Actions

Work Header

Rating:
Archive Warning:
Category:
Fandom:
Relationship:
Characters:
Additional Tags:
Language:
English
Stats:
Published:
2024-12-01
Words:
2,211
Chapters:
1/1
Comments:
8
Kudos:
122
Bookmarks:
11
Hits:
588

take my hand

Summary:

Ford rubs his thumb absently along the edge of the ring, feeling the faint, faint tingling of the energy inside it. The last remaining atom of Bill's home.
“You chose this finger on purpose,” Ford starts morosely, “right?”
“I mean.  Yeah.  You people call it a ring finger.”
“On my left hand,” Ford clarifies, looking over at him.  Bill is looking quizzically back.
“Yeah.  It's significant.  It… it's the only thing I could think of.”  Bill flits his pupil away to glower at the bonfire before them.  “I didn't know what else to do to make you believe me.”

Notes:

okay I'm sorry about my last fic loooool here take this one, it's at least just bittersweet. This takes place in an AU I've been cooking up dubbed Atlas AU (At The Last Second). You can read more about it on my tumblr or twitter! Basically a slightly OOC Bill changes his mind at the last second when Ford gets sent through the portal and is now trying to make things right, helping Stan build the portal back on earth while keeping Ford safe in hostile alien dimensions. To prove his intention he's given Ford a ring that contains the last remaining atom of his home dimension. When Bill returns Ford home, Ford returns his home. It's a promise, not a deal.

Work Text:

After drinking one cup of… whatever beverage is handed to him (and ignoring Bill's pissing and moaning about how it wasn't compatible with his biology and whatever else he was prattling on about), Ford is pleasantly buzzed, floating in a comfortably warm fog on the sidelines as the other beings dance around the big bonfire.  Bill has given Ford the ability to communicate with the local populace, as he has in other dimensions, and he's been excitedly jotting down notes on the festival in his journal - it was some kind of winter ritual, historically done to ensure good harvest the next year but has since morphed into a celebration meant to boost morale and help them get through the gloom of winter.  And what a gloom it was - outside the safe atmosphere of the bonfire, the temperature is uncomfortable for the native beings and inhospitable for Ford.

He settles into the mossy log and tucks the journal into his knapsack.  He'd been attempting to illustrate the dance they'd been doing but the alcohol (or whatever it was) loosened his stroke enough that he wasn't satisfied with any sketch he'd come up with.  Maybe he could sleep on it and clean the sketches up later.  Instead he resolves himself to just… exist in the moment.  It's the first time in quite a long time (one year back on Earth, if Bill's recounting is to be believed) he's had a moment of peace such as this - so many of the dimensions Ford and Bill had found themselves in seemed to be in varying states of turmoil, and even with Bill keeping him safe, he never felt safe.  

The triangle in question bobs in place over the log to Ford's left, hunkered down with his arms crossed and a disgruntled wrinkle to his eye.  He's sulking with every single atom of his being.  “Y’know,” Ford says, tongue relaxed by the drink, feeling a little more willing to chat with Bill, “you can go join them.  Don't you like dancing?”  He doesn’t let himself think about their karaoke night in the mindscape however long ago.

“Not in the mood,” comes the flat response.

Ford furrows his brow.  “If you're so steamed, you can go somewhere else.  You don't have to stay here and kill my buzz.”

“Oh, kill your buzz?”  Bill straightens up, flipping from unimpressed to unhappy.  “Kill your buzz?  That's rich.  If I hadn't helped your body process that drink, it would've calcified the bile in your stomach!”  Ford screws his nose up at him.  “But luckily I was here and the worst you gotta deal with is a mild hangover tomorrow!”  He puffs out a heavy sigh and sinks back down, folding his arms again.  “Honestly.  You have negative self-preservation.  If I’m not floating over you like a mother hen you’ll get yourself torn apart molecule by molecule.”

“I'm so sorry my being trapped in another dimension is inconveniencing you,” Ford seethes back, then all at once he stands up, dusting his pants off.  “Y'know what?  If you won't leave, I will.  You can stew here in your bad mood and I'm going to enjoy myself for the first time in a year.”

Bill starts to say something terse but Ford stomps off, inserting himself into the ring of dancers surrounding the fire.  They chitter excitedly as they welcome Ford into the fold.  While he'd been trying to draw them dancing he'd caught on to the moves - but he was by no means a dancer, and the… buzz didn't make him a better one.  Still, it's something to keep his mind off Bill.  Keep his mind off being so far away from home and all the comforts he's ever known and loved.  He lets the ring of dancers swirl him around the bonfire, hopping from one partner to the next.  The cycle finishes and he grabs onto the waist of the being he ends up with, one of the shorter or the species - he hasn't caught onto any sexual dimorphism, or even trimorphism, and he doesn't even know if dancing is meant to have heterosexual partnerships in their customs. He didn't care.  He was having fun for once.  They gracelessly clomp through the little partner bit of the dance, Ford laughing as he tries to avoid stepping on the creature's soft feet with his big steel-toed boots.

The music lilts and they bow to each other before entering another ring.  Ford lets himself sink into the moment, lets the warmth of the fire and the beating of the drums and the touch of the other beings’ hands and the buzz of the drink carry him.  

Another round of the group dance ends and he lands on a much taller creature that takes his hips readily in two of its four arms - and without warning the arms are gone from him, and instead Bill floats eye-level before him.

“I changed my mind!” he grumbles, his wide eye catching the flickering of the flames beside them.  One tiny little hand rests in his open, outstretched palm, the other winding around his waist a few times.

“You can't dance this dance while you're floating,” Ford chides, and Bill shifts easily into his makeshift human form.  This form is taller than Ford but his hands are thinner, daintier.  Where he'd once had his little rubber hose arm wrapped possessively around Ford's waist, now a three-fingered human hand sits on his hipbone.  The other intertwines fingers with Ford's.  The difference in fingers makes it awkward, and Bill seems to realize this, casting a sheepish glance at their hands before they step into the motions of the dance.  “If I didn’t know any better I’d say you were jealous,” Ford puffs out, entirely as a joke.  

But Bill's human face is serious.  “I was.”  Ford is shocked into silence, another teasing remark dying on his tongue.  Bill slips his right hand free of Ford's left long enough to trace a fingertip over the ring he'd put there the day Ford was thrust out of his dimension.  “I'm only here because of you,” he says, as if it was the most obvious thing in the world.  He takes Ford's hand again as they continue the dance.  Ford's losing the rhythm quickly but Bill easily leads him through it.  “That makes you mine.”

Though he'd tried not to he now has no choice but to remember their karaoke night - or what of it he could remember.  His hand in Bill's.  Bill's hands on his body.  How easy he was to bend to Bill's touch, dancing with him in a blissful haze.  How easy the slide of their lips were against each other.  He could have that again, right now.  “I'm not yours,” Ford spits back instead.  The dance ends.  The other partners bow but Ford and Bill stand resolutely upright before each other.  “I'm here because of you.  All of this is because of you.  I will never be yours.”  Ford shoulders his way past Bill out of the circle of dancers.  The dance continues on behind him.  It doesn't need him to progress, after all.  He wants to stomp off far away but the night is too cold, so he resigns himself to the same log he'd been sitting on before.

Bill, in his normal form again, drifts out of the ring of dancers and resumes his place by Ford's side.  Ford puffs out a disbelieving laugh.  There they were again, sitting side by side on the same log, more irate than they were when they left it.  Ford rubs his thumb absently along the edge of the ring, feeling the faint, faint tingling of the energy inside it. The last remaining atom of Bill's home.

“You chose this finger on purpose,” Ford starts morosely, “right?”

“I mean.  Yeah.  You people call it a ring finger.”

“On my left hand,” Ford clarifies, looking over at him.  Bill is looking quizzically back.

“Yeah.  It's significant.  It… it's the only thing I could think of.”  Bill flits his pupil away to glower at the bonfire before them.  “I didn't know what else to do to make you believe me.”

“I'm sorry,” Ford breathes out, a mirthless smile tugging at the corner of his mouth.  “Could you repeat that?  You didn't know something?”

“Yuck it up,” Bill grouses, sinking down to actually sit on the log.  He folds his arms tightly over his knees.  “Yeah.  I don't know everything.  That make you feel better?”  He digs a tiny fist into the ground and drags it around, absently tracing lines into the dirt.  “I know all there is to know about destroying things.  Places.  Lives.  Trust.  But I don't know the first thing about repairing something.”  Bill shakes the dirt off his hand and folds it in his lap.  “Your putz of a brother hit the nail on the head on that.  Don't ever tell him I said it, though.”

The mention of his brother clutches his heart, which he hadn’t realized was beating so rapidly.  Bill had claimed to be meeting with Stan in the mindscape, helping him put the portal together.  He’d come back from these meetings steaming more often than not which inclined him to believe Bill truly was interacting with Stan.  The offer to join him in the mindscape was always there, but Ford would be a damn fool to ever put himself at Bill's mercy again.  “What… did Stanley say?” he asks against his better judgment.

“Oh, he put it so eloquently,” Bill snorts.  “That I would ‘put this place in the rearview like I did with my home, and go fuck things up in some new place over and over, and hope something changes’.  Only it never does because I'm still… me.”  A pensive silence follows, broken only by the thudding of the music, the tamping of the aliens’ feet, the crackling of the fire.  “And ‘me’ doesn't know how to fix things,” he adds at last, like a confession.

“I don't think I know more than you about that,” Ford replies.  "Stan and I... god, I don't know how things got to the way they did.  Everything seems so stupid now."

A short laugh emanates from Bill.  “Cool.  So all three of us are screw-ups.”

Ford chews on the conversation.  “What changed?”

“Hm?”

“With me.”  He takes in a shaky breath, steeling his expression.   “Why did you want to help me at all?  Why not just… put me in your rearview too?  Why are you here?”

Bill’s pupil, a thin, wicked slash, darts around Ford’s face, over and over.  “Sixer, I don't know that either,” he replies, voice subdued for what may be the first time in his existence.  “I wish I knew.  Maybe when I get you home I’ll find out.”

“And then what?”

“What do you mean?  Then you can do whatever you want, I dunno, go on a boat with that farkakte brother of yours-”

“No, what will you do?” Ford interrupts.  This seems to catch Bill off-guard, eye turning wide and round like a dinner-plate.  “Is destroying my dimension all you ever planned to do?  Isn’t there something you… want?”

Bill sits on the log, pulsing softly with yellow light.  Ford has come to understand it’s him thinking.  “Tell me about the boat thing,” Bill says at last.

“What about it?”

“I guess just… why does that matter to you?  Why is that what you want?”

It’s not really the response he was expecting, but it wasn’t unusual for Bill to deflect when asked to talk about himself, so Ford sighs and leans back on his arms.  “Stan and I, when we were kids… it was kind of just us against the world.  Shitty homelife, shitty school life, and…” he fidgets his fingers against the log, “well, it just was all shit.  We wanted to leave it all behind.  A boat seemed like the perfect way to do that.  No neglectful parents, no abusive peers, no unfair school systems, no unjust society, just… us.  And a whole world ahead of us.  A world full of chances to start over.  Find something new, something good.”  Ford chances a look down at Bill, who’s not looking at him.  “That’s out there for you, too.  Entire dimensions, entire realities.  You can start over.  Maybe you don’t know what you’re looking for, but you should… look.  And you might find it.  You don’t have to know everything ahead of time.  Sometimes the most amazing things in your life are things you never even dreamed of, things you couldn’t have seen coming.”

“I was that to you, once,” Bill murmurs.  

Embarrassed heat flushes through his body.  “Once.”  He runs his thumb against the ring again.

With a little sigh Bill drifts up into the air and pats himself down in the same way Ford had, little strands off moss floating off of him.  “I’ll leave you alone,” he announces.  “Try not to die, okay?  No more weird food.”

“I think I can handle that,” Ford replies.  

Without another word Bill flits off into the night of the strange alien world.  Ford watches him go until the pallid light of his body winks out, then he turns back to the bonfire.  He feels just a little colder now.