Chapter Text
Something was wrong.
It was all blackness. When he closed his eyes, when he opened them, it made no difference.
With a grunt, he shakily stood, causing a sharp pain to spark up his leg. God, his whole body hurt. Every muscle ached in sore protest to even the slightest movement. His head was spinning, but with no vantage point, no way to visually discern between up and down, it actually made his nausea worse. He moved his hand to pinch the bridge of his nose and found a pair of glasses perched there.
He frowned. He didn’t remember ever wearing glasses. In fact, he didn’t remember… with a jolt of terror he felt all the way to his fingertips, he realized he didn’t remember anything about himself. He fretfully tried to recall his name, what he looked like, where he was—nothing.
“Where am I?” He wondered aloud, internally cringing at how shaky his voice sounded. “What happened?”
Somehow, he wasn’t expecting a response, so when a voice echoed back out of the void, reverberating inside his skull like an empty auditorium, it made him flinch.
“What, you don’t remember?"
The voice was loud, high-pitched, and slightly mocking—but also so achingly familiar it made his head hurt even more trying to place it.
“Who are you?” he called out, thankful his voice seemed a little less wobbly.
“Who am I ?” He could hear the smile in its voice. “Let’s just say I’m a FRIEND. The best friend you have right now. The only friend you have right now.”
“What happened?” he repeated, more assertively this time. “Why can’t I see anything?”
“HAHAHA, I know.”
That… wasn’t an answer. “What do you mean, you know—who are you?”
“Kid, relax.”
“Relax? Relax?! ” Full-fledged panic had set over him now, and it manifested itself in angry shouting. “I don’t remember who I am, or- or where I am, or what’s happened, and I can’t see anything—”
“Hey now, save some oxygen for the rest of us! Don’t worry, I’ll tell you everything you need to know. Trust me.”
That made him pause. Beneath all fear and the pain, the most nauseating deja vu was gnawing at his gut, telling him that even though he couldn’t remember, he knew this voice. Not only that: he trusted it. It was like instinct.
The unseen speaker spoke again. “Alright, smart guy. Let’s start with your name.”
My name… He was still drawing a blank. His name was important, he felt it, somehow—so why couldn’t he remember it? Who was he?
“I…” He paused, swallowed, tried again. “I….”
“Eye-Eye? What kind of name is that? Did your parents hate you or something?”
“This isn’t an appropriate time for jokes, friend, ” he ground out.
In fact, the question was the metaphorical equivalent of pouring gasoline on a house fire. He felt a pang in his chest when he tried and failed to conjure his parents’ faces in his mind. What if they actually did hate him? Were they even still alive?
This was all just too much. He started to shuffle unsteadily forward, hands instinctively reaching out to feel his way through the darkness. He needed to find a door, a light switch, something, anything to prove that the world was still here, and that he was a part of it.
“WAIT,” the voice boomed suddenly. “Don’t move.”
He stopped, more out of shock at the sharp change in tone than blind obedience.
“Why?”
“I just need you to do a liiittle something for me,” it said normally.
“You want me to…”
“Do something for me, yeah. Kid, are you going to repeat everything I say? You’re not THAT brain damaged, are you? ‘Cause that would kind of suck. For you.”
Brain damage? That would explain why it felt like there were a thousand shards of glass inside his head, all sharp angles slicing infinitely into soft gray matter. Oh yeah, and the amnesia. He had forgotten about that.
“So, what is it?” he asked cautiously.
“Reach down by your feet.”
“What am I—”
“Just something you dropped,” the voice cut in impatiently.
The vagueness of the voice’s answers were really starting to wear thin on his already frayed nerves. But he obeyed, kneeling down and reaching into the darkness. God, he couldn’t even see his hand right in front of his face.
His left hand brushed against something, and he pulled back reflexively, before steeling himself and—
“It feels like… a book.”
“Yep!”
“What is it?”
“A book.”
“I know it’s a book,” he snapped back.
He ran his hand over the tome. It was bound in worn leather, with thick, uneven pages. He let his hand rest squarely on the cover.
“Is it mine?”
The voice laughed again, like he had said something genuinely hilarious. “IS IT? Just look at it, Sixer.”
“Sixer?”
“Yeah, ‘cause you’ve got six fingers, just like the cover of the journal. HAHA, man, you must be REALLY messed up if you can’t even remember something as freakish about yourself as that.”
The nickname brought another wave of feeling of deja vu crashing over him, followed with an almost nostalgic flush of shame. He shoved it down.
“Well, if I wrote this book, that would mean…”
Quickly, he picked it up and flipped open the cover.
“Do you see… Does it say the author’s name?”
The entity just chuckled in response. “Wow, that’s some crazy plot convenience.”
The man groaned in frustration. Minutes wasted begging for nonanswers from this strange voice, when he should have just been solving this mystery himself. He straightened, gripping the journal tightly, and took another step forward.
“Woah, slick, you’re just giving up on the whole identity crisis thing? We should keep reading.”
The man frowned. “Why do you want to read my journal so badly?”
There was an infinitesimal pause. “I’m just trying to help you, Sixer. Remember, we’re friends. And friends do fun things with each other. Like burning down orphanages, or taking apart each other’s neural networks and reassembling them.”
“Well… if we’re friends, then what’s your name?”
Another giggle. “Keep reading and find out.”
Doing that would be a very stupid idea, and the man knew it. Books were powerful objects: interacting with the wrong one could unleash a new curse, monster, religion, or economic theory upon the world. But what other choice did he have? He needed answers about what had happened to him.
“I am not reading anything out loud,” he warned the voice. If this entity thought it could trick him into reciting a summoning spell or raising the dead, it was sorely underestimating his intelligence.
“Ok! Just start flipping through the pages. I’ll tell you when to stop.”
With a sinking feeling, he obliged. For a few moments there was nothing but the soft rustle of pages. Then—
“There! Aww, Fordsy, that’s so sweet of you! Really, all that about little old me?”
Against his better judgment, he took the bait: “What it is?”
And what did he call me?
The disembodied voice cleared its throat. “Bill has proven to be one of the friendliest and most trustworthy individuals that I’ve ever encountered in my life,” he began, deepening his voice in what the man assumed was supposed to be an impression of him. “What a guy! I honestly couldn’t trust him more. Not in any way. Bill is a true gentleman.”
“I wrote that?” he asked dubiously. The entry sounded incredibly naive and grammatically redundant, but it did come from his journal…
“Of course you did! About ME, your good old pal Bill Cipher! Pleasure to meet you. Again. You and I go way back, you know.”
“Really?”
“Yeah, back a FEW PAGES, HAHA. But seriously, go back.”
Ford thumbed back through the journal and again stopped where Bill instructed.
The bad impression began again. “Two years ago I experienced a miracle while napping in the forest that has forever changed the way I think about the world and my place in it. I was contacted by a ‘Muse.’”
Muse. Images, flashes, fragments of memories poured into his head. A sun-dappled afternoon in a yellow woods. A dark night sky all around him, with more stars than he’d even seen on Earth. A chess board. A cave. A karaoke machine? A handshake.
“I… I do know you,” he said at last.
“Ding ding ding! Ten points for Mr. Memory over here!”
“And that means you know me,” he continued slowly. “Therefore you do know my name.”
“Well, DUH.”
“Then why the hell didn’t you tell me?!”
“You didn’t ask,” said Bill innocently.
He wanted to be angry at him for withholding such crucial information, but was more preoccupied with the slow but steady stream of memories trickling back into his brain. In the end, all that mattered was that they were making progress. Nothing good would come from getting upset at his only ally.
“My name is Ford.” It wasn’t a question, but a statement.
“Stanford,” Bill corrected. “Stanford Pines, and don’t you forget it. One of the greatest scientific minds I’ve ever had the pleasure of crashing in, let me tell you.”
“You’re in my head,” Ford ventured. “Am I dreaming?”
“Hey, wanna hear a joke?”
Ford blinked in surprise. “Uh, sure?”
“What do you call a genius with a god stuck in his brain?” Bill paused. “POSSESSED with knowledge!”
Ford’s mouth suddenly felt very dry. He said nothing for a few moments, mostly because he couldn’t think of anything to say.
“Alright, alright, I’ll admit it—not my best work. But it’s hard to land jokes when you’re inside the punchline.”
Ford’s mind was racing with a million more questions. How did this happen? Was it permanent? And, worst of all:
Did my Muse mean for this to happen?
Bill sighed. “Don’t look so DEVASTATED, Sixer. From a certain angle, it’s like your dreams came true!”
“Are my eyes—”
“Wow, you sure ask a lot of questions!” Bill cut in. “You didn’t even let me get to the good news yet: I can fix you! I just need you to do one more eenie-meenie favor for me first.”
“Which is…?”
“Turn the portal back on.”
The portal. More flashes. There were blueprints, Crash Site Omega, the basement—
F.
Ford caught himself trying to look around. “Muse, where is my assistant?”
Bill paused. “Uh, who?”
Ford flexed his fingers, concentrating. “F. Fiddleford. My friend from… from college. He was– he should be here. We were supposed to be testing the portal today. I think.”
“What do I look like, a babysitter? ‘Cause I am. I love sitting on babies.”
“Bill, this is serious.”
“Are you sure it’s not Procyon?”
Despite everything, Ford cracked the ghost of a smile at that. Science humor was his one true weakness.
“ Bill .”
“Whatever. Why don’t we look inside your little diary and find out?”
It’s not a diary, Ford bit back. “Good idea.”
He opened to the last entry, feeling where indentations from his heavy penmanship gave way to smooth, unmarked page.
Bill was silent for a minute as he appeared to read, then suddenly burst out laughing. “HAHAHA! Oh boy, this is JUICY. Listen to this, Sixer:
‘It was just as my Muse had warned me.’ That’s because I’m always right,” he cut in. “‘How could someone I trusted for so long suggest giving up now, when victory was so nearly in our grasp? Was he planning on leaving me the scraps while he discovered the Grand Unified Theory of Weirdness for himself?. Was I—’”
“'Was I to be the Tesla to his backstabbing Edison?'” Ford finished sadly. “I remember writing that entry.”
He sighed and scrubbed his free hand under his glasses. So F really hadn’t shown up after all. How had things gone so wrong, so fast? Just yesterday he was on track to stand in the halls of history with the aforementioned Tesla and other famous scientists—and now here he was, abandoned by his assistant, blindly groping around in the dark, missing most of his memory, talking to a creature he still wasn’t convinced wasn’t a figment of delusion.
As if reading his thoughts, Bill spoke up, “Cheer up, junior. We’re gonna get you that Nobel Prize. And a new henchman. Maybe even two—I have a couple guys I could loan you. Only problem is they’re on the other side of that portal.”
Right. The portal. Bill seemed convinced that turning it on would solve all of this: his vision, his memory, his dwindling career prospects. Though he was concerned that he hadn’t gotten a chance to do a test run, he was willing to disregard safety protocols just this once.
Ford tucked his journal into his jacket. “Which way is the control room?” he asked aloud.
“I’ll do you one better—all you have to do is pull the lever!”
Ford didn’t move.
“Didn’t you hear me? Giddyup! Or whatever magic word makes you humans move.”
“I can’t see, Bill.”
“Oh. Well, straight ahead! Mush! Mush!”
Ford took an unsteady step forward. He felt like a baby foal learning to walk for the first time; in other words, totally vulnerable and humiliated. He almost wished his divine friend wasn’t here to see him like this.
Pull the lever. That didn’t make any sense. He should first have to boot up the machine in the control room, and double-check the fuel lines, and enter the coordinates, and… Unless he had already powered up the portal once and just couldn’t remember! Bill’s earlier words echoed in his head:
“Turn the portal back on .”
His theory was true, then. Not only was he sure he had already opened the portal once, but he was now nearly positive that was what had caused him to be bound to his Muse. Maybe something went wrong with the test. (Likely, since he had been operating without his assistant’s invaluable help.) Ford could have accidentally opened the portal to the wrong location, and Bill somehow got pulled through. It was plausible that a creature of light and dreams manifested in the physical world would have to take on a physical form—or borrow one.
There was something nagging in the back of his mind, though, like a whisper—no, a chorus of whispers. To Ford’s shame, his step faltered for a second as he strained to hear what they were saying.
Then he shook his head and kept moving forward. What are those tiny, imaginary voices compared to the singular voice of his Muse, Bill Cipher? The immortal demigod that had taken his hand and shown him a world no other man had ever been privy to, who had casually explained the secrets of the universe over chess and dream tea because he saw him as an intellectual equal? Ford’s memory might still be incomplete, but he at least remembered who had gotten him this far. He was literally and metaphorically standing at the edge of the universe, and he owed it all to the triangle in his head.
A triangle that was still talking. “...Then wham, blam, zam, you get your eyes back, I get my body back, and you’re a gazillionaire just like your pops knew you would be—hey, move a little to your left.”
Ford shifted his path to the left.
“Your other left!” Bill screeched. “Stop, STOP!”
He tried to stop, but not before his foot made contact with something solid and he tripped, landing ungracefully on his side with a grunt.
“I SAID STOP!”
“I tried, I tried. Just tripped over something,” Ford murmured, perplexed at his Muse’s sudden outburst. “What is this, anyways? It feels like…”
It was dangerous to have tripping hazards so close to the portal. Ford cursed his cluttered tendencies. What if someone accidentally fell in? With one hand, he prodded at whatever had caused him to fall, and made contact with something soft. Fabric.
“Like…”
He moved his hand and this time felt a completely different material. It was rubbery and had a slight give to it. Ford frowned. Then, with sudden realization, he violently jerked his hand back like it had been bitten.
“Oh my god.”
He was touching another hand. A hand that was limp and cooling and did not react to Ford’s touch.
He scrambled backwards on the ground, legs kicking out wildly. If he was able to, he probably would have stood up and started running, but blind panic didn’t allow him that option.
“I think… I think that’s a body,” he whispered to himself in disbelief.
“BINGO!” Bill yelled out suddenly, making Ford jump. In his horror, he had forgotten all about his hitchhiking friend. “Three lucky guesses as to who it belonged to?”
Ford began to tremble. In some distant, dispassionate part of his brain, he wondered if he was experiencing shock.
It was a hand he recognized by touch alone. It was a hand that had calluses on the first two fingers from playing the banjo. It was a hand Ford had seen solve a Cubic’s Cube in under 12 seconds, a hand that had built the portal he was standing in the shadow of, a hand he had gently, painstakingly pulled Gremloblin quills out of for hours on end.
It can’t be…
He wanted to be wrong. Only one other time in his life had Stanford Pines ever wanted to be wrong about something. And in this moment, more than anything, more than he wanted his eyesight back, more than he wanted to fit in or stand out or impress his unimpressible father, he wanted to be wrong.
“Teehee, I can’t keep it a secret any longer! It’s your Edison! Your favorite letter of the alphabet! Your—”
“Stop,” Ford begged. “Please, this– this is too much.”
“Sixer—”
“Cipher, what did you do?!”
“SIXER!”
Bill Cipher’s voice boomed inside Ford’s head, demonic and dripping with contempt and so deafeningly loud he felt like his head was going to split open like an orange peel.
“LISTEN TO ME! I HAVE YOUR EYES NOW. SO YOU’RE GOING TO SHUT UP AND LISTEN TO ME.”
Ford slammed his hands over his ears. “You- you have no power over me! You’re just in my mind!”
“THAT’S THE THING, SLICK. DO YOU REALIZE WHAT I CAN DO IN HERE IF I WANT? I ALREADY DELETED YOUR MEMORIES TO GIVE ME SOME MORE LEG ROOM. WHAT SHOULD GO NEXT? YOUR SENSE OF TASTE? YOUR MOTOR SKILLS?”
“That’s ridiculous! My amnesia was just temporary—my memories were coming back!”
Cipher cackled infernally. “YEAH, the one’s I WANTED you to have. The ones that I could use to MANIPULATE YOU INTO BLINDLY OBEYING ME.”
Ford suddenly felt like couldn’t breathe. His lungs couldn’t take in enough. His throat felt constricted. Tears were welling in his eyes, though he wasn’t sure if they were from anger or pain or terror or grief. He was gasping for air like a dying fish. Or a dying twenty-something-year old scientist. Or was he in his thirties? His Muse must have decided that wasn’t important enough for him to know anymore.
Muse. He buried his head in his hands, fingernails digging into his skin. The name suddenly made him feel sick. How could he have called something so beyond evil, so undeserving of worship, a title so revenant? No, Bill Cipher wasn’t a muse.
He was a monster.
“I swear,” Ford choked out between sobs. “I swear I will find a way to kill you.”
“Uh-huh. Sure, yeah, whatever. In the meantime, you should get started on firing up the portal. Before I get too hungry up here.”
“I don’t care if it destroys me. I- I don’t care if it takes a lifetime.”
“Hey, have you ever realized brain matter looks like spaghetti?"
“And if I cannot kill you here, I will hunt your body down across the multiverse and destroy it.”
"Mmm, I LOVE spaghetti."