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"UNTIL THE END OF TIME," Bill says, and Ford echoes the words, the truth of them spinning his head, turning his thoughts, making him giddy with the weightless ease of it all. Bill's hand is warm and, though Ford knows this is a dream, reassuringly solid in his grip. The azure flames licking around their clasped hands are like a warm breath from a roaring blaze in a sheltered hearth, like a hot wind across a tropical beach. Like an embrace. The feeling seems to burrow down inside him, filling him up with swelling warmth.
"Until the end of time."
...
The sores first start showing up a few weeks into building the portal. Small and round and reddish, slightly raised, like little pinpricks or insect stings. Ford thinks they're acne, at first, dots toothpaste on the ones on his cheek and gets back to work.
There's a lot of work. The portal is - is like nothing the world has ever seen, is nothing the world has ever seen. It will be entirely unique, something truly novel in a history full of cycles and mirrors and repetitions. It will be a masterwork, in the true historical sense of the word - if he can complete this portal, it will prove that Ford has learned all there is to learn in his chosen field, that he is finally worthy of the title of 'master'. That he is worthy of his muse's attentions.
It is in him like a fire between his lungs.
So there's a lot of dropping everything in favour of the work, for the first few weeks. Ford barely remembers to eat and sleep, so it isn't surprising that he can't pinpoint when the sores first start to appear. He only begins to notice them when they widen.
...
Bill inhabits him like a recurring thought, like a parasite, like a puppeteer. Bill curls inside his chest like a child, nestled deep in flesh, waiting, growing. Bill whispers in his ear like a premonition. Every word for what Bill is has negative connotations dangling behind it, and Ford finds that somehow fitting. He has a hollow where his stomach used to be, a lightness where sleep used to sit. He is faintly aware that he's running on fumes. Ford is burning out from the inside. Bill is burning him out. Bill is burning, in him, and it is glorious and terrible and terrifying.
But this is what inspiration feels like. (Though never this strong, before. Never this irresistible. Never this driving. That's how he knows this is real.) This is the price of greatness. Ford thinks of Daedalus in a prison of his own design, thinks of Madame Curie, thinks of the vanished Tesla. He pours himself another mug of coffee and goes back to his schematics, Bill's voice in his head.
...
The marks on his face aren't going away, Ford realises, on the day Bill's teasing about the beard he hadn't meant to start cultivating finally drives him into the bathroom with a razor. He's had more important things on his mind than a little hair on his face, but if Bill doesn't like it, then Ford will get rid of it. Even if he does suspect that Bill is actually enjoying the teasing more than he's annoyed with the beard.
Angry red marks litter his face and neck, revealed as wiry hair falls away under the razorblade. Ford thinks at first that he's given himself razor burn, or something equally innocuous - but now that he's looking, he sees them smattered along his neck and down below his collar, peeping out from under the cuffs of his shirt. He undoes his tie and unbuttons the shirt, examines himself as best he can in the mirror. His back and upper arms are studded with the things, clustered into constellations, a Milky Way of angry raised red spots anywhere from the size of the head of a pin to the size of a dime.
Ford thinks of Madame Curie again, tries to quell the bile churning at the back of his throat. The spaceship Bill had pointed him to for raw materials, the radioactive waste he's had to steal and store against the day he can finally power the portal up - he hasn't been careful. He will have to watch his step. Bill is magnificent, knowledgeable beyond Ford's most irrational hope - but his understanding of the limitations of the human body is...incomplete, at best.
He has to be more careful. And, the shuddering thought slips by before he can stop it, like lead, like the thump of a duffel bag on a sidewalk, he has to work faster.
...
It is a dream and not a dream, the place where Ford and Bill can coexist as two.
It comes over Ford like sleep, in a wave, a softness that envelops him, inhabits him. The world turns inside out.
Bill is carding fingers through his hair, this time, humming radio silence and static like a lullaby. Ford doesn't ask what he's doing, or why. He's learned that if it's important, he'll get answers in due time - and if it's not important, or not something Bill deems important, then he never will. Instead, he lies back and tries to simply enjoy the cinnamon-flavoured shivers that run through him with every touch.
"YOU'RE LOOKING GOOD, FORDSY," Bill comments off-hand, and in a voice Ford's not sure he was meant to hear, "WON'T BE LONG NOW!"
"What?" Ford asks, and curses himself for it. The curse bursts vermilion against the sine wave of their shared but dual existence.
Bill, thankfully, doesn't mention it.
"Won’t be long for the portal to be finished, you mean?" Ford tries again, and Bill's hand on his head stills, as though Bill is taken by surprise.
"OH, YEAH, THAT TOO!" Bill says, and this time, Ford manages to keep his big, curious mouth shut.
"I think I should hire an engineer," Ford says, when he feels he's in danger of drifting apart into a marshmallow cloud under Bill's repetitive caresses. "I have a friend, from college, he -"
"WHY?" Bill interrupts. Ford fumbles.
"I - I'm not -" The words sting his tongue like capsaicin, cling burning to his lips like Greek fire. "Bill, I simply don't have the technical know-how to put this portal together on my own."
Both of Bill's hands still in the idea of Ford's hair. There's a strangeness, electric, in the hiss of between-station white noise that whistles out of him, and Ford feels as though the sound is swelling to fill the whole world, to press on his eardrums and his teeth and his tongue until it pours down his throat and sets his molecules vibrating in concert with it.
Then Bill pulls his hands away. "WHAT'RE YOU TALKING ABOUT, SIXER? OF COURSE YOU DO!"
"What - Bill, I -"
Another stroke through Ford's hair. Is that even a hand? Ford isn't sure. There is static thrumming in his bones. "DO YOU REALLY THINK I WOULD'VE PICKED YOU IF YOU NEEDED HELP FROM SOMEBODY ELSE? OF COURSE NOT! YOU'RE SPECIAL, STANFORD PINES, AND DON'T YOU FORGET IT!"
Ford comes to his senses flat on the cold floor of the basement, surrounded by the supplies he's gathered for the portal.
Looking through his own schematics, he realises: Bill was right. Ford does know what needs to be done.
He gathers up his gloves and goggles, and sets back to work.
...
From the moment he realises that something is wrong, Ford tracks the appearance of his strange marks, noting date and time and any changes. They seem to have ceased to increase in diameter, but one by one they begin to bulge, like little marbles pressing out from under his skin. They don't hurt, unless he pushes on them.
There’s a blur in his vision, now, a darkness, that he can’t quite pin down. It must be somewhere in his peripheral vision, somewhere just out of direct sight. It hasn’t caused him any difficulties in working on the portal, yet, other than a minor but annoying distraction, but Ford fears the day it starts to spread.
He doesn’t know for sure what’s happening, but he knows why. He’s feeding everything he has into the blaze in his chest, keeping it roaring. He knows it’s burning him alive. That eventually there will be nothing left of him to burn.
Ford finds that so long as the portal is complete before that can happen, he doesn’t care.
He doesn’t know how he would keep going without Bill to string him back together. It feels literal, some days, like threads - no, like wires, drawn taut and vibrating, tying his limbs to his torso by the barest tightrope thinness. He drifts. He wanders. His hands work while his mind blanks, sleep forcing itself into his exhaustion. Without Bill - well, without Bill, none of this would have been possible. Without Bill, he would not be here. Without Bill -
Without Bill, Ford knows, he would be nothing.
...
“CONGRATULATIONS!” Bill’s voice grates, and Ford looks up to see his muse hovering in the air before him, arms akimbo, framed in the blue glow of the sleeping portal.
“...Bill? Wh-” Ford pushes himself up from where he has fallen across his desk, head in his arms. He knows as he does that he must have fallen asleep. There’s no other way he could be seeing Bill like this -
“HA! GOOD THINKING, SMART GUY, BUT THIS TIME YOU’RE WRONG!” Bill laughs, dropping in to pinch Ford’s cheek. Ford wishes he wouldn’t. His face is sore, perhaps from where it was pressed against his arm. Now that he’s thinking of it, he realises that he’s sore all over, aching like a fever is settling into his bones. “WE’RE GETTING CLOSE NOW! YOU’LL BE SEEING A WHOLE LOT MORE OF ME!”
Despite himself, Ford feels his heart kick painfully in his chest at the thought.
“SO WHY DON’T YOU FIRE THIS BABY UP AND SEE WHAT IT CAN DO?” There’s a hint of something mocking in Bill’s voice, like he knows something Ford doesn’t. It’s not uncommon for Bill, though - after all, there is such a lot that he knows that Ford doesn’t.
“You really think it’s ready?”
“READY AS IT’LL EVER BE!” Bill does some kind of cartwheel through the air, drops down to wrap an arm around Ford’s shoulders. He’s warm against Ford, warm and a little electric, like a thousand tiny shocks.
Ford pushes his chair out from the desk and stands, circling the control room to make certain everything is turned on and operational, that all the readings are optimal, confirming that Bill is right. It's time. He double- and triple-checks the safety protocols, the -
"WHATSA MATTER, SIXER?" Bill's voice rings in the small space, its usual echo amplified. "SCARED?"
Ford blusters and sputters but ultimately has to cede the point to Bill. He is scared. What if he turns the portal on and nothing happens? What if he's not really the man Bill thought he was, that he's not worthy of this after all? What if -
"HEY, SMART GUY, DON'T GET SO WRAPPED UP IN YOUR OWN HEAD!" Bill says, interrupting Ford's thoughts with a sharp rap of knuckles on the crown of his skull, like he's knocking to be let in. It hurts a little, but mostly it's just cute. "GIVE ME SOME CREDIT HERE! I WOULDN'T'VE PICKED A LOSER WHO'D BUILD ME A DUD! IT'LL WORK ALL RIGHT, BUT YOU GOTTA TURN IT ON FIRST!"
Ford nods, and finishes his preliminary check, and powers the portal up.
He knows as soon as he does that something is very wrong. Instead of the cool blue light of the small-scale tests he's conducted, the portal glows a dull, sullen yellow-red, like a glowering thunderstorm sky at evening. It hums and thrums with power, as he'd expected, but it also whines, a buzzing, grating note slowly sliding up the octaves. The stronger it grows, the more sure Ford is that he can hear inhuman laughter from somewhere beyond.
"Bill -" he starts, turning to his muse, only to find that Bill is laughing too. His nasal cackle slowly deepens, slows, like a record played at half speed, as his little yellow, triangular body unfolds itself through seventeen dimensions to reveal something that makes Ford's marrow throb and his eyes burn. He understands, at first, at last, the enormity of the mistake he's made, the horror he's unleashed on the world, just as the whine from the opening portal reaches an unbearable peak -
Ford wakes with a start, knocking his knees on the underside of the desk he's fallen asleep at when he tries to leap to his feet. Through the observational window, the portal sits still and silent as it has for months, powerless but still imposing. Bill is nowhere to be seen.
"A nightmare," Ford laughs to himself, running a hand through his hair and adjusting his crooked glasses on his face. They barely help anymore, the darkness keeps encroaching on his vision. He can't have much time left. "Just a nightmare."
His face still stings all down the right side, where he had leaned it against his arm, and his joints and his skin still ache like fever.
...
"WELL? WHAT'RE YOU WAITING FOR, A KISS ON THE CHEEK?"
Ford stands frozen with his hand on the switch. He reminds himself sternly that his nightmares are only nightmares, that he has personally checked every inch of the portal's schematics and inner workings. It's safe. He should know, he designed it. The future is only the flip of a switch away.
And yet here he stands, transfixed in place.
"Y'KNOW, IF IT'S THAT IMPORTANT TO YOU, I CAN MAKE THAT HAPPEN," Bill's voice goes on nattering in Ford's head. "JUST SAY THE WORD AND PUCKER UP!"
"No," Ford says, once his tongue has thawed enough to move once more. "No, I'm...I'm powering it up now."
It's safe. It's safe. He's running out of time. The world will know his name. Bill will be so proud.
Ford pushes the switch, and a low hum slowly begins to gather in the room beyond.
...
The hum fills Ford's chest, swells in his lungs, pumps his heart. His back teeth hum along. He aches and burns and shivers. The portal rocks crazily on its single point, shaken by the force of its spinning centre, of the hole it's tearing in the world.
There's a pop, like a cork flying free from a bottle, and lightning spits in erratic bursts from the centre of the portal, slamming sizzling into the ground at Ford's feet, blowing chunks of concrete from the ceiling, crackling along the pipes and wires. It doesn't disperse in a flash - instead, every bolt stays, crackling and spitting like a thousand mad cats, anchored with one end in the portal's centre and one end earthed in the lab.
"Bill! What's happening?" Ford shouts, over the mechanical cacophony. Part of him is already certain that this is another nightmare, another 'what could go wrong' conjured by his own mind to torment him. But he can smell the hot-tin tang of the electricity flowing from the portal, earthed inches away; he can taste it, bright and bitter, on his tongue. The crackle and snap of the lightning is almost deafening, a low, constant sizzle filling the air beneath it. The hum of the portal has grown to a full-throated roar. "Answer me!"
The voice that answers, "EXACTLY WHAT WAS SUPPOSED TO HAPPEN, SIXER!" doesn't come from the back of Ford's brain. Instead, it comes echoing out from the centre of the portal, so heavy and distorted that Ford almost doesn't recognise it at first.
A long, void-black noodle of an arm shoots out of the portal, its stubby fingers clamping down on the rim and clinging there. The portal shudders in place as a leg follows, and the earth quakes under Ford's feet, nearly toppling him to the ground. The lightning screams, widening into thicker bolts, and Ford feels his own breath catch as he catches sight of - something - through the bolt, as though it is not just channelled electricity but rather a crack in the fabric of his reality, slowly widening to show what lies beyond.
Bill heaves himself out of the portal, huge and monstrous and grotesque in three dimensions, his eye bulging with black veins as he fills the room with booming laughter. "OH, WOW, DOES THAT EVER FEEL GOOD!" he says, his voice and its echoes almost drowning the clamour already filling the lab, and drops suddenly to hover eye-to-eye with Ford. Out of the corner of his eye, Ford can see the lightning-cracks starting to widen, spilling reddish light over both of them.
"What is this, Bill?" Ford demands, trying to keep his voice steady. It's just a dream. It's just a dream.
Bill throws his arms wide. "WHADDAYA THINK IT IS, SMART GUY? THIS IS WHAT YOU BUILT THE PORTAL FOR!"
"No - I - I didn't want this! I didn't want any of this." It's just a dream. Ford takes a deep breath, raises his eyes to meet Bill's. "What are you going to do?"
Despite the fact that Bill has no mouth, Ford's always somehow been able to tell when he's smiling. "EXACTLY WHAT I PROMISED!" He reaches out, rests a hand on Ford's shoulder despite the way Ford flinches. It's vast, warm and heavily solid even through the layers of Ford's shirt and vest and coat. "YOU'RE GOING TO CHANGE THE WORLD!"
It feels as though someone has wedged a knife sideways between Ford's ribs.
"You can't - this isn't what I wanted!" he gasps, when he can recover his breath and his voice. The cracks are wider now, that infernal light bathing Bill and making his single eye sinister in its stare. Ford can swear there's diabolical laughter just on the edge of his hearing.
"WHAT ARE YOU TALKING ABOUT?" Bill's hand on Ford's shoulder squeezes, painfully, the bones in his shoulder grinding together under Bill's grip. "THIS IS EXACTLY WHAT YOU WANTED! YOU SUMMONED ME IN THE FIRST PLACE! YOU KNEW WHAT WAS COMING! I SHOWED YOU, LIKE, TWELVE TIMES! BUT YOU JUST KEPT ON FORGING RIGHT ON AHEAD, BECAUSE YOU WANTED TO SHOW THE WORLD WHAT A SMART GUY YOU WERE! FACE IT, FORDSY, THIS MESS HERE'S ON YOU, NOT ME!"
"You - you sent me those nightmares?"
"HELLO? DREAM DEMON? OF COURSE I DID!" Bill presses a hand to the bottom of his eye, in a grotesque parody of a girl coquettishly covering her mouth after letting a secret slip. "WHOOPS, SPOILERS! OH WELL, GUESS THAT CAT'S OUT OF THE BAG ANYWAY!"
"You're a demon," Ford says, hollowly. This is not a dream. None of his dreams have ever been so cruel.
Bill spreads his arms wide. "WELL DONE, DR. FAUSTUS! OR SHOULD THAT BE DR. FRANKENSTEIN? SINCE YOU'RE SO AFRAID YOUR OWN CREATION IS GOING TO KILL YOU."
Ford nearly chokes. Of course Bill knows about that. Of course.
"COME ON, SIXER, YOU REALLY GOTTA LEARN TO LIGHTEN UP," Bill says, and that mocking note is back in his voice now. "STOP WORRYING SO MUCH! THAT FRAGILE LITTLE MEAT-SHELL OF YOURS ISN'T ABOUT TO GIVE OUT!" He waves towards the spreading cracks in reality that line the room, at the dim shapes starting to gather behind them. "I JUST FIGURED IF YOU WERE GONNA PLAY WITH THE BIG BOYS, YOU SHOULD BE A LITTLE MORE DURABLE!"
Just this morning, Ford hadn't thought anything could be more frightening than the knowledge that he's about to die. Now, he wonders if knowing he's not about to die couldn't be worse.
"What did you -" he starts, and can't finish the sentence.
"COME ON, FORDSY, DON'T BE SUCH A DRAG! THOSE FREAKY FINGERS OF YOURS, THOSE IDIOTS WHO MOCKED YOU AND OSTRACISED YOU FOR BEING SPECIAL, THAT THIRST FOR KNOWLEDGE AND ACCEPTANCE THAT MADE YOU SUMMON A LITERAL DEMON AND BUILD A DOOMSDAY DEVICE JUST TO SHOW THEM ALL... FACE IT, KIDDO." Bill's face splits, right across the middle of his eye, into a jagged-toothed grin. "YOU WERE ALREADY ONE OF US."
"No," Ford manages, trying to take a step back. Lightning crackles from the portal to land hissing in the concrete floor behind him.
"I WAS JUST MAKING SURE YOU'D LOOK THE PART," Bill says, nonchalantly, as an enormous red tongue lolls out of his eye-mouth to dangle across his bricks. "SPEAKING OF, THEY SHOULD BE JUST ABOUT RIPE NOW!"
Ford starts to look around for an escape route, but Bill snaps his fingers and -
Ford's vision clears, for an instant, before it suddenly splinters. He shouts as everywhere he had had those strange sores erupts into searing pain, as light and colour and smothering darkness from a thousand thousand directions assail his senses. He looks down, to his hand, sees one of the raised red marks that peeps out from under his shirtsleeve cracked open, something white with a ring of dark in its centre looking back at him. Sees his own face staring down at him, his right cheek spackled with -
Eyes.
The marks have broken open to reveal hundreds upon hundreds of little staring eyes.
Ford feels bile rising in his throat, squeezes his eyes - all of his eyes - shut. The flood of information stops, the dizzying sensation of looking in hundreds of different directions at once momentarily cut off.
He takes one deep, shuddering breath. Then another.
"SO WHATCHA SAY?" Bill asks, in his ear. "READY TO HELP FINISH WHAT YOU STARTED?"
Ford opens his eyes, focusing as hard as he can on Bill so that the multiplicity of his vision doesn't disorient him too badly, so that the vertigo can't set in. He's lucky so many of his - his eyes are covered, but there are still more than enough to confuse him and set his head spinning.
"Never," he says, and his voice is a rasp. "I'll die before I join you."
Bill's single eye narrows.
"Or let you destroy my dimension," Ford continues, and, with barely a thought, flings himself at Bill.
...
Ford has noticed, in trials, that there is some minor gravitational disruption caused by the portal's operation. Not much - just enough to lift his coffee cup a few inches off his desk, or make all of his hair stand on end. Inconsequential.
On the other side of the yellow line that denotes where proximity to the portal becomes dangerous, Ford discovers, the lack of gravity becomes very consequential indeed.
He was expecting this to be a futile act of resistance, a last desperate act by a desperate man. He's seen the way Bill has played him, what Bill was able to do to him - to reality - with only a snap of his fingers. It's still stinging. So he doesn't have much hope that his feeble attempt to fight back will succeed.
But gravity looses its hold on him and suddenly all that’s acting on his motion is momentum. Ford slams into Bill like a small but very determined bullet, knocking both of them flying. He somehow manages to duck the bolts of screaming red light Bill fires at him from his single eye and ignore the explosions as they strike the control room behind him, ignore Bill’s shouts of fury, ignore the sharp teeth and claws and worse things gnashing at him. He clings grimly to Bill’s smooth sides despite the multitude of hands the press against his face and his head and his shoulders, trying to push him off.
The blue light of the portal draws closer and closer, and Ford shuts his eyes against the glare.
...
The ring of light closes.
Ford and Bill drift a little ways past the mouth of the portal, but passing between dimensions has stolen most of their momentum. Ford finally lets go, lets himself fall away from Bill.
Bill is incandescent. Literally, Ford realises - heat pours off of him like anger made physical. He wishes he could see Bill properly, but with his vision in splinters and half of those splinters in darkness it’s hard to even figure out which eyes are seeing what, where to look or how to focus. All he can see is fragments, slivers of red light and dark shapes and Bill’s angry eye.
“JUST LOOK WHAT YOU DID,” Bill snarls.
His voice rattles in Ford’s skull and Ford’s ribcage, a growl that’s practically subsonic.
“YOU’LL NEVER SEE YOUR PATHETIC DIMENSION AGAIN, YOU KNOW! DO YOU HAVE ANY IDEA HOW LONG IT TOOK ME TO FIND SOME IDIOT DUMB ENOUGH TO BUILD THAT PORTAL?”
Ford lets his head fall back, shuts his eyes.
“IT’S JUST YOU AND ME NOW,” Bill says, and somehow the words that had once sounded so tantalizing are like a threat. “UNTIL THE END OF TIME.”
Despite himself, Ford can feel a tired smile cross his face.
“Until the end of time.”