The next time he woke up floating over the bed, it was three in the morning and he couldn't get down.
Bill had been panicking for the last minute, trying to will himself to the ground, but it just wasn't happening. Last time he'd just fallen down in the shock of floating in the first place. How was he supposed to get down now?
All the other people who gained this stupid power, and whose memories Bill had gotten because of it, could just float down or up with a thought, so why wasn't it working for him!?
Bill then noticed the bookshelves on Will's side of the room, Will asleep in the bed beside them. He quietly pushed off the wall to that side of the room, grabbed hold of a bookshelf, and began to pull himself downward from bookshelf to bookshelf until he could reach the floor with his feet.
As soon as he could stand normally again, he let out a small, shaky breath of relief. He carefully walked over to his own bed again, one feet at a time, making sure he kept touching the floor no matter how cold it was to his bare feet.
Bill shivered as he reached his destination and crawled under the covers.
He didn't sleep the rest of the night.
It was getting worse. What if dad walked in while he was floating?
Bill flinched at the thought. He morbidly wondered how one went about leaving a will. To Will. Ha. Not that anyone would care to read it.
Maybe dad would go through the effort of burning it.
Finally Bill couldn't stand just lying there anymore and wandered downstairs. Dad was lying passed out on the couch, stinking of alcohol as usual, a bottle lying in a puddle of beer on there floor.
Bill sighed and cleaned it up, before hesitating as he looked at his father. He definitely wouldn't like being woken up, but it was almost morning and he didn't look like he'd wake up himself before Will got downstairs.
Bill braced himself and shook his father, who snorted and turned over. Bill shook a little harder, to which the man opened his bleary, bloodshot eyes and glared at him with thunderous eyes.
Bill's breath caught in fear for a moment before he steeled himself and whispered softly, "Please, sleep in the bedroom dad.."
"What the hell, you little shit?!" His father snapped at him, raising himself upright threateningly and squinting at the dim light of dawn falling into the room. His narrowed eyes were filled with irritation.
Bill shrank back and his breath caught at the sight of the man towering over him, but there was only a little waver in his voice as he quickly spoke. "It's almost morning, dad, Will would see you. You promised, remember?" Bill asked pleadingly. His father glared at him incomprehendingly, his mind still fuzzy from the alcohol.
"To never let Will know about your drinking habits or discipline, as long as I do what you say," Bill reminded him desperately, glancing at the clock on the wall nervously. Will had always been an early riser.
"And you couldn't have taken me to my room yourself, you goddamn brat?" His father grunted, standing up, and Bill wasn't fast enough with hurrying back to avoid being kicked in the stomach. He hit the ground and gasped for air, reflexive tears having appeared in his eyes as he tried to regain the breath that was kicked out of him.
"Fucking weakling." His father muttered in disgust, not giving Bill another glance as he shuffled upstairs.
Bill slowly got back up, relaxing slightly in relief. There were days when his dad would be too out of it to register his words, and Bill was forced it explain a black eye to a sleepy Will, but it seemed that today was one of his father's better days.
Bill absently rubbed his stomach and winced as he felt a bruise forming. It was nothing new, but it never got less painful.
He set about making breakfast, some toast, bacon and fruit, setting aside a part for when his father woke up somewhere in the afternoon. He'd forgotten to do that once, and he'd never forgotten again.
Not half an hour afterward Will entered the kitchen, yawning and stretching. Bill, still standing by the stove making the bacon, greeted him smiling widely.
"Again, Bill?" Will raised an eyebrow at the scene. "I swear, you're making breakfast almost as many times as dad does!"
Their father never made breakfast, of course. But if Will came downstairs to Bill eating breakfast, Bill didn't correct him in thinking it was made by dad.
"Just looking out for my baby brother!" Bill said cheerfully, easily faking a wide grin.
Will pouted. "We're twins, Bill! So what if you're a few minutes older. If I'm a baby, you're a baby too!"
"Whatever you say, little bro."
Bill did see Will as a little brother. Will had a naturally soft voice, especially in public, and it was in the safety of his home where he would really talk freely. As the older twin, it was Bill's job to ensure that home stayed a safe place, to hide what was really going on in the house.
It would break Will to see their father as something other than perfect, and Bill couldn't stand to see his little brother unhappy.
"Is dad already out?" Will asked, after swallowing his mouthful of toast.
Bill nodded in confirmation, not bothering to swallow his bite of bacon before responding, "Yeah, said something about a friend in need."
Except it sounded more like, "Yeh, sa' summin 'bou a fwienh ih nee'," through the bacon.
Bill and Will walked the few blocks to school together, like they had ever since they started school, their backpacks hosted on their backs, and Bill could almost laugh at the normalcy of it all.
He remembered waking up to a trillion years of memories. He remembered floating. He could still feel his blood burning with pure energy. But walking together with Will, it felt like he could think straight for a minute, return back to reality, just because of how routine this was.
Bill chatted mindlessly with his twin as he thought about what he was going to do now.
Continue like normal, like everything was alright when it was clearly not? Or learn to control his flight, at least, so he wouldn't float all the time? The second option did sound like a good thing to do, but he'd need to accept that power flowing through his veins.
'Accepting it' didn't trigger anything, it wasn't part of the process or something, it was just a mental problem for Bill. Just the thought of using the power he never wanted didn't sit well with Bill, nevermind actually doing it.
Bill didn't realize he'd fallen still until Will nudged him with a small smile. "Earth to Major Bill, do you copy? You look pretty distracted."
Bill offered another fake grin back and lied through his teeth, "Just wondering if Andy's better yet."
Andy was the new kid in the class who Bill was determined to befriend. Will had simply laughed when Bill said that and mentioned something about how of course Bill would try that, being the butterfly he was.
"Yeah, he's been away for a few days now," Will commented idly as they walked through the gates of Elementary Falls, the rather dumb name of Gravity Falls' elementary school. Bill adjusted his backpack and prepared for another lame day.
School wasn't that bad, or, well, it hadn't been, when Bill didn't have the trillion years of experience and knowledge. There was simply nothing school could teach him that he didn't already know. It was boring as all heck.
So while Will was attentively making notes looking slightly bored, Bill was flicking pieces of paper at the wall through the whole oof the first lesson. The teacher called on his twice to answer a question, thinking that he wasn't paying attention- which he wasn't- and Bill simply rattled off textbook answers, no matter how wrong Bill knew they were.
The second lesson was slightly less boring than the first, as they got a pen and paper and were told to draw something symbolic representing their thoughts.
Bill's mind blanked, and he looked at Will across the room, who looked back just as full of amazing ideas as Bill was.
When the teacher came by to collect the papers, she stopped at Bill's still blank one.
"Why haven't you drawn anything, Bill?" She asked, curiously.
"Oh, the blank paper is representative of my inability to think of drawing ideas, Miss."
She laughed lightly and responded, "Keep it with you. If you think of anything to draw the rest of the day, please hand it in tomorrow, but it's fine if you don't."
Bill smiled back at her. Their teacher was generally pretty easy-going, and Bill appreciated that.
"It's almost break time."
Bill looked after the teacher, who had already turned back to collecting the rest of the papers, questioningly. She sounded a bit different from usual. Something was.. Off about her voice.
Bill was about to shrug it off when she looked at a students paper and said in that same, weird voice, "David's drawing skill is pretty amazing for a nine year old."
Only Bill got a look at her face this time, and her mouth wasn't moving as she spoke.
What.
Bill sat frozen in his seat for a moment, searching through his memories to find what the hell this was.
Mind reading.
Shit.
Bill slumped and let his face fall into his hands. It was getting worse. This whole thing was just going downhill at record speed.
The bell rang and Will immediately came over to Bill's desk, where the latter hadn't moved from his seat.
"What is it?" He asked, frowning. "You look pretty glum."
"Did the teacher berate his drawing?" Bill heard what he now recognized as Will's thoughts before he gritted his teeth and focused on blocking it out. He would not invade his twin's privacy like that.
"It's nothing, Will," Bill managed a fake grin.
"Alright." Will shrugged. "He'd tell me if it was something serious."
Bill slammed mental walls down like he remembered others doing, but wasn't fast enough to block out the guilt. Of course Will wold trust Bill to tell him things, after all as far as Will knew his twin had never lied to him.
Will didn't know a lot of things.
I think I'm writing child abuse pretty well for someone who has no experience with it nor has ever seen it nor has read much about it.
Yes, Bill is incredibly OOC. That's because THINGS CHANGE, STANFORD PINES. THINGS C H A N G E. He's just a kid right now, and not yet insane, and severely abused.
Don't worry, this innocent panic-y phase won't last too long. Soon he's gonna get his first summons... Hehehe.