Chapter Text
“One (hic) Sixer, please!”
“Sir, I’m sorry, but that makes no sense.”
“YOUR FACE MAKES NO FUCKING SENSE!”
“Ugh, did I really say that?”
“Yup. And…” A moment of hesitation.
“Just tell me, Pyronica, I can handle it.”
“Well, you cried. A lot. And when you saw the server was calling the police, you grabbed the phone from her hand and said some… stuff.”
Bill Cipher, one of the most powerful entities of the whole multiverse (according to himself, that is), was scared of asking his Henchmaniacs—his closest allies! —just what he had said on that fateful night.
He knew he shouldn’t have drank that much “I’m Fine Juice”. He remembered getting weird looks from his little gang of freaks, as he downed drink after drink. But he had a reason to! After all he’d done for him, Stanford Pines had chosen to abandon him! Just swept all of their history aside like it was nothing. HOW DARE HE!
I mean, yes, Bill had manipulated him and used him and lied to him, but that’s just what partners do! It’s not like Ford wasn’t using Bill as well. Their relationship was based on mutually using each other. He thought Ford understood that. Apparently not! Stupid little human! Disgusting sack of meat and blood! Why did Bill think it was a good idea to trust a human being?
Now was not the time to mull over his feelings for Ford, though (even thinking the word “feelings” gave Bill nausea). It was time to find out exactly how much he had embarrassed himself the night before.
“What, um, what kind of stuff did I say?”
Pyronica and 8 Ball exchanged a look. The rest of the Henchmaniacs were with them in the room, but they were milling around and pretending not to pay attention to what Pyronica and 8 Ball were telling Bill. Earlier that day, the Henchmaniacs had conferred amongst themselves and chosen two representatives to break the news to their boss. The chosen two were beginning to regret everything.
“Just spit it out!” Honestly, the things he said couldn’t have been that bad. He’d probably just declared his love for good ol’ Sixer in a very embarrassing way, in front of a bunch of people. That was something he could live with.
“You… said, ‘Mum, this is Billy’. And told her you’d be coming back from school soon, so she was supposed to cut the crusts off your sandwiches. And then you started asking where she went? We… aren’t really sure what you meant by that.”
Bill tried his best not to emote. He simply nodded and said, “And then what?”
8 Ball blinked slowly.
“Well, boss, um… you got arrested. We busted you out. And here we are.”
“I meant, did I say anything else?”
“No… not really.”
Bill hummed and turned his back on them. He walked with his hands behind his back to a corner of their Nightmare Realm hideout (he didn’t even remember how he had got here the night before), as if he were deep in thought. The moment his “friends” were out of his sight, he widened his eye and quietly took a deep breath. He couldn’t let them see him like this, he couldn’t panic in front of them. He needed to get out of here. He turned back towards his henchcreatures, trying for a casual move but missing the mark by a mile and only managing to look robotic.
“Good! Very good!” Bill’s chipper tone was clearly forced, but none of the Henchmaniacs commented on it. “I have to do some thinking to decide my next course of action, and I do that better without you freaks distracting me. So I’ll be leaving now. Bye!”
Bill couldn’t see the looks they were shooting at him and at each other, but he could feel them. He knew they were judging him harshly, despite the fact they were all outcasts together. They loved to hear the tales of how easily manipulated Sixer was, of how he worshipped the ground Bill floated above, but they simply couldn’t understand that Bill and Ford’s relationship was a little more than just a muse/ scientist one. Ford was as much of an outcast as all of them, but his humanness prevented the Henchmaniacs from seeing it.
What worried him most, though, was that he’d spoken of his parents. He hadn’t thought about them in years. He certainly had never mentioned them to his friends.
He wandered the Nightmare Realm, floating aimlessly as he let his thoughts run wild. He knew none of his gang would come looking for him, but that didn’t stop a paranoid feeling from creeping up on him. It made him keep checking behind him to see if anyone was following. After a couple of minutes that seemed like hours, Bill was confident enough that the twists and turns he had taken would have dissuaded anyone from tailing him. And then… he gave himself permission to think about things he had tried his best to push to the darkest recesses of his mind.
He thought about Euclydia, his lost home, his destroyed dimension. A flat land full of (literally) two-dimensional people with two-dimensional thoughts. A bunch of non-believers who thought him stupid for speaking of stars, who bullied his family because he dared say there was such a direction as “up”. He thought of his parents, Scalene and Euclid Cipher. He remembers them trying to protect him when he was really young, remembers his mum gently telling him to stop talking about this weird “up” direction. And even though Bill kind of understands why they did, he can’t stop but think about how fucked up it was that his parents tried to blind their only son, solely to get him to shut up about the stars. He hated them for it, a hate so strong and deep he felt it burning in his gut. But he didn’t hate them as much as he expected because he still thinks fondly of them (how his mum would cut the crusts off his sandwiches, how they insisted on calling him Billy, how they never teased him about wearing Velcro shoes until he was a teen), still keeps that one atom of his dimension hidden inside his hat.
He realises he misses them, kind of. Not just his parents but Euclydia as a whole. They didn’t understand him, but they were his family, his people. He always used to go on and on to his Henchmaniacs about how he was beloved by all and how he liberated everyone, but it was all a lie. Deep down, Bill knew that if you repeat a lie over and over again, you end up believing it yourself. And that was exactly what he did. He didn’t remember what happened, but he remembered being hated and feared for being different. He remembered the blood and the screams. No one ever understood him, and when he tried to make them, he caused their destruction.
He slowly descended until his feet touched the ground. He had caused their destruction… He had massacred his people and been the only one left to tell the story, and the story he told painted himself as a hero, a liberator. But he was none of those things. He was a monster.
He was the monster he had warned Ford about.
Oh, Ford… A freak himself, by human standards. But not to Bill. He fit in with Bill. They just made sense together. Two brilliant loners, rejected by their peers for being different. And by his angles, did Bill miss him. He missed Ford so bad it manifested itself as a deep ache behind his eye. He didn’t think that was normal, and he hadn’t dared tell any of his Henchmaniacs about it. They would judge him for it, even though they were all outcasts and freaks. Big bad Bill Cipher, feeling physical pain because of a simple human being. He usually found pain hilarious but this? This wasn’t funny, this made him want to lay on the floor in an uncomfortable position while his tears gathered in a pool under him. So, Bill sat down on the floor and hugged his legs. He wasn’t going to lay down or cry, not here in the middle of the Nightmare Realm where anyone could see, but he wanted to. No one would think it weird that he was just sitting down in a random place, but crying would bring attention over to him and, for the first time in a long, long time of his long, long life, Bill did not want to be the centre of attention.
His thoughts travelled to Earth, to the portal. He couldn’t let a couple of pesky feelings stop him. He had to complete his work with the portal. He had tried getting an operational device multiple times now, had manipulated and tricked countless people. This was the first time he had got so close to seeing his goal met. But there had been an obstacle in his way. That hill billy Sixer was friends with, the man had ruined everything. But Bill was certain he could still salvage it, it was what he had been working towards for almost a trillion years, he couldn’t give up now because of a minor setback with a couple of dispensable humans.
The hill billy could die for all he cared, but Ford wasn’t dispensable, was he? Bill actually cared about that stupid human, didn’t he? He missed being admired by Ford, missed being worshipped. He liked being worshipped as a god, as a muse. But deep down, he didn’t want Ford to admire and worship him as a superior, he wanted the human to see him as an equal. He wanted to admire and worship, and be admired and worshipped back in equal measure.
Could he simply put aside a trillion years of hard work, his literal life’s commitment, and his whole gang over a human he had met just a year before? No, of course not. That would be stupid, and if there was one thing Bill Cipher wasn't, it was stupid. His life’s work was more important than a single sack of meat with the lifespan of a fly. Besides, he had promised to find the Henchmaniacs a new home, and he was a triangle of his word. He might cheat and trick and lie, but when he made a deal, he was sure to keep it. He had no way out of this deal, anyway, the Nightmare Realm would eventually collapse in on itself and he (and his friends) would have to get out or be destroyed along with it.
If Bill was being completely honest with himself, he didn’t really care for his Henchmaniacs. They had fun adventures together and it was always good to be seen as a leader, but if he got out of this doomed dimension and they didn’t, he wouldn’t miss them. He would maybe miss the companionship, the fact that they could be their weird selves without fear of judgement, but not the creatures themselves. And even though he called him his friends and enjoyed the freedom their camaraderie gave him, he couldn’t help but feel like a bit of an outcast. Bill knew it was ironic, feeling like an outcast amongst a group of outcasts. But the Henchmaniacs considered each other a sort of family and saw this decaying and entropic place as a home. He didn’t. Bill hadn’t had a family, found or otherwise, ever since his parents, and he hadn’t felt at home ever since Euclydia.
Here he was, trying to fool himself once again. If you repeat a lie over and over, you end up believing it yourself. But he didn’t want to believe this lie he was telling himself, the lie that he hadn’t felt at home in roughly a trillion years. Bill knew exactly when he had last felt at home. He didn’t want to admit it to himself because it would cause many complications in his master plan. Could he deny it any longer, though? Could he keep on repressing that and pretending to his Henchmaniacs that their coexistence was enough for him?
Bill took a deep breath. He wasn’t exactly… used to telling the truth, even to himself. However, he didn’t think he could keep up this farce any longer. It was eating away at him, scrambling his thoughts, preventing him from thinking clearly. Normally, he would be plotting his next course of action, how to get around the small mishap the humans had caused. But a single human occupied his current thoughts. A messy human with two fingers too many, and a brain so brilliant it sometimes hurt to look at (and Bill would know, he had been inside that brain multiple times).
He took another deep breath. You can do this. Another deep breath, and another, and another, and they didn’t stop, the breaths just kept on coming, Bill couldn’t stop them, and even though he was breathing and breathing, he couldn’t get enough air, does he even need air? he’s an interdimensional being, he doesn’t need air, but then why did he feel like his chest was constricting, and was his vision starting to black out at the edges? this was new and he didn’t like it, this wasn’t the type of pain he found hilarious, this made him feel desperate, he wanted it to stop, he couldn’t take it anymore, he just…
Bill opened his eye and blinked slowly. Had he… blacked out? Yes… he had. He knew he had because he felt weak and disoriented, and the only other time he remembered feeling like this had been when… when Euclydia was massacred. All this because he was trying to admit something to himself.
He was trying to admit
He was trying to admit that Ford
He was trying his DAMNED HARDEST to admit that Stanford Pines
Felt like home.
Bill exhaled harshly.
Ford felt like home.
It was easier to say the second time around. And Bill knew, with the utmost certainty, that this wasn’t a lie he was telling himself to feel better, or something he was trying to make himself believe. This was the pure, unadulterated truth. It was intoxicating. He wanted to chase that feeling to the ends of the multiverse. He preferred this to the mute bliss provided by the “I’m Fine Juice”. He hadn’t told a truth this pure in so long, he had forgotten how it felt.
He had been chasing a home for so long, he'd failed to recognise that a home didn’t have to be a place. It could be a person. Someone who understood you completely and accepted you for who you were, flaws and all. And it didn’t have to be romantic because Bill’s home had once been his parents. But this time… this time he knew it wasn’t platonic. He was willing to do anything for Ford, to give all of himself to the human, all that he had been before, all that he was now, and all that he would be in the future. Bill wanted to tie their hearts together, chamber by chamber, so they could beat as one.
What did he care about some stupid portal, some stupid decaying dimension? Ford was all that mattered, he always had been. Bill had just been too blinded by his own ego to see it.
And he had ruined everything. Bill had traumatised the hill billy, he had used, manipulated and lied to Ford. How could he ever convince Ford that he regretted it all? He had threatened to send someone to steal the human’s eyes, for fuck’s sake!
Regardless, Bill was nothing if not persistent. He knew he could do it. It would take time and patience, but he was willing to wait and to try. He was an almost one trillion-year-old being who had been searching for a way out of an entropic dimension for almost as long as he had been alive. Time and patience were things he had plenty of. It would upset Ford if Bill just traipsed back into his head, but the demon could tolerate anger if the end result met his expectations.
And if it didn’t… well. He could still take over Ford’s body, finish the portal, make Ford’s dimension into a playground for his friends, and keep the human as a pet. If he couldn’t be with Ford, he could at least own him. Yes, that was a solid plan. He would just have to execute it without alerting his Henchmaniacs.
~~~~
Stanford Pines was pacing back and forth inside his home, hands behind his back. He had been pacing for so long, his shoes had started to leave skid marks on the floor. Bill’s last threat kept replaying in his head, but it had been over 72 hours and he had seen no sign of Bill or his eye stealing friend.
No sign of Stanley either. Ford was scared his brother would show up. Every time he looked in the mirror, he wondered if the face looking back at him from his reflection would be the same one he would see when he laid his eyes on Stanley for the first time in ten years, or if he and his brother had changed so much during that time that the face looking back at him wouldn’t be the same as the one in the mirror but a complete stranger’s. But Ford also worried he wouldn’t come. That their fight and Stan’s subsequent disinheritance had damaged their relationship to the point that his twin had thrown his letter in the rubbish without even reading it. But worst of all, he worried his brother had been on his way but had got intercepted by Bill somehow. They may not have been on speaking terms, but Ford would never forgive himself if Bill got his hands on Stanley.
The waiting was slowly making him go insane. He hadn’t slept in days out of fear of Bill entering his mind. Ford was so tired, he was afraid he would just keel over. The bags under his eyes had reached such a dark shade of purple they were almost black, and his hands were shaking slightly due to the gigantic amounts of coffee he had been consuming the last few days. The amount of caffeine needed to keep him awake increased every day, as Ford’s body got more and more tired, and as his organism slowly built a tolerance to the substance.
Things were easier when he’d just let Bill take over his body so he could rest his mind. His brain would be asleep, but his body would be working, a puppet in his muse’s hands. He hadn’t minded being a puppet then because he hadn’t felt like one. Even though their hierarchy was very clear (he was but a lowly scientist, lucky enough to have caught Bill’s attention, lucky enough to have his muse illuminate him with his infinite knowledge), Ford felt like he was seen as a partner, not as a means to an end. How wrong he had been. At the time, however, Ford had loved it. He loved being under Bill’s watchful eye, feeling his muse guide his every step, his every move. Unlike Ford’s parents, Bill didn’t expect him to do something that would make them money, they had a common goal (or so it seemed), and that was science.
Bill also praised him. Praised and encouraged and never got mad. His muse always had some sweet word to say to him to keep him going. Ford never realised how much he needed that. Filbrick Pines, a man that wasn’t easily impressed, didn’t have the habit of telling his children they were doing good, that he was proud of them. The man barely, if ever, emoted. All of Ford’s achievements as a child were never met with pride or a word of encouragement. If he were lucky, he’d get a nod of acknowledgment. The one time his father had seemed the least bit interested and impressed by him, had been when the principal of their high school hinted at a rich future for Ford. He should have known then that he would never be enough for his father unless he became a millionaire.
And if that little bit of encouragement had blinded him to his father’s greed and got his brother kicked out, Bill’s steady praise had kept him on a constant high, making it impossible for him to see his mu—he had to stop calling Bill his muse—the demon’s real intentions until it was too late. However, a question plagued his mind. If he had been privy to Bill’s intentions from the beginning, would he have declined their partnership? Or would he have helped the demon anyway, for the sake of science? Ford liked to believe he’d never doom his dimension like that, but a little dollop of uncertainty rested atop his brain.
But none of that mattered anymore. Ford couldn’t help thinking about how effortlessly he had fallen for Bill’s charms and manipulations. And, although he was loath to admit it now, he had fallen for something more. Bill had been so easy to love, at the time. He couldn’t care less that his former muse was a triangle being from another dimension, his form didn’t matter to Ford (and even though he knew Bill was capable of shifting into a human form, he never cared about it either). What mattered was that he and Bill were on the same wavelength, their brains all but connected through science and maths. That’s what had drawn Ford in. Their connection was stronger than a simple physical human one. It was the marriage of two brilliant minds, the merging of their consciousnesses. Ford had never felt like that before, but he had unknowingly spent his whole life chasing that feeling. To find someone who shared his thoughts and beliefs in the same intensity had been exhilarating. And it had been so easy to love someone like that. Ford had tried to stop it, knew that Bill was his muse, and the power imbalance was obvious, but he lost that battle (he didn’t fight very hard). How could he not fall for Bill? How could he not fall for the being that understood and accepted him, no questions asked?
It was one of the reasons why Bill’s betrayal hurt Ford so deeply. Not only had he been lied to, but he had been made a fool by the one being who he thought understood him completely. The one being who didn’t see “freak” as a negative thing, who encouraged Ford to embrace his weirdness and not be ashamed of it. The complete and absolute trust he had placed in the demon, slowly cultivated over the course of a whole year, shattered in a couple of minutes. Something he thought was made of iron was simply porcelain in disguise. And Bill had grabbed that trust like it were nothing, like it weren’t a fragile thing, and thrown it on the ground forcefully, cackled as he watched it break into a million tiny pieces.
Bill had been Ford’s muse, his god, his… his beloved. He still harboured feelings for the demon, but had been trying his best to repress them and substitute them for utter hatred. He was succeeding, although not at the pace he would’ve liked. If he were being frank, he missed Bill. He had got used to seeing and communicating with the triangle demon every single day, and it was weird to have him be absent for days on end.
A knock on the door startled him badly, interrupting his train of thought. Who could it be? None of the city’s inhabitants ever came this far out. It could be Bill, wearing someone like a puppet. It could be Bill’s eye-stealing friend (although Ford didn’t think that a creature that stole people’s eyes would be so polite as to knock on his door first). It could be… it could be Stanley. That thought filled his heart with fear, perhaps even more than the idea of having his eyes stolen. He was absolutely not ready to see his brother again.
The knock came again and he was startled once more. Ford moved slowly towards the door, grabbing his crossbow on the way. He hesitatingly gripped the doorknob and yanked it open as fast as he was capable of, while also pointing his crossbow at whoever was outside.
“Who are you? Have you come to steal my eyes?”
~~~~
Ford didn’t know what he had expected upon encountering his twin brother ten years after their fateful fight, but fighting again wasn’t it. He had known it was a possibility, of course, but he didn’t want it to happen. All he wanted was for Stanley to get his journal, sail away with it and hide it! Why couldn’t his brother understand that? It was so simple! But Stan had no way of knowing the danger he was in, that their dimension was in. And how could he, honestly? Ford knew that trying to explain everything about Gravity Falls, his research, and his muse to anyone would only get him a one way pass to a psychiatric hospital. So here he was, wrestling his brother in the exact same way they did as kids, except this time they weren’t pulling their punches, it wasn’t playful.
And suddenly he was being pulled towards the portal, discovering exactly how Fiddleford felt when the other man had had the same experience. It was like being at the top of a rollercoaster and feeling that pull in your gut as you began to free-fall. He threw the journal towards his brother as a desperate last act, and closed his eyes, bracing himself for whatever lay beyond the portal, whatever his former lab partner had seen.
“Woah there, Sixer!” A strangely familiar voice yelled in surprise.
Ford felt something or someone grab him and roughly pull him outside the portal’s gravitational pull. He fell to the floor and rolled until he came into contact with a wall. He couldn’t bring himself to open his eyes yet, the pull of the portal had disoriented him and he felt dizzy. But he could hear his brother gasping and falling to the floor, he could hear the portal powering down due to lack of fuel. And he could also hear a strangely fleshy noise, followed closely by a metallic one, and, at last, the weird noise a quartz stone wind chime made when the wind hit just right.
“What the fuck?” He heard Stanley say.
“Oh boy, it sure is good to have a physical form again.”
NO! NO NO NO! THIS CAN’T BE HAPPENING!
Ford was panicking. He knew that voice. He opened his eyes and saw his brother looking curiously (and a bit fearful) at a form he knew very well. A form he’d seen in his dreams multiple times. Yellow, one single eye, black top hat, tie, gloves, and thigh high socks. His former muse, former god, former beloved. Bill Cipher.