A/N
"I'm not good with words," said the journalist who also happens to write fanfiction on her spare time. But I'm gonna try anyway.
When I began writing Flat Dreams almost a year ago, I was pretty much clueless. Not only I wouldn't have expected in a million years it would become so well-loved, but I charged my way into it as I go with most of my long fics: full of ideas and with very little in mind when it came to, you know, the actual plot. In a way, I figured out precisely where the story went along with the readers, as I wrote.
Or, at least, I figured out some of the story. There was plenty I didn't know about Bill before I thought up a backstory and there is plenty I don't know even now. What really happened to Bill after the finale? We have no idea. What happens to him after this fic is over? Beats me.
If you're hoping for an actual ending, with answers to everything that has been brought up throughout the story, I am afraid I'll have to disappoint you guys. Gravity Falls left a lot about Bill up in the air and so will I, because there is nothing else that feels quite right for him. Fun as it was to think up and explain Bill's beginnings, I could never quite imagine him having an ending and I can't write what I can't imagine. The way I see it, I'm not ending a story. I'm just done telling the part I felt I could.
Last but not least, I'd like to thank all of you guys. The people I annoyed to death sharing idea after idea at the most random of times (you know who you are); the people who used their talent for amazing art, fics, fanmixes and more based this; everyone who left a comment, or a kudo, or a like, or just have been reading this. Some of you may not have even realized they gave me ideas and inspiration that ended up shaping much of Flat Dreams and everything that followed.
So, thank you, to all of you.
Now scram, nothing to see here and I've got something in my eye.
"Sometimes I like to pretend things could have gone differently. That none of this would have happened had Liam Cipher never been taken."
"But it would have. Your dimension was doomed regardless the moment Bill Cipher came into existence. No matter the circumstances, no matter the reality or timeline. One way or another, he'd have come to hate it. And what he hates, he destroys."
"Countless realities, and not one where Bill Cipher never came into existence."
"Not a single one. He was always meant to be. In a way, he existed before he took form in the Second Dimension. Chaos is timeless."
Where they are now, time stands still.
It is not so in the rest of the Multiverse, with the only exception of the Nightmare Realm. Much like Cipher, time cannot be destroyed. Neither can Time Baby, whose molecules will come back together a thousand years after being disassembled; he will be in a sour mood when that happens, the Ancient assumes, and will certainly make his displeasure known. Time Baby was always prone to tantrums, and it is one common ground he and Cipher have, come to think of it: neither of them has ever done an awful lot of growing up.
A very powerful child, still thinking he could win at chess by eating the chess pieces.
Resting down in the non-existing floor of a ravaged Mindscape, the Axolotl glances down at the tiny gray form nestled in the crook of his elbow - his yellow glow gone, leaving behind just the boy that has been. The All Seeing Eye remains closed to all that Bill Cipher doesn't wish to see, the mind that could contain the secrets of the Multiverse now confined to the four walls of a tiny bedroom, in a dimension long gone, where he can dream up what could never be.
LIE UNTIL WHAT YOU WANT TO BE TRUE BECOMES TRUE. LIE UNTIL YOU CAN'T REMEMBER WHAT'S A LIE AND WHAT ISN'T. LIE UNTIL YOU AREN'T LYING ANYMORE.
Says he's happy. He's a liar.
The All Seeing Eye may be closed, but the Ancient's own are wide open. He knows truth from lie, no matter how vehemently Cipher tried to claim otherwise, only… well. If time meant anything there, he could say it wasn't too long ago.
"I liked it there! I liked home! They ruined everything - nothing would have happened if they hadn't taken Liam away!"
The Ancient stares down at Cipher for a few moments, then closes his eyes and lets another eye, hidden from sight, open to show him whether there's any truth in it, whether different realities would have had different outcomes. He has looked before; he knows the answer. But, with Cipher being hardly of any company at all, there's no harm in another glimpse.
And the first other reality he sees is one where a mother chose to maim her son rather than parting from him.
They won't have him.
It is the only thought in Mephis' mind when she lifts one of her husband's working tools and brings it down on the child. In those few moments, she seems unable to think of anything but just that - that they will not have her son.
His scream when she hits him is terrible, even more so than the crunching noise when the tender lower side gives in and shortens. It is what she wanted, and relief overrides any other thought for a moment, before the enormity of what she has just done sinks in, before she hears - truly hears - her son's agonizing screams.
"Oh, no. Oh, Circles, what have I done?" Mephis chokes out, the grip slackening on the handle of the wrench. It clatters loudly on the floor, but she doesn't hear it: her child's cries drown out all other noise. She spends the rest of the day weeping and trying to quiet him down, but nothing seems to calm him, and his screams eventually die down due to nothing but exhaustion.
He cries again when she dares put him down, with great braying whoops, eye swimming with tears and arms reaching up for her, so that she'll pick him up, relieve the pain of his weight pressing down on the damaged side. She hurt him horribly, mutilated him, took away everything he could have been, and he reaches up for her for comfort.
Somehow, that tears at her heart in a way even his screams could not.
Lou probably guessed, he must have, but never questions it. He never brings it up, and neither does she. Their son is Isosceles, and he will remain with them. He'll be loved and cherished like no other, because he is the only child they will ever have: should she have another, and should it be Equilateral as well, she knows she would never find the courage to go through it all again. Or, at least, that is what she tells herself: the truth is that she doesn't want her child to have to share her attention with anyone else.
To keep him, she has taken a better future for him; there is nothing she can do to make up for it, if that is even possible, is to give him all the love she has to give.
And yet all of her love will not be enough. In this reality, Bill Cipher grows an Isosceles. He never has a brother nor he ever loses one, but his lot in life makes him bitter. He longs for more. He teaches himself how to read. And, as a manual labourer, he has sometimes access to wealthy people's houses. To their libraries. In the end, the information that matters makes its way to him.
In the end, he reaches the Third Dimension. He gains power.
And the Second Dimension burns to ashes.
There is a reality where Bill Cipher was the Irregular one.
It does not differ much from the first: not quite irregular enough to be terminated, he's allowed to live with all the limitations of his kind - closely watched by police, given a state job for a miserable stipend. His birth family, for no one would adopt an Irregular, does love him dearly, but it's not enough. It can never be enough for someone who hungers the way he does.
He never accepts his lot in life. He grows angry. He grows bitter. Eventually he goes into hiding, aided by well-meaning dissidents. It takes him longer than it does in other realities, but eventually he does find his way to the Third Dimension and cheat his way to power.
His dimension is reduced, yet again, to cold dead embers.
The same thing that will happen in any reality - any at all - in which Liam Cipher lives to see his brother's true colors.
There is one reality where the Board was merciful, where two votes make the difference and the boy is allowed to live on. Bill Cipher returns home with a wrapped-up book - a surprise - to be surprised in turn. It takes him several minutes to finally get someone to speak to him: they're all weeping, his mother and father clinging to Liam in a way he's never seen either of them doing, and his brother seems too shocked for words.
"See? I told you!" is all Bill Cipher eventually says once filled in, not at all surprised. He's always known his brother would pass the Inspection because really, what idiot wouldn't want someone so clever to stay among them? How could their parents not know that was the only possible outcome? He laughs at Liam's relief, hands him the book, and thinks nothing of it.
Liam reads the book, but he then hides it away and shares nothing with his brother. He may live, which is staggering, but this means constant surveillance on him as an adult, as well as a low-paying and tedious work. He cannot take risks, he thinks - the fact alone he can live is a gift, and he can't put his family in danger by being greedy, by wanting more. He accepts his lot in life, and lets his childhood dreams remain childhood dreams.
But Bill does not. When he finds the book, he demands answers and there is nothing Liam can do to sway him; the sinking realization of how miserable his brother's life is set to be makes him all the more bitter.
"This isn't fair! What's the point in living if this is all that there is to it?"
Liam lies, he tries to tell him that it is all right, that he's happy with what he has.
"You're a terrible liar," Bill snaps at him, and keeps reading on. He keeps learning, he grows more restless and, in the end, he succeeds. As in all other realities, he breaches into the dimension he longs for, to grasp power he never before dreamed of.
As in all other realities, he takes his anger on his own dimension. Each time, Liam attempts to stop him. Each time, the events unfold the same way in a cruel echo.
"I'd have preferred to die without seeing any of this! I'd have preferred to go without knowing what kind of monster you'd become!"
"Look, now you're startin to get on my-"
"I would have never left any of my books behind if I had known this would happen! This should not have happened!"
"Shut up."
"YOU SHOULD NOT HAVE HAPPENED!"
"I SAID SHUT UP!"
There is no pain, in those realities; only one last moment of terror, a terrible heat, and then nothing. Liam never gets to hear the scream that always, always follows.
"No! No no no no NO! Come back! I didn't mean to! I DIDN'T MEAN TO!"
He does not come back. Bill Cipher wills himself to forget about him.
And keeps on burning, until the day his flames turn against him. That, too, is something that happens in all realities. Like his birth, like his rise to power, it is a fixed moment in time and space that simply must happen.
But it is not the end. Bill Cipher cannot have an end.
When the Ancient closes his other eye, and opens the ones on the outside, nothing seems to have changed. Fog is all around them, nothing visible except for the small door behind him. It is ironic, he supposes: the things Bill Cipher wished to erase are now his consciousness' refuge, the only place where he wishes to be in this stasis of is.
Just a little more summer.
Mabel Pines needed all of the help she could get before she could burst her bubble. Cipher will also need far, far more time, but it is for the best. Should he leave his stasis too early, the Multiverse may suffer the consequences for eons to come. He cannot be forced out of this.
The Ancient could have done so, once, when Cipher asked one question.
"Where did he go? Where do they all go?"
Where is Liam?
A straight answer would have been enough, but he couldn't do it: it simply wasn't wise, to let that bubble shatter before it was the right time for Bill to awaken. He had given him a choice, of course, fully knowing what he'd choose.
"I suppose you could say he's in here. Isn't that the reason why you don't wish to leave your memories?"
"But out of here…?"
"Perhaps. Perhaps not. But I cannot tell: if you wish to know, you must leave this illusion."
"... And if he's nowhere?"
"Then he's nowhere, and you need to accept it."
"No. I don't. I won't let him be gone."
… Oh, Billy. This was always beyond your control.
There is a movement against his paw, and the Axolotl glances down to see Cipher shifting in his slumber. "Liam?" he mumbles, his eye still tightly shut, and the Ancient leans his head down on him like a shield. A tiny black hand closes around one of his frills.
"Sleep," he says. "I am here."
There is a ripple.
It is weak and lost to most, but not to the Oracle, never to her: she knows what it means and she's been in wait for too long to miss it.
Across reality, someplace that is in all dimensions and yet in none of them, Bill Cipher has stirred. He did not awaken; that will not happen for millennia to come. But stir he did, and the cracks in his bubble have grown another fraction.
The day will come when it shatters, in a future shrouded in mist that she could never look upon, never predict - until this moment. Now Bill Cipher stirs, the fog is lifted, and that future is there for her to look upon.
Jheselbraum the Unswerving opens her eyes to the infinite, and gazes into the abyss.