acedormouse - Tumblr blog

acedormouse · 19 hours ago

Text

BillFord Week 2025

Day 1: Dreams, Worship

"Until the End of Time"

Chapter 1: https://archiveofourown.org/works/70141011/chapters/182110211 Word Count: 2,902 Rating: Teen and Up Audiences

It has been two years since the world ended and began once again. Unfortunately, it never gets easier.

No, not the end of the world, but everything else.

Something else.

There is a unique kind of pain that Stanford knows like an old friend. It echoes his every footstep, threatening to make itself known if he ever stops moving. If he ever looks back. If he doesn’t keep his chin high. If he doesn’t keep himself busy and much too distracted.

It is still shocking, sometimes, how present this pain is. He would have thought that he’d be used to it by now, or, better yet, that he would have managed to ditch it entirely after so many years. After all, his life is good now. Great, actually. …Though it’s still difficult to swallow the idea that perhaps he does deserve it, as he is so often told. He has been trying, really, he has been! He’s been trying to learn how to live. No, rather― Trying to learn how to thrive. How to be himself again.

He is simply ignoring that with the passing of each day, he is less sure just who, exactly, that is supposed to be.

Especially now that he and Stanley have returned to shore and Gravity Falls this year, leaving Ford once more between the walls of his old, old house and sitting on the, admittedly, pretty ugly couch in his old bedroom.

Sunken, aged, visible pilling and worn threads. Speckles of dust and smatterings of fractured, polychromatic light dappling along the length of the cushions, cast from the stained glass window above. A sturdy fabric. Pillows that are firm and refuse to yield beneath the weight of a body. A piece of furniture that has always been a keystone feature, despite the myriad sights this room has unwittingly borne witness to. Something unwavering and robust to carry Ford when he’s crumbled and broken down. Something to balance his head when shaken awake by nightmares.

Ford doesn’t realize that he’s been sitting there, staring at the couch beside his lap in silence, until he is surprised by the ticklish crawl of…what he hopes is an insect up his spine. Vertebrae by vertebrae. Calculated. Tap. Tap.

Raised goosebumps.

A shiver he will sooner admit was from fear than anything else.

A smooth drag closer and closer to his jaw.

He almost says something, but the syllables simply do not form.

He has to lean back heavily on the couch to steady himself once the floor starts moving. Swaying, unsteady, as if with purpose to displace him and shake him from the cushions. Or make him tumble into the walls, which he vaguely observes are closer to him than they were before. The ceiling, too. Everything is closing in on him, including the cage of flesh and bone that is his own torso around his lungs. Was he always breathing this quickly? Was breathing always this difficult?

The ground rumbles, the couch rumbles, and a rumble rattles through his skull, a pressure that settles behind his right eye. A jab. Insistent. Impossible to ignore.

Stanford is struck with the bizarre feeling of even his eyesight suffocating once he takes note of the lucent yellow in his peripheral vision. No matter which way he swings his head or how hard he closes his eyes, the blinding yellow surrounds him, edging his eye sockets and searing in the pitch darkness. When had it gotten so dark?

It feels like he is swimming. The rocking of the room, the way the walls rotate around him like a central fixture. A weightless floatiness pulling at his body from every angle, yet he is held down to the couch by a heaviness in his guts. His vision, too, swims.

He tries to blink and squint the blurriness out of his vision, but the unexpected warm wet spots on his face only seem to twinkle and become stars, floating away to abandon him and mock him for the darkness within. Each blink only deepens the glossy sheen in his eyes, stubborn and unrelenting.

One star in particular is a bright, glittering crimson, and Ford swallows down the recognition of what that means, doing his best to deny the reality of the stickier wetness leaking from his right eye.

The weight of that star's hand on his chest forces him to finally sink all the way flat on the couch. N-No, the pressure was… in his chest, surely. Purely internal. Nothing external. Breathe, Stanford, breathe. Six of his fingers are gripping the threads of his sweater just over his heart, and he increases the force, seeking pain that may ground him. He grits his teeth, but is helpless as he watches the stars thrum and throb and cling to the ceiling above him. His left hand is out, somewhere, probably gripping the couch, but he cannot feel it.

The stars begin to paint this dim bedroom in a bleak mosaic of emerging equations and the crisscrossed lines of blue engineering graph paper. A tapestry of a dreamscape long past, now coalescing from the ether into a haze that smothers the room in smoke.

The distinctive red star begins twisting and reshaping itself. Three equal sides, as vivid and searing as the sun, flames warbling and coalescing into a form he knows too well. Ford swallows, tongue flicking out and tasting the coppery tang that has trickled down to his lips from his eye.

Stanford can’t breathe. Air squeezes out of his chest in haggard, faltering rasps. He might as well be inhaling fire.

Stanford can’t move. His muscles twitch, but his tendons can only strain, leaving him paralyzed and splayed out, pinned on the couch with no defenses.

Stanford can only lay there, blinking and scowling at the stars, trying to mask his terror. The racing of his heart. The tremors in his limbs.

“ARE YOU FINALLY READY TO ADMIT THAT YOU MISS ME, FORDSY?”

Stanford is floating in space. Stanford is being battered and heaved by the mayhem of the waves enveloping him, offering no escape. Stanford can’t see. Each star fizzes, pops embers against his face, then dies, one-by-one, leaving him in darkness.

He isn’t sure if Bill was really here. Or if he truly left, if he was.

The droning waves in the space around him carry no clues. Only echoes.

“I KNEW YOU MISSED ME.”

Something buries into Ford’s ankles and yanks him beneath the depths. He only has a moment to scream from the pain and shock―

He sits up on the couch, abruptly, choking and coughing on what little air is in his throat. The dreamscape has disappeared. The spotlight on his vulnerabilities has vanished. Yet he can’t shake the feeling that the echoes still follow him.

“BEING AWAKE ISN’T THE ESCAPE YOU HOPE IT IS.”

However, Ford would say that the worst part of the experience was how familiar the companionship was. For just a moment, a single moment, his mind seemed not alone, and that fleeting connection was as enticing and alluring as it was chilling.

He sinks back onto his elbows, trying to anchor himself with deep, steady breaths as the drumming in his skull ebbs and the tremors in his extremities finish their restless dance.

… It seems that now is as good a time as any to face the honesty which he has been trying not to.

He sighs, readjusting to be more comfortable on the couch while he pulls out a journal and pen from within his inner coat pocket. He knows it’s good advice to try and write about his feelings. It is a practice that he has found tremendously useful before, in fact. Both before the portal days, and even during his decades in the multiverse.

He just didn’t think he would be writing about Bill again anytime soon. Yet, he isn’t all that surprised by it, either.

The unique pain Stanford knows is the wretched, special pain of intense loneliness. Of not having anyone who truly looks at him for him and sees something that is worth knowing. And… the basic fact that Bill was this person, once, and now Ford’s loneliness has an equally wretched triangle-shaped hole of history in it that, try as he might, he is unable to forsake into the oblivion of non-remembrance.

Ford… was never quite sure what label was the most fitting. Then again, organizing his feelings into neat rows of clearly defined boxes was never something he ever managed to master anyway.

The pain of loneliness settled around his heart and Ford was loath to admit that it felt like an old friend. He couldn’t outrun it this time. …Maybe ‘friend’ isn’t the correct word, but what does it say about him that something as treacherous and terrifying as this only felt right with that specific label? One more piece of evidence for how off-kilter he is.

It’s not that Ford doesn’t have boxes to sort his mind into. It’s that his boxes are wrong, and they always have been. He’s never been able to fit into them, and they’ve never been shaped correctly, regardless. Even if he could fit in, the shape wasn’t suited for accepting him. This was his curse in this life, as genuine and omnipresent as the Bill which haunts the wounds in his psyche.

…Still, he had to try, even if he didn’t want to. The nagging prickling at the back of his skull insisted that trying was good. Always good.

It isn’t Cipher that Ford misses, really. Really.

Ford doesn’t even think he would call it ‘love’ that he misses.

No, the deep-rooted anguish he’s been carrying for forty years and nurturing every time he lets himself decompress is something that is delicate and sensitive yet heavy, rotting in his guts. It is the feeling of wanting to be understood. He isn’t sure he wants to be loved, so much as understood. That’s all he thinks he ever wanted. Though, maybe being understood is an act of love in the first place. Is this why he was forced to live his life devoid of both for so long?

He blinks up at where there had been stars on the ceiling and sighs.

The experience of mutual respect between peers who could keep up with one another. The ease with which they read one another, and conversations that flowed readily between them ever-so-naturally without any of the usual social hiccups Ford has always seemed unable to escape suffering the tribulations of. A beloved friend, a Muse, who lifted him up and who he enjoyed lifting up in turn. They made each other better, or at least that was what it felt like at the time. His Muse was a god, and he was god’s favorite scientist, and wasn’t that just nice?

Ford didn’t need to be understood by fellow humankind, after all, because the most fitting fellow was someone not of this realm. An idea that made perfect sense to Ford as soon as the seed had been planted within and taken root in his heart. Of course someone like him who could never fit in with typical human normality was destined to find a home in something from beyond, instead. Something that was even weirder than he was― and wasn’t that utterly charming?

It was captivating, enchanting, and made him feel connected to something greater than this universe! Greater than his flawed human body. Greater than all those other people who refused to understand what was special about him. He demanded respect, and Bill gifted it in spades.

Worship was the natural answer between them. Every act of it, every offering, only served to lift Ford higher to Bill. All the more fitting for how hard Ford would crash, in the end. Sent tumbling back down out of the clutches of this bastard, where he would proceed to evade, resist, and fight against his false god for the next thirty years.

The loneliness that plagues Ford’s heart is something he has felt shift and transform over time. Perhaps it has even adapted to every new bout of trauma he has been forced to endure over the years. The thought unsettles him, but even that feeling is something overfamiliar and hardly noteworthy after all this time.

It is what it is.

…Right. Yes. Of course. It just…is.

And Ford is someone who was never fated to be easily understood. Every time he made some headway, it was inevitably wrenched from his twelve fingers like the world itself reminding him that he should never take what doesn’t belong to him. He didn’t deserve to have it; the proof lay in the ruination he brought to everything he touched, everyone he dared to let into his heart.

His very existence has always been poison. Corrosion.

Something he was afflicted with while very young that trickles around his veins to this day. But it was always just him. His curse has always been internal. Try as he might to hide it, to pretend to be better, he is unable to shake the feeling of there being something obvious on his face he’s blatantly failing to hide. This is simply one unshakable truth of many that Ford has gotten used to following in his shadow.

Just like his twelve fingers. Six-fingered hand in unlovable six-fingered hand, hidden behind his back, out of sight.

Oh, but didn’t Bill like that poison? Didn’t Bill like these fingers? Didn’t Bill enjoy splitting into shards and carving a home in each of those unfilled, uncategorizable boxes in Stanford’s head?

Moses, Ford had never felt so loved, so seen, as he did back when he naively worshipped his Muse, and isn’t that just the worst? He doesn’t want to admit it, but it, too, is undeniable.

It doesn’t make sense to Stanford unless he is a bad person. Why does he miss Bill, why does he miss that mutual respect, despite how much better his life is without the demon? Despite how much Bill tortured him, exploited him, betrayed him, and even hurt his family?

Doesn’t Ford care about his family? Don’t they make him feel loved?

The idea is one that Ford struggles to comprehend.

After all, how could they possibly love him? How could anyone, especially his family, see past the part of him that still aches, still stings, and still yearns for a demon like Bill? That lingering, regrettable piece of himself, so obviously monstrous and inhuman, should be proof enough that Ford is unworthy, undeserving, and unlovable. Why else would he miss Bill if he were not also a terrible, evil thing, himself? In fact, is it not because the two of them were monsters that they were able to get along so well for so long? Ford just hadn’t realized the truth, yet. Ford had ruined his brother. Ruined Fiddleford. Damn near ruined the world itself. So of course he deserved every inch that Bill had taken from him in return. Every bloody streak across his soul.

And yet… His family loves him anyway. It makes no sense. None at all. How can they find it in themselves to love someone so obviously broken and dangerous to be around, someone who still aches and longs for the demon he cannot forget? The demon that still haunts the nightmares of all the Pines.

The more Ford wonders, the more the thought gnaws: perhaps this love is the cruelest trick Bill ever played on him. A reminder that even when Ford is held dear, he is still someone terrible.

A reminder that the love Ford held for Bill was itself ruined by the reality of who Bill was. Tarnished memories that flicker and pulsate behind his eyes. …A reminder that, despite everything, Bill had loved him too. And that… that was the worst.

Is this what love is supposed to feel like?

Ford doesn’t know. But he is able to muster up enough trust to believe his family when they tell him the unbelievable. They do love him, they truly, wonderfully do, but…

Well. He supposes his fate is such that the triangle-shaped void in his soul, still sharp, forever empty, can never be properly filled by anything else, and he will just have to live with that. This is fine. He can do this. He doesn’t need Bill. It’s… even okay to acknowledge that he misses him. He can even agree that it’s better for him to have finally managed to escape from the clutches of that demon’s obsession.

He is… allowed to heal. He is allowed to love his family and hold them close. He is allowed to be forgiven and even be loved, in turn. Perhaps his family doesn’t entirely understand his pain, but they do understand that he is hurting.

Stanford’s family sees him for who he is, and what they see is something wonderful. Struggle as Ford might to fathom their perspective, he cannot deny just how abundantly clear they are about it. And they are all veritably, certainly, genuinely good, loving people who only wish him the best. Stanley, Dipper, and Mabel leave no ambiguity here, none whatsoever.

Like what they offer to him, this kindness he can grant to himself is the highest form of respect his soul could ever receive; warmer and more flourishing, more nurturing of his character than even his Muse… than even Bill ever tried to be.

Surely.

#stanford pines #ford pines #bill cipher #billford #gravity falls #art is wonderful #hurray!!! a fic to read!!#the blues here are gorgeous btw #it's just a little triangle drawing #oooh so storybookesque i love this

192 notes · View notes