Archive of Our Own

zero.

“I shouldn’t have agreed to this.” Stanford tells himself for what must be the fourth time this afternoon – “fifth!” chimes Bill, aggravatingly in sync with his thoughts.

Life after Bill Cipher is good. It’s simple, it’s— okay, yes, boring, sometimes, now that the kids are off at boarding school and Stanley’s got a new show to run out in Vegas. Ford can’t help it. This is the human condition, even for misfits like himself.

On bad days, the worst days, days when he could hardly drag himself out of bed for the longing of it all, he’d itched to load it all up in the car. Drive down the road, out in middle-of-nowhere Oregon, to his ramshackle old home. Slip in the backdoor when Soos wasn’t watching and dive down, down, deep into the basement of the shack. Fingers over keyboard. Magic, at least of a sort, at his fingertips.

Turns out, it hadn’t taken a foolhardy trip to a long-dead portal to welcome Weird back into his life.

“Are you done?” Bill’s got no patience for ruminations. His spindly little arms stick out the driver’s side window, his eye narrowed long-ways. “Tick-tock! Time’s a wastin’, grandpa! You’ve got, what, two solid years left in that old wheezer body of yours? Don’t waste them at the world’s worst roadside attraction!”

A gas station. They’re pulled into a gas station, where Stanford is siphoning fuel into his 1991 Miata with what little’s left on his debit card.

Clunk.

Twenty-two dollars and thirty-seven cents’ worth of gas. It’s enough to get them to their destination.

(The next, he hopes, the demon will subsidize– without blue flames and the shaking of a hand and the signature, horrible, all-too-nostalgic ‘let’s make a deal.’)

“Did your therapist never teach you decorum in asking for help?”

Thank you for your patronage, chimes the terminal, the gas nozzle sliding back into its holster.

“They tried!” The demon exudes pride, brushing a hand back over the tip of his triangle like there’s imaginary hair to tuck behind an imaginary ear. “But I’m a wild stallion. If anyone was gonna break me in, it would’ve been done already! You know how it is. Plus, you and I go way back! Theraprism Executive Number Three-forty-eight-B would totally get it, if it was here—”

“Alright.” Ford cuts the rambling off with the bridge of his forehead between two fingers, breath heavy with weariness as it rattles out his lungs. His keys droop down to rest against his knuckle, ring looped around his index finger. “Allow me to shed light onto your situation.”

The car door screeches open. (The hinges have never been the same since Stanley rammed the tail-end of a motorcycle into it. The owner had been none-to-happy. It is, incidentally, the reason why Ford was coerced into purchasing the accursed thing.) He collapses into the leather seat unhappily, shoving the demon out of the way with the back of an arm. 

Bill scoffs: “rude!” but settles into the passenger seat, legs dangling over the edge.

“You.” Ford’s eyes are on the dash, hands and foot busy cranking the car, but the word is pointed in the rightward direction. “Are required a chaperone to collect your— what is it, signatures?”

(Bill chimes: “forgiveness signatures!” but shuts up promptly thereafter.)

“And for reasons unbeknownst to our dimension or the next, your extraterrestrial therapist has deemed that to be me. So for the sake of your program—”

(“nonconsensual program!”)

“I am your sole prospect. That means that you will be respectful, you will be dignified—”

“Hey, hey, hey hey hey hey hey! When have I not been respectful?”

“‘Two solid years left’?”

“I was trying to be helpful!” Bill protests, little hands clenched into balls. “Most humans love learning when they’re going to die! It’s fun for the whole family!”

“Alright,” Ford acquiesces, although this is hardly an excuse deserving of acquiescence. “When you took ten rolls of toilet paper from the gas station bathroom. When you put a bumper sticker for ‘Ciphertology’ on my car. When you stole literal candy from a literal child not five minutes after apparating into my booth at Applebees—”

“Yeah, yeah, yeah, fine. I get it. Respect. I’m all about respect! Just watch, Fordsy, you’re about to see a master of respect. A real Theraprismized man in the shape of an eternal being of chaos in the shape of a triangle!”

“I shouldn’t have agreed to this.” Ford groans, gunning the gas as a hummer sidles up to the station. Flashes its brights behind them. 

“That’s the sixth time you’ve said that!” Bill says, helpfully.

△

one.

The spider-woman shuffles her eyes at the two of them, her elbows propped up on the ledge of her tourist-trap stall. Snap! Her bubble-gum, blown wide enough to nearly reach the sunglasses atop her head.

“Darlene, baby,” Cipher’s cooing at her, levitating with his angles tucked back and triangle-tip elongated. But she’s only got eyes for–

“You wanna do right by me?” She purrs, inching forward with her stiletto nails. A set of long, tapered lashes bats in Stanford’s direction. He’s stiff as a pillar, caught halfway between mortification and indignation. “What’s your friend’s name? Don’t be shy, sugar, come say hello.”

Her lower half is concealed by the base of her stall. And besides that, Ford’s certain the ‘woman’ has disguise enough to make two legs from eight (six?). It’s only by Bill’s warning that he’s keen on the spider- prefix of it all, and the man-eating ramifications that follow.

His lips pull down at the corners. A scowl. He’s scowling. Cipher’s too busy schmoozing to notice, a fiery blaze apparating a contract and quill from some pocket dimension.

The quill dances towards Darlene. She bats it out of the way absentmindedly, her eyebrows waggling. Ford can’t help the sound of disgust.

Cipher tries, “Hey, listen, tootz. I’m really s- sor– sorrrrrrraughhh about all the, y’know, trapped-in-the-human-dimension-for-all-eternity-’till-you-starve-and-die-a-horrible-death stuff. In my defense, I thought it’d be a way shorter turnaround. But hey! You’ve got nice digs set up! Bet you catch a whole lotta flies with this honeypot, more ways than one, you know what I’m saying? So listen, if you could just—”

“You left me,” Darlene suddenly intercuts, her eyes narrowing in fury as she wheels on the demon. (Bill’s tophat does a summersault of surprise.) “To die in this filthy, stinking, worthless dimension!”

“Technically, I left your family, and that was half your fault. Hey, how’s old Dad doing, by the way?”

And suddenly Stanford has a better idea of what’s going on here. He sighs, rocking back on his heels. Runs a hand back through his hair, a gray follicle coming off along with. “I’ll be in the car,” he starts.

“Oh, no,” the spider-woman finishes. “Better go fetch your friend, Cipher. I’m not signing anything until I’m fed.”

Bill looks over his— not a shoulder, but the absence of one, twisting like a pool noodle. They lock eye.

Oh, no, Ford summarizes. 

This is how he ends up with windows up, shades down, his coarse hair tucked into a baseball cap and a suspiciously-golden-slash-suspiciously-glowing accomplice peeking back at him through the shrubbery, industrial-level fishing net in hand.

(Rewind, one hour earlier: “Child predator souls hardly count as ‘human’! C’mon, all the influencers are doing it! Please please please please please please please pleas—”)

Bill has one-lensed shades down over his eye, hunched over in on himself as though he doesn’t shine through the supposed-camoflauge of leaf and bracken. He gestures now and again with one hand, forming little nonsense signals or lifting a palm to say ‘wait, wait… not yet. ’

(Stanford, loathe as he is to admit it, knows that this is for his benefit. This comedy routine, the innocent playfulness woven into something amoral and twisted. This is how Bill operates when he wants something; it’s meaningless. And he does believe it.)

After only fifteen minutes of waiting, the man shambles up the hill atop which they wait, eyes sweeping his surroundings. They narrow when he sees the car, but Ford has ducked down below the window and Bill has covered the roof in a heavy layer of film and dirt, and the Miata itself is old enough now to pass for an abandoned relic.

Apparently satisfied by the lack of consequences, the man approaches the bench, seemingly somehow oblivious to one Bill Cipher and his corners glowing ominously at him from behind the stone. It’s six minutes out ‘till meeting time. Stanford has seen the texts, screwed up his face in revulsion, although that was more at Bill’s play-acting. 

    - just sit tite cutie <3. gonna b there soon

Honestly, who would fall for something so—?

The man pulls out his phone. The screen is blinding, tucking everything in the dark back into the shadows, and Stanford knows his cue by the point of a barely-there black-tipped finger.

He rolls out of the car door, launching up off his haunches before the man blinks up at him. Bill flings the fishing net well over his head– but their victim (or would-be predator) is a large man, taller than Ford and nearly twice as big around, and he does not go down so easily by the weights. He swings at Stanford with a meaty fist, and as Ford dodges, his neck cracks from the force with which he whips it to the side.

“Cipher!” Shrill, somehow familiar. The fishing net goes up in flames suddenly, cerulean and starving. Ford winces at the brush against his own skin; his target screams as his flesh crackles and peels.

Within a moment, they extinguish, the man twitching beneath his burns inside.

“Lady likes to play with her food.” Bill shrugs, floating out of the foliage. “Chip-chop! Get ‘im in the trunk.”  

“You boys went through all that trouble for me?” Darlene purrs, tugging Stanford closer by force of her fingers curled around his shirt collar. (He ignores the way Bill flashes bright white in warning, evident in the light dancing across the wall.) “You’re so cute. I could just eat you up.”

“Hands off, dollface,” says Bill, tugging Stanford back with a claw-like grip. “I still need this meatsack. These puppies aren’t made for driving.” One of his fingers barks in agreement.

“What about when you’re done with ‘im?” She bats her long lashes, curling a pointed fingernail around her hair.

Bill considers this.

“Gimme a call in a week. You can have what’s left of him for the right price. I’m sure we can work something out!”

“Thank you, ma’am,” Ford clears his throat, gesturing at Bill to roll up and apparate away the freshly-signed scroll. “We’ll be getting out of your way.”

As they swing the door shut behind them, muffled screams for help devolve into abject cries of horror, and then Ford starts the car and there’s nothing at all but wind through the window and bubblegum pop in the air.

△

two.

Two days and three stops later, the car is out of gas.

“That’s fine,” Bill says.

Stanford pointedly ignores him, on account of the car being out of gas.

“That’s fine,” Bill says, again, reclining on the windshield and gazing up at the stars. They’re stranded out in the middle of nowhere, trees and rocks and cave-lines hills and nothing else much around but dirt road. Two hours, and not another soul’s come down this path. They’ll die out here, he figures, or Ford will die, and then Bill will never complete his therapy program, or maybe he’ll find some other sucker’s body to latch onto, keep himself in this reality, go home and get good marks and forget all about the man he hung out to dry along the way. It tracks, actually.

So.

“Fine? ” Ford snaps, whirling on his heel. “This is the definition of not fine! We have no method of transportation, no supplies, no reasonable account of the next nearest town, and you haven’t even told me where we’re—”

“It’s fine,” Bill says for a third time, propping himself up on one of his corners for a better look at Ford. “Geez, chill out, woulda? We’re already here!”

The world does a flip, or at least Ford’s stomach does, one that leaves him winded, hands splayed on his half-crouched knees. “Here?” he wheezes.

And he looks around, blanches. Realizes that they’re standing smack in the middle of a town, tin- and wood- latched roofs on unsturdy houses, like something out of an old western movie. An honest-to-god tumbleweed rolls past, drawn along the dusty breeze. Somewhere out beyond the hill, a coyote howls.

“You’ve kept teleportation magic concealed?” The bite is thinly veiled in his voice, cold as the damn desert.

Bill just cackles in response, floating over to one of the buildings that’s as unmistakably ‘saloon’ as any set designer’s vision.

For lack of a better option, Ford follows trepidatiously, but his head swivels over his shoulder.

The car is gone.

It’s immediately apparent that the both of them are horribly out of place in whatever town Bill has taken them to. Well, Bill’s out of place everywhere, and Stanford has a poor track record for ‘fitting in’ at best. Still, the point stands. This is a town of folks who meet the very definition of the word, clothed in leather-and-cotton wear, the women bundled from their ankles to their hair, the men chewing tobacco and spitting into the road made of dirt and dust.

Miners, merchants, women with more than goods for sale litter the porches of the various wooden buildings that comprise the stretch. Many fan themselves with pieces of paper, or else carefully-constructed fans. The heat is sweltering, suddenly, a summer snap nearly worse than any Ford has experienced, no doubt in part due to the expanse of tree stumps around them, forest cut down for growth.

“Cipher,” he hisses, jogging to catch up with the floating triangle. “Where have you taken us?”

“Someplace forgotten,” the demon responds ominously, his eye swiveling around in self-satisfaction. “Try not to draw attention to yourself, Sixer. These people are the kinds to throw stones at anybody who sticks out. Fun! They tried it on me, once. Not as fun, but it was cute to watch them go at it!”

And so bursts open the saloon door.

Out pours a band of men who have clearly branded themselves criminals. Like something out of a historical fiction novel about the bandits of the old Oregon trail. (Not, Ford would protest to anyone who asked, that he had read any such thing.)

“Gawd-dayum demon!” Grunts one of the bandits, hat brim tipped low so that it hangs precariously over his brow, casting his whole face in shadow. “Told ya if you ever dared show tail ‘round here, you’d leave with more n’ a few new holes.”

Cipher appears to consider this, tapping his hand in the space under his eye where, presumably, a chin could be.

“I don’t have any holes!” He decides cheerfully. “Sounds fun!”

“A’right,” chin tilted up, it becomes apparent the bandit is quite literally chewing a cigar, teeth grimy with it, “then you won’t mind me makin’ good on my word.”

Click, and suddenly there’s a pistol pointed straight at Bill.

Not ordinarily a problem – good news, even, on the average day – except for the fact that Stanford is standing right behind him. What’s the velocity of a bullet in the 1800s? Is this the 1800s? Wait– is Bill Cipher even tangible–?

“Hold on.” Both hands come up, placating, but he steps sidelong and safely out of range. Just in case. “We aren’t here to fight. Cipher is—”

“A no-good sonofabitch with the sissy-lashed eye of a saloon girl? A plague and menace on this town and the one over and prob’ly the next after that?”

 (“Such high praise!” Trills Bill, a fake tear rolling down his bricks.)

There’s no arguing with that. Stanford shrugs, rolling his shoulders. “Yes.”

The man squints. Spits a wad of something black into the dirt. “The demon take you, too, stranger? Don’t be fooled by all those fancy-mouthed promises. All he’s good for’s driving a man mad. Happened to no less ‘n three of my boys. Two of ‘em never recovered. Third’s dead.”

It’s a story as old as human civilization. Stanford is under no delusions that he’s the first to make a deal.

(He only pretends at it, sometimes, plays forgetting the memory like a game.)

“Can you blame me?” Bill’s shrugging, unbothered, the pistol still pointed square at his eye. “I thought they were holding out on me! All that talk about empire-building, and you guys didn’t have one lousy steelworker in the lot!” 

“Prepare to die, varmint bastard!” Says the cowboy gravely, clicking back the hammer of his pistol.

“And after I went through all the trouble of bringing you a make-up present! Are you watching, Sixer? This is why you never bother with early settlers! Their idea of invention is piggybacking off the labor of immigrants. Pretty innovative, actually, I should’ve tried that when I—”

“Present?” The bandit’s grip shifts, gesturing Bill closer with the side of his pistol. This, to Stanford, does not seem like optimal gun safety.

Bill perks up, hat shaping into an exclamation point and back. “Boy, am I glad you asked! Hang on, I know it’s in here somewhere—” The space underneath his eye (and, disturbingly, half of the lower lid)... inverts… something brown and stony visible within. The demon reaches his own hand inside, rummaging around to the effect of a cartoonish level of sound.

“So what are you doin’ with this yellowbelly?” slurs the man, tilting his head at Ford all off-to-the-side like. “You seem like a clean-cut ‘nough man. On the older side, pardon my say-so, for the keepin’ n’ company of demons.”

“I’m still deciding that myself.” Stanford says, clenching his hand into a fist. The bandit’s eyes follow; he gives a soft huh. Doesn’t comment on the extra finger. “I assure you, though, I have no intentions of entering another deal with the monster.”

“Another, huh?” There’s something oddly contemplative in the way he chews his cigar. A flourish brings the snap of a light up to the end of it; the wrapping crackles and burns. “Then you must be mad. All the others what survived are.”

“Found it!” Bill brandishes a long, shiny piece of metal, the hole in his body closing up with a gulping sound. “Congratulations, bucko— you’re the first owner of one of these bad boys in all of history! Just make sure they print my name on the books.”

The bandit takes it cautiously, turns it over in hand. His fist nearly wraps around the diameter of it. “What is it?” He grunts. When he tilts it upright, Stanford sees the black plastic box, the brown wires.

He cards his fingers through his hair, hissing.

“Cipher.” He says, warning.

“What?” Bill says. “It’s a pipe bomb! Trust me, James, you’re gonna blow the town’s minds with this one! Get it?”

“Name’s Ames,” says Ames. “So it’s a bomb that looks like a pipe– what good’s that? We’ve got a whole stockpile of dynamite back at base camp.”  

“You see,” the demon tuts, “this here baby’s got a fancy clock built into its face. It’s proprietary! You set the time, and it goes boom, right on cue! No scrambling out of the way required! Plus, to the unsophisticated eye, it’s barely noticeable– you’ll be breaking down back walls in no time!”

Ames considers this without much care for caution, tilting the bomb back and forth, tossing it from one hand to the other once. Stanford watches this wearily. “What’s the angle here, demon? Your kind don’t do no favors. Know you ain’t show no remorse, neither.”

Bill brightens, waving his hands around as he explains his program, the contract, “– and once you sign, you won’t have to–” until Ames cuts him off, palm to the wind.

“If you’re that confident in this here bomb, then we’ve got ourselves an opportunity. You hang around ‘till the bank’s busted, and I sign your fancy piece ‘a paper.”

“We won’t be staying long.” Stanford interjects, glowering. The bandit only laughs.

“No problem, there.” He grins. “I’ll gather the boys. We’ll move tonight.”

The world ends around them in a torrent of fire and shredded stone.

Stanford clutches his coat lapels tight against himself, squinting against the dust storm that the explosion’s stirred up. Halfway into midnight, and there’s nearly two-dozen criminals in spiked boots and leather jackets loading armfuls of money into carts, saddlebags.

Their leader is cackling under the moonlight, madness matched only by the demon to his side, whose laughter cracks the moon to reveal shiny, glimmering yolk.

“There you have it, James!” Bill is saying.

(“ames”)

“A whole town’s savings– all yours! Now whadday say, you wanna pledge to my good-doing?”

Ames chortles, belly-deep. A piece of shrapnel embeds into a deputy’s head. As crumbling, burning bits of building rain down around them, women screeching and men shrieking, money set aflame and gold scattered at their feet, the world takes another dive to the deep end of the pool.

Ford forgets to plug his nose and hold his breath. He comes up stumbling, nauseous.

Bill’s laughing, reclined backwards in mid-air, the Miata keys dangling from his clawed fingertips. The car beeps its amusement. They’re back: woods, dirt, solitude, no town as far as the eye can see.

“What was that?” Stutters Stanford, but the airiness is only half from panic.

Other half from exhilaration, his heart pounding in his chest, suddenly some twenty-odd years old again and experiencing the wonders of a much wider world for the first time.

“Isn’t it obvious, Fordsy? The big guy up there gave me the special go-ahead.” Bill bats his eyelashes. It’s only a little off-putting. “That was time travel.”

(After all this, they still have to walk five miles there-and-back to refill the gas tank.)

△

two-and-a-half.

They’re in the grocery store when the call comes.

It’s a simple corner market, fruit stalls lined in the front of the ramshackle building. The exterior doubles as a gas station, triples as a coffee shop.

Bill had protested the stop — “you wouldn’t have had to eat if you’d taken my deal!” — but Ford is, disappointingly, only human. Oddly, none of the customers seem to notice the floating triangle over his shoulder, though everyone in the place has a sheen of gloss over their eyes. From the road or a life unfulfilled, Stanford isn’t sure.

He’s inspecting a half-rotten sale bag of apples when the banana across the aisle begins to ring.

It shakes first, vibrating until it nearly topples off the top of the pile, and then the noise starts up, a shrill sound that echoes throughout the store, only that no one else pays it any mind.

Bill answers it with an irritated roll of his eye. “Yellow?” He pops, holding the curve of the fruit up to one of his angles. “Yuh-huh. Nuh-uh. Yuh-huh.”

An aggravated sigh, the drag of his four little claws down his eyelid.

“Why do you— uh-huh. Yep, fine, sure, can do-odle.” He cuts the call short with the slam of the banana into the linoleum floor. A mother of two screaming toddlers balks at Ford for this, tugging her children away with her nose in the air.

“Friend of yours?” Grumbles Stanford, stepping over the mashed mess.

“Hah! Try prison guard!” Bill begins to systematically toss bananas onto the ground; Ford shuffles out of the aisle and away from the blame.

(This is attention drawn that he doesn’t need, which is, according to Stanley, the number one obstacle in shoplifting.)

“The frilly guy in the sky himself called. You messed up, Fordsy! Turns out you’re not supposed to give nineteenth-century settlers modern-day explosive devices!”

“You did that.” Inserts Ford here, ignored.

“Who knew, huh? Well, Time Baby’s old crew cleaned up all those pesky anomalies, but one thing led to another led to them capturing a new plaything, and now we’ve got another name on the list!” He waves his worn scroll in front of Ford’s face, who squints at the parchment. There, underneath a series of expletives from Sharp-Toothed Bandit Ames:

“Blendin Blenjamin Blandin?” He quotes, the name vaguely familiar then gone as it leaves the tip of his tongue.

“Oh, you know this guy! Gave that niece and nephew of yours the runaround, way back when.”

There’s no shortage of people to fit that description. Ford shakes his head.

“I may have borrowed his body a few years ago.” Bill taps his finger on the space underneath his eye, thinking. “Nothing major, couple minutes of his lifespan.”

Ah. Ford sighs, snatching a bag of granola and shoving it into a pocket hidden on the inside of his jacket. “The man whose body you used to open the rift.”

“Bingo!”

A shopkeeper eyes him suspiciously. Stanford takes this as their cue to leave– not before brazenly lifting a reusable water bottle from a shelf. “So,” he drones, “where do we meet this ‘Blandin’?”

The answer to that question is, evidently, nowhere.

He’s only just tucked his half-shamefully stolen groceries into the backseat when the pavement under his feet opens up like a maw, and then he’s falling, the world a series of black as horrible and endless as the bottomless pit.

Only this particular void has an endpoint. He lands on it with a thud, groaning at the sudden impact. Miraculously, none of his bones have broken.

This is the first sign of trouble.

“You!" Shouts the shrillest, most grating voice Ford has ever heard in his life.

(This is saying something; he lived with one in his head for a matter of years.)

But when he looks up, blinking fuzzy spots out of his vision, the owner of the voice is pointing at Cipher. The man is short, chubby, sporting an orange jumpsuit and a set of magically-bound handcuffs. Two guards blanket him, one on either side, their shapes an amorphous dark gray set against the backdrop of the void only by their crisp eggshell suits.

“Heya, Bland-jamin.” Bill tips his hat, eye creasing in the way Ford first came to associate with the word ‘smile’ and later came to associate with the word ‘RUN’. “Heard you got yourself caught! And after everything I did for you.”

“Everything you did? Everything you did?! You– you tricked me! You used my body– and pinned it all on me! This is all your fault!”

“Hey kid, those were the terms of the deal! Check your receipt. Buyer’s remorse does not equal refund!”

With a high-pitched growl, Blendin screams, “Your family ruined my life!”

“Woah now! Family, is it?” Bill splays his palms in the air, rolling his eye over to Ford. “Sixer, looks like you’re the one who owes this freak of nature an apology. Just look at him! Blubbery, bald— ‘ruined’ doesn’t cut it!”

“I’ve always looked like this!” Blendin stamps his foot, whole body trembling with a level of rage previously known only to little dogs and small, bearded men. One of his guards clamps a vaguely hand-shaped tendril on his shoulder.

“I’m hardly going to apologize to the man who opened a spacetime rift to the nightmare realm.” Stanford scoffs, pushing himself up off the invisible ‘ground’ and re-popping the collar of his coat.

Cipher cackles, leaning back with fists on his– well, wherever ‘hips’ would be on a triangle. “Fordsy, old pal! You sure know how to tell ‘em.” He swoops in closer, holding up his hand to block an imaginary mouth as he stage-whispers: “Didn’t you do that, too?” 

“I was deceived.” Ford hisses, running the cost-benefit analysis of spitting in Bill’s eye.

“So was I!” Bemoans Blendin. “You promised me vengeance! And now look at me! Imprisoned! Handcuffed like some– some– like some common criminal!”

“Is there some kinda manager I can speak to?” Bill’s refocused his attention on the guards, ignoring Blendin entirely. (Blendin stamps his foot again in disgrace.) “If this jerkoff qualifies for the list, there’s about a thousand other beings you’re missing across this realm, and I don’t think ol' Stanford’s got enough juice in him to make it that long.”

One of the guards rolls its oblong head (Ford questions whether the word ‘head’ applies) towards the other. A low hum permeates the area. He recognizes this as the native language of dimension Gi#u%75SA. Unfortunately, it’s one he hadn’t time to learn. After a moment, the other guard inverts, collapsing in on itself.

Blendin blinks. “Uh, guys– is that supposed to happen?”

“Get used to it, slimeball, you’re gonna be seeing a lot more where that came from!” Bill sneers. He’s created a mouth out of his eye for the sole purpose.

And within another half-second, the alien has popped back into place, mumbling something back at its colleague. A moment later, and:

“Well hey, look at that!” Bill waves his assignment list around with a fervor. “Blendin Bland-jamin Blandin! Stricken out and everything! Boy, you guys work fast when you’re not dealing with intergalactic war criminals!”

“This is ridiculous!” Blendin’s voice reaches a fever pitch, devolving here and there to open screeches. “I was told there would be apologies! I was promised comeuppance! I– I– I won’t stand for this!”

Stanford clears his throat. Bill’s eye is focused on him. It’s crinkled into even lines of amusement. He knows this without turning to look. “An apology is in order, I believe. Your deal with Cipher caused a great deal of suffering to my family and town.”

A low grumble from one of the guards. From the top of the void falls a scrap of paper, bound so tightly by twine into a roll that it thunks as it collides with Blendin’s head.

“Ow–! ” He stutters, rubbing the bald on the back of his head. “Oh.” He stoops to retrieve the scroll. “Hang on, guys, let me read this.”

Bill calls, cheerfully, “Take your time, buddy!” 

Blendin clears his throat, then begins to recite aloud, stumbling over every odd word: “Blendin Bland-jamin– I mean, Blenjamin!– Blandin. You are heh– You are hereby compelled to bestow your sincerest apologies onto– S-Stanford Pines?!”

Stanford crosses his arms, unamused.

Cipher rolls on his back in the air, fists pounding an imagined ground.

“No way! Nuh-uh! I won’t do it!” Blendin swivels to look at the guards. “You can’t make me! I’ll– I’ll die! Yes! I’ll die before I apologize to– to this–”

“That is correct. You will not.” Utters one of the guards in a bone-deep growl, its already-blobulous form ebbing and shifting. Blendin is stunned into silence. “The Theraprism does not condone amend-making without the accompaniment of a witness. You will be brought before the High Axolotl to identify one of great importance in your life to act as chaperone.”

Blendin’s eyes widen. “N-no! You can’t! Oh, boy, if my mom hears about this–”

But with a sound like pulling slushie from a silly straw, the void expels its inhabitants, and with a grunt, Stanford is back on solid ground, bracing against the back of his Miata. There’s a note, scrawled on the back of grocery store receipt paper, shoved into the trunk. I know what you did, it reads, accompanied by a sad face with furious eyebrows drawn above.

He groans.

“I’d call that a success!” Bill punches the air, spinning in a triumphant circle. “That patchy-haired freak’ll never make it off of the Axoltl’s waiting list! Do you know how many calls I had to place to– Sixer?”

“Do not speak a word of this,” Ford warns, before promptly turning over the side of his car and hurling up the contents of his stomach.

△

three.

It isn’t that Stanford never had sympathy for Stanley’s plight. Even in the aftermath, blood still-curdled and thirty years out in the pits of disreality, he’d offered him the summer: income, housing, stability.

Only in his old age has he come to reckon with the cold awakening of his own selfishness. (This, he knows, is something unattainable for a demon. Perhaps there is something to be said for a life lived too long.) The metaphorical ice sears a freezing trail up his face: there is no money for a motel.

Ford, and his ward by extension, are flat broke.

Bill pockets a key when the desk receptionist is away, floating up through the floorboards with a cackle to snatch the chipped piece of plastic. Under the subterfuge of night, they try the keycard on every door twice (threatened by tattoo-ridden men and, once, a woman) before realizing that this is not how motel computer systems work.

They spend an hour sharing a bag of Fritos in Ford’s car (Bill crushes them into crumbles that fall into the carpeting) before he says, “can’t you float through doors?” And at last they have a room to themselves and the cockroaches.

And the bed bugs, and the silverfish. Bill busies himself by lighting them on fire until Ford returns with a bucket full of ice and shampoo filched from an abandoned housekeeping cart.

“Nice digs.” Bill’s rapidly flicking through television channels. Dog shows, toddler pageants, two dozen cooking programs – when he hits an empty transmission feed, he gives up, chucking the universal remote at the screen.

It shatters, of course. Ford is suddenly grateful for the lack of a card to put on file.

“If that’s an attempt at sarcasm,” he lifts the mattress, winces at the charred little corpses underneath, “it would be clearer if you tried straying away from your usual grating cadence.”

“That’s cold, Sixer.” Bill’s inspecting the ice bucket. Settles into it with an exaggerated ahh, arms propped up along the edge. “Ice cold.”

Ford pointedly ignores this. With a flourish, he sprawls a large route map over the bed, clacking a cheap pen found earlier in a drawer of the bedside table. (Next to the Holy Bible, which Bill had first laughed at, then demanded Stanford keep shut up in the bathroom.)

“Our first stop was in northern Oregon. The next sits on the California border. We would conserve our time and gas if we chart the most optimal route through your various waypoints.”

“That would be a great idea!” Wiggling deeper into the ice, Bill’s eye watches him through a half-shut lid. “If you knew where we were going.”

“Yes.” Clips Ford. “So tell me where we’re going.”

“What’ll you give me for it?” A kick sends a piece of ice flying across the room. It hits the corner of the map, taking out the county that encompasses Gravity Falls in a blur of wet ink.

“My cooperation.” There’s no humor in it. Stanford flicks the fast-melting piece of ice onto the carpet, eyes never straying from the map. With the pen, he draws a line from the largest town outside Gravity Falls to Mystery Mountain to Goose Lake. He scribbles a filled circle on top of the first two.

Bill makes a tongue-tutting sound. Impressive, Ford has to admit, given the lack of a mouth. “You already gave that away for free, old man. My deals in the Theraprism are dry, dull, dead! And your mind’s still succulent enough, so how’s about you–”

“No.”

“Then our destinations are for me to know, and you to find out! Wrap it up, Sixer. I just need you for the car and the Axolotl-approved accompanying body. All your planning’s giving me a migraine.”

There’s a nearly-imperceptible shift in Ford’s face, blink-and-you’ll-miss it. The way his brow knots and arches in the center, his lips smooth into a fractionally flatter line, his breath escapes him with five percent higher velocity than his usual exhale.

Fortunately, Bill Cipher never blinks.

So he’s already eyeing his human (nevermind the possessive pronoun) when Stanford crumples up the west coast with a six-fingered fist, righting himself with the snap-crackle of his back and a snarl to his chest. “Is this a game to you, demon?”

“Woah, woah! Bringing back the name calling? I thought we had a partnership going on here, pal!”

“A partnership? With you? Do you take me twice a fool?” Ford grabs for the ice bucket. Bill, surprisingly, doesn’t float up and away, doesn’t blink into a different corner of the room – something Stanford has yet to see him do, isn’t sure if he can, with the limitations imposed upon him. His singular eye goes wide and round, pupil shrinking to a speck of a slit, but there’s irritation there, the barest hint of blue. “That’s it, then, is it? These apologies are an assignment? A checklist between yourself and freedom?”

Bill rolls his eye. “What is this, the obvious questions game? Check, yes, duh, and you know it, babe.” 

Ford casts the bucket down. The little yellow triangle, still smaller than remembered, rolls to the filthy carpet in a swamp of water and half-melted ice.

Earlier that day, they had pulled up to a gated complex. Wood and stone, like something out of a film set. (A former set, in fact, he’d learned later.)

“Townies here are real whack-a-doodles,” Bill said, dangling his tiny legs over the side of Ford’s shoulder. Ford tolerated it only for the opportunity to flick him off when he least suspected it. “Keep an eye out, Fordsy. These guys aren’t my biggest fans.”

“Is anyone?” He approached what appeared to be the central gate, breath caught in his chest as he craned his neck up at a watch tower.

“I’ll have you know that there’s a thriving community of Ciphertologists somewhere in the Utah valley! People out there take a lot better to the world ‘cult’ than Kansans. But! You live and you learn. And I did! And I learned not to mess with Californian seclusionists. Yeesh.”

“What did you do to them?” Ford asked, and Bill looked up at him while humming, curious.

“Easy,” he said, cheerful. “I let them watch while I ate their idol.”

“Did you think,” he’s standing over Bill now, the low light reflecting off his glasses, that old pain in his right eye throbbing, “that we could play as partners in the light of day?”

There’s a singular beat of silence, and then the heavy weight of it descends upon them both like a shroud of doom. In the wake of it, breaking through the swell like a wave, Bill cackles. It’s a horrible sound: shrill, cruel. The laughter of a madman.

“So you’re not as old and complacent as you look, Sixer.” With the snap of his fingers, the water clinging to him evaporates, and then he’s floating, darting around Ford’s head with his eye shifting to either side of his body, so long as it keeps eye contact. “Just play along, won’t ya? Help me get through this list–” A flash of magic and it appears, an innumerable length of names. “– and you’ll never have to deal with me again! I’ll be somebody else’s problem.”

“You were meant to be dead,” Ford’s snarling, jerking to follow the eyeball’s line of sight. “Your body is a stone statue in the Oregon woods.”

I know, he doesn’t say. I’ve been to it.

(More than once, has he been to it; the words recited there will not bear repeating.)

“Yeah, yeah, your family murdered me. Congratulations! Big whoop-de-doo for you. But you can’t kill an idea! That’s what I told the Great Axolotl, anyways– and he agreed!”

“So– what? This is your sanctioned second chance at life? Existence? After the program ends, you go back to terrorizing the minds of the living and scheming your way into the annihilation of life on Earth?” A disgusted scoff. Ford swipes his glasses off his nose, holds them aloft as he massages the bridge of his forehead. “Are you so incapable of change?”

Silence, in his lack of vision. Somewhere, Bill spins around him in a slow circle, his expression obscured in the darkness of behind-eyelids.

“Now you’re getting it!” He finally chimes, but the note falls flat. When Ford opens his eyes, there’s nothing but blankness there, even after he readjusts his spectacles. “I’m never gonna change, Fordsy! But this is your chance to do away with the ‘me’ in your life once and for all. Otherwise–”

His voice warps. 

“ʏᴏᴜ'ʀᴇ ɴᴇᴠᴇʀ ɢᴏɴɴᴀ ʜᴇᴀʀ ᴛʜᴇ ᴇɴᴅ ᴏꜰ ɪᴛ!”

Ford sighs. Considers. Looks anywhere but in the room.

“I’m going to bed.” he says at last, resigned.

The next morning, in the gray-wash break of dawn, Ford is the first to stick out his hand:

“A deal,” he says, firmly. “I’ll chaperone the remainder of this ill-advised trip, and when the Theraprism releases you from custody, you’ll go anywhere but Earth. Take over whatsoever reality you feel, con whoever you can– but not here. Never again.”

Bill eyes his hand, the blue streak throughout his body spasming, a darkness to the bits of exoskeleton around his eye.

(If Ford didn’t know better, he would use ‘exhaustion’ as a descriptor.)

“Deal.”

△

an aside.

[ Stanford had always known he was an idiot. From childhood, it had carved at him. All the intellectualism and ego of a self-proclaimed scientist couldn’t conceal – not from himself – a childlike naivety.

There was that old drag of self-loathing: it tasted like loneliness in the daytime, of ill-belonging by night. In school, they’d called him by name of ‘freak’; at home, they’d labeled him an outsider. His father had cared little for his use outside of opportunity, his mother little better. In his weaker moments, Stanford could point to his six-fingered hands, his abnormal interests, his peculiar understanding of metaphysics for a child their age.

But Stanford had known, even then, that there was something distinctly ‘other’ to him, something pervasive beyond physical being or the personality that resulted.

Proof had come later; theory was first. A friend – prefaced by ‘only’ – by the name of Fiddleford McGucket.

McGucket was once an engineer on the California coastline, pioneering a field of computer science that would make Steve Jobs a fortune or five. That had changed when Stanford reentered his life post-college. So much had changed by way of his presence, and all for the worse.

It wasn’t surprise that had rankled him when Bill’s fingertip had tapped the name on his list. Somehow, he had obscured the others with a glitch-like effect, so that only one glowed: Old Man McGucket.

(Curious, how names worked – did the Theraprism’s list reflect the name an individual called themselves by? That which they were most called? Or was it simply the best recollection of a madman?)

No. Guilt was a word better suited to the duty, although it couldn’t encompass the depth of the pit that had settled deep in his stomach. Forty years after their first meeting, McGucket had turned up homeless, camped out in a shack spruced up by contraptions he only half-remembered.

That was halfway Cipher’s fault. But mostly, it was Stanford’s. If anyone owed the poor man an apology…

The GPS was set for ‘home’. ]

△

four.

Gravity Falls! It’s good to be back! Years of sharing a body (and decades of fearing it) have left an imprint like a voice on his mind. Behind the metal shield, behind it all. Ford half-turns his head before he realizes the interjection is nothing more than a figment of his imagination.

He and Bill aren’t on speaking terms. It’s a mutual silent treatment sort of thing, like nails on a chalkboard through the air.

It’s a five minute drive from the ‘Welcome to Gravity Falls’ sign to town proper, five more to the old Northwest Mansion. A two-mile drive punctuated by empty streetlights. Wait at each for thirty seconds, wonder if it’s worth it to run on through.

(Regret it instantly; Gravity Fall’s only got so much for law enforcement to do.)

Ford spends the stretch imagining what he’d say if he and his traveling companion colleague were saying anything at all. This is where we first met, someone might tell an old friend; this is where you turned me to stone and attempted to murder my grand-nephew.

Out of the corner of his eye, he watches Cipher, tucked into the side of the car door, peering out the sealed window. Not so much as a flick of cognition in the light dancing across his edges. This is where I realized that you–

“This is the place.” The Miata grumbles, tires caught in the gravel of a driveway-in-progress. Northwest Mansion looms high above the replanted treetops, the garden relandscaped, more attuned to nature. The walls of the place itself are more stone than wood, now, metal springing off of it in bits of satellites and dishes.

Bill floats stoically behind him as Stanford makes the long walk up the bumpy road. In the silence between, he can all but feel the ghosts who haunt these grounds watching him, curiosity more than hatred turning their eyes. It’s been decades since he interfered with the spirits who rest here, decades since he troubled himself with the poor refugees local to Gravity Falls. But then, he’d always had a single-minded focus once he had found the Muse.

Funny, he thinks. All that time worrying over the souls of the deceased. If only he’d known that there was something inhuman and far, far more feral preying upon him.

His fist raps against the door. After thirty seconds, he knocks again. Just as he debates a third, and Bill’s impatience – even silent – begins to grow palpable behind him, Fiddleford opens the door.

Stanford, who had deliberately failed to pre-announce his arrival, finds himself at something of a loss for words. Fiddleford McGucket, old friend, old partner, old assistant– Fiddleford tilts his head in wonder, sighs as though in acceptance, then notices the demon over Stanford’s shoulder.

He shuts the door in their faces. There’s the distinct turning of a metal lock. Another. A third. A fourth– Stanford stops counting and calls out through the thick, steel-reinforced wood.

“Fiddleford!” He shouts. Clears his throat. “There’s no need for that, I assure you– the demon is powerless here. I’ve come to talk.”

He hesitates.

“He’s come to apologize. To you.”

(A wince; there’s no disguise for the bitterness like poison tinging that sentence.)

Slowly, there’s a metal scraping as one lock is undone. Another, and then McGucket moves more quickly, until the door is thrown open again and there’s aluminum atop his head and he’s eyeing Ford warily, a nervous jitter to his entire body.

“We’ll talk outside.” He says, glancing fitfully over his shoulder. “The others won’t like it if he’s here. And neither’ll I. There’s nothing good to be had with the demon, Stanford, no matter what he’s promised you.”

Bill glowers in the background, his eye narrowed. Ford is grateful for his commitment to the silent treatment, for his old friend’s sake.

“That will be fine,” he says, stepping back off the shallow doorstep. McGucket follows warily, and then they stand facing each other uncomfortably, so much gone unsaid in the past two years.

After a moment, Stanford begins: “You were right, of course. About it all. You entered the portal before I ever did, and you warned me what would happen if we proceeded with the project. I was a fool, then, not to listen.”

“A fool then, eh?” McGucket stares at Bill as he says this, stroking his beard thoughtfully. “Stanford, I always admired ‘ya for your ideas. Just let them get out of hand– but then, so did I, I guess. We’ve both got hard-earned lessons for that.”

“Isn’t this touching.” Bill’s sneering, petulant as a child with his arms drooping over. “Looks like I brought two old pals back together! So how about hopping on the forgiveness train and letting me off the hook, old man?”

Fiddleford shuffles uneasily. This is the cost of a mind erased perpetually. Stanford has felt it himself, in more ways than one. The empathy only makes the sickly feeling of guilt in his stomach worse.

“What’s that mean, forgiveness? I don’t– I’d rather not think about these things. Makes me…”

“The universe has chosen to enroll the three-sided psychopath in a mandatory therapy program. This is one of the steps– make amends, collect signatures attesting to his reformed character. That’s all.”

Bill squints his eye in the approximation of a smile. Even then, it’s tight.

“Well, that’s good and all, but is he sorry?”

This, for Stanford, is as far as the lie goes. He cranes his neck to stare at Bill, who says:

“Yeah. Sure.”

McGucket glances at Ford. There’s something complex behind his eyes, vulnerable. It’s the look of a man who has already lost more than he had to give; a man who can’t afford anything more. “I suppose,” drawn out slow and twanged, “if you think that it’s alright, Ford.”

A man who would give what little remains for the sake of trusting an old friend. Even one who doesn’t deserve it.

There’s that pang of guilt, old and fresh and strong as a shot of whiskey to the liver.

Ford feels air curl on a bubble on his tongue. Chances another look at Cipher, Fiddleford shifting nervously behind. The demon floats stonily, remarkably impassive for something with only one eye. It does little to put Stanford’s conscience at ease.

Does he think it’s alright? Is it worth the chance of not-alright? And why, Ford wonders, is he willing to attest to that risk, print his name good as a signature beside the gamble?

“It’s alright, Fiddleford.” Weariness betrays his age more than the adjustment of glasses, more than the ache of his back. Cipher turns incrementally – two or three degrees or so; these mathematical specifications had been important to someone he knew, once – towards him, but comments no further.

For the best. Nothing particularly helpful or reassuring has ever come out of that– that— that lack of a mouth.

McGucket says nothing for a moment. And then, softly, with the reluctance that Stanford knows is his last line of resistance, he says, “How do you know?”

And there’s only one answer, really. One that Ford likes to keep from even himself, deny in the light of day and avoid in the dead of night. One that he’s taken measures to make disreality– but there’s no undoing the past.

“He’s been in my head.” He says simply.

(McGucket’s name is a scrawl in the ink of a quill.)

△

five.

It’s a cool seventy-seven degrees Fahrenheit. (An inferior system of measurement, notes Ford.) There isn’t a cloud in the sky. Down the teetering hill of pavement, the crash of lake water lapping its shore is a soothing constant, the call of gulls denoting a swell of fish. Overpowered air conditioning leaks out the propped-open hardware store door. This does little to disguise the rank of weed, or to cure the absence of customers.

“Already prepping for Halloween?” Smacks the stoner behind the counter, tongue skimming over misaligned teeth.

“Ha-ha. Yes. Halloween.” Says Ford, reevaluating the state of his squeaky-wheeled shopping cart:

A shovel, three bags of ready-dry concrete, one styrofoam tombstone, a small wooden box, a cheap bouquet of flowers to match.

This matches, more or less, the paper shopping list he’d been handed earlier in the morning, his neck stiff from a night spent tucked against the side of his car door. Cipher had said, “here’s the stuff we need, so go fetch,” and like a faithful dog, Ford had gone.

There’s a kind of morbid familiarity to the scenario that had drawn a wry twist to his lips, and perhaps this is why his shopping passes for the escapades of a man with bold hobbies and a passion for spooky lawn design.

It’s their fourth stop of the day. Stanford’s back aches with each item he stoops to haul onto the checkout counter.

(“Why’d you do that?”)

“Sixty dollars and forty-two cent’s your total.” The cashier breathes onto the back of his hand, makes like it’s inconspicuous. The minty breath spray he spritzes onto his tongue does little to disguise the smell of herb.

Ford shuffles through his wallet. “Can you break a hundred?” The demon had slipped five Franklin-faced bills into his pocket the night prior, and turned away when asked. Call it a stipend or whatever, aloof, though Stanford’s certain he’d stolen it from McGucket earlier that day.

(“Do? What, exactly?”)

The kid passes back three tens and two quarters. Ford doesn’t quibble over the difference.

(“Don’t play dumb, IQ. Why’d you lie to the old man? Don’t tell me it’s ‘cuz you believe in all this redemption bullshit.”)

The cart’s got an auto-lock system that stops it dead at the barrier between the store and the world. Something hot and frustrated slips out between Stanford’s teeth. He tucks what fits into the too-large store bag, hoists the shovel over his shoulder. It’s a stumble-stop-go trek back to the car. Past the glass of the back windowpane, Bill bobs in time to some unheard song playing through the speakers. He doesn’t notice Ford struggling behind him, or else just doesn’t care. That’s fine.

Help never comes free with Bill Cipher.

(“Was it a lie?”)

Be-beep, clicks the Miata as he opens the trunk by the key, struggling shovel first, then bag to lift everything into the fabriced hollow. It’s all reminiscent of days gone past, pillaging ancient materials from alien spaceships, feeling like he was transporting a body beside him all the while. There’s little fondness in those memories.

But there is some.

“This one doesn’t count,” Bill says as he settles into the worn leather. He’s got Ford’s phone in his inky little clutches, tapping away at a Reddit post – he conceals the title with the round of his palm – then swiping to the maps app. “Think of it like a pitstop! An itty-bitty detour to Mount Hood, National Forest. It’ll be like a family reunion!”

Stanford sighs, swiping his phone back and rigging it up to the stand the kids had installed. Something about road safety, as though he wasn’t a licensed driver in thirty-two dimensions. “On account of the–”

“‘Cause of all the pine trees, yeah.”

In Ford’s lifetime, he only recalls three moments of true despair.

Three is not enough to make an expert of a man. (How many sleepless nights had it taken to reconstruct extraterrestrial power banks? How many more to comprehend the limits of interdimensional wavelengths?)

So, with Cipher staring at the styrofoam headstone – nothing to his face besides the one eye, to boot – he’s left without the proper diagnostic tools.

“This would go quicker if you were to help,” he grunts instead, digging the spade of his shovel deep into the soft earth.

“With these babies?” The demon wiggles his fingers in Ford’s direction. “Manual labor’s for peons!”

Thus the sixty-eight year old man with the sixty-eight year old back finishes digging the six-by-six-by-six hole in the ground, wiping his forehead with the back of his sleeve, mild weather turned sweltering under the duress of it all. He’s a far cry from the dimension-hopping criminal-slash-hero-slash-vagabond of thirty years’ duration.

Bill floats over to the pit with a furrow in the flat above his eye.

Ford burrows the shovel upright into the ground. “I read the book,” he says, solemn, locking eyes with the hole, “but you already knew that.”

The demon says nothing.

With a sigh, the air tugging a gravely hitch out of his throat, he continues, “What exactly did you expect from that? You aren’t half the fool you play at, Cipher. There was never going to be someone in this reality capable of freeing you from your confinement.”

Except for him. But this goes unsaid.

“Did you expect me to feel sorry for you?” A singular eye shifts towards him. Ford shakes his head, hands shoved into his pockets. “Well, I don’t. Everything that’s happened is your own doing.”

Cipher considers this for a moment, then lifts the plastic gravestone in his hands and – with a jerking downwards momentum – rams it into the ground at the head of the rectangular pit. “This craftsmanship is shoddy at best, Sixer. Didn’t anybody ever teach you to respect the dead?”

“Styrofoam isn’t biodegradable,” Ford says. “If it makes you feel better, should the natural environment break it down, its particles will inevitably poison the local ecosystem.”

Bill hums, tracing over the cartoonish R.I.P. embossed on the front. (This does, in fact, make him feel a little bit better.)

“You still have it, then.” Ford says.

“What are you even supposed to say at a funeral?” Bill hovers over the center of the hole, staring straight down. “You humans are always prattling on about sentimentality– and you guys get to keep the bodies! What’s the point, wasting them in the dirt?”

Stanford sighs, leaning on the hilt of the shovel. “We return our loved ones to the earth; we mark where they’re buried. Some cultures preserve ashes, instead, although recent times have brought new forms of cremation to the forefront. I saw an ad for ash-pressed diamonds, for instance–”

“And who cares if you read my book?” Bill scoffs, whirring on him with an accusatory finger. “Always with the ego! Maybe I wanted some other mad-scientist type to ‘inspire’– wouldn’t that drive you crazy?”

Stanford does not dignify this with a response. He gestures at the hole in the ground, instead, and slowly, gingerly, Bill removes his hat. Turns it over in his hands and clutches it close to the flat of his body.

“I’d like to say a few words!” He declares, with the intonation of a television monologue. “Here lies a bunch of flat-minded idiots. They’re buried in the new, better dimension I’m soon to take dominion over! The end, forever!”

But he hesitates when he reaches into the void of his hat.

But he hesitates when he plucks from within a speck of a molecule.

But he hesitates when Ford holds out the small wooden box, its top on a clasp and meant for jewelry, his eye narrowed near-shut.

Stanford looks away. By the time he’s opened his eyes, the box rests gingerly in the bottom of the hole, unfathomably small compared to the enormity of it. He squats, haunches protesting, to collect a handful of dirt. Passes half to Bill, who says nothing; follows suit when he overturns his fist and pours the collection in. It only takes a minute more to shovel the dirt back into the hole, another to align the bags of cement over the top, ready to turn to a tableau at the next rain.

When all is finished, he asks, lowly, “Do you ever miss them?”

“I never miss anybody! My aim is perfect!”

“Your family, Bill.” The name is unfamiliar in his mouth. It’s been Cipher for so long now, Cipher like a curse, Cipher like a stain on his life, his brain, his heart. “Do you ever miss them?”

A beat.

The woods, isolated here in the footfalls of a mountainous national park, are suddenly alight in the wash of madness-red crimson. It emanates from Cipher, his eye gone something demonic and feral. (This is a side of him Ford is still unaccustomed to; still associates with those hectic few days when the whole world was ending.)

“You don’t know anything!” There’s barely a growl to his voice, the tone as pitchy and grating as ever. It’s the reverberation that warps into something lower, something that burrows deep into the ground and comes out the other side in Stanford’s bones. “So you read a few, measly pages– so what ?!”

The wind picks up. Ford, thinking that the Theraprism would have done better to further limit the demon’s powers, holds a lapel of his coat, the tails billowing in the gust.

“What, did you think you were special? The first person to put your trust in the wrong all-seeing eye of destruction? HAH! Don’t make me laugh. HA-HA-HA-HA-HA!”

If this were a journal entry, Ford thinks, he’d write it by the letters. H then A, no laughter behind the bite of the word.  

“I read between the lines, Bill. The pages you included. A man is only a monster of his own making. You could have had a new home dimension, I would have–”

“Oh! Now we’re back to playing hero!” For lack of the ability to size-shift, Bill shoves himself up close to Ford’s face, slamming his squiggle of a hand into his nose like the press of a sturdy fingerprint. “What’s that, Fordsy? You would’ve what? Would’ve kept our deal? The one you reneged on ‘cuz of the ramblings of a raving lunatic?”

Fiddleford’s face, harrowed and haunted, flashes within the perimeters of Cipher’s body.

“The past is not a cyclical thing.” Stanford’s voice is even, firm. “What happened to your home dimension doesn’t need to happen in the next. If I’ve learned anything of family, then I’m certain your parents would–”

“You don’t know anything about my parents!”

Ford crosses his arms. Bill pants (sans mouth) in the flow of his own breath, eye darting to his lips and crinkling furiously.

“I liberated my dimension.” Bill insists, a strain to the crackle-pop of his voice. Crimson flickers once, twice, then dies back to yellow, sickly and pale. “I would have liberated yours, too. You– you low-level mouth-breathing lifeform.”

Wordlessly, Stanford steps around him. The demon makes a wet sound that he chooses to ignore out of–

Well, out of a feeling that is most definitely misplaced.

By the time he’s returned from the trunk of the car, Bill is sitting with his legs bent beneath him on the heap of dirt, turned towards the plastic headstone. Ford carefully does not think about–

Gently, he lays the bouquet of flowers beside the marker, an insect crawling immediately onto the sleeve of the plastic and grasping for a petal.

“Bill.” Ford says, like finding his footing. “I’m sorry.”

Like this, the wind gentle through the woods and a creek, somewhere, babbling to itself:

some odd minutes pass in silence.

“Well!” Chipper and sudden, Bill straightens to a float and bob. “That was something! An unpleasant something. Come on, Sixer! Time’s a-ticking!”

Something about it twinges him wrong, as does the way Bill floats up in a spin, tipping his top hat. Inscrutable. Stanford grabs – misses – at his hand to drag him down, but the demon tap-dances away in the air, ever out of reach.

“Just one apology left. Get ready! We’re going home.”

△

six.

“If this is some kind of trick, you’re sorely mistaken. The only oddities here now are man made. Your portal’s long been destroyed.”

The old Mystery Shack has a fresh coat of paint, the letter ‘S’ fetched up from its steady descent, if slightly askew. It’s been a tourist trap for years, and a tourist trap, only. Ford’s taken care to bring his research alongside every travel, or better yet: trapped within the steel plates of his mind.

Bill is floating lackadaisically along the outside of a renewed forcefield, the throb of blue magic humming into existence when he chances too close. He taps the shield with a stick-like finger. “No tricks up my sleeve, Sixer. ‘Cause I don’t have any! Just one last apology.” He reconsiders, cackling. “Well, really, a lot more! A number higher than the human mind can comprehend! One quadrillion-billion seven hundred gazillion, eight-four– let’s just call it a whole bunch. But there’s just one left that matters.”

His singular eye peers up through suddenly-lengthed lashes, moon-wide pupil directed at Stanford.

“You aren’t going to believe this!” he says, eyes rounded.

“Yeah? Tell me, tell me!” chimes Bill.

“I don’t believe you.” Deadpan, Ford rerolls the cuffs of his sleeves, his jaw heavily set. Behind him, the engine’s still purring, only just drawn to sleep.

(When they’d pulled up, Bill had had to coax him into pulling into the side parking, putting the car to rest. Turned out he could handle old personal hells, old personal demons; it was the combination that was the sticking point.)

“But I want to get this over with. Who here do you owe an apology to? No. Nevermind that. Who here did your Thera-whatever determine to be most deserving of an apology?”

“Oh, I dunno.” Bill sing-songs, but there’s a dip to his voice. If Ford didn’t know better (he does, he does, he does), he would say that the demon is almost bashful. “Don’t freak out, capiche? Things might get a little weird. Two things, one place and all. Can’t do it. Not sure how that’ll turn out! But don’t freak. Remember that.”

Ford’s tongue feels around the dry edges of his mouth. Cotton-dry, and the gums, too, like a bad trip gone on too long. Before he can ask, though, he feels it in his gut, and then in the air tingling around him.

Once more, the world flips.

And they’re back in Gravity Falls, but not how Stanford Pines knows it.

(Know, knew; there’s more than one dimension in which to learn a town.)

Stumbling, he raises his hands to glance at his palms and– yep, six fingers on each and all, all body parts accounted for. But.

His eyebrows furrow. (They don’t.) He readjusts his glasses. (He doesn’t.) There’s a delay. (Not a delay.) And when he looks up at the mirror–

a ɹoɹɹıɯ?

the car’s.

ᴺᴼᵀ ᵀᴴᴱ ᶜᴬᵣ'ₛ.

A twenty-eight year old looks back at him.

Stanford freaks out.

His 🄱🄾🅳🆈 doesn’t.

It’s splashing water on its face, this thing inhabiting his body, controlling his movements. He’s trapped, a goldfish in a bowl, a lower-level being on a flat plane of existence, peering past the confines of eyelids – was the world always so dark with a blink? – that don’t respond to his desperate fight to shut his eyes tight, wait for the nightmare to be over.

“Well, well, well, if it isn’t my old pal!”

Bill.

Fury rankles his caged mind; would turn his stomach, were it still his. But it no longer responds to his emotions; its hands freeze on the lip of the sink basin.

Of course. Ford curses himself for his stupidity, his naivety, for the guard he knew better than to let down. And now it’s too late, now the demon has taken control of his body, seized his mind, and left him along as a passerby–

Chills like ice rake down his spine, send searing tingles raging up along his back and into his shoulders. His throat is dry; his tongue is heavy, numb. The feeling is not unfamiliar.

The body turns.

No, Ford thinks. No, no, no–

But he’s helpless to shut his eyes, helpless to be anything but an unwilling observer, and through the trembles in his hands, his body turns to see:

“Demon.” His mouth is spitting. It isn’t Ford’s words. “Get out of my head! I’ve revoked our contract– I’ve–”

Ow. That’s the contact of a fist with a metal plate in the middle of his head.

Bill’s singular eye rolls. “I’m not in your head, kid.” A beat. “Or yours, either, if you’re wondering. This is me, live in color, baby!”

Spittle flies from Stanford’s mouth. A speck of it hits his own wide-open eyeball. The body doesn’t react; Ford does, gnashing his metaphorical teeth.

“You’ll never get me to open the portal.” Ford says. (The body says.) Its eyes dart to the clock on the wall. Sixteen past four p.m. Midday and rescue isn’t coming. Stanley is still a world away, maybe a whole timeline, and he can’t hear nails digging into calloused palms, regret awash in palpable sweat, heartbeats, pinpricks in wake-weary eyes

“Good thing I’m not here for that!” Bill’s a vision in golden-and-white flickers; Stanford knows this in the way the body knows to keep its gaze averted, steady on the wall. Breathe, that old mantra. Breathe. In, then out.

“What.”

Then what?

“Are you here for?”

Are we here for?

“Look.” With the pop of oxygen, in and out of place. There’s Bill, pupil split and tapered to a hand of time. Tick tock, tick tock. “Somebody out there’s real upset about how it all went down. And that somebody’s you! Whaddaya say? Let’s talk it out. For old time’s sake!”

“You threatened to steal my eyes,” the body is saying.

A handwave. “That was a joke! You really thought I’d do that? Steal someone’s eyes? Please! I don’t even know a guy into eyes! Intestines, sure. Brains, duh. Feet? If you wanna get real PG-13 about it. But eyes? No can do. ‘Sides, Sixer, that was forever ago! Time to let bygones be bye-bye-gones.”

Stanford feels the growl bubble up in his throat. The way his voice pitches and cracks and rumbles back down into something deeper. Too wet to be furious. “That was three days ago! Right after you ate spiders with my body. Right after you led me up to the roof and–”

“Yeesh! Reach in your pants, kid, check the back of them. I think somebody’s got his panties in a twist.”

And then there’s something hot and fluid and salty breaking and spilling down the side of Ford’s face, and fumbling fingers he can’t control swiping at them, and Bill’s eye going wide and uncertain, and he’s sure that he’d die of mortification on the spot if he wasn’t tethered to a very much still-living body.

Is this how it felt for him? He wonders. A lifetime ago.

“Woah. Uh–” For once, Cipher’s on the backpedal, pulling out– is that?

A literal manual, big embossed letters spelling: Making Amends (for Interdimensional Dummies).

“If former victim begins to cry, turn to page three-hundred sixteen, diagram 38b.” Bill reads aloud, the book’s pages rifling through the air. “Hey! Lookie here. ‘First, ascertain the nature of your victim’s woe.’ Hey. Sixer– you got a ‘my life is eternally ruined!’ complex, or is it more of a ‘my perception of reality is forever distorted and my trust is irreparably shattered’ thing going on?”

“My life is eternally ruined!”

“Great! Option A, then, that’s easy! Ahem. Here goes! Insert victim name here, I am very s–”

“You isolated me from humanity. You stole my only friend’s sanity. You pretended– ” Ford remembers this. Remembers the sleeplessness, the paranoia, the misery, the– Anyway, it’s nothing that can be overpowered, nothing that can be outspoken or overruled, not even by a demon. “You pretended to be my friend, my muse, my partner. You made a complete fool out of me!”

“I didn’t have to make a fool out of you. You did that all by yourself! It’s not my fault if you got it into your delusional brain that I–”

“Shut. Up.”

(But there is something that can overpower it. Something older.)
(Something even more broken.)

Bill creates an eyebrow only to raise it. It hovers over his head.

𓄼

𓄼

“I never said you didn’t matter.”

The body’s snuffling through the furious red track marks on its face, and inside, Ford is–

Well. Ford is–

Ford is.

(And that’s a complete sentence; would be written into it by virtue of being true, if it wasn’t.)

There’s an awkward, spindly black hand on either shoulder. The demon’s had to extend his arm length to make that work. It gives the appearance of a particularly disturbing spider, already half-crushed and missing a few limbs.

“How much was real?” Ford isn’t sure which version of him asks it. They’re in unison at last, himself and his body, looking down at the floor in dejection. (In shame.)

“It was all real, Sixer.” Bill’s impatience betrays his discomfort. Stanford realizes that this is new to him, and of course it is.

He snorts a lump of mucus back into his throat, nearly gags on it. Bill’s eye twitches. (This, if he’s asked, is absolutely the body’s doing.)

Then change this moment. Rewrite it.

“No-can-do, Fordsy. We’re working with constants, fixed points. ‘Sides, even if I tried, somebody’d just come along and clean up our mistakes.”

“I missed you,”

he says, misery underwritten into his skin. “I thought we would be partners for the rest of my lifespan.” 

“I forgot how dramatic you are, kid. Please– you think you can escape me? Even death couldn’t keep me away! If anything, this has only motivated me to show you all the perks that come with universal domination!”

“So that’s it, then?” Ford asks, and it’s both halves in sync, an itching under his skin that tells him this here and now is fast slipping out of his unwitting grasp. “This is all you came to say?”

Bill’s eye darts down to the ground. His feet shuffle, hands toying with each other, thumb-like appendages swirling around in circles. “I came to say that–”

“Look, kid. This won’t be the last you see of me. Lucky you! And–” Bill Cipher shifts in mid-air, freed in the exact right place and time and yet more trapped than ever, fidgeting under the weight of it. “Some of it’s gonna be not-so-fun. For you! Me? I’m having the time of my afterlife! But yeah, no, seriously, some of it’s gonna suck. So you’ve gotta keep in mind, when it does– uh. You know. Just remember that I–”

“I’m sorry.”

And suddenly Stanford remembers how this goes.

Because’s he’s lived it.

Funny, he thinks, sigh soft on the inside of the kid’s mouth, a whole lifetime of suffering ahead. Funny, how the past fails to change the present. Always some degree of inevitability in it: not for the sake of the deal, not for the nature of the demon.

In the end, there are only so many things that can be conveyed in the split of dimensions. Maybe there’s no direct translation for the one little word that wrings it all.

Ford won’t say it.

But Stanford Pines, still starry-eyed despite it all, who will put himself in harm’s way time and again, thrust himself through a portal into hell, despite the warning, despite time itself splitting open to whisper this is something you will regret–

That Stanford will think it, even if the word won’t come to tongue.

Love. A tenderfooted thing that runs quick to hide under a straying eye. Love, love, love. 

“Bill.”

“I’m revoking our deal.”

“I’m revoking our deal.”

Bill’s eye crinkles in what may be confusion. (May be irritation.) “Kid, I dunno if that’s gonna–”

“Come to Earth if you must.” This is all Ford,
now, Ford tasting bitter desperation curling on
his borrowed tongue. “If you’re ever freed from
that prison you’ve made for yourself. But until
then, until the day you deserve to call this
reality home,

I will never stop warning the world of
the mistake of trusting you.”

Silence.

And then:

Bill laughs, unrestrained. Free. “Sixer,” he says, something dangerous glimmering in his eye. Something sparkling and eight-sided and impossibly bright. “That sounds like an invitation.”

△

?.

Reality comes back like a glossed-over jigsaw puzzle: in pieces, but already stuck together, polished.

Honk. Honk. Hoonnnkkkk.

Ford’s forehead is pressed up against a steering wheel, body slumped over the driver’s seat of his Miata.

The unsettled feeling in his stomach is the only proof of–

Of whatever that was.

Beyond the windshield, the Mystery Shack glows warmly in the golden hour light, a young woman bouncing up the steps to the front door, child balanced on her hip. Soos meets her in the doorway, a bizarre costume stapled to his person. She laughs; it bounces off the trees and through his cold shield of glass.

Stanford watches this with a stone the size of his heart buried deep in his stomach.

And he is very much alone.

△

after.

“What’d you wish for?”

Mabel’s leaning across the table by the waist, blown-out candles still-sparking in her eyes. There’s a smattering of icing on her forehead, and a smear of it caked into her bangs.

“Right. Birthday wishes. I forgot those existed in this dimension. In quadrant eight-forty-three, wishes are strictly prohibited on account of–”

“You said that last year!” She frowns. Swivels to Dipper for backup, who nods seriously.

He did say it last year. The truth is, Stanford doesn’t believe in wishes anymore. Learned the hard way that anything unearned is something rotten. (And half the things gained through hard work, too.) Only a fool casts his luck on candles, even if they aren’t the ever-flickering trick variety of last year’s go-around.

(“A sparkler spirit! Quick, Dipper, fetch the flamethrower from the kitchen sink cabinet! The only way to defeat one is to fight fire with fire! Hurry now, before it consumes our souls!” – The twins (Mabel) had learned that Stanley was better-suited to birthday-related pranks.)

Fingers crossed beneath the table, because Ford still feels the sting of dimension 36ªM@ in his sleep, he lies: “I wished for a pony. A large one. Good wagon-bearing shoulders.”

“Now it won’t come true!” Moans Mabel.

“Do horses have shoulders?” Wonders Dipper.

“Everything’s got shoulders, kid,” says Stanley, party cone hat strapped to his head and cutting into the flesh under his chin.

It’s nearly two years since the last sighting of Bill Cipher, or gnomes, or magic, or anything of the Theory of Weird-related variety. Stanford’s just accepted that this is life post-epilogue: quiet, unassuming, his efforts by-and-large unrewarded, a small house on the Jersey coastline with a sailboat docked out back–

Not unrewarded. Not even close. His family beams at him from the other side of a pair of blown-out candles. 7 and 0.

(How time flies.)

“What did you wish for, Stanley?” His brother’s cake is a messier imitation of his own, decorated in pink glitter that Ford only hopes is edible. His candles are still flickering. (Not a demon; Ford had eyed them with fierce scrutiny, just in case. They’re only the party store variety.)

“Easy. Money!” Stanley chortles. (The twins don’t catch the dart in his eyes, the flicker of pride towards Mabel, then Dipper. The way it betrays him.)

This is the way an evening passes now: in laughter that lives longer than the fast-fading sunlight, in awkward clasps on the shoulders thrown to full-force hugs, in an old man too prideful to admit that his back hurts when the weight of the group throws them all down to the floor.

This is the way an evening passes in his absence: easily.

Since when did you care for the easy life, Sixer?

Stanley is the last to leave. (He lives the closest; one short walk that always turns into a drive up the road.) And maybe silences stretch longer now, maybe they share looks that betray hurt and loneliness and regret, maybe things will never be the same as when they were children–

“Meh. Tell Mabel to make you a carrot cake next time. You look like you need more vitamin C, old man.”

But maybe things are better now.

Stanford laughs, unguarded. “Get out of my house,” he says, and this time, he can mean come back, come back and stay and the words don’t need to be spoken to be understood.

And then there’s the emptiness of night. No demons to plague his dreams. No monsters to ward away. Nothing but a mess of streamers and smashed-up candles and melted ice cream to clean.

It can wait for tomorrow. Ford carefully picks up the gifts, cradling them in the crook of his elbow – a stack of lottery tickets, a hand-knit sweater, a leather-bound copy of his unpublished thesis – and switches off the light. There’s tomorrow for cleaning, and tomorrow for calls, and tomorrow for–

Wait.

There, in the center of the table.

Ford frowns. (His eyes aren’t what they used to be; he flips the switch back, blinks rapidly as the light strobes back into being.)

There’s a small card in faded, crumpled yellow, a child’s rendition of a six-fingered hand sketched on the front. He sets the presents down gently in the still-warm cradle of a chair, reaches for the note with cautious fingers. Tentative.

Breathe. In, then out.

𓄼

HEY, SIXER!  

The big brass said I couldn’t do mail. HAH! These idiots don’t even know about the cross-dimensional thought-to-text-to-letter railway!

Big doc says I’ve only got 1,452,197,827 theramillenia left until I get exterior-realm planetary visitations. 1,452,197,823 if I keep up with the quantum-log-ecryptodiary cards!

In human speak, that’s

NEXT FRIDAY!

Hip hip hooray! I can hear the trumpets now. Clear your schedule, Fordsy, cuz you’re gonna be seeing me

REAL SOON!