FAMILY MEETING - semi-open

[mothmansplaining]

Who: The Pineses, and anyone else on the third floor who hears Ford yelling at 8 in the morning and wants to come tell him to stop.
Where: Third floor.
When: Too early, backdated to the morning after Ford arrives.
Rating: Y-7
Summary: Ford calls a family meeting.

As soon as he wakes up from the dream, Ford knows what he has to do. He takes a few minutes to gather himself, to order what he's going to say in his mind. But he can't put it off. He has to tell them about Bill.

No secrets, not this time.

The sun's just nicely coming up when Ford opens the door to his room, puts a hand to his mouth, and bellows, " FAMILY MEETING! FAMILY MEETING!"

This will continue until the other Pines twins emerge. It will continue mercilessly.

Comments

FAMILY MEETING

[charlastan]

Stan hears it and he groans. He was, of course, still asleep. He puts his pillow over his head and tries to block it out, but it's no use - Ford's still hollering like an alarm clock, and now Freeloader is pawing at him because he saw him move so the whole effort is futile. This is it. He has to be awake now.

He doesn't bother getting dressed - everyone's used to him walking around in his underwear anyway. He does, however, make a dramatic show of covering his ears.

"Alright, alright! I'm up!" he says. "You got a snooze button somewhere or what?"

[mothmansplaining]

"There's no time for that, Stanley," Ford insists. "Besides, you'll want to hear this before you go back to sleep."

[powerofmabel]

Mabel emerges from her and Dipper's room like a shot, wielding her grappling hook like she's about to shoot somebody in the face with it. Weirdly, she is already dressed for the day.

Look, she doesn't sleep in. She has a healthy sleep schedule unlike literally everyone else in this family.

"What happened? Who're we messing up?" She has no idea if it's that kind of family meeting, but Ford seems dangerously anxious what with all the knocking and disturbing the peace, so clearly it is a day for grappling hooks.

[krmvgivv]

Dipper does not have a healthy sleep schedule and he rubs his eyes as he follows Mabel out of the room. He's wearing his sleeping clothes and socks and his hair is even more of a mess than usual.

"Why are family meetings never in the afternoon?"

[mothmansplaining]

"We're not messing up anyone," Ford says, ushering them all into his room and into seats at a table he's wished into existence. "But there is something very important I need to tell you," he goes on, taking a seat himself. He places a hand on the surface of the table.

"I'm not the only one who's been brought here from the Barge," Ford says gravely. "Another passenger crossed into this dimension as well: Bill Cipher. Luckily, I was able to confirm last night that he is the Bill I was on the Barge with, so we aren't dealing with an unknown Bill from a different probability stream. He appears to be trapped in the mindscape."

[charlastan]

"Should've figured," Stan says. "About half the time we've had a 'family meeting' it's been about that dumb cornchip."

Despite what he says, Stan can't help taking this a lot more seriously than he did the last time they had a Bill Cipher in Wonderland. Since then he's gone home and experienced the whole Weirdmageddon thing for himself. He knows what Bill almost did to his family, and he's a little tense.

"Look, this ain't our first Bill Rodeo in Wonderland," he goes on. "And on the upside he's stuck in the Mindscape, so he can't get out unless someone's dumb enough to make a deal, right? Plus we've got the kids' room and mine hooked up with that unicorn voodoo stuff."

It could be worse. It could be a hell of a lot worse. They've basically Bill cornered, so there's no reason to panic - not when they've got the upper hand here.

[powerofmabel]

Mabel gasps and clutches her grappling hook to her chest. There's a lot of weird complicated emotions about Bill in her brain and the worst of them she hasn't talked about. She never has let go of the co-op event where the two of them were remarkably effective together, because it scares her.

But she pushes past that and just laughs awkwardly, "Schyeah, and most of the people dumb enough to make a deal with him here already did it once. Right? Right." Sorry, Wirt. Sorry Dipper. Sorry... A lot of people.

[krmvgivv]

Dipper slams his fist into his palm. “We’ve beat him once. We can beat him again.”

Which is about 60% how he feels, 40% him covering up the fact that Bill still terrifies him. They beat Bill because Stan tricked him, and he sacrificed his memories in the process. It’s not going to work again, and even if it would, there’s no guarantee they’d be able to get his memories back again.

[mothmansplaining]

Ford nods at Stan and Mabel, but draws a deep breath when Dipper speaks.

Not for the first time, he wonders where to begin.

"There's something else you need to know," Ford says. "Something about this Bill specifically. We were on the Barge together for a year and a half. It was kind of like Wonderland: a pocket dimension we didn't fully understand, subject to the whims of strange events that changed who we were, for a time, or forced us into all kinds of embarrassingly personal situations. It was all run by an Admiral we never saw, one who was so incompetent that, when he was brought in by his superiors for a review, he stole a different ship and kidnapped us all onto it rather than have it be decommissioned for his poor performance.

"It was the Admiral's power that kept Bill's in check in the first place. In a situation like that, I had no choice but to take matters into my own hands. I knew Bill was planning to break out, and I..."

He takes a breath.

"I helped him do it. I had no choice -- he would have broken out sooner or later with or without my help, and this way, I had a hand in the project. Influence over what exactly would happen. By leveraging my assistance, I was able to ensure that when we escaped into the real -- into the world we were looking for," he corrects quickly, "none of the native inhabitants would come to harm as a result. Of course, we underestimated the strength of the Barge's connection to its inmates, and we kind of dragged the whole thing with us! It was a real mess, one that most of the ship was furious with me for. Half of it still is. We thought we were going to be able to bring the Barge to the world where the Admiral's bosses lived, to make them answer for what they were doing to us, what they put us through on that ship! But they weren't there. They're somewhere else."

Ford got a little distant there, but he brings himself firmly back to the point.

"The point is, this iteration of Bill and I have a...rapport. A working arrangement. He has an interest in keeping agreements he makes with me, and not doing anything so terrible that I can't stand to be around him anymore."

He lets that sit a moment before going on, gives himself a moment to consider what he's going to say next.

"I don't know yet how being in Wonderland is going to change that. But dealing with Bill, this Bill, won't be the same as last time. He's not the same. And...neither am I."

He's changed so much since Weirdmageddon. Mostly for the better, he hopes. But this isn't going to be Ford With A Giant Space Gun Looking To Prove To Everyone That He's The Hero Who Shot Bill. He...doesn't know what it is going to be, yet.

[powerofmabel]

Mabel is strangely silent through all of this. The expression on her face is unreadable, which is odd for her- she wears her heart on her sleeve a lot of the time, but there's just something in her eyes that seems like this cuts her particularly deep in some way.

And if she says anything, she's going to show her hand- or lie, which would be worse. So she doesn't say anything. Ford and Dipper can say what they want, but she definitely doesn't want to let her feelings be known in a public space. She can talk to Ford later.

[charlastan]

A rapport. A working arrangement. To Stan, it sounds like Ford's dancing around what actually happened.

"So, what, you made a deal with him? After everything that's happened? Seriously?!"

Bill nearly killed Dipper and Mabel, and would have if they didn't manage to trick him first. No amount of explaining that he isn't the same will change that, and Stan honestly can't believe they're even having this conversation.

"How do you know he's not playing you like a fiddle again?"

He can't. There's no way he can know that, Stan's sure of it. But he asks anyway, hoping Ford's got a better answer for that one than he does.

[krmvgivv]

Dipper draws back a little as Ford makes his explanation. It’s... it feels bad. It feels like patterns repeating. It feels like it’s the kind of thing that ends up with portals in the basement and thirty years of dimensional drifting.

But there’s one big difference. One change so big that Dipper clings to it and the hope it brings with all his might.

This time Ford’s telling them. He’s not collaborating with Bill behind their backs. Anything he’s doing, he’s doing with their awareness. Dipper’s not sure he can go so far as to say Ford would take their advice if they said to cut it off, but he’s pretty sure Ford would at least listen.

“How do you know it’s the same Bill?” His voice is quiet, a little strained. He wants to be cool and rational about this. He doesn’t know if he can. “He could be just saying what you want to hear.”

[mothmansplaining]

"Not a magical one!" Ford tells Stan, insistent. There's a difference in Ford's mind between shaking hands to let Bill back into his mind and making an agreement based on the mutual self-interest and understood predictability that functions enough like trust to allow agreements like that to be made. "What was I supposed to do, let him break out? Tell an Admiral dumb enough to bring him back in the first place? You know how long he can wait, and on the Barge, he couldn't be killed! I had to do what I could to protect the world he broke into. Otherwise, he'd just wait until my back was turned and build something else!"

Mabel looks at him with something in her eyes that looks like pain. Dipper's pulling away, too, and Stanley is, of course, furious. Who can blame them, after what happened? Bill hurt them badly. It was one of the reasons Ford was so furious, so unwilling to engage with Bill at all, when he'd first arrived. It wasn't the injuries Bill had done to him: it was what Bill had done to his family. Things have changed for Ford that haven't changed for them.

"I--" He looks from Stan to Dipper, and a hot blush flashes over his cheeks and ears. It fades out quickly, but something about the question's embarrassed him, flustered him for a second. "I thought of that too, Dipper," he says. "When I encountered him in the mindscape, I couldn't believe anything he had to say until I found a way to confirm his multiversal identity. It was hard, finding a way to test it reliably in a place where imagination becomes reality, but eventually I found a way to test his memory of the Barge, something another Bill wouldn't be able to replicate. I'm positive he's the same one."

Please, leave it at that. Don't make him get technical. There is an explanation. A good one! But not one Ford is ready to drop on the kids just yet. He was hoping to get them over the working-together hurdle first. One admission at a time.

"Of course, it only matters if he hasn't been lying to me the whole time. There are a lot of reasons I've come to believe that Bill is sincere, at least when it comes to this. I've learned a lot about him over the last year and a half, enough to understand that if he were trying to sell me on something, he'd have picked a story that was much more likely -- much easier to swallow. He wouldn't have chosen for things to happen the way they did. Besides, there were Barge elements that were completely out of his control! We even had to sing our emotions out once. That one was embarrassing, but it ended with an ongoing agreement that when I'm serious about wanting him to stop whatever he's doing, he'll listen."

Ford pulls a deep breath. "I'm not saying you should trust him. You shouldn't! But we have a way to deal with him now that we didn't have before." It's Ford. It is Ford using himself as a bargaining chip. As long as Bill wants Ford around, Ford can use that leverage to negotiate.

Being alone in death prison's been a little rough.

[powerofmabel]

Wait. Is he embarrassed?

Leave it to Mabel for that to be the thing she picks up on. All that technobabble and legitimate answers to legitimate concerns are for Dipper and Stan, because there's not a whole lot that's gonna change her mind about this. She has Feelings and she will express them later, but she zeroes in on Ford tripping over something and files it away for later.

"Yeah... We had to sing our feelings once, too," she finally says, because it feels like the one thing she can contribute that doesn't open herself up to family scrutiny or worry. "It's kinda hard not to believe somebody once they've busted out a showstopping number on you."

[charlastan]

"Ha, I remember that one!" Stan says, momentarily sidetracked. "I got around it by just singing everything I was doing - since it was technically the truth, it let me off the hook!"

That distraction isn't enough to completely change the subject though, or to make Stan forget that look on Ford's face. He hasn't seen that since they were kids, and it stands out against this otherwise cool and calm explanation. It's rational and composed, and probably rehearsed to some degree, except for whatever had made him blush like a kid trying to hide his crush when his nosy twin brother asks him too many questions. He might not literally be the Ford he knows, but some things just don't change.

So Stan does his best to stay calm himself, and pokes a careful and precise hole in Ford's story.

"So, how'd you do it?" he asks, harmlessly enough. "What if we wanna test him too? Memory-testing's a pretty big thing around here anyway. Plus, putting Bill through the ringer is practically a family tradition at this point, right guys?"

[krmvgivv]

"Yeah, we folded him into a hat once."

Dipper musters a smile, though he's really not feeling it. He's not picking up the nuances of Ford's blushing, but he can tell there's something he's just not getting about the situation. He hates not getting stuff.

[mothmansplaining]

Ford raises his eyebrows at Dipper. "You did?" he asks, clearly interested in how that story went. "Ha ha, that must've been really something. How'd you manage that?"

Nope, Stanley, you're not getting him that easily.