Chapter Text
Bill Cipher has lived a thousand lives under a thousand names in a thousand timelines. He has been worshiped, revered, hated, exorcized, blessed and cursed in every single language of the gross, overlapping multi-planed mess most mid-level beings referred to as the universe.
Never once in his life had he been psychoanalyzed. And boy, would he take a good old fashioned Catholic exorcism over this schlock anyday.
His last memory before keeling over unconscious on the padded floor of his off-white cell was the annoyingly melodious voice of his assigned Orb of Healing Light (#D-SM5 if he wanted to pretend like they were on a first name basis), telling him something about his “tumultuous therapeutic journey.” He also recalls something about a “severe lack of empathy” and “the need to pivot to an alternative treatment” before unceremoniously face planting on the pillowy ground.
Unconsciousness isn’t a normally unpleasant thing—certainly it’d usually be more preferable to the arts-and-crafts themed hell that was Theraprism. But now, he thinks, for the first time the darkness reminds him of something else. That time spent floating in oblivion after what was supposed to be the end of the world. Before his frustratingly unproductive talk with the axolotl but after he was broken. After he was betrayed by–
When he comes to, the first thing he notices is the wind. Or rather its smell.
The ocean, boardwalk garbage cans, and saltwater taffy.
“God, just send me back to the burnt remains of the nightmare realm.” he mutters, sitting up in a gross, brittle substance that he unfortunately determined to be sand. Being ripped apart at the molecular level surely couldn’t be worse than whatever experimental psychiatric treatment was being tested on him.
It’s sunset. A few stars begin to peep out from behind the intensely pink clouds arranged carelessly overhead. In front of him are a few lonely beach towels, and heaps and heaps of sand as far as the eye can see. Sand in between his fingers, his toes, his eyes, his–
Eyes. Plural. As in two of them.
He blinks one shut experimentally and Oh god–
He can still see.
Scrambling to his feet in sheer, visceral terror, Bill can see a whirlwind of disgusting, thin human limbs that keep pushing their way into his line of sight amidst the miniature tornado of sand. An arm, a leg, a foot, and–are those veins under his skin??
Not if he has any say in it.
“Hey!” He waves in the general direction of the setting sun, trying his best to look like anything but desperate. “Hey, you sorry-quack excuses for medical professionals, I’m talking to you! What APA peer-reviewed bullshit told you to incarcerate a guy in New Jersey for his psychological well being?”
He pants, out of breath, frightened. Surely they could hear him behind some dumb two-way holographic mirror somewhere. He drops to his pitifully sensitive knees and begins patting around in the sand, looking for a crevice, a hatch, a panel, anything that might clue him into a way out.
The sand crunches behind him.
With a slight spasm, he comes to a stop. A jolt of sudden intuition—that animal instinct Sixer always prattled on to him about—has lit up the panic section of his brain that is currently telling him in giant neon letters that he’s not alone.
With the most ferocious exhale he can muster, he turns on his heel and charges at the figure behind him, knocking them down in the sand. He’s just about getting ready to test the destructive capacity of his newfound fists when he notices something disturbingly off about his would-be victim.
This is a child. And a familiar child at that.
“Hello.” the boy says calmly, clearly scared out of his mind, but trying his best to maintain composure. He pushes his comically large, thick-rimmed glasses up onto the bridge of his nose, and waves up at Bill shyly.
Bill counts the number of fingers on the boy's hand. Then counts again.
No no no no no no no, this couldn’t be happening.
“I’m sorry if I scared you.” Ford continues, picking up the slack left by Bill’s stunned silence. “It looked like you lost something. I thought maybe I could help.”
Bill swallows thickly. Was this what they had meant by alternative treatment? Babysitting the man who had saved and then ruined his existence? Surely, the only other explanation was that this was a prank of some kind—some cosmic scheme run by ol’ frills for his personal amusement.
“Sorry” he says instead, carefully lifting his weight off of Ford. “I was exploring around town a little bit. I just moved here.”
Ford sits up, gently letting out a sigh of relief at avoiding what was likely not his first fight of the day. He takes off his jacket to shake out the sand, and Bill notices a few bandaids on his arms coupled with angry bruises webbing out between them. Something in him frowns at that—even after everything Sixer had done to him, the thought of some random human kid hurting him in that way makes him squirm.
“So,” Ford says, quickly shrugging the jacket back on, “Did your parents move here for work?”
Work? Parents? The implications of this wording take a second to settle into Bill’s mind. As if this day couldn’t get any worse…
Bill lifts his hand and presses it against Ford’s, gritting his teeth when he sees that they’re roughly the same size.
Not only was he a human but he was a child—the weakest, softest, most vulnerable type of human there was. This had to be a prank. Definitely a prank.
The boy clears his throat softly and Bill jerks his attention back to him, noticing that the boy's face has gone ever so slightly more red. Their hands are still pressed together.
Oh. That’s weird for humans who don’t know each other. Maybe just weird in general.
“It’s a common greeting where I come from” Bill says, nonchalantly pulling his hand back.
Ford pulls back his own hand, the slightest bit of disappointment showing at the sudden loss of contact. “Where are you from?”
Drat. Places. Names. Demarcation. Geographic distribution. How did that stuff work again?
“Ark-ucky-gon” he says flatly. “It’s in the Northwest.”
“All the way across the country,” Ford breathes, eyes lighting up. “What’s it like out there?”
“Hot. Buggy. Lots of tourist traps.” Bill raises an eyebrow in disgust. “There was one old conman up there that really got on my nerves.”
“Can’t be any hotter than here.” Ford laughs, and pushes himself to his feet, dusting off his pants. “If you’re looking for things to do around here, maybe we could go together. I usually go on adventures with my brother, but he got grounded for nesting his pet possum in one of mom’s old sweaters”
Ah. That explained the absence of the infinitely less interesting twin. Bill narrows his eyes. “Go where?”
“Oh, I was…” Ford rubs the cuff of his jacket between his thumb and his forefinger, suddenly anxious. “I was going off to look for a ghost.”
He winces. “And his lost treasure.”
“Alright.” Bill says with a shrug. “Lead the way, smart guy.”
Ford relaxes a little bit, as if easing up after a slap that never came. “Are you sure?”
“Am I sure?”
“I mean,” he looks at the ground, ashamed. “It’s not too weird, or stupid, or anything?”
Bill blinks. This fear, this shyness that came with worrying about what others thought, had been a trait of Ford’s that had long been forgotten. He’d had it when they first met, still playing the scientist eager to bridge the gap between himself and the rest of humanity, but at that age it had faded with time. Flattery and a slow submersion into the perfect weirdness that was second nature to Bill’s everyday life had robbed that anxiety of its bite. At this age, it must be eating him alive.
“Kid,” Bill snorts and begins to push himself up. I’ve stolen treasure from more ramped up, self-important ghost pirates than you could begin to imagine in that abnormally large head of yours. This ain’t my first rodeo.”
He begins to lose his footing, and Ford grabs onto him to steady him out. The texture of the ground is unfamiliar, but even more unfamiliar is the experience of standing on his own two feet. It’s gross, he thinks, face scrunching up in disgust. Everything about sand is coarse and irritating.
More familiar, however, is Ford’s beaming face— looking at him as if he were some simple, elegant equation that gave purpose to all matter and life in the universe. He hadn’t seen that expression for some time.
Even for him, trillions of years old, it feels like a really long time.
“Let’s go then,” Ford says eagerly, tugging him by the arm. “I’ve been mapping out this area for the past few weeks, and there’s a cave up ahead that I’m sure Captain Kidd uses as his lair.”
“Okay.” Bill says simply, and falls into step beside him.
They walk together along the shoreline as night falls over Glass Shard Beach. Bill looks up at the stars in the now clear sky and thinks that, under less sickening circumstances, he might find some comfort in the fact that he knows all their names by heart.
“Y’know.” Ford says, “I never thought I’d ever meet someone like me.”
Well, this was sudden. Ford had recognized them to be intellectually compatible moments after their first meeting all those years ago, but all he had done here so far was pin the kid to the ground, lie poorly, and then stand up with all the grace of a newborn deer.
“Your eyes.” Ford says, bringing him back to the present. “I’ve never seen anyone with yellow eyes.”
Oh, this was definitely, undoubtedly, 10000% a prank.
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They reach the entrance of the cave—a gaping dark hole in the side of twisted, sea-beaten rocks that looks about as homey as a solitary confinement cell. Bill’s heart begins to pick up its pace, and his breathing becomes more shallow and quick. It’s disgusting. It’s humiliating. It’s—Bill scoffs as he puts a name to the face of that unsettling feeling rearing its ugly head. Fear. Just another pathetic human instinct, designed to hamper their evolution and keep them shivering in the dark.
Yet, this reassurance does little to keep his heart from pounding.
“Ready?” Ford asks, turning to Bill with an awkward grin. “Just stay right behind me, and you’ll be fine.”
“Whatever you say, Sixer.” Bill says, brushing his hair out of his face. He can’t let Ford see he’s scared. He can’t he can’t he can’t he–
And just like that, Ford steps into the cave, and is swallowed up by the darkness. With every ounce of concentration he can muster Bill steels himself, lifting a foot towards the threshold—
When suddenly, he is grabbed by the shoulders from behind and whipped around.
After a few seconds his vision, thrown off by the sudden force of being unknowingly assaulted, begins to clear, and brings into focus a very familiar and very angry face staring back at him, ever so gently backlit by the glow of the moon.
“What is this?” The man barks in a gravely, rough voice, shaking him slightly. “Why did you bring me here, Bill?”
A smile creeps onto Bill’s face as the man glares down at him, his barely contained rage causing his hands to shake, and furrowed eyebrows adding even more wrinkles to his aging face.
Now there’s the Sixer he knows.