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Ford clenches his teeth and squeezes his eyes shut as the chains binding him spark once more, sending powerful volts that, under normal circumstances, should've killed him. In the near distance, the cacophony of mocking laughter rings in his ears.

A regular person wouldn't have even survived the amount of shocks Bill brought upon him out of sick amusement, but Ford is no regular person. Not in a way that matters. He is more than aware that Bill won't kill him; he can't afford to lose his golden ticket out of Gravity Falls' natural borders. But that hardly means Bill will treat him like a king during his involuntary stay in the Fearamid.

So Ford endures, endures, and endures. No matter how many times Bill electrocutes him until all he can smell is singed hair and charred clothing, no matter how much it hurts to even move his wrists, no matter how long it takes to stall Bill's invasion, Ford will never break. He'll never surrender to the pain. He'll never let Bill win.

Stubbornness has always been the Pines' strongest trait, after all. It's how he managed to live this long traversing the multiverse with a bounty on his head.

(But how long will that last?)

He doesn't know how long it's been since the torture started. Probably hours. Days. Months. Years. Did time even exist in this pocket of the universe? Maybe not, remembering Bill's declaration of killing time itself.

Another round of volts.

The smell of burnt flesh, smoke, and ozone.

The sharp, tingly feeling in his wrists and neck, exacerbated by the tightness of his chains.

The cackling, the jeering, the scorn.

The delirious thought of ending the torment by telling Bill—

Ford groans, shaking his head.

It doesn't matter. What matters most right now is keeping Weirdmageddon from infecting the Earth. Ford doomed it to begin with when he built the portal—heck, when he came to Gravity Falls and found the cave painting that kickstarted these events—so it was on him to ensure Bill won't do so much as draw a smiley face on the planet's crust.

He can do this for eons if he has to.

(He can't. He really can't. But he will.)

Bill sometimes leaves him alone to continue "partying" with his minions, mostly just to render him as an object of ridicule for the other multiversal beasts to point their fingers at. Ford barely cares about that; he's been subjected to that sort of treatment since childhood. (Except Stanley isn't there to punch mouths and lift his spirits up. A small, broken, and scared part of Ford that sorely missed the presence on the bottom bunk wonders where his brother is in all this mess.)

During such instances, Ford finds himself thinking. He's always thinking, really, but this time, he lets his mind wander a million miles a second. Just a way to distract himself.

But old habits die hard, and his brain conjures scenarios in which he fails, the world falls, and everything perishes by Bill's merciless hand; he fails, and he's turned to gold for all eternity, not quite dead but not quite alive, Schrödinger's statue; he fails, and he helplessly watches as Bill picks off his family one by one.

God, stop, stop, stop, this is just what Bill wants, think of something else—like a plan to escape, you're good at that, aren't you?

Ford barely has a moment's breath to notice Bill returning, hovering before him with his cartoonish hands behind his back. For a one-eyed three-sided polygon, the demon looks absolutely smug. (And a young voice in the corners of his memories untouched by grief and terror wishes to dish a mean left hook to that giant eyeball.)

"So, brainiac, what's your final answer?"

Ford can't find a reason why Bill even bothers asking. It's practically rhetorical now.

"I will not let you into my mind, Bill."

Another sigh, fake and meant for show. "Oh, Fordsy, always so uptight! Can't say I blame ya, though! Anyone would go nuts after being stuck in one place for so long." Ford pointedly ignores the obvious jab as he warily watches Bill needlessly fiddling with his bowtie, suspiciously calm and amicable than Ford thought.

"You know what you need? How about a little magic trick to loosen you up a bit, smart guy? Call it a surprise gift from an old partner!"

With the exaggerated flair of a showman from hell, Bill snaps his fingers. Instead of getting fried to oblivion, Ford's chains vanish in a puff of smoke, and he falls in a giant wrought iron birdcage of all things. From this height, the demonic triangle seems even larger. Bill takes off his top hat and rummages inside it, almost like he's looking for something.

"Here we are!"

He brings out his hand, holding...

Holding....

Oh. Oh no. This can't be happening, no, no, no, no, no!

"HAHAHAHAHA! You should've seen your face, IQ! Hysterical! Then again, I never expected this reaction outta you. After all, you have been playing favorites lately."

Ford blocks Bill out, blocks everything out. Nothing the triangle says or does can ever distract him from the horrifying reality that Bill has Mabel in his grasp; Mabel, who is so small, and silent, and—

Not moving.

Mabel's not moving.

"Mabel!" Ford rushes forward, grasping the cold iron bars tight enough to turn his knuckles white as the realization dawns on him like an anvil to the head.

He's stuck. He's trapped, and Mabel is in danger. Bill has Mabel. Bill has Mabel. "What have you done to my niece, Cipher?!"

Bill just laughs. He's always fucking laughing.

He lets go of her prone form for one heart-stopping second before catching her by the scruff of her sweater like she's some children's plaything.

(Ford thinks back on the note taped to his third journal. The note Mabel found; the note specifically written by Bill before-while-after possessing Dipper's body; the note specifically addressed to Mabel with a clear threat of violent harm on her and her brother.

It felt like a millennium ago when Ford read it in the suffocating stillness of the basement. He vowed to himself he'd never let the three-sided bastard even touch a single hair on his niece and nephew's heads.

And what did that amount to?)

Mabel barely reacts to the treatment, let alone stirs awake. She swings listlessly from the demon's fingers, painting a grim picture in Ford's mind (—"Wanna join him, Shooting Star?"—) but he forces himself to not think about it.

He hopes against hope that it's not what it looks like. He checks the current state of his niece in the quickest assessment imaginable; her skin and clothes are caked with dirt, her hair less shiny than used to be with soot coating it, and there's not a hint of blood on her person. No blood, okay, no blood. No visible blood means no major injuries from what he can discern. Yes, there's a possibility of a broken bone, or even—heaven forbid—internal bleeding, but right now, Ford wants to believe in the good news, to believe that Mabel is okay.

(Except, she looks so utterly pale, even from a distance. As if everything that was warm and bright and colorful got drained out of Mabel, like her very soul got viciously torn from her body, leaving nothing but an empty husk.)

She's just unconscious, his mind tries to reason. Bill probably knocked her out and brought her here as a hostage, a bargaining chip, something to hold over Ford's head as a means to get him to spill the equation.

With that one thought, a surge of anger bursts into life within him, ignited by the mere idea that his enemy is using Mabel, his weird and wonderful great-niece who welcomed him home with a braces-filled smile and positive acceptance of his six-fingered hands, as leverage against Ford. How dare he?

How dare he?!

Despite common sense and the leftover pain from the electric shocks, he pushes and pulls against the iron bars, as if his strength and rage would be enough to move them, but the action just makes Bill laugh even more.

"Nothing much! I just gave her what she wanted!"

'Gave her what she wanted?' Ford wonders. 'What does he mean?'

Bill dangles Mabel ever so lightly in front of the cage, taunting him further. "You know, just what any kid wants! Schools that don't feel like prisons, friends that don't leave, parties that don't stop..."

His eye curves into a poisonous facsimile of a grin.

"Summers that don't end."

A rock drops inside of Ford's stomach, icy and heavy, because that could mean so many things when Bill is in the picture. But he knows better. It means Mabel, somehow, accepted whatever deal Bill made to put her in this state, or Bill manipulated her into accepting it. The latter seems most likely, and it enrages Ford even more.

Mabel is a naturally trusting person. It was a trait that often worried Ford because, in his experience, trust is what gets you toyed with and damaged beyond repair. But Mabel, in all her glittery, extensively colorful glory, gives it away freely, no matter the consequences. She trusted Dipper and her friends to have her back. She trusted Stan and it led to Ford returning to his home dimension. She trusted Ford even though they haven't known each other for that long.

Ford wants nothing more than to wring that cursed polygonal jerk's nonexistent neck.

Bill cackles. "It's funny how dumb and gullible she is; didn't even think twice before going straight for the pot of gold!"

(She shook his hand, and instead of disgust and fear, she smiled like she discovered something wonderful. "Woah, a six-fingered handshake! It's like a full-finger friendlier than normal!")

(With a determined grin and a wild imagination backing it up, she rolled the dice. "I cast centaurtaur!")

(Though bruised and battered and covered with the evidence of a unicorn brawl, she still smiled triumphantly from a mission accomplished. "Thanks, Grunkle Ford!")

His niece is many things, but dumb and gullible are not, nor will they ever be, parts of who she is.

"You let go of her right now, Bill! She has nothing to do with this!" Ford yells, seething. "I swear if you harm another hair on her head, you will regret it!"

Through the eyes of any higher being in power, his threats mean absolutely nothing. They're for show, meant to uncover the rage Ford feels toward Bill Cipher for daring to hurt his family, and bragging about it right in front of him. They were for hiding the fact that underneath the anger is complete terror. Ford can't do anything substantial to Bill, a mere human against a primordial beast. But now that he's discovered his status as a great-uncle, none of that matters to him.

What matters is protecting his family.

Bill regards him as one tyrannical king would to his subjects, then shrugs his shoulders. "Alright, sure. If you insist, pal." In a blink, Bill floats closer to the cage. "It's not like I've got much use for a useless sack of flesh with a heartbeat anyway."

He holds up Mabel higher.

"On the other hand, neither do you, huh Fordsy?"

Another snap of fingers, and the top of the birdcage opens with a creak. Ford looks back at Bill just in time to hear him say—

"Have a fun family reunion, Sixer!"

And just like that, Bill releases Mabel with a flick of his fingers, and she falls inside the cage, Ford's stomach plunging to the ground along with her.

"Mabel!"

Ford ignores the spike of pain slithering around his body as he catches his niece in his arms, and for one nauseating minute, he thought he was holding a corpse.

But no, he isn't, because Mabel is not dead. She can't be dead. Her heart still beats and she's breathing, so she can't be dead.

"Mabel!" He cries out, thorny tendrils of fear squeezing his heart in a vice. "Mabel? Please wake up, come on now. Whatever Bill promised you, it's nothing but a trick! You can't give in! You have to fight it, Mabel! I know you can do it!" Because she's fought tougher battles than this, hasn't she? She takes after Stanley that way, and he's the toughest man Ford ever knew, so surely she can make it out of whatever hellscape Bill concocted for her.

But she's not responding.

"Mabel, please!"

She's not waking up. Her eyes don't flutter open, her face remains slack, and her body feels so incredibly small and cold in Ford's arms.

"...Sweetie?"

(Ford had an encyclopedia of regrets. Not getting to know his incredible niece and protecting her as he should were on the first page.)

His face crumbles. "Oh, Mabel," he whispers weakly, and it's all he can do to shield her from Bill and the horrors outside, and keep himself tethered to reality as he hugs her close, tucking her head under his chin, and hoping.

Ford clenches his teeth and squeezes his eyes shut as the chains binding him spark once more, sending powerful volts that, under normal circumstances, should've killed him. In the near distance, the cacophony of mocking laughter rings in his ears.

A regular person wouldn't have even survived the amount of shocks Bill brought upon him out of sick amusement, but Ford is no regular person. Not in a way that matters. He is more than aware that Bill won't kill him; he can't afford to lose his golden ticket out of Gravity Falls' natural borders. But that hardly means Bill will treat him like a king during his involuntary stay in the Fearamid.

So Ford endures, endures, and endures. No matter how many times Bill electrocutes him until all he can smell is singed hair and charred clothing, no matter how much it hurts to even move his wrists, no matter how long it takes to stall Bill's invasion, Ford will never break. He'll never surrender to the pain. He'll never let Bill win.

Stubbornness has always been the Pines' strongest trait, after all. It's how he managed to live this long traversing the multiverse with a bounty on his head.

(But how long will that last?)

He doesn't know how long it's been since the torture started. Probably hours. Days. Months. Years. Did time even exist in this pocket of the universe? Maybe not, remembering Bill's declaration of killing time itself.

Another round of volts.

The smell of burnt flesh, smoke, and ozone.

The sharp, tingly feeling in his wrists and neck, exacerbated by the tightness of his chains.

The cackling, the jeering, the scorn.

The delirious thought of ending the torment by telling Bill—

Ford groans, shaking his head.

It doesn't matter. What matters most right now is keeping Weirdmageddon from infecting the Earth. Ford doomed it to begin with when he built the portal—heck, when he came to Gravity Falls and found the cave painting that kickstarted these events—so it was on him to ensure Bill won't do so much as draw a smiley face on the planet's crust.

He can do this for eons if he has to.

(He can't. He really can't. But he will.)

Bill sometimes leaves him alone to continue "partying" with his minions, mostly just to render him as an object of ridicule for the other multiversal beasts to point their fingers at. Ford barely cares about that; he's been subjected to that sort of treatment since childhood. (Except Stanley isn't there to punch mouths and lift his spirits up. A small, broken, and scared part of Ford that sorely missed the presence on the bottom bunk wonders where his brother is in all this mess.)

During such instances, Ford finds himself thinking. He's always thinking, really, but this time, he lets his mind wander a million miles a second. Just a way to distract himself.

But old habits die hard, and his brain conjures scenarios in which he fails, the world falls, and everything perishes by Bill's merciless hand; he fails, and he's turned to gold for all eternity, not quite dead but not quite alive, Schrödinger's statue; he fails, and he helplessly watches as Bill picks off his family one by one.

God, stop, stop, stop, this is just what Bill wants, think of something else—like a plan to escape, you're good at that, aren't you?

Ford barely has a moment's breath to notice Bill returning, hovering before him with his cartoonish hands behind his back. For a one-eyed three-sided polygon, the demon looks absolutely smug. (And a young voice in the corners of his memories untouched by grief and terror wishes to dish a mean left hook to that giant eyeball.)

"So, brainiac, what's your final answer?"

Ford can't find a reason why Bill even bothers asking. It's practically rhetorical now.

"I will not let you into my mind, Bill."

Another sigh, fake and meant for show. "Oh, Fordsy, always so uptight! Can't say I blame ya, though! Anyone would go nuts after being stuck in one place for so long." Ford pointedly ignores the obvious jab as he warily watches Bill needlessly fiddling with his bowtie, suspiciously calm and amicable than Ford thought.

"You know what you need? How about a little magic trick to loosen you up a bit, smart guy? Call it a surprise gift from an old partner!"

With the exaggerated flair of a showman from hell, Bill snaps his fingers. Instead of getting fried to oblivion, Ford's chains vanish in a puff of smoke, and he falls in a giant wrought iron birdcage of all things. From this height, the demonic triangle seems even larger. Bill takes off his top hat and rummages inside it, almost like he's looking for something.

"Here we are!"

He brings out his hand, holding...

Holding....

Oh. Oh no. This can't be happening, no, no, no, no, no!

"HAHAHAHAHA! You should've seen your face, IQ! Hysterical! Then again, I never expected this reaction outta you. After all, you have been playing favorites lately."

Ford blocks Bill out, blocks everything out. Nothing the triangle says or does can ever distract him from the horrifying reality that Bill has Mabel in his grasp; Mabel, who is so small, and silent, and—

Not moving.

Mabel's not moving.

"Mabel!" Ford rushes forward, grasping the cold iron bars tight enough to turn his knuckles white as the realization dawns on him like an anvil to the head.

He's stuck. He's trapped, and Mabel is in danger. Bill has Mabel. Bill has Mabel. "What have you done to my niece, Cipher?!"

Bill just laughs. He's always fucking laughing.

He lets go of her prone form for one heart-stopping second before catching her by the scruff of her sweater like she's some children's plaything.

(Ford thinks back on the note taped to his third journal. The note Mabel found; the note specifically written by Bill before-while-after possessing Dipper's body; the note specifically addressed to Mabel with a clear threat of violent harm on her and her brother.

It felt like a millennium ago when Ford read it in the suffocating stillness of the basement. He vowed to himself he'd never let the three-sided bastard even touch a single hair on his niece and nephew's heads.

And what did that amount to?)

Mabel barely reacts to the treatment, let alone stirs awake. She swings listlessly from the demon's fingers, painting a grim picture in Ford's mind (—"Wanna join him, Shooting Star?"—) but he forces himself to not think about it.

He hopes against hope that it's not what it looks like. He checks the current state of his niece in the quickest assessment imaginable; her skin and clothes are caked with dirt, her hair less shiny than used to be with soot coating it, and there's not a hint of blood on her person. No blood, okay, no blood. No visible blood means no major injuries from what he can discern. Yes, there's a possibility of a broken bone, or even—heaven forbid—internal bleeding, but right now, Ford wants to believe in the good news, to believe that Mabel is okay.

(Except, she looks so utterly pale, even from a distance. As if everything that was warm and bright and colorful got drained out of Mabel, like her very soul got viciously torn from her body, leaving nothing but an empty husk.)

She's just unconscious, his mind tries to reason. Bill probably knocked her out and brought her here as a hostage, a bargaining chip, something to hold over Ford's head as a means to get him to spill the equation.

With that one thought, a surge of anger bursts into life within him, ignited by the mere idea that his enemy is using Mabel, his weird and wonderful great-niece who welcomed him home with a braces-filled smile and positive acceptance of his six-fingered hands, as leverage against Ford. How dare he?

How dare he?!

Despite common sense and the leftover pain from the electric shocks, he pushes and pulls against the iron bars, as if his strength and rage would be enough to move them, but the action just makes Bill laugh even more.

"Nothing much! I just gave her what she wanted!"

'Gave her what she wanted?' Ford wonders. 'What does he mean?'

Bill dangles Mabel ever so lightly in front of the cage, taunting him further. "You know, just what any kid wants! Schools that don't feel like prisons, friends that don't leave, parties that don't stop..."

His eye curves into a poisonous facsimile of a grin.

"Summers that don't end."

A rock drops inside of Ford's stomach, icy and heavy, because that could mean so many things when Bill is in the picture. But he knows better. It means Mabel, somehow, accepted whatever deal Bill made to put her in this state, or Bill manipulated her into accepting it. The latter seems most likely, and it enrages Ford even more.

Mabel is a naturally trusting person. It was a trait that often worried Ford because, in his experience, trust is what gets you toyed with and damaged beyond repair. But Mabel, in all her glittery, extensively colorful glory, gives it away freely, no matter the consequences. She trusted Dipper and her friends to have her back. She trusted Stan and it led to Ford returning to his home dimension. She trusted Ford even though they haven't known each other for that long.

Ford wants nothing more than to wring that cursed polygonal jerk's nonexistent neck.

Bill cackles. "It's funny how dumb and gullible she is; didn't even think twice before going straight for the pot of gold!"

(She shook his hand, and instead of disgust and fear, she smiled like she discovered something wonderful. "Woah, a six-fingered handshake! It's like a full-finger friendlier than normal!")

(With a determined grin and a wild imagination backing it up, she rolled the dice. "I cast centaurtaur!")

(Though bruised and battered and covered with the evidence of a unicorn brawl, she still smiled triumphantly from a mission accomplished. "Thanks, Grunkle Ford!")

His niece is many things, but dumb and gullible are not, nor will they ever be, parts of who she is.

"You let go of her right now, Bill! She has nothing to do with this!" Ford yells, seething. "I swear if you harm another hair on her head, you will regret it!"

Through the eyes of any higher being in power, his threats mean absolutely nothing. They're for show, meant to uncover the rage Ford feels toward Bill Cipher for daring to hurt his family, and bragging about it right in front of him. They were for hiding the fact that underneath the anger is complete terror. Ford can't do anything substantial to Bill, a mere human against a primordial beast. But now that he's discovered his status as a great-uncle, none of that matters to him.

What matters is protecting his family.

Bill regards him as one tyrannical king would to his subjects, then shrugs his shoulders. "Alright, sure. If you insist, pal." In a blink, Bill floats closer to the cage. "It's not like I've got much use for a useless sack of flesh with a heartbeat anyway."

He holds up Mabel higher.

"On the other hand, neither do you, huh Fordsy?"

Another snap of fingers, and the top of the birdcage opens with a creak. Ford looks back at Bill just in time to hear him say—

"Have a fun family reunion, Sixer!"

And just like that, Bill releases Mabel with a flick of his fingers, and she falls inside the cage, Ford's stomach plunging to the ground along with her.

"Mabel!"

Ford ignores the spike of pain slithering around his body as he catches his niece in his arms, and for one nauseating minute, he thought he was holding a corpse.

But no, he isn't, because Mabel is not dead. She can't be dead. Her heart still beats and she's breathing, so she can't be dead.

"Mabel!" He cries out, thorny tendrils of fear squeezing his heart in a vice. "Mabel? Please wake up, come on now. Whatever Bill promised you, it's nothing but a trick! You can't give in! You have to fight it, Mabel! I know you can do it!" Because she's fought tougher battles than this, hasn't she? She takes after Stanley that way, and he's the toughest man Ford ever knew, so surely she can make it out of whatever hellscape Bill concocted for her.

But she's not responding.

"Mabel, please!"

She's not waking up. Her eyes don't flutter open, her face remains slack, and her body feels so incredibly small and cold in Ford's arms.

"...Sweetie?"

(Ford had an encyclopedia of regrets. Not getting to know his incredible niece and protecting her as he should were on the first page.)

His face crumbles. "Oh, Mabel," he whispers weakly, and it's all he can do to shield her from Bill and the horrors outside, and keep himself tethered to reality as he hugs her close, tucking her head under his chin, and hoping.