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An admission is an admission, whether in silence or solace. Whether morosely truthful or interspersed with deceit. What language held was power, and to speak was to place faith in the hand of whoever—or whatever— heard it. To speak is to carefully, meticulously, pour over verbs and adjectives with scrutiny and acknowledgment. It’s to create falsifications, to facilitate conspiracies; To destroy the vernacular so that if the transcript happened to be recorded, the speech would be illegible.
His time has come to burn—what an awful sentiment to be reduced to. To speak such folly and foolishness, encumbered by vitriolic memories gone up in flames, smoke choking and yielding it his final ward. To think his final resting place would be a shoddy living room done up in (a once attractive looking) peeling wallpaper and rotting wooden wainscoting (that had seen better years and had become well acquainted with termites) with, positively, the worst furniture a North Jersey Raymour & Flanigan could provide. Even the carpet—a stained, poorly raked, and vacuum-damaged shag—is in abysmal taste. What an awful casket the funeral director chose for him.
He invokes the ancient power that he may return — With an empire in shambles, it only serves as a last resort. Distorted speech, ever-evolving and as crude as the forms he uncontrollably shifts through, creating his shackles. He’s damned himself, but he supposes his hubris could be thanked for that. He’d remember to send himself a bouquet of raw meat coiled into rose-like shapes with a note card that read ‘You failed’ if it weren’t for the flames that lick up the floorboards, slobbering ash and spitting melted plastic. Good to know the shag carpet was as fraudulent as the owner of this shitty house, the remnants molten and actively burning a hole through the center of the room.
A-X-O-L-O-T-L; Look at him, asking for help—He’s pleading and outstretching, sniveling, and groveling like a spoiled child. His playthings revolted, and how was that his fault? He’d only played with them so hard that their stability malfunctioned; barely used, practically still in the box! Even now, the puppet-who-resembles-his-previous-puppet-but-is-also-not-his-puppet still looks as good as he left him; practically smug with intense satisfaction despite the literal destruction of his entire memory. Raring to go like a bull who’s seen red, and he himself might as well be holding the fabric; a torero of cosmic proportions, readying with a weakened stance to defend himself. Who was he kidding, though? The maladaptivity of his form—melting and reconstructing and knocking down all over again—provided no shield. With a wide opening in his defenses, he might as well have been made of flimsy cardboard and overly saturated, paper thin streamer pieces.
He hopes, as fractals of his body splinter and cascade from a sudden—intense, electrifying, painful— impact, that confetti bursts from the broken seams and serves as colorful kindling. That way, he’d get the last laugh.
They give you an inch, and as the saying goes, you take a mile. For Bill, however, it was ‘they give you an inch, now consume everything within a five-hundred-mile radius’. There was always an underlying, excessive greed, like a void in the pit of his being that was doomed to face a lack of satiation. An encompassing desire for more, and by default, for recognition. He supposes, in one regard, that he’s achieved such a feat.
The highest form of flattery came in a kitschy bundle of an orange tracksuit and matching orange socks, one accented by silicone bottoms and the other by a badge with his distinctive ID number emblazoned on it. He’d prattled on as such when he’d been changing into the damned thing, saying something along the lines of how it ‘brought out the angle of his angles’ and how it accentuated the ‘color of his bricks’. At the very least, after he’d begged (even he, to this day, is shocked that he’d stooped to such things), they let him keep his beloved top hat. Give an inch, take a mile, he often remembered to remind himself. It wasn’t long before word had spread throughout the facility that he, the notorious Bill Cipher, had somehow been contained and admitted to the rehabilitation program.
All eyes were on him, and in retrospect, he’s obtained the audience he’s always wanted. He’s captivated the correct crowd, and the words on everyone’s lips is his name, whispered into the very corners of the sterile hospital. However, if this is what having an audience entailed, Bill would’ve chosen to melt.
This damned facility sought to dumb him down through a process known as ‘healing’, practically coaxing him into becoming a ‘better person’ with insultingly garish, neon posters boasting shoddy sayings like ‘be a try-angle’ or ‘you are purrfect the way you are’. Somehow, they expected poorly-crafted finger puppets to constitute something in his, dare he even think it, ‘growth’. Even worse were the times he was escorted to a group-therapy session, of which the therapists running the programs always had the most prying questions to ask of him, singleling him out amongst his peers. It was an absolute joy and delight for him to peruse through the minds of his zealots, gaining insight into their deepest and darkest secrets. He didn’t quite care for a similar method to be thrust upon him, even if he outwardly brushed it off by proclaiming they should take him to dinner first as though he were simply being interviewed by his admirers. It didn’t help that the nurses of these sessions had a terrible sense of humor, not able to appreciate the finer things in life, or his witty responses to all the questions thrown at him. Bill thought them all to be quite clever, and quite witty at that!
It wasn’t long before they’d decided to escort him again, but this time, not back to the room in which he’d begun to call his temporary home.
In this new room, there were no posters. There weren’t any C-grade art supplies for him to fiddle with, or books to mindlessly thumb through. It was himself, Bill Cipher, placed in a room of bleak, barely padded surfaces that offered no comfort to him. He’d been brought here, the staff citing something called ‘observation day’ as the reason for him to be moved down here, apparently. For what instilled such a response in the staff, he was entirely unsure. All he’d done was what every single psychologist in this godforsaken place had wanted him to do since day-one of his voluntary commitment—express his feelings—and suddenly everyone wants to know what’s going on in the head of Bill Cipher.
It didn’t take long for him to realize the predicament he’d been placed into, as though being placed in the Theraprism wasn’t a predicament in and of itself. He was a mouse inside a maze with seemingly no way out. He was a weed in a garden doused in toxic pesticides. He was a soul afraid of the world, cornered and cajoled by the Axolotl to relinquish himself for the sake of himself. He hadn’t acknowledged it in the beginning, but with the doctors outside taking notes on the stability of his condition, and the eyes of the observers from the windows into the room, it hit him no harder than the blaringly hot punch that had fractured him.
His own game had been played against him.
Bill had spoken recklessly, his tongue spitting invocations that he’d never intended to admit. He’d gone against his own understanding of language, and here he found himself as a direct result of syllables utilized against him in a fashion not too dissimilarly from his own methods. It was as though the Axolotl—and by extension, the Theraprism staff—had ripped a page out of the very book of rules he penned himself. He’d given the universe an inch, and it had taken everything else from him along with it. It wasn’t as though he’d ever stated something blatantly, but he knew that for every line of dialogue he’d speak, there was an in-between that was just begging to be explored. Give an inch, take a mile.
An admission is an admission, whether in the comforts of loved ones or a therapy room full of strangers. Whether tinged with honesty, or laced with lies. What language held was power, and to speak was to place faith in the hand of whoever—or whatever— heard it. Bill Cipher had spoken, and now his time had come to perform underneath the fluorescent lights of the facility, and the scrutinizing eyes of the Theraprism staff.
The sillier, less logical part of his mind asks, ‘What invocation do you think will get us out of this one?’