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In another timeline, your lives are separate. The both of you are ancient, and destructive, and lonely. You work to save the lost souls of the multiverse, while he ends the world, and ends the world, and ends the world.
In another timeline, you do not get to save him until he has already died.
But those are the concerns of another version of yourself, another side of the tesseract that is time. Here, now, he is far younger than the monster called "Bill Cipher" ever was, body still trembling with the aftershocks of destruction. It is no effort at all to scoop him up in your great paw and take him away, away, away from the empty space that was once Euclydia and will one day become the Nightmare Realm. He is perfectly still as you carry him, save for the imperceptible tightening of his hands around a single mote of dust. Tears like silver drift into space as you fly towards the center of the world. Anyone who'd known Cipher in the other timelines would be unable to reconcile the two creatures.
He doesn't speak, not until you take him to your place, a location outside of time not dissimilar to the Nightmare Realm, though far less chaotic and long since shored up against entropy. You take him to the center, overlooking the karmic reincarnation cycle. When he finally speaks, his voice rings hollow, echoing with the words of a thousand dead beings.
"...Are you gonna kill me?"
There are timelines where you do, and the world is better off for it. There are timelines where you don't, and he leaves this place, and nothing changes.
No.
He looks at you, pupil impossibly thin. You feel, strangely, that you have no idea what you're doing. You deal in the dead and the dying and the things the multiverse has declared unsalvageable. You do not deal in children.
"Oh," a pause. "what, uh... what kind of divine retribution we talkin' about, then, pal?" You cannot recall the name of the last timeline in which Bill Cipher was frightened of you. It is strange to hear it now.
Something that might be called a hum rumbles to life in your chest, and the stars around you burn brighter in response. Redemption, you say, protection.
"So, uh, just to confirm—you're not going to kill me?"
No. There is nothing that could be killed that cannot instead be redeemed. Besides, to kill the last living member of a species would be genocide, and that would be needlessly cruel.
He flinches, staring hollowly at the dust mote held in tiny hands. You think of taking it from him, but do not. Letting go may be the most valuable skill to any creature that will live as long as you and him, but you like to avoid cruelty when possible. Call it repentance. Besides, he will have more chances to learn that lesson.
Later. Now, he is but a child in need of comfort. I do not blame you.
He curls in on himself, as if by compressing his body into a small enough shape he can bring back the world he's lost. "You should."
It was an accident, was it not? It's good to confirm—there are timelines where it is, and timelines where it isn't. Sometimes, it makes all the difference.
"Does it matter? They're all dead, anyway."
There are entire species that cannot feel guilt. There are beings who have taken the part of themselves that can and ripped them out. What matters—it takes you a moment to remember the name his parents gave him—is that you feel remorse. What matters is that even though I don't blame you, you blame yourself, which means you can feel guilt. Which means, ultimately, that you can do better.
"I should have burned with them."
No. You survived because Fate willed it.
He crosses his arms in an imitation of his first three-dimensional hug and turns away. That's fine. There will be time to pry beneath his exoskeleton yet. For now, you leave him to his grief, and wonder what you have gotten yourself into.
A universal sentiment among nearly every species is that children are difficult. They are loud. They cry. They get everything sticky, and they break things, and they demand more and more and more of you.
You have never understood this sentiment, and you understand it less, now. He is easy to deal with—though, he doesn't require much "dealing with," content to drift in silence, a haunted look to his eye. Perhaps a better caregiver would be worried, but neither of you are creatures of family. So used to your own loneliness that comfort would surely be grating—though for you or him, you're not sure.
Being unsure is a novel feeling, and yet it comes to you often these days. Curious.
You spend your time much the same as before: still, save for the gentle undulations of your tail. Not that you need movement to stay afloat—there is no water in this place, only sky and something like stardust, but holding still reminds you too much of being trapped, hence swimming, and other small things to keep you sane.
Below you, souls ebb and flow. The dead, the unborn. Those that reincarnate and those on their way to rest. You guide them, keeping them in line, weighing the new arrivals. The work is easy, soothing. Your body bathed in their light. As time passes, he floats closer to you. It's a slow process, a bit like taming a wild animal, pretending you can't see it creeping ever closer from the corner of your eye.
"Are they stars, too?"
You blink. So used to only knowing a version of Bill that claims to know everything, you forget that he hailed from the simplest of dimensions, that everything he knew in another timeline he had to learn. No creatures come into this world knowing everything, save yourself. The thought is endlessly lonely.
No. These are souls, remnants of every living being, and a few besides. The dead, on their way to an afterlife, or a second chance. Those—you crane your great head upwards, nose pointing out the gentle lights that surround you—those are stars. Ancient clusters of dust and gas, burning as brightly as they can until they burn themselves out.
He blinks, quickly, tears like liquid mercury pooling along his lower eyelid. “Just dust and air, huh?” He laughs, moonlight spilling down his front as he cries. “I didn’t even know what they were, and I—" He chokes on the weight of all he’s done, body folding in on itself like an origami crane.
In Dimension 46’\, they call that one Gemini, you say, speaking over his cries, the twins. But in thirteen other dimensions, there’s only one. And that’s the belt of Orion, those three there, and—
When he gathers himself enough to speak, he sounds tired beyond his years. “What’re you doing, Ax?”
I am… unaccustomed, to this. Comfort. It has been a long time since I was anything but untouchable, and yet I have taken it upon myself to care for you, so I thought it wise to offer you words of kindness—
He chuckles. It’s subdued, quieter than Bill Cipher has ever been in any timeline, and yet, something within you glows at having made progress.
“I’m not talking about your questionable maternal instinct, I meant—that one’s called the Side. Obviously. Everyone knows that.”
When you laugh it sounds like water over rocks in Dimension 59-a. Everyone, hm?
“Yep!”
A swish of your tail, a gentle tap of your paws to the shoulder of a ghost slipping out of line. This work is slow. Tell me about your world’s constellations.
When he speaks of the stars, he does it not in the way that astronomers do, but in a way that suggests he knew them each as close friends, had spent eons learning to differentiate them by their heat, the colors of their light, the things that make them glow brighter and the thoughts that make them dim. There is an uncertainty in his eyes as he speaks, growing smaller each time you respond with encouragement instead of dismissal, understanding instead of ridicule, and you know that if just one other person believed in him, Euclydia might have been saved.
Key word being might, as there are no timelines where he learns to be happy in that flat world. It seems Bill Cipher’s destruction of his home is a constant in every universe.
Eons later, or only hours—time is strange to creatures like you, Earth time stranger still—he slows, quiets.
“Thanks, Ax.”
Of course.
“No, really, I… For saving me. I don’t—I don’t know what I would have done, out there, alone.”
You do. It’s why you saved him.
You will not sit idly by as you witness the birth of another monster.
He grows bored quickly.
This is expected. New to immortality, his body still moves at mortal speeds, not yet aware that it doesn’t need to spend every second fighting entropy. His shell will learn, soon, to slow down, to let decades slip by like water in a stream. But for now he is young, and tied too-tightly to the hands of Time, and he bores easily.
Idleness, you’ve found, brings him to dissociative periods broken by fits of rage, sadness, terror, and so he keeps himself entertained with watching the stars and the endless march of souls and asking you question after question about the outside world. You do not mind, happy to share with him knowledge of other worlds: those far away, those dead, those yet to be. It has been a long time since you were in the company of a mind comparable to yours—though the difference between you is still apparent. Perhaps another timeline’s Bill Cipher would be able to keep up with you easily, but this one needs to be spoon-fed information.
You don’t mind. He is, after all, just a child.
But even conversation bores him after a time, and there are only so many stars to count in the vast plane in which you two reside. Perhaps one day you will let him “leave the nest,” so to speak, but not now. He is fragile, and the world is armed with teeth and claws. Any damage done now could undo your little progress towards saving him, and so many other worlds.
And so, you’ve started training him in magic.
More cautious versions of yourself might call this a mistake, but more cautious versions of yourself would never have exposed themselves to a Bill Cipher still reeling and volatile from the death of his dimension.
He takes to power easily—you can see it even now, the seeds for tyranny growing within this child. But there is light, too—in the way he flinches away from his own power, the way he holds his flames close to his surface, so he’ll burn before they get a chance to touch the world around you.
Aside from the fear, he’s making good progress. You teach him to fly, to shield his body against entropy and the heat of the stars. You teach him self-healing and how to alter his body’s metabolism until the need for food and drink and sleep is almost removed. You show him how to peer into other timelines, to see all that has happened and all that might, though you guide him away from looking too far into his own future. What would he do, if exposed to his own evil? You’re not sure.
But he seems uninterested in his future, more interested in peering into worlds so different from his own—those with three dimensions, four, five, those where knowledge is seen as something to cultivate rather than suppress.
You teach him other skills, those only creatures the multiverse deems gods know: how to cultivate a timeline, how to guide a soul, gently, along their predestined path. How to bestow knowledge upon mortals without destroying their simple minds. How to shift one’s body into different forms, ones within and without reality, things perceivable by mortals and those that aren’t—though, like you, he seems to prefer his original shape.
“I’m equilateral, Ax! Basically perfect! Why would I want a bunch of eyes, or tentacles, or whatever?”
Even now, there are similarities to the creature he might become. He delights in power, freedom. He seems more inclined to make deals than promises, prefers games over taking things seriously, jokes over vulnerability.
But he is, for the most part, harmless.
You do not teach him how to leave, but he does anyway.
On many worlds, the fact that you don’t notice he left until he’s already returned would make you a bad caregiver. Perhaps you are. Perhaps you aren’t. Your skill as a caregiver is less important than the fact that you are the only one he has.
Where were you?
He avoids your gaze. “Around. Outside.”
Worry churns somewhere beneath your coastal grooves. You left?
He shrugs, eyeing you carefully like a dog waiting to be kicked. You’ve never managed to learn much about his life on Euclydia, aside from his visions, and the world’s destruction. But he looks at you with fear in his eyes whenever he thinks he’s done something wrong, and even you, a creature without family, understands that a child raised in cruelty can only grow to be cruel.
“I, uh, just wanted to see where they come from.” He gestures below you, at the winding road of souls. “I didn’t go far—”
You raise your tail, using it to nudge him closer to your side. Relax. There is no malice, here, only the simple curiosity of a child. I’d been planning to show you how to leave, soon, anyway.
He blinks up at you, hopefully. In other variants of the multiverse, survivors of his destruction might claim that the only thing more dangerous than a Bill Cipher still alive is a Bill Cipher allowed to roam free, but in this one you understand that danger only arises when he grows angry at being contained, a rocket erupting only when gravity becomes too weak to continue holding it back.
A dangerous Bill Cipher is a Bill Cipher trapped. What he needs is space to grow, not flat walls and hatred from those who could never believe in him. When one is taught they can only be a monster, that is often what they become.
Not this time. Not in this universe.
Here, now, you teach him to leave—to step into other realities as easily as gliding through a shallow pool. You are careful, of course, to explain how dangerous it is, making sure he understands that creating rifts rather than doorways, tears rather than gentle openings, could rend apart the fabric of weaker realities. You notice his flinch at your words but do not soften yourself—he must learn.
You show him everything that matters—a swampy planet of blue-green beings, the first to worship you. A supernova that will one day form a human galaxy. The outside of the Oracle’s sanctum, the first place you’d ever built that wasn’t for yourself.
And then, you let him go.
It is frightening, but in a distant way. You wonder if this is what mortals feel when their children age—not exactly, of course, as the two of you are ageless, but close enough.
He drifts in and out of the pocket dimension from which everything grows, visiting other worlds and coming back with traces of their skies on his tongue. He flies around you in looping circles, speaking of all the worlds he’s seen and the people who’ve loved him. He gains followings—nothing large, but whispers of his name are heard on a few planets, just enough to make him shine brighter with their worship and adoration—and you watch as Bill Cipher, like many gods before him, falls for mortals.
Their creativity, their ingenuity. The sparks burning bright inside each of them, desperate to be seen before they go out—he sees himself in them, and so, like any narcissus, he loves them.
You are regaled with tales of each: the shrine buried beneath the swamplands of Dimension 21{, the moth-woman priestess of 42.z with his likeness tattooed on her head. The artists and the dreamers of the Orion Belt, his eye carved into their flesh. He delights in their submission, their worship, their self-mutilation.
And yet, despite it all, he does not become a creature of destruction. No genocides cause your line of souls to swell. His name, when spoken, carries curiosity rather than fear. You pay a visit to Jheselbraum, and when you ask her about the zodiac, you are both in agreement that those symbols are the product of another timeline.
And you believe, for a time, that you have changed him.
He is not away for long. He never is. Mortal time moves so slow for creatures like you—he could stay away for a hundred generations and it would be naught but a moment, in your eyes, before he returned.
This is good. You do not get lonely, the years having made you incapable of it, but you have grown used to the feel of silence charged with the presence of another person against your skin. You itch, without his presence.
You know, from ages spent studying the other timelines, that this is around the time he discovers Earth. You hope, perhaps naïvely, that his lack of destructive tendencies will pull his gaze away from that blue-green planet. You do not want to see its destruction. You want, even less, to see his.
But discover Earth he does. Such things are destined, after all, and even you cannot shift the will of Fate.
He seems uninterested until the first humans arrive, and then he falls, and falls hard. Spending more time on that planet than at the center of the universe—really, you wouldn’t mind if it were any world but this.
You stretch out the seeds of your influence planted throughout the multiverse to watch him, carefully. On Earth, they call him a Muse, and he is benevolent, and no one but you remembers the timelines where he is much, much worse.
You find yourself, in moments of lonely silence, grieving for a Bill Cipher that is dangerous, a Bill Cipher that is infinitely destructive, a Bill Cipher that should never be allowed to exist, if only because he, too, might have understood, might have peered into other timelines with you and laughed at the differences.
A foolish notion. You were never friends—he never would have allowed it.
The years pass, and then centuries, and he grows stronger, until sometimes when you look at the gold of him imprinted against the not-sky it is so, so easy to see what he might have become. But his gentleness remains, and his curiosity. Saved from the curse of having to grow up too fast, Bill Cipher is allowed to remain not a god, but a child.
Maybe not by his species’ standards, certainly—but he lacks the weight on his bricks that you grew used to seeing in another timeline. It makes him look younger, despite his moments of screaming grief.
The humans he chooses, as devotees, as disciples, and sometimes as friends, aren’t special. Mortals rarely are, and humans less so. Like ants in a colony: interesting, remarkable, even, but only as a whole. Individually—well, they’re hard to relate to.
Not that he seems to struggle. He loves them easily, if only for the wide-eyed ways they watch the stars.
You’ve grown used to the way he acts with a new pet, but there is something different this time. He moves quickly—almost too quickly to track, and it takes you a moment to readjust to process him moving at mortal speeds, fighting against the biological clock that is his current human’s lifespan. And there is a nervousness in the way he holds himself that you have not seen for eons, as if he fears your nonexistent wrath.
You swirl around him, pulling him close to your body with your tail. Tell me of Earth, Bill, you say, using the name he’d chosen for himself. Easier on the human tongue than his Euclidean name, less associated with ghosts.
“I’ve found—Oh, Ax, I’ve found a human.” He flips in the air, a clear sign of his delight, despite the anxiety that shines through in the nervous wringing of his hands.
A human? You tilt your head. What mortal could possibly cause such wonder in the voice of a god, of Bill Cipher?
“He’s—incredible,” he says.
“He’s different,” he says.
“He’s a genius,” he says, and understanding washes over you like the cold tides of a seaside New Jersey town.
Of course. Who else but Stanford Pines, the man who helped Bill bring about the end of the world. Who else but the man destined to destroy him in a thousand universes?
Of course Bill, ever the self-destructive fool, would fall for the sword pointed at his heart. Like Euclydia’s destruction, some things are a constant in every universe.
You’ve inspired many humans, you say, voice level. You’ve had millennia of practice at keeping yourself peaceful, calm, anger tamped down and snuffed out.
“But this one, he’s—” he pauses, eye rolling as he searches for words, “he’s like… your Oracle. You know?”
If you were any other creature, you might close your eyes, pinch the bridge of your nose, sigh. Instead, your tail simply sways a bit faster, your voice grows a bit sadder.
Bill.
Letting go is the most valuable skill a creature as old as the two of you can learn. This is how you’ll teach him. This is how you have to teach him, before the world sinks its claws into his shell and shatters him.
He turns to you, eye shining, and even before he speaks you know, because some things are constants in every timeline and this has happened again, and again, and again.
“I want to bring him here,” he says, “I want to show him everything. Everywhere. The whole universe. I’ve already gotten started—I’m building him a gateway, a portal—”
You rear back, skin burning like a dying sun. You can’t.
He blinks, confused. Despite all your time caring for him, you cannot help but see it as an act.
“Why not?”
You will destroy him. Destroy his world.
He floats away from you, little fists clenched, and though a part of you understands that he is just a child, confused and unused to you denying him, all you can see is the being that destroyed infinite worlds without mercy. All you can see is yourself, failing to save him. “I won’t. I wouldn’t. You—you know I wouldn’t.”
You have tried, throughout this experiment, to avoid mentions of the other timelines. This Bill is innocent—not truly innocent, because that is something he can never be, but far more innocent than any of his parallel selves. But something akin to fear makes your tongue loose, and the words slip out too easily.
You already have.
There is a pop, and a smell like gasoline, and sulphur, and burning butter, and then he is gone.
He returns soon, all things considered. This is far from the longest he’s been away from you—though it is the angriest he’s been upon leaving.
You wonder, sometimes, when your work slows to a lull, if he will ever return.
But return he does, eventually, the human—Stanford Pines—in tow.
No mortals—no living mortals—have ever set foot here. This is a place for you, and your child, and the dead. But you feel—not guilt, but something like it, over your argument, so you do not stop him. The human will be dead soon enough, anyway, and will pose no further threat to him.
You watch from afar as he guides the human around your space, a child showing off their favorite toy. They loop around stars, bobbing through nebulous clouds that color his glow blue, pink. Tethered together by their hands, Bill twirls the human who laughs, flushes, pressed closer into his side, and Bill—
Oh. Bill looks at him with something dangerously soft in his eye, like a mortal to a God, or a star to its neutron companion.
They drift, slowly, closer to where you float, watching them with eyes that have never blinked. The human stares at you, awe painted across his face, though Bill stays farther behind, trepidation evident in the stiffness of his movements, so unlike his excited looping from a moment ago. But he approaches nonetheless, and you take it as a sign that things can be salvaged.
“Ax. This is my, uh, human.”
You make a noise that might be called a hum. If you could have gone back to your world, would you have wanted to bring your Oracle, show her to the others, tried to explain her significance? Perhaps. Perhaps not. You remind yourself to visit her sometime this century, regardless.
Stanford Pines, you say, and to anyone who had never spoken to you before, your voice would sound gentle. The favorite devotee.
Stanford sputters, face red. “Ah, Great One, I’m not sure if I’d—I mean to say—”
You coil your tail loosely around the two of them. Do not fear, child. No harm will befall you here. You do not say as long as he remains unharmed. Should this human shatter Bill, undeserved, you want your retaliation to be swift, and painful, and impossible to see coming.
Stanford moves, awkwardly, into something that might be called a bow. “Ah—thank you, Great One, I—”
Bill ruffles his hair, eye creased fondly. The sight makes something inside of you churn unpleasantly. “Relax, Sixer.”
I would… you turn to Stanford, speak with Bill, for a moment. The human furrows his brow, glancing from you to Bill nervously.
Just a moment, you assure him, he will be returned to you soon.
He turns to Bill, squeezes his hands, then, easily distracted as humans are, pushes off, stars in his eyes.
Silence, then: you built the portal.
“I did.”
I told you not to.
A harsh, buzzing noise—a bit like a sigh, maybe. “It was fine, Ax. His stupid planet is fine.”
Bill—
“I know—” his voice is quieter, now, shyer than you’ve heard it for a long time. “I know you don’t trust me—”
Something inside of you aches at that; you coil your tail tighter around him, drawing him closer to your body. He pulls away, and when he speaks again his voice is flat, guarded—too reminiscent of another time.
"I need a favor."
Ask.
"I want you to do for Sixer what you did for me.”
I don’t understand. You said Earth was fine. You deal in the lost and the lonely and the things without any homeworld to return to. You do not deal in humans, even humans that are the favorites of gods.
He makes a small noise of frustration. “It is. But I want—I want him to live forever. I want you to make him one of us—he is one of us. You have no idea, Ax, he’s better than every other stupid single-celled organism on that planet, and none of them even like him!” He sounds so very young, when he speaks. Nothing more than a child bargaining for their favorite toy. You feel so very ancient in comparison. You think of Bill in another timeline, begging for his life. You wonder if you will ever be able to let go of what he was, what you have taken care to ensure he will never be again.
He is nothing like us, Bill. You must let him go.
He lets out a wordless screech—the human turns back to you with wide, worried eyes; you shift until you sit between the two of them, severing their view of each other.
“You don’t understand, he’s—he’s everything like us, Ax, he’s everything—”
Should you have been crueler, earlier? Should you have taught him from the very beginning the importance of letting mortal lifespans slip like sand from his fingers? How many tears would he have had to shed, then, to save him from this now?
He is a mortal.
The words burst out of him, behind them the screaming desperation of an entire species’ worth of dead souls. “I am a mortal! Or at least, I was supposed to be! You and I both know that this was a mistake, and you’ve just been deluding yourself by trying to keep me here! You should have killed me when you had the chance—it’s the least I deserve.”
You are silent. When he leaves, devotee in tow, you do not stop him.
He returns, later. You did not expect him to.
It has been—years, you think. You’d been allowing yourself to fall into deeper and deeper sleeps; it helps with the grief, and the time passing, and the denizens of the multiverse do not need you as much as you like to think.
The Oracle visits a few times. You think of her death—it will come for her one day, though not for a long while yet. You wonder, if you were younger, what you might have done to prevent it.
He floats to your side, slowly, something clasped in his closed hands and eye weighted with unshed tears, so reminiscent of when you’d found him.
Bill, you say, and hope your care is evident in that singular word.
“Ax.”
You wrap your tail around him, and he goes easily, pressing into your skin. You do not feel temperature, yet you find yourself wondering if his exoskeleton would be cold against your skin. He opens his hands—within them sits a swirling, milk-like cloud, glowing faintly in a weak imitation of a human heartbeat. A soul, captured in greedy hands before it could make its way to your lines.
I told you to let him go, you say, but there is no malice, no blame.
“Oh Ax,” he laughs, joyless. “You know me. I never could.”
You deal in the dead and the dying and the things the multiverse has declared unsalvageable. You do not deal in affection, or children, or family, and yet something small and soft inside of you sighs at seeing him returned. Letting go is the most valuable skill any creature can possess. You consider it a blessing that the two of you, unskilled as you are, have infinity to learn.