thinking this, but...

He leaned forward, too. So far forward. 'Till his head reached his knees, going through the space where Bill would have been.

If any of it was real.

He looked around, and everything felt a little less hazy and lovestruck. A lot more harsh. And so cold. He missed the warmth so fucking much. 

He would have cried harder. Cried until his throat bled, until his eyes hurt, until he was so severely dehydrated he physically couldn't anymore.

But he didn't. He barely had any time to register anything before yet another nightmare sucked him in. Nothing was ever going to be worse than those two, though. And back to back. The next few nightmares seemed tame after that. Ford just felt numb.

He stopped writing. That memory was one of the worst he'd dug up in a while. After he came out of the portal, he could hardly remember any of the time he'd spent in there. Nobody even asked him about it, not really. Of course, Dipper did, but the kid used to ask him about everything. Used to.

Some faint sound woke him from whatever stupor this was. The tone made it clear it was something shouted, but Ford was so far away he could hardly hear it.
"....DOWNTHEGOSHDARNSTAIRCASEYET!"
"I'M COMING, CALM DOWN! I DON'T WANT TO SPLIT OPEN MY HANDS AGAIN, DIPPER!"

They were talking to someone. Their great-uncle realised he was looking for something to distract himself with, and was quick to dismiss his acceptance of his trauma and overall growth in favour of eavesdropping on his family's conversation.

He didn't so much as run but stumbled quickly up the staircase. The vending machine door was hardly soundproofed, which, usually, Ford thought was a bad thing, but here it was brilliant. He pressed his ear up to the cold metal, wincing, but refusing to let go of this. Distract, deny, and it'll disappear. Hopefully.

"Who is he?" asked the voice of his brother. His tone wasn't even angry, more... fed up.
"I- ugh, Grunkle Stan, PROMISE you won't be mad!" pleaded his great-niece. She had a very distinctive voice.
"I won't," Stanley conceded, luckily managing to say anything before Mabel suddenly launched into her rant.

"Okay well look just before I say it we only decided to keep him here because he had no other [undiscernible] Gravity Falls OBVIOUSLY- hah- would have kicked him out [unintelligible] and also I was mad when he showed up and I insulted him and he was all sad [???] kind of just overpowered that but DIPPER was- was nicer and-"
"He's Bill," her brother finished for her. "That guy in there is Bill Cipher."

Outside was completely silent. Ford's heart dropped into his stomach. Oh, gods, what was Stanley going to do?! His brother was always so rash this way; he wouldn't be thinking about anything but how Bill had hurt them all. FUCK.
"Let me inside, please, kids."

He heard his niblings go through much the same terrifically horrified thought process as he was going through. The two of them tried to get their other great-uncle to calm down, but Ford knew it was no use. Stanley wasn't willing to let go of anything. His brother knew that best.

He heard a little squeak from not too far away and a tapping on the wall facing the basement. Must be Bill. He'd be standing in the doorway. Completely exposed. He didn't suppose the demon had any self-preservation instincts after being invincible for so long. Something thudded near the gift shop entrance, presumably one of the kids (!) and stomping footsteps along the floor, coming towards Bill. And, by proxy, Ford.

Well, what else could he do? He wasn't going to sit by and let someone with no predators in the wild be attacked by someone double his size!

He flung the hidden door open and lunged at his brother.

Chapter Text

Stan's legs buckled as the weight of whatever or whoever had flung themselves at him hit him. They had leapt from the vending machine door–in front of him and a little to the left–so he ended up crumpling backwards. He probably would have hit his head quite severely had it not been for the fact that the attacker had actively tried to cushion his skull with their arm.

The whatever-it-was that had crawled out of his brother's stupid science lab thing pushed him down, so he stayed on the floor before getting off him and pushing him so that his nose was pressed to the floor in a very uncomfortable manner. They pressed their palm or foot or whatever (Stan couldn't see what was going on! He couldn't even see what the little shit WAS, for God's sake) into the small of his back, earning a pained yelp, before seizing his wrists and binding them together.

Stanley couldn't tell exactly what was holding his wrists together, only that it seemed to be some sort of fabric, and it was VERY tight.

He tried to no avail to heave himself upright. Something or other about age flicked across his mind, but he quickly shoved it out. Assess the situation. That was the first thing he'd been taught at those amateur self-defence classes he'd got a coupon for. The wrestling classes from when he was young were all well and good, but they taught you what to do when you were in control, mainly, not how to struggle out of somebody's grip.

He scanned the room for anything that might help him pry the whatever-it-was off him. There didn't seem to be much, and besides, he hardly thought he would be able to get his arms out from under his chest.
Don't get distracted. Keep going. What's attacking you? That's an important thing to know.

Suddenly, a weight flew off his chest, if only a little bit, only to immediately be replaced with a much harder pressure on his lower back, like all the weight that had just been spread out on his chest. There was an audible crack, which Stan honestly couldn't tell was a good or bad thing.

He muttered a curse under his breath and turned his head to the side; motor functions returned to him, if only a little bit. All he could see was the flow of a brown trench coat as it lay gracefully on the ground.
He stopped himself for a moment. Come on now, what entity that could easily tackle a man to the ground like this would bother stealing and putting on a coat? His brother's coat.

"Get off me, IQ," he spat, surprised at the level of effort it took to choke out the words. Being forcefully pressed against the ground did something to your lungs, he guessed.
"No!" Ford told him. He didn't let up at his twin's protests; if anything, he pressed down harder on the small of Stan's back.

"OW! Where the hell is this- ugh- COMING FROM?" The twin who was losing the fight strained himself to ask the question. Couldn't Ford have been a normal sixty-five-year-old, close to invalid in bed and not capable of fighting a herd of oxen and coming out unscathed?
"Why the hell were you attacking Bill, Stanley?! And in front of the kids!"

Ford's voice was more scolding than scalding, which made his brother pause for a second. He was being talked to like a child again.
"I- Well - because he's BILL, GENIUS! YOU KNOW! HOMICIDAL TRIANGLE WHO TORTURED ALL OF US AND IS PROBABLY DEFINITELY OUT TO KILL US!?"
Since all else was silent, the wince from the doorway was audible. Stan would have shot Bill a look, but he could still hardly move.

"Do you think for a second, Stanley, that I would have let Bill in if I didn't know he was perfectly harmless?! The children were trying to tell you so at the door, but you wouldn't listen to them! You always do before you think, don't you?" Ford conceded. 
"Yes, yes, I'm so immature, you're so much better than me, now GET OFF OF ME, STANFORD."

Ford grunted, unsatisfied, and didn't move off his brother, apparently preferring to watch the younger twin struggle underneath him. He looked ever-so-slightly detached from what was going on, but it was fine.
"No. Not until you tell me you aren't going to hurt Bill."
"How the HELL did he get here?" Stan asked, deciding to ignore the ultimatum he'd been given. "Isn't he dead?!"

"Of course not, Stanley. He's standing in the doorway," Ford said matter-of-factly. He always said stuff like that, like his brother wouldn't get it, like he had to dumb it down for him. "You're being irrational."
"I'm being irrational?! Give me one reason why this thing -" here Bill winced again "- is innocent!"

Stanford stayed silent, which was telling. His know-it-all brother never knew when to shut the fuck up, and he didn't usually know what a rhetorical question was, either.

"Damn right. No defence, huh?"

----------------------------------------------

Bill was fairly sure he had stopped breathing. Lungs? In another room. Brain? Mysteriously empty. Heart? Seemed all the employees of the brain had evacuated to it, since it was pumping way too fast for it to be in any way normal. His mouth was dry. 

Holy fucking fuck, the lone worker in his head supplied him with. Did Stanford Filbrick Pines - the most untrusting, obsessive, introverted, asocial BRILLIANT man alive - just tackle his kin to the ground because AND ONLY BECAUSE he tried to hurt you?!

Yeah. Yeah, he had.

This was the best feeling in the fucking multiverse.

Somebody tapped him lightly on the forearm. He felt it (he felt everything, it was all so real), of course, but didn't look over to see who it was. He knew, after all, that it was Dipper– Mabel wouldn't have dared to waste her time on Bill, even though she had joined the efforts to stop him from getting jumped by her great-uncle. Bill vaguely wondered whether that had ever been a sentence before now.

In any case, the small poke devolved into a tug on Bill's long sleeve. He slapped the offending hand away and still refused to look at h̶i̶s̶ ̶n̶e̶p̶h̶e̶w̶  Dipper.
"What is it, kid?" He asked in hushed tones. He wasn't gonna leave the kid hanging completely, after all.

"Did- did Ford- did Stan- did–"
"Why, I'm just coming to terms with that myself. I'm fairly sure all of that happened and wasn't a shared delusion."
"I kinda wish it was," Dipper sighed, watching the two octogenarians struggle for power over the other (wow, a LOT of new sentence making today, huh).

"I kinda don't," Bill said. Actually, swooned would be a little more accurate.
"Why? A bunch of crappy things just happened to you, one of those being arriving here! Why do you want this?"
"Pi– Dip, if I could give you the answer to that question.... I can't."
Dipper looked unsatisfied with this response, but honestly, Bill couldn't stand to care less.

Since he was much more focused on his Fordsy fighting for his right to stay in the Shack, Bill didn't notice the flicking of Dipper's eyes from Ford to the dream demon himself. The kid was smart (of COURSE he was smart, he took after Stanford Pines for Gods' sakes it was in his genes!) The kid could read body language, even if it had taken him actual years to figure out how.

It was pretty easy to see the things that compelled him to draw his conclusion, in any case. Notably the surprised expression of Bill's face, side by side with an ever-so-slight flow of blood to his cheeks — his great-uncle's willingness to defend him to Mabel, to Stan, to anyone who dared not to believe  Bill had reformed.
"Oh," he said out loud, partly to Bill and partly to himself.

Bill finally met the younger boy's eyes with his own. The elder set of twins appeared to have parted ways by them.
"What? What's up?" He asked flatly, almost impatiently. Like he wanted to get back to whatever he was doing. Which Dipper knew now, he most certainly did.
"You guys are in love."

------------------------------------

"Tell me, Stanley, out loud, with God and our family as your witness, that you will not harm a hair on Bill's head as long as he chooses to stay here at the Mystery Shack," Ford spat, again. His brother was easy enough to pin down—he was weaker than he thought he was—but Stanford grew tired of these games now. He just wanted to get this over with so that he could retreat to his safe space and not look anyone in the eyes for the next 8-9 business days.

"What if that time is FOREVER, Ford?!"
"Then forever it is!"
"Why the hell are we giving him a choice?! We should just kick him out on the–"
"NO," Stanford insisted staunchly.
"You're acting weird, IQ. You're all about reason and logic and waffling on about all that sort of crap, and then you turn around and pull this on us with no explanation! I don't understand you."

Ford fell silent again. He hated it when Stanley had a point, which was a fraction of the time.
"Look, I just don't want you to hurt him. Think, there could be people looking for him. We could get a cash reward.'
"Liking money isn't the only thing that drives me, Sixer," Stan huffed.
"But it's the main one."
"You're not wrong there."

"Just say you won't hurt Bill. That's all I want."
Stanley hesitated, a telltale sign he was seriously mulling it over. Ford silently cheered himself for getting his brother so agreeable.
"Can I hurt him emotionally? He's still a bastard, after all."
"Of course."

"Cool. I, Stanley Pines, yadda yadda yadda, no hurting Bill Cipher so long as he is under this roof, yadda yadda legal crap."
Ford released the pressure holding his brother to the ground, earning a relieved grunt. The two men stood themselves up, brushed themselves off, and gave one another a grin.

Ford turned to go back to the basement – he had things to do in there for once, he was just updating his report on how the shapeshifting creature he had captured decades ago functioned physiologically – when he caught a glimpse of Bill's face.

It wasn't like he never thought about the demon's feelings. Occasionally, he would obsess over the very thing, especially when he was younger. 'Does he like me,' 'Am I good enough for him,' 'I wonder how his species experience romantic attraction in general,' 'Oh my gods what are Bill's reproductive organs,' That kind of jazz.

Well, he never thought in his life he'd have to ask himself the question:
'Why is he looking at me like that?'

Bill's unbelievably blue eyes were wide and starstruck as they locked with his, his lips in a sweet, dazed smile, cheeks red like nothing else was, ignoring Ford's great-nephew's attempts at getting his attention.

Ford opened the door, and just before it shut, heard the glimpse of a word that would proceed to bury itself in his subconscious like a parasite for the next eternity.

Love.

Chapter Text

It took Bill a solid second to register exactly what Dipper had said. That, in and of itself, is hardly a bad reaction time for a demon whose consciousness was recently transferred into an incredibly overstimulated human body. The part that was worrying was that Bill didn't deny his  ̶n̶e̶p̶h̶e̶w̶'̶s̶ newfound-friendlike-younger-person-whom-he-felt-a-mild-familial-attachment-to's claims for another twenty-odd seconds.

"I- wait a damn-" he stuttered out, eventually. "What the hell d'you think you're talking about?"

There was nobody else in the room by this point. Stanley had left by pushing past Bill to reach the living room, which lay beyond the doorway he still stood in. Presumably, Mabel had followed him, though he couldn't recall her leaving. Dipper was planted just beside him, completely blocking the entryway by taking up the space Bill's frame couldn't. 

His friend-NOT-NEPHEW-type-thing only hummed doubtfully in response to the demon's very late reaction. Bill scoffed.
"'Scuse me, when did you become the love expert?"
"Look, I have Mabel Pines for a sister and Pacifica Northwest for a best friend. I know when people are in love," Dipper said, as though that made any sense in the slightest. Bill only had the faintest memory of that second name.

"Llama? What does she have to do with love?" he asked. From what he knew (very little), Llama was a rich kid with a guilt complex. Unfortunately, she was also the weakest link in the chain of successful multimillionaires that the blasted family kept producing. She let the pressure get to her. She was weak for that.

Ha. As if I can call people weak. I'm such a bloody hypocrite.
"More than you think," Dipper said, making a face. "Look, don't worry yourself about it. That's a whole other can of worms. Getting back on topic now..."
He was right, of course. What was the point of this conversation again?
"...you and my great-uncle."
Oh, yeah, that.

"Kid, there's nothing to be said about me and Sixer. There's nothing going on between us! I know you like conspiracy theories and all that crap, but this is far-out, even for you!"
Bill's insistence only seemed to assure Dipper he was correct. The once-demon groaned and nervously raked his fingers through his hair. The strands were sticky and greasy and had an awful texture, but it was fine.

"He just tackled his twin to the ground because he thought he was gonna hurt you. Why are you so scared? If anything, he should be the paranoid one," Bill's... he needed to find an actual word for their relationship. Pseudo-nephew. There, that fits. And didn't imply he wanted to take Stanford's last name.
"Well, I hope IQ is down there being-being paranoid," Bill said, even though in truth he hoped his Fordsy wasn't getting worked up over this. Sixer didn't need that stress.

"Ha! Liar." Dipper leaned on the doorframe casually, as though he had won the argument.
"I am not a liar. Anymore," the demon tacked on. He needed to find a way to apologise, and now was as good a time as any. It would even change the subject. Perfect.

Don't think like that, his conscience reprimanded. He didn't know he had a conscience before now. That was what the thing calling him a hypocrite had been. That's selfish. You aren't doing this because it helps you; you're doing it because you wronged everyone here, and because you're sorry.
So go on. Apologise.

"I... look, kid, I'm so sorry," Bill began begrudgingly. "I can't begin to describe to you how stupid everything I-"
"Don't start," Dipper cut him off. For a moment, there was a weight on the demon's chest which crushed him, moving down to his stomach and bursting it, sending bile crawling its way up the demon's throat.

Nobody's going to forgive you.

"Wait - no - that came out WAY wrong-!" The younger man in the equation quickly recovered. He seemed to have noticed the weight somehow; maybe something about the demon's expression gave it away. "I meant you don't have to start, Bill. Well, not with me. I don't know why, every logical part of my brain says I shouldn't, but I trust you. You don't have to apologise."

"Oh," Bill said quietly.

...he had been forgiven.

------------------------------------

The basement was quiet enough. Ford could hear people talking still, but anything said was soft, whispered, like they didn't want anyone else to hear. He suspected they were talking about him, which was fair enough. He glanced at the curtain draped over one of the walls of the room he had walked into.

He didn't know why he had come into this room in particular. He could've gone anywhere else, but he hadn't.
He didn't know why he walked over and pulled the curtain down. He could've done anything else, but he hadn't.

What lay underneath the drapings was something the man was ashamed of. He should have taken it down decades ago; he had had so many chances, of which he had taken none. There were tapestries and statues, scrawled drawings, rabid poetry, and candles that he had lit years ago, ones that refused to go out, refused to burn anything but their wicks, candles that should have melted away to nothing so long ago.

Everything was built in his name.

The room smelled of worship. It wasn't unwelcome, but it gave Ford an odd sense of deja vu; it made his thoughts sluggish, it made him feel comforted to come back here, to kneel before an altar, to feel heat rising in his chest, imprints of hands splayed on his chest, arms wrapped around him sweetly, a memory which held so much power he could hardly bear it.

I want to give myself to him.

The heat rose to his head, focused intensely on the back of his skull like a laser beam, something attacking him. The pain hit him hard. It almost burned, but it returned his lucidity to him.
"Why am I doing this?" he said, out loud, to nobody in particular. "He's not... this isn't him. He's here. I can go and talk to him."

I don't want to talk to him, something in Ford's head thought. It wasn't him; it was distinctly a separate thing. He noticed that now, with all the cloudiness gone from his eyes, his thoughts. That human thing isn't the god I want; it isn't the god I worship. I want to be able to devote myself to him. I can't do that with a human. Why would I want to?

"Because..." the scientist began to retaliate. He quickly realised he couldn't think of a good enough answer, and covered his tracks. "I'm complex. I think he's far sweeter in this form. What I want is to worship a god that has repented."

Ford was sure he heard a small, dissatisfied grunt from the voice. He took that as a sign he was winning. He closed his eyes for a moment, turning his attention to the back of his head where something still stung.
He ran his hand over the spot where it hurt, and realised there was a small amount of burn damage to his hair, the strands singed and severed and, though he couldn't see them, probably blackened.

Something had physically done that to him. Odd. It couldn't have been the voice, he figured it worked a similar way to Bill when the scientist had first met him: unable to interact with the physical world, reduced to a disembodied voice unless the correct surgery was performed. Then they'd be reduced to a projection of themselves.

It had to be something real.

He quickly turned around to see the barrel of a gun pointed at his forehead. It was a situation he was unfortunately prepared for, not that that made the situation any more unnerving. He cocked his head to the side, to both remove himself from immediate danger and get a good view of who was on the other end of the weapon.

It was an odd sight, but not an entirely unexpected one, to see his twelve-year-old niece pointing a gun at his forehead.

"Mabel?" he asked tentatively, keeping a comforting tone in his voice so as not to provoke her. She seemed pretty volatile, her aim steady as she brought the gun - one, Ford realised, she must have already shot him with -  back towards his head. She made one wrong move, he made one wrong move, and it was over.

Then it occurred to the scientist.
He had just been shot in the back of the head, presumably by the very same person, presumably with the very same gun, and he hadn't died. He'd hardly gotten more than a scratch, about the same as a small electric shock would have given him.

This wasn't anything that could do real damage. He was fairly sure this was the gun he used decades ago to get Bill out of his body - nothing that could do any real harm to him, just enough to hurt, enough to snap himself out of it.
Any fear that Ford may have had (none) was quickly dissipated as he brought his hand up to the barrel, calmly pointing it away from him. It might have been harmless generally, but he still didn't want to get hurt.

"Mabel," he tried again. The girl dropped the gun immediately and outstretched her hand to him. Ford quickly realised he was still kneeling, and gratefully took his niece's offer of help. He hated to admit he relied on the assistance quite a bit. He often prided himself on being one of the most fit sixty-five-year-olds currently alive, but not even the most extreme of training regimens can fix stiff joints. WD-40 might, though.

"Grunkle Ford," Mabel said shakily. It wasn't a quality anyone usually could attribute to Mabel, but it was very present now. Her great-uncle raised his eyebrows, trying to tell her that he was listening without interrupting whatever she was going to say. The girl squeezed his hand. "I don't want you coming down here anymore."

There was a beat of silence before Ford sighed.
"I can't, sweetie, I have things to do."
"Oh, yeah?!" she asked, voice suddenly much louder, more distressed than it had to be. "Like what?! Name one thing you need to do that is more important than getting OUT of here!"

"Why do you want me to leave?" her guardian said calmly. He again found he didn't have a proper response to the question posed, so he decided to deflect the attention.
"I just came down here to check and see if you were okay or mad at anyone, and found you kneeling before an altar. Why do you think?!"
Touche.

"Look, I don't know what was going on just now or why you sounded like you were having a conversation or something with someone that isn't here, but IT WAS TERRIFYING. I don't want you down here because the bad things always happen down here!!! The portal, you're not sleeping, everything!! And now this!!" Mabel paused for air, screeching in frustration as she brought her sleeve to her eyes - oh, gods, she was crying -  and wiped them aggressively.

"Please," she begged, now unable to keep the hoarse tone of someone crying out of her voice.
"Okay, okay," he said, caving. His niece sniffed, but her face changed from righteous anger to pleasant surprise in an instant.
"Promise?" Mabel said, remembering her great-uncle's decidedly flaky nature. "And I'll hold you to it!!"

"I promise."
"Good," she smiled, interlocking her finger's with Ford's and leading him out of the darkness of the rooms under the house, up the staircase and through to the light.

He had never felt so happy to be forcefully taken somewhere.

Chapter Text

The rest of the day went on without much conflict, which wasn't what Bill was expecting in the slightest. Stanley kept true to his word and kept out of the demon's way. Not hard, as he barely ventured to the lower floors, instead holed up in the attic with Dipper, reading War and Peace over the boy's shoulder and getting distracted and/or confused every few minutes, and proceeding to have a completely random conversation with the kid.

Ford also made good on his promise to his great-niece, not daring to go down to his lab. It was very alien not to have his research close at hand. He didn't know how he got through the morning without obsessively writing something, let alone the whole day. And he also didn't know how the hell Black and White Period Piece Old Lady Boring Movies managed to keep him enraptured in the story and characters to the point of immobility.

He also realised that Stanley had a soft spot for The Duchess Approves. Unfortunately, he had learned this by listening to him shout insults at every love interest of the Duchess's, most notably Count Lionel, whose insults were eerily personalised.

Mabel spent her time off gadding about somewhere with Wendy and Candy. Grenda had been carted off to Austria to spend a week with Marius. She'd be coming back soon - the only reason she had agreed to go was so that she could break up with him. He was far too clingy, and she couldn't deal with a long-distance relationship. (Much to Candy's delight.)

It got dark eventually. And cold, very cold. Especially for summer. Perhaps it simply meant that global warming was slowing down or something, but it was eerie to watch the thermostat dip to twenty-six degrees in the middle of summer.

Bill got kicked out of the attic as Mabel came in. Stan reluctantly turned off the CRT and trotted off to bed. Soos and Melody closed up shop and went to their room together like the sickeningly sweet married couple they were (did they even know Bill was in the house? Surely they must).

Ford quickly realised he had nowhere to sleep, and then realised there was nobody awake to stop him from obsessively writing about that fact.

-----------------------------------------

The kitchen light was annoyingly harsh. There wasn't a dimmer setting to it (of course not, the house was incredibly poorly built – Ford was surprised it even had electricity). It hurt his eyes and gave him a splitting headache. And even if he gave enough fucks to get up and turn the blasted thing off, it wasn't like he could just sit in the dark as if he were some lonely, self-hating man with no purpose or drive.

He looked down at his feet on the edge of the chair, his knees tucked into his chin like a child.

Yeah, if this were in the dark, it'd look preeetty pathetic. Not that it didn't look even more pathetic bathed in the light of a thousand fucking suns. Seriously, his eyes hurt.

Ford slid his heels off the base of the chair, assuming a regular seating position, and tightly crossed his arms. There was a piece of paper in front of him, one half being less-than-neat notes on the equity of the sleeping arrangements in the Shack, and the other half merely mildly passive-aggressive thoughts on Mabel's black-and-white take on healthy and unhealthy behaviours.

She was twelve. How could she know what behaviours were "damaging to his health" and "falling back into old routines" and "oh my god grunkle ford why are you kneeling in front of a statue of a triangle what the hell"?

...Alright, maybe she had more sense than he gave her credit for. Still, it didn't mean she knew what was best for him. Nobody knew what was best for him. Including himself, unfortunately.

He drummed his fingers on the grain of the table as all manner of thought left his mind somehow. It was never unpleasant when his mind quietened, but occasionally unwelcome. For instance, it was all very well and good as he lay awake at night and all drifted into fuzz, but while he sat at the kitchen table at - what, one in the morning (gods, he was up so late again, this venture above ground was doing NOTHING to help his sleep schedule) - trying to think of a place to crash without being a complete nuisance, it was a little more annoying.

At least his worries were muted, even if it came at the price of his late-night musings.

Yeah, no, don't use that word, thanks.

There was a pattering of feet from the parlour, and if Ford had any capacity for thought, he would have, if nothing else, frozen up and silently begged for them not to walk in and see him still awake at this hour. He did nothing of the sort, only continuing the simple, repetitive action he was stuck in, tapping on the wood with his pencil.

The pitter-patter stopped harshly, and he heard a tut from the doorway behind him.
"Ford, shut the FUCK up. You have been tapping that pencil for TWELVE MINUTES - I counted - AND I CANNOT SLEEP."

He didn't even have the sense to stop tapping the pencil, let alone respond.  He did, however, tilt his head ever-so-slightly upwards, catching the glint of golden hair in the corner of his eye. Bill. Bill was in the room.

Ford blinked hard and snapped his eyes up to meet the once-demon's. He leaned on the doorway of the kitchen, an unwanted parallel to earlier in the day. For the first time, the scientist really registered what he was wearing.

It was the same outfit he had been wearing when he had first fallen through that blasted rebuilt portal. Ford had no idea where he had gotten it from, how he had gotten it in the first place. It was a brown jumper, looked hand-stitched and sloppy, but heartfelt. It was a light brown and fluffy, with the words 'CERTIFIED TRIANGLE' sewn into the front, and a little pictogram of his old form beneath.

Bill's pant legs were made of equally fluffy material, almost resembling velvet, but puffed out in a way. They had... were those the symbols from the zodiac? Mildly morbid to wear the cause of your own demise on your pyjama pants, but no matter. These weren't sewn in like the words and icon on his pullover. In fact, his lower half looked like it had been bought rather than made. 

The beanie, which suffocated that spun gold mess he wore on his head, was a mess of colours, none of which complemented one another. Some sort of maroon, a very vibrant blue, a faded green,  an unpleasant bright red, and a familiar goldish yellow made for a mildly sickly combination. Even with all the chaos, somehow it all balanced out. It wasn't as if Bill was bad to look at.

...Well, that came out wrong. But anyway.

Pencil tapping. Stop. Can't sleep. Yelling. Fuck.

"I–uh..." Ford stammered, slowly letting his repetitive motions come to a stop. The stress on Bill's face went away for a second, his eyes closing.
"Thank you. Finally," he sighed, without even opening his eyes. The scientist found himself resisting the urge to laugh. Couldn't think why.

"Are you alright?" He asked instead, adopting a rather more serious tone than his comrade had used. "I don't believe it's entirely normal for people to be woken from what I'm assuming was deep sleep by something so insignificant as–"
"Oh my gods, I know I used to say I loved your science talk, but SHUT THE FUCK UP. I have a headache and you are making it WORSE."

Stanford did allow himself a chuckle here, earning a lazy opening of one of his muse's eyes.
"Wow. Laughing. Didn't think you were even capable of that anymore."
"I'm glad I can prove you wrong," he smiled. He was far too out of it to force a straight face, and besides, it was oddly gratifying to see Bill sheepishly smile back. Kind of sweet, even.

This body suited him.

Shut up, shut up, shut up. If he can change what body he's in, you are not allowed to make an offhand comment on how good he looks in one of them.

"Anyway," Bill said, eyes now both open, if full of sleep. "What the hell are you doing up?"
"I have nowhere to sleep," Stanford admitted. There was a pause from the demon, whose expression turned to one of mild confusion as he leaned more heavily on the doorframe.
"Yes, you do. Are you not sleeping in the lab?" he asked.

"I was," the scientist sighed. "Mabel... actually, you don't need to know the specifics."
"But I'd like the specifics," Bill pouted.
"Shut up. Look, I'm not allowed to go down there at all, let alone sleep down there. Not until Mabel forgets that I promised her I wouldn't."

"Doesn't this house have a bunch of bedrooms and crap? There's what, the master bedroom-"
"Stanley took it from me."
"-the guest one that stupid research partner of yours stayed in-"
"Soos and Melody sleep there. I refuse to intrude on a couple.  And Fidds wasn't stupid."
"-obviously, the kids are in the attic-"
"I'd just keep them up all night, plus I'm not ready to talk to either of them."

Bill went to continue before realising that those were all the viable options for rooms that could feasibly be used as a bedroom.
"Well, fuck."
"Fuck indeed," Ford huffed.

"Look, I'm not just gonna let you sit at this table like a pathetic little man until you fall asleep upright. You're coming with me."
The room wasn't small, but the table was oddly close to the doorframe. All the demon had to do was reach out a little to clasp his hand around Ford's wrist and tug. The scientist let himself be dragged wherever he was going. He was truthfully too tired to give a shit.

When Bill let go of him, he almost fell over. He caught himself before he face-planted, thank goodness, and opened his eyes. He hadn't realised they were closed, but now he could see, dimly, the outline of his demon dumping an exceedingly thin blanket and shitty pillow onto the floor.
"What are you do-?"
Ford was cut off as Bill turned around, grabbed him by the shoulders, and pushed him onto the couch.

"Get comfortable and don't argue. Actually, just don't talk at all. I'd also like to sleep tonight," his demon said. The words themselves were admittedly harsh, but Bill said them fondly. Speaking of which, he half-collapsed onto the floor, covering himself with the blanket and turning over so that his back faced the scientist.

Ford almost began to argue that he shouldn't have been the one to sleep on the couch - it was Bill's spot first, and arguably the more comfortable makeshift bed - but he stopped himself as he was overcome with a wave of sluggishness. There was no real reason he shouldn't have been sleeping on the couch anyway. Bill wanted him to, and he always felt like he should do what Bill wanted.

Especially now that he was being so sweet. When he finally figured out how his Muse had betrayed him so long ago, it had been world-shattering. Bill had completely changed. He was threatening and sadistic and violating, and horrible. He had no empathy, he had no sympathy, and he hurt Ford. Over and over with no remorse.

He had been lovely before then. He had showered his devotee with praise, called him a genius, helped him through everything, and...
Well. Urged him to sleep.

Ford didn't like to take care of himself. Of course, that sounds awful without context, but... well, the context hardly made it better. It wasn't even something that had just spawned from the time he had spent unsleeping, uneating, hardly even moving as he willed himself not to let Bill get to him, as he reminded himself that his Muse's threats were empty so long as he didn't open the portal. So long as he didn't fall asleep and let himself get possessed.

That, of course, might have spawned an inherent fear of the whole getting-rest thing, but even before then, he would neglect himself. Hours working and experimenting, and writing theses and not pausing for a rest once. The only time he'd ever let himself slow down enough to take care of himself was when his Muse would be there to tell him he should.

Like now.

Ford didn't know if that kindly version of Bill was a facade, just something to gain trust, to make his aesthete do what he wanted him to do. Make the scientist pliable, vulnerable, let down his guard. But Ford thought - well, sort of knew - that somewhere during all that, Bill had gone too far. Had said one too many nice things, had one too many conversations about loneliness.

Had made Ford fall in love with him.

You know, he had thought all that shit he felt would be gone after the initial betrayal. He was stuck in the Nightmare Realm, for fuck's sake. Had to kill whatever came his way, fight to survive, and eat whatever wouldn't kill him. It, of course, wasn't gone.

It wasn't gone during Werdmaggedon, either. Whenever the scientist looked at Bill, the one torturing him for information, the one who wanted to destroy everything he loved, he always tried to imagine that he could see a twinge of guilt. It probably wasn't really there.

And it wasn't gone now, as he heard Bill's breath slow and quiet on the floor in front of the couch. As that ugly fucking beanie he had somehow managed to get slipped off and his golden hair puffed out. As he himself moved, lying down and curling in on himself. The couch had an oddly distinct imprint where Bill had been sleeping only a couple of minutes before.

He was too tired to think too hard about how he felt. The closest he could get was warm. And even so, that was literally - his Muse must have been rather warm, because the space where his wrist had been grabbed was pleasantly temperate, and the plush leather beneath him similarly temperate.

Even if the nice thing was an act in the beginning, Bill had nothing to gain anymore. Maybe his Muse had gotten better now. 

When did he start calling Bill...?

Nevermind.

And he lets himself relax into the warmth and sleep soundly for the first time in a long, long while.

Chapter Text

"Shit, shit, shit, shit, shit. Uh, a minute to arrange my thoughts?" Bill hated begging, but he needed to know what happened before he could relay the information. He had a feeling that if he hesitated for a moment longer than necessary without explaining himself, Stan would use those brilliant brass knuckles of his to knock the brains out of him. He probably wouldn't even enjoy the pain, since the older man would likely get some satisfaction from it.

"Fuck no. And don't swear, the kids could be awake," snapped Sixer's lesser clone. Did he have to be so difficult? Bill was just trying to get everything in order. Gods, the man - demon - whatever was disoriented! He couldn't be given a bloody minute to understand what the hell was happening, what did Fez expect from him?! He had been snapped from the cusp of sleep, and everything was still dark, and why the hell was Stanley awake at this hour? He didn't have trouble with sleeping, that was Fordsy's thing, not his...

And besides, how hypocritical of Fez, swearing even louder than he himself had. Bill had the urge to tell him so, but bit it down in favour of organising a rough timeline.
Sixer was awake. Dragged him to the couch because he couldn't sleep downstairs (for some reason???). Slept on the floor. Had horrific dreams-

"Hardly. You think they have as much trouble sleeping as this one?" he asked, gesturing vaguely to the unconscious body of Ford Pines. Damn his motormouth. Not the time for conversation, Bill, not the time, come on, just try to remember. Had horrific dreams. Somehow (again, ???) crawled onto the couch in sleep-

"Maybe. You wouldn't know," Stan reminded him. He had only been here for... he couldn't remember. Not long. Even if he knew the Pines inside and out, even if he'd already lived with them once, even if all of this had happened but differently, less real than it felt now. Now is crisp and now is sharp, and then is blurry, and he doesn't really know them; he knows what he thinks they are.

Do I still think that? he asks himself, looking up at Fez scowling down at him.

"You're... not wrong, I guess. I don't know you people that well," he admitted, more to himself than to Stanley. He didn't know them. He should. He wants to. He wants to be able to sit in a room with them and have no tension. 

He wants to be able to talk to Dipper - which he can, he can actually do that! He wants to have Mabel paint his nails, because it still feels wrong the way they act around one another, like the most trusting and kind girl in the multiverse doesn't trust him, and he doesn't like his hair being only one colour. He wants Stan to make him breakfast, and gods, that has never been something he ever thought he wanted, but honestly, having a brother like that would be so brilliant after everything.

He wants to be everything to Ford again. That would be awesome. The only person who can calm him down and know him as well as he does. Help him take care of himself. Comfort him when he's sad. Just to be there by his side always.

"Bill, I still want an explanation."

Aww, well, that's nice of Stan to completely fucking shatter his blissful delusions of romance. Eh, fuck him, to be honest. He could do without the brotherly relationship. You know, he didn't give a single shit about Spare Parts over here. Fucking tapping his wrists like Bill was a child who couldn't just do what he was told.

"I KNOW YOU WANT AN EXPLANATION! I'M STILL ARRANGING MY-"
"Shut the fuck up, Cipher. The kids might be upstairs, but Ford is not. He is literally right there. He will wake up if you keep screaming in his ear."
Oh, and fuck the calm explanations! Like he was some chiding parent - again, treating Bill like he was a fucking child, like he was unable to take care of himself, like he wasn't acutely aware of all the horrible shit he'd ever done, like he wasn't horribly aware of his mistakes.

Order your fucking thoughts.

"Well. Fordsy was up late again," Bill growled. He paused for a moment, waiting to see if Fez would interrupt him again, or doubt him again, or just generally have something stupid to say like he always did. Spare Parts kept his mouth shut. Good.

"Sitting at the dining room table like a kicked dog, worried about something or other like he always does. He was tapping a pencil like you'd never imagine - how the hell does he manage to make tapping a pencil loud enough to wake the dead-?!"

"Eh, he's Ford," Spare Parts interrupted, just like Bill knew he would. He had a point, though.

"Fair. Anyway...
I couldn't sleep even though I was in here, like, twenty-something metres away. Told him to shut the fuck up and go to sleep, he said he couldn't go into the basement (oh, by the way, I'd check that out if I were you), so I dragged him to the couch, slept on the ground. I dunno, I think I might sleepwalk and talk or whatever, so I just... sort of... ended up on the couch. Unconsciously."

"Uh-huh. Right," Stan said. Bill didn't like the tone of his voice, if he was being perfectly honest. His nose crinkled like Fez smelled bad.
"Come on, I gave you details and everything! What more do you want from me?!"
"Oh, I don't know, what possible reason might I have for not trusting BILL CIPHER?!"
"Come on."
"Don't you 'come on' ME. Wasn't it you who called the entire human race - what was it, er, three-dimensional-"

"ONE LIFESPAN, THREE DIMENSIONAL, FIVE SENSE SKIN PUPPETS! AND I DON'T RETRACT MY FUCKING STATEMENTS NOW THAT I AM ONE! GOD, LIVING IN THIS THING- IN THIS THing... It's horrible," the once-demon insisted, voice breaking. "See? I can't even be MAD at people without my voice FAILING me. So shut UP."

Bill was glad to see uneasiness flit across the other man's face. He thought for a second what could be the cause of it, then remembered that the most common cause of human voice breaks (other than whatever the hell Dipper had been going through for the last, like, four years) was that they were about to begin crying.

He didn't... feel like there was any reason he'd be crying. Right? What were the other reasons voices 'cracked' or whatever it was called?
Why was everything so hard to remember this time around?
It was fine, you know. He could try to remember, and he could remember, and it was fine.

Losing his voice. That was another reason. And he had been shouting just now, if he was being honest. So he was probably just losing his voice. Great. Okay.
Well, Stanley also seemed much more at ease when he realised Bill wasn't about to start sobbing in front of him. He looked a whole lot less mad at him, too.

"Look, I don't like how you act around my brother," he said, like it was any of his business. "I've never liked how you act around my brother. It isn't a caring thing; you don't like caring. You're a sadistic fucker who wants to hurt him, and you're putting it under the guise of wanting to be with him. I know for a fact that is not what you want."

Wow, you're... really, really fucking bad at reading people, Bill thought. He didn't say it out loud because he couldn't quite fathom the words. Maybe it was just because Spare Pa- because Stanley seemed so sure of it. He... didn't know. He found himself not knowing a lot of things. He felt weird and empty. He didn't know why, and that was scary. He used to know everything, and now he knew nothing, and he didn't know why.

He didn't see through his own eyes for a second, and everything around him flashed white, and a crack of blue flew across his vision.

"Can you STAY OUT of shit you don't understand?! It isn't your fuckign business and it never has been, so shut the FUCK UP and move along. STOP SCRUTINISING ME BECAUSE YOU THINK YOU KNOW WHAT'S BEST FOR PEOPLE."
......when had he started saying that? Why...?

"Well, you're certainly not the best for anyone! You're pathetic, demon!"
"I'M NOT A FUCKING DEMON, YOU THIRD-RATE CONMAN!"
"AND?! I'M TEN TIMES MORE SUCCESSFUL AT CONNING PEOPLE THAN YOU ARE AT GETTING THEM TO LIKE YOU!"
"YOU HAVE NO REAL FRIENDS, THEY ALL HATE YOU! ALL YOU ARE IS A SHITTY STANDEE OF-"

"Excuse me?" Sixer asked, causing the other men in the room to immediately snap their necks around as the panic settled in. He was propped up on his side and somehow managing to glare disapprovingly at both of them.

"Fuck!" Bill squeaked, collapsing back onto the floor. At some point during all this, he had propped himself into a seated position. Hah. Not anymore. Stanley also looked flustered (HAHAHA, SUFFER) and instinctively crossed his arms.

"I'm sorry, but can the two of you shut up? I am trying to get some sleep, for once!" 
Bill was almost glad of the dark. He had a feeling his face was red. It was really hot all of a sudden, and memories kept flashing across his mind of being in Ford's body, feeling a similar thing. But it wasn't embarrassment back then.
How is it that I only remember the things I don't want to?

"Sorry, Sixer," Stan said, earning a good flinch from his brother. Bill could only guess the nickname had kind of been ruined by him.
...That wasn't good. That wasn't a good thing. He shouldn't be thinking that.
Since when did I care about good and bad? He's thinking about me!

Fordsy nodded at his twin, who somehow (?) got the message and backed out of the room, presumably to go to sleep. He himself stayed silent, praying that he would escape unscathed.
Pleasepleasepleasepleaseplease-
"Bill?"
Fuckkkkk.

"Mmm?" he hummed, very much hoping he wouldn't get yelled at. He really would rather not. He had already been yelled at tonight, he'd already yelled tonight, he kept Sixer up with all his yelling... it was his fault. So maybe he deserved to be yelled at.
Sixer paused. Bill opened one of his eyes, which he hadn't realised had been screwed up tight.

He was hard to see in the dark. And he didn't have an expression Bill could read anyway.

"Fordsy..?"
"Go to sleep, Bill. And be quieter tomorrow night."
He couldn't even compute the meaning of the sentence, the fact that he was going to sleep here again. He was just glad everything was over.

He didn't dream. Well, he didn't think he dreamt. Maybe he did.

kcab uoy teg lliw I flesyM fo rewop ythgimla eht yb
kcab uoy teg lliw I flesyM fo rewop ythgimla eht yb
kcab uoy teg lliw I flesyM fo rewop ythgimla eht yb
noisiv yM ni gip yhtlif a naht erom elttil era uoy ho
kcab uoy teg lliw I flesyM fo rewop ythgimla eht yb