#and his devotion to bill is Concerning! the fact that bill and kryptos genuinely care about each other

[irregularbillcipher]

i was thinking about that one au i mentioned a while ago of "human bill redemption happens but kryptos actually gets humanized and tossed into gravity falls first" which i said was mostly an excuse to have some wild character interactions but also. oh my god kryptos and ford's dynamic would be So Much

like ford sees this dude who is so attached to bill and is convinced that somehow bill cares about him and even that bill loves him which is So Obviously Incorrect and is just understandably projecting so hard onto this dude that he basically sees as a mistreated devotee. so he's trying so hard to not snap at kryptos no matter how awful he's being and to not be cruel to him and to try to get him to understand how awful bill is because he really just sees him as someone who Just Doesn't Understand how bad bill was; he sees him as a victim bill couldn't have cared about it because the idea of him being anything else is messy and terrifying. he doesn't want to grapple with the idea that bill could care about someone genuinely, he doesn't want to deal with the idea that bill could hold fondness for people

the realization that bill was a manipulator who never had his best interests at heart and never really cared about him was so important to his healing process and he shouldn't have to dissect the internal motivations of his abuser! and he's right, he shouldn't, but now there's this guy here who claims that bill cares about him and he can't stop projecting. because if he takes kryptos at his word then he acknowledges that bill could care for people and either he wasn't good enough for someone claiming to be a friend to care about, or worse, bill did care about him in some way and still treated him that awfully

and if he doesn't believe kryptos? then kryptos is yet another victim of bill's manipulation in which case ford just can't find it in himself, with the guy powerless and confused in a new form and a dimension he doesn't really know, to ignore him and cast him to the side. he shouldn't be responsible for bill's awfulness and he knows that, but he can't abandon someone he sees as a victim of bill when the guy is right in front of him and saying stuff that makes his stomach churn

and then there's kryptos who just hates ford so fucking much. and he has no right to! he has absolutely no right to, he's fucking deranged for being angry at the guy bill abused for... being abused by bill and not being okay with it but kryptos sucks!!! he's not a good person!!! and Nobody Gets Bill Like He Does and he's so angry that this guy who knew him for less than a fucking mortal lifespan is claiming to know his closest friend for literally trillions of years better than he does, to know what their relationship actually was better than he does

and he's quieter about it than he wants to be because he's at the mercy of the pineses and doesn't want to snap too much and risk his very mortal self but he's passive aggressive and plants all these doubts in ford's head because god ford, he liked you, don't you know how rare it is for him to like you? and you killed him anyway, you're really alright with looking at someone who liked you and helping to kill them? and you're really gonna tell me that the only person who ever actually loved me didn't really love me, what's wrong with you? is that supposed to help me? that the only person who ever cared about me was apparently lying? that's supposed to make me less miserable? maybe when bill told you that nobody else actually cared about you it was a lie but it wasn't a lie for me and i know that because he was the first person to ever be nice to me. great that you had your brothers, great that you had your ma, great that you had fiddleford-- i didn't. good for you that you had a few people in your life before him who cared about you, i didn't. he was the first person who cared and the only one who stuck around-- i remember what our mortal lives were like, and he couldn't get anything out of me by keeping me around, there was nothing he could have been using me for, so don't assume our relationships were the same. stop trying to make this easy for yourself-- bill loved me, he liked you, and you don't get to make this easy for yourself by saying he just wasn't capable of it

and it's just through passing, biting, mostly-calm-sounding comments every so often, conversations where kryptos doesn't even raise his voice, but he doesn't let up, because he's just so unjustifiably angry at this guy for being worried for him and for hating bill