sixerpath (sixerpath) wrote in valarlogs, @ 2020-04-02 22:34:00 |
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Entry tags: | bill cipher, stanford pines |
Who: Bill Cipher and Stanford Pines
What: Aftermath of Stanley being kicked out of the Pines house
When: Age 17, 1993
Where: In their shared room at the house/pawn shop their family owns, New Jersey
Rating/Warnings: None, except sadness
Status: Ongoing
In the past few weeks Ford had become entirely withdrawn. Depressed. He wasn’t leaving the house much, and in the short time since Stanley, his brother and twin, had been thrown out onto the street he’d come to entirely isolating himself. Even from Bill. And from the world. And...well, from everything.
When he did leave, it was on his own. Usually spent aimless at the streets or sitting at a swingset on a beach in front of an abandoned old ship that at one time three boys had worked so hard to bring into working order for a future that wasn’t ever going to come. Sitting there for hours in the ringing silence. He wasn’t coming down for meals anymore. And he wasn’t eating. He could be found, sometimes, at rare moments, staring at photo albums in his and Bill’s room, eyes filled there with pain, something that ran deeply through him, too deep, just to get up and leave or shove it away should Bill or anyone else enter. All of this wasn’t something that was spoken. Nothing much in the house was, these days.
The whole of the Pines house had been shaken by the events, taken to a kind of ring of deafening silence, like the aftermath of a gunshot roaring through the air. Still the echoing of it vibrating from the crack of that single pistol shot.
Their pa had suddenly become stiffer, colder, and shorter than before. If he’d not talked or said much before, it seemed that now grunts and one word answers had become his only form of communication. He also showed far more affection to the boys, strangely enough. Even in the stiff silence, reaching out to ruffle Bill’s hair. Putting a strangely heavy hand at Ford’s shoulder at any opportune time...for this, it was seemingly a lot of affection from his usual standoffish form. As if perhaps the guilt, the desire not to lose them too, had somehow brought their pa to acknowledging the two more.
Their Ma too...god, their Ma. She had changed. Over night, her posture, her demeanor becoming so different, as if another woman had taken her place. Her fake psychic line continued, her work hadn’t seemingly suffered. But she had fallen so much more quiet from someone who was always ready and able to speak up her mind on any and every subject that was out there. Ford was certain he had heard the usually so fierce, loud and strong willed woman crying at night. With a twist of pain he could remember pausing by her door, something horrible aching, tugging at his heart, clutching at it with his six fingers, head bowed into the shadow at the foriegn sound. He had never witnessed something like that before. Not from ma. Not from her. Their whole lives, dealing with three rowdy, energetic boys and a short fused pillar of a man like pa had left her to be like a whip of strength and snark that rivaled nothing else the universe could have thrown. She’d always been such an unmovable force of wit, no nonsense nature, taking their pa’s sharp tones and short temper with a sass and straight ease that could match nothing else. It was alien, the sound of it. And it shot deep into Ford’s entire being.
He spoke nothing of it. Ford, like the rest of the family, spoke hardly at all, really. The silence still stifled there for weeks.
Ford honestly couldn’t seem to find any balance in himself or what had happened. The betrayal of it. The sharpness of it. But he was alone now. Drifting apart from his family, all of who seemed to hold a kind of isolation and silence, steady of their own. Living in the same house, but miles, planets apart from each other. Never talking about what had happened, conversations seemingly short and to the point. The cold seeming to run ice deep in every wall, every crevice, every peeling of matted wallpaper that adorned the rooms. Especially Ford’s.
Ford had begun to hate his room, even with the time he spent there now. He felt heavy in it, suffocated really. Like something not quite there, not quite real or alive, images and memories plowing over him in very real, unwanted ways. And even with Bill there, he wasn’t really with the other at all. Even together, Ford was somewhere else entirely. Apart from him. Apart from everyone and everything. He was never short with Bill. Never cold. Never angry. He offered weak, soft smiles, sad, guilt filled looks that came straight from his heart, but the two, in all honesty, didn’t share the same space anymore. Didn’t breath the same air. Weren’t sharing the same ground under their feet. Whenever Bill tried to get his attention, tried to engage him, he just seemed lost from it. Like ma, as if he were replaced by another person entirely. Alien. Foriegn. And mostly, Stanford simply isolated. However and whenever, in whatever ways he seemingly could.
The family had been hit deep, and no one spoke of it.
Space, it seemed, was something each of them found. An unacknowledged thing, never said aloud. Existing only in Filbrick’s, their pa’s deep regret, assurances he caught rarely that “the boy would come back groveling,” that he “needed to learn his lesson for once.” Not their ma’s fleeting, continued glances desperate toward the window as if expecting something miraculous, as if someone important may walk right back through, following through the ideas their pa had assured her...or maybe himself so clearly of. Not the way Ford seemed to collapse in on himself, eyes uncharacteristic and downcast, grades slipping, school forgotten in light of remaining somehow apart from the world now. He stayed home mostly. In his bed, often staring at the ceiling. Notes, stories, scfi and nerd games and shows and books forgotten.
It was where Bill would find him tonight, alone on his bed, staring at the ceiling of the top bunk with a distant, short expression, listless and somehow empty.
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