Work Text:
Four-thirty in the morning was his least favorite time to wake up.
Ford yawned deeply as he shuffled through the house and towards the back door, blinking groggily. He had been asleep, in bed, pressed against Stan’s back. Bed was warm and comfortable. Bed was behind him now, for some reason.
The knocking continued.
Ford groaned as he kept shuffling towards it. The rhythm was even, almost mechanical in nature, perfectly measured. He’d tried to ignore it, had tried to get back to sleep, but it had happened again and again.
Mostly, he’d been afraid that Bill was going to wake up and come into their room, shouting about intruders and spies.
Again.
If he could head off that particular disaster at the pass, he would.
The door stood in front of him, almost like it was watching him. Ford yawned again as he reached to open it, missed, then tried once more. The knocking was still going, still the noise of knuckles meeting wood, and he glared at the door as he finally got his hand on the knob. The moment he turned the metal and got the door open, the knocking stopped.
There was no one on the other side.
No footsteps that would mean someone had run off as fast as possible when he opened the door, no tracks on the ground, nothing to indicate that someone had even been there at all. The only thing that kept him from believing he’d been hearing noises that weren’t there was sitting on the doorstep.
A couple of things, actually.
A jar about as tall as his shin stood on the step, with a bright red bow and a couple of leaves tucked under the ribbon. It was filled to the brim with something and his still half-asleep mind tried to deny what he was seeing.
In the jar, in various colors, was a variety of teeth.
Human teeth.
Ford felt disgust rear up in the back of his throat as he stared at the somewhat grisly thing sitting in front of him, as if daring him to comment on it. Next to it was an entire human skull. It was intact, polished to a shine, and it looked like it was grinning at him. For some reason, he’d half expected it to have a bow around it as well. If one was a gift, then the other was as well, his mind insisted.
He retched, a little.
None of it was bloody, there was no gore or anything other than just…Teeth. And a skull.
A jar full of teeth.
Just as he was about to step back, to close the door and let whoever opened it next find the offerings on the steps, he spotted the card.
It was small, easy enough to miss, about the length and width of two of his fingers—more of a nameplate than anything else, folded out of heavy cardstock. The letting was almost calligraphy, a singular name with four letters.
He stared at it for three seconds while his sleep-addled mind tried to make sense of it.
Bill.
That was the name on it. That was the recipient of the nightmarish gifts on his back porch. That was who all this was for. For a second longer, Ford stared at the teeth before he looked into the forest, still trying to make sense of what was happening. Between the lovingly written name and the red bow, the fact that there were gifts at all, a picture was coming together and he did not like what he was seeing.
“Is this what gods court with?” he called to the trees, unable to stop the horrified expression he could feel twisting his face. “Is this—why are you like this? Gods,” he shuddered, then gestured down at the skull and the teeth. “Why this? Why this?”
The forest, unsurprisingly, did not answer him.
He could, however, almost feel Emiyaeris’s eyes on him. If the forest god had been present, he probably would have been smiling.
Bill had been venturing out into the woods, lately. Stan had theorized that maybe the former-demon was trying to reacclimate himself to them after having been trapped in them for years. Maybe Bill was trying to work through his trauma, just like the rest of them.
Somehow, in those times of venturing into the trees, he seemed to have caught the attention of the god who had threatened him when the fight against Invariace had ended. If the gifts were anything to go by, Emiyaeris seemed enamored of Bill. Ford put a hand to the bridge of his nose and shook his head. “If you’re going to deliver gifts for him, please make sure it’s later in the day,” he scolded the trees and tried to decide if the movement he could see in them following his words was an answer or not.
With a groan, Ford turned around and left the room. The back door was still open about two inches and he ignored his instincts as he made his way into the living room.
Bill’s hammock was hung up in a corner, on the far wall from the television. The creature himself was sleeping in an odd position, one of his arms wrapped around his head. Watching him sleep actually made Ford’s back twinge in sympathy pain; Bill, if he had been a normal human, would have woken up with a seriously sore spine and an out-of-place shoulder. “Bill,” he stopped a few feet away. “Bill, wake up, you’ve got mail.”
Bill groaned and flopped over in his sleep, managing to make a noise that sounded uncomfortably like Dipper. “G’wa…” he muttered.
“Bill Cipher, wake up and go get your mail,” Ford tried again, putting a little more authoritative force into his tone. “I am not going to leave the door open for hours until you wake up and I have a feeling if I do not get you to retrieve it, I am going to be woken up every hour on the hour until you do.”
“S’time?” Bill rolled over to look at him, yellow eyes still mostly closed.
“It is not even five in the morning,” Ford answered.
“…Sle’p.”
Ford watched, narrowing his eyes, as Bill turned back over and settled back down. “Bill Cipher,” he stepped up to the hammock and grabbed the edge of it. “You will wake up and deal with your mail right now.”
When Bill didn’t respond, Ford simply tipped the hammock over and dumped him on the floor.
Screeching and shrieking like a trod upon cat who had also been soaked in water, Bill scrambled up from the floor and hissed at Ford. “What’cha doin’ that for, Fordsy?” he snarled the words out, suddenly more awake than he had been.
“You,” Ford grabbed his collar before he could say or do anything else. “Have mail.” He dragged the slighter male out towards the back door, gesturing at the gap. “From the forest.” He waited as Bill seemed to be waking up still. “It seems as if it is from Emiyaeris.”
All at once, Bill straightened up and broke out of Ford’s grasp.
The anger from before was gone and he flung the door open, dropping down to sit on the back porch as he reached for the things he had been left. It wasn’t as strange as Ford thought it might have been to watch Bill coo and smile over a jar of teeth and a human skull. He had, it seemed, almost gotten desensitized to Bill’s weirdness.
“Why teeth?” he muttered as he turned away from the sight in front of him. “Why a skull?”
Without bothering to ask Bill or wait for any answer that might be forthcoming, Ford turned and headed back towards his bed. He would need more sleep to deal with a day that had the events he’d already witnessed in it.
When he woke up for the actual start of his day, got ready, and headed downstairs, Ford stopped in the middle of the living room.
Bill had gone back to bed as well, it seemed.
Curled in his arms like the worlds’ most morbid teddy bear was the skull he had been gifted by Emiyaeris. The jar full of teeth was tucked into the shelf of things he had been allowed to have while they tried to figure out where he would be moving as a permanent resident.
Despite his hatred of Bill, his anger over being manipulated and toyed with, Ford could admit that there was something nice about seeing him happy.
Well, when it didn’t involve the destruction and enslavement of Ford’s entire world and species.