He trusted humans, in his own way, he truly did. Trust looks different for him, compared to how we see it.
He genuinely grieves the loss of Ford's companionship. He spent time thinking about him at O'Sadley's. It was the closest he's ever been to loving another person.
He loved Ford. He'll never admit it.
Love looks different to scarred, untrusting people like him. It is a long, difficult journey full of trial and error. Where every mistake burns their being.
He sees himself as a monster. He blames himself for an accident. For burning his home. He lives the next trillion years running away from it.
He punishes himself by calling himself a monster: he internalizes that until he ultimately becomes one. He lets people villainize him, he both relishes and is deeply hurt by people antagonizing him. Especially people who he cares for. He reacts very poorly to Ford and the last human who picked up The Book of Bill.
Betrayal is a cycle that he just can't seem to free himself from. Which is funny, he's a TRIANGLE for Axo's sake! Vicious cycles of emotional, multidimensional, and time-transcendental (Is that a term?) trauma doesn't quite fit him!
“denied the catharsis of punishment” is an underappreciated but hugely effective narrative consequence imo
I feel cheated. no one on Reddit told me that tumblr is a serotonin factory. Keep liking and reblogging my posts please thanks
Wait the book of bill appearing to Ford first is fucking HILARIOUS actually. Ford literally killed Bill less than a month ago, and Bill's still banking so hard on him getting him out of therapy that the book shows up in Ford's stuff MULTIPLE TIMES. Girl the situationship has been over for thirty years give it up 💀
subscribing to a fic isn’t enough I need the author to blast a bat signal into the night sky whenever they update
I BADLY NEED A PRINT OF THIS BEAUTIFUL, TRAUMATIZED MAN
Meet Me in the Woods ⚠️
THANK YOU FIR WRITING THE THERAPRIST
It's one of the most beautifully written, well-paced, and entertaining fics I've read out here.
I got a question for you, how do you feel about AUs of your fic? Are you comfortable with people writing fics from that standpoint? Apologies if this has been asked before!
Please take care and know we readers adore you and your talent!!! I love your little doodles!!!
(firstly thank you for the kind words) and so basically. Yes we have an AU collection on AO3 please please please feel free to submit things!! YOU CAN FIND IT HEEEERE: THE THERAPRIST AU COLLECTIVE Also you can find the original event post right HERE: bling blong
It's a little bit silly because basically it's tumbleweed city over there. I'm not very good at hosting / promoting events because I'm incredibly awkward and dumb and so it just sort of dissolved away to dust and nobody really noticed it (although like I say we did have one really awesome contribution on AO3!) It's open-ended and open to anyone who wants to join in so please do if you feel so inclined! okay now back to wallowing in my own embarrassment at existing
notes: temporary character death
You were a little kid, when you’d first met him. But so was he. It had been a time before time, when many things did not yet exist, and even more were simply incomprehensible.
Other kids always talked about Bill and his ‘weird’ eye. You didn’t really get it. Your mom told you to be nice to Bill, but you didn’t really know him. When you asked the other kids why he or his eye was weird, none of them knew what to say. And if they did, they all gave a different answer. You guessed their parents just told them he was weird. Maybe you were weird, too, then. You never really knew what to say or how to approach anyone, and it’d only become a problem when your parents asked you if you had any friends. That was the moment you had realised that you didn’t.
You didn’t really know why you picked Bill, back then. You didn’t care about him either way. But you did liked his shoes. They were big, a cool colour, and they were squeaky when he moved. What was there not to like? That morning, you had asked your dad what you should ask when you wanted to play together with someone. He had said that, after school, you should get someone’s parents’ permission if you want to play after school.
“Bill’s mom, can Bill play?” You’d ask who you would later get to know as miss Scalene.
“I don’t know!” She responded, in that slow, sweet tone people who spend a lot of time around young children naturally begin to emulate. “I think you should Billy ask that.”
“Oh. I thought his name was Bill! I’m sorry.” You called out, swaying a little from side to side.
“It’s Bill,” he’d said. His voice was higher than you had expected. “But mom calls me Billy.”
“Oh,” you started again. “Can I call you that too?” You asked.
“…Mm.” Billy had hummed. “Okay. I guess.” Even when he’d said the affirmative, he hadn’t sounded entirely convinced. He was hesitant to appear from next to his mom.
“So. Do you wanna play, Billy?” He glowed a little brighter.
He was quiet for a moment. You think his mom squeezed his hand. “Sure. But what?”
You didn’t really have much experience playing with other kids, either. But you weren’t about to tell your new friend Billy that! You’d offered to play hide and seek together, to which he’d agreed. After just a little bit of time together, talking and playing came a lot more easily.
You would play hide and seek together quite a lot. That was the first time you really came face-to-face with Billy’s mischievous side. He had advantages over you that you simply could not imagine. With his eye, that could see ‘every’ which way, was always able to spot you long before you bumped into him. Yours were always just fixed in a single direction, bumping into other shapes was normal and expected. Billy never did that. He could suddenly appear behind you, and you had no idea how he did it. If you ever found him, it was because he could no longer contain his laughter, or because of the squeaking of his shoes.
For a while, this went fine. But you grew sick of losing all the time. You’d eventually stopped, swayed violently from side to side (a sight of great displeasure amongst your two dimensional race) and cried big, fat tears. Your purple glow diminished to a flickering.
“It’s not fair!” You mumbled out, and crossed your arms in front of your chest. “You always win, and I never, ever do. You’re cheating.”
“I’m not cheating!” He exclaimed a little too loudly, and you cried even harder. “It’s my eye,” he said and pointed at it. “It’s not my fault I can see things you can’t. I’m not cheating.”
“…It’s still cheating if you’re not doing it on purpose,” you mumbled huffily. Not to mention, he had been way too happy beating you over and over and over again! You sniffle and loosen your arms. “Did you know people call your eye weird? Why is it like that?”
“Yes. Duh. I know people say that… And I dunno. Mom says it’ll be alright when I’m older.” You were too young to know to recognize or maneuverer around a touchy subject. “…Do you think it’s weird?”
“I don’t know yet,” you responded. “What else can you see? And do?”
Billy told you about the stars. Whereas his parents had tolerated his talks about the stars, had found his enthusiasm for something they couldn’t see endearing and worrying in equal measure, you were fascinated by them. Perhaps exactly because you couldn’t see them, your interest had expanded. Bill and you would exchange drawings. He’d draw the stars for you, while you would show him what the world looked like to you, or other things. Sometimes, you drew the two of you together, too.
Afterwards, the two of you had become inseparable. And, years later, when Billy’s parents had lost all hope in the possibility that his eye would change, when people started to fear him, you’d stuck by his side like glue. He had told you of his plan to show everyone the stars, and you’d practically vibrated with excitement. You had counted down the hours.
And, like the rest of them, you had ended up smashed. Into. Pieces, scattered into nothing but the finest of dust, leaving behind a pile of static, writhing blood. Maybe, unlike the rest, you had felt a sliver of happiness when you died. Maybe you’d even gotten to see it.
--
In another life, many, many, many years in the future, you had been a human. In this life, you were born with the same fascination for the stars, and granted the opportunity to study them to your heart’s content. Maybe the Axolotl had taken mercy on your soul, or something along those lines. You had a good life. A comfortable one. A life that was much, much happier than the one you had lived a trillion years ago.
But you had a childhood imaginary friend. Perhaps a part of your traumatic past life had lodged itself so deeply in your soul that not even reincarnation had washed away all memories of it. You had a childhood imaginary friend named Billy, who was a floating little triangle with a big, glossy eye and cool shoes. As you grew older, he’d slipped from your mind, and the only remnant of his existence were some drawings you’d kept of him in a forgotten drawer in your room.
When you had doodled him again once, many years later, the shape was in line enough with his current appearance to allow him a portal of view into your life. He hadn’t been able to explain what it was that drew himself to you. Why he started to infiltrate your dreams, merely to watch from a distance. The design of your mindscape, the big, starry expanse spanning out above it, had felt familiar to him. The desire to watch you go about your day and do the boring, mundane things that every meatbag does every single day. But when he finally decided to show himself in one of your dreams, it had all clicked into place.
“Billy!” You’d exclaimed happily. “Huh… I haven’t thought about you in forever. It’s been a really long time.” It was something in your eyes and the way you’d said it, that had jolted him back all that time. He’d almost forgotten about you. Forgotten your name, and what you’d looked like. Only vague memories of happiness had remained in contrast with the sight of your corpse. “But you look a bit different from what I remember. Well, a dream’s a dream, right?”
“Y…Yeah, well, ahahaha!” It wasn’t often that Bill was thrown off-balance, and it’d made him a little sick. His mind jumped between destroying you from the inside out then and there, and cradling you into a little pocket dimension he could fit in the palm of his hand for the rest of his eternity. “You’ve changed, too, kid. Like you said, a lot of time has passed. So! What are you up to now, huh?”
Bill knew from the moment he set his eye upon you, that he’d have a soft spot for you. It was dangerous. You weren’t like those others, who he could grow amused with for a little bit, toy around with and, eventually, discard without a second thought. No. The two of you went waaaay back, and he’d already seen you die once before.
Could he really let that happen again?
illuminaughty wasnt bad but this one was??
He's still adjusting.
Let's write!20+ | She/her | Artist and fanfic writer | MDNI for your own safety.
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