Another Form, Another Time (Bill Cipher x Reader)

Chapter 8

Immediately, after getting home, Bill gave you some space to settle down; getting back into your pajamas, brushing the knots out of your hair, and brushing away with toothpaste the grody and irritating plaque you can feel on your teeth when you run your tongue along your slightly yellowed ivories. Though it is just merely not too far past twelve post merīdiem, with today having been a half day for finals and you having just got home from the bus ride home from school, Bill follows you to your room and the two of you go through that same ritual: you get comfy, he annoys you a bit, you quip back, and then he knocks you out mid-sentence like the troll he is.

And now you are dead asleep, and in God knows where.

When you gain some sense of awareness, you find yourself in some kind of fancy cabin... or antique house? Are you back in that one meeting place Bill and you talk in? It seems... different, to put it a bit mildly.

The place has polished wooden flooring, though not drenched in whatever protective plastic or wax covering that cheap American houses use - it is genuine and untampered wood that has simply been polished and smoothened down. The walls seem to have an interior made up of stacked, polished decorative logs - the walls honestly seem to be really made of, if not mainly supported by, the grey stone bricks you can see through the sides of the windows, with mild white light pouring inward and glazing the rims and the floor before it. A grandfather clock that ticks dutifully sits stoic against a wall with a loyal end table with a showy flowerpot cupping hydrangeas sitting silently atop its sheen wooden surface. It is now that you notice a fragrant scent.

Looking around, you see little doors, from normal doors to double doors, attic doors, basement doors, and tiny doors that you would need to get on your knees to go through like the one from Coraline that led to the other world. All of them are pretty, made of wood with beautiful carving and golden knobs and lining, but they are put too numerously thru-ought the cozy building. Fancy rugs and beautiful paintings decorate the place, with lamps that have stained glass art as heads with black metal poles, stained glass windows in high places with normal windows in more lower and assessable places (though there are a few glass stained windows you could touch or lean upon), warm lighting, knick-knacks and shelves, and much more little details that really bring the whole place together. Perhaps the decoration can excuse the excessive amounts of doors, although their placement makes sense despite their number being baffling.

A familiar mellow glow of yellow radiates softly from your peripheral and you turn to see Bill, and a familiar bird perched on the tip of his top hat.

"I didn't expect your mindscape to be this influenced by browsing through some houses, but I can't complain much about this place," he looks around, doing a quick three-sixty loop of the place in the air he levitates before settling back and looking at you again, "hm, better than most mindscapes I've seen. The last mindscape I've been to was so gray I wanted to burn it to the ground after getting what I wanted from it. At least that would add some yellow to it." He chuckles impishly, a brief crease in his eye as he looks off to the side and thinks about his own joke. Now you feel just about fully lucid, if not at least aware of what is going on. "That probably would have left that wrinkly meat-sack brain-dead though." He continues his chuckling for a few more seconds.

You give him an offended look, "...you're not going to try burning my mindscape down, right...?" Honestly, while you know he would never do something like that, his giddy laughing over the prospect does not exactly inspire any trust or confidence from you, nor would inspire any of it from just about anyone - whether they have a good relationship with him or not.

He laughs curtly and whips out his cane again to "lean" on, "No, even if your mindscape had turned out to be an eyesore, I don't dabble with fire in mindscapes anymore. The last time I saw fire in a mindscape wasn't pretty, and the flames weren't yellow. Can't say I'm a big fan of that anymore," he thrums his fingers on the curved top of his cane, "Burning your mindscape simply because it's not my style is just a complete waste, anyway. I also don't want to put up with the hassle of having to deal with a human vegetable or start over from scratch with you - doubt you having complete amnesia will be fun. That doesn't exactly sound like a fun pastime to me." Now that he has supposedly revealed that burning someone's mindscape can basically vegetize them or wipe their memories, if he is telling the truth, you are afraid of even knocking over a lamp in this place, and slightly back away from the stained glass lamp you were just standing near.