Chapter Text
Hah. So. This was interesting.
It hurt to walk. It hurt to stand, too, or sit for too long, or do anything, really. And it wasn't a fun kind of pain, either. After a while it had gone from mildly interesting to a feeling that grated against his very being, pushing and piercing and never giving him a moment to rest.
Bill had no idea how humans put up with this for the entirety of their short, pathetic lives.
No one else had ever brought up the constant pain, so Bill hadn't either. Whenever he tried to remember if he'd felt it when possessing human bodies, he couldn't remember it being there. Given, he also couldn't remember it not being there; Usually, he was too focused on hurting the body in new, more exciting ways.
Bill sighed, shifting to lay on his side on the tile floor of the bathroom. He missed when pain was fun, something he could tap in and out of whenever he wanted. The bathroom floor was… well, it definitely wasn't comfortable, but it was private, and Bill was too tired to pretend everything didn't hurt right now.
He laughed a bit at that. Tired. He shouldn't be able to be tired. Yet here he was, lying on the floor, exhausted and hurting, failing to distract himself by counting dust bunnies. Bill winced, drawn back to his unfortunate reality as a particularly sharp pain stabbed through his leg. It was an extra-extra bad pain day today. Seriously, how did everyone else put up with this all the time? Why didn't they ever talk about it?
This seemed like the kind of things humans would just love to compain about, but he'd never heard one so much as mention it. Sure, they'd acknowledge varying levels of pain at times, but only when something was visibly wrong. Never the everyday pains that always seemed much more irritating to Bill.
So. Anyway. The bathroom sucked. But hey, he was tired! Physically, sure, that was a constant now, but emotionally, too. He didn't like hiding all this. It was too much extra effort for Bill to be reasonably exerting when everything he did was already so much harder now.
Luckily, Bill Cipher was not a reasonable being. Which was why, when he heard a sharp knock on the bathroom door, his first instinct was very, very stupid.
"Don't come in! There's diarrhia all over the shower curtain!"
There was a brief pause, and then a familiar voice answered. "I believe that gives me all the more reason to come in, Bill." He paused, waiting for Bill to answer. Bill didn't. "Why is there diarrhea all over the shower curtain?"
Crap. He hadn't thought that far ahead. "Um. I put it there."
"Alright," Ford said. "I'm coming in."
He glanced up and saw that he'd forgotten to lock the door. That wasn't good. Bill wasn't entirely sure he could walk right now, and he was too tired to come up with a lie good enough for Ford to believe.
Goddamn, even thinking was tiring now! what was wrong with him!?
The door opened, and Bill didn't didn't have any more time to think. What Ford saw was not, in fact, a shower curtain smeared with diarrhia and a Bill equally covered in it. He saw a perfectly clean bathroom, a perfectly clean Bill, and a look of sheer terror on said Bill's face.
"What—"
"It's not what it looks like," Bill said hurriedly.
"What, exactly, does this look like?"
Bill shrugged, still laying on the floor. "Not important. What is important is that everything's fine and you should go. Right now."
Ford did not go, much to Bill's annoyance.
"There isn't any diarrhea."
"And?"
Ford sighed. "Why did you say there was?"
"Thought it'd be funny." Ford gave him A Look. "What? What do you want from me? I didn't want you to come in, so I said the first thing I thought of that would keep you out. Clearly it didn't work, because you're here, and you aren't leaving. Y'know, like I said you should?"
Ford continued to not leave, which was really starting to tick Bill off. Instead, he sat down beside him. "What's wrong?"
Shoot. Bill had thought he'd been doing a pretty good job of communicating that nothing was wrong. Because it wasn't. He was fine, really! He was just in a lot of pain and couldn't walk and his limbs felt so heavy he could barely move them. He was the definition of fine.
"Nothing's wrong."
"Bill."
"Hey, why are you even here? Aren't there like, a bajillion other bathrooms in this place?"
"This one was the closest, but I would have been fine finding another one until I heard that there was diarrhea all over the shower." Bill mentally kicked himself. Why hadn't he just said he was using the bathroom?
"Well, the shower's clean! It's all fine, so you can go pee somewhere else now." He said.
Ford took his hand, and damn it, goddamn it, Bill wanted nothing more than to curl up with him and cry. Instead, he took a deep breath and held it until the air was burning in his chest.
"You lied about the shower."
And Bill absolutely, definitely, 100% did not feel bad about that. "So what? I lie all the time! You know that!"
"That's true. However, something is very clearly wrong, which means you're still lying," Ford said. He was being way too calm about this.
"I'm not—"
"I know your tells."
"I don't have any tells!"
"You do. Avoiding the subject, which you're doing right now, is one."
Unfortunately, there wasn't much Bill could do to argue with that, so he was quiet.
"Why are you laying on the bathroom floor?"
"Because I don't want to move." Technically not a lie!
Ford stood, slouching to continue holding Bill's hand, and tugged it gently. "Why don't we take this riveting conversation somewhere else? The bathroom floor is hardly comfortable."
Bill thought it was a hell of a lot more comfortable than being upright at the moment, but Ford was standing there and asking him to stand up and looking down at him with his damn eyes and he was too tired not to give in.
He sat up—ow—and tried to push up with his legs the way he'd done countless times since being put in this body—ow ow OW
OW OW OW
He was not standing up. Instead he was kneeling, hands splayed on the floor in front of him because… ah. Because he had fallen over. Because he couldn't stand. Panic flooded through him. He couldn't stand. He couldn't get upright and something was wrong with this body, he was sure of it, something was deeply, deeply wrong and that should be fine but it wasn't because this body wasn't one he could leave whenever he wanted, oh no, he was trapped and Ford had seen the whole thing and—
Ford. He was in front of Bill now, kneeling and cupping his face gently. Bill was in too much pain to really focus, but he could hear some of what he was saying.
"—Okay? What are—" Pain. "—could be happening, I don't—" Pain. "Can you walk?" Bill grimaced and shook his head. "Alright. That's alright. We should—" Pain. Pain. Painpainpainpainpain. He felt something wrap around him, and then he wasn't on the ground anymore but that was all he could process because everything hurt and he couldn't get away from it and that wasn't good, probably, and he was moving but he didn't know where and then he was in a bed and it was so much better than the floor and the pain cleared enough for him to think again.
Okay. This was… okay. He looked around. He was in his and Ford's room, in the same bed they slept in every night. He wasn't dying any faster than he should be, at least that he could tell. Everything still hurt, sure, but pain and something actually being wrong had long been disconnected from each other in his brain.
So, he was fine. Ford knew something was up with him now, sure, but that could all be fixed with a little story. Maybe he had a bad fall in the forest earlier and messed something up in his legs. Yeah, that could work! Humans were notoriously fragile, after all.
Except Bill wasn't entirely sure he was fine, but that thought was scary and bad so he shoved it way down until he didn't have to look at it anymore.
Ford was standing across the room, murmuring something Bill couldn't quite hear into the phone. He nodded, brows furrowed as whoever was on the other end said something in response.
"Alright. Yes, I'll talk to him," Ford said. He put down the phone and walked over to Bill, sitting down on the edge of the bed. "How are you doing?" Bill raised his eyebrows. Ford laughed. "Fair. Is it any better, at least?"
"Enough that I'm talking to you right now."
"Hm. Enough that you can keep talking to me?" He asked.
Bill thought about that for a minute. It was, but saying that would lead to questions that he really didn't want to answer. Then again, they were questions would come no matter what. "Yeah."
Ford took his hand again, and Bill suddenly felt a bit too much like a hospital patient. He sat up, and that made the feeling better. Kind of.
"Okay then. It hurts, right?"
"Yeah."
"Where?"
Bill laughed. Wasn't that a good question. It hurt everywhere, and it only hurt in very specific places. It was changing constantly. Sharp pains squirming like worms under his skin, into his muscles and joints, then disappearing completely only for new ones to pop up somewhere completely different.
"Hell if I know, Sixer." Then Bill said something that was, apparently, a very concerning thing to say. "It's just the every day pains, you know? Those kinda weird ones that are always there that people just, like, ignore?"
Pause. Loooooong pause. "Bill," Ford said slowly. "Are you in pain every day?"
Bill's heart was beating a lot faster now. "Um. Yes? But that's just, like, a human thing, right?" It was just another one of the weird human things he was still adjusting to, like sleeping and remembering to breathe.
Ford closed his eyes for a moment. "No. No, that's… It's not. At all. You shouldn't be in pain." Bill's blood ran cold. Oh. That wasn't good. "I'm going to call the doctor back and schedule an appointment for you."
"What? I don't need—"
"Yes, you do. This is non-negotiable. How bad is the pain on a scale of one to ten?"
Bill wrinkled his nose. "I dunno. Six?"
"And when you tried to stand earlier?"
"Like eight or nine." And yes, sure, that was pretty high. Sure, he couldn't walk right now. Sure, every damn thing he did hurt, but that didn't mean he needed to see a doctor. It didn't mean something was actually wrong.
Ford nodded and stood. "I'm calling the doctor, then I'll get you some ibuprofen. We're getting the soonest possible appointment. Understood?"
He was so tired. "Fine."
Bill could hear muffled bits and pieces of the call through the door once Ford left, but couldn't get the specifics. Eventually, he came back in with a pill and a glass of water.
"Ooo, is it drugs?"
Ford chuckled. "Not the kind you're used to."
"Eh, at this point I'll take what I can get."
He downed the pill and water. Ford laid down beside him, and for once Bill let himself be held with no complaints.
"I'm sorry," Ford murmured. "I should have noticed sooner."
Bill personally still thought that he shouldn't have noticed at all, but he wasn't about to say so to an already guilty Ford. "Don't worry 'bout it. I was trying to hide it anyway."
"Hmm…"
They lay there together, and Bill felt a bit better. The ibuprofen was starting to kick in, Ford was there, and he felt ever-so-slightly lighter knowing that, at the very least, he wouldn't have to hide the pain so much anymore. It wasn't good yet. There was still a long ways to go before that happened, but it was better. That was enough.