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Well this is quite the predicament… Ford thinks to himself, glancing at the massive boulder pinning his lower leg to the ground of the weird green canyon.
He’d been hiking through it trying to find a rumored outpost dedicated to science, in hopes of finding someone with a way to cross dimensions or at least a part for his weapon against Cipher, when a large rockfall caught him off guard and pinned him by his right leg with the biggest of the rocks.
Now, not only is the way back completely blocked off, but now he’s hopelessly stuck.
And his leg is probably shattered.
‘Probably’ because it is in excruciating agony right now, every nerve screaming at once. And also because from what he sees from out here, it’s likely bent all the wrong ways.
“Help!” Ford cries, knowing it’s probably in vain. So he doesn’t bother any more than his only attempt, sitting up and trying to pull his leg out from its rocky prison without another word.
It is hell.
Ford tries to move the rock, but he has no leverage and no way to be certain it won’t just topple on top of the rest of him if he ever does move it. He tries to dig a hole in the ground next to his leg but the ground is as hard as the rock crushing his leg and he doesn’t have any tools that can be used to break through.
There’s no hope of escape now.
Not unless someone finds him, but the last civilization he’s seen in this dimension is miles away and they’d warned him that they don’t go after missing persons in their wilderness. It’s none of their business, so they said. Very apathetic and useless for his predicament. The outpost he’s looking for is only rumored too, so it’s probably not even guaranteed that there is anyone who could help out here.
Ford is alone and his time is running out.
He lays back down on the ground, sparing only a little relief from the pain, and wishes to just give up. It’s the end, after all. There’s nothing he can do.
“I guess this is it, then,” Ford mumbles to himself, his voice curling into a little sob, looking up at the stars and wishing they weren’t so strange as he feels the end of the road looming in front of him, “There’s nowhere to go for me. Not unless I…”
Ford trails off as the realization strikes.
No, I can’t… He denies, though he finds himself searching for his bag of essentials anyway, groaning as he realizes it’s far out of his reach against the opposite side of the canyon’s wall. But I have to, if I want any chance of reaching my goal.
Bill isn’t going to kill himself — and if he is, he better do it quick so help him — and Ford can’t allow that demon to live any longer. Not when he’s threatening his home’s destruction with everyone he ever cared about on it. Not when it’s his mistakes that allowed that demon access to his home.
If he has to chop off a good chunk of his leg to do that, so be it.
But to do that, he needs some way to cut and some way to stop the bleeding.
And his knife is in his bag, last he remembers.
Ford checks his coat’s pockets anyways, just in case he put it there without remembering. But of course it’s in none of them.
Can’t believe I didn’t think of having my knife on my person, what an idiot I am… Ford thinks as he glances around for anything sharp near him. He’d use his teeth if worse comes to worst but he’d rather not even consider that idea right now as he focuses on the tools he does have on him.
A couple plasma guns, a flashlight, a pen, a lighter… that one photo he always keeps next to his heart…
The only thing physically useful in any sense are the plasma guns, seeing as he could use them to cauterize the stump once it’s amputated, but they aren’t useful for cutting otherwise. Ford chuckles and wishes one of the plasma weapons he’d had was a lightsaber, from those couple Star Wars movies he’d seen before falling into the portal.
Ford sighs and spends a moment looking at the photo of him and Stan on their little boat, eyes pricking up as he realizes how far away he must be from him. Everything’s messed up between them now, but lying here with his leg hopelessly stuck under a crushing boulder is making him feel awfully nostalgic.
But there’s no time to feel that way, he has to find a way to cut off his leg or he’ll die out here. A grim prospect, but one he has to face.
Ford looks around his environment next, searching for anything remotely cutting that he can reach.
It is surprisingly quick before he spots the perfect thing.
A shard of rock from the rockfall, its edges already looking pretty sharp without any input. Ford reaches for it, finding it just barely within his semicircle of reach. He gasps in pain as he finds his leg’s pain threshold much earlier than said reach goes, but pushes through.
Holding it, Ford tests the sharpness with a finger.
It’s very sharp. To the point of feeling like he’d only need a little push to break skin.
As for how to keep himself from bleeding out, he has the idea of a makeshift tourniquet in his mind. All he needs for that is a strip of fabric and a stick of some kind, his eyes lighting up when he remembers the pen. It’s straight and stiff, perfect for twisting the fabric around his leg with.
Only problem he sees is that his pants will make any cut into his flesh much more difficult than it needs to be. But after a few moments of debate with himself, he decides to cut the fabric from his pants off from a few inches above the crushed part of his leg with the improvised blade he’d scored.
As Ford gets things all set up, his mind races with possibilities. Of what he should do if the tourniquet doesn’t stop the bleeding as well as he hopes it will, if the plasma gun will even do a good job at cauterizing the stump like he hopes, and worst of all, how he’s ever going to get around once the better portion of his leg is gone.
All things I’ll worry about when I get to them, Ford thinks as he ties his pant fabric and pen tourniquet on his thigh, No going back now.
The pain is still here, as expected, but his determination to cut his leg off seems to exacerbate it, as if the expectation is making it worse somehow. Ford shakes his head and tries to ignore it as he starts to tighten the tourniquet.
He grits his teeth with every twist, the pain strengthening until it feels like an impossible beast to defeat. Feeling the fabric, he can’t even put a finger under it. He grumbles as he ties it off, wishing it could already be done and over with as he grabs the rocky blade for the first cut.
Ford can barely hold in a scream when he slips the blade through flesh for the first time. Whatever pain he was in before is nothing compared to this, tears pricking his vision as the makeshift knife grows bloodier with every sawing slice. The rock’s rough surface helps more than Ford thought it would, acting like serration to really rip his flesh apart.
He can no longer hold in a scream when he passes through the skin and into the fascia. Into the layer of fat and muscle surrounding his thigh. The blade is no longer green at this point, the crimson its new color. Ford can practically feel its uncleanliness with a shiver that he can’t really pay attention to through the renewed agony.
“Fuck!” Ford cries as he looks down at the wound he’d given himself in his efforts to cut his leg off. It is gnarly but not nearly deep enough. He can barely see where he’s cutting through his tears of pain, but he doesn’t need to see to know he’s cutting the right place. Kinda hard to miss the canyon he’d dug into his flesh.
It is long and arduous and horrible, especially considering he’s cutting through his thigh. If only it was a foot trapped under here, or even just a little bit of his calf, then he’d be at the bone already for sure. But he isn’t, still sawing through muscle and crying through the torture.
The tourniquet is only helping a little, inspiring Ford to tighten it further until the next cut doesn’t bleed as much. What’s a little more pain, huh? It sure beats the fuzzy feeling in his mind that tells him he’s feeling the blood loss.
Ford doesn’t know when or how through the agony, but he makes it to the bone with a gasp. And the only reason he knows that is that he can no longer saw with his rough blade of a rock.
It can’t be described how awful cutting through his leg has been so far. Especially with the rock, which Ford notes is starting to break apart on the edges. It’s not meant for heavy duty cutting like this, something Ford knew while he was planning it out in those precious few moments before he’d started the amputation process. But he thought he’d be past the bone before he’d need to find something else to use as a blade at least.
Ford groans, unable to move in ways outside of the way he’d been moving just to cut deeper and deeper. The pain is searing, every part of his leg now exposed to the air of this dimension. There’s no telling what kind of infections he’s inflicting on himself by doing this, but at least he’ll have a chance at finding help once he’s out from under this stupid boulder.
He just needs to find a way past the bone and he’ll be nearly home free.
First, he examines what he can see from out here, which isn’t a whole lot but it is enough to realize that there’s a hairline fracture emanating from the crushed part and reaching the femur. That’s a big help, considering that the femur is the strongest bone in the body.
He just… needs to break the bone further.
Ford feels a bit nervous about this, but he has a bigger rock, like slightly bigger, right next to him. It seems good for breaking things, including the pesky bone in the way, he just needs to psyche himself up for the impact. Something he’s not quite looking forward to even as he hefts the thing, wishing he could just lie down again without risking being unable to sit up again.
But there’s no time to freak out about this, he’s already sending it straight down with all his force into the wound with no regard for how painful it’s going to be.
Somehow he wishes he had regarded it a little when he hears the loud crack and feels the worst pain in his life the moment it hits. He wants to writhe and scream and maybe puke. He does at least one of those things, gasping and screaming so loud it’ll surely send someone down here to rescue him.
“I can’t do it… I can’t do this…” Ford mutters to himself when he sees the break isn’t deep enough just yet, even with the hairline fracture’s assistance, “But I can’t just… give up. I have to do it.”
Ford hates how easily he becomes stuck in determination when he has a goal as his hands dig into the wound and squeeze the bone through the blood and muscle and fat without his express permission. He screams but he can’t stop, practically throttling the exposed bone with every squeeze.
Then he crashes it upward, using the boulder as leverage despite the fact it won’t move. No, especially the fact it won’t move. He pulls his leg by the bone up and down and up and down vigorously, screaming and gagging on his own vomit the entire way. He doesn’t care about infection anymore, he doesn’t care about making it worse, he needs to get out from under this fucking rock now!
Ford does this process over and over and doesn’t care to stop.
Not until he falls backwards, farther than he should’ve been able to at the angle he was sitting at.
Then he stops and looks at the damage.
His leg is free. But it is the promised stump, more mangled than he expected when he went into it. There’s bits of his femur sticking out a few inches at least. His muscle and fat are hanging like they’ll slip out any second. The blood… the blood is everywhere, ignoring the tourniquet like it isn’t even there.
The pain is excruciating, nearly causing him to black out and die of blood loss.
But Ford is smart, he already had his gun’s safety turned off and right next to his hand.
He doesn’t pause to get ready, he just aims and shoots.
The blue light blinds him and sears whatever flesh it landed on in one moment.
Ford glances at the damage the instant he can see, realizing he’d also blown a hole in the boulder he was stuck in as he sees the charred but bloodless stump left behind.
He wants to scream and laugh at the same time at the knowledge that he could’ve just shot the rock and freed his leg that way.
Though frankly, looking at the remains of his leg under the broken boulder, he probably would’ve needed amputation regardless.
But it would’ve been easier without being stuck!
Ford sighs and looks around for something to use as a crutch or whatever so he can find a way back to town. He’s already given up hope that that stupid science place even exists.
Only chopping off a leg with no medical supervision or experience could ruin his hope like this, but Ford is tired.
So very tired.
He blinks and he’s in a strange white room without warning, like he… teleported or something.
Or he passed out and died and this is heaven.
Clinical. Observant.
All the things he didn’t want heaven to be if he ever really believed it existed.
Not to mention that he can’t believe he still died after all that and now can’t fight Bill Cipher to the death.
He groans and looks around, startling at a figure in a mask standing over him.
“Where am I? Wh-who are you?” Ford asks woozily, watching as the figure holds up a finger in silence, “Oh, okay…”
“Keep still, Stanford,” The voice tells him, forcing him to realize he’d sat up already, lying back down with a wince that says it’s more than just heaven, “We just saved you from the desert surrounding our lab.”
“Oh… so you are real!” Ford shouts, jubilation only marginally impacted by his lingering pain, “I was looking for a scientific outpost for ages out there!”
The figure giggles and Ford realizes it sounds feminine.
“Yes, we are real. I thought you were gonna ask about your leg,” The scientist says with a laugh still in her voice, “What were you searching for us for?”
“Oh, it’s a long story…” Ford is strangely unwilling to think about his initial mission when he remembers his leg, “But… what about my leg?”
“There’s the question I was looking for!” She laughs and takes off a blanket covering him that he didn’t notice until right now, revealing a bandaged up stump with a strange metal pad on the end that feels rather odd and disconnected for a reason he can’t parse right now, “We cleaned up your residual limb and… we needed to take a little more off your leg than you already did by yourself due to some bad infection from the rock you seemingly used… but that’s not all.”
Ford can’t imagine there being more to the news, already happy that he’s not gonna die to his leg anymore.
But then he sees what she’s gesturing for him to look at, a sheet with a suspiciously shaped lump underneath.
With a flourish, the scientist sweeps the sheet off of the table it rests on, revealing a silver metal leg that stops halfway up the thigh into a pad that looks like it matches exactly with his stump’s end like a puzzle.
Ford is so excited at the sight, he nearly falls off the bed. He catches himself on the edge, where his remaining leg hangs with its stump buddy still on the bed. There really was a good chunk taken from what he’d left before, the stump isn’t even hanging over the bed that much, if at all.
Must’ve been a bad infection… Ford thinks lightly, the realization a little sobering even as the doctor allows him a moment to test run his new prosthetic. It takes a bit of him focusing his mental energy into moving the leg a little before he feels comfortable trying to stand.
“Just for a few moments though, your leg needs time to heal from surgery,” She tells him as he wobbles onto his feet, his hands gripping her shoulders so tight he might tear something if he weren’t so weak at the moment, “This sort of thing can’t stay on all day every day, your residual limb needs its breaks from such a piece of equipment, especially early on. I wasn’t even sure you’d be able to stand like you are right now.”
Ford gets what she means, his residual limb screaming in agony after a few moments of standing. He needs to sit down on the bed, letting the doctor remove it for now.
It is a frustrating roadblock, especially considering his goal. Ford’s not sure where his standing with fighting Bill is after what happened, a little worried that his newfound physical disability will hinder those goals, even with his new prosthetic.
It is a little clunky as Ford thinks over that brief moment. He was hardly able to control any of the apparent neural functions in moving outside of jerky little movements guided only by the doctor, which certainly isn’t really a surprise so much as it is a new factor in his recovery he’ll need to learn. He’s not sure when he’ll be able to master his mobility with it even when he gets a hand of the neural stuff.
But at least he’s alive to figure it all out in the first place, a blessing he will not be taking for granted any time soon.
He shudders at the thought of suffering to death under that boulder.
Right now, all he can be is grateful that he was given a second chance at moving forward in his strange life and in his goals.
Even if he had to lose a leg to get there.