Chapter Text
This game is already starting to get boring.
Pull back. Comments like that are unhelpful and meaningless without a broader context.
Context, context, context. That’s all it is, these days. Event -> Action -> consequence. That’s life. Very little else. All that is surprising, or interesting, or fascinating, or god forbid, unique, it all becomes pale-faced and Known in the horrifying gospel of context.
A Mystery is nothing more than a problem that has yet to be solved.
Stanford can’t afford mysteries anymore. Mysteries are how you almost lose an arm. Or a leg. Or a friend. Or a home.
Mysteries are his downfall, his anathema, divine providence– hah! Look at him, invoking a strain of God he never believed in– and prophet of failure. He can look at the data, see the very living– or dead– proof that an obsession with the unexplained charts a very clear map to why he’s even here in the first place, and yet he just can’t help himself, can he?
Now, now, before we move on from this, it’s imperative that the phrase just can’t help himself be read in the most post-ironic, awful, shit-heel voice imaginable. There’s no getting out of this one. Doomed, doomed, he’s doomed, and–
My god, he’s morose today.
The last one only survived for just a hair shy of a week. Shrinking returns. Diminishing ends. Catastrophically little satisfaction for Ford. Not that it matters. He wasn’t giving Ford what he needed. Wouldn’t. Well– Some sort of energy, blah, blah, he won’t bore anyone with the details of highly advanced physics, and feats of engineering, and a frankly marvelous sophistication of technology and energy transference. He won’t bore anyone with the fact that his portal, the one he built from scratch without any help from–
Stanford’s portal is a work of art. Just missing one, small, little thing, and fueled by one, small little thing.
Put simply– he has energy in spades, if he plays his cards right. A mousetrap to end all mousetraps. It’s the destination that he’s lacking.
Pull back again.
It’s not as though Stanford doesn’t have a good guess of where his is. Oh, yes, of course. That’s what we’re talking about here. Cipher. Cipher has a home in the Nightmare Realm and Stanford wants to wrap his hands around him and squeeze, but the problem is, Cipher doesn’t have a neck, and the other problem is, Cipher could kill him with little more than a couple thoughts.
(That is a sign of Stanford’s relative power as a human. Most humans would take nary a thought.)
There’s a host of other problems, but, well, welcome to dimension-hopping existence! (In a world where text could convert to pictures, for the record, one must imagine an ironic smiley face here, one that belies the situation and increases the awareness of its futility.)
(Stanford would love emojis, if he knew about them.)
The multiverse is expansive. While the dimension he’s from hosts a Nightmare Realm and a Bill, arguably the Bill (since he’s learned that his Bill is the one that’s gotten closest), there’s all sorts of dimensions that scatter themselves about the cosmos. Pocket dimensions. Expansive ones. The one he’s on now is… Parallel to his own. Like a dream on top of his own, almost, with all the accompanying logic to boot. A dimension doesn’t have to have anything unique about it, but it often does, by the sheer grab-bag prowess of having its atoms uniquely scattered about it.
He makes his ‘home’ in a small, hollowed out planet that once housed a civilization that got too big for its britches, too fast. Oxygen makes things easy. Gravity makes things easy– a binary sun always helps. Water runs through deep underground rivers that bubble up into springs, relatively clean if you know how to strip metals from it. Hollowed wasn’t a metaphor. It was an ore-rich planet. Was, because the relative abundance wasn’t enough for the civilization and they expanded outwards, trying to reach the cosmos, but–
If you go up you’ll find another planet. If you go down you’ll find another planet. Eventually. You get the point. If you go through the cosmos, you’ll end up in a different realm entirely. Realm does not equal dimension. Ford has traversed both. Realms layer on top of the dimension. Dimensions sit temporally together. This species went to another realm. And in the great laughable comedy of the universe, in a landscape where something like the Nightmare Realm tends to exist in most dimensions–
It didn’t go well.
C’est la vie. Now the planet’s Ford’s.
Where was he.
He’s bored, and over it, and wants it to be over, but accepting that it could be over would be a hurdle in and of itself, and– Ah, yes, the grounded where. He has something new to play with today! He needs more energy, and he needs more leads, and, he has a new idea on how to get his hands around the neck of a creature that doesn’t have a neck.
The portal buzzes in anticipation. More anticipation than his own. There’s a distinct apathy that runs through Ford, even as he tries to set himself up for success. Perhaps that’s a warning sign.
Regardless, the soft blue reflects in his eyes, shielded against the light by goggles, and he leans against the control kiosk, attention flicking from the triangular gateway to the landing pad, which has been encased in a translucent bubble. It’s a very dangerous bubble. The kind of bubble that men shouldn’t build. He’s reminded of Bhagavad Gita, because he doesn’t want to think of Oppenheimer.
Or perhaps he could get Shelley with it, Ozymandias– “Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair! Nothing beside remains. Round the decay of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare, the lone and level sands stretch far away.”
It’s not an atom bomb. It’s not the wastelands of time. It’s a different sort of mockery. Artificial quantum disruption. It’s been three years in production, but it’s promising technology, at least for creatures that have imbued themselves with enough universal radiation to become their own sort of reality mockery.
All he needs is… Another one. Cipher always looks outwards. Catlike in his curiosity, to his downfall and his mastery. Stanford likes a mystery? It’s catnip to something like Cipher, always obsessively on the hunt for even a glimmer of hope to get out of his circumstances. Ford… Sympathizes, really, he does. It’s just that Stanford gave up around year five on the efficacy of ever going home. Call it human limitation of the mindscape. He doesn’t have millions, billions of years to fine-tune it. He just has enough time to try to get in and make some change and maybe solve a few meaningless mysteries along the way.
Today: how do you disrupt Bill Cipher’s atoms in such a way that his form can be controlled?
—
Come on. Of course the bait works. Once you break him down into a science, it's not hard to figure out exactly what draws Bill right in. And if anyone could have it down to a science, that would be one—
—dead—
—very, very exploded—
Nobody.
That's unusual! It's a rip in time and space, or less like a rip and more like a scandalously unzipped zipper with just enough space for him to shimmy and squeeze his way through, this tiny, tiny blip of fleeting energy. At first, this Bill Cipher thinks it's a bomb. Or an asteroid. In all honesty, he's in a bit of a broody phase, considering his pet scientist went and got himself—
Exploded.
Again, it's not relevant. He's just in a tiny, insignificant period of contemplation over a lead that went busto.
Hook, line, rising action— The Bill that pops through is Bill in every way, from each individual brick to the top of his hat— Wait, no, that's a party hat. His top hat is only barely visible underneath it. His eye is bloodshot, and he floats a little drunkenly through the entryway as he gets his bearings, grabbing onto the metal side. He staggers and lands on his feet, and the music blasting from the other side is cut off as soon as the portal zips back up and dies out.
"Whoa, ho—" He looks at his hands once he stabilizes his footing, trying to comprehend what he's feeling.
Corporeality.
"—What?" He sways back to look at the now-empty portal. "Hey, where'd my party go?!"
Stanford tilts his head as he regards what comes forth from the portal. A twinge of curiosity flickers through him– it always does, but the last few times hasn't been the full heart-beat pound of excitement. He knows how it ends. That tarnishes the curiosity. Still—
Each Bill Cipher that has some through this portal has been the same but different. Two of them didn't even know him, confused and unhelpful. Those two made Ford angry, a sudden rush of fury that he still hasn't been able to pinpoint accurately. Then again, he isn't in the business of naming his emotions.
This one doesn't seem remarkable at all. It isn't his Bill Cipher, though. He'd know. He'd know, because when atoms from your own dimension come close in proximity, it's less that there's a feeling that blares wholeness and more that things just feel a little less wrong for a moment.
The light from the portal reflects back from his goggles, and then fizzles out. His expression is grim and stoic, but now that Cipher hasn't died immediately upon being transferred inside his little corporeal bubble—
Excitement is twin with manic. Manic is twin with unhinged, but don't let him catch you talking about his mental state or twins unless you'd like the barrel of a gun pressed tight against your forehead.
He reads the outpouring of data on a machine to his left. It's more than a little crude, but Stanford uses what he has. So far, so good. He can't help but smile, just a little, as he leans over the console to gloat.
"Gone! You're grounded."
Bill's righteous anger flares immediately. He looks straight forward, ignoring every context clue that surrounds him. His eye isn't all that focused. This Bill's on a Double B— a Bad Bender.
"Wow, so much for a 'Hey, how are you'! Listen, buddy, I don't know who you think you are, but you're messing with the wrong guy, here! Lucky for you, I'm gonna give you two seconds to roll it back a little and start over— Grounded?! You should be grateful you're not a screaming mascot on a soup can made out of your own liquefied organs Egyptian-style right now!"
The readings from his machine are stable. Stable enough to justify stepping away from the console, right up to his strange little bubble.
'Bubble' is tongue-in-cheek. It isn't made of any physical material. The effort to create a glass dome like that would be– Stanford doesn't have the resources. No. It's an energy bubble, thick and potent enough that it's almost visible, if you know how to read the air. He steps away from the console and right up to the barrier, and his expression is heavy.
"You're not going to do anything, anymore, Cipher."
Bill thinks, at first, that maybe this is some sort of dream. He'd keep thinking that, if he wasn't all weird in the— on the inside, he's tangible, and he'll address that disbelief as soon as this insult to his ego is dealt with.
He's too distracted ripping off the party hat and crunching it between his fingers— holy smokes, it crinkles, into a whole unique array of polygons that shouldn't be possible because it's paper now, not illusionary— and tossing it to the floor.
If he were more aware of this being in front of him, he'd connect the dots in an instant. He's significantly indisposed. That's his excuse. There's no one else like Stanford Pines, and it's not unreasonable for him to ignore some initial context clues because he's a pile of ash in a basement.
"Oh, yeah? Watch me."
Bill snaps his fingers. A bright spot of blue flame ignites in front of this guy's face, which is just short of where it should be landing. On his face. Melting and boiling his skin off the bones. Making his eyeballs pop under the heat. It sparks wildly at the barrier, igniting in a radius around it, sending off colorful fireworks. There's nothing to catch alight, except the party hat, which fizzles out into—
Ash.
"What?!"
His form shifts hues, violent red, a furious little chameleon. He hops up off the ground, to make himself seem huge without testing the constraints of his new— something different. He needs to handle this bug before he plays with mass. He snaps again.
This fire is angry and targeted, almost a living thing, clawing at the bubble with so much force it ripples to disperse the momentum.
He does it again.
And again.
It isn't until his attempt is so grand he feels the flames lick his own hand that he pauses. It hurts, but he hides it. He points directly at the thing on the other side.
"Start talking!"
Stanford stands there and watches the display. He should have a pinprick of fear– what if the barrier doesn't hold? What if it falls apart?– It should be sound, but Bill's magic is... strange, elusive, old. And Ford has learned that old magic supersedes pretty much everything. Except physics, and even then... It's a coin toss on who wins.
He should be scared at this display. Would be, if it was ten years earlier. Even five years earlier.
If the barrier falls, then Cipher will kill him and that's– Not a horrible way to go. He's already purged several dimensions of his influence already.
Inclining his head, Ford's eyes narrow. It is, in a phrase, diametrically opposite to how Cipher's disciple would ever act in the presence of his Muse.
"Are you finished throwing a fit? Consider," He holds his arms up, illustrating the portal behind both of them. A preacher to his conclave, a scientist greeting his creation. "That with the right motivation, your portal isn't actually that difficult!"
It is. Difficult. Massively so. He's cracked more than a few parts of his brain to complete this. This, and that, and that, and– hah. The point is made.
Bill stops, suddenly. All of his aggravated motion halts in space. He's so offended by this tone that he shorts out.
Oh, he's gonna kill him.
But— No, no, hold on, stop the presses, pump the brakes. Something's off. Something's weird.
"Take the goggles off."
The command makes Ford want to spit at the energy barrier. He doesn't, but it's a close thing, his expression twisting ugly for a moment. His fingers twitch, gloved, and he slowly acquiesces, lowering his arms to his face. He lifts the goggles to his hairline. Ten years older than his, and the stress of his life's wrinkles to prove it, but it's still, despite it all, unfortunately, Stanford Pines.
Bill's eye squints into an angry crescent. He balls his fists, which make a distinct, rubbery sound. He wants to throw himself at the barrier and rip this guy to shreds. What an insult.
Pfft— Like he'd care about some mirage. Nope. Not getting to him! Who cares? That was a single, frustrating, pointless blip in his greater master plan. The latest of a countless string of human blunders that failed to pull off his work to the part that really mattered.
The tension cracks in half, and Bill bursts into a hysterical fit of laughter. It takes him over so completely that he tilts in the air, kicking his legs and clutching at the middle space on his body, up near his bowtie.
"Neat trick, kid! This is funny! Dead disciple, what a classic," Bill manages to respond in-between his bitter, mean-spirited cackling. He wipes a tear from his eye. "Phew, that's a good one. What a riot. Whichever one of my Henchmaniacs put you up to this, I hope they got it on camera."
He pauses.
"Now tell me who you really are."
Ford's shrinking patience diminishes by the second as he watches this display. Hatred curls in the pit of his stomach.
Cruelty. It's always cruelty that Cipher exhibits. The first, the second, hell, the third one he caught, he considered... He hoped that it wasn't a constant. The benefit of the doubt. A placation on Ford's own ego– what if his Cipher was different? Uniquely cruel. Or, maybe, uniquely hurt to act the way he did. That twitch of sympathy died with the third.
At least, he thinks it did.
He lowers the goggles back over his eyes, and holds his hands behind his back, posture straight and imposing and confident. He waits until Bill stops laughing, demands to know his answers, and smiles, thin-lipped and cruel, back at him.
Dead disciple. That's a new one.
Ford clucks his tongue. "Aw. Did you play too rough with yours? Kill him before you could get what you wanted out of him? A pet scientist is a big responsibility, Cipher. Maybe you're not ready for it."
He drifts back to the console, imposing behind it. A preacher in his church; a scientist to his tools.
This is starting to really piss Bill off. He can't even gloat.
Yours. Wait a minute. There's not— There's no way—
Bill refuses to wear pitiful emotions that are beneath him on his face. Disorientation. Hesitance. Fear. But the second Ford turns around, he's zipping across the constraints of this forcefield, blunt force and piercing and plasma, let's try plasma, audibly slamming at every possible angle he can fit into a range of several seconds. He snarls when it doesn't make a dent, his physical form vibrating with pure rage.
He doesn't know the stakes. He doesn't know the terms. He hates when someone thinks they can just walk away from him, with some smug stolen smile on his face. He hates that it works.
"In case you missed the news, you sick, sick disciple-wearing skin puppet, he blew himself up!" Bill's eye screws up as he tries to see beyond the strange invisible aura, to the man behind the machine. "What's your angle?"
Bill's displays are amusing behind the nebulous safety net. Ford wears it on his face with the unpracticed ease of a man who hasn't had to modify his expression for the politeness of society in... far too long. And when you're already a man who found the displays of emotion difficult to begin with... There's very little modulation. He's either too stoic or too naked in his displays of emotion.
He laughs. A sharp bark of a thing, the kind of laugh that has only, hitherto in Bill's approximation of Ford, been let out during the sharp, deep-set pride of him figuring out an equation. This isn't quite that. It's glee. Glee at Bill's anger, at his other displays of fascinating emotion.
The barrier jitters when Bill throws himself at it, but it holds strong. It won't hold forever. That's fine. This was just the first step.
He doesn't answer the second question. To the first comment, though, he holds up a finger, like he's interjecting a point that's already been made.
"In that dimension, maybe. I'm sure your disciple was a stupid, weak fool that blew himself up. Taste the air, Cipher!" He laughs again. "This isn't your dimension!" He pauses, just briefly. "Well! Neither is that other one, but you get my point! Your Earth, your home dimension, this isn't it!"
Either this guy did his homework just to mess with him, or this guy's the real deal. But that'd be— some human wouldn't be able to— Boy, he's way too out of it for this. It's giving him a preemptive hangover.
"In that dimension?! He was a weak, stupid fool who took out his own stupid twin fighting over my portal like a bunch of stupid flea-infested cats! What do you care?! Scratch that, actually, nobody cares— Clearly!"
His reaction is, in this situation, fear-based. That manifests as anger. Of course it does. But so, too, does it manifest as something new for him, in this capacity, something he hasn't been able to tap into in a whole lifetime.
He briefly loses it. He twists into a writhing mass of limbs and teeth, sharp claws digging into the impenetrable atoms of the barrier. The first layer, he can sink into, but the rest won't budge. He tries to cleave it down the middle. He can't comprehend the half-sphere's limitations, the size and shape of it all, so it squeezes him as he expands on all sides, limiting his self-expression. He screams and thrashes and bangs until he hears his own fleshy anatomy tear itself open at the furthest outreach of this stupid bubble.
He sucks it back in. Back to the triangle, black heels flat to the floor.
"I'm calm. Why don't we talk this out? You want something, obviously. and I'll admit it! You made an impression. Now I'm listening."
Stanford leans over the console with abject interest at the horrific display. It's disgusting, it's terrifying, and it makes his heart beat so fast and strong that he can feel it in his ears, ringing and beating with the pulsing of Cipher's own body morphing. This is the part that hooks him. The glimpses he gets of Cipher that his would never show him, cooing in his ear with ink-sweet persuasion.
It's displays like this that make bitterness take root in his tongue and bite it before he can say something he'd regret. Things like I wish he trusted me with this.
The display is the only reason he doesn't press the button on the console. The one he wants to push and will push when the time comes. He almost does, his finger hovering at the mention of his brother, distracting him before he can dissect that sentence and despair.
He drapes it over the podium instead, adopting a perverse display of casual confidence. It looks weird on Stanford. Scary. He's an excellent case study in demeanor making the man, for the meek little academia-monkey researcher would never be able to stand like this and make it look convincing.
"I do want something. Two things, actually. But if you give me the first, I'll spare you the second."
"You'll spare me, huh?"
Bill's laughter echoes off the walls. That lousy barrier doesn't filter sound.
He hops into the air again, manifesting a particularly comfortable chair to sit in. The kind a principal would have. Or a really good lawyer. He touches the fabric on the arms and pretends he doesn't find it so incredibly fascinating. It's the most fascinating thing in the known universe.
"Okay, Megalobrainiac. Shoot."
"It's simple." So Ford says it as simply as he can. "I'm looking for... you. My you. Where he is, and how to kill him.”
"My oh you, what did he do to you? Me oh why, don't be shy." Bill crosses one leg over the other. "Okay, I see the carrot. Where's the stick?"
Ford laughs. This is the part he'll get stuck in if he's not careful.
"I can tell you, or I can show you. Your choice."
Bill's eye narrows. This is a dangerous game. It almost feels... familiar, in a totally backwards way.
It's a gamble. A toss-up.
Or, it would be, if his brand new annoyance hadn't already shown a few bubble-shaped cards in his hand. He's smart enough to make something that fancy, and dumb enough to think he can get away with it. This isn't bluffs and smoke. This guy's nothing like his loyal Sixer.
And that makes him actually think about what he'll say next. It makes his insides squirm with excitement. Adrenaline, or something like it, reconnected with his own bodily guts for the first time since the dawn of time.
But, since he hasn't revealed any of his own cards, specifically about what he does and doesn't know about some other Bill, neither choice will kill him.
He wants to see what this guy's next card is.
"Paint me a picture and make it pretty, Dr. Mystery."
"Oh," Ford says lightly, and presses his button. "I don't think it's going to be pretty."
It's a strange machine. Humans are a crafty species. Sometimes things work because they work, and they have to work backwards, over years of testing, to find out the why of it. There's an intuition that humans have always been proficient at tapping into. Look at SSRI's for god's sake!
Stanford isn't building an SSRI. He's built a strange little machine that plays quantum games beyond his comprehension but seems to like him enough to do what he wants. And what he wants is for atoms to rearrange themselves. It pulls matter in from the portal, and makes it real, makes it physical, and once those atoms are heavy with reality, it's able to play the game of dimensionality. Of moving everything around. For something as movable and malleable as Bill Cipher—
It's not the portal's light that glints off his goggles this time. It's a white light and a black light in equal concentrations that simultaneously don't glint off anything and blind him. It's everything and nothing. It scatters Bill as quickly as it made him. Now it's on Bill to pull back together. Ford holds his hands pressed together in front of his mouth, like a strange mockery of a prayer. Anticipation oozes deep in his intestines.
Bill's favorite luxury— commentating— is the first thing that's ripped from him.
Regeneration is his thing. He's great at it. So great that he's managed to escape every fleeting brush with the physical realm unscathed. So unusually effective that he's unkillable inside the laws of most known realities. Immortal. Charged by the potency of an entire dimension's unwitting sacrifice.
In short, it would take nothing less than this to accomplish such a gargantuan undertaking as flaying Bill into a trillion pieces.
The last thing he experiences is pain. This pain stretches on a thousand lifetimes. He explodes within the dome, shattering into a kaleidoscopic menagerie of stained glass shapes, red and blue and yellow and all the other colors beyond the rainbow that exist only in a plane of reality he's swallowed whole.
Between all the bits and pieces, though, viscera clings desperately to the corners of squares and rectangles and triangles. Against his will— this pain is so significant he would truly rather it end for good, if he could turn off his own capacity for reconstruction— the pieces reach out to each other, pulsating, radiating the purest form of agony. Laid bare.
Tendrils start to knot together, twisting and quivering into a cellular quilt. All these pieces scramble to close in however they can, doing damage control at the most rudimentary of levels. Pure, unfiltered survival at work. The pieces struggle to communicate, colliding and sticking to one another with no rhyme or reason, until they knit together closely enough to breathe. The mass at the center swells as soon as it can make enough storage to pump blood, circulating air as any other creature must. It expands and collapses very quickly, sharp and painful breaths with nothing in between.
Claws form at the very edges, jagged fractal triangles clinging to the furthest reaches of his form in the hopes of making limbs. Self-defense. They sharpen into gleaming crescents as tendons spiral out towards them from the central mass, working in real time to find something to coalesce into. Something of substance. His brain is still behind it all, completely unaware of itself, having no capacity to remember what it knows it can be from a predetermined blueprint. That part comes later.
It knows that it needs limbs to move with. It knows that it needs organs to function internally. It knows it's in pain, the more his nerves start to spark together.
Bill's atoms surge with activity the closer he comes back together. They divert course as he recovers enough electricity from the air to power his brain. They remember that all of these juices and guts need a protective shell, and start to lay rectangular brickwork over the exposed bones and muscles.
He's much larger on the inside than his usual form indicates. He's able to store a lot, in there, normally folded up into a perfectly hidden homeostasis. This form is much bigger, much heavier than he appears to be when presented by choice. All those yellow strips of exoskeleton curve over his discombobulated form, riddled with gaps, into what is essentially a degloved, partially geometric partially swollen organic sphinx, teeth growing spontaneously from the underside of his ribcage and forming an open zipper all the way up to the larynx.
He writhes in pain, some shattered and perverted image of a lion chipped away by time and vandalism you'd find on some kid's geometry homework.
His eye lolls up at the center of the skull forming around the socket, wildly roaming the room as he tries to close his mouth. Tries to stitch himself back up. He's not used to both his eye and his mouth being exposed at the same time, and that's the least overwhelming part of this entire configuration.
His body spasms, too jarred to curl into a protective ball. His limbs seize and jerk at random, and when a tail forms at the spine, it forms a three-dimensional morningstar at the tip, twitching defensively.
When it's clear that Bill's atoms are going to attempt to reform– that's not always the case, sometimes this is it, so this Cipher at least has a will to live that transcends a little atomic scrambling– Ford leaves the console to get a closer look. It isn't true. He hasn't done this with success yet. The last Cipher died because he hadn't fine-tuned the machine. There's no will to have about it. But it flavors the reality, doesn't it? Gives everything a tinge more significance.
He sits on the floor of his makeshift lab, crisscrossed, hardly a foot away from the barrier. His hands curve over his knees, and his nails, through the gloves, tighten against them as he watches the show. He tries to keep up appearances, but he's haggard compared to the Ford Bill knows. Knew. Scruffy in the face, manic-eyed, hair that should have been trimmed weeks ago. Scars dipping into flesh that his Ford hasn't had a chance to experience.
How interesting and neat. Ford leans forward, nose nearly at the barrier, eyes wide, his grin perverse.
"Your picture is pretty. I didn't have to paint anything," He almost whispers. A sense of awe that Bill would be familiar with, but with the circumstances twisted, it comes out eerie.
Bill's eye flicks and lands on the source of sound— his hearing is back in full-force, though he hasn't quite sorted out who or what the sound is. It's one of his strongest senses.
That zipper of teeth bares angrily, cracking its own ribcage to do it. Self-sabotage, concentrated.
He claws weakly at the image of the man in front of him. Even with his slicers fully extended, he can't quite reach.
Ford laughs. He finds himself—
Delighted. It's a cruel emotion, one that fills him up weightlessly and light-headedly. Like taking an upper built on the back of hatred.
"How intriguing. I wondered how all of that worked. I've seen you do something similar once or twice, but never under such duress. That must have been–" He sucks in a breath. Captivated. "Every neurological impulse would be to warn you on the very atomic level. That must have been painful. Like being rendered by an atom bomb and living. Hah! I don't know about the radiation implications to this, actually. Well— to an extent, of course. I'm safe, out here, and you're theoretically safe from that, in there, but who knows when Quantum's involved! It's out of my hands!"
He's babbling. Babbling and he doesn't even know it. It's halfway to a mumble for all he cares if Cipher hears him. "I never imagined you so animal."
Bill starts consciously keying into this whole conversation right around the time his brand new enemy starts going on about this being painful.
Oh, he'll show him animal.
Bill suddenly roars to life, splitting at the seams so he can lunge with full force at this— the cause of this—
He scratches at the barrier, gnashes at it with the second set of teeth he's growing at his jaw in the correct orientation. He's large, a solid four times Ford's size, imposing, threatening even though he's not put all the way back together again.
The exoskeleton along his back jut upwards and outwards, becoming sharply pointed scales. His tail thrashes with frustration when he still. Can't. Break it. To the point that it splinters and cracks from the force he bangs it against the forcefield with.
My, what a good litmus test of data Ford is getting from this. This is all very, very valuable. He'll have to calculate what Bill's relative force is here, so he can start stringing together graphs, data, and preliminary hypotheses.
He flinches at the teeth, and then laughs again, making his way to his feet, his eyes blown wide. His grin more like the mockery that Bill once stretched it, when he was possessing him, than anything recognizable as Stanford Pines'. One of his eyes has more wear in it than the other, slightly paler, the whites almost permanently bloodshot. Just a little. Just enough to notice if you're this close to him. Not a lot of people get this close.
Wear and tear.
"Magnificent," He breathes, lost in the show just enough that he forgets to hate his very being. The being is the wondrous part.
When Bill finally stitches up his vocal cords, they're hidden somewhere deep inside his ribcage, which is not where they should be, if he were a mammal. He's his own class entirely. One that can mimic and transform, can rearrange into something new entirely. Something made of approximations, caricatures, pieces arranged in new unheard of configurations.
And he's pissed.
His voice casts an odd, luminescent glow along the edges of his form. A halo that appears to be paired with telepathy. It's not telepathy. It's projection.
It's uncanny, though, that the mouth at the sphinx's muzzle doesn't open or move when he speaks. He looks away from this guy, like he's suddenly disinterested.
"Wow, I think that cured my hangover!"
Stanford finds the creature Bill is... Beautiful. In the same way Darwin found his birds beautiful no doubt. It isn't quite that. But it's how Ford is going to take the word that comes to his mind right now. He feels a little breathless, weightless, but it isn't fear. It's a mixture of awe and a biologist's glee of cataloging something new.
"I'll add 'cures hangovers' to the list of side-effects. Want to go for round two?"
Bill's scales flatten along his body. They create something he hasn't been able to accomplish in the non-physical realm; smoothness.
He tries to stand up; his limbs are new, and they shake, struggling to hold up the significant weight of his own body. He brushes it off as soon as he's upright.
He makes a real big show of how casually he can turn his back away from this threat to his existence, and drops himself to the ground like a lounging cat. If a lounging cat weighed as much as a 16 wheeler. The floor vibrates when he lands.
Oh, he's so, so, so, so, so angry. So angry. He idly stretches his neck at different angles, masquerading as disinterested and settling into this shape to hide that he's searching for something he can use to escape.
"What ever happened to romance? Take me out to dinner first, at least. All they care about these days are lasers and explosions."
"I don't want to take you out to dinner," Stanford says flatly. "I don't like you."
He settles back onto the ground, leaning back with his legs crisscrossed again and his palms flat to the ground behind him. There's something wrong with Ford. It's as simply as the human ability to crack without socialization. A human, alone, isn't very human at all.
"Did you make yourself look like that on purpose? Or did you just settle into that? It's impressive. The other one just kind of fizzled out. I don't think I had the dials on the right settings. Whoops."
"You don't like me, but you sure have a lot of questions," Bill says evenly, tempering his fear by smacking his tail rhythmically against the floor. He hopes this guy can feel it on the other side and know it'll cave his skull in pretty soon.
Don't get him wrong, he hears it right. There was another one. But he's better than that one, so he's not— he's not worried at all.
"Consider me an ex-fan," Ford replies. He watches the tail, up, down, up, down. He could never have expected this outcome. He didn't—
He didn't imagine Bill's atoms taking on the forms of amalgamated approximations of what seems to be Bill's ideas of evolutionary traits. How novel. He wonders if the atoms could be pressured into certain forms. Squeezed into certain shapes. If it could be controlled.
"I always have questions. Just because yours killed himself doesn't mean I'm not the same." His smile gets stretched thin. "Minus the killing myself part, obviously."
Bill watches him watch his tail. That is a much more familiar face. The interest. The naked wonder. His tail rattlesnakes distractingly.
"You sure? It's never too late to pick up a new hobby."
"I've gotten this far," He says, "No need to kill myself until after he's dead. Speaking of—”
He gestures at the dome. "Is that carrot enough for you? Stick enough for you?"
"The carrot wasn't all that. Not sweet at all. The stick?" Bill lifts one of his hands off the ground and tilts it to one side, then the other, back and forth. "I see the appeal, but it's not getting you anywhere. Actually, it just set us back pretty significantly. Maybe I would've told you if you said 'please'!"
Ford frowns.
"It was supposed to be an incentive. That, and maybe I wanted to see what would happen. Don't you deserve it, anyways? Just a little?"
" ...Hmmmm." Bill purrs, but it's more of a painful vibration in the air, at a frequency that passes with a heavy sense of wrongness through eardrums. "And what do you deserve, The Little Fordsy That Could?"
Ford winces. He isn't immune to the air, after all.
"Deserve?" He barks out a laugh. "What does that have anything to do with? I'm trying to stop the end of the world."
It sounds hollow even in his ears.
"Hey, all I'm doing is reflecting this back onto you. You don't know me, you don't know my story, and here you are, talking about what I deserve! Maybe I'm curious. Just a little! Or maybe I'm not. Apparently, I'm a sphinx."
Bill says this with no humor whatsoever.
"Apparently you are. It makes sense, the more I think about it. As for your story, I only know what you've told me. But it doesn't really have anything to do with right now."
Bill casually experiments to see what he's back in charge of again, inside this body. He flexes his claws. His tail slithers. But his teeth are all stuck as they are, lockjaw but all over. He's horrifically stiff. And, suddenly, for the first time he can ever remember— Exhausted. Fried.
He purrs again, only because he saw on Ford's face how much it hurts.
Ford's jaw tightens. "So. Want to make this simple for yourself? Tell me how to kill... Well, you, and we can wipe our hands clean of it. You can go back to your dimension, and I can go back to mine."
"Oh, please. I know that look on your face. You were drooling." Bill rolls his eye. "Besides, you already know how, remember? What did you say about the last Bill? He 'fizzled out'?"
"The last Cipher wasn't my Cipher. Who knows I'm trying to kill him. It's not a bad idea, in theory, but... It's the getting here that's hard. He's not as gullible as you are."
Bill's body fritzes out. Those scales raise like hackles. He wants to roll onto his back and pierce and smother this guy to death, in that order.
"You're the one asking for my help, pal."
"Ah," Ford says. "Forgive me. It's been a couple of years since I spoke regularly with people. Let me clarify."
He slips his palms so they're pointing upwards, his knuckles resting against his knees. It doesn't mean anything. He's just opening up his body language.
"I'm not asking for your help. You either help me, or you die."
Bill's legs spasm. It's outside of his control. He grew back all wrong.
"You're gonna have to give my brain some time to put itself back together, numbskull. What, you thought it was—" Twitch. Writhe. "—gonna be that easy?"
"No, I just wanted to give you the parameters. You never make anything easy."
Ford barks out another laugh. "Mind if I smoke while you stitch yourself back together?" He doesn't wait for an answer, pulling a hand-rolled cigarette and a lighter out of his breast pocket. From around the unlit cigarette, he says, "So did he just die? Your me?"
Bill's claws are leaving scratch marks on the floor. Maybe if he goes deep enough, he can dig his way out of here.
Probably not.
But if he's getting at least a human cigarette's amount of time to figure out a plan, he'll take a stretch break. He walks his way into the center of the forcefield.
"Like I said, he went at it with his spitting image. Really went at it. I've never seen Poindexter so royally pissed!" Bill stands up on his back legs and reaches up to the center of the forcefield. He puts his hands flat against it. The teeth he has along his entire underbelly face Ford. They could swallow him whole. "They were breaking all my stuff."
Ford lights the cigarette and takes a drag. He watches hawk-eyed and attentive as Bill moves. He's curious about the strength of all this, too.
Look. He's not an idiot. If Bill gets out of this, he's dead. So there's no use worrying. It either holds up or it doesn't. He'll scramble his atoms again if he gets too close.
"Mm. Stanley doesn't deserve to die for Stanford's stupidity." He pauses. "His. Stupidity."
"Hey, can I take the driver's seat here?" Bill pushes up on the roof of it. It doesn't budge. "Just for a minute? I want to run through some hypotheticals. Play in the space a little."
Ford tilts his head at the Bill Sphinx. Binx. Mm. He doesn't think he likes how that sounds, even if it makes him want to laugh.
"I'm listening."
"I tell you some information that I definitely have about your Bill. Then I'm not useful anymore! You kill me. On the flip side? I don't tell you squat. You get broody. You kill me. Zero for two. And here's the real kicker, door number three. I tell you or you get sick of me, so you kick me back into my universe, where my life is meaningless now! There's no point in it all! Nothing! Zip! Zilch! So, from my perspective, I've got nothing better to do than annoy the crap out of you until my inevitable turn on the Bill Bingo murder card!"
"Why is your life meaningless now?" Ford narrows his eyes behind his goggles. He lifts them again, so they sit in his hairline.
Bill reaches and reaches up into the air. There's a warped nature to the forcefield up where the beam came through. He scratches at it insistently.
"My portal's a bust. I put a lot of effort into it, this time. I thought I finally had it! Thousands of— failures, thousands of worthless— human subjects— this was the one! The one to end this song and dance! A change of pace from the monotony! Finally, finally, finally!—"
He's not strong enough, right now. He takes out his frustration by whipping his tail into one of the walls. It shatters, leaving chunks of exoskeleton and blood in the aftermath.
When he slams his shoulder to the ground and lays down sideways, facing away from the scientist, he is pouting.
"Now I'm just stuck in another prison. What a joke."
Ford leans back a little. How curious. He can't help but be curious by this display.
He opens his mouth. Closes it. Opens it again and asks the question he's asked every single one of them, selfishly, to a fault, like it won't just open up wounds again, "Why weren't you just honest to him? Why the deception?"
Bill's body doesn't move. He's biding his time.
"The Greeks thought sphinxes were man-eating hags who told riddles. Egyptians slapped the faces of their pharaohs on those things and made statues sixty-feet up in the air to worship them." Bill pauses. "They're still the same monster."
A flash of anger heats up his belly at the answer. Ford makes his way to his feet.
"You're obsessed with human culture for someone who wants to destroy it. You're missing something in your assessment of the situation, by the way."
"So are you. You want to destroy Bill Cipher, but how many of me have you asked those same two questions?"
"All of them." Ford laughs. It has a note of hysteria to it. He starts to make his way over to the console again.
He moves on as fast as he can. "Anyways, are you sure it's hopeless? I have a neaaaarly working portal. Right behind you. But more to the point, I've made you corporeal. Doesn't that get down to your greater need?"
Bill's ear twitches towards the sound of footsteps. He's afraid. He doesn't know if he can reconstruct himself again so quickly. He doesn't know what it means to die.
He makes himself look as sad and pathetic as possible.
"I already know how this ends. There's no way it shakes out for me."
"You don't know that." Ford leans on his hand, his elbow pressing delicately into the console. His fingers drum a beat on his cheeks. "I'm a fickle man. Help me kill... You... And I'll have all the carrots you want. You're giving up so easily after... What, all of that? Just because Stanford Pines died? You must have really liked him."
"I liked my portal, dummy," Bill responds. He's dodging the questions. "If you want a chance at getting something out of me, you're gonna have to start over from the top. You might be fickle, but I can hold a mean grudge."
Ford sighs. It's dramatic.
"If I start from the top, we'll have to get to the part of the demonstration where I scramble you again. Okay! As long as you want that!"
"Why do you have to do that part?!"
"Because I like it. And I like watching your atoms recombine. I bet I could make you turn into different creatures. With just a little pressure. It's fascinating. You're fascinating and you know that."
Bill can't believe what he's hearing. This is an unfathomable chain of events. Of course he knows he's fascinating, but that has nothing to do with it! Make him? What right does some worthless ant have to make him do anything?!
Oh, they are not starting over. Now the grudge is forever. Now it's real. Now this guy's a goner. Bill's going to rip him to ribbons.
Ding!
And, Bill has officially reconstituted himself enough to get a little creative on purpose.
The scales along his back and legs jut outwards again. They shoot out like arrowheads in every direction, and while most of them bounce off the invisible barrier, a few manage to lodge themselves into it. Not all the way through, but they're in there, without a doubt.
Where they stick, the barrier gets a little more... wiggly.
Bill's laughter is furious and prideful.
"You're sick! You think you have the high ground now? When I'm done with you, you're gonna wish I let you be my lab rat! I'll turn your nervous system into violin strings and make you scream!"
Ford's laughter is a little nervous and excited. His heart hammers another symphony in his chest as he watches the barrier start to weaken. His machine starts outputting error messages, flashing a warning light at him.
"You promise?"
No, no, that's not—
"Sorry. Sorry. That's inappropriate. Are you sure you want to break the machine that makes you corporeal, though? It's a prototype. I was thinking of making it smaller."
He's scared. Of course he is. He's a human animal. He's lived in fear for ten years.
Hm. He fiddles with a few knobs. Corporeality comes with a potential few drawbacks. If he ups certain frequencies– the barrier starts to hum– he wonders if it will cause Cipher's shape-shifting to stagnate somewhat. He's playing Calvinball and he knows it.
"Oh, I promise, alright! I promise as inappropriately as possible!" Bill's charging up a new set of scales. He paces his prison like a rabid animal, a flurry of motion, contorting his shape even though it hurts to make himself harder to lock onto. At least, that's how he's imagining it works. "Your secondhand garage sale bells and whistles don't scare me! Stop playing with those buttons!"
"No," Ford says. "I'm getting data on you."
He smiles again, but it's strained this time. He is getting tired of this dance. The Bill-dance. The fruitless, impossible, meaningless dance where logic never wins and madness is the only thing that works.
"I'm not asking for much, Cipher. Are you seriously telling me you wouldn't get amusement out of helping to kill another version of... You?"
Bill snarls, and the ethereal, fiery glow around his body intensifies. He's about to go for his version of round two.
"Helping?! For all I know, he's a great guy! He's probably just wildly misunderstood! I would know! I am this guy!"
Ford barks out a genuinely amused laugh. It looks wrong on him, loud and abrasive and like his brother's laugh but tilted. He keeps moving settings around on his control panel.
"If he's you, then you know he's an awful hole of the universe. Don't pretend around me. Don't pretend you like yourself."
Bill shoots off another round of shards. It takes a lot out of him. Literally. He's losing chunks. A few more stick in there, vibrating violently in mid-air.
He doesn't have any good response to that. He's not answering that. He's not denying or confirming that. This waste of air space doesn't get to know anything. And soon, he won't.
"ARE YOU DEAF?! STOP PRESSING BUTTONS!"
The machine next to him is pleading with him in its read-outs to please stop the stress. It's all very good data for him to pour over later. That's why he hasn't pressed the button yet. The button. He heightens a few knobs, a few readouts, and—
He's going to be gambling. He wants something that will knock Bill on his ass for a few hours, at least. While he twists and maneuvers the technology. But it can't be so heightened that he loses control of the technology and threatens it spilling out.
Not everything should be quantum.
If he was inside that dome right now, he'd be viscera splattered on the insides of the invisible walls. Once he has his settings to where he wants them, he looks placidly inwards. Like he's not mentally drooling over the show Cipher's giving him.
"So I take it you're not ready to help me?" That's his last warning.
"You'd like that, wouldn't you? I can smell your human fear from a mile away! Boy, oh, boy, I sure hope he'll make a deal! Otherwise I'm screwed!"
Bill slams his hands against the barrier, propping himself up there to push on his containment. Poised to charge straight at Ford.
He's too eviscerated to think this through. Too torn up to beg and plead for an agreement. No compromises. The gaps between his teeth widen with a series of audible squelches.
"Come here!"
Only a mad, dolting idiot would be unafraid in the face of something like this. Someone unaware of their surroundings, of reality. Being full of fear is how Stanford knows he's not completely gone, that he still has natural self-preservation.
Cipher is disgusting. Horrific. Beautiful, in how each segment of his patched together body fits together. He can see the intricacies of life in how he's constituted himself. Wet and awful and awesome, the latter two words biblical in their applications.
He flashes Bill a smile. "No."
The light that follows, when his hand presses the button to commence glints off his glasses again. Reconstitute. Maybe this has the potential for more fun than he gave it credit. Maybe this can be something new.
