Chapter Text
“Oh, hey, is that Terry?” Bill asked, snatching a sketch off the corkboard in the lab. It was a Cambrian-looking thing, with five eye stalks of all different sizes and a thick, tongue-y tendril that split off into two freakish pseudo-hands. The head was almost seahorse-y if you squinted, and the body looked like an isopod-lobster hybrid that had gotten its legs yanked off and been stretched out the long way. “Yeah, this is totally Terry.”
“That’s a beast Stan and I encountered a few months back,” Ford said, giving the drawing roughly four seconds of his attention before returning to whatever equation he was working through. “Or an approximation of it, at least. It tried to drag us both overboard, but Stanley managed to kick it hard enough to make it drop him. Though he claims the finishing blow was really that he called its mother ugly.”
Bill tapped his nails on the glass of the snow globe, which he’d spent most of the morning carrying around in his free hand. He kept tapping, tink tink tink, as he said, “Wish I’d been around to see that!” The only glimpses he’d gotten over the past few centuries were at the most boring opportunities, like fishing or staring out at the open sea. Anything was better than the white walls of his cell, but damn if Bill wouldn’t have minded an action scene or two. “If I ever see the ol’ Terrminator again, I’m never letting him hear the end of it. Six eyes, and he couldn’t even see a kick coming? Embarrassing is an understatement.”
Ever dedicated to exact accuracy, Ford reached in front of Bill with his pen and sketched an extra eye stalk. “You really know this creature?” he asked.
“Yeah, we go way back. A few… hundred million years? How long has it been since the Cambrian Explosion?”
Ford didn’t reply, but his silence was the sort that meant he was waiting for Bill to say more, not that he didn’t know the answer.
“That whole shebang was basically just a fistful of cosmic Mentos getting chucked into the Pitt Cola ocean,” Bill explained. “I tossed some of my own in for fun. It made a bunch of weird bugs and stuff.”
“Including one named Terry?”
“What’d you think he’d be called?”
Ford considered the image. “Something a little more… eldritch?”
Pff, seriously? “Stanford.”
“Hm?”
“My name is Bill.”
“Point taken.”
Bill pinned the picture back up, looking almost fondly at that freak of nature. “Tell him I say hi if you bump into him again,” he said. “He’ll probably still eat you alive, but maybe he’ll bite your heads off first to make it humane.”
“I’ll keep that in mind,” Ford said. He returned to his work with something almost like a smile at the corner of his mouth, and it was around that time that Bill bothered to actually look at whatever it was Ford was doing instead of wandering around and touching his things.
“Whatcha workin’ on?” Bill asked, leaning over the table in such a way that he blocked all the light from the nearby lamp.
“A more portable receptacle,” Ford said, and Bill cocked his head. “For your speck.”
Bill’s fingers curled around the snow globe reflexively despite Ford making no move to grab it. “Why?”
“You seemed averse to keeping it in the lab. Something you could carry with you would be less distressing, am I correct?”
“I’m not distressed about it.”
Ford nodded a sarcastic nod. “Starting a shouting match is something non-distressed people do regularly.” Without giving Bill the courtesy of waiting for a clever comeback, Ford stood, and strode around the table, plucking a ruler out of a World’s Greatest (Gr)Uncle mug that sat a few feet to Bill’s right and heading back to his seat.
“I coulda passed that to you,” Bill said, and only then did Ford look up at him.
“Oh. Yes, I suppose you could have.” He chuckled, tapping the end of his pen against the table. “I don’t think I’ve gotten used to you being physically present while I work.” He shuffled through his myriad of notes for a moment, then flipped a few sheets around toward Bill. “You’re bored out of your mind, and I’d rather see you channel that into something productive than have you rifling through my lab.”
Bill reached for the pages. Then he stopped reaching for the pages, his hand half-outstretched, a crease between his brows as similar words fizzled in the back of his brain. Channel that restlessness into something productive, the shrink had told him. Instead of destroying, try to create. They’d found her shivering in a corner two hours after the session had ended, rocking back and forth.
“Here,” Ford said, sliding notes across the table himself. “It’s messy, but —”
Bill snatched them up. “I can read your fancy-pants cursive just fine.” He’d been in the guy’s head, for shit’s sake. He wished he could be in any head but his own for five damn seconds.
“Good. Then I trust you’ll be able to calculate the ideal diameter for the container.”
“No sweat,” Bill said, shaking off the condescending ringing that lingered in his ears. He grabbed a pen and was reminded that his middle finger didn’t have that callus on it that made writing feel less weird. “I could do this in your sleep.”
Ford, already back on task, didn’t respond. Bill begrudgingly followed suit.
Not that Bill would ever admit it (not even if you hung him upside down like a piñata and let a band of gnomes hit him with a big stick), but this was kind of… nice. He smoothed his free thumb over the glass of the snow globe in a lazy rhythm as he worked out strings of numbers and variables that didn’t seem to feel like coming together, but which would when he finally cracked them. Ford made his little thinking sounds across the table; Bill listened to them like they were lo-fi beats to do extradimensional astrophysics to. There was a warmth settling in his chest that he might deign to call comfortable. It was nice. Nice wasn’t something he was accustomed to; this comfort was made simultaneously uncomfortable by virtue of its unfamiliarity.
The cynical asshole that spent a majority of its time grappling for the controls in Bill’s head was raring for a fight, pushing back against the calm and demanding chaos. Shouting his head off while Ford got all grumpy and defensive was fun in a way that this wasn’t. He missed the yelling. He missed the heat of the moment.
He did not miss, however, the mistake Ford just made in his calculations, and he leapt on the opportunity to point it out.
“That should be sixteen over pi.”
Ford squinted at his work, nudging his glasses. “Huh,” he said. “So it should.”
“You sound surprised.”
“I am.” Ford spoke to the paper, scratching and scribbling and reworking. “You just helped me in a completely non-transactional fashion.”
“Hey, I can give out freebies on occasion. Samples are how you keep your customers coming back for more.”
“Humor me with another,” Ford said, pointing his pen toward the glass. “Could you provide any more insight into this miasma that surrounds the speck?”
“It’s ash,” Bill said simply, watching it swirl beneath his palm. “Burned out of existence, remember?”
A beat as Ford scrutinized it, drawing a small magnifying glass from his pocket (his pocket, he kept that on his person) and taking a closer look. “Why does it gravitate toward the speck?” he wondered aloud. “It’s far too small to realistically have a gravitational field this strong.”
“Realistically?” Bill repeated. “Sixer, it’s a dead clump of fragmented particles from a nonexistent dimension. Nothing about that thing’s realistic.”
Still, Ford didn’t seem satisfied. He stood, leaning over the table to bring his face close to the glass, and made more of those thinking sounds (which he had no idea he was doing, and which often lasted for minutes at a time). Bill watched him watching the speck, letting the capital-F Feelings duke it out in the background while he did.
Some part of him, he realized, was still furious with Ford. It always would be. For everything Ford had done in the past, and now for this. For taking this thing, the one thing Bill might have actually cared about in an at all genuine way, and hiding it from him, just because he thought he knew the first thing about what that speck really was.
But Ford had made it a little snow globe. He’d kept it safe. Sure, it had probably been because he thought it was some massive threat to all of existence. He’d still kept it safe. And he’d given it back.
Whatever thoughts were conducive to science-doing, these weren’t them. “I’m taking a break,” Bill said after maybe seven minutes of work, stretching over the back of his chair and feeling each of his thoracic vertebrae pop one by one.
Ford waved him off, chipping away at some equation or other. “Yes, fine.”
Knowing for a fact that Ford wasn’t listening, Bill said, “I’m gonna go upstairs and bug people.” In response, he received another noise of vague affirmation. Bill probably could’ve said he was going to blow a hole through the roof and gotten the go-ahead.
Actually, it’d be funny to test that theory. He picked up his cane and said, “I’m going to blow a hole through the roof.”
“Good, good,” Ford muttered. Bill snorted and got in the elevator, unaware of and unbothered by the fact that he’d left the snow globe behind.
The living room was empty. So was the kitchen. The only signs of life came from the top floor, where the occasional rustle or clink could be faintly heard, so that’s where he went.
The noise came from behind the kids’ closed door. He knocked, because he learned recently that not knocking meant having a hairbrush hurled at his head. (Sue him for wanting to see where the BABBA sing-along was coming from!)
“Yeah?” Dipper said, and that was enough of an invitation, right? Bill was about eighty-four percent sure it was an invitation.
He opened the door to find Dipper seated criss-cross atop his moth-eaten blankets with newspapers spread out before him like a drop cloth. A dozen or so oddly-shaped little gray things were scattered in a loose formation across them, plus an assortment of miniscule paint pots, and a murky glass of water sat on the bedside table.
Dipper looked up and scowled when he saw who had come in, then went back to painting, a little more aggressively than before.
“What are these tiny guys?” Bill asked, approaching the bed and plucking one from the lineup.
“D&D&MoreD minis. That one’s still drying.”
Oh! Ford’s nerd game. Bill remembered him yapping about it, but he didn’t remember the tiny guys. He held the one he’d grabbed up to his eye.
It was an inch-tall figure wielding a sword nearly as big as he was, with pointy ears and a cape that was suspended in an imaginary breeze. The paint job so far wasn’t terrible; the kid had even found a way to make the armor look battle-worn.
“Do you eat these?” Bill asked.
“What? No.” Dipper reached up and plucked it from Bill’s hand, disgruntledly starting to repaint the spots Bill had smudged off. “You put them on the battle map and move them around during combat.”
Bill dragged over an upturned bucket (which had been repurposed into a windmill for a mini-golf hole) and sat on it with an oof. He could recall in great detail all the long nights he’d spent listening to Ford explaining dice rolls and class mechanics; it had turned into something like white noise while Bill did his work — not in a sounds-you-tune-out way, but in a persistent-backing-track way, filling the dreamscape around them.
“When you’ve done actual fantastical battles,” Bill said, squinting at the lineup of mages and fighters and mage-fighters, “it makes made-up ones sound pretty boring.”
“You might like it,” Dipper told him. “Grunkle Ford did fantastical battles for thirty years, and he was super excited to play again when he got back.”
You can take the nerd away from the sci-fi/fantasy romp, but evidently, you can’t take the sci-fi/fantasy romp away from the nerd. Bill was about to say as much when he noticed Dipper struggling to find the right angle to hold a tiny guy to paint the buttons on its cloak, trying to make it catch a sunbeam through the window in just the right way.
“Do you, uh… you want some help with that?” Bill asked. He could hold up a light or something. That’d be super helpful.
“Usually Mabel helps, but she’s at Grenda’s.”
“I meant from me.”
Dipper finally found the time to shoot Bill a glance; it was a scathing one. “No,” he said without elaboration. He dunked his brush into the water, watching the muddled colors swirl.
This was just annoying. Bill was being so nice right now, and the kid wanted nothing to do with it. How was he supposed to stave off boredom if his only viable botheree wouldn’t bite? “Shooting Star was pretty insistent about the whole crafts-with-the-gang thing,” he said, “and painting tiny guys looks like it counts as art, so —”
“Stop calling her that.”
“Heh?”
Dipper stamped the water out of his brush and popped open the black paint, scooping some up to prod details onto the tiny guy with the utmost precision.“Ever since you met us, you’ve called us by those stupid zodiac names. We have real, actual people names, and you don’t use them.” He looked at Bill again. Looked right through him. “Do you not want to see us as people? Is that it?”
That was exactly it, actually. Well spotted. Bill flicked an unpainted tiny guy across the comforter, and Dipper let it go.
“Whether you like it or not,” he said, “we are people. And now, so are you. It’s up to you whether you’re sorry for what you did to us, but you don’t get to treat us like ants anymore.”
Bill had nothing to say to that, and flicking another of the guys would come off as a smidge too petulant. He tapped his cane against the floor. Cleared his throat. Blew a few raspberries. He’d never been good at sitting quietly.
“Are you sorry?” Dipper asked out of the blue — well, out of the green, that’s what was on his brush — and Bill froze with his cane mid-tap.
“For sending your tiny guy to outer space? Not really.”
“No,” Dipper said. “For the puppet show.”
It took a little sifting through the past three hundred years to find the event he was searching for. (He’d had enough Puppet Hours at the Theraprism to add up to at least a few decades.) The memory came to him in a technicolor flash. He recalled the laptop; the satisfaction of smashing it, of crushing it under a kiddie-sized heel; a ring-bearing pig and a whole lot of explosives.
“Are you?” Dipper pressed.
A “Ha! Nope!” was on the tip of Bill’s tongue. Something in the kid’s expression kept him from saying it. Instead, he did something rare: he thought before he spoke. After a minute, he settled on this: “If you went back in time and asked me right then if I was sorry, the answer would be no. I couldn’t think of anything funnier than kicking you out of your body and damning you to an eternity of wandering the mindscape.”
Those weren’t great words, actually. He hadn’t thought them up well enough. But they were true, and that was better than lying. Allegedly.
There was an unreadable stillness to Dipper’s face when he said, “How about if I asked you now?”
“Does it matter now?”
“It matters a lot now.” Dipper had been swilling the paint water for at least a minute. He chewed at the inside of his cheek just like Ford did when he was steeling himself. “I had a panic attack in the lunch line once,” he said, “just because I looked at a dollar bill for too long before I paid with it.”
“That’s embarrassing.”
“Yeah, no shit,” Dipper said, abandoning the paintbrush in the cup. He folded his arms. “So are you sorry, or what?”
Bill very bravely won out against the desire to groan. “I don’t know,” he grumbled, leaning forward and propping his chin on the head of his cane. “Was it funny then? Absolutely. Would I do it again now if I could? I mean… probably not?”
A tch sort of noise passed through Dipper’s teeth. Almost like a laugh. Like the kid was laughing at him.“You’re hopeless,” he said. “You get that, right?”
“Trust me, kid, I’m aware.” He’d been told as much for just about as long as he could remember. Probably longer. It certainly wasn’t news to him. He chuckled lightly, a mirthless thing, and stood, making for the door. “Yeah. I’m aware.” He put a hand on the squeaky door knob. Turned it.
“You can give it a shot.” Dipper said it like pulling the pin on a grenade.
Bill turned, knowing the disbelief showed on his face. “I can?”
“Yes. But you’re sitting on the floor,” Dipper added. “I don’t want you spilling paint all over my bed.”
It sounded dumb. It sounded fun. It sounded like something to do. Bill looked at Dipper, and Dipper looked at him, and Bill broke off the staring contest to pick out a tiny guy and a paintbrush. You could almost call the silence they sat in for the next hour or two companionable, if you didn’t count the fact that Bill kept reaching up to flick the finished figures off the bed.
Seven hours later, back in the lab, his spine potentially stuck in this hunched-over-the-paper posture forever, Bill decided that human exhaustion was a miserable thing.
He had powered through it in Ford’s body plenty of times, but there had always been a degree of giddiness to fuel him, paired with the knowledge that he could leave whenever he wanted. He had neither of those things now. What he did have was various unpleasant physical sensations (including, but not limited to: stinging eyes, a pounding head, and a painful leg) and that nagging boredom that gnawed at his brain like a… thing with lots of teeth. A teeth-y thing. Screw it. He was too tired to come up with anything good.
He tapped his pencil irritably against the snow globe, ready to crack and tell Ford it was time to stop doing nerd stuff and go the fuck to sleep. When he opened his mouth to do so, he realized Ford had beaten him to the punch; he’d dozed off sitting up, his chin propped in a rapidly slackening hand. The sight was a familiar one; it was the window he used to spend hours waiting for, toiling away in the mindscape until Ford left a chink in his caffeinated armor. There was an instinctual tug in the pit of Bill’s stomach that told him to go go go, get in there, break something break everything break him, and just as he remembered that no, that wasn’t how things went around here anymore, Ford’s chin slipped and he lurched upright with an almost cartoonish gasp.
The Morning, Sleeping Beauty on the tip of Bill’s tongue died as he got a proper look at the wild eyes, the harried expression, the heaving chest that Bill was equally as familiar with. There was even a sticky note plastered to Ford’s forehead, courtesy of his habit of zonking out with research materials still in his hands.
Bill was still in the process of sifting something to say out of the sand in his brain when Ford zeroed in on the note half-obscuring his vision. He ripped it away in a flash and read it feverishly, horrified anticipation consuming his expression. It wasn’t until he processed that all it said was some string of numbers or other and not an ominous all-caps game of text-based telephone that the fire in his eyes dimmed a little.
“Remember two hours ago,” Bill asked, smirking at the way Ford jumped in response, “when I told you to quit it with the equations and go to bed?”
Rather than answering him, Ford shuffled through some papers and kept his head down. The air between them was filled with the little beeps and boops of various radars and machines having conversations of their own.
“Jumpy and sleep-deprived isn’t a good look on you, IQ,” Bill said. “Trust me, I would know — Hey now, hang on, no need to hop the train to Scowl Town.” He leaned back in his chair to very casually stretch out his leg, and not at all to remove himself from the radius of Ford’s radioactive glare.
“If nothing else, I’d like to think I’m entitled to scowling,” Ford said. “Especially around you.”
Had Bill not proven he could be trusted at least enough to not lunge at Ford in his sleep anymore? Not that he had the power to do so, but that was beside the point. “Around little old me? Your favorite study buddy? You wound me, Fordsy.”
“Do I need to remind you of the things I used to wake up to when you hung around?”
“I remember them just fine,” Bill said, wishing he could go to bed already. He was tired. His thoughts were soup. “Bloody knuckles, a snake, some hilarious back-and-forth sticky note banter. It was funny! We were having fun!”
Ford scoffed in what sounded a whole lot like disbelief. He held up three fingers, counting off on them one by one as he said, “The full-body ache of having pounded on a door for hours on end, a highly probable chance of being injected with lethal venom, a needy little beast wasting my supplies as a constant reminder that the body I inhabited wasn’t mine anymore, all in an effort to use my research and my mind to destroy the universe as I knew it. And if we’re discussing reminders,” he went on, like he wasn’t the one who’d brought them up in the first place, “how about the night you caused me physical pain beyond anything I’ve ever experienced, all to ensure I knew that I was your property?” Ford spat the last word and slammed his hands on the table, shoving himself to his feet.
Okay, come on. Hadn’t they been getting along? What happened to the Ford that had been tolerating him? Was one little triggering flashback all it took to jump back to square one? “It wasn’t that bad —”
“You don’t get to tell me whether or not it was bad!” Ford swatted his notes from the desktop with a sharp sweep of his arm. They fluttered down around him like frantic moths in search of a light they would never find. “You tugged on every nerve ending in my body just to see how far you could stretch them. You hacked away at memories because it was fun to watch me fail to piece them back together on my own.”
“I was just making a point,” Bill told him. Judging by the way Ford bared his teeth, it had been the wrong thing to say. There was no winning with this guy. “I talked big game to scare you into doing what I wanted. It’s not my fault it worked on you.”
There was an entirely unfamiliar gleam in Ford’s eye. He pushed back from the table and stalked around it, closing in on Bill with each step. “All of this,” he said, “is your fault. You wanted power. You lied to me. You bled me dry for the sake of your sick, twisted schemes, and you laughed at me all the while. If I had never been ripped from this dimension, you would have persisted until one of us died. The folly of my hubris is my own to contend with. The things you did to me because of it are yours to shoulder.”
Christ, had he rehearsed this or something? “The folly of my hubris,” oh, please. All the theatrics and the whining and the blame-flinging and — You know what? Fine! Fine. Ford wanted to play the damsel? Bill would put him in distress.
“You don’t have a clue how lucky you were when that portal turned on, Sixer,” he hissed, taking up his cane and slowly rising to Ford’s level. He could feel the dials turning in his head, tuning out the version of him that got all mushy about doing astrophysics with his old partner and cranking up the version that wanted to make that old partner scream. “Your body was so close to collapse from everything I’d put it through, I could practically taste it. Getting sucked into the Nightmare Realm gave you just enough adrenaline to slip away from me — but did you ever stop to think about what would’ve happened if you’d stayed here?”
“What are you getting at?” Though the sharpness of Ford’s voice didn’t dull, he narrowed his eyes in the way that meant he was picking up on the implications far too slowly for his liking.
Bill nearly choked on the laugh he swallowed down. “If that pathetic fist fight had ended in this dimension,” he said, “you two would’ve run out of steam. After that, it wouldn’t have been long before you passed out, and god knows your lesser clone wouldn’t have left with that journal if he thought you were in trouble. It would have been you and your old pal Stanley, alone in a cabin in the middle of the woods, and you would be sound asleep. Remember what that used to mean?”
The color drained from Ford’s face. He’d never been much good at keeping his fear under wraps; half the time, Bill hadn’t even needed to read his thoughts to know exactly what he was thinking. “Speak plainly,” Ford said, and Bill happily obliged.
“It meant damage.” Bill was grinning so wide it stung, but he didn’t stop. He couldn’t stop. Manic heat was thrumming through his veins. “When I took you out on our little date nights, I did whatever it took to wear you down in the funniest ways possible. Nobody in this town meant a thing to you except the hillbilly, and I couldn’t have you getting close enough to reconcile with him, could I? Cutting you off from the town was my best bet.” He took a step closer, cane clicking against the concrete. Ford didn’t back away, but Bill could tell the desire was there, making him shift his weight between his feet. “There was only so much I could do to you all on your own. But once your brother came into the picture — well, that was a golden opportunity.
“Torturing your body wore you out. Made you stupid. But you were so convinced you could endure it, I started to wonder if you’d ever break. Torturing Stanley, though — that’s where the real action was waiting.” Stanley Pines, the man who’d ended it all, the grifter who conned his way into destroying a plan a trillion years in the making.
A shadow passed over Ford’s face. “I’d recommend shutting your mouth,” he said, “before I seal it with alien adhesive and throw the recipe for solvent into the bottomless pit.”
“You don’t wanna hear all the fun plans I had in store for him?” Bill asked. He shouldn’t be saying this. It had been so long since he’d gotten to do something he shouldn’t. It had been so long.
Ford started to speak, but Bill shushed him, waving a hand like he had a hilarious story to tell. “No no no, hang on, you’re gonna love this. First, I was gonna let him spend a good few minutes trying to shake you awake. Make him think he knocked you out cold. Then I’d sit you up nice and slow — really milk it, maybe fake a broken nose. Maybe actually break your nose. And once he got a good, hard look at all the damage he caused, I’d rub enough salt in the wound to drive him nuts. I’d tell him Dad was right. He was a lowlife, a thug, a useless freeloader who couldn’t manage one simple task, not even when the fate of the universe was at stake.”
The hollow horror twisting Ford’s features was just as delicious now as it had been back then. Was it really so easy to drag him down again? “I didn’t — I’d never —”
“Ah, but he didn’t know that, did he?” It was impossible to wrestle the untethered glee from his voice. “You abandoned him, Sixer. You left him to rot. Then you called him back to use him and send him away all over again.
“All he ever wanted was to stick by your side through thick and thin, but you were way too good for him. He would’ve stuck to your side like some blood-sucking parasite. He’d already ruined your future once — why let him ruin it a second time? No,” Bill said with a theatrical sigh, “no, him hanging around was no use. He didn’t belong here. He didn’t belong anywhere other than face-down in a ditch five miles south of Vegas.”
Ford’s jaw worked against the weight of a thousand outbursts, yet he didn’t seem capable of saying a single word. His breaths were growing shallower; his defiance was tinged with a creeping, crawling dread. The sight of it was ambrosia, flooding Bill’s chest with a radiating sense of power. Not the magical kind, but the tangible kind. The kind that showed you plain as day that you’d wrapped a stupid little human around your finger so tightly, you could shatter them without an ounce of effort.
He could’ve left it there. But he had missed this. He needed more of it.
“And then,” he crooned, “I would tie him up, grab a knife, and get to work. I’d cut him open piece by piece. Death by a thousand triangles — carved into his skin with your own hand, one line at a time. Maybe this time, I’d let you watch. We can share, you know — you didn’t have to be asleep. How long do you think you’d last, seeing your brother’s life bleed out of him? How sick would you get with the knowledge that you were the one who brought him here in the first place?”
If Bill were in Ford’s mind right now, he knew what it would look like. Klaxons blaring, fires burning, people screaming. A thousand disasters that were all his fault, his fault, his fault. This was how it had been, and this was how it should be. Him and Ford, harrowing and harrowed, hurt and hurting, united in agony. Bill relished in his search for the next thread to tug loose. How many could he pull before unraveling Ford completely?
“One more word,” Ford breathed, and oh, oh, how cute! He was talking back! “Say one more word about any of this, and you will live to regret it.”
“I already regret everything about this whole setup,” Bill said, spreading his arms wide. “But not as much as Stan should regret coming to help you thirty years ago. Worst mistake he ever made in his grand fuck-up of a life.”
There was a visible crack in Ford’s expression; a breaking point. Bill expected to have a mug thrown at him, or for Ford to start shouting, or for the Axolotl to beam him back to space jail because he was failing so miserably at becoming any better than he was before.
He did not expect Stanford Pines to punch him in the face.
Bill toppled backward with the force of it but Ford caught him as he fell, one hand clutching Bill’s collar, the other throwing punch after punch after precise, deliberate punch. There was plenty of time for Bill to fight back; to shake Ford off; to scramble away. But he didn’t, because this weak, fleshy body would only make a mockery of his attempts. No other reason.
“All this talk,” Ford said, backing Bill further and further into the corner of the lab, “it’s born of your fury toward the fact that he beat you. The trickster finally tricked.” He released Bill’s shirt only to shove him backward, sending the cane clattering from his grip and making Bill’s leg burn in protest as he landed on it far too hard.
“You think I’m jealous of that good-for-nothing —” Another shove. Another stumble. Ow, ow, ow.
“For nothing, you say? He sacrificed his own mind just to send you back to the cesspool you crawled out of all those billions of years ago. He risked it all, and it paid off.” Was that… pride in Ford’s voice? How could he possibly be proud of that imbecile? “He’s a braver man than I’ll ever be, and he’s stronger than you ever could’ve hoped to become. Even with your infinite cosmic power, you lost. You lost to a grown man playing dress-up, all because you were too greedy to stop and think about whose hand you were shaking.”
Fuck this. Ford was not supposed to have the upper hand. That wasn’t how this worked. They’d bicker, Ford would spew an empty threat, and then Bill would find some fun new way to have him shaking in his boots hard enough to cause a minor earthquake. Sure, Ford had fought back during Weirdmageddon, but it had been a pitiful attempt. It was — oh, damn it all, it really was Stanley who came out on top. The satisfaction inside him curdled as he stepped forward —
And was hit again. And again. And again. A push, a punch, a smack, all designed to disorient, forcing him back into the corner, trapping him, and this wasn’t getting him fucking anywhere, why was he even doing this to begin with? Where was the fun in it all if he was losing? “Sixer —” WHAM. “Listen —” WHAM.
“I did listen to you,” Ford said, yanking Bill closer by the front of his shirt, “and you know damn well where it got me.”
“Pretty close to becoming an overlord of all reality, if I’m remembering right,” Bill said around a lip that felt too big and tasted like copper.
Ford actually laughed at that, hot against Bill’s face. “You were never going to make good on that promise,” he said. “You would’ve turned me into a goldfish and left me to asphyxiate in the dirt the instant your plan was complete.”
Did Ford really think so little of him? Bill had given him every reason to, but — That didn’t matter. What mattered was getting back under Ford’s skin and ripping as many things apart as he could. “And dispose of such a doting servant? At the very least, you made a great back scratcher.”
WHAM. Something threatened to crunch with that one.
“I’ve tried to be nice,” Ford said, panting now. “I’ve tried to be better than you. But you don’t deserve that, do you? In all the years you’ve plagued the multiverse, has anyone ever punished you for what you’ve done in a way that mattered?”
Bill’s hair tumbled over his forehead and stuck to the blood that seeped from his skin. “Oh, that’s cute. That is beyond cute.” Really, it was. Seeing Ford all red in the face over him again was like watching an old pet remember how to roll over. “Three hundred years in the Theraprism, doing arts and crafts and sharing circles, stuck with a rotating cast of a thousand assholes with nothing better to do than ask me to open up about my terrible crimes, you think that wasn’t punishing? You think you could do better? Show me what you got, Sixer.”
Show him, Ford did. A sickening blow connected with Bill’s jaw and radiated up the side of his head. His already-split lip rammed into his teeth, spilling blood across Bill’s tongue as ringing filled his ear. Bill just smiled, knowing it would send Ford further down this endless spiral. Ford grabbed him again and flung him at the table in the center of the room, then stalked toward him with a split-knuckled fist prepped and ready to punch.
Then came a noise that wasn’t in Bill’s head. A clanky, rumbly noise. An elevator noise, followed by a gruff, befuddled voice.
“Whoa, whoa, hey, what’s goin’ on here?” Stan hovered in the doorway for approximately three seconds before launching into action, hoofing it across the room with impressive speed and grabbing Ford by the shoulders before he could sink another blow into Bill’s gut.
“Speak of the devil.” Bill held himself up on the edge of the table, longing for his crutch but too fired up to think to find it, as Ford wrenched against his brother’s grip.
“What’s going on here,” Ford said, “is what should’ve happened the instant this whelp turned up on our doorstep.”
Stan looked from one bloodied man to the other and determined that only one of them was actually doing the bleeding. “What, beating him senseless?”
“Can’t beat something out of me that I never had to begin with,” Bill said. His smile threatened to falter when he moved the wrong way and felt half a dozen flares of miscellaneous pain, but he held it firmly in place, never breaking his gaze away from Ford’s.
“Alright, let’s take it easy,” Stan said, giving Ford a little jostle that clearly meant Quit it, I’m not letting go. “Punching’s my thing, Poindexter. Especially when it comes to this guy.” He winked at Bill with far too much enjoyment for his own good.
“I’ve learned how to throw a punch,” Ford said, his voice low. If Stan didn’t still have a hold on him, Bill might have actually felt a molecule of worry, but as things currently stood, the rage in that man’s face could sustain Bill for days. Ford looked about ready to blow every gasket he had. “I had to, during the thirty years I lost to fighting for my life, meandering dimensions in search of a way to destroy you.”
“It must have stung pretty badly when you almost did,” Bill said, feeling a seed of chaos take root beneath his words. He could work this. “A few more seconds, and maybe you would’ve had me! But world famous device-ruiner Stanley fired up our precious portal right when it was time for the money shot.”
Stan’s poker face was admirable, but there was no disguising the way his eyes cut toward his brother. Is he lying? he asked without asking. Ford didn’t answer, but he did stop struggling.
“Stan,” he said, suddenly even and cool. “Give us a minute.”
“You sure that’s a good idea?” It certainly didn’t seem like one.
“Approximately ninety-two percent sure, yes.” When Ford saw the way his brother was looking at him over his shoulder, he elaborated. “Bill is attempting to stoke feelings of animosity which I haven’t harbored in several years. He’s not going to succeed, obviously, but he’s making this conversation much more difficult than it needs to be. You have my word that I won’t punch him again.”
“I’m holdin’ you to that,” Stan said. “You want me to DVR Ducktective once I’m up there? You’re gonna miss the reveal.”
Ford shook his head as Stan stepped into the elevator. “No need. All signs point to the hotel custodian.”
“SON OF A —”
The doors slid closed. For nearly a minute, there was dead silence. Even the beeps and whirs of the computers seemed to dull to a whisper. They watched each other, breathing hard, having lost track of the fight and unsure of where to pick it up.
“What do you want from me here?” Bill asked, unmoving. Moving made the pain wake up. “If you need a few more swings, go crazy. I won’t tell the old man.”
“We’re the exact same age.”
Bill batted his lashes. “You wear it better.”
“I want you to apologize,” Ford said abruptly. Despite the return of that weighty quiet in the wake of his demand, he didn’t say more.
“You’re gonna have to be a little more specific,” Bill said. “I’ve been responsible for more atrocities than you could count on all those fingers even if I duplicated your hands eighteen times.”
Bill could see him flipping through a mental card catalog of dialogue options. “If nothing else,” Ford said, “I want you to apologize to me. You’ve tormented me for half my life. I’ll never get those years back. And while it’s my own fault for falling for your tricks, you are the one who set each of those gears into motion. It was you — not myself, not Stanley, not the twins or the town — who ruined everything to the brink of irrevocability, all for the sake of your world-ending college party.” Ford folded his arms neatly over his chest and looked Bill right in the eye. Well? I’m waiting.
Spending a thousand years at the bottom of the ocean would have been preferable to this. First the kid, now Ford, holding him at knifepoint for two words that meant nothing in the grand scheme of things. “Fine. I’m… eugh. I’m sorry.” The word tasted foul in Bill’s mouth. Or maybe that was the half-dried blood. “I maybe feel a tiny bit bad about driving you into paranoia-induced seclusion, semi-permanently damaging your right eye, and torturing you a whole bunch, even if all those things were funny at the time. Most of it was just a stab at getting your attention. I hope we can… move past it, or whatever.” He tacked that last bit on in an effort to smother the drop of honesty that had somehow weaseled its way into his half-assed apology.
“Excellent.” (Ford did not seem to find it excellent.) “You’re sorry. Sorry for what you did to me, because you’re facing the consequences of it. Now what about all the other lives you’ve ruined? The cults you started and slaughtered? The people you’ve possessed? The lackeys you cast aside like broken toys when they don’t interest you anymore? Are you sorry for what you did to them?”
Not really. Not yet. This was moving too fast. “I —”
“How about the entire population of your home dimension?” Ford demanded, pointing at the snow globe that sat innocently on the table. “Are you sorry for their fates?”
The fire that had flooded him was suddenly doused. His insides had turned to wisps of smoke. “No,” Bill said, licking more blood from his lips. He didn’t look at the speck. He didn’t want to. Ford was blowing the scope of this apology tour way wider than he had proposed it to be, and Bill was far from prepared for it. “I freed them.”
“You killed them!”
“You sound just like Time Baby!” Bill stamped his foot like a petulant child and winced when a shockwave rolled up his leg in response. Composure be damned. If Ford could throw a hissy fit, he’d throw one ten times bigger. “Massacre this, devastation that, wa, wa wa. How would you know? You weren’t there! I broke a Flat world free of its chains and everyone was grateful for it.”
Ford raked a hand through his hair. “Why do you insist on telling such a falsified version of the story?” he asked, something like incredulity catching on the rough edges of his voice. “I understand lying by omission when you were trying to trick me into caring about you, but that jig is well past up. I’ve spoken with the Oracle. I know the truth.”
“Taking gossip from a hermit in a bathrobe as hard fact,” Bill said, pretending that the bit about tricking Ford into caring didn’t sting. “Falling through that portal must’ve really scrambled your brain, Sixer. I thought you were smarter than that.”
“Stop deflecting!”
“Stop being annoying!” Something was stirring in the ashes in Bill’s chest, and he couldn’t make it stop.
“If asking you to admit to committing genocide is annoying, I don’t know what to say,” said Ford. Another laugh, this one a touch more frenzied than the first. “You’re so utterly enamored with this lie, but no matter how many times you tell it, it won’t change what you did to your dimension. To your people. To your family —”
Shut up shut up shut up shut up shut UPyour mouth.” These emotions — they changed so quickly, hit so hard. If he could have ripped his own brain apart and yanked them out, he would’ve done it then and there.
“Why should I? You never have.”
“Because I know what I’m talking about,” Bill said, “and you’re an idiot. For once in your life, quit while you’re ahead.” Something volatile was roiling in his gut, and fuck, he missed not having a gut for things to roil in. Having a human body meant every word Ford shot at him was a dart packed with a different poison; one to set his heart hammering, one to make his face flush, one to make his hands shake. “I didn’t even have a mouth to watch until two weeks ago, when the frilly pink bastard on high saw fit to damn me to this piece of shit planet.” This body, this body, he hated this body.
A socially conscious person would have known to let it lie. Ford was not a socially conscious person. “Maybe you deserved damnation if —”
Bill snapped his fingers, and both of them froze.
They hovered in the anticipation of a cataclysmic magical reaction that would set the lab ablaze or call down a lightning strike. Nothing like that happened, of course, because Bill had no access to magic of any kind. No magic, no nothing. He was nothing.
Bill’s eye went unfocused. He took a step back. Two. Three. When he bumped into the table again, he reached behind him, and his fingers closed around a handle. He didn’t care what it was; it was heavy, and heavy meant hurt. He reared his arm back and threw it as hard as he possibly could.
“What the hell!” Ford dove aside, nearly putting his shoulder through a computer screen in the process. His head whipped toward the wrench that had lodged itself in the drywall at the opposite end of the room. Bill had another tool, a sharper tool, in his hand long before Ford got his bearings.
“Shut the fuck up before I start experimenting on the penetrability of the human skull,” he said, holding a screwdriver to his temple like a loaded gun.
“Bill, what —?”
“Shut up!” Bill pressed harder almost without thinking, feeling the point dig into his skin but not break it. He wanted to break it. “You and the Axolotl and the therapists and fucking Time Baby, you’re so persistent, and for what? Is it funny to you? Do you have a death wish? What do you think pressing that big red button over and over is going to achieve? You know what they say about the definition of insanity.”
Slowly, as if trying to avoid startling a wounded animal, Ford moved infinitesimally closer. Bill let him. Maybe he’d come near enough for Bill to get a swing in.
“You all act like you’re winning some mind game against me,” Bill said, “but you’re not even close! I’m the king of mind games. I am the mind games. I drove six therapists clinically insane over the course of a single century back in Barbie’s ultimate nuthouse. I convinced another inmate to pull out their hair one strand at a time and eat it like spaghetti!”
Ford extended a hand, and that was close enough, actually, that was more than close enough, that was way too close, and the light bulb above Bill’s head shattered as he screamed at Ford to STOP, glowing sparks and bits of glass biting into Bill’s skin like static.
“I can still see right through you,” he said, clenching his teeth against the sting but reveling in it, too. “Everything you do, the little lies and the accusations and the kindness, it’s all to drive me crazy enough to get me sent back there — but I’ve been crazy since before crazy was invented, and I’ll be crazy long after you’re nothing but dust. You think you can break me, Stanford Pines? Not if I break me first!”
What came next should have been blinding pain. What came instead was a linebacker’s tackle, checking him against the wall, knocking the tool from his hand and engulfing him completely. Ford wrestled him down to the cold concrete floor; unlike the night he’d first been dragged here, Bill fought. He fought with his knees, with his teeth, with whatever he could use to hurt and hurt and hurt. One by one, each of these things were restrained.
He was forced onto his back, staring up past the blur that was Ford’s face at the multicolored array of blinking LEDs in the ceiling. Ford sat on his legs and pressed on his shoulders, pinning him down, powerless, puny. Bill hadn’t been restrained like this in a trillion years. All he wanted was to break and burn and maim, but the longer he was held this way, Flat on the floor and blinking up at distant lights, the more the fight drained out of him. His heaving breaths turned shallow. With what little range of motion he had left, he grasped the hem of Ford’s coat in limp fists, peering up at him, unable to so much as tug on the fabric.
“Get off.” The words caught in his throat, barely audible. When Ford didn’t move, he tried again. “Please.” Could someone just put him out of his misery? “Ford, please. Get off.”
The smallness of his voice was what did it. Ford blinked once. Twice. Like he didn’t recognize the man pinned beneath him. Then he rolled to the side, and the instant the pressure lifted, Bill flung himself upright, landing on his hands and knees. He stared down at the smooth, speckled floor; looked around him at the screens and scanners and rolling chairs. There was more than just Up. He wasn’t trapped anymore. No one was.
No one was.