It was one of the better nights at the sea. The ocean was calm, the sky was clear, Ford could see the stars stretching out in the sky while enjoying the rhythmic slap of the waves on the boat and the rocking motion it created. It was a good night.
At least it was, until a scream tore through the veil of peace that was draped upon the Stan o' War II.
Ford sprung and dashed at once, forgetting the wheel he was manning and broke into Stan's room. "Stan!" he shouted, locating his brother on the wooden floor, tangled in his own blanket and gasping for air, eyes wide and clouded from the nightmare that had haunted him.
"Wha – I – this is – " Stan seemed to be at a loss of words, and Ford understood what was going on at once. This had happened before, many times, and without doubt it would happen again.
Ford crouched in front of Stan and grasped his hand. Physical contact always helped his brother, and he wouldn't deny him the help he desperately needed. "Stan," he called, gentler than before, but it seemed to be enough to catch Stan's attention. "Are you alright?'
"I – " Stan was still panting. He stared at Ford, confused, wary, maybe a little bit scared. "I'm sorry. I don't think I know you."
Ah, so it was one of those. Ford ignored the painful pang in his heart and smiled at Stan, tightening his hold on his hand. He could handle this. He had, before, and he would do it again. "I'm Stanford Pines. You're Stanley Pines. We're twin brothers. Do you remember that?"
Stan frowned. From the look in his eyes, Ford could see that he knew it was true, but was still trying to place the information.
He decided to go on. "We went our ways around high school, but we decided to go on a sailing trip a while ago. Do you remember Dipper and Mabel?" Ford paused, pleased at the spark of recognition in Stan's eyes. The kids had always been a good thing to mention to jog his memories. "Lovely kids, aren't they? Our grand nephew and niece."
"Yes, the kids," Stan responded, tone wistful. He blinked a few times and stared at Ford, and recognition finally dawned. He groaned. "Ford… oh God, I'm so sorry…"
"It's okay," Ford patted Stan's shoulder, assuring him. "You had all your memories wiped away, even your sense of self. Of course it would have complications."
"Yeah, but even your explanation doesn't make me feel less crappy," Stan sighed.
"So…" Ford spoke after a moment of silence. "Was it another nightmare?"
Stan frowned. "I think so, yeah."
"Do you want to talk about it?"
Stan shook his head. "I can't remember."
Ford frowned. This again. "Not even a little bit?"
"I think…" Stan's face had the expression of a man who was trying desperately to hold sand in his hands, but it kept slipping through his fingers. The harder he tried, the more they slipped, until finally there was nothing to hold anymore. He shook his head as he gave a sigh of frustration. "No. Nothing at all."
"Okay," Ford said, voice small. Stan pried the blanket off of himself and threw it carelessly on the bed, and the two brothers sat in silence, taking comfort in one another's presence.
Ford's mind wandered. He wasn't surprised that Stan had another amnesiac episode – it was sadly common to see on the Stan o' War II. It was true, however, that he couldn't expect to wipe everything in Stan's mind and have no consequences whatsoever.
The first time he realized this was back at Gravity Falls, when Stan first announced that he had remembered everything but recounted what he knew in a jumbled order. Both Dipper and Mabel quickly corrected the timeline of their short shared time, and he helped with their childhood and adolescent years, but they sadly couldn't do anything about the rest.
"I know I got everything," Stan insisted. "But it's just like when you watch a TV drama without any episode guides. You've watched everything randomly and you know all the facts, but you need to figure out which is episode one and which is the finale on your own."
Other things they learned over time. Hearing Bill Cipher's name gave him a headache, and when they took a walk in the woods and saw the demon's statue sitting there among the trees, he got a headache so bad he passed out. Seeing flames, specifically blue flames, triggered a panic attack that usually ended with him being unresponsive for a quarter of an hour, at the very least.
And then the nightmares. Ones bad enough to wake him up screaming, but he could never remember any detail. Ford remembered seeing him trying to remember, describing a room that sounded awfully alike to the Mystery Shack before he stopped and told him that everything was gone. There was nothing he could recall.
"Do you think you can go back to sleep?" Ford asked after a while.
"I should be able to," Stan shrugged.
"Alright then. Goodnight, Stan," Ford said, standing up, intent to go back to the wheel because he was pretty sure that had gone off-course, and for who knew how long.
"Goodnight, Ford," Stan smiled, pushing himself to the bed. "Thanks."
"Anytime."
As Ford manned the wheel once more, he thought about the nightmares Stan were having. It was common to forget your dreams, he knew, but was it common to forget nightmares that haunted you enough to kick you awake? He didn't know, and couldn't know. His position in the sea didn't exactly give him the source he needed to run a research on it, and he wasn't a dream expert, even with all his experience being possessed by a dream demon.
Dream demon. Bill Cipher. Could it be…?
But no, couldn't be. Ford shook his head, angry at himself for even thinking about the possibility, though he wasn't completely sure if he was certain that the demon was really dead or that he was just scared to admit the possibility of him still existing was present.
Bill Cipher is no more, he told himself. They got him into Stan's mind, the place where he was arguably the most powerful and yet most vulnerable at the same time. And they wiped Stan out of existence, ensuring that there was no crook or cranny Bill could've jammed himself in Stan's mind to avoid erasure. Sure, Stan came back, but there was no way Bill could be coming back with him.
Isn't that right?
Sometimes Ford hated the fact that he could know so much and yet knew so little at the same time.
He was standing in the middle of a field. Faraway, he could see a shipwreck that somehow ended up on land, a pair of swings, and his broken portal.
His broken portal. He wondered briefly how it got there.
The place was dreary, to say the least. Grey skies stretched as far as the eyes could see, and the large sun didn't seem to give any light that could cheer the place up.
Strong wind blew all of a sudden, stirring the stagnant air up and gave him a feeling that wrong, wrong, this is wrong, something bad is about to happen.
And then, booming laugh like no other. The laugh that he had come to know better than his own, that he had learned to first like and then to despise. It called out the anger within him, the fear, the memory of being frozen into a statue of gold holding the expression of eternal surprise before being melted back into a living, breathing human.
He looked around, up and down, and spotted the anomaly. The demon hovered above his head, far away, a small black triangle with a big, glaring eye that seemed like it could pop out of its socket at any time. The triangle grew in size as it came near, and Ford waited for it. He was done running away. The demon couldn't do anything anyway; he was long gone. This was a dream, and that was it. A dream.
The black switched into yellow and the triangle turned into the form Ford was most familiar with. The dream demon summoned a cane out of nowhere, leaned on it, and waved. "Hello, Stanford Pines," he greeted. He sounded just like usual. "How've you been?"
Ford stared at the tall hat-donning triangle, unimpressed. "That was a tame entrance for you," he commented and sighed. "Stan's conditions must have affected me. To dream about you of all things… this in itself could be counted as a horrifying nightmare."
"About me?" Bill looked surprisingly confused before he blinked in realization. "OH!" he exclaimed, before he laughed aloud. The sound enveloped Ford's whole being and shook him up and down. "You think you're just dreaming and this is just an average dream!" The amusement in Bill's voice was so palpable, one could almost touch it.
"Isn't this?" Ford raised a brow. "You're dead, after all."
"And that's where you're wrong!" Bill twirled the cane in his hand. "I'm immortal, dummy. I was born way before your solar system was created! Do you really think you can get rid of me that easily?"
There was a growing pit in Ford's stomach. "You were wiped from the existence," he pointed out, but he knew it was going to be shot down soon.
"That memory gun of yours?" Bill would be grinning if he had a mouth. "I'll admit, I was scared I'd be dead for sure! But Stanley Pines returned, didn't he?" The single eye narrowed with glee. "And along with him, so did I."
Ford stumbled. The dread intensified tenfold, and he felt physically sick. Was there no way to kill this demon and make him stay dead? "I – I don't believe you," he muttered childishly, not wanting to admit the fact that Bill Cipher was back, and very much alive.
Bill laughed again, the oh, you clear in the voice. "You better believe it, Mr. Six Fingers! And I gotta thank you and Pine Tree and Shooting Star for it. Without your efforts to make Fez remember, there's no way I'd be here now!"
Ford ground his teeth. The nausea at the base of his stomach stopped him from saying anything, and the dread that accompanied it wasn't helping, either. Or was it the other way around?
"Now I just need to find a way to gather enough energy to break free and get back to my body," Bill tapped his fingers together. "Sapping my host's energy will only get me so far, after all."
"Sapping Stan's – " Ford's eyes widened in realization. "His nightmares. You induced them?"
"Hey, dream demon," Bill pointed at himself, stating the obvious. "And that's the best way to gain power. I mean, sure, it's really dangerous because Fez's mind protects itself by trying to erase Stanley Pines' very existence to kill me for good, but you!" Bill pointed at him giddily. "You keep reminding him, and you don't even know you're keeping me alive!"
All this time, reminding Stan. Was it all for nothing?
"But Fez can only give me so much, so I need another source," Bill shrugged. "Right now I'm strong enough to get to you, so you'll be my new power plant! And soon I'll be strong enough to get to others. And I have the right ones in mind." His eye flickered and switched like a TV, and suddenly all Ford could see in it was Dipper and Mabel, and the dread that he felt turned instantly into rage.
"You stay away from the children!" he roared.
"No way!" Bill laughed again. "Children their age are so easy. And getting to them will be easy, too! I've been in Pine Tree's head so I've already had an easy access to him. Shooting Star might be trickier because I don't have direct access, but I did put her into that pink bubble of hers, so I know her dreams and nightmares. They are, after all, my forte."
"Don't you dare touch them," Ford's voice rumbled with anger, rolling like a thunder in the distance. "They have nothing to do with this."
"Nothing to do!" Bill cried in disbelief. "They're involved the second they step into Gravity Falls, Six. It's their fate." He leaned to Ford. "They, you and Fez, me… we're intertwined together, all of us." He straightened up. "In any case, I need power and you Pines will be the ones to provide it for me. And when I'm finally strong enough to break free…" he left the sentence unfinished on purpose and glanced at Ford, eye narrowing in twisted glee as the yellow of his body blinked and switched into the events of the near-apocalypse that had befallen Gravity Falls – red waterfall flowing to the sky, wooden statues walking left and right, a giant pyramid floating in the midst of dark clouds, people being turned into statues, six of the ten zodiacs turned into mere tapestries that hung on Bill's wall like a sick reminder of their failure to stop him.
Ford's hands shook with barely suppressed anger. "You will not touch any of them." The amount of wrath that managed to slip into his voice surprised himself, but he basked in it. Anger gave him more protection against Bill.
Unfortunately, Bill only found humor in his words. "Aw, Sixer, that's so cute of you!" he teased, like an adult teasing a young child, and Ford realized with disdain that perhaps, for the demon, he really was a child considering their age gap. "But what can you do against me? I've wreaked havoc in your beloved universe once. There's no guarantee I can't do it again."
Out of nowhere, tapestries fell from the sky and landed on the ground around Ford. The familiar faces of the zodiacs stared back at him, all their expressions the same kind of sick, frozen terror, six faces that he had seen hanging on Bill's wall, back to haunt him even in his dreams.
Then fell two other that made his stomach twist with anger and fear and anxiety. Dipper and Mabel, both eternalized in a pair of woven tapestry. Their mouths were open in a silent scream, and the look of horror in their faces seemed to be stronger than the other six. Lines of red were woven into the cloth, and Ford clenched his teeth and forced himself to calm down when they reminded him of blood.
And then another.
The last one was small, smaller than the rest of the tapestries, and it hung mid-air right in front of him instead of falling and draping down to the ground. It depicted a man Ford had grown up together with, in real-life size, etched into the threads that created the tapestry that would no doubt win an award had it been real and created by non-magical means. Stanley Pines in the tapestry held the look of a solemn man, eyes closed as though asleep and the fez he was wearing sitting snugly on his head. His arms were crossed in front of his chest, and he wore the suit he used to wear back in Mystery Shack. There was no sign of distress in his person.
He looked calm, as though in a deep, peaceful slumber. But somehow that only sent a jolt of panic down Ford's chest.
"They will all be involved once again, Sixer. There is no doubt about that." Bill's voice boomed around him, within him, and yet the demon was everywhere and nowhere at the same time. "My host will provide me the power I need to break through, and so will you and your nephew and niece, and eventually I'll plague the minds of every single person that once stood in my zodiac wheel. They were destined to bring me to my downfall, but they too are capable of bringing me my glory. And soon the world will be mine to rampage on."
Blue fire appeared on Stan's tapestry, burning his face out bit by bit as it spread out to eat the rest of the cloth. Ford cried out in distress, feeling like he was seeing the real Stan burning away, even though he knew it wasn't true. He watched the blue flames panning out in horror, leaving a dark hole where Stan should have been.
From the darkness, a yellow triangle emerged, growing bigger and bigger as it came closer to Ford's eyes before it replaced the tapestry that was now no more than a pile of ashes and chunks of unburnt cloth that managed to escape the fire's wrath.
"Fez here," Bill announced, "would be the first to perish."
Hot air rippled around Ford as the rest of the tapestries burst into flames. He stared at the faces of his nephew and niece, horror eating away at him as the red and blue flames danced, licking and eating away the cloth. And then something inside him snapped, almost audibly. The horror and fear vanished into smoke, and the rage that had stepped back earlier took the central stage and consumed him in a different kind of flame. He turned to Bill, knowing that his face was contorted into an ugly scowl by the anger he was feeling. "We stopped you, once," he hissed. His voice reminded him of the rumble of the earth, the groaning hum before a quake, the faint roar of a faraway thunder. "We will do it again."
"You can try, buddy, you can try," Bill nodded up and down, not looking concerned at all. If anything, he looked like he was enjoying a good show. "But what can you do? This is just a dream."
The rage stepped back again, replaced by confusion. "What?" There was a feeling of dread again in his stomach.
"You said it yourself, didn't you?" Bill asked, twirling his cane once more, too casual for Ford's comfort. "It's a dream. And what do people do with dreams?"
The confusion and rage was thrown out of the window at once, and dread and fear gripped every cell of Ford's being when his mindscape and everything within it – field, swings, ship, broken portal, still-burning tapestries – suddenly turned into a land of black, and he floated in it for a moment before the gravity that he hoped was nonexistent started to pull at him.
"No…"
As he lurched down the black hole with a loud, loud scream, Bill's voice echoed around him, shaking him with its laughter and glee; "They forget about them!"
Ford jolted awake, gasping for breath and feeling coldness at his fingertips. He blinked as he forced his breathing to slow, to calm down as he gulped down air and let warmth spread to his limbs again. It took a while, but he could finally feel his fingers again.
He looked around in silence. He was sitting by the table at the dining room, having ensured that the ship would sail in a straight line after Stan's nightmare episode and deciding to take a rest while sipping a cup of hot tea. Said tea was long gone, as he had finished the cup not long after the tea cooled off enough to drink. He supposed fatigue had taken over and he fell asleep there.
He frowned. Sleep. He had a dream, didn't he? A bad dream. A nightmare. There was remnants that taunted him at the edges of his consciousness, and he desperately chased for it. He had a feeling that however terrible the nightmare could be, it was immensely important, and he had to remember.
A dreary field, blue flames, tapestries, laughter that sounded so awfully familiar… His frowned deepened. He wasn't sure if there was really a field. Or flames, or tapestries. The details blurred even more, the remnants of the dream escaping from his hold like water slipping through small cracks. The only thing that he could confirm to be true was the laughter, but even then he couldn't remember what it sounded like. It could be Stan's. It could be his own, for all he knew.
He shook his head. It was a dream. How relevant could it be?
He glanced at the clock. Soon, it would be dawn, and then he could take his turn to really get some rest for real. It would be Stan's turn to man the ship and he could doze off for a few hours, at least. He leaned back in his seat, awaiting the alarm that he and Stan had set up together.
But instead of the familiar ring, what he heard was another of Stan's horrified scream ripping through the atmosphere. He jumped at once, knowing that he might have to deal with another amnesiac episode at hand.
There was a bad feeling settling in his stomach as he shook his brother awake, as he calmed him down. His internal alarm screamed for him to stop when he began reminding Stan of who he was and what they had gone through. Something deep in his mind was yelling that something bad could happen, would happen, was happening, and reminding Stan was bad, bad, bad.
He did it anyway. There was nothing in this world that could separate him and Stan anymore. He wouldn't let himself do it, nor Stan. No one else would dare to do it, he wouldn't let them. Not even if Bill himself somehow managed to continue his eternal existence and tried to pry them apart.
"Don't worry, Stan, you're here now. You're back," Ford patted Stan's shoulder in an attempt to ease his mind.
For a split second, too quick for him to confirm if it had been real, it looked as though Stan's irises elongated, and a yellow triangle flashed in Ford's mind. Too soon, Stan blinked and Ford saw that his eyes were normal. He ignored the weird nauseating feeling in his stomach.
"You're back, Stan, and Bill is dead for good."
He didn't know why, but he felt like he was telling a lie.
A/N: First time writing for the GF fandom. I think I did pretty well?
I've always liked the possibility that Bill might not be gone, not yet. He's pretty much immortal after all, and if Stan's memories can return, why can't he? And I get that some people might dislike the kind of story where it goes 'everything was just a dream' or the character forgets all about it, but this was done intentionally. Bill is smart. He wouldn't blab all his plans without ensuring his existence wouldn't be threatened again.
Anyway, did I do good on this? Was it okay, or just meh, or bad? Please tell me about it! Leave me a review, tell me what you think. Hope you have a great day!