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Stanford Pines opened his eyes.
There was a warm, dry breeze billowing the parched stalks of wheat around him. He stood, as he had for several nights now, in the eye of a triangular shape of flattened crop, alone. It smelled of earth and rot and...distantly, of smoke. Like a wildfire, unseen, beyond the fog. He took a breath and let it out again, staring at the distant, blurring horizon beyond the wreckage of the portal in front of him.
“Heya Sixer.”
Ford twisted round at the voice, but the space behind him was empty as far as he could see. He frowned and turned round again, only to come face-to-face with the triangle directly in front of him. He made a startled grunt and stumbled backwards, his foot crunching against the dry wheat beneath him. Bill was hovering at eye level, fingers interlaced, watching Ford with amusement. “How’s it going?”
Ford took a moment to catch his breath, frustrated at himself for how easily startled he could be, even after several nights of the same behavior. “What do you want, Cipher?” he spat, feeling more impatient than usual.
Despite having no facial features whatsoever save for the unblinking eye in his center, Bill somehow managed to look wounded. “Want? Can’t I check in on my old pal Stanford before the end of the world?”
“We are not old pals,” Ford replied sharply. “And difficult though it may be for you to believe, we are not standing on the precipice of the end of the world!” Bill didn’t reply, he just watched Stanford, looking amused now. Ford glanced away, uncomfortable. “In any case, I find it hard to believe you don’t have anything better to do than to bother me,” he grumbled.
Bill shrugged (somehow), doing a slow casual turn in the air, like a coin flipped in slow motion. “I’m getting bored, Sixer,” he lamented, the hint of a threat in his tone. “This whole bringing about the devastation of humanity thing is takin’ a lot longer than I anticipated!”
“How tragic for you,” Ford muttered, turning to walk away from him. He made a stiff jerk backwards when he found Bill hovering directly behind him. He twisted to look back at where the first manifestation had been, but it was already long gone.
“Come onnn,” Bill whined as Ford whipped his attention back around, frowning. “Why don’t’cha help speed things along a little! Y’may as well! You know you can’t avoid the inevitable.”
“I won’t help you,” Ford snapped, stepping back from him and abruptly sitting down cross-legged on the flattened wheat. He was getting bored of this nightly exchange, and his exhaustion was beginning to show, even in his dreams.
Bill hovered in a slow, lazy spiral around him. “You’re no fun any more, Fordsy.”
“I’m sorry to disappoint you,” Ford muttered, watching the triangle. “But none of this is going to work out the way you expect to. I’ve given up being careless. I won’t allow you to enter my world again.”
Bill burst out a laugh, and the sound seemed to come from every direction at once. Ford’s shoulders tightened, his hands curling into fists in his lap. “Very funny, Sixer!” Bill exclaimed when he’d composed himself. “Like you could stop me.”
“I will stop you,” Ford said, stiffly, as Bill came to hover just in front of him. Despite having no mouth to do so with, the triangle was smiling; Ford could tell. It made his skin crawl and his chest tight. It made it harder to believe the words that he was saying. “Your plans will fail. You’re wasting your time.”
“The one wasting time here is you,” Bill replied, folding his spindly arms and crossing his legs at the ankle. “But you know where I stand. If you really won’t join me, then go ahead and try and stop me. I’d like to say it’d make things interesting, but I think they’ll be plenty interesting with or without you! Humans are hilarious! They won’t know what to do when that rift opens, and I’m gonna have a front row seat to the show!”
Ford turned away from him, staring down at the ground beside him, at the dry, dead wheat pressed down into the earth. Ford blinked, and a perfect replica of the rift appeared beside him. He stared at it. It cracked, slowly. Very slowly. Bill was humming a tune in front of him, amused.
“Why are you here?” Ford asked, dryly.
“Be more specific,” Bill replied.
Ford turned and glared up at him sharply. “Why do you keep coming into my dreams?! You won’t convince me to join you and you won’t get my help any other way. I’m no fool, Cipher. I know you.”
“Oh ho ho,” Bill said with amusement, “do ya now, Fordsy?”
Ford clenched his fists so tightly he felt the strain even as he slept. “You used me once, and never again! I was a fool to have ever trusted you! If I could take it all back, I would! If I could stop myself from ever meeting you, from ever being STUPID enough to trust you, I would!”
Bill was smiling again. Ford couldn’t see it, but he knew it; knew it with the same certainty with which he knew that the world as he knew it was about to change, very soon.
“You can lie to yourself, Sixer,” Bill said, the amusement thick in his voice, “but you can’t lie to me.”
Ford flinched away as a second manifestation of the triangle appeared on his immediate right, casually laying an arm atop his head and scruffing up his grey hair. “I’ve been in that great big brain of yours,” this new iteration said. “And you’d do it all again, if you could. I mean, think about it!”
A third manifestation of the creature appeared at his left side, leaning on his shoulder, making a broad gesture with his free arm. “All the knowledge you’d never have!” he said. “All the things you’d never see. You wouldn’t trade it for anything! You love that knowledge more than anything in the world. Maybe more than the world itself!”
Ford clenched his fists in his lap, his heart pounding. He could feel the manifestations of the creature near him. Not giving off heat, but giving off...dread. A yellow haze glimmered in the peripherals of his vision. Ford stared at the first manifestation, the one directly in front of him. “You haven’t been inside my head in thirty years,” he said slowly. “I’ve changed.”
The three Bills chuckled and Ford’s heart pounded harder. “You’re cute, Fordsy,” they said as one. “Very...cute.”
Ford opened his eyes with a sharp intake of breath, staring up at the dim ceiling above him. The moonlight through the windowpane over the couch cast sharp, angled shadows across the room. He took a deep breath and let it out again, pressing his palms to his eyes.
Another night.
Another nightmare.
The worst still yet to come.