Chapter Text
Ford awoke with a pinch in his neck. It wasn’t especially unusual for him to fall asleep at the desk of his lab, but his body had felt especially frail that morning. With a groan, he twisted his spine straight, rubbing the exhaustion from his heavy eyelids. Perhaps Stanley was right and he had been overworking himself just the slightest bit.
Ever since they’d returned from their Transatlantic sea adventures, Ford had been overeager to compare notes— to analogize his new findings with his research back in Oregon. The new summer also meant the return of the younger pines twins. Ford was pleased to see them again so soon and spend his daylights accompanying them and their ever persistent high jinks. He supposed spending his nights on his lab-work alongside it had been a bit beyond his body’s reason.
However, his reflection— staring shocked against the glass lab equipment— had practically frightened him out of his body. He fell backwards off his chair as an eerily familiar laugh echoed loudly within the walls of his own head.
“What a fun wake up call, Sixer!” More shrill laughter circled past his ears.
He couldn’t believe it. Looking back up at his appearance again, his eyes bulged in horror. His face looked younger. His hair was brown, his stubble was less defined, hell, even his eye bags were more pronounced. Tugging at his features in awed observation, his brows slowly set with a crease.
“What’s the meaning of this?” He demanded brusquely.
“The meaning of what?” Bill echoed merrily inside his head. “Life has all sorts of meanings depending on your own sad point of view. Like a fill in the blank game!”
Ford curled his fists tightly to his side. “Quit the games, Cipher! What did you do to my body!”
Bill was quiet for a bit. If Ford focused keenly, he could see him languidly floating in his mindscape. It had been a while since Bill had been truly inside his mind, but it had practically felt like no adjustment at all.
“You should watch your tone,” Bill warned. “All I’ve done was within our deal, kid. That means the noggin! Haven’t I sharpened your mind just like you asked? I promised not to pry inside your brainy little head too cozily.” His laugh grated at Ford’s nerves.
“Your head must be completely mushy from all that repulsive liquid-caffeine you consume. Seriously, how do you expect me to let you keep working on our portal like this?”
Ford gaped. Turning his head to his right, another sight seriously scared the sense right out of him. The framework of a giant triangle, half plated along its metal wiring. A half-finished portal.
‘Our portal’ Bill had said.
Was this…really the past then? Had he seriously time traveled all these years back? Or was this merely some illusion Bill had fabricated in an effort to trick him, seemingly beyond the grave.
He squinted. “Am I…dreaming?”
Bill barked a laugh. “What? Can’t even recognize your own dreamscape, IQ?”
Bill was right. This lab looked nothing like that liminal dreamy space.
“No, I…”
“No, of course not! If this were a dream, I might even deign you with a sight of your beloved muse.”
Ford swallowed. “Of course,” he murmured. It had been thirty years since he had thought of Bill with such grace. ‘Muse’…What a fool he was.
“How about this? I’ll let you off for the day, no work, no portal-business, no calculus, nothing! Aren’t I just so gracious?”
Ford, maintaining his stern expression, made a slight noise of assent. It was unclear whether Bill was the master behind this whole time-mess; it would do Ford good to play a little of the fool for now, though that didn’t mean he’d have to fall to his knees. His days of reverence were behind him, and even its pretense was bitter on his tongue. Maybe his acting wasn’t up to par— he’d never been especially good at disguising his distastes where they arose— but he was equally sure Bill was too blinded by his own ego to notice.
“In exchange for,” Ford stiffened, “what?”
“Man! You must really like making deals, Fordsy!” Bill clutched at his own eye like Ford had made some sort of hilarious joke. “It suits you. And who am I to deny you what you seem so eager for?”
“That’s not—”
“But I not-so-secretly love to disappoint, haha! This one’s one hundred percent free of charge. Twenty four hours on the clock, starting now. Fight a bear! Bake a cake! Run around in the woods naked for all I care!”
Ford’s finger’s fiddled with his coat's buttons. “What? Why?”
“Tell me why I knew you’d say that.” His eye smirked. “You seriously think too much, Brainiac, wouldn’t you rather waste away your freedom without a thought at all?”
“You make it sound as if I’m trapped here otherwise.”
“Haha,” Bill chuckled dimly, “That’s not exactly how I’d put it.”
And just like that Bill disappeared.
Putting aside the demon’s ridiculousness and nonsensical riddle-speak, Ford relied on what he always had in the face of ignorance: scientific inquiry! He grabbed one of his nearest journals, an engoldened number 3 shining on its cover. It looked newer than he last remembered, less worn to time, with pearly white unaged paper. Remarkable.
Just as suspected, the newer entries in the journal were nowhere to be found. Gone were Dipper and Mabel’s entries in endearing childlike handwriting. Gone were the betrayed chicken scratch embellished with blood stains revealing the true character of his so called ‘muse’.
In fact, there were more than a few new ones. Ford had practically forgotten how many entries his fascination with said muse had occupied in his journals. It had been so long since he had relived those days straight from his own handwriting. The day-to-day, warmly mundane discussions, even a night of karaoke recorded to text in clumsy lettering.
There was no point in lingering, he reasoned. But irrationally so, he was disappointed to have failed his memory. That those recollections were so intertwined with his inevitable hurt that he could only see them through a complicated haze. He had been happy beside Bill, for a little while. This journal was irrefutable evidence of it.
And hadn’t he been the one chastising Fiddleford for his delusions in chasing a worriless memory? It would be hypocritical of him to deny the past regardless of how it wounded him, or how foolish it made him feel in the present. Still…
Ford shut the journal closed.
If that was the alternative, he’d rather have never remembered at all.
——
Ford was a perfectionist in all his endeavors. He was deterministic in his pursuit of the truth, eager for the answers to the currently unknown. Yet just as easily, Stanley might say he was actually just ‘stubbornly picky’ and ‘within an inch of unhealthy paranoia’. Well so say you, Stanley— but because of Ford’s excessively painstaking blanket-pleating, he was confident in his assertion that he didn’t move an inch in his sleep. Something mostly unsurprisingly from his end; he trained his body to sleep stock-still while living between dimensions in the portal. But what this more interestingly implied was:
Bill hadn’t possessed his body in his sleep.
Ford sat up on his futon, scratching his tangled hair. What did that mean? Bill was genuinely giving him space? Ford scoffed. There wasn’t a promise alive Bill could’ve bragged to have kept. When Bill acted kind it only meant something far, far worse waiting in the distance. Lying meant nothing to him.
Dragging himself across the lab, a new coffee was already brewing. He practically lived in his lab back in his younger days. Everything was kept downstairs; waking hours were dedicated to his work alone, so walking more than five feet away would only harm his productivity. He had been so naive at thirty, so desperate to please. He’d completely sacrificed any basic care for himself in the process.
The odd moments Bill took pity on his declining health and sleep, Ford was always in awe.
“You’re starting to look more corpse than human, Sixer…”
“Time to hit the hay! And I’ll keep you company in the dreamscape. Your mind will be fresh as a daisy in my capable hands.”
Ford had done this all for him. Worked himself to the bone for him. And despite his muse’s ever-present excitement for the portal’s construction, he had enough of a heart to spend on Ford’s trivial wellbeing. He felt…
Ford groaned into his coffee cup. What a sad state of affairs. He couldn’t understand how it had truly gotten so bad that he considered these horrible living conditions adequate. Then again, he might as well make himself home for the foreseeable future.
The rest of the day was a flurry of theories: time travel mechanisms, dimensional authorities, Bill’s role in this whole mess. He had practically drafted a new thesis on the Theory of Interdimensional Time Fluxuations when his stomach bullied him into taking a break.
While he waited for his microwavable pizza bagels to finish— it’d been a while since he’d gotten groceries, apparently— he recalled what Dipper had shared with him about his and Mabel’s personal experience with time travel. According to Dipper, they had used a multidimensional ‘tape measure’ device to move between time periods. Ford had touched nothing of that sort. Apparently, his nephew and niece had appeared in time exactly as they were. Clearly, Ford appeared significantly younger.
With a sigh, he lowered himself to his desk chair for a long day of contemplation ahead of him.
——
Bill returned to Ford’s cabin exactly on the turn of the next hour, right as promised. The scientist closed his eyes in consideration of the familiar negging entity.
“How was the staycation, buddy!” Bill hovered around his mindscape, a proverbial skip in his step. Taking in Ford’s appearance his eye pinched unfavorably, “Yeesh, kid, you look like you’ve never seen the sun in your short, sheltered life. Seems like you still need to unwind. I got it!”
“Bill—What are you,” Ford exhaled, feeling his anger fade with it. The tension behind his temples, heaviness behind his eyes, and stiffness in his muscles were all awashed with a tidal wave of calm.
“Hahahahaha! You should see the look on your face! Cute!”
“…I feel light headed.”
“In a fun way?”
Ford stumbled, grasping for the wall. He made a small noise of surprise upon contact.
“Does it feel nice?”
Bill seemed oddly attentive in the moment. His eye was wide, emptily staring through him.
Returning his concentration back to the mindscape he floundered for words. “It’s…different.”
“Different’s pretty good, huh Sixer?”
Ford was quiet. Maybe it was because the torrent of negative stimulus had seemingly melted away, but he seemed to remember Bill doing something similar back then. It was an old memory, when Ford had really been pushing the bounds of his sleeplessness. He couldn’t remember it exactly, but it had been late at night.
Fiddleford had already called it a day, or perhaps he was gone on one of his few family visits. Ford was fussing with the horrid welder, his fingertips growing calloused beneath his fraying gloves. For someone who was used to being a natural in all things he pursued, his temper was terrible when he wasn’t. His frustrations had been a slow building thing, growing and growing day after unproductive day. When Ford finally had enough, he practically threw the welder at the wall, which unfortunately for him, bounced right back with a vengeance. It landed below the cuff of his pants, welting the open skin in a small burn.
Ford had kicked it away almost instantly. It had hurt, but it wasn’t a major injury. Though, when he reached to soothe it with a nearby jug of water, his hands didn’t budge. His whole body had seemed to drain itself instantly with the lost adrenaline, but most of all his hands, which would shake incredibly with any effort to move them.
Bill possessed him without asking, still letting him see through his own eyes. “…Muse?”
Bill was quiet, turning Ford’s hands in front of him, with slightly more success than he had. “Humans are so fragile.” His muse hummed a single note under his breath. “Your fleshbag feels all tingly…all weak.”
Ford couldn’t reply. Not only did Bill not let him use his lips, but he was stumped for a response.
“It makes me feel a little sorry for you,” Bill chuckled.
A dim remedy had passed through his body at once. It was a slight of his actual powers, he would one day learn. But at the time, he fluttered his eyes closed, relaxing into the touch of peace. Bill had interlocked Ford’s hands together, mindlessly fiddling with them as Ford fell asleep. In the fogginess of his mind, it almost felt like they were holding hands.
It would be of no surprise to Ford now if there were other times Bill employed this particular ability in an effort to manipulate him. But he hadn’t used it when it really mattered. When Ford was infuriated with Bill upon learning his true intentions, there was never a moment Bill tried to lull him into an easy submission. Ford would have still resisted, and maybe Bill already knew that. Or maybe, for whatever reason, Bill wanted a Ford without too much of his own influence. Whatever it may be, Bill’s modest use of this power between them was probably why Ford was still a little cozy to it.
“It’s… soothing.” Even more so than the last time. Imaginary hands laced into his own.
“I learned a few new tricks is all.” Bill seemed pleased with himself, scurrying around Ford in a flurry of movement. “Wow, Sixer, that really mellowed you out.”
Ford frowned, but without its usual bite. “What’s the meaning of this?”
“Oh, nothing!”
Ford was still suspicious, but his body felt too mellow to question him further.
“Now you get it! Who needs all those pesky follow up questions, right?”
Ford blinked languidly.
“You seem pretty tired, Fordsy.”
“Nonsense…”
“Ha! You can barely hide it even if I wasn’t in your head!”
Ford shook his head. “I can’t yet… my covers.”
“Oh yeah! That funny blanket trap of yours hahaha!” Bill mussed Ford’s hair in his mindscape. “Since when are you so scared of me? Well, whatever. Don’t worry, Sixer, I won’t take your body for a drive tonight.”
“But…why?”
Ford knew he shouldn’t trust a word Bill said. He knew there was no point asking straightforward questions and expecting straightforward responses. But still, the young devotee in him cried to his god, pleading for an answer.
“Because I like you, Sixer,” Bill laughed. “Just an eensy, weensy, teensy, tiny bit.”
Ford froze. “That—”
“Good night, Sixer.”