Chapter Text
Sandwiches. Cucumber sandwiches to be specific. With hot…no, iced peppermint tea. Yes. Or…a savoury meat pie with carrots, or—
“Hilda!” a voice sifted through her maddeningly hungry thoughts and snapped her awake, “Hilda, are you alright?” Hilda’s heavy eyes flew open; the sight of an extremely nervous David hunched over her fully eliminated whatever numbness was left in her mind.
“David!” she yelped, sliding her back up the trunk of a large tree she was resting under, the rough bark scraping her shoulders and waking up her dulled senses even more. “Wh-ouch, uh…what’s happened? Where’s Frida?” She watched the cogs in his brain turn, half expecting his ears to release steam, as he struggled to find where to start. ‘Something’s mucked up our memories…’ Hilda thought to herself as David began his retelling.
“Well, I can’t really remember exactly, but…” he paused to take a seat next to Hilda, his fingers fidgeting with the drawstring on his hoodie, “I think I saw a gate…yeah, a real old, wrought-iron gate with loads of vines…Frida used some spell to open it and this huge light came out of the ground…it had a shape…a diamond? Or a…no, it was a triangle, it was super bright, like some kind of beacon. It kind of went through us and then…huh. That’s all I remember.”
Hilda was rather upset to realize he was truly telling him all he knew, as well as that she could barely remember any other details herself. She let the fullness of the situation at hand sink into her mind as she scanned her surroundings. Tall, almost what could be described as whimsical-looking trees stood sentient and sporadically placed, their pale green curling branches just barely brushing the forest floor, the limbs heavily laden with juicy, bright pink fruit. The sky above was tinted a balmy yellow, the sun painting the clouds and masking any trace of blue. Hilda slid her fingers through the cyan grass, pulling the shoots from their roots in an effort to calm her nerves and satisfy her picking fidget. A permanent feeling of unease, despite the beauty of their surroundings, itched the back of her mind…almost the feeling of having an eye watching her every move. Impossible, me and David are the only living things here she thought to herself, rolling her shoulders back a few times to shake the feeling.
“So…some kind of, magical light, I suppose, screwed up our memories and now we don’t know how we got to this forest, where Frida is, or where we are, for that matter,” Hilda sighed, the impossibility of it all carving a hole in the bottom of her stomach. David mirrored her sigh and pulled his knees into his chest. “Maybe we should…make a camp? It’s getting quite dark,” he suggested in a slightly wavering voice. He’s not wrong, you know Hilda thought, tilting her head up towards the dimming sky. “I dunno, David, I think we need to look for Frida, I’m starting to get worried. We don’t know how long we were out for,” she replied, standing up to brush the annoyingly sparkly dirt off of her leggings and offering an outstretched arm to David, which he begrudgingly took.
~~~
It seemed as if they’d been walking for hours. Every distinguishable landmark was blurring together, every path they took led to nowhere, and the rapidly setting sun wasn’t helping their endeavors at all. Eventually, the sun sank below the horizon and the little light it gave faded away. Hilda, nervous as she was, refused to let the consideration of stopping cross her mind. David, however, spoke as if that was the only thing on his mind.
“Hilda,” he muttered for the umpteenth time that evening, “Please. Wandering in circles isn’t going to solve anything better than taking a rest for a bit. Maybe Frida’s looking for us too and our constant moving around is messing with her attempts to…I don’t know, magically track us or something.” Hilda let out a slow, anxious stream of air. As much as it pained her to agree, her route had, if not completely made them lost, had also led them deeper into the forest; the trees on their path looked thicker and darker, their growth pattern less sporadic and more or less rows upon rows of menacing forest guardians with long, grasping feelers. A shiver ran up her spine at the thought of the branches coming to life and snatching her and David where they stood.
“Yeah. Maybe that’s a good idea. Let’s…find a
decent sized outcrop and get a fire going. I haven’t really heard or seen anything else in here so we should be safe setting up camp.” David sighed with relief, “Thank goodness. For a moment I was worried we’d walk till my trainers broke- the soles are coming off, look!” He turned his foot from side-to-side, shining his torch on the damage as Hilda rolled her eyes a few lengths from him. “Pity, these weren’t even that old…hang on, what is that?” He adjusted the light to shine just past him, revealing a pebble-paved path leading to a statue shrouded in darkness.
“Hilda, come see this!” David called in her direction, his torch’s beam of light revealing the rough outline of the statue encased in ivy. “David, I don’t care about your trainers- wait…” She tilted her head from side to side, a puzzled look on her face, like she had seen the subject of the statue before. “I recognize this…” Hilda breathed as she led her own torch to shine on the mystery sculpture, “Do you think you could help me take off these vines?” David bobbed his head in agreement, holding his torch between his teeth to keep it steady as the duo peeled off what appeared to be years of ivy, dirt, and other nature debris.
Their efforts were not made in vain, as a few minutes of scraping stone with raw, bleeding finger nails revealed an oddly shaped being with an outstretched arm, its body less a body and more of a shape… almost as if it was a- “A triangle with one eye, complete with a top hat and a bowtie…how odd,” chuckled David, putting dirty hands on his hips and looking at the shape from a few angles. Hilda, however, was not so amused. She didn’t know why, but the strange figure looked extremely familiar; like deja vu, she could have sworn she had met him in a dream.
“I-I think…he could help us find Frida,” Hilda deadpanned, her head cocked to one side.
Now it was David’s turn to drop the amusement.
“What do you mean ‘he’ ? Actually, what do you mean by ‘help’ for that matter? It’s a statue!”
“He wants me to shake his hand. Y’know, make a deal?”
“Make a deal?”
Hilda nodded, her curiosity growing by the second. Oblivious to David’s worried warnings, she put out a steady hand and grasped the statue’s own outstretched arm.
~~~
“You’ll do well to call me up whenever you need a hand, Blue! I’m just one shake away!” The slowly dissipating form of Bill Cipher left his final remarks, the trio left reunited at last, “See ya on the flip side, Bug! And a pleasure to spawn you to your friends, Brains!” As suddenly as he had appeared, he was gone. Breathless, Frida grabbed David and Hilda into a relieved embrace, her worn face revealing to the other two that she had had a much rougher go of the forest than her counterparts.
“Frida…what happened to you?” Hilda asked, still wrapped in Frida’s arms. She felt Frida’s grip loosen around her middle as her face fell. “Oh, Hilda, it was horrible. There were these…creatures that seemed hell-bent on keeping me from traveling in one direction. I found myself more lost than I’d felt in a long time. I had just been cornered back into a wall when a light -kind of like the light that we saw at the gate- fully surrounded me and took me here…wherever here is.”
“Strange,” David muttered, “we didn’t come across anything but trees. Well, I guess lucky you knew what to do with that statue, Hilda.”
“Statue? What statue?” “Bill, actually. He was this old, concrete statue covered in vines,” Hilda clarified. Frida appeared to be chewing on this thought for a while. “How did you know what to do?” “I-I don’t know. It just…felt right? Instincts, maybe?” Hilda shrugged off her own uncertainty, that nagging feeling of having too much information but not wishing to share it giving her a headache right behind her temple. She didn’t know how the others would react if she told them she’s had full conversations with what seemed to previously be a very much concrete sculpture.
“Well, no matter how it happened. We’re all together now, right?” David suggested alternatively to what he foresaw as a long, back-and-forth conversation in which he knew he would be left out of. “Right…” Frida repeated sarcastically, pulling out her wand from her back pocket, “but once we get back, I’m heading straight to the library and researching this…Bill Cipher character.” “I agree,” Hilda replied, her own unanswered questions compelling her more than Frida’s thirst for knowledge. “And I bet Kaisa may help us a bit too, huh David?” she added with a wink in David’s direction. His face turned bright red as he sputtered to defend himself against this inclination, Frida inexpertly hiding her giggles as a cough.
Together at last, the trio began their trek out of the forest.