“I wanted him dead. I wanted him all to myself.” - Interview with the Vampire
“I’m looking for a new muse, you have only made me tired …This is my loss of limb, my loss of love…My limb, my love, are lost on you / My limbs, my love, belong to you.” -Bird Balloons
Ford picks up the phone after the third call. Really he feels that he can hardly be blamed, as he’s still trying to get used to the bizarre reality in which an all-powerful device is stored so readily in his pocket.
“Hello?” he says, rolling his eyes as he’s greeted with nothing but a dial tone, realizing he had answered the call a second too late. If it was that important they’ll call again, he reminds himself, closing the device and pocketing it once more as he swung out of his sagging makeshift bed with a groan.
Ford closes the glass door with a gentle yank. The mirror rattles as it always does, sitting precariously above that tiny and cramped sink, within an even tinier and more cramped bathroom. At least, he was used to it by now. Or perhaps he’d already returned partly used to it, muscle memory making sure he could restrain himself not to yank that dinky fixture out of the wall in a far quicker amount of time than the first few months he’d inhabited the abandoned cabin all those years ago.
What does take getting used to, is the smaller knickknacks that keep cropping up amongst his usually dreary, slightly flammable ones. The other bathroom toiletries range from even more disparaging, his brothers, to strangely sparkly and bright, his niece’s, and change in confusing rates. Bottles deplete in an amount of time he’s convinced does not make sense and then appear anew or different or with add-ons soon after.
In the middle of them all, amidst their chaos and bizarre arrangements is Ford’s coordinated mess. The middle spot that he’d fought very hard for whittles down with each summer though as his niece and nephew discover more frivolous trinkets to spend their money on; his poor deodorant now sits along its thinnest side, sticking out gauntly and misshapen from the row of other toiletries. He reaches for it now with a sigh, knowing that in that sweltering summer heat, he needs the cheap aluminum more than ever, regardless if he actually made it out of the house that day, let alone his room.
He treks out of the bathroom after shutting the glass door with a small suctioning click, padding ratty-slippered feet against creaking wooden floors. The sun streams through painted glass panes, setting down triangular patches of light that he has to wade through. Ford sighs into the quiet of the residential section of the Mystery Shack, feeling only slightly guilty about this new routine he’s adopted. But it is nice to fill up his steaming mug of morning coffee in the late afternoon without squawking teenagers, squabbling employees, and his brother’s tirades.
Or maybe that’s just what Ford tells himself, shrugging off the tightness in his chest as he hears a particularly loud shriek from the gift shop, where he knows his niece and nephew to be currently working. He’ll see them later; summer’s only just started and he’ll be seeing a lot of them.
He’s just busy, he reminds himself as he wobbles back to his bedroom-turned-office. So busy as he sits down amongst papers of words that blur together within that stifling heat that refuses to abate. He almost feels guilty as he opens another book and pretends to read from it for a bit, convincing himself he’s absorbing the words. This was easier though, he reasons as the sun goes down and he continues finding random hobbies to fill the hours. It was easier than Stan’s worrying look or the downright awfulness of two identical expressions of disappointment.
But it was only a phase, a rut, an innocuous stretch of time. Change was just hard.
Somehow after spending a life on the run, crossing dimensions and constantly moving, it was the seasonal shift into summer that bunched something up nauseatingly within him. Suddenly his already blundering paper on rising emissions affecting supernatural behaviors and reactions felt impossible and daunting. Ford looked from his window down to his grandniece and nephew frolicking in the yard and felt old.
He felt old in a way he never had before. An off-season in his and Stan’s adventuring at his insistence to spend the summer with family, a chance to work on new findings, was starting to feel like an awful suggestion. Dipper spoke of college and Ford could only see the life in front of him. Mable regaled with stories of companionship, heartbreak and friendships, lovers and enemies and Ford could only see the many notches in her web of connections.
It was summer and he felt old and burdened. Summer had rolled in and he was back in that same house. He felt foolish for suggesting lodging here, for locking himself back up in the walls of the Mystery Shack, for giving himself such an easy out when things shifted in the slightest. His ideals were challenged and like a child, he crawled to the familiarity of his room and repeated every day like the last.
Thus he can hardly fault himself when he ignores his phone the first time it rings out before falling into silence. Even whilst he remembers earlier that day, he still rationalizes that a truly important matter will warrant the second call. So when it does ring a second time, he picks up the device displaying a familiar unfamiliar string of numbers and answers.
“Hello?”
“Mr. Pines?” a timid voice wobbles. He wonders if the caller is searching for his well-met glib brother, unable to imagine who might be trying to reach him.
“Yes, this is him speaking. Who is this?”
“Hi yes, sorry right, this is Tyler. Tyle Cutebiker. The mayor. Of Gravity Falls. I’m so sorry to disturb you.”
“That’s quite alright Mr. Mayor. Is there anything I can do for you? You are aware this is Stan’s twin brother, if you wanted me to fetch him—”
“No no, Mr. Pines. I was looking for you.”
“Oh. Well, then what can I do for you, sir?”
“Um, you see, hm, basically we— uh actually do you think you can come down here? I think it might just be easier if I show you.”
“Down to where?”
Tyler Cutebiker must look at Ford somewhere between a range with an upper bound of ten and a lower one of seven. However, he loses track of the amount of times he glances down at his hands.
“So,” Ford begins, realizing it would be up to him to conduct the social proclivities of the day, as Tyler, like most other Gravity Falls denizens uncaring of any societal conventions, would probably have spent the rest of their time in silence. “What are we looking at?”
“Well that,” Tyler starts to say in a stammer, “is exactly the question I was hoping you could answer Mr. Pines.”
“Hm,” Ford rubs his chin and hums. Instinctively, he wants to pull out one of his notebooks and jot down the odd display in front of him. If it were up to him, he’d spend the next several hours ducking underneath the police tape to fully examine the ruptured chicken coop, documenting every speckle of blood and piece of mangled wiring. Especially as he quickly narrows in on the confusing odd tracks that lead away from the site of destruction, not sure how to categorize the odd mix of smeared steps that end so abruptly with no other sign of starting back up again.
But this was Gravity Falls: a town Ford had brought a devastating amount of destruction to due to his naivete, nearly costing the man beside him as well as most everyone else their lives because he’d figured himself a genius. And he knew how little the townspeople liked thinking about that, about the world’s oddities and their dangers—even if it had taken him what felt like a lifetime to accept that.
So, rather than spout some answer about possible new hybrid creatures or cracks in their world’s reality that had allowed other dimensional beings to slither in and cause chaos, he snaps his fingers and turns to the timid man.
“A fox.”
“What?”
“I believe we are looking at the work of a fox.”
“Oh,” Tyler’s eyes widen. “Oh! You’re saying a fox got them, the chickens.”
“Yes. That is my hypothesis.”
“Well, that’s a relief,” he says, wiping at his brow. “Just wanted to check with the town’s scientist to make sure there wasn’t any…spooky foul play.”
The words make the tight fist of guilt wrapped around his stomach squeeze harder. “Nothing spooky.”
“Great, I’ll let Bubs know then that it’s a fox we’re looking for. Thank you, Mr. Pines!”
“Of course, and please, call me Ford.”
“Ok, Mr. Ford! You sure I can’t give you a ride back? Really, I insist.”
“Thank you kindly, but there’s no need. Still need to get in the rest of my morning walk.”
He waves to the man as Tyler pulls off in his stylish moped, following the cloud of dirt he leaves along the main path leading away from the small farm. As he walks, Ford thinks only briefly about whether he will return that evening or not to scout the area again. He should task his nephew with the work, maybe even tell his brother about it. It was just surveying a bit of property damage, which in all honesty could in fact be nothing and was additionally a mundane assignment: the chickens were gone, the alleged beast had no reason to return. Furthermore, Ford had his research paper to work on.
He’s still mulling over sensible actions when he arrives at the town’s only diner, stepping in without much thought for a muffin. Ever since he’d returned, he found himself addicted to the daily batch of blueberry delights Susan would put out and had begun to miss them as late start days meant she was always sold out by the time he managed to drag himself out of bed.
Only when he’s setting out the pasty, pulling it free from its paper brown bag, does Ford argue again with himself about how he was better off handing initial explorations to his capable assistant. Dipper had adept observational skills that functioned just as well as his own, if not better with his sharper senses. There was no harm in splitting the work. Besides, the boy had been clearly dying for him to throw him a bone of something supernatural.
Resolving that he’ll delegate the task to him the next time he was his grandnephew, Ford opens the textbook he’d been reading last, picking up a pen for diligent notes about cloud formations in the tropics.
Ok, Ford tells himself as he gets up to crack his back and trod over to his bookcase a good twenty-five minutes before his typical half-hour break, there’s no harm in looking at my book on identifying different types of tracks for a few seconds.
Fishing out the heavy book, he pushes aside his earlier work with a grin. He doesn’t even realize he spends most of the morning and afternoon running his finger along his long dried pen marks until his stomach lurches with such exquisite pain that he sits up with a jolt. Groaning at the crick in his neck from the sudden movement, Ford pushes back and stretches his arms above his head with a frown.
He rubs his dry eyes, blinks them a few times, and looks back at the page of swimming text. Next to that, he eyes his much fresher notes scribbled onto a thinned notepad and finds no further satisfaction. He thought there’d be some winning conclusion from all the notes he took but upon a second look, they all look rather misguided and more like they’re only restating the obvious. With still half a book left to go, he decides he can allow himself just a few more pages.
By the second stomach lurch, he shuts the large book with a sigh, deciding to finish it after a rushed meal. With how the tracks were already beginning to fade from memory and how he knew that Marybeth, the owner of the farm, wouldn’t be resting until far later in the day, he had no choice but to rely on his decaying recollection and push to get through any material he could as fast as possible.
Ford realizes his mistake the instant he forces open the barely functioning door to the living room. He nearly curses himself for not checking his watch or paying closer attention to his surroundings as he offers an awkward wave to the three pairs of eyes.
“Grunkle Ford!” a chorus of two cheers.
“Well well well, wouldya look at that, kiddos? ” the man who wears his face remarks, not even looking up as he piles more pasta onto his plate. “Guess who finally decided to grace us with his presence.”
“Hey,” he says gruffly, swallowing dryly as his voice drags through his throat, rough from disuse.
“You know he’s busy,” Mabel chastises, pulling out a chair beside her and patting it with an accompanying million-watt smile. Ford avoids his brother’s glare as he sinks into the seat.
“Too busy for family?”
“You know how important my research is,” he answers on instinct, already regretting it as Stan’s face sours.
“Do you want any of the bolognese?” Dipper cuts in, holding up the large glass bowl of mid-way completed pasta. “Mabel spent a lot of time on it.”
“You don’t say,” he says, turning to his niece with a lopsided grin, offering a nod as Dipper piles more spoonfuls onto his plate, feeling just how empty his stomach is. Mabel puffs out her chef-hat-patterned sweatered chest, nodding enthusiastically.
“Naturally. I only put in half a bottle of glitter too, so best of both worlds.”
Ford coughs around his forkful, setting down the mouthwatering prongs stuffed with shredded beef and rich marinara. “Huh?”
He looks around the table, not relieved at the exasperated look displayed on both Dipper and Stan’s faces as Mabel cackles and shoves more rigatoni into her mouth and hums a satisfied ‘mhm’.
“Those two worlds being your insanity and my desire not to die from a sparkly esophagus?” Dipper states matter of factly, with the type of defeatism that suggested this was a topic of conversation that had been entertained many times over. Warily, Ford eyes the mostly empty bottle of a suspicious glistening substance at the edge of the table.
“Ugh, Dipper! How is that such a bad thing? You don’t have any sense of adventure. Besides, I already told you it’s edible.”
“Oh yeah, according to who? And don’t say the Federal Trade Comrades. I looked that up; there’s no such thing.”
“Jeez, you going to let your phone tell you everything? Just live a little. I didn’t see you complaining about your third serving.”
Dipper sighs, looking into his practically licked-clean bowl as Mabel’s forehead wrinkles from how hard she moves her eyebrows before huffing and using a finger to raise one of them.
“She’s got you there kid,” Stan grumbles, picking at his own now empty plate. He says nothing as he fills his dish again with steaming food. “Eh, she’s really inherited my knack for cooking.”
“Isn’t this the one dish you know how to make?” Ford mutters, giving up on some mental battle and shoveling warm pasta into his food-deficient half-corpse of a body.
Surprisingly, Stan laughs.
“Says you, I’d be surprised if you could even make cereal without burning down the place,” he shakes his head. “I saw what you were consisting on before I got here.”
Ford feels his face heat, “I was busy.”
“My point exactly.”
“What did you find Grunkle Stan?” Dipper asks with wide eyes. In some ways the quiet awe in his voice makes Ford feel all the more awful and swallow up any complaints as Stan begins his embellished tale of the Mystery Shack’s kitchen before it had become the Mystery Shack (and thus gained a kitchen).
He eats his food silently with only a few corrections (‘It was not a kitchenette!’), instead circling back to his earlier outing and thinking of other track marks that might match. He ponders creatures capable of flight as the trail had halted so abruptly, an idea he had earlier discarded for how crushed the earth had looked—not typically the work of an animal that needed to be light enough for flight. He practically forgets he’s still at the table until Mabel’s elbow accidentally knocks into his from how hard she’s laughing.
“No it wasn’t casual bro,” she roars, flinging a broccoli at her brother from the speed at which she whisks her fork around as a talking piece. “Admit it! You’re still weird about it.”
“Who’s weird?” Ford asks, gaze trained on Dipper’s hunched shoulders, settling an open palm on the table as he leans forward.
“Dipper,” his niece answers, as Dipper hollers back an angered, “Mabel!”
“What, just calling it like I see it.”
“This again?” Stans asks with a sigh, stacking empty plates together. “Thought the kid was over her.”
“I am,” Dipper continues to yell as Stan walks toward the kitchen’s exit. “Mabel’s just being an asshole.”
“Am not! Just admit you still like Wendy.”
“Wendy?” Ford asks.
“The redhead,” Stan says before the kitchen door closes behind his retreating form.
“I don’t like her anymore,” Dipper exclaims, rising to his feet as he gets in his sister’s face.
“Then why were you being like that?” Mabel asks, attempting to raise a brow again to accompany her crossed arms.
“I wasn’t being like anything,” Dipper pauses, taking off his hat to run a hand through his tangled locks. “Was I being like something?”
“Listen, bro,” Mabel sighs. “I get it. I get you. I’ve been you.” She shakes her head and smiles this wistful smile that Ford is unused to seeing her youthful face portray. “See, once you’ve liked someone, and I mean really like like them, you never quite get over them. Sure you might not have a crush on them anymore or you lose that special spark they used to give you, but your heart develops this like muscle memory where no matter what happens you still always feel a bit of something.” She leans across the table to tap his elbow reassuringly. “You don’t like her anymore, but sorry my brother from the same mother, you’re probably just going to always feel something for her.”
Dipper sighs. “Well, that sucks.”
“Yeah.”
Ford excuses himself shortly after.
On the third ring, Ford awakes, shuffled onto mortal coil of dry eyes, jeans, and a parched throat. He peels lined paper from a spit-adorned cheek with a grimace, reaching for the vibrating object. The top of the screen reads a collection of numbers he distantly registers as morning but little else.
“Hello?”
“Mr. Ford!” Tyler says into the receiver.
“This is him.”
“I need you down here, by Jimenez’s. It’s urgent.”
“Alright,” he says, the words forcing a bit more cortisol to release into his bloodstream. He looks around his desk in confusion, spotting piles of notes and books, a flashlight lying on his desk and a collection of poorly lit photos. The denim of his pants feels especially inflexible, digging into his skin with each shift. “I’ll get over there as soon as I can.”
Stuffing his feet into constrictive-feeling shoes, Ford bites down a yawn as his mind continues to fill with static as he drives over to a small house at the edge of a row of unique-looking homes.
“Do you think this is the fox again?”
Ford looks over at Tyler, trying to piece together the words. He blinks away images of trodden dirt from his mind and tries to focus on the short man. He looks back over at the broken fence and police scattered a few paces away who speak in hushed voices with a stricken-looking tall brunette he knows to be Shandra Jimenez. Catching a glimpse of her wide eyes, he willingly meets Tyler’s gaze instead.
“What’s she saying?” he asks, gesturing over to the reporter.
“Not much, just that Jared, that’s her boyfriend, never came home last night and when she woke up there was this.”
Ford walks a bit closer to the splintering wood that made up what was left of the fence surrounding her yellow house, scanning for any possible remnants he might have missed on first impression. He makes sure to keep his sweeping scan consistent so that Tyler doesn’t catch the moment he spots the odd twinkle in the edge of his vision.
“And the cops?”
“No signs of any struggle other than the fence, and nothing else evidence wise in the immediate area. They think he probably just got really drunk, crashed into the fence, and then feeling guilty about it, stumbled off somewhere. Honestly, they called me a bit stupid for calling you over but well,” he makes some sort of odd gesture with his hands as he circles them around one another. “Something felt weird to me.”
“Weird huh?” Ford neutralizes his expression, slows his breath, and folds his hands behind his back. “I believe I’m inclined to agree with law enforcement on this. It is strange that he has yet to turn up but not unheard of.”
He doesn’t mention the chickens and feigns cluelessness when Tyler tries to hedge at yesterday, instead making sure to position his back closer to the alleged crime scene. It almost makes him feel bad when Tyler just sighs as Shandra’s voice picks up to a clear shout.
He doesn’t look at the fleck of gold he snags until he’s parked back at the Mystery Shack. Inspecting it he frowns, not noting anything distinctive. He’s still staring at it intently when he nearly bumps into a careening Dipper who shouts his apologies as he chases after a giggling Mabel he hears somewhere in the distance. Ford mumbles out some jumble of words he hopes conveys his own apology as he steps into the cabin.
Unfortunately, despite hours of meticulous research, the fleck continues to point to nothing but being an innocuous piece of gold, not one that holds any meaning to him. Even after cracking out all his books on gemology and chemistry searching for any relevancy or meaning hidden amongst its composition, he finds nothing. Annoyingly stumped, he circles back to digging into all the information he could find on Shandra’s boyfriend.
But Jared Fiedlings is as uninteresting as one can get as a Gravity Falls resident; he only finds one newspaper clipping summarizing some journal-making business he’d attempted a few years ago. There’s nothing to connect him to the chickens or to the piece of gold or anything else for that matter that would contradict the cops’ narrative. Yet, Ford knows deep down that none of this is a coincidence.
It’s an absolutely aggravating intuition as he cannot back it with hard facts or reasoning other than this being Gravity Falls of all places. It also means that he has no real excuse to give his housemates for his long hours holed away and the puddle of light that’s constantly present under his door. Which of course means Ford finds himself at more family events than he had planned.
This is crucial, he reminds himself. If something was happening, he had to be sure of it. And the only way to be sure of it without worrying anyone that he’d had a psychotic break that didn’t involve him rambling about dead chickens, was to play it cool to balance things out.
(Though honestly, it wasn’t that Ford minded the events he’d previously been dreading as much. Somehow, the knowledge tucked in the back of his brain of the stacks of papers waiting on his desk funneled enthusiasm into whatever Pines shindig of the day.)
Ford acclimates, balancing his life of grunkle and unraveling a town mystery without unnecessarily harming or worrying anyone.
Thus the breakfasts, lunches, and dinners, the pool outings, and the current board game he’s in the midst of when the town’s mayor calls him four days later.
The pig pen he and Tyler stare at from a distance is nothing like the chickens of a few days prior. For one it’s ten times bloodier and broken. The blood mixes with the mud so thoroughly that the pools that manage to retain a crimson hue, gathered in pits of brown sludge, speak to their grandiose volume. The circular wiring of the pen is in some places so mangled that it looks as if made of clay from how densely tangled the steel is.
It does not bode well and for a brief moment almost makes Ford wish he was back home with his grand niece and nephew, many-sided die at the ready. The sight washes away any of the momentary flutter he’d felt in his chest as he had reached for the phone while Dipper and Mabel argued about proper plastic property sharing and colorful paper currency notes.
Tyler says nothing, watching as the police cars drive away with a deep frown.
“This does not look good,” Ford says plainly. There was no bush around to beat.
“Not a fox,” Tyler says grimly.
“Not a fox,” Ford agrees. The display sharply contrasted with his earlier ideas of a flying creature as the strength displayed was not one wings or a massive beak could handle. Whatever had been done to the fencing required both strength and precision to arrange it as if it were string and not metal.
He leaves the scene without saying much else. Having been so thrown off by what he’d seen, he’d elected for the back entrance for once. His mind is still buzzing with possibilities when his foot sinks into something soft a few paces away from the smaller rear door of the Mystery Shack. The smell hits him a second later.
Ford jumps back, eyes widening as he takes in the fermenting display. There, with now a large shoe print in its middle is the crude makings of a heart. His eyes jump wildly between the frame of circular chunks of meat to the much less distinct mess of red that the chunks cage. Unlike the skeleton which contains similar sized pieces, the middle is all mashed together meat; it’s hard for his eyes to pick out where one glob ends and another starts. Although it’s nothing too large, perhaps a foot in diameter at its widest, his breath quickly vacates from his chest.
Yet, he can’t stop himself from crouching down, leaning forward, and breaking away one of those outlining pieces for closer inspection. His breath rushes back in all at once as a memory wiggles to the forefront of his mind. One relived eighth-grade science dissection class later Ford knows what he’s looking at are the hearts of chickens.
He throws up quickly a few crawled paces away from the gore, splattering the dewy grass with an odd mix of stale cereal, muffin, and stomach acid. Ford sits there for a while after his chest stops heaving, caught between his puke and the meat. It’s not until the sun finally peeks out from behind the clouds that he gets to work; it wouldn’t be long before the Shack was up and running.
Ford works as quickly as he can, finding a shovel buried in the back of some shed with shaking hands and digging to the best of his abilities. He feels sweat drip down his palms as he forces the carnage under the earth. He tries his hardest not to breathe in the mix of rot and flesh, not wanting to have even more to bury.
His shower afterward is long and impossibly hot, and still, Ford can only smell the raw sludge, can only picture how those oval organs had bounced lightly in the grass as they’d slipped from his trowel, can only hear the splurt of those unidentified intestines spilling down into their grave.
It’s all he can think about as he sits back at his desk, fingers practically itching with sudden electricity as he struggles to connect pieces of estranged evidence, straining to see their links as his nausea fades.
He finds himself in the bathroom with surprise, not realizing his own bladder’s pain until he splashes his warm face with chilled tap water a few hours later.
He realizes his hunger in a similar fashion, preparing quick bowls of flavorless oatmeal that he spoons with varying degrees of success into his mouth as he scribbles on the page in front of him. The next few days pass like that. Ford wakes up and reads and writes and paces. He addresses his body’s faculties when his eyes feel hot from reading the same page ten times or when they all gang up on him as to finally overwhelm his senses into acknowledging their presence. He takes calls from Tyler in the moments between, calls about a dog that disappeared on a hike, a tree that’s uprooted overnight, a confusing scattering of feathers and bones around town hall, an emptied wallet turns up on a river’s banks, a walking cane found deep in a cave, a woman’s purse found dangling on a mountain ledge and so on. None of it connects.
Ford can barely even find it in himself to be surprised when he steps out late one night. He’d been meaning to check on one of the latest confusing culprit-less crime scenes, as he and Tyler had begun referring to them, a second time—a car had recently been discovered cleanly cut in half with no sign of any passengers less than a mile out of town—when something catches his eye.
Somehow, Ford knows it’s he who is meant to find the singular heart. In the same way, it was he who was meant to find the chicken hearts. He looks down upon the large organ, in all its asymmetrical glory, still red and shining under the bright moon. The soft light is still enough for him to make out large veins and severed aorta. A memory once more tugs at his mind, remembering the day his class had spent on pigs, just a week after the chickens.
Back then he’d felt from the moment he’d looked at the heart; now his thoughts are quiet as he fishes a cloth out of his pocket. Picking up the heart he thinks of whether it’s his imagination or not that makes heat radiate to his palms. As he walks further into the woods, he wonders if it would be a similar layout of arteries, valves, and muscles that he’d once seen. Or if the anatomy would be off. If the sizes of the vessels would be disproportionate.
The smart thing would be to take this back to inspect, to be sure of his suspicions. Instead, Ford sticks the shovel he’d brought into the soft dirt and digs for what feels like hours. He places the heart carefully into the open pit, staring at it until it was fully covered.
Ford does jump though when his phone buzzes in his pocket. He answers by the second ring.
“Ford,” Tyler’s voice cracks through the speakers, distorting briefly. There’s something in his voice that’s different from the times before, something different in his heavy breathing. He’s oddly calm. It scares the sh*t out of Ford.
“What’s happened?”
“It’s McGucket.” Ford’s stomach plummets.
“Where?” His voice trembles.
“Somewhere near the water tower, there were reports of…a disturbance.”
“What sort of disturbance?” he asks, feet already propelling him away. But the line’s gone dead.
Ford’s fingers shake as he yanks his keys out of his pocket, cursing as his grip slips and he has to catch them before they fall to the floor. He yanks the door to the old compact car his brother keeps and is speeding out toward the main road a few seconds later.
Please be ok, he repeats like a mantra, as he flattens his foot against the gas pedal—anybody but Fiddleford. Despite the increasing amount of persisting pieces that brought him no closer to unraveling the enigma plaguing the town, Ford knew that if anything were to happen to his old partner it would be his fault. Fiddleford had expressed such a concerning amount of dedication to ridding himself of such dangers and risk. To think that all that would be in vain once more due to his own involvement had Ford leaping out of his car the moment he reaches the tower.
“Fiddleford,” he yells at the rows of closed stores, sprinting as his head whips around from left to right.
When he finally hears a familiar-sounding scream from what sounds like a few streets over, he feels no relief. He takes off in that direction, careening toward an alley between two older storage buildings.
Ford would scream out for his friend if his breath wasn’t wasted panting as he heaves oxygen into his squeezing lungs, footfalls echoing in that winding alley. He reaches the final lamppost, gaze narrowing as in the dark he only makes out discarded wood, old furniture, and other miscellaneous items. Again comes Fiddleford's cries, echoing all around him.
“Fiddleford!” he roars, feeling queasier by the second, taking a step forward, then pedaling backward, only to choose a new direction to stumble in and repeat, while he yells at, pleads with, himself to figure it out—to sort through all of this in time, to find out where his voice was coming from.
“Boy, oh boy!”
Ford freezes. His muscles lock, blood slowing to what feels like a standstill as everything within him stops; a quiet ringing teases his right ear.
“Screaming another man’s name…what’s a triangle to think?”
The voice is loud, spoken as if right beside him, shrill and annoying. The flashlight drops from Ford’s fingers. He spins around, in disbelief, in confusion, in disagreement with what his own senses were telling him. Ford turns and sees nothing. He turns back to the other end, and then once more to the alley’s entrance until finally he sees something.
Silhouetted against the hills of soft golden light that spills from the line of street lamps between them stands what he reasons to be a figure. It’s hard to be certain as it’s concerningly tall, inhumanly so. Regardless, it stalks closer until just enough light scatters its shadow to the ground in front. Ford doesn’t need to see what shape it makes to know what or rather who stands before him. Even without the voice, the glowing slitted yellow eye is enough.
Everywhere along the alley similar eyes form on random surfaces, blinking open and fixing their unnerving pupils onto him.
“Hiya honey, did you miss me?”
The being before him lifts his hat, tipping it as the world shakes beneath him in accordance. Ford falls to his ass with the crushing weight of his consciousness. Back in the day, though it’d taken a while, he’d eventually learned to distinguish dream from reality. And now there was no mistaking his wakefulness.
“No,” Ford’s voice croaks as it rattles through his heaving chest, dry lips cracking with strain. He scoots back, palms scraping on rocks whilst his head pounds. “No. You’re dead; you died. I saw it with my own eyes.”
“Death is such a funny thing,” Bill muses, leaning a gloved hand on a cane that poofs into existence. The closer he walks the more Ford can take in the impossibility of his appearance. The suit he wears is darker than anything he’s seen before, a tailoring that’s too otherworldly perfect and makes use of materials he’d only ever seen in his time working for Bill or during his years spent traveling other dimensions. The yellow that makes up his stitching looks impossibly bright. The golden, immaculately stylized, hair that sits above a shorter darker layer almost looks vaguely normal.
His face is wrong. It’s the only way he can think to describe it. His eyes are too beastly and his mouth too sharp. It’s somehow nothing any human would sport, even without the dapper eye covering he’s convinced in some moments is a mask and in others is an eyepatch (it’s difficult to say with how bits of his being seem to shift in and out of reality as if struggling with adapting to the lower dimension).
Amidst all the gross perfection though, Ford spots the one thing marring his otherwise spotless appearance. He can’t fight the slight bit of pride at the wide scar that slices through his face, the bit of distortion that he cannot seem to control.
“Besides, who's to say I’m not dead now?”
“But, I’m not even dreaming,” Ford says, stomach dropping as Bill takes a step forward with his polished back shoes.
“You are not,” Bill confirms with a knife-like smile. It’s disorienting, Ford realizes, to see him smile. It was something that was always apparent in that saccharine, overly enthusiastic, voice. But actually seeing it paired with that eye was horrid—an influx of too much information. It’s something that only starts bothering him then as he realizes that at no point earlier had his lips moved—not even when he spoke.
Ford feels himself hit a wall that he’s sure marks the end of the alley and uses it to gather himself onto wobbly knees. “But Fordsy, what’s ‘impossibility’ to someone like me? A stupid word like that is irrelevant!”
He’s larger than he had first thought, he notes. It wasn’t just that Bill was oddly tall but that his broad shoulders made a further imposing frame as he leaned forward once there were only a mere few feet between them.
“This can’t be real,” he reasons, muttering to himself. He rubs his face, wishing that at any moment he’d find himself back at his desk or that his vision would clear and he’d be alone in that alley. Instead, Bill’s eye grows bright. All the yellow parts do, glowing in time with his speech.
“Oh, but it is!” Bill cackles.
“How could you have survived?” he demands, feeling his knees shake. “How?”
Bill’s smile widens. “Well, you’re not the only one with odd friends. Turns out it’s not so simple to just kill a super fun guy like me. Alls I had to do was shake a few hands, promise some things, and boom! Zip zap, here I am.” He snaps his fingers into pointing his thumbs at himself to enunciate the last part of his speech.
In the silence between them, it suddenly dawns on Ford the distinct absence in the night’s air. He looks Bill directly in the eye.
“Where’s Fiddleford?”
Bill groans, the top hat that floats above him follows his head as he throws it back in exasperation. “That hillbilly again? Ford, baby, I just traveled across universes to see you, practically broke out of prison and the first thing you want to talk about is that basketcase?”
Ford seethes. “Where is he, Cipher?”
Sighing, Bill runs a hand through his locks, disturbing the perfect slicked style he has them in. Yet the second his hand moves away, his hair falls right back into place. Then, horribly, his right side bulges, the squares at the edges in his suit widening until they split along a fine line, jagged knives appearing in the space created as the part of his flank he expects to house his ribs, opens.
With a slack jaw, Ford watches as a black tendril slips between the teeth that stretch out from either side of the opening that forms, forcing out a larger object. Fiddleford tumbles to the floor and the mouth in Bill’s side licks its lips once before reforming into his suit.
“What a nasty little bugger I tell you,” Bill sighs, confusingly wiping at his face’s lips with a handkerchief.
Fiddleford wastes no time scrambling over to Ford, collapsing by his legs and crying.
“Ford,” he yells. “Golly sh*t. What’s going on?”
“I’m terribly sorry old friend,” Ford says, unable to look him in the eye as Fiddleford shakes beside him. “Cipher,” he yells, turning back to the demon. “Whatever wretched thing you’re planning, I want no part in it!”
Bill laughs. “Again with the accusations! Isn’t it obvious Sixer?” He twirls his cane, shoes smacking obnoxiously against the concrete as he dances an odd walk toward them. Fiddleford clung to him even tighter. Ford didn’t even want to imagine what he’d done to him before he’d gotten there. “Listen, I’ve given you your little sidekick back, the least you can do is hear out an old friend.”
“I want nothing to do with you.”
“Oh but, Fordsy that’s not going to get us anywhere is it?” He snaps and suddenly black hands emerge from the walls behind him, yanking Fiddleford up by his neck. He tries in vain to pull against the tight shackles, his heart thundering as his friend cries out in clear pain.
“Stop, sh*t. Fine, I’ll listen, you ghoul just put him down!”
“Great choice,” Bill cheers, snapping again and roughly dropping a gasping Fiddleford. “Now where was I? Oh yes, what brings me here? Now I know you must be asking yourself, ‘Bill with your endless power and knowledge, why come back to this loser village you hate so much?’ Well fear not, it’s really all quite simple.”
Fiddleford tugs incessantly on his coat sleeve until Ford looks over at him. “We have to run,” he whispers. “We’ll have to split up.”
Ford shakes his head as discreetly as he can. He tries conveying with his eyes that they’d already lost, they were well within his grasp. Their only salvation would be Bill’s disinterest in their well-being, growing bored and moving on. Especially as it was clear his powers were not like Ford had ever seen them before; he was too unpredictable.
Bill prattles on about his grand resurrection while Ford tries to convince Fiddleford not to try anything rash.
“—got out on good behavior, yadda yadda, and well now I’m here to collect.”
“If this is about revenge—” Ford starts, stepping out in front of Fiddleford.
Bill shakes his head as he clicks his tongue, or rather he broadcasts such a sound into Ford’s mind. “You’re still not getting it! C’mon Fordsy darling, let bygones be bygones; you know I don’t hold grudges.”
Involuntarily, Ford rolls his eyes. “Then why are you here?”
“I want what’s owed to me.”
Ford’s brows draw close as his mouth wrinkles into a frown. “And what would that be? I’m not building you that portal, never again. Haven’t you caused enough destruction to this town?”
“Ford,” Fiddleford whispers again. “Something is wrong, we need to go.”
“I spent a lot of time thinking,” Bill says, twirling his cane as he rocks back and forth on his heels. “Well not a lot to me, but a lot to you. Spoke to some folks and did some soul searching and what have you. Eventually, I realized how even when I had won,” “You never won.” “I still had this small little itch. And see the thing about an itch, no matter how small, it’s really hard to be having my party to end all parties when all I can think about is how badly I need to scratch!”
“Save me the sob story and state your intentions,” Ford grits out, sweat dripping down the sides of his face.
“Aw, honey I’m starting to feel a bit unwelcomed here,” Bill pouts. “I guess there’s no point in drawing things out though; we both know how patient I’ve been. Here’s the bottom line Sixer: Billy’s here to make a deal, clean and simple.”
“I will never make a deal with you again.”
“So dismissive! Gosh hear a triangle out first,” Bill crosses his arms. “Didn’t we already establish how I feel about not being listened to?” A hand wraps around Fiddleford's ankle and he shrieks.
“Fine, speak.”
“You always were a fast learner,” Bill says. “But as I was saying, I’m here to make a deal. I think at this point you get my capabilities. So I’m sure you’ll understand that I mean it when I say that I’m either going to kill, torture, or behead—unless I come up with anything cooler—every person you care about.”
“Or?” Ford wheezes out of a throat that feels filled with sand.
“Or,” Bill says, “we make a deal and all of your loved ones stay boring and safe.”
Ford’s mind spins, thinking of how the twins and Stanley were surely safe, asleep in the Mystery Shack. They had to be. “And what do you get?”
“You.”
“I’m sorry?”
“I get you, Sixer.”
“Ford,” Fiddleford pleads. “Don’t listen. Remember everything he says are lies.”
He looks away from his wide eyes. “I thought this wasn’t about revenge?”
“It’s not,” Bill states flatly.
“They’ll…really be safe?”
Ford tries to think logically. Surely this was a trap. Bill could not get through the Shack’s barrier. But Bill was also supposed to be dead, and confined to dreams. Not openly threatening him with clear displays of prolonged manipulation as well as raw strength. Still, taking Bill’s plan would surely be worse. It would mean the destruction of his own sanity, his life work; he would lose all autonomy surely. The others had to be safe in the Shack. All he had to do was worry about the man beside him. If he got him out of harm’s way, then perhaps…
“Safe from me at least,” Bill shrugs, flicking an imaginary lint from his shoulder.
“Fiddleford,” Ford says without turning his head. “Go.”
“No way—”
“Go,” he finally glances at the other man, taking in his panicked expression—so reminiscent of their youth, of the man he’d known decades ago. He didn’t want to picture what Bill had done to him, would do. “I’ll never be able to forgive myself if you don’t.”
Fiddleford looks like he wants to object, but he stares back at Bill, and then with a final squeeze of Ford’s arm, he inches toward the other end of the alley—squeezing his eyes shut as he passes Bill—until he breaks into a lopsided sprint. Bill’s head tilts to the side, tracking his movements over his shoulder until Fiddleford is out of sight. Rather than twist back, his head continues along its one-hundred-eighty-degree turn until he’s staring down at Ford again.
“What a relief! I thought he’d never leave. Now,” he sticks out a black-gloved hand, familiar blue flames enveloping the offering. “Time for your end babydoll.”
Ford doesn’t move, feet rooted in place.
“Fordsy sweetie, we both know I’m not a very patient guy. I don’t like to be kept waiting.” When Ford does nothing, his face morphs into a sneer. “You think I’m kidding around?”
He snaps just as Ford steps forward, instantly recognizing, with increasing horror, the appendage that drops out of thin air. Despite the night air’s chill he feels sweltering under his clothes, leaning on the wall behind him as he becomes light-headed at the sight of his former lab assistant’s arm lying there on the floor.
“And remember, there’s a lot more where that came from. So,” Bill says a bit tersely, kicking aside the arm as he moves closer. “What’ll it be?”
Ford thinks himself to truly be the dumbest man alive for slipping his six-fingered hand into that burning grip, flames immediately licking up to his elbow. A man of principles reduced to a blundering fool with just a bit of trickery and intimidation his mind chastises. He closes his eyes, praying desperately for his singular pain—that it’d be his misery and his alone. After all, it’d been him who started this, his naivete, his refusal to alert others to the warning signs, it was only fair.
Instead, his arm is yanked forward, making him lose balance as he stumbles forward, shooting out his palms to keep himself from falling.
“Oh ho ho,” Bill croons by his ear, stepping forward until Ford feels his back press up once more against the cool brick wall of one of the buildings. “Oh, Sixer.”
Ford snags onto fistfuls of his fine suit from where his hands are braced against his chest as he readies himself for whatever unimaginably horrific payback someone as twisted as Bill had prepared for him.
“Gods I thought I’d really have to kill that guy before your stubborn ass agreed. Although, not that I’d mind of course, as you see I really hate sharing.”
“Huh?” He was used to Bill speaking in riddles, but still, the lack of exquisite pain was confusing.
“Surely you’ve noticed that by now point-dexter. Boy was it hard to watch that guy’s pathetic attempts. What entertainment! My only consolation was how you kept breaking his heart. But none of that matters anymore.”
He sighs as he drops his head to press his nose to Ford’s temple, inhaling deeply. The unfamiliar touch makes his stomach roll with some unidentifiable mix of anticipation and something rousing he can’t quite place.
“I don't understand. Why would you go this far? If you have this supposed power you’re bragging about, you shouldn’t need any deals.”
“Perhaps,” Bill says. “But where’s the fun in that? Besides, this is how humans do it, don’t they? Binding forever and such.”
“And that’s your revenge?” Ford swallows, trying to inch away from where Bill had begun to rub his nose further along his face, breathing harshly as he wrapped arms around his waist. “To chain me forever?”
“Didn’t I already say this wasn’t revenge,” Bill says, sounding a bit distracted as he pulls Ford back into place as he continues to lean over him. “Though it wouldn’t change the deal, ideally you’d enjoy this.”
“Enjoy being tortured?”
“Fordsy,” Bill says by the sensitive skin right where his ear connected to his skull. “I don’t think you’re getting this.”
“If this isn’t revenge, then what? You’re not angry?”
“Oh, I’m plenty angry,” Bill admits, a self deprecating laugh tinting his words dangerously. “But, I realized there are things I want even more than that.”
Ford blinks a few times, trying to follow along with his words. “You came all this way…for me?”
“Yes, duh! Shape up IQ!” Bill tugs him closer by his hips.
“Then I don’t understand again.” Bill groans. “Why do all of this then for just some random human if you’re not that mad?”
“I hate you brainiac sort. You’re all the same and always so stupid when it comes to yourselves.” Without any warning, Bill picks him up, sliding him further up that wall until he is at eye level with him. Ford yells in surprise, scrambling for balance as his long coat bunches uncomfortably behind him.
“Be gentle,” he scolds, without thinking, slipping back into the same mildly annoyed tone he’d once used to chide Bill for drunken nights out.
“Stanford,” Bill says, moving back to fix his unblinking eye on his own. “There is no greater honor than something belonging to me. Everything that is mine is immeasurably priceless; it has the pleasure of being mine.”
His lips turn up at Ford’s intake of breath, shooting forward. He disappears from his peripherals and in turn, Ford feels something wet and warm across the left side of his face.
“Did you just lick me?”
Bill responds by repeating the action, dragging his tongue slowly across his skin while humming. He does it a few more times, laving his tongue against his cheek, across his forehead, over his nose. Speechless, Ford splutters as his mind reels at the bizarre display.
“Oh Fordsy,” he says into his thoughts as he continues his barrage. “I really need to hand it to you humans, perhaps there are values to your meat-bag senses. Giving fear a run for its money!” Letting go of his waist, Bill keeps him from slipping because of how tightly he pushes him to the wall behind him. Instead, he splays large hands beneath each one of his thighs, hiking him up a few more inches to now run his tongue down his neck, yanking aside the high collar of his sweater to do so. “The way you taste…I could just eat you alive darling.”
“Bill,” he complains, trying to keep up with the events as the insides of his brain turned into a confusing jumble of overlapping confusion and emotions that were too frazzled to put a name to. “Slow down.”
“I never thought there’d be such a benefit to not inhabiting your skin,” he muses with a chuckle. “But clearly I’d been missing out!” He bats away the hand Ford tries to cover his face with as his glasses begin to fog, wondering if this was some new form of torture he had yet to uncover. “Though, the only downside,” he says as he brings their foreheads together, looking around Ford’s face with an enthusiasm he hadn’t seen from him in years, “I will admit I do miss being inside you.”
“Shut up,” he says weakly as his face reddens, using one of his hands to push Bill’s face away. The demon laughs, snapping as a shadowy hand snakes around each of his arms, bringing them above his head.
“Is that all you can come up with, honey?” he teases, leaning closer to the wall as he tugged him forward by his legs. Ford freezes at the same time that Bill’s eye goes wide. “Oh, oh! Sixer,” he cackles, “looks like someone else missed it too.”
Ford coughs, struggling in his hold to no avail. “You misunderstand.”
“Do I?” Bill says, pressing a hand to the front of his pants. “Or do you just not want to admit to how much you need me?”
“That’s ridiculous.”
“Says the guy who was depressed out of his mind until I started haunting this dump.” Bill pinches his cheek, pulling him to meet him in the eye. Ford spits at him before he can think twice, enraged at the accusation. He knew he’d made a mistake the second he’d done it but still frowned as Bill’s grin grew, wiping a gloved finger at his wet cheek and bringing it to his mouth—watching in horror as he was finally awarded front-row seats to the freak show that was the monstrous dark tongue which resided in that acidic mouth.
“You’re wrong,” he rebuttals, trying to pull away from the pressure building between their pressed-together bodies, convincing himself that it was Bill he was fighting and not himself.
“We both know that’s not true! Just look how you perked up the second you knew I was back.”
Ford drops his head, wanting to deny the words. He searches for anything to use that would make his assertions untrue. But Ford hadn’t been surprised when Bill showed up. He hadn’t touched the paper he was supposed to be working on in weeks. He no longer slept till noon and he managed conversation with his family.
With how his brain was already busy making the case against how he wasn’t so insecure as to fawn over the notion that Bill, an all-powerful being, had come all this way for him of all people, it was hard to also deny the flurry of evidence backing Bill’s claims.
“Do you really want to go back to a reality without me in it baby?” Ford gasps, arms flexing as a distinctive hardness pushes against his. “That’s what I thought,” Bill rasps, bringing his hands back as additional limbs wrap around his legs to prop him up, dropping his index finger at his lips and biting down on his glove, peeling it away to reveal hands that darkened to an impossible pitch black and their ends. His hand drops back to the front of Ford’s pants laughing as his hips buck up in response.
He then slips his other hand under his sweater, hiking it up with an appreciative hum. Bill’s just about to wedge a finger in his waistband when he looks down and pauses, inhaling sharply.
“Ford,” he mutters. “You didn’t.”
Ford doesn’t need to look down to see what he’s staring at, face flushing further. “That’s—” he coughs, “from a really long time ago. I was going to get it removed.”
“And now you never will,” Bill says as his fingers dance along the letters written in a language that had taken Ford years to partially understand. He still remembers the day he’d gotten the tattoo. As a kid he’d always frowned upon the practice, assuming he’d never be one to sport permanent ink. But he’d somewhere grown accustomed to the blemish Bill had left on him and figured that at his point it wasn’t like things could get worse. Besides, it had been months since he’d seen his muse and loneliness had made him impulsive. It wasn’t until he was stowing away on a random planet, using communal showers when he’d stumbled into a creature that had trembled at the words inked underneath his chest.
Bill mumbles something in that language and with years of no practice, Ford can’t decipher his words. He jolts as Bill's hands come to settle on his chest, pushing up his flesh to stretch out the words, leaving them there as he tastes the ink through the warm tongue he lays on his skin.
“You’ve finally been returned to me,” he says then in plain English, actions growing frenzied as he scrapes his teeth along the flesh. It’s only precursor he gets to the demon biting down harshly, holding Ford in place as he flinches.
“sh*t,” he pants, shuddering as the firmness in Bill pant’s shifts lower to nudge against his ass. It was beyond humiliating.
“Mm,” Bill finally pulls away, pressing his hand down on the tent in his pants, squeezing his co*ck once before yanking his pants down harshly. “Like what you see?”
“Don’t do this here.”
“Do what? I’m only asking you a simple question.”
“This is playing dirty Cipher,” he grits out, embarrassment making him light-headed.
“What, are you telling me you don’t like this puppet? Even after I spent so much time customizing it?”
Bristling, Ford loses the last tidbit of hope he’d been holding onto that he might be mistaken about the visage the other had taken. However, Bill had spent countless amounts of time rooting around his brain, enough to bypass Ford’s usual answer of priding himself on being above human carnality—that he did not understand the appeal. Bill would have been fully able to stumble past his pompous rhetoric and into the truth underneath found in the few brief flashes of indisputable want to create the figure before him.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he lies. “This is conjecture.”
Tutting, Bill traces a black nail along his shaft as he angles his face to look him in the eye, forcing Ford to take in his sculpted face and full lips, his slightly crooked nose and defined eye.
“Should we end play time early then?” he asks, wrapping his ungloved hand around his co*ck, palm mysteriously slick. “I was hoping you could teach me about this species’ copulation but there’s no rush, I can be patient.”
“Do whatever you want,” Ford grunts, realizing that Bill already knew exactly how he liked to be touched in the rare second he’d find a moment to pleasure himself.
“Always playing so hard to get huh Fordsy?” Bill continues to play with his co*ck, working his wrist in a perfect winding fashion as he eases back his foreskin, laughing as Ford grunts in response. “I will admit it is adorable to watch though. Guess it’s your lucky day that I know you inside out sugar!” He presses a mocking smooch to his cheek.
He tugs down his own pants depleting the registry of responses Ford had been selecting between, taking in the demon’s arousal. Like the rest of him, it’s only vaguely human, the shape is slightly off—a bit too oddly shaped at the head, and obscenely wet. It reminds Ford a lot of the mock gift an outlandish friend from his paranormal society club had gifted him as a joke. A gift that had perhaps only existed as a joke for half a year until one night and then was thrown out shortly after. A memory Bill had most likely had access to.
“You should see the look on your face,” Bill chortles as he rubs a hand down himself, coating it in the same shining translucent liquid that was still drying on Ford’s co*ck. “How long has it been? How many should I be using?”
“One,” he answers gruffly.
“You really have been in a slump, pumpkin. Good thing your good ol’ pal came around to make a splash in this dry spell.”
The hands holding him up begin to pull his legs further apart, positioning his lower half toward Bill as he lines up a slick finger with his hole.
“Bill,” he says with a clenched jaw, watching him in disbelief, unsure how things had progressed to that moment, hoping to distract him as he tried to close his legs together. Instead, a few more eyes pop up, a few on the opposing wall, a few along Bill’s lower lashes, another over his eye covering, and one final one in the middle of his forehead.
“Yeah?” The voice in his mind somehow sounds strained and ragged, unlike anything he’d ever heard from a timeless interdimensional god. His fingertip pushes against the sensitive plush flesh of his rim, just barely pushing in.
Ford feels his flush travel down from his face, aided by the wool material of his sweater even while still lifted to sit above his chest. Still, he struggled to comprehend that it was he who had reduced Bill to such a human and perverse act. That he had this all-powerful being hanging off his every word.
Hands wind down his arms, slipping through his hair and knocking his glasses askew as they bring his face closer to Bill’s. The other breathes harshly enough for Ford to see how his nostrils flex, eyes almost going cross-eyed with how their noses are only an inch apart.
“Bill,” he whispers. “I’m yours.”
The effect is instantaneous, Bill’s lips curling into a ravenous grin as he pushed his pointer with that urgency he knew Ford liked. Ford struggles against his constraints again, trying to look away and hide his reactions anywhere that Bill’s many eyes couldn’t see. Rather, with even his legs restrained in mid-air, there’s nothing he can do to keep himself from crying out, dropping his jaw as he tensed in sensitivity.
For once, Bill says nothing as he wriggles his finger around in an act Ford would normally categorize as curious, but now defaults to cruel as he treats the delicate surface of his walls like a new contraption he’d discovered.
He slid the second finger and then the third in soon after, laughing in glee as Ford jolted and let out an unbecoming noise as he stabbed into his prostate. In some act of sadism, Ford is sure, Bill keeps up his ministrations until he’s so unbelievably red in the face he’s certain blood will gush out of his nose in any second, quivering with pleasure. He opens his mouth to complain about how out in the open they were, ashamed he’d overlooked it for this long. Instead, a moan slips out as Bill roughly withdraws his fingers.
He waits with bated breath as fingers spread his hole for that wide tapered tip, sliding it in inch by inch as he shut his eyes. He tenses at the strain, sure his back would ache even more than usual the following day.
Looking up at Bill, he freezes as he takes in how transfixed he is. He thinks about inquiring after his silence when he places a hand on his stomach, trailing down till he comes to stop near his navel. Mortifyingly, he only understands his intent the second he presses down, now aware of the slight bulge present. He can barely brace himself before Bill pulls back quickly only to slam right back in, leaving his hand in the same spot all the while.
His mind burned as he thought of what an image the two of them would make if any late-night townsperson were to stumble down the alley. Even worse, what if Fiddleford had called for help? He bits his tongue as he imagines a pitchfork-carrying crowd following an agonized Fiddleford’s claims of impending doom, of how his dear selfless friend needed to be saved from the devil that had once terrorized them, stumbling across the demon in question f*cking him so intensely that his glasses were close to slipping off his face, back sliding up and down a shaking brick wall.
The hand that was still gloved, pushes against the bridge of his glasses, pushing up his spectacles and shoving his face into the freed space, laying his open mouth over his. Ford feeds his attempt at a kiss, trying to steer him into something more coordinated as he continues to buck wildly into him.
“Bill,” he chokes out as he peels his mouth away for a needed gasp of air, knowing he was close to his limit.
The other maintains his silence, watching him intently as Ford tugs his legs, surprised when he’s allowed enough slack to wrap them around Bill’s hips. He doesn’t think as he drags him closer, feeling another inch of him sink in from the added squeeze.
“You like that?” he challenges, feeling smug with the whine Bill lets out, head falling to land onto his shoulder as he digs nails into his shoulders.
“You have no idea,” he responds, followed by a string of what sounded like expletives in a language he didn’t recognize. Pulling down the neckline of his top, he manages a singular bite before collapsing into him with a groan that combined noises too obscured and jumbled to classify. Ford is almost surprised he c*ms at all, having been unsure of what his new form would be capable of. The warmth that fills him is evident though and he cringes at the rush; it fills him with co*ck twitching and dripping more onto his stomach.
Sensing his writhing, Bill begins to pull back. Panicked, Ford squeezes his legs again.
“Stay,” he gets out quickly.
“Fordsy you—”
“And shut up. Just touch me with your mouth shut.”
Surprisingly, Bill complies with a laugh, wrapping his warm and wet palm around him. It only takes a few of his artful tugs before Ford seizes up, causing Bill to hum by his ear as he comes with a shout, sagging into the arms still holding him up as pleasure courses through him.
He grits his teeth when his arms are finally released, feeling blood rush back into them as he tucks them to his chest, whacking the being flopped against him for good measure.
“You are the worst,” he says once he feels confident his voice will not betray him.
“Which is exactly how you like it toots,” he boasts. “Oh I just cannot wait to meet the family.”
